Women and the Silent Screen XI Conference (Web Exclusive)
by Cynthia Rowell and Amira McKee

More than one hundred years ago, the filmmaking capital of the United States shifted from the metro New York area to California and what would become Hollywood. For the first week of June, NYC was again a mecca of silent cinema, drawing scholars from around the world for Women and the Silent Screen (WSS) (June 1–8, 2022), the biannual conference sponsored by Women and Film History International (WFHI). The eleventh edition of WSS was held at Columbia University in Dodge Hall and the Lenfest Center for the Arts, both buildings connected to the School of the Arts, whose Film & Media Studies program along with the departments of History and American Studies were the major university sponsors. Full disclosure: we both worked for the conference.  

Originally slated for June 2021, the conference responded to the COVID-19 pandemic by shifting to a mini online version with panels focused on Chinese and Soviet women directors, Alice Guy Blaché’s transatlantic career, and breakthroughs in digital humanities. Nearly a thousand people signed up to view three days of presentations and screenings. It was a test run for when participants were finally able to gather in person, complying with the university’s COVID-19 restrictions while enjoying all the benefits of being face to face.

Beyond daily screenings, WSS participants attended conference panels, workshops, short presentations, and plenary sessions to explore questions of migration, mobility, and the significance of women during the early film era. Though the sessions all fell within WSS’s theme of “Women, Cinema, and Global Migration,” each displayed unique perspectives on various films, figures, and movements. Panel discussions included topics of gender discrimination, transnational stardom, cross-racial performances, among many others. Sessions were full of spirited inquiry, as scholars and audience members alike engaged in WSS’s fierce dedication to showcasing an unmatched intersectional perspective on the economic, aesthetic, and narrative centrality of women in early film. 

The week’s programming was punctuated by more than a dozen show-and-tells, fifteen-minute blocks in which silent film scholars shared their research and received peer questions and commentary. Scholar Evangeline Morphos and School of the Arts students Mollie Murtagh and Annie Berman, for example, presented their research “Theatre to Film Migration: Silent Era Actresses in New York.” The show-and-tell used archival photographs to identify many Fort Lee silent film actresses who started in theater, often returning to the New York stage again in their later careers. Dwight Cleveland, the owner of the largest collection of early film posters in the world, dedicated his show-and-tell “Remarkable Women Behind the Camera” to sharing the significance and scale of this reserve of cinema history, with a focus on lobby cards. (If you are in New York before Oct. 9, 2022, you can view his exhibit at Poster House.) Other presented work ranged from data visualizations to biographical reconstructions, each contributing to the growing canon of women in silent film research.  

Although talking about silent cinema is enlightening, nothing beats viewing it, especially with live music. Three of the best silent film pianists in NYC (Makia Matsumura, Ben Model, and Donald Sosin) gave their musical interpretations to the screenings, mainly shown in digital copies from international archives. Audiences at plenary and archivist panels preceding the screenings received not only scholarly reflection but also historical, political, and academic context for each film’s contemporary viewing. All the screenings took place at Columbia’s Lenfest Center for the Arts – its Katharina Otto-Bernstein Screening Room was a top-notch venue—with the exception of the very first one held at The Museum of Modern Art.

This program on June 1 was also one of its most noteworthy. Aptly titled “Preserving and Presenting Silent Era Women’s Films,” the archivist panel featured Anne Morra, retired curator at MoMA’s Department of Film; Dave Kehr, current MoMA Department of Film curator; Anna Kovalova of Free University Moscow; and Barbara Moss, founder of The Women’s Film Preservation Fund (WFPF) of New York Women in Film & Television (NYWIFT).  Panelists responded to audience questions following the screening of The Daughter of Niagara (1910) and The President’s Special (1914), respectively starring Pearl White and Gertrude McCoy. Questions of the criterion for film preservation and its necessary funding dominated the night’s discussion. Though relevant to film preservation writ large, this question was especially poignant considering the racial masquerading and Indigenous stereotyping in The Daughter of Niagara, motivating several audience members to wonder why it was preserved at all. Kehr and Morra, given their experience in museum curating, described factors such as historical significance, film quality, and the involvement of women as central to their preservation considerations. Still, the panel acknowledged the dissonant moral and cultural standards between modern and contemporary audiences.  

