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Pink-Slipped
What Happened to Women in the Silent Film Industries?
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Book Presentation:
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.
About the Author:
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.
Press Reviews:
"An eye-opening look at these innovative film pioneers and their relevance today, supported by extensive research and in-depth presentation and an insightful examination of the historiographical process itself. This scholarly narrative is an informative addition to film, cultural, and feminist history collections, prompting additional study and discussions."--Library Journal
"[Gaines's] work should not be missed by those interested in the intersection of critical theory, feminism, and film." --Publishers Weekly
"Complex and well researched." --H-Net Review
"Gaines's study is of crucial importance to feminist film critics and historians, and its meditations on history and politics are relevant to many contemporary fields of study. Essential." --Choice
"Gaines' book is an engaging and rich examination of the 'knowability' of the past." --Gender & History
"Pink-Slipped is a momentous contribution to the interdisciplinary field of feminist media history in its embrace of 'unknowability' as a critical stance." --NECSUS
"An intellectually dense and enlightening intervention in the never-to-be-concluded discussion of how we frame history and how we navigate time." --Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television
"Pink-Slipped weaves an extraordinarily intricate complex of issues and impasses surrounding history and historiography." --Screen
"A valuable reflection on the processes of history-making, and an interrogation of the blind-spots that such practices create." --Synoptique
See the publisher website: University of Illinois Press
> From the same author:
Classical Hollywood Narrative (1992)
The Paradigm Wars
Dir. Jane M. Gaines
Subject: Countries > United States
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