The Girl from God’s Country: Nell Shipman and the Silent Cinema

Abstract

THE GIRL FROM GOD'S COUNTRY: NELL SHIPMAN AND THE SILENT CINEMA Kay Armatage Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003, 428 pp. 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 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 the tender age of thirteen in 1905. Instead, the book begins with Back to God's Country and works through Shipman's filmography. In her analysis of Shipman's first film, Armatage brings to the forefront questions of national and gender identity in relation to landscape, wild animals, and the indigenous and immigrant people. These themes run through Shipman's career and surface so often in the book that it could well have been organized thematically rather than chronologically. In detailing Shipman's filmmaking career, Armatage describes the production conditions of each film. For example, she illuminates Shipman's corporate affiliations in The Trail of the Arrow and Something New, two films that were funded by automobile companies, with Shipman directing and acting. Armatage examines these two films through the discourses of modernity, technology, the automobile, and gender, and she links them to Shipman's own tendencies toward adventure and excitement, as embodied in stories of her reckless driving in New York City. The connective tissue of the cultural and historical themes of the book is the on-screen and off-screen performances of Shipman herself. Moving from a discussion of modernity and technology to an examination of racial stereotypes of Indians and the melodramatic conventions of the mulatta film, Armatage examines the lost film The Girl From God's Country in relation to questions of the representation of race and cultural identity in silent cinema. …