Another Cinephilia: Women’s Cinema in the 1920s

With the turn to the silent period, feminist film historiography has become a dynamic new field of research, focused less perhaps on the of than on the commercial and the public sphere it spawned. Yet the analysis of contributions to film is an equally charged area of research. A closer look at the pioneers of the silent period-women writers, filmmakers, and spectators-indicates a rather different convergence of art and cinema than has been typically assumed by film studies scholarship. Women's experience of in the silent period tends not to be expressed through manifestos or treatises, but in publications and genres, memoirs, and private correspondence.1 The analysis of discourse on in turn provides an eminent context for the reconsideration of canonical filmmakers such as Germaine Dulac, and for the appreciation of little known filmmakers such as Stella Simon. The new approach to a gender-specific genealogy of film discourse is based less on the conceptualization of a feminine aesthetic than in the analysis of specific instances and modes of participation in as a cultural discourse. Sandy Flitterman-Lewis and Judith Mayne have pioneered this type of analysis in their studies of French women filmmakers and cinema, respectively, by situating feminine enunciation in film within sets of historical and social determinants that include aesthetic and industrial modes of film production, as well as cultural contexts and institutions.2 The current discussion of gendered film discourse applies this type of contextualization to an interdisciplinary examination of social and cultural practices related to modern life and media. The authors collected here expand upon the slim canon of women film critics and theorists, including Germaine Dulac, the female editors and writers of Close-Up, and the French actress Eve Francis. These historians are delving into unpublished testimonies, personal memoirs, publications in non-filmic venues, institutional records of cinephilic activities, and filmmakers' artistic reflections on the cinema, from a variety of professional and geo-cultural contexts. Moreover, the experiences of described by female critics in these sources are echoed in cinematic practices, including the films of Dulac and Simon and the filmed dances of Loie Fuller, and also in the retailing of films to homemakers on the other side of the Atlantic, as Haidee Wasson shows. These essays represent a new generation of feminist historians, a generation which Jennifer Bean has described as challenging previous film categories and periodizations, using context-sensitive strategies of research founded on interdisciplinary, diachronic, and local approaches to film history.3 The articles compiled here are a selection of the many essays that were presented at the Women and the Silent Screen Congress that was held in Montreal in June 2004, the third edition of a feminist conference dedicated to silent cinema.4 In keeping with the conference's international focus, the present dossier adopts a transnational perspective, particularly with respect to European and North American artistic connections and transatlantic applications of modernist aesthetics. Indeed, one of the key implications of this collection is the suggestion of another women's modernity becoming visible within the overlapping frames of more dominant discourses of modernity, such as Symbolism, Art Nouveau, the various discourses on photography that were circulating in the 1920s, and of course the discourse on avant-garde cinema. A common thread throughout these papers is the discussion of cinephilia, manifested in various forms and venues, and connected with different institutions and cultural contexts. If cinephilia describes a passionate (indeed often obsessive and totalizing) and personal relation to film, these essays suggest that the cinephilia associated with movie going in the 1920s was highly experiential and sensory. …

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