Silent Women

Pioneers of Cinema

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• Publisher: Aurora Metro Books
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780993220708
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

The first ever overview of women's contributions to the dawn of cinema looking at a variety of roles from writers and directors to film editors and critics.Why have women such as Alice Guy-Blache, the creator of narrative cinema, been written out of film history? Why have so many women working behind the scenes in film been rendered invisible and silent for so long?Silent Women, pioneers of cinema explores the incredible contribution of women at the dawn of cinema when, surprisingly, more women were employed across the board in the film industry than they are now.It also looks at how women helped to shape the content, style of acting and development of the movie business in their roles as actors, writers, editors, cinematographers, directors and producers. In addition, we describe how women engaged with and influenced the development of cinema in their roles as audience, critics, fans, reviewers, journalists and the arbiters of morality in films. And finally, we ask when the current discrimination and male domination of the industry will give way to allow more women access to the top jobs. In addition to its historical focus on women working in film during the silent film era, the term silent also refers to the silencing and eradication of the enormous contribution that women have made to the development of the motion picture industry."e;The surprise of the essays collected here is their sheer volume in every corner of a business apparently better able to accommodate female talent then than now.."e; Danny Leigh, Financial Times, July 2016"e; It's a fascinating journey into the untold history of a largely lost era of film.."e; Greg Jameson, Entertainment Focus, March 2016"e;This book shows how women's voices were heard and helped create the golden age of silent cinema, how those voices were almost eradicated by the male-dominated film industry, and perhaps points the way to an all-inclusive future for global cinema.."e; Paul Duncan, Film Historian"e;Inspirational and informative, Silent Women will challenge many people's ideas about the beginnings of film history. This fascinating book roams widely across the era and the diverse achievements and voices of women in the film industry. These are the stories of pioneers, trailblazers and collaborators - hugely enjoyable to read and vitally important to publish."e; Pamela Hutchinson, Silent London"e;Every page begs the question - how on earth did these amazing women vanish from history in the first place? I defy anyone interested in cinema history not to find this valuable compendium a must-read. It's also a call to arms for more research into women's contribution and an affirmation of just how rewarding the detective work can be."e; Laraine Porter, Co-Artistic Director of British Silent Film Festival"e;An authoritative and illuminating work, it also lends a pervasive voice to the argument that discrimination and not talent is the barrier to so few women o

1. GIRL FROM GOD’S COUNTRY: The History of Women in Film and Other War Stories

Karen Day

Nell Shipman (1892–1970)

Shipman once wrote ‘Applause and recognition are the handmaidens of creativity.’ The truth and irony of this pioneering filmmaker’s insight are apparent in the fact that her legacy of writing, producing and starring in seventy silent films remained buried for nearly a century. In 1984, Shipman’s obscurity nearly dissolved when Professor Tom Trusky, at Boise State University, stumbled on mention of this unknown filmmaker in a 1933 Idaho publication. The professor began a seven-year, transatlantic search to rediscover and restore Shipman’s lost body of work, including the complete remastering and digitization of her ‘obtainable’ films from 1912 forward.

Boise State University also published the first volume of Shipman’s dusty autobiography, The Silent Screen and My Talking Heart. Written a year before her death in 1970, the autobiography had been carefully preserved by Shipman’s son, Barry, in the hope that his mother might someday earn recognition. Trusky, however, suffered a fatal heart attack in 2009 and with his passing, the filmmaker’s name faded once again. In credit to his own legacy, the professor did succeed in amassing a comprehensive library of Shipman’s personal papers, her writing and eight of her films.

I’d been producing and directing independent documentaries for twenty years when I saw a head shot of Nell Shipman displayed at the Idaho Historical Museum. The black and white photo was a studio-manufactured image, mandatorily glamorous, but unusual in that its ‘star’ lacked the typical pouted lips and corkscrew curls of the silent era. More wholesome than stilted beauty or sultry vamp, Shipman offered an adventurous image, completed by a luxurious, Lynx fur hood and the title, ‘The Girl from God’s Country: Idaho’s First Filmmaker’.

Two thoughts continued to haunt me for weeks after I’d seen the photo. First, I wanted one of those coats despite its scandalous political incorrectness. More importantly, I wondered how had I lived in Idaho for fifteen years and been making movies for twenty, yet never heard of Shipman? I spent the next two years of my life searching for the answer. Eventually, the truth revealed was so unjust and purposefully entombed, I felt compelled to produce and direct a feature-length documentary on the Girl From God’s Country.

