Women and the Silent Screen

Abstract

Research on women and the silent screen examines the role gender plays onscreen and behind the scenes in early film cultures worldwide. This vibrant subfield emerged in the 1990s in response to the rise of scholarship on early cinema that began after the Brighton conference in 1978 and the emergence of feminist film theory earlier in that decade. Scholars of women and silent cinema add a historical perspective to feminist film theory, while demonstrating the formative role that gender and sexuality played in early filmmaking, filmgoing, and film culture. Although scholarship on early cinema often focuses on the period prior to 1915, it has been important for research on women and the silent screen to consider the full scope of silent-era cinema since many female filmmakers became active after 1915, female audiences were significant throughout the silent period, and representations of gender and sexuality onscreen were central to evolving conceptions of modernity in many international contexts throughout the 1920s and into the early 1930s. Scholarship on women and the silent screen is not limited to the representation of gender onscreen, but examines the entire scope of women’s engagement with early movie cultures—as audiences and fans, as exhibitors and theater owners, as filmmakers, screenwriters, and other creative artists, as critics and journalists, as educators and activists. Much of this scholarship adopts a cultural approach to film history, looking at cinema in relation to wider contexts of changing gender roles, changing modes of work and industry, changing leisure patterns, changing sexual mores, the rise of consumer culture, and organized feminism in many global contexts. Cinema’s emergence as a popular entertainment form coincided with profound social change, and feminist film historians believe it is crucial to examine these two phenomena together. Some research on women and the silent screen examines these questions in relation to particular national or regional contexts, while other strands adopt a transnational approach, examining the global circulation of films, personnel, or ideas in cinema’s first decades. A majority of this scholarship has thus far focused on American cinema, so this bibliography is US-centric. Considerable research remains to be done about women and silent cinema in global contexts. Even still, arguably some of the best feminist film historiography in recent years has developed around the scholarship on women and the silent screen.