In a way, the early women filmmakers became victims of the economic success that they had done so much to create. As the film industry became an increasingly modern, capitalist enterprise, consolidated around a small number of leading studios, each with specialized departments, it grew harder for women, especially newcomers, to slip into nascent cinematic ventures, find something that needed doing, and do it. “By the 1930s,” Antonia Lant, who has co-edited a book of women’s writing in early cinema, observes, “we find a powerful case of forgetting, forgetting that so many women had even held the posts of director and producer.” It wasn’t until a wave of scholarship arrived in the nineteen-nineties—the meticulous research done by the Women Film Pioneers Project, at Columbia, has been particularly important—that women’s outsized role in the origins of moviemaking came into focus again.
Now we are in the midst of a new round of rediscoveries—this time of women’s behind-the-camera roles well into the golden age of Hollywood. There’s a romance to ushering lost women back into the light. Second-wave feminism has made a particular mission of doing so, starting with poets and novelists, who were in some ways the easiest to find again. There were so many of them, their work had (mostly) survived in libraries, and feminist scholars soon began pumping out theories on how to rethink the canon based on such rediscoveries. Sometimes the work was itself a revelation. Zora Neale Hurston had been well and truly forgotten until Alice Walker published her article “In Search of Zora Neale Hurston,” in Ms., in 1975. And sometimes the fascination lay in the sheer unlikelihood of such an author existing at all, amid the most inauspicious circumstances: a houseful of children, a ne’er-do-well husband, a spindly desk in a drafty hallway.
The challenges of tracking down lost female moviemakers, on the other hand, have been both material and theoretical. Only a small portion of the movies made in the silent era, when women were particularly active behind the camera, still exist. Many silent films were allowed to disintegrate or were purposefully discarded or destroyed, sometimes by the very studios that had produced them. Fires took others—silver nitrate, the compound in early film stock which makes the images shimmer, is so flammable that a tightly wound roll of such film can burn even submerged in water. As the film historian David Pierce writes, the industry considered “new pictures always better than the old ones,” which had very little commercial value, and so many films “simply did not last long enough for anyone to be interested in preserving them.”
Trying to figure out who actually worked on films is not as easy as you might think. Credits were assigned haphazardly in the early days of filmmaking. Then, too, the first generation of feminist film scholars, in the nineteen-seventies, didn’t tend to look for evidence of women exercising creative or administrative authority in Hollywood, because they wouldn’t have expected to find it: they were preoccupied with theorizing the male gaze. And auteur theory had little time for creative figures other than the director.