“Lights, Camera-maids, Action!”: Women Behind the Lens in Early Cinema
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BY THE 1920s, the United States had transformed into a nation of enthusiastic moviegoers. Hollywood was fast becoming the film industry’s capital as studios were built, stars born, and successful careers made in every aspect of filmmaking from lighting and writing to stuntwork and publicity. Long before film schools, the industry was populated by ambitious self-starters of all sorts, including plenty of women.
Anyone familiar with film history knows that women behind the camera are not a modern phenomenon. Recent documentaries, such as Be Natural (2018) about director Alice Guy-Blaché, who began her career in the 1890s; websites like the ongoing Women Film Pioneers Project, which collects scholarship about women working in all aspects of the early film industry; and DVDs like Kino Lorber’s Pioneers: First Women Filmmakers (2018), a collection of women-directed films gathered from archives around the world, many of which have never been released for home viewing before — document significant contributions by women in the early film industry.
But so much of film history — the films themselves, as well as information about the people who made them — is still unknown. As we become more aware of how hard women have had to fight to make movies, with the hurdles of outright discrimination and sexual harassment often creating impossibly high barriers, it is worth recalling a time when women first had careers in one of the most technical positions in the industry.
When was that time? Roughly one hundred years ago
Ten seconds into this mysterious film fragment, an unidentified woman camera operator makes an appearan
“The Mansfield News Journal,” Feb 6, 1922
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Back in 1920, Ida May Park, a prominent director at Universal Film Manufacturing Company, touted the challenges and rewards of the filmmaking profession in deliberately gender-inclusive terms: “[T]here is no one, man or woman,” she wrote in a book called Careers for Women, “who might not take up the profession with a certain degree of confidence in his or her ultimate success.”
This was uncharted professional territory, after all, though Park’s optimism for women in the field would prove false. The division between men’s and women’s work in the movies was already in the process of forming as the studios became big business. Park observed that the industry was too young to have an established path to the director’s chair, nor barriers to keep anyone, including women, out of it. However, she cautioned, “Knowledge of camera operation, of lighting effects, and of all the hundred and one less important mechanical details must be gained through work in the studio itself. The difficulty of obtaining a position as apprentice or assistant is unfortunately very great.” [i]
Park was correct: camera operation was the most important skill of all.
In filmmaking’s earliest days, the camera operator was, in fact, the director. There was no division of labor when filmmaking was, essentially, a one-man or one-woman show. According to director Alice Guy-Blaché, women weren’t just capable of being filmmakers, they were better positioned to succeed at it than their male counterparts. In 1914, Guy-Blaché proclaimed that “[o]f all the arts there is probably none in which [women] can make such a splendid use of talents so much more natural to a woman that to a man and so necessary to its perfection.” [ii]
Both Park and Guy-Blaché’s confidence about what women might do behind the camera was off the mark, at least in the immediate years after they expressed it. This is evident by looking at the case of the camera operator in the decades to come, when women were marginalized from directing and most other technical roles. Between the 1930s and the 1960s, there were only two female feature film directors working in Hollywood — Dorothy Arzner and Ida Lupino. To our knowledge, there was not a single female camera operator working for the studios in this same window.
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