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.
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Date: 2018-09-30 01:49 am (UTC)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.