Book Review: Pink-Slipped

[osprey_archer]

I was all excited when I got Jane M. Gaines' Pink-Slipped: What Happened to Women in the Silent Film Industries?, but this excitement quickly dissipated when I actually started reading it and discovered that Gaines has no intention of actually answering the question in the subtitle. "Thus in chapter 1, 'What Happened to Women in the Silent U.S. Film Industry?' I refused to answer the question posed, using the 'what happened?' query to anticipate a theory of history in which past and present are put into constant relations."

Well aren't you edgy.

This is particularly maddening because right afterward, literally in the next few sentences, Gaines articulates a few more topics that I want to know more about, which Gaines just as clearly has no intention of exploring: "1) Silent-era women as writers, actresses, producers, and directors disappeared from the limelight. 2) They were left out of historical accounts of the era. 3) They slipped away along with silent cinema and remained buried in the 1970s when they might have been uncovered again. But in the present, I intervene, deferring an answer to my question and asking the reader to take a detour through the book's chapters to find out how the 'answer' to the 'what happened' question eludes us."

I suspect that a slightly less lily-livered writer might have found the "answer" less "elusive," and might indeed have posited some possible "explanations." Gaines instead opts for the argument that "they did not know and we cannot know" what happened, which - for the reader, if not Gaines - inevitably raises another question: "Then why the hell are you bothering to write this?"

It's cowardice thinly veiled by post-structuralism. Rather than saying anything substantive, you say, "Ah, but when we write about the past are we not in truth writing about ourselves?" - and of course from a certain point of view the answer to this has to be yes, because the questions we bring to the past inevitably reflect the issues we care about now. So as long as this sort of bloviating is all you ever do, you'll never be really wrong.

But you'll also never make any real contribution, and I find this especially galling in this context, when gender discrimination in the film industry is still so strong. Gaines may be right that "feminist discourse is academically automatic," but outside of academia it is not such a potent force - and even in academia, the fact that everyone can talk the talk doesn't mean that the academy actually walks the walk of hiring and promoting and publishing and giving tenure to women on an equal basis with men.

And it's such an enormous missed opportunity! She's steamrolled over so many potentially interesting things in order to say absolutely nothing! She brings up, for instance, Gene Gauntier, an actress in the 1900s and 1910s who starred in a series of films as a cross-dressing spy and then directed films in her own production company (!!!!!) till it fell apart around 1915 - and then does nothing with it! Nothing! How do you do nothing with a cross-dressing spy heroine?

Comments

[thisbluespirit]

That does sound immensely frustrating!

[osprey_archer]

I was super hoping to come out of the book with recommendations for some silent films I could watch on Youtube, but she doesn't talk about the individual films much at all, let alone helpfully mention which ones have gotten loose on the internet. MUCH SADNESS.

[sovay]

"But in the present, I intervene, deferring an answer to my question and asking the reader to take a detour through the book's chapters to find out how the 'answer' to the 'what happened' question eludes us."

"Defer" implies she will eventually get around to answering the question. I take it she never does?

I suspect that a slightly less lily-livered writer might have found the "answer" less "elusive," and might indeed have posited some possible "explanations."

I would be willing to accept a book whose answer was "Almost certainly steamrolled by male chauvinism and structural patriarchy and we don't really know the precise mechanisms by which it happened, but before it did, look at this incredible array of women filmmakers in the silent era whose work I am going to discuss insofar as it has survived and/or is known," which doesn't answer the question per se but nonetheless takes its existence as a springboard to talk substantively about women in silent film. That doesn't sound like this book, either.

She brings up, for instance, Gene Gauntier, an actress in the 1900s and 1910s who starred in a series of films as a cross-dressing spy and then directed films in her own production company (!!!!!) till it fell apart around 1915 - and then does nothing with it!

Does she even say if these films still exist and I can watch them right now?

How incredibly frustrating.

