Reframing Women in 1920s British Cinema: the Case of Violet Hopson and Dinah Shurey

Abstract

The last decade of film history has seen a concerted effort by international feminist scholars to reinsert questions of women’s participation in the emergence and development of cinema, a movement now gathering a head of steam with the establishment in America of a international ‘Women Film Pioneers Project’ based at Duke University which is developing an impressive distribution and publishing programme, supported by biennial conferences on ‘Women and the Silent Screen’. Equally, recent cultural histories of cinema’s emergence in a range of different countries emphasise its interaction with changing ideas and practices of gender and sexuality.1 Until recently, little of this work had surfaced in Britain, although the admirable annual Silent British Cinema events at Nottingham Broad way have thrown up significant contributions from a number of silent cinema historians.2 However, the recent NFT event, ‘Women and Silent Britain’, witnessed a surge of activity bent on filling this gap and hopefully there will be a strong British presence at the next ‘Women and Silent Screen’ event scheduled for Stockholm in 2008. This renewed interest in women’s film history prompted me to return to my recent attempt in Reframing British Cinema, 1918-1920 to construct a socially and historically situated ‘cultural poetics’ of British film making. There I argued that British cinema’s habit of treating shots like pictures, performances as play-acting, and storytelling as the repetition of well-known tales makes it a site for the circulation and intersection of images and practices functioning like social signs or ‘documents’. Such images participate in cultural negotiations and change, played out in fantasies woven from the interplay of traditional and new pictures and stories. This suggests a cinema that, while conservatively constrained, is also open to struggles around changing gender and sexual identities both within the home culture and pressing in from European, and especially American, imports. In this essay, then, I revisit the shifting