Formost of history, women, confronted with high social barriers, left few recordsand contributed less to the arts and sciences than men. This remained true intothe 20th century and the early years of cinema. Women had feweropportunities behind the camera than their male counterparts and the positionsthey held were often overlooked or undervalued.
Editedby Christine Gledhill and Julia Knight, Doing Women’s Film History: ReframingCinemas, Past and Future (University of Illinois Press) contains a higher thanusual percentage of gems than many anthologies from academic conferences.Whether such a book can “reframe the future” is a metaphysical question.However, the historical essays in Women’s Film History serve to not only raisethe profiles of forgotten women in the industry but to illuminate film culturein times and places seldom studied.
MichelleLeigh’s “Reading Between the Lines: History and the Studio Owner’s Wife” isexemplary in assessing the possible role played in pre-Bolshevik Russianfilmmaking by Antonina Khanzhonkova, wife of a movie industrialist. Leigh’sessay is a marvel of how to do history when the facts are few and the goal, asin all good history writing, is to make those facts “yield meaningful storiesabout the past and our relationship to it.”
Somefeminist academics have been less careful in using facts, constructing“meaningful stories” better categorized as historical fiction than history.Kimberly Tomadjoglou gently takes one of her colleagues to task for reimaginingAlice Guy, a pre-World War I Franco-American filmmaker, into a feminist rolemodel. A closer examination of the sources deflates that balloon, revealing aperson who was more complicated, perhaps even more interesting, than a projectionof present-day concerns onto the past.
Mostof the contributors to Doing Women’s Film History did work that was painstakingas well as imaginative, patiently tracing their subjects through newspaperarchives and public records, and making full use of the riches made availableby the Internet, to piece together theories based on the fullest availableevidence.