Anna Kovalova delivered an eye-catching PowerPoint presentation of newly unearthed research illustrating the life and work of Elizaveta Thiemann, Russia’s first credited female film director. The next day, she also took part, along with Karen Pearlman of Macquarie University and Anastasia Kostina of Yale University, in a plenary panel on “Soviet Revolutionary Women,” which catalyzed an engaging interrogation of the role and importance of Soviet women’s silent era work. Pearlman shared her creative take on renowned Soviet documentarian Esfir Shub’s career, “I Want to Make a Film About Women” (the title is from a 1933 article by the director). Combining clips from the filmmaker’s oeuvre with actor stand-ins for revolutionary women artists of the 1920s, this short film embodies the spirit of the times, while giving background on Shub, who taught Eisenstein to edit and was a pioneer in remix filmmaking. 

Kostina, a leading scholar on Shub and other Soviet women in film, offered a thoughtful introduction (more here) to one of the most anticipated conference screenings: Shub’s rarely shown film Segodnya or Today (Cannons or Tractors?). The 1930 co-production of Sovkino (USSR) and Weltfilm (Germany) is a prime example of remix filmmaking, contrasting newly shot footage chronicling Soviet proletarian life in 1929 with German newsreel clips, including images of NYC’s Union Square, to highlight the capitalist West’s perceived societal corruption. Today had first streamed during the 2021 online WSS in a new digital scan from the Russian State Film and Photo Archive—something that would likely not have been possible to obtain this year. The response was so rapturous that its projection on June 2 was greatly applauded. When the film was originally screened in 1930s New Jersey, it was deemed such radical propaganda that it was confiscated and banned by state police. The role of censorship and Russian revolutionary context remained central as the discussion progressed, as audience members were interested in how the explicitly political nature of the film may inform a modern viewing. Both the panel and most discussion of Soviet revolutionary work screened at WSS featured commentary on the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine. Despite the controversy of its messaging, as many scholars emphasized, Soviet revolutionary propaganda film, especially Shub’s, remains a crucial element of the women’s film canon.  

Another title rarely seen on the big screen—here shown in the conference’s only 35mm print, imported from France courtesy of the Centre National du Cinéma (CNC) and GP Archives—is Robert Z. Leonard’s The Waning Sex (1926), starring Norma Shearer in a battle of the sexes. This MGM production based on the eponymous play was part of a June 3 program of films by creators with connections to Columbia University. The Waning Sex was adapted for the cinema by Frederica Sagor Maas, who had studied journalism before going west to start a screenwriting career for which she barely received proper credit (as recounted in her memoir published as she neared her hundredth birthday). The feature was accompanied by two shorts: the surviving fragment of By Right of Birth (1921), from a Black-owned independent company and starring African American actress Anita Thompson, and The Diver (1913), from Vitagraph scenario editor-in-chief Marguerite Bertsch. Both had matriculated at Teachers College. Columbia University not only was a pipeline of talent to Hollywood but also helped to fashion how film was studied. Frances Taylor Patterson taught Photoplay Composition for decades beginning in 1917, and her books on the art of screenwriting shaped film appreciation and pedagogy. 

Often cited as the most famous woman screenwriter of the silent era, Frances Marion was represented with one of the few films in which she was both writer and director, Just Around the Corner, a 1921 feature from William Randolph Hearst’s Cosmopolitan Productions (Columbia University Libraries houses the collection of Cosmopolitan’s art designer Joseph Urban). Adapted from a short story, “Superman” by Fannie Hurst, this is a sentimental tale of family bonds and unexpected love. The DCP of the restoration shown at the June 4 screening was the result of years of collaboration between the Library of Congress and Eye Filmmuseum in Amsterdam, with support from NYWIFT’s Women’s Film Preservation Fund (which, years earlier, had also funded the George Eastman Museum’s restoration of The Daughter of Niagara, shown in the resulting 16mm print). Eye curator of silent film Elif Rongen-Kaynakçi and LOC’s Motion Picture Laboratory supervisor Heather Linville gave engaging presentations on how the two countries’ copies were merged into the final result to bring back to vibrant life the Lower East Side’s tenement setting. Even more fascinating is that the copy of this film that had been circulating for years was just over an hour in length; the restoration brought it closer to the correct speed, thus bumping the run time closer to one hundred minutes! 

