Kathryn Bigelow’s win for THE HURT LOCKER at the 2010 Academy Awards marked the first time in the Academy’s 82 year history that a woman was awarded Oscar for Best Director. In fact during that eight decade span, only 3 women (Lina Wertmuller- SEVEN BEAUTIES (1976), Jane Campion-THE PIANO (1993), Sofia Coppola-LOST IN TRANSLATION (2003) had been nominated for Best Director prior to Bigelow. However, women had been working as directors in movies since before the start of the 20th century. Here now is a brief look at a few of those early female pioneers.
It all started over 100 years ago in France in 1897. A French native, Alice Guy (rhymes with key-1873-1968), directed what’s generally considered to be the first narrative short film (as opposed to simply recording an event) called THE CABBAGE FAIRY the topic of which was where babies came from. Guy was not only a director but also became the head of production at Gaumont Studios (1897-1907), one of the very first movie studios and still in existence today. Like so many others, Guy immigrated to America with her husband Herbert Blache’ and established her own studio in Fort Lee, NJ.
One of the performers who began her career with Alice Guy-Blache’ was Lois Weber (1879-1939). By 1911, Weber had moved on to writing original scripts and directing them. From short films she moved into feature films and by 1916, was the highest paid director in the world making even more money than D.W. Griffith. Like Griffith, she had complete control over the making of her movies from casting to content. She tackled such controversial topics as abortion, birth control, capital punishment, and drug addiction. Despite her subject matter, Weber’s movies made money.
Comedienne Mabel Normand (1892-1930) worked as a model for Charles Dana Gibson (of Gibson Girl fame) before going into movies in 1909. She started off at Vitagraph before moving on to Biograph and D.W. Griffith. Her first appearances were in one reel dramas with her good friend Mary Pickford but a natural flair for comedy brought Normand to the attention of Mack Sennett who invited her to join his new Keystone company. She quickly became their top comic star and wrote and directed some of Keystone’s comedy shorts including one with a very early appearance by Charlie Chaplin.
Lesser lights such as Nell Shipman (1892-1970), Cleo Madison (1883-1964), Dorothy Davenport Reid (1895-1977), and Helen Holmes (1892-1950) directed shorts, serials, and feature films. Such titles as BACK TO GOD’S COUNTRY, ELEANOR’S CATCH, THE RED KIMONA, and the serial THE HAZARDS OF HELEN were commercially successful and made these women directors very well known in their day. But by the mid 1920s, it was over. Why? Well, to make a long story short, we have the rise of the Hollywood Studio system and the audiences of the “Roaring 20s” to blame.
By 1924, with the creation of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), all the major studios we know today had been established. These were studios helmed by European born men who’d made their way to America. With them they brought Old World patriarchal attitudes. They ruled their studios much as a strict European father might control his family. Movies were a business whose purpose was to entertain but, more importantly, to make money. Women could be in front of the camera as performers or behind the scene as writers but could not be directors.
The moguls’ reasoning for this exclusion was twofold. 1) Despite the successes of Lois Weber & Alice Guy-Blache’, women were considered less capable than men due to their emotional makeup and 2) because women like Weber used their films as a vehicle to deliver a personal or social message which the devil-may-care audiences of the mid-1920s weren’t interested in receiving. As one mogul succinctly put it “If you want to send a message, call Western Union”. Movies concentrating mostly on story or character were replaced by films focusing on style and action.
By the time sound arrived in 1928, only one woman director remained in mainstream Hollywood. Her name was Dorothy Arzner (1897-1979) and although she directed major stars such as Katherine Hepburn, Rosalind Russell, and Lucille Ball in financially successful movies, her career was over by 1943 after making 27 movies. Of the original women pioneers, only Lois Weber was left. She worked as a script doctor for the big studios but they refused to hire her as a director. Weber directed a few movies for poverty row outfits but they sank without a trace. She died, forgotten, in 1939 at age 60.
There were still women directors but, like Weber, they could only find work at B movie studios or in early independent productions. The “Queen of the Bs”, actress Ida Lupino (1918-1995), directed several highly regarded movies in the early 1950s but had to continue to act in order to finance them. She eventually turned to the new medium of television and directed over 100 episodes for most of the major TV shows of the time. Shows that ranged from THE TWILIGHT ZONE to HAVE GUN, WILL TRAVEL to GILLIGAN’S ISLAND. She quit directing in 1966 but continued to act.
Once the Motion Picture Production Code was abandoned in 1968 and replaced with the current rating system, the door for female directors opened again, however it took another 8 years for a woman to be nominated by the Academy, and that was Italian director Lina Wertmuller. In 2003 Sofia Coppola became the first American woman director to be recognized for LOST IN TRANSLATION but we had to wait until now (2010) for a woman to win the top award. So, congratulations Kathryn Bigelow for your movie THE HURT LOCKER. Now that the glass ceiling has been broken, we’ll see what the future holds.
UPDATE 2024 – Since Bigelow’s win, two other women have won a Best Director Award. They are Chinese born Chloe Zhao for NOMADLAND (2020) and New Zealander Jane Campion, who’d been nominated in 1993 but lost, for THE POWER OF THE DOG (2022). The early women directors are finally getting their due as well. Kino has released a 2 volume set of Alice Guy-Blache’s early Gaumont films, and Kino has also released a set devoted to Ida Lupino’s 1950s movies. Milestone Films has several Lois Weber films on disc while both Kino and Flicker Alley have multi-disc sets devoted to early women filmmakers. These are EARLY WOMEN FILMMAKERS and PIONEERS: EARLY WOMEN FILMMAKERS.
The Capsule Critic 