1 Philip Leers Behind the Great Man
Philip Leers Behind the Great Man Female Screenwriters and Collaborative Authorship in Early Hollywood The predominance of the auteur theory in cinema studies has been a double-edged sword, each benefit attended by a disadvantage. While it mitigated the primacy of the Hollywood system, it posited in its place the equally problematic figure of the director as the sole source of meaning-making in filmmaking. While it has brought to light a worthy list of previously unappreciated films and directors, it has also been justly criticized for reinforcing the centrality of white, male directors, and exacerbating the marginalization of other voices. And while it has provided an invaluable identificatory and analytic framework for film theorists, it has also fostered an essentialist, and often ahistorical, conception of film authorship. The cult of the male director, for instance, has obscured the remarkable contributions of female screenwriters to the early cinema. Throughout the silent era, and into the thirties, a majority of the screen’s foremost scenarists were women, with luminaries like Alice Guy Blache, Anita Loos, Elinor Glyn, Lois Weber, Francis Marion, Beulah Marie Dix, June Mathis, Jeanie MacPherson, Marion Fairfax, and Jane Murfin achieving a considerable measure of influence within the industry and celebrity without. These screenwriters constituted a network of powerful women who outnumbered their male counterparts ten to one, a ratio that was perhaps only possible in the infancy of the cinema, when filmmaking practice had not yet been consolidated under the patriarchal hierarchy of the Hollywood system. Certainly, the masculinist slant of Hollywood’s “Golden Age” and its subsequent usurping of the public interest served to efface the impact of these women on the film industry, but their prominence at a time when the narrative language of the cinema was taking shape cannot be ignored.
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