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Hollywood: Her Story, an Illustrated History of Women and the Movies

Jill Tietjen,

Barbara Bridges

3.96 · Rating details · 25 ratings · 4 reviews

The year was 1896, the woman was Alice Guy-Blaché, and the film was The Cabbage Fairy. It was less than a minute long. Guy-Blaché, the first female director, made hundreds of movies during her career.

Thousands of women with passion and commitment to storytelling followed in her footsteps. Working in all aspects of the movie industry, they collaborated with others to create ...more

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Hardcover, 400 pages

Published April 26th 2019 by Lyons Press (first published April 1st 2019)

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Oct 31, 2019 Lauren Salisbury rated it it was ok

Shelves: nonfic, women-s-history-rhetoric

While the photos are undeniably gorgeous, there are quite a few shortcomings that made this book disappointing to me. Once the novelty of seeing so many talented stars of the early days of cinema wears off, readers are left with little more than an extended listicle.

The format, while initially engaging, does little to provide context for the history it purports to relay. The novelty of seeing so many photos paired with slight blurbs wears off quickly and I'd imagine would wear off even quicker While the photos are undeniably gorgeous, there are quite a few shortcomings that made this book disappointing to me. Once the novelty of seeing so many talented stars of the early days of cinema wears off, readers are left with little more than an extended listicle.

The format, while initially engaging, does little to provide context for the history it purports to relay. The novelty of seeing so many photos paired with slight blurbs wears off quickly and I'd imagine would wear off even quicker for readers coming to this volume without any preexisting knowledge of cinema. The book is divided into decades containing information about actresses, directors, producers, writers, costumers, and crew that started their careers in that ten year span. While each decade does begin with a page long blurb, there isn't much actual narrative description about the state of film or how these women contributed to the larger story of movie making.

Similarly, there doesn't seem to be any methodology for who the editors included or how much real estate they were given on the page. Some big name stars got a brief mention while others were given whole page spreads.

When they did focus on particular women long enough to get a pull quote, the editors chose blurbs on feminism that were lukewarm at best. They were largely admissions by directors and producers who didn't feel obligated to help other women or tell women's studies just because they were women. It's unclear why the editors chose to tread the line on this issue and how they ethically included them without explaining that attitudes like those led to and continue to lead to women to hold fewer positions of power than men.

More importantly, the book clearly has a race problem. Though there is brief mention of discrimination in the industry, the book itself does little to improve on it. Whereas the editors could have end should have devoted time to women of color they are few and far between and typically rate only a sentence of description even where their white counterparts get a paragraph.

In the same way, little to no attention is given to trans actresses, lesbians, or any non heteronormative narrative about Hollywood.

While the book is lengthy and the editors certainly had the space to provide more in the way of a complete history. Disappointingly, they favored glossy pictures over a true history that could have provided readers with a more complete view of all women have done and continue to do in movies. ...more

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