Festival In LA: PINK-SLIPPED: WHAT HAPPENED TO WOMEN IN THE SILENT FILM INDUSTRY

January 17, 2019. The Film Scholars Lecture Series took place at the Academy of Motion Pictures with the presentation of “Pink Slipped: What Happened to Women in the Silent Film Industries” at the Linwood Dunn Theater in the heart of Hollywood, California.

In the lecture, we saw some great short films by groundbreaking female filmmakers from the silent film era and questioned why that representation faded over the course of the last century.

Professor Gaines discussed some magnificent silent shorts, including.

The Girl Spy Before Vicksburg (1910),

The New Love and the Old (1912),

The Diver (1913),

The Roads That Should Lead Home (1913),

Fedora (1916).

Jane M. Gaines is a professor of film at Columbia University and Professor Emerita of Literature and English at Duke University.

The titles of some of her books: “Contested Culture: The Image, the Voice, and the Law” and “Fire and Desire: Mixed-Race Movies in the Silent Era.

She is the recipient of an Academy Film Scholars’ grant for “Pink-Slipped: What Happened to Women in the Silent Film Industries?”

I firmly believe that the professor’s studies should include a section about the production of films by women in other countries.

We still need to know why, in other countries, the gender gap is not so notorious as it is in Hollywood. France, Germany, Spain, Mexico, and Argentina have a significant number of compelling women directors. While in the United States, they have to work harder to get represented in the white-male-dominated film industry.