more streamlined. Movie-making was both fast and furious, with each studio cranking out at least two short films per week.
During the late teens, film production began to center in Los Angeles. This was partly because of its ideal weather for filming and space to build studios, and partly because of Thomas Edison. He had tried to monopolize film production in New York by suing for patent infringement on his inventions, so everyone escaped to Los Angeles where they were free to use his inventions with less likelihood of legal trouble.
Silent films became longer and more intricate, and the films were screened in new movie “palaces,” elaborate theaters with lavish aesthetic design features that were designed to attract a more upmarket crowd. To fill the seats, theater owners specifically targeted female audiences.
The thought was that if you could entice white middle-class women into theaters, it would push out the raucous working-class crowd. These women would bring their husbands, and the theaters could charge more for tickets, advertising it as an elegant night out. So the palaces were built near shopping centers, coupons were placed in magazines, and free childcare was offered. This completely excluded non-white audiences of a lower class.
Movie studios wanted to cater to this middle-class female audience, so female writers and directors were hired to ensure the content would appeal. Karen Ward Mahar, author of Women Filmmakers in Early Hollywood, says these women were “believed to lend a moral tone to the movies that the middle classes appreciated.”
The silent era saw actresses such as Mary Pickford, Lilian Gish, Theda Bara, Greta Garbo, and Clara Bow become hugely popular. The fame of these women was almost a reflection of the changing ideas about ladies during these decades. For example, Mary Pickford was the innocent Victorian-era girl, while Clara Bow was the sexy 1920s “New Woman.”
The New Woman was part of the first wave of feminism in the U.S., which saw protests for women’s rights grow throughout the teens and into the twenties. The movement was successful in winning the right for white women to vote in August of 1920 with the 19th Amendment.
By the end of the 1920s, silent films featured complex plots, artistic cinematography, and glamorous movie stars, and attracted big audiences. But a new filmmaking technology threatened this silent utopia. The ability to record sound heralded the arrival of “talkies,” which forced a complete rethinking of how to make movies—such as where to hide the giant microphones. All of this was wonderfully lampooned in 1952’s Singin’ In The Rain.
This brings us to why women were pushed out of the industry. Firstly, many filmmakers, writers, and actors struggled to make the transition to this new style of making movies. Secondly, the success of a couple of talkies, such as The Jazz Singer, saw a select few movie studios rise to the top, and independent companies (often run by women) just couldn’t compete, often as a result of a lack of finances.
The Great Depression caused many of these small studios to go under, and the financial gain of making movies became the biggest focus. Filmmaking started to be looked at as a business instead of a creative enterprise, and corporate structures were implemented, complete with executives in charge.
At this time, women were not perceived as being business-minded or executive material, so positions of power on a movie set, such as directing, now were given to men. From the 1930s onward, Hollywood became a boys’ club. And women have been trying to make their way back into the industry for almost 100 years.
Here’s just how dramatic and entrenched this boys’ club mindset became. Between 1912 and 1919, Universal had 11 female directors who regularly worked for them, and who made a total of 170 films in these seven years. But from the mid-1920s right up to 1982, the studio didn’t hire a single female filmmaker.
Reading film history books I learnt all about D.W. Griffith, Cecil B. DeMille, and Georges Méliès, but I didn’t know about the ladies who were working with them. When I started to research them, I was amazed by their stories. There were female directors who created techniques that filmmakers still use today. Movie actresses who not only demanded equal pay, but made more than the men. Female action heroes who performed their own stunts. Established women who supported younger women, giving them jobs in the industry. And much of this happened before ladies could even vote.
There are so many wonderful stories about revolutionary women in film who shaped the silent era. My hope is that by sharing a couple of them, you too will be inspired, and help to make sure they are not forgotten.
Alice Guy Blaché: The First Female Filmmaker
One of the first directors in cinema history was a woman. Her name was Alice Guy Blaché, and her history was lost for many years, because it was erased by the man who hired her.
Alice was born in Paris in 1873; twenty years later, she applied to be a secretary for Léon Gaumont—an inventor and the owner of a photography business. One day, Léon and Alice attended an exhibition put on by the Lumiére Brothers. They were showing off their latest invention, a camera which could record motion pictures. Léon purchased one, and Alice, inspired by the footage she watched, asked if she could borrow it.
With this camera, Alice made a short movie called The Cabbage Fairy. This was 1896. As you may guess from the title, this was a simple scene of a fairy pulling babies out of cabbages. It was created to show Léon’s customers what a motion picture camera could do, but now stands as one of the very first movies in history which featured a story. Alice didn’t think it was a masterpiece, but said, “the film had enough success that I was allowed to try again.”
Around this time the first movie production companies were being set up, and Léon decided to create his own—the Gaumont Film Company. Alice was put in charge of making the films, and she proceeded to direct every single movie out of the company for the next eleven years.
Slowly, Alice’s productions became more elaborate, and new technicians were hired to help her out. Alice had gone from being a secretary to a powerful figure at the fledgling studios, and she had to learn how to take charge.
On one of Alice’s movies, a camera operator fell ill, and an English man by the name of Herbert Blaché-Bolton was sent in his place. He was new to the equipment, and found his director to be cold and distant. “No doubt he was right,” Alice said later, “still young, in a job where I had to give proof of authority, I avoided all familiarity.”
Over the course of working together, however, Alice began to trust Herbert, and they fell in love. Unfortunately, their first film wasn’t as successful. When the print was developed, it was found to be over-exposed, scratched, and unusable. Alice cited faulty camera equipment—which could be true, cameras were not very reliable in those days—but I prefer the romantic version that she was trying to save any blame from falling on Herbert. Not long after, the two were married, and three days later they set sail for a new life in the United States.
For a few years, Herbert and Alice ran the new Gaumont Film Company in New York. But Alice wanted her own production company, so in 1910, she built Solax Studios in New Jersey. This made Alice the first woman to ever start her own motion picture studio.
At Solax, she oversaw the production of more than three hundred films, everything from comedies to dramas and westerns. She directed about fifty of those films and continuously experimented with new filmmaking techniques, such as in her movie Beasts of the Jungle, where she used a split screen effect to make it appear as if a lion were on the other side of a family’s front door. Really it was two recordings side by
