In the beginning, there was the 1978 Brighton conference. This was the catalyst for a renewed scholarly interest in cinema's early years and the installation of film theory within film history. About a decade after the turn to the ‘new historicism’ in mainstream film studies, groundbreaking publications in women's film history began to emerge. Kay Sloan focused on a number of women directors in The Loud Silents: Origins of the Social Problem Film,1 and in Unheimlichkeit des Blicks2 Heide Schlupmann analyzed early cinema in Wilhelmian Germany, highlighting a potential for oppositional women's perceptions.3 Miriam Hansen's Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film4 offered an expanded view of the historicity of women in the silent screen era, and the first book-length study of a single woman director from the silent era came with Giuliana Bruno's Streetwalking on a Ruined Map,5 a seminal work that synthesized theories of feminine subjectivity and representation with film history and production. Cultural studies opened new vistas, decentring the filmic text to ‘make way for a more open, dispersed and non-linear field of research in which film is studied as an intersection of a range of discourses that circulate through a culture, a shift which leads to investigations of representation, reception and production through intertextual, intermedial, and contextual perspectives’.6 Shelley Stamp's Movie Struck Girls7 took up Hansen's baton along with cultural studies methodologies, and the book's title became a catchphrase in studies of spectatorship in the silent era. The camera obscura special issue on early women stars edited by Diane Negra8 was followed by A Feminist Reader in Early Cinema,9 a giant tome that presents the groundswell of US scholarship on early cinema.10 Kino International and Milestone concurrently released videos of silent films by women directors, and independent documentaries about early women filmmakers appeared in profusion, for example, The Lost Garden: the Life and Cinema of Alice Guy Blache (NFB, 1995) and Reel Models: the Women of Early Film (American Movie Classic, 2000). A new movement in feminist film scholarship and production was underway with a generation of women scholars who had been trained in film studies and were bent on making a mark on the discipline.