Category Archives: Women

The work of an early cinema actress

April 22, 2007 By in Documents, Performers, Women 2 Comments

I’ve just stumbled across a Project Gutenberg ebook of Edith J. Morley’s Women Workers in Seven Professions (1914), produced for the Fabian’s Women’s Group. The Fabian Society was a socialist group committed to gradualist reform which helped form the Labour Party in 1900, and which of course continues to this day. Its Women’s Group was founded in 1908 and was active in producing reports and pamphlets on work and social conditions for women. Morley’s book looks at women’s work in teaching, medicine, nursing, health visitors and sanitary inspection, the civil service, clerks and secretaries, and the acting profession. The latter section is mostly about the stage, but it does include this intriguing snippet about the cinematograph work that the actress might occasionally find:

It is only possible for me to touch very lightly on employment by the cinematograph firms; but from the enquiries I have made, the usual payment seems to be roughly from 5s. to 7s. 6d. a day, the workers finding their own clothes: 10s. 6d. if the workers can ride and swim: 3s. a day for walking on, when light meals are provided. There is a form of application to be filled in, which demands the following particulars:-

Height.
Bust measurement.
Waist measurement.
Skirt length.
Age.
Line of work.
Remarks.
Ride horseback. Cycle. Swim.

The pictures take about ten days to prepare, and as a supplementary trade, undoubtedly this work is of value to the actress.

I think that the ability to cycle is something that has not been considered when researchers have looked at the work of women in early British film. Clearly a topic for further investigation. An ability to swim, however, we already know about. There’s a celebrated story of Will Barker selecting an Ophelia for his film of Hamlet (1908) purely because she was able to swim (see Robert Hamilton Ball’s Shakespeare on Silent Film, pp. 77-78).

Virginia Woolf and suffragettes

February 27, 2007 By in Conferences, People, Women

The 17th Annual Virginia Woolf conference is being held at Miami University of Oxford, Ohio, 7-10 June 2007. It includes a Virginia Woolf film festival, and a screening of the film Suffragettes in the Silent Cinema, misleadingly described as “featuring satiric clips of nickelodeon melodramas created by early twentieth-century women’s suffrage activists”, the film was compiled by cultural historian Kay Sloan in 2003. What is actually features are films that were made in the silent era which satirised the suffragettes, rather than films made by them, though the film does include clips from the film What 80 Million Women Want (1913), which was made in sympathy with the suffragette cause. Virginia Woolf, incidentally, is one of the most notable of twentieth-century figures never to have been filmed (so far as is known), though she herself wrote interestingly on film in her essay ‘The Cinema‘ (1926).

Bird’s Eye View

February 17, 2007 By in Festivals, Modern silents, Women

The Bird’s Eye View film festival “showcases the very best work from women filmmakers” and takes place at London’s NFT, Barbican and ICA from 8th -14th March. Below is the programme description from the festival web site:

SOUND AND SILENTS – LIVE MUSIC AND SILENT FILM

Two programmes of short silent films made by women directors from early pioneers to contemporary artists taking place at the Barbican on Sunday 11th March and NFT as part of the Optronica Festival on Sunday 18th March with specially composed & original soundtracks performed live by cutting-edge women musicians including ERROLLYN WALLEN, SEAMING TO, JOANNA MCGREGOR and RITA RAY. Expect a variety of styles and genres for both ears and eyes: innovative and inspirational.

SOUNDS AND SILENTS 1 Sunday 11th March, 3PM, Barbican 1.

THE SMILING MADAME BEUDET

Made by one of the first female directors, Germaine Dulac, in the 1920’s, The Smiling Madame Beudet is lauded as the first feminist film ever made. It is the story of an intelligent woman trapped in a loveless marriage. Her husband is used to playing a stupid practical joke in which he puts an empty revolver to his head and threatens to shoot himself. One day, while the husband is away, she puts bullets in the revolver. However, she is stricken with remorse and tries to retrieve the bullets the next morning. Her husband gets to the revolver first only this time he points the revolver at her.

Specially commissioned soundtracks performed live by Errolyn Wallen.

MESHES OF THE AFTERNOON

One of the most influential works in American experimental cinema. A non-narrative work, it has been identified as a key example of the “trance film,” in which a protagonist appears in a dreamlike state, and where the camera conveys his or her subjective focus. The central figure in Meshes of the Afternoon, played by Deren, is attuned to her unconscious mind and caught in a web of dream events that spill over into reality. Symbolic objects recur throughout the film; events are open-ended and interrupted. Deren explained that she wanted “to put on film the feeling which a human being experiences about an incident, rather than to record the incident accurately.”

Specially commissioned soundtracks performed live by Seaming To.

SOUND AND SILENTS 2 Sunday 18th March, 5:30PM, NFT OPTRONICA Festival.

Daisy Doodad’s Dial (UK 1914, 6’) – Florence Turner
Brilliantly entertaining British comedy, featuring Turner herself as rubber-faced Daisy.

Jetsam (UK 2002, 2’ 30”) – Sonia Bridge
A fascinating high-speed experimental short celebrating the everyday.

Sap (UK 2002, 8’) – Hyun-Joo Kim
Animation in the style of a Korean folk tale that makes use of delicate oil-on-glass animation techniques.

Suspense (USA 1913, 8’) – Lois Weber and Philip Smalley
Innovative early thriller using groundbreaking split-screen techniques.

Missing People (UK 2003, 6’ 30”) – Kathy Hinde
A hypnotic film from one of Joanna Macgregor’s most frequent collaborators.

The Grasshopper and the Ant (UK 1954, 11’) – Lotte Reiniger
Remarkable shadow-puppet animation from the first filmmaker, male or female, to direct a full-length animated feature film.