[osprey_archer]

To be fair I was so enraged by the introduction and the first chapter that I didn't read all the way through, although I did skip to the last chapter to see if perhaps the thread got picked up again and answered and it doesn't, really. It's like she got to the "we don't really know the precise mechanisms by which women were pushed out of the industry" stage in the writing process and became so enamored by The Ultimate Unknowability of History and Also the Present that she just got stuck there.

And really all I wanted was a rousing discussion of the silent films that were directed or written or produced by women that we still have access too, even just in stills.

What makes this even more frustrating is that this book was written in tandem with the Women Film Pioneers Project, so Gaines had the information to do this at her fingertips and elected to navel-gaze instead. However, the Women Film Pioneers Project itself is pretty helpful about whether the films exist and where they can be watched: if you scroll down to the bottom of the profiles it has a list of extant films, plus which ones are on DVD or streaming.

[sovay]

It's like she got to the "we don't really know the precise mechanisms by which women were pushed out of the industry" stage in the writing process and became so enamored by The Ultimate Unknowability of History and Also the Present that she just got stuck there.

After leaving my initial comment, I thought that I would even accept a book that investigated whether the narrative of "pioneering women filmmakers pushed out by men who then erased them" matched the reality of early film history or just fit a familiar shape of story (once upon a time there was the mother earth goddess and her worshippers who lived in egalitarian harmony and then came the cruel hierarchy of the patriarchal sky god to overthrow them and everything has sucked since then), but it sounds from your description as though the author wasn't interested in the history itself one way or the other, which is just weird.

I can think of a lot of books that are not apparently this book.

And really all I wanted was a rousing discussion of the silent films that were directed or written or produced by women that we still have access too, even just in stills.

I would enjoy something like that myself, and was hoping this book was it.

However, the Women Film Pioneers Project itself is pretty helpful about whether the films exist and where they can be watched: if you scroll down to the bottom of the profiles it has a list of extant films, plus which ones are on DVD or streaming.

Thank you! That's good.

Have you read Judith Mayne's Directed by Dorothy Arzner (1994)? It's a study of one filmmaker as opposed to a generation, but it's full of close reading, I can disagree with it without wanting to throw it across the room, and it does consider how Arzner's career resembled or differed from the careers of other women who got their start in silent film, which may at least give a fossil-cast impression of those other lives.

[osprey_archer]

She gestures toward the idea that this narrative arc of "pioneering women filmmakers pushed out by men who then erased them" is too simple of a story line - but not on the grounds that it doesn't fit the facts, because everything Gaines writes tend to suggest that it does. Rather, this overarching story doesn't tell us much about the lived experience of the women involved at the time.

But this book tells us even less about the lived experience, so it's not like Gaines is filling in the gap. It seems unfair to criticize other people for failing to do a thing when Gaines has no intention of doing it either, and indeed is arguing that it can't be done.

I haven't gotten to Dorothy Arzner yet (although Dance, Girl, Dance is on my list!) but when I do I'll keep the book in mind.

[sovay]

It seems unfair to criticize other people for failing to do a thing when Gaines has no intention of doing it either, and indeed is arguing that it can't be done.

I'm pretty into the unfillable gaps of history and the otherness of the past and everything you tell me about this book is driving me up the wall.

I haven't gotten to Dorothy Arzner yet (although Dance, Girl, Dance is on my list!) but when I do I'll keep the book in mind.

Cool. (Enjoy Dance, Girl, Dance!)

[kore]

Aww, boo. A lot of modern "re-discovery" history books can be like that.

[osprey_archer]

WHYYYYYYYYYY I feel like a modern re-discovery book would be the perfect place to talk about obscure old things IN GREAT DETAIL to try to make other people interested in re-discovering them too. Save the theorizing for things that have already been written about extensively, writers!

[sovay]

Gaines may be right that "feminist discourse is academically automatic," but outside of academia it is not such a potent force - and even in academia, the fact that everyone can talk the talk doesn't mean that the academy actually walks the walk of hiring and promoting and publishing and giving tenure to women on an equal basis with men.

