Cinematic Representations of Women in Modern Celebrity Culture, 1900–1950

María Cristina C. Mabrey, Leticia Pérez Alonso, María Cristina C. Mabrey, Leticia Pérez Alonso

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781032004303
• eBook ISBN: 9781000574722
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

The purpose of this edited volume is to explore the contributions of women to European, Mexican, American and Indian film industries during the years 1900 to 1950, an important period that signified the rise and consolidation of media technologies. Their pioneering work as film stars, writers, directors, designers and producers as well as their endeavors to bridge the gap between the avant-garde and mass culture are significant aspects of this collection. This intersection will be carefully nuanced through their cinematographic production, performances and artistic creations. Other distinctive features pertain to the interconnection of gender roles and moral values with ways of looking, which paves the way for realigning social and aesthetic conventions of femininity. Based on this thematic and diverse sociocultural context, this study has an international scope, their main audiences being scholars and graduate students that pursue to advance interdisciplinary research in the field of feminist theory, film, gender, media and avant-garde studies. Likewise, historians, art and literature specialists will find the content appealing to the degree that intermedial and cross-cultural approaches are presented.

Part I Women, Vanguardism and the Film/Advertising Industries

1 Silent Cinema and the Avant-Garde (1910–1939): The Provocative Advent of Mass Culture and Women’s Reformulation of Visual Arts

María Cristina C. Mabrey

DOI: 10.4324/9781003174134-3

All art is at once surface and symbol.

Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril.

Those who read the symbols do so at their peril.

It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.

(Oscar Wilde)

In the voluminous history of cinema, as we know it, little has been said about women who lived through the pioneering days and were themselves pioneers of the moving image. Women filmmakers of the silent era erected the medium together with those who built the industry and those—mostly men—who became renown filmmakers. Silent cinema, an art in which women intervened firsthand as directors, producers, editors, script writers, stage decorators, designers, score composers, musicians and actors, decayed with the advent of sound. From that point on, Wall Street interfered to make cinematography a money-making industry.¹ Those seeking to benefit from it quickly appraised its tremendous power of influence over emerging popular culture. Jane Gaines insists that history has denied feminist intervention in the origins of cinema until recently, and feminist theories had also ignored it.² Other than the stardom system, which supported the industry and extracted the female spectator from her disappointing reality, women's participation in producing, directing, writing, editing or designing has largely been ignored.³ As Gaines describes it, we are now in “a new film history”, and it is impinged upon us to rediscover female filmmakers, and, more importantly, study their careers.⁴ In this history full of holes and riveted with male-labeled grandiose accomplishments, women are makers of stories, spaces, fashion, characters, sets, music which today we admire and see in awe. Film is the first art that attracts crowds and incites a new relationship between the work of art and the spectator. The creation and manipulation of film images for Walter Benjamin was as contradictory as being both a dangerous and exciting development in the “age of mechanical reproduction”.⁵ These images that at first may entice us to admire women have as their objective a wide consumption by spectators and the media, and, to that end, they are manipulated. Film is an art that made protagonists of women away from their kitchens and marriages. A new image of femininity—modern woman—fitting in adventure or solving a crime, provocateurs with men at their feet, aroused both an internal desire and a distaste of traditional roles. What they thought about themselves and saw on the screen made them calibrate what was superimposed on them which worked against what they genuinely desire in life.

I intend to discuss the role of cinema in blurring the boundaries between highbrow and popular cultures by proposing new pleasurable ways of looking and self-contemplation. My focus will be on two women creators of silent film, Alla Nazimova and Natacha Rambova. They were popular and successful in the movies. They were also creators of Salomé, a silent film opening in 1923 that radiates avant-garde artistic philosophy. Influences of avant-garde movements on the moving image, such as Art Deco and Expressionism, are calibrated by these two artists to produce a true original film.⁶ My intention is to observe under the guiding light of these artists as to how their involvement in the film prevailed over Hollywood directives. Salomé is a masterpiece among other films of the period to be considered an avant-garde work compelling us to better understand women in the history of film.⁷

The popular story of Salomé, and the highly artistic representation in the celluloid, enters a new stage in Nazimova-Rambova's filmmaking. One should consider Salomé by Nazimova a film of great importance and transcendence as others like L’Áge d’or, Metropolis or Caligari, had it been available to critics beyond Hollywood's commercial magazines. Avant-garde movies throve on academic, intellectual and political support by way of new criticism focused on new techniques, camera shot composition and developments in filming image construction conducive to representing reality and desire (perception of the senses focusing on the image) in a work of art.

But Salomé was off the tracks when we fully appraise what then most attracted audiences: beauty and glamour, fashions, character-star identification, all embodied in the cinematic image whose fascination engulfed both high and low classes going to the movies. Ewa Glapka, from a poststructuralist theoretical point, conflates gaze and beauty standards informing each other and influencing how we look at images of women. She problematizes what Mulvey and others have theorized as the male gaze patriarchal/voyeuristic invention of the female star.⁸ The star system transformed how audiences looked at the actors and their roles as people, questioning themselves with a closer look, bearing unprecedented feelings and causing pain and pleasure. Engaged spectators may experience joy, laughter, sadness and repulsion, seeing subjectivities unlike themselves, in the sense that these roles offered a venue to their own unconscious subjectivity, and stirred in them previously unfelt sensitivities of judgment.

Cinema is an art