Pink-slipped : what happened to women in the silent film industries? / Jane M. Gaines.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Gaines, Jane, 1946- author.

Series:

Women and film history international

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Motion pictures and women--United States.

Motion pictures and women.

Silent films--United States--History.

Silent films.

Women in the motion picture industry--United States--History--20th century.

Women in the motion picture industry.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (274 pages)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Urbana : University of Illinois Press, 2018.

Summary:

Women held more positions of power in the silent film era than at any other time in American motion picture history. Marion Leonard broke from acting to cofound a feature film company. Gene Gauntier, the face of Kalem Films, also wrote the first script of Ben-Hur. Helen Holmes choreographed her own breathtaking on-camera stunt work. Yet they and the other pioneering filmmaking women vanished from memory. Using individual careers as a point of departure, Jane M. Gaines charts how women first fell out of the limelight and then out of the film history itself. A more perplexing event cemented their obscurity: the failure of 1970s feminist historiography to rediscover them. Gaines examines how it happened against a backdrop of feminist theory and her own meditation on the limits that historiography imposes on scholars. Pondering how silent era women have become absent in the abstract while present in reality, Gaines sees a need for a theory of these artists' pasts that relates their aspirations to those of contemporary women. A bold journey through history and memory, Pink-Slipped pursues the still-elusive fate of the influential women in the early years of film.

Contents:

Introduction: what Gertrude Stein wonders about historians

What happened to women in the silent U.S. film industry?

Where was Antonia Dickson? the peculiarity of historical time

More fictions: did Alice Guy Blache make La fee aux choux (The cabbage fairy)?

Object lessons: the ideology of historical loss and restoration

The melodrama theory of historical time

Are they "just like us"?

Working in the dream factory

The world export of the "voice of the home"

Conclusion: women made redundant.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on print version record.

Made available through Ebook Central

ISBN:

9780252050480

0252050487

9780252041815

025204181X

9780252083433

0252083431

OCLC:

1027851023