The girl from God's country: Nell Shipman and the silent cinema

Abstract

Situating Canadian filmmaker Nell Shipman in the current stream of film studies is only a portion of what Kay Armatage sets out to do in this book. Neither a hagiography of a forgotten film legend, nor the story of genius ahead of her time, Armatage’s work treats Shipman as an ordinary working woman. From this point of departure, Shipman’s career is mapped onto a series of social and cultural topics, such as the history of women’s participation in the film industry, silent film aesthetics, and current scholarship on women’s films and women filmmakers. Part intervention, part historical treatise, part biography, The Girl From God’s Country is a tightly woven history of women filmmakers in the era of silent cinema. Armatage first learned of Nell Shipman’s existence in 1973 when a print of Back to God’s Country, Shipman's 1919 feature film, was programmed for Toronto’s Women & Film Festival. In the festival catalogue, Armatage appealed to feminist film scholars to employ archival and historical research methods in order to recover other lost filmmakers. She also called for more analysis of feminist films and the development of aesthetic, critical and theoretical frameworks to deal with feminist film practices, as existing methods had overlooked female creators and women’s films. Despite her own directive, Armatage candidly admits that her research on Shipman was sidetracked in a major way: I was swept up into what seemed more exciting and revolutionary, the feminist theory project which in 1973-75 was in its germinal stages. Armatage further divulges that since her background was in literary theory, she was better prepared for theoretical work than for historical research. Her intent in returning to Shipman after almost thirty years is to rekindle her call for scholars in film and women’s studies to push the boundaries of critical methods towards historical research. While she defends the gains in theoretical feminist film scholarship that have been made since the 1970s, she says the wave of feminist film theory failed to bring about a historical framework for women filmmakers or women’s films. By means of introduction, Armatage provides an in-depth and detailed examination of the existing literature on women film directors during the silent film era, situating Shipman amongst her female filmmaker counterparts such as Dorothy Arzner, Alice Guy Blanche, Leni Riefensthal, Esfir Shub and Elizaveta Svilova. Armatage has unfortunately chosen to pass over the details of Shipman’s youth and participation in the vaudeville circuit which she entered at