Over the many decades of film history, we’ve come to acknowledge the great directors and pioneers of film as being mostly men: Alfred Hitchcock, George Cukor, and James Cameron, to name a few. But few people outside of academia look back to the early days of film, where women like Alice Guy-Blaché, Mabel Normand, and Lois Weber pioneered advances and creative techniques at the dawn of the movie industry. I think the time has come to celebrate the top three women directors from Hollywood.
In this article, we’ll take a look at the top three female film pioneers who produced didactic films and invented techniques such as the split-screen and experimented with double exposures. The time from the turn of the century until the 1920s yielded many opportunities for female innovators and their efforts should not slip silently into the recesses of history.
Top Three Women Directors from Hollywood
Let’s take a look one by one at the Top 3 Female Directors from Hollywood who revolutionized the way we directed movies, and paved the way for
Alice Guy-Blaché – First Female Director
Alice Guy-Blaché was a French filmmaker and the first woman to direct film and, impressively, she was possibly the only female filmmaker in the world between 1896 and 1906. Her film career lasted longer than that, however. She started out her career as a secretary, but she advanced well beyond that position, and within the years she was active, Blaché directed and produced almost 600 one-reel films, some were as short as one minute while others ran up to 30 minutes.
One of her early films that managed to be preserved is A Fool and His Money from 1912. In this old comedy with an all-Black cast, a woman refuses to reciprocate the affections of a young man because he doesn’t have much money, but when he stumbles upon a fortune, he wins the approval of many until he loses it in a poker game. A Fool and His Money was recovered in California and given to The American Film Institute for restoration and remains preserved in the Library of Congress.
As one of the first major filmmakers, female or otherwise, Blaché influenced many later directors, including the great Alfred Hitchcock.
Lois Weber – Advocate for Social Change
Lois Weber is one of the most impressive U.S. filmmakers of her day, boasting credentials as an actress, screenwriter, director, producer, and film company owner. Having worked in the theater with her husband, Phillips Smalley, the pair began working in cinema in 1907. At the start of their career, Weber was the screenwriter and the two co-directed her scripts, turning them into one to two-reel films each week.
In Weber’s time, film was a new medium that many were unsure how to use. Weber’s take on film was to produce didactic features–movies that would advocate for a particular issue, like birth control or draw attention to religious hypocrisy. In her 1916 film, Where Are My Children? Weber makes an argument for birth control and against abortion, pointing out that there is a need for contraception, and if women cannot obtain it they will resort to illegal abortions. As a modern viewer watching this pre-code film, it feels surreal, especially if you’re used to seeing classics made after 1934, which mostly scrubbed society clean and did away with too many inconvenient or anticlerical social themes.
In addition to exploring new themes for early Hollywood, Weber also made a technical innovation called ‘the split screen.’ In her 1913 short film, Suspense, there is a woman at home, a husband at work, and a pursuer intent on breaking into the couple’s home. To heighten the tension of the film, Weber placed all three characters on screen simultaneously.
Mabel Normand – Actress and Director of Keystone Studios
Mabel Normand might be remembered by film history buffs as a silent film actress, but it’s easily forgotten that she ran her own production company. One of the events that overshadowed her success in the film industry is the scandal she was part of following the murder of director William Desmond Taylor, who was allegedly shot with Normand’s pistol by her chauffeur. But Mabel Normand had a strong career that’s certainly worth remembering outside of the scandal surrounding Taylor’s death.
The Keystone Film Company housed silent film greats like Charlie Chaplin and Fatty Arbuckle, and Gloria Swanson. Mabel Normand was not only a part of the star studded troupe, but she was also listed as a director within the company. Between the years of 1912 and 1915, she directed and co-directed up to 26 films. Despite her contributions as an actress and director at Keystone Studios, Normand was paid significantly less than her male peers, earning only $175 per week compared to Charlie Chaplin’s weekly salary of over $1000.
Celebrating Female Ingenuity – Top Three Women Hollywood Directors
In Alice Guy-Blaché’s later years in the 1940s, she grew upset over her absence from film history, so much so she wrote an autobiography to place herself in the canon of film history where historians had overlooked her. This is often the risk that comes with female innovators in any field. They can be easily overshadowed by their male counterparts.
It’s such a cliche to say that we’re doomed to repeat history if we don’t learn it. So cliche in fact that the phrase almost has no resonance anymore–and yet it’s still as true as ever. While the modern viewer may not get as much entertainment from a Lois Weber or Mabel Normand film as they would a more current flick on Netflix or Hulu, if anything the history of filmmakers itself is important to know if we want to hold picture of the past that’s as fair to underrepresented innovators as possible.
And of course, the women on this list are only in the top three of best-known women directors at the beginning of film history. This is by no means an exhaustive list and there are plenty more women innovators in the film industry that deserve celebration and acknowledgment.
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