Women held more positions of power in the silent film era than at any other time in American motion picture history. Marion Leonard broke from acting to cofound a feature film company. Gene Gauntier, the face of Kalem Films, also wrote the first script of Ben-Hur. Helen Holmes choreographed her own breathtaking on-camera stunt work. Yet they and the other pioneering filmmaking women vanished from memory. Using individual careers as a point of departure, Jane M. Gaines charts how women first fell out of the limelight and then out of the film history itself. A more perplexing event cemented their obscurity: the failure of 1970s feminist historiography to rediscover them. Gaines examines how it happened against a backdrop of feminist theory and her own meditation on the limits that historiography imposes on scholars. Pondering how silent era women have become absent in the abstract while present in reality, Gaines sees a need for a theory of these artists' pasts that relates their aspirations to those of contemporary women. A bold journey through history and memory, Pink-Slipped pursues the still-elusive fate of the influential women in the early years of film.| Title Copyright Contents Acknowledgments Introduction: What Gertrude Stein Wonders about Historians Chapter 1. What Happened to Women in the Silent U.S. Film Industry? Chapter 2. Where Was Antonia Dickson? The Peculiarity of Historical Time Chapter 3. More Fictions: Did Alice Guy Blaché Make La Fée aux choux (The Cabbage Fairy)? Chapter 4. Object Lessons: The Ideology of Historical Loss and Restoration Chapter 5. The Melodrama Theory of Historical Time Chapter 6. Are They "Just Like Us"? Chapter 7. Working in the Dream Factory Chapter 8. The World Export of the "Voice of the Home" Conclusion: Women Made Redundant Appendix Notes Bibliography Index | A Choice Outstanding Title, 2018 — A Choice Outstanding Title, 2018
|Jane M. Gaines is a professor of film at Columbia University. She is the award-winning author of Contested Culture: The Image, the Voice, and the Law and Fire and Desire: Mixed Race Movies in the Silent Era.