Women Behind the Camera

In the 1910s more women directed films in the United States than in any later decade until very recently. Most of their work is lost; what survives is in this Reel.

Alice Guy-Blaché was the first. The Cabbage Fairy (1896), made at Gaumont in Paris when she was twenty-three, is arguably the first narrative film by anyone. In America she ran her own studio, Solax, in Fort Lee, New Jersey: Falling Leaves, A Fool and His Money — with an all-Black cast — and Making an American Citizen (all 1912), Algie the Miner (1912), Matrimony's Speed Limit (1913) and The Ocean Waif (1916) show her range from melodrama to comedy of manners.

Lois Weber was the highest-paid director at Universal in 1916, male or female. Suspense (1913), with its three-way split screen, is a formal landmark; Hypocrites (1915) scandalised censors; Where Are My Children? (1916) argued for birth control; Shoes (1916) is an unflinching study of a shop girl's poverty; The Blot (1921) and The Sensation Seekers (1927) are her late independent work. Suspense and Where Are My Children? are on the National Film Registry.

Beyond Weber: Mabel Normand directed herself in Mabel's Blunder (1914); Marion E. Wong, a young Chinese-American woman in Oakland, wrote, directed and starred in The Curse of Quon Gwon (1916–17), the earliest known Asian-American feature; Nell Shipman produced and starred in the Canadian wilderness films Back to God's Country (1919) and The Grub-Stake (1923); Dorothy Davenport Reid produced and presented The Red Kimona (1925) after her husband's death from addiction. In France Germaine Dulac's The Smiling Madame Beudet (1923) and The Seashell and the Clergyman (1928) are founding works of feminist and surrealist cinema.

The Reel ends thirty years later with Ida Lupino, the only woman directing in 1950s Hollywood: Not Wanted (1949), which she took over uncredited, The Hitch-Hiker (1953), the first noir directed by a woman and a National Film Registry title, and The Bigamist (1953), in which she directs herself.