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

Abstract

Pink Slipped: What Happened to Women in the Silent Film Industry? focuses on women silent-era film workers as they 'dramatize' the challenges and questions raised by feminist historiographic approaches to researching and writing women's film history. One of Jane Gaines's great achievements in the past years has been the launch of the Women's Film Pioneer Project (WFPP), a growing online database of women working in the silent-era national film industries (see https://wfpp.cdrs.columbia.edu/). In less than a decade, the WFPP has published an impressive catalogue of career profiles and overview essays of women film pioneers. These do not just focus on actresses, but on camera operators, costume designers, editors, exhibitors, directors, producers, scenario writers and title writers. WFPP has also facilitated new research and discovery, bringing together an international community of film scholars, curators and historians interested in studying women in cinema's first two decades. Women film pioneers-once lost, overlooked or excluded from canonised narratives of early film history-are now firmly established in feminist film historiography. This renewed attention to women's silent-era work-some forty years after Sharon Smith and Anthony Slide both discovered evidence of women silent film directors in the archives of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences-is one of the starting points of Pink Slipped. Pink Slipped, however, is not a definitive history of 'what happened' to women working in the U. S. film industry between 1895 and 1925, yet the historian's reliance on empirical evidence is central. It is not a study of the ways in which Anglo-American feminist film theorists' accounts of women's silent-era work evolved since the 1970s, though these different historical narratives are examined. In Pink Slipped, Gaines brings together the historical and theoretical sides of her earlier work on women film pioneers to interrogate historiographic assumptions about 'doing' early women's film history. Pink Slipped is a rich, complex and insightful book that deftly manoeuvres through a wide range of critical theorists such as Ernst Bloch, Gilles Deleuze, Michael Foucault, Reinhart Koselleck, Joan W. Scott and Hayden White. If Pink Slipped is sometimes theoretically dense, it is always rewarding. Interdisciplinary in both scope and approach, Pink Slipped is a significant contribution to the fields of feminist film theory and historiography, media archaeology, and women's history. Pink Slipped asks: 'What happened to women in the silent film industry?' This question is never fully answered; however, Gaines keeps coming back to situate it historically. The fact is, we don't know 'what happened' to women working in the first decades of cinema; we have proven through empirical research that women were indeed 'there', and yet we will never know the full extent of their creative contributions. Although Gaines acknowledges the significance of ongoing archival research and excavation, she is not interested in personally revisi...