The previous projection speed of Just Around the Corner might have made the film seem like a comedy. The melodrama was actually preceded by the amusing Thanhouser short Toodles, Tom and Trouble (1915), in which a father gets a heart-pounding lesson in minding the baby. Edwin and Gertrude Thanhouser parlayed successful theatrical careers into one of the first motion picture studios, located just above the Bronx in New Rochelle. Grandson Ned Thanhouser and Dean DeFino of Iona College, which houses the studio archives, tag-teamed the show-and-tell “From Stage to Screen: Thanhouser Studio (1910–1917).” Ned runs Thanhouser Company Film Preservation, Inc., and for nearly forty decades he has sought out and preserved extant titles, now numbering close to one hundred (dozens are free to view online), though only a fraction of the Thanhouser Company’s output, ranging from Westerns and melodramas to literary adaptations and nail-biting mystery serials.

The derring-do and courage by heroines of the 1910s were most spectacularly embodied in serial films, with the main protagonists essayed by a group of women referred to as serial queens. The history of this genre is too massive to do justice in a few paragraphs, let alone in the mere seven films screened on the afternoon of June 5; however, with a conference held in Manhattan, across from the Palisades cliffs that spawned the term “cliffhangers,” a survey of this popular silent cinema genre was a no-brainer. Film workers of that time would even depart by ferry near Columbia University to commute across the Hudson River to Fort Lee, NJ, “America’s first film town,” where most of the major studios had set up shop. The Fort Lee Film Commission and film historian Richard Koszarski (Fort Lee, the Film Town) have kept the flame of remembrance alive. In 2008 they “adopted” Chapter 14 of Wolves of Kultur in a global preservation initiative spearheaded by Lobster Films. This was Leah Baird’s only appearance as a serial queen; she and others who took on such roles more frequently were part of the June 5 screenings: from the most famous, Pearl White (Pearl of the Army, 1916), to the first in line, Gene Gauntier (The Girl Spy Before Vicksburg, 1910), to multihyphenate talent Grace Cunard (The Purple Mask, 1917), who shared writing and directing duties with her business partner, Francis Ford (older brother to John Ford). Background information on Gauntier and White was shared on June 2 in show-and-tells “Daughters of Mary and Gene: The Serial Queen’s Two Origins” (Daniel Aufmann, University of Minnesota) and “The Romance of Orientalism and the Passions of Pearl White” (Jennifer M. Bean, University of Washington-Seattle). 

The craze for these films was not just confined to the States. Monica Dall’Asta (University of Bologna) gave one example with her show-and-tell “From Pauline to Paolina: The Mystery Case of Paola Pezzaglia Greco, Italian Serial Queen.” In a plenary session on June 5, Yuki Irikura (Waseda University), Chonghwa Chung (Korean Film Archive), and Rudmer Canjels (an independent scholar based in Amsterdam) discussed the reception of U.S. serials, such as The Broken Coin, in Japan and Korea. In addition to the American films captivating audiences overseas, other countries had their own versions of kick-ass heroines. Three featured in this day’s screenings were Josette Andriot (Protéa, 1913; courtesy of the Cinématheque française), Emilie Sannom (Daredevil of the Cinema, 1923, Danish Film Institute), and Wu Suxin (The Valiant Girl Nicknamed White Rose, 1929, China Film Archive). 

China’s most well-known silent film actress, Ruan Lingyu, graced the Lenfest screen for the epic melodrama Love and Duty (1931), in which a young woman escapes an arranged marriage in search of her true love, only to land in a spiral of poverty and despair. Ruan’s life would turn as tragic as her on-screen characters’ trajectories. The film was long thought lost until a complete print was discovered in Uruguay in the 1990s and turned over to the Taiwan Film and Audiovisual Institute, which worked with L’Immagine Ritrovata on a digital restoration in 2014. As promoted in one of the online show-and-tell presentations, American cinephiles can expand their knowledge of Chinese silent cinemas thanks to Christopher Rea’s online film repository, Chinese Film Classics. 

Due to the Omicron outbreak, the biannual conference for Domitor, the international society of early cinema, had to go online instead of taking place at the Library of Congress’s Packard campus in Culpeper, VA. As a number of Domitor members were in NYC for WSS, the latter devoted much of the June 6 screenings to the society’s selections. Musical accompaniment was provided by Liz Magnes and Donald Sosin. At a round table earlier in the week, the team behind Cinema’s First Nasty Women, a four-disc DVD/Blu-ray set released by Kino Lorber, spoke of the process in assembling ninety-nine European and American silent films “about feminist protest, anarchic slapstick destruction, and suggestive gender play.” To kick off this “mini-Pordenone” day of screenings only, co-curator Maggie Hennefeld presented an eight-film sneak preview that delighted the audience with its irreverent humor. Tami Williams, Domitor’s president, then introduced thirteen films illustrating their conference theme of “copy/rights.” The Library of Congress’s National Audio-Visual Conservation Center supplied digital scans of these deep cuts from their vaults (along with several titles screened on other nights). Conference co-organizer and Columbia University professor Jane Gaines made a contribution to the copy/rights theme with a split-screen video of the Edison Company’s The Great Train Robbery (1903) compared to the Lubin “remake” (1904). 

