by Pamela Hutchinson

Movies inspire a lot of passion, but the back catalogue of film history can be daunting. For every fan who’s obsessed with an actor, director or sub-genre, there’s another struggling to know where to start. Sometimes all it takes is the right recommendation to set you on your path from newbie to know-it-all…

Why this might not seem so easy

In the silent era, films were made mostly for women, and often by women. However, early female film directors are misrepresented by a ‘scarcity myth’. From the contemporary movie magazines to respectable film history books, early female directors are regularly referred to as rarities – even when that was not the case. A woman directed what was probably the world’s first scripted narrative fiction film; in the mid-to-late teens the Universal studio was bursting with female directors. Women such as Lois Weber, Alice Guy-Blaché, Germaine Dulac, Lotte Reiniger and Mabel Normand were leaders in their respective fields, and they were supported by an industry filled with female screenwriters, and some hugely important female producers producing movies for a majority female audience. But you wouldn’t know that from textbooks that relegate ‘women in film’ to a sidebar. 

It follows that if the names of the early female filmmakers are unfamiliar to you, the films themselves are too, and you would be forgiven for thinking they aren’t worth seeking out. But that’s a big mistake – these are major talents, who often made films that were critical of contemporary gender relations, whether playful or political. And don’t overlook directors with just a few screen credits either. The setup of the film industry reflected the rest of society, and there are lots of reasons why talented directors found themselves quitting the business to work (or not) elsewhere – but not before showing us what they were capable of.

The best place to start – Suspense (1913)

Lois Weber was one of the greatest film directors of the early 20th century – a heavyweight rival to D.W. Griffith and Cecil B. DeMille. One viewing of this 10-minute action flick will give you a taste of her skills. Weber crafts a home-invasion thriller of nailbiting intensity that incorporates cross-cutting, three-way split-screens and a deftly shot car chase. Not only that, she is taking a tale frequently told by her male peers, that of a vulnerable woman in an isolated house threatened by an intruder and calling her husband on the telephone to come and rescue her – and making the radical decision to shoot it from a female perspective. Weber does this with some extreme POV shots, putting us right in the shoes of the woman trapped in the house with her baby, listening to the man with a knife climb the stairs. Not only that, but Weber herself plays the mother. Where other directors found pathos in the sight of women in peril, Weber supplies stone-cold fear – hence the stark and evocative name.  

After this you’ll want to explore more work by Weber, it’s guaranteed. Like her contemporary Dorothy Davenport Reid, many of her films address social problems, and she made some powerful pictures with a purpose in the late 1910s such as Discontent (1916). But to get a sense of the span of her remarkable career, proceed directly to 1921’s The Blot.

Made in Weber’s own studio, shot in sequence and foregrounding her revelatory attention to detail (she was a meticulous stylist), this drama combines naturalism and a passion for social justice in a way that feels refreshingly modern. And without giving away any spoilers, it boasts one of the most emotionally sensitive endings in 1920s cinema – one you may be pondering for a while.