Abstract
It will soon be five decades since Sharon Smith and Anthony Slide each published research revealing the surprising extent of women’s filmmaking during the pre-classical period of American cinema that ended a century ago.1 It has been over twenty-five years since the Women Film Pioneers Project2 was founded by Jane M. Gaines, whose latest book, Pink-Slipped: What Happened to Women in the Silent Film Industries?, sets out to push the ‘reset’ button on feminist film historiography. Meanwhile Kristen Anderson Wagner’s Comic Venus: Women and Comedy in American Silent Film and Maggie Hennefeld’s Specters of Slapstick and Silent Film Comediennes reclaim silent-era comedy, a genre slow to be taken up by feminist scholars, as a means of feminist assault on power structures. This review considers how the three books reconceptualize not only the nature and dimensions of women’s filmmaking and influence in the silent era but those of feminist film history itself.
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