The final screening program selected by WSS staff consisted of two “sensational melodramas” courtesy of Eye Filmmuseum: the Dutch release version for the opening chapter of the six-part 1913 Edison serial Who Will Marry Mary? and the American release copy, containing the alternate happier ending, of Maurits H. Binger and Hans Nesna’s Carmen of the North, a 1919 Dutch take on the famous novella Carmen, probably best known as Georges Bizet’s opera adaptation. In the framework of a conference meant to explore migration, these two examples of international distribution were an appropriate capstone to the screenings. Moreover, they reminded the audience of the invaluable aid of archives to scholars as often only one copy (and as shown by the short, not always the country of origin) remains and is kept safe, and hopefully preserved to the point of allowing access, by the tireless effort of archivists.

For its last two days (June 7–8, or June 7–9 in Asia to accommodate speakers Zooming in from that continent and to match the subtitle “Online China Time,” the 2022 conference again shifted to the virtual realm, expanding the audience outside of those who could attend the campus events. In collaboration with the Beijing Contemporary Art Foundation, Columbia University graduate student Yulong Hu coordinated six panels chiefly focused on Asia-related topics (Women of Shanghai, Shanghai Early Cinema, To Be the First, Japanese Actresses, The Orient and the West, Cross-Cultural Discoveries of the Silent Screen), five show-and-tells, interviews conducted by Columbia University’s Xiaoyang Pan with directors S. Louisa Wei (Golden Gate Girls (2013) and Havana Divas from 2018) and Qin Li (Blue Sky Station: 8th Avenue, “New York’s 3rd Chinatown” 2000), and screenings of their films.

Another forgotten pioneer who was featured in both 2021 and 2022 conferences was Marion E. Wong, whose The Curse of Quon Gwon (1916) was the first film with an all–Asian American cast. Her grand-nephew (Gregory Yee Mark, a professor at California State University in Sacramento) and great-grandson (Chris Kumaradjaja, a Columbia student) spoke about keeping their relative’s legacy alive. The family’s safekeeping of the film allowed the former to work with Prof. Cordelia Siporin (Fairleigh Dickinson University) in reinserting English intertitles, thus making the film more understandable for Western viewers. Prof. Mark wrote about the film for a Hong Kong Film Archive publication (see pp. 208–33), Transcending Space and Time: Early Cinematic Experience of Hong Kong, available online. 

That link and others are included on the conference’s Website, which remains active with details on both the 2022 hybrid and the 2021 online editions. There are also recommended readings and links to research collections in Columbia University’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library and elsewhere in NYC. If you are interested in the next WSS conference, keep in touch with WFHI.

Meanwhile, silent cinema scholarship continues to thrive. The Women Film Pioneers Project, a digital resource published by Columbia University Libraries and initiated by Prof. Jane Gaines, hosts profiles of hundreds of women who worked in front of the camera and behind the scenes worldwide during the first three decades of film history. Among the projects presented under the digital humanities rubric during the conference, the Women Film Pioneers Explorer, created by faculty and students of Philipps-Universität Marburg, enables users a variety of ways (geographical, chronological, hierarchical) to visualize the vast quantity of information gathered by the WFPP. 

Silent cinema exhibition is also far from extinct. One of the Nasty Women playdates is September 29, which is also National Silent Movie Day. Although not in time for this event, silent films will return once more to Fort Lee, NJ, when the Barrymore Film Center finally opens (currently slated for October 2022), a fitting return of this art form to the town that was the precursor to Hollywood. A portion of WSS XI was to be held in their brand-new state-of-the-art theater. In the near future, we can take the ferry like in days of yore to cry with Lillian Gish, laugh with Mabel Normand, and gasp at the perils of Pearl White— the real-life locations only a stone’s throw from the screen. 

Cynthia Rowell is an assistant editor at Cineaste.

Amira McKee is a Columbia University student, and research assistant to Prof. Jane Gaines.

Copyright © 2022 by Cineaste Magazine 

Cineaste, Vol. XLVII, No. 4