The Discovery of Early Cinema

Abstract

This chapter reviews the study of early cinema in the 1980s, focusing on the significance of the rediscovery of early cinema for feminist film historiography and theory. The fact that women participated in every branch of early cinema while at the same time being denied a public voice brought the silence of film to the centre of feminist considerations; for those who were not allowed to speak in public, like women, and who lacked voice—for them, film, which relied on gestural rather than spoken language, offered equal opportunities to interact with what was happening on screen as it did for the dignified bourgeois male sitting next to them in the cinema. By rediscovering and imagining early silent cinema as a preparatory stage for a radically altered public sphere, emancipatory movements and a developing film scholarship were equally equipped with the means to critique the dominant “media public sphere.”