I'm sorry, it took a second read for this bit to hit me. Is Gaines actually arguing that the scholarly study of women in film is superfluous because it's like catnip and everyone's on it already?

[osprey_archer]

I'm not entirely clear what she's arguing, beyond the idea that writing history is impossible. My impression is that she's having an argument with her fellow feminist film history scholars (she would probably want all those words in quotation marks) which has become completely disconnected from what anyone outside that circle knows about women in silent film history.

[sovay]

My impression is that she's having an argument with her fellow feminist film history scholars (she would probably want all those words in quotation marks) which has become completely disconnected from what anyone outside that circle knows about women in silent film history.

That is very frustrating for the rest of us.

In strict terms of "what happened," I found Cari Beauchamp (Without Lying Down: Frances Marion and the Powerful Women of Early Hollywood, 1998) quoted in this recent article at Refinery 29:

Everything changed with the invention of the "talkie"—or movies with sound—in 1927. In a sentence, that's when the movie business began to be taken more seriously as an engine for profit. Wall Street began to invest, and the many studios were consolidated into fewer, more powerful production hubs. Beauchamp says that in 1920, the L.A. directory listed 100 filmmaking companies; by 1933, there were seven. "By '33, moviemaking is a big business," Beauchamp explained. "Salaries are higher. The guys wanted the jobs."

With the consolidation of power into a few major, Wall Street-backed studios came the elimination of the egalitarian, creative flourishing of the silent era—thus compromising women's once prominent position in the business. "The most important reason to understand why there was this incredible group of women working in the movies was because filmmaking wasn't taken seriously as a business. That was key to it," Beauchamp explained.

The Women Pioneers Film Project itself says:

It is now well established that the phasing out of women paralleled the development of the motion picture business into the corporate studio system, in place by the mid-1920s.

Their citation for that is Gaines' "Pink-Slipped: What Happened to Women in the Silent Film Industry?" (The Wiley-Blackwell History of American Film, 2012)—an article later developed into the book of the same title, it looks like. The same article is cited for the assertion:

One answer to this question of what happened to the women's independent companies, largely gone by 1923, is that they were caught in a second corporate power-grab, a second monopoly thrust after the court-decreed end of the first.

You may wish to look for Gaines' original article. It looks as though it actually offered content pertinent to its title question and not just a lot of theory about what that question even means.

[osprey_archer]

I should probably just dig deeper into the Women Pioneers Film Project, because it will probably have a lot of the information I want, even if it isn't laid out neatly the way it would be in a book. I noticed that the article you linked from the WPFP is actually cowritten by Gaines, which shows that she can write clear, coherent prose that directly addresses the questions that the article is about when she wants to... what a waste.

I'm thinking I may put together a list of silent films directed by women that are currently available on Youtube - not a comprehensive one by any means, but enough to be getting started with. I'll post it once I've assembled it.

[littlerhymes]

I mean... sure, you definitely can tie yourself into knots about historicity and self-reflexivity, but don't you also have to actually answer the original question?! I feel it is cheating to skip ahead to the navel gazing part when in fact one has not yet done the hard work on locating the navel.

[osprey_archer]

It so is! And it's not like this is a hard question to answer, either: I feel that in a case like this, where you go from having loads of female directors to having literally none, you can posit gender discrimination as the explanation even if you don't have a physical memo saying "Let's all stop hiring women!" The proof of the pudding is in the eating.

[thawrecka]

I feel immensely frustrated just knowing such a book exists.

[osprey_archer]

I was so looking forward to this book and it's so disappointing and as far as I know there is no other book that does what I hoped this one would do so there is no way to soothe my troubled soul. WHYYYYYYY.

[skygiants]

"I refused to answer the question posed [in the title of my own book]" - WHY. WHY WOULD YOU DO THIS.

[osprey_archer]

TO TORTURE US ALL, PRESUMABLY.

sovay has noted that Gaines appears to have published an article by the same name which actually did engage with the title question, which just makes the whole thing more baffling.