In the beginning, I envisioned the film as the shocking, untold story of one bold and forgotten female film pioneer. By the end of post-production, I was shocked by the naïveté of my original vision.

Before proceeding further, professional integrity demands a disclaimer: I am not a film historian nor academic. As a journalist and documentary filmmaker, credibility demands fact checking, but the human story fuels my focus. My words and films concentrate on ‘giving voice to those who don’t have the opportunity to speak for themselves.’ Working in warzones, I’ve specialized in places that will never see a Club Med – South Sudan, Kandahar, and Baghdad. I go there in pursuit of stories that would not be heard if I didn’t go. In other words, my work has been a matter of life and death for many and not surprisingly, a few times, the life at stake was my own. The final results are worth the risk when counted in lives saved and wrongs righted. The people my work has served always prove humbling in their courage and grace. Hence, I’ve avoided assignments about Hollywood celebrities, no matter how altruistic their cause. In my initial ignorance of all silent filmography beyond Charlie Chaplin, I dismissed Nell Shipman as a superficial object of attention.

What possible pertinence could a turn-of-the-century woman offer twenty-first century female filmmakers like myself? This was the Oscar-era of Zero Dark Thirty and action-adventure Pixar heroines! Silent films were the dark ages of cinema, overacted with batting eyelashes and flailing sheiks. If you’d seen one Rudolph Valentino film, you’d suffered too many, was my belief. I wasn’t alone in my pop cultural vindications. Today, tweets and blockbusters rule as our makers of meaning. Ask anyone younger than seventy years old about actresses in silent films. Even the screen queens, Lillian Gish and Mary Pickford, in my recollections, smear into black and white blurs between simplistic intertitles. Therefore, I confess it was curiosity and coat envy, rather than scholarship or artistic appreciation that finally sparked my research into Nell Shipman.

Wild at Heart

Nearly a century apart, Shipman and I both chose to relocate from California and make films in the state that still boasts the most wilderness in the lower forty-eight. This commonality indicated she was a kindred spirit, a fellow cultivator of worthwhile risk. Idaho has as much landmass as Texas, but remains obscure, surrounded by five more-famous western states and Canada. The population was 436,000 when Shipman moved here in 1922, equating roughly to thirty-three square miles per person. (Current residents can only claim eight square miles.) Already a successful silent film writer, producer and movie star, Shipman boarded trains then tugboats to travel 1,280 miles from Glendale to the Priest Lake, fifteen miles south of the Canadian border. Her life was an orchestrated spectacle even in the wilderness. She brought along her ten-year-old son, her married lover-director, a future Academy Award-winning cinematographer and a zoo of seventy abused animal actors, including bobcats, bears, elk, eagles, deer and sixteen sled dogs.

The more I read, the more brightly Shipman’s boldness shone. Her daring was like a dimmer switch, turning up the light on early female independence. Seeking space enough to create herself and her films on-location, not on veneered sets, this firebrand rejected interference from ‘suits’ like Sam Goldfish (soon to be Goldwyn) who offered her a seven-year studio contract with a guarantee of stardom in velvet handcuffs. Shipman writes in her autobiography:

‘Cheekily, I turned down the offer… Probably as silly a move as any neophyte ever made. But I did not like the way they dressed their contract players. This was the period of curly blondes with Cupid-bow’s mouths… This long-legged, lanky outdoors gal, who usually loped across the Silver Screen in fur parkas and mukluks, simply gagged at such costuming.’

Independent, audacious, lover of animals and fur coats, determined to make films in dangerous locations – here was a filmmaker and a female I could relate to, albeit a century later! Imagine, she rebuffed Goldwyn to start her own production company the same year the U.S. Postal Service destroyed 500 copies of James Joyce’s new novel, Ulysses.

I suddenly wished I could take this woman to lunch. Surely, we’d drink martinis and share dessert and disdain for the latest Mad Max movie. This revelation, coupled with the fact that today, Idaho still boasts only three female filmmakers and two million cattle, spurred me to walk into the Special Archives library at Boise State University and ask to see ‘The Nell Shipman Papers’.

My purse and phone went into a locker. I was handed a pair of white gloves and guided into a transparent room, all walls being windows into the library. Students looked up from their laptops and texting. Stripped of technology, I stared at my feet, feeling strangely exposed.

A young woman with blue hair and cat glasses wheeled in three file carts with forty-four boxes labeled meticulously with cross-referenced file folders. ‘Good luck,’ she said. ‘You may use those pencils and paper to take notes.’

Pencils and paper? What fresh hell is this? I sat down and opened ‘Box One.’ The first folder was labeled ‘Birth Certificate’.

She was still-born, according to record, on 25^th October 1892, on Victoria Island B.C. Her mother, a victim of Victorian repression and British upbringing, refused to cry in public and ran with the dead babe in arms to the blustery cliffs overlooking the straits. There, in gale-force winds, Helen Barham-Foster fluttered her blue eyes and was reborn. ‘A creature as foreign to her parents as Siwash,’ Shipman later wrote. ‘A being made of fire and water and gutter-muck, a half-wild, ornery, often vulgar, and brave-beyond-reason child who would forego convention, dodge proper education, refuse to be a lady and instead, become an actress at the age of thirteen.’

Vaudeville Years

Apparently, circus acts and shamelessly-black-faced musicals welcomed child labor at the turn of the 20th century. ‘You’re pretty, and tall for your age… but what idiot told you you were an actress?’ Shipman relates her failings with wry and sardonic wit in her autobiography. ‘A shabby little tramp in a backwoods troupe in a one-night stand company as there ever was… But, at last I am a professional actress!’ she wrote home from a pool-table stage in Wallace, Idaho.

Touring with stock theater companies from her childhood home in Seattle to New York and as far as Alaska, the eighth grader learned fast what it meant ‘to sit on my theater trunk so the local sheriff could not attach it for the troupe’s unpaid hotel bills, to go hungry, cold and study one part while rehearsing another and playing a third’.

Shipman’s descriptions of her pubescent years on filthy pillows made me wince as a mother. As a filmmaker, however, I understand artistic passion as both a gift and affliction. The applause and hardships were life’s boot camp, building a maverick girl before women could even vote. Sexism and feminism had not been named nor cursed yet, but resilience, determination, independence and the ability to fry mascara in a tin cup over a smoky kerosene lamp became Shipman’s armory for life as an untamable artist and liberated woman forty years before Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique.

By her eighteenth birthday, Shipman had mastered the road, living off two dollars a week and stirring crowds in plays like Queen of the Highway, where she performed a horse-rearing stunt and manure-dodging death in two performances daily. These talents, plus her intact virginity, spiked the interest of a ‘posh’, thrice-married, Broadway promoter.

‘Men like Ernie Shipman made the 90s gay,’ she wrote. ‘He was one of the great cocksmen of his time, not immoral, but amoral, not lascivious, but lusty.’ This amiable rake and slippery gentleman gave Shipman a beloved son, Barry, then shoved her off the stage and into ‘moving pictures’, while touring with another leading lady.

In 1912, every town had a Vaudeville ‘house’ and those theaters where Shipman reared her horse were quickly converting to cinemas. Around the world, film companies were springing up as fast as the cameras could be cranked. So raw was the industry that Kalem, Selig and Biograph, the ‘biggies’ printed their company names on the lower left hand corner of every frame to stop hijacking. Ernie Shipman smelled money and advised his young wife how to earn it, writing melodramatic scenarios for Vitagraph at $25.00 a reel.

Before Hollywood

By 1915, Ernie Shipman’s exceptional spending ability and promotional perspicacity had propelled his wife into writing two-reelers for the new Universal. He even sold her first novel, Under the Crescent for a startling, thousand-dollar advance. The money evaporated quickly. Ernie Shipman went to jail for unpaid bills pre-dating the marriage. Nell Shipman pawned the first of many family heirlooms lost to debt, bail and broken dreams. Ironically, it was while writing scripts that Nell Shipman was elbowed into directing, when a director on a Universal set in Tahoe ran away with the leading lady.

‘You wrote this mishmash,’ shouted the lead actor, ‘you can direct it.’ Shipman picked up the megaphone and from then on, only put it down when she applied Stein’s thick-greased make-up to play the part of the female lead. Even two-year-old Barry earned his first of a thousand film parts.

Hollywood didn’t exist yet. Burbank, Pasadena and Glendale (where the Shipman family and two pet bears, resided within a population of 3,000) were individual production towns. Nell Shipman’s persistence of vision and empty bank account, coupled with the boom time of silent film, catapulted her career when she wrote the script and starred in the first multi-reel feature shot on-location. Vitagraph provided a staggering $90,000 budget to produce God’s Country and the Woman, adapted from the popular outdoor novel by James Oliver Curwood. Logline: Queen of Dog Sleds Conquers Canadian Tundra.

Temperatures regularly slid to thirty below, according to Joseph Walker, the future Oscar-winning cinematographer on the set. He later published an autobiography about his work with Hollywood’s most beautiful women. In The Light on Her Face, he describes Nell Shipman in near angelic terms and that film location as a polar hell. Cameras had to remain outside or their lenses would shatter if brought inside the cabins at night. The lead male actor died of pneumonia and was replaced half way through shooting while the director, Bert Van Tuyle, suffered crippling frostbite on one foot that would eventually drive him delusional with pain. Nell, on the other hand, emerged from the harsh landscape a true movie star – with Van Tuyle, her clandestine paramour.

Witness here the birth of the first action-adventure-heroine in a box-office blockbuster. Stunt queens, like Helen Holmes in the Perils of Pauline were at their zenith in 1915. These cliffhangers were packaged as ‘serialized’ entertainment, but God’s Country and The Woman was a feature-length film. Box-office receipts soared and investors garnered 300%, while Nell’s pay lagged until last. More valuable, however, her public persona blossomed as the heroine who paddled canoes and drove dogsleds. Fans loved the Girl From God’s Country. This marketing moniker would prove as true as it was successful.

This Curwood epic and its sequel, confirmed Shipman’s uncommon bond with wild animal actors. Bears, cougars, elk, skunks and vicious dogs – she considered all four-legged creatures to be as worthy of respect as any actor, insisting they be treated as humanely by refusing to allow guns, whips or chains on her sets. Even the most dangerous animals returned the favor.

At this point in my research, I felt like I’d struck documentary gold! How utterly cool was this woman? And better yet, she’d mysteriously disappeared! I dug deeper into the archives and my production budget.

The box-office success inspired Ernie, Nell and author Curwood to abandon Vitagraph and create an independent production company to make, Back to God’s Country. This rebellion provoked a contentious relationship with the studio establishment for a price Nell alone would pay the rest of her life.

Freedom is Never Free

Shipman’s rejection of tyranny, particularly against the patriarchal construct, made me cheer. She embodied the archetypal dilemma of all women, then and now, the choice between security and freedom, of the predictable turn and the unknown road – or as the author, Karen Von Blixen described it, ‘the lion hunt and bathing the baby.’ As twenty-first-century women and mothers, we owe these female provocateurs of change, women like Susan B. Anthony, Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Nell Shipman, a debt. Our freedom is no less free, but we have the advantage of looking back on their sacrifices and bonfires. We know the price of freedom demands a loss of innocence and a fight. As a director and woman, I suddenly began to understand this story was much bigger than Nell Shipman and this film, more than a documentary. It had become a personal journey and homage to all these anarchic sisters I’d never met.

In 1919, Nell Shipman was female liberation in the flesh, literally. Back to God’s Country premiered with Nell flashing the first nude scene in film history. (Lois Weber’s film, Hypocrites, is a spectacular runner-up and Hedy Lamarr’s 1933 nude scene in Ecstacy still generates far more press.) ‘Don’t book this movie unless you want to prove the NUDE IS NOT ...

Table of contents

• Silent Women: Pioneers of Cinema
• Copyright
• Title
• Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction
• 1. Girl from God’s Country: The History of Women in Film and Other War Stories
• 2. Early African-American Female Filmmakers
• 3. The Silent Producer: Women Filmmakers Who Creatively Controlled the Silent Era of Cinema
• 4. Women were Writing: Beyond Melodrama and Hot House Romances
• 5. Doing it All: Women’s On-and Off-screen Contributions to European Silent Film
• 6. Female Legends of the Silver Screen
• 7. Directors from the Dawn of Hollywood
• Images
• 8. Interview with Director Dorothy Arzner
• 9. Women Film Editors from Silent to Sound
• 10. Who was the first Female Cinematographer in the World?
• 11. When the Woman Shoots: Ladies Behind the Silent Horror Film Camera
• 12. Critics, Reformers and Educators: Film Culture as a Feminine Sphere
• 13. U.S. Women Directors: The Road Ahead
• Index