The role of women in the early history of film has become better understood. In the first decades of the last century, women were prominent as screenwriters, directors and even producers. With Movie Mavens, Richard Abel tries to uncover the part women played in early film criticism.
Photo via University of Illinois Press
Movie Mavens
Movie Mavens is admittedly a tentative first step. As the author acknowledges, the archives of many newspapers, even major ones, aren’t digitized. Some archives have been lost. The research by the University of Michigan cinema professor was limited to a random sample of daily papers, many from the Midwest, and was hampered by the reticence of some women (or their editors) to acknowledge their gender. The identify of manywriters Abel encountered in his research are “hidden under initials.” Was C. Kelly male or female? In her case, Abel was able to identify her full name, Charlotte S. Kelly of the Indianapolis Star.
In Movie Mavens, Abel republishes entire reviews and articles published from 1914 through 1923—the end date based on U.S. copyright law. Establishing rights to reprint the property of often defunct newspapers would pose another research obstacle. Most of the women represented in Movie Mavens are unknown, aside from Louella Parsons (later notorious as a Hollywood gossipmonger) and Janet Flanner (later Paris correspondent for The New Yorker). Their writing is usually crisp, occasionally ironic, and represents a variety of perspectives. One writer defends the potential of film as art (this was 1916) and another is happy that it’s only entertainment.
Several articles are revealing about the early formation of the Hollywood studios and the cinema business in the 1910s. Most of the films critiqued in this collection have slipped into obscurity. Noteworthy is the Chicago Tribune’s favorable review of The Birth of a Nation, defending the film aesthetically (right), historically (wrong!) and against the push by censors to ban it (still a pertinent question about restricting speech and content); and the Tribune’s pan of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (“this German study in insanity”).
Many interesting details are picked up along the way, including a complaint by one critic about people reading the silent movie title cards out loud. This must have been 1915’s version of moviegoers chattering on their cellphones.
Movie Mavens: US Newspaper Women’s Take on the Movies, 1914-1923 is published by the University of Illinois Press.
