Pink-Slipped: What Happened to Women in the Silent Film Industries?

Women and Film History International

by Jane M. Gaines

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.

Genres: History, Film, Nonfiction

328 pages, Paperback

Published February 23, 2018

Reviews

[BAM doesn’t answer to her real name · Rating 1 out of 5]

Netgalley #50

Many thanks go to Jane Gaines, University of IL Press, and Netgalley for the free copy of this book in exchange for my unbiased review.

“ I like to use big words so I can sound more photosynthesis “

I honestly don’t understand this book’s point. Was the author on amphetamines?

This basically sums up my feelings on this book. Gaines likes to use her large vocabulary of nonsense words when simpler words would better communicate to her readers. I was under the impression there would be more discussion of the women of silent film, but alas, that was not the case. At one point Gaines asks herself, "what am I saying here?" Well if she doesn't know, I certainly don't, and I did my best to figure it out,
This was mostly feminist theory and historical conjecture that could be presented to a very narrow, specific audience. I would not recommend it to anyone who is generally interested in the silent movie era.

[Kathleen · Rating 2 out of 5]

“Actually, all historical tellings should be in dispute.”

[Cat · Rating 3 out of 5]

Intriguing book. I had hoped it would be a pleasanter read, but it bogs down and gets a tad confusing at times. Still, it was interesting enough of a read about a subject I don't think has been explored enough. I love the old silent films! I had hoped to at least glean enough info to get started looking up women in the early industry on my own. sadly, much info has been lost or buried, so it was exciting to discover this book. Jane M. Gaines does deserve some credit for attempting to get the info she found out here for all of us. And there are good leads in it. More research likely needs to be done. I'm not sure I'd recommend this book to any but real silent film fans, and even then, maybe they should check out this book in a library before purchase for their collection.
I received a Kindle ARC in exchange for a fair review from Netgalley.

[Mary Mallory · Rating 3 out of 5]

Academic and with little to do about what happened to women in the silent film industries, more a response to what other academics missed in the past.

[Claire Meadows · Rating 4 out of 5]

Any book that shines a light on women in the film industry is one that I will definitely read. A bit academic in parts but I learned a lot that I didn’t already know.

[Kevin Cecil · Rating 2 out of 5]

I went into this expecting a more traditional academic exploration of women in silent film so was left a bit at sea when the majority of the book was more about the philosophy of studying history. There are a few great chapters - I especially liked the analysis of the various productions of The Cabbage Fairy - and the Conclusion pointed towards a book I'd love to read. But, and this may just be me reading above my intelligence level, most of the time I felt like I was trapped in an eternal spiral of caveats. Every sentence that advanced an idea led to twenty pages questioning the meaning of each word in that sentence. I didn't really enjoy reading this, and often felt I wanted more from insights that were rushed past, but also can't deny that there were many questions and revelations that will shape my thinking about film moving forward.

[Matthew Bieniek · Rating 2 out of 5]

I should have checked the reviews before taking this out of the library.

I was looking for information about women in silent film. That's not what this is. I'm not sure what this is. There is a chapter titled "Did Alice Guy Blache make La Fee aux choux (The Cabbage Fairy)?" I read the whole chapter and I can't answer that question.

There is an interesting bit where the author discusses the role of the film restorer, specifically about whether in the process of restoration, a particular scene should be changed to fix a continuity issue in the original print of the film. That made me think about stuff, but that's not what I was looking for.

I wouldn't recommend this.

[Beth Younge · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was really intrigued going into this book as i love history books that put women back in the narrative. I found reading it to be quite dry but still interesting and progressed through it at a slower pace than i would like to admit to. I haven't read or seen much about early minus the odd mystery documentary about true crime and was enthralled by this.

I received this book from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

[Julie · Rating 1 out of 5]

I couldn't even make it through the introduction, it was that laughably bad. This is not a history of women who worked in the silent film industry. It is one woman having a brain melt over how to write a book.

This book began as a study of events that took place in what we think of as the historical past, roughly the years 1895-1925. Over the course of that study the book became less about events and more about my disillusionment with the historiographic project of researching and writing, of tracking and describing receding events about which I knew too little.

the easiest way to explain this exceptionality is to fit academic feminism and film (a subfield within the larger discipline of cinema and media studies), into Euro-American intellectual trends where the post-structuralist challenge to the humanities and social sciences has been taken up unevenly. LOL, that's the easiest way.

if post-structuralism came "late" to history, it had, in contrast, come "early" to feminism and film studies, which meant that historiography came "late" to this subfield, arriving in the 1980s with what has been called the "historical turn" in film and media studies (Butler 2008, 397-399) or the "new film history." Dude, you are overthinking this. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

[Arcelia Ramos · Rating 5 out of 5]

We see the role of women increasingly being explained within the greater scope of universal history, and it is not surprising that these new information is being gathered by women themselves. Jane M. Gaines is looking into the area of motion pictures finding that women had been part of it even when this is barely mentioned (if it is at all) in film history books. This is a very short book, so it barely touches on the subject, but it does in a way that the readers feel prompted to explore it more. At about 297 pages, 200 of those pages belong to the actual text and the rest of them are devoted to tools such as an appendix, notes, a bibliography, and an index which users can use to expand more on this subject. I think this book will be a nice addition to any Women’s Studies and Film Classes as it may help readers find direction within a relatively new subject. I received a free copy via NetGalley.