Constellations: Past Meets Present in Feminist Film History

What was the first feminist narrative of women and silent-era film?i Between the mid-1970s and through the 1980s the academic narrative was that in the American silent-film industry “there were, effectively, no women.”ii By extension, there were no women in any other silent-era national film industry. As Alison Butler notes, however, by the 1990s there was new interest in historical research in silent cinema, new discoveries and publications such Anthony Slide’s book documenting a surprising number of silent-era women filmmakers (Butler 2008, 398; Slide 1996b). Butler does not, however, refer to Slide’s book of nearly twenty years earlier, in which he asserted, “During the silent era, women might be said to have virtually controlled the film industry” (Slide 1977, 9). In other words, in the 1990s it is less a matter of “new discoveries” than of “new interest” in and of “new questions” put to Slide’s narrative from 1977. The narrative in which women “controlled” the industry begins to be posed against the narrative that “it controlled them.” Why is the difference between these narratives an issue? It is an issue because we are not satisfied with a theory of historical revisionism whereby what we call “history” (meaning the events as well as their narration) is continually being updated and called “history” all over again.iii Are we attempting to “revise” the events themselves, or are we only adjusting our versions of these events? Yet, from today’s historiographic perspective, what are the events of the past anyway, other than what we think we know of them and how we narrate them? “No women at all” and “more women than at any other time” are two competing versions of historical events. The contradiction between these two versions is too significant to ignore and deserves more study. Do we explain the difference between these narratives through a critical theoretical approach, or do we address this issue by writing yet another narration of empirical findings? If a historian of ideas were to study the field of feminism and film, he or she might find a source for these competing versions in the 1970s theoretical investment in women’s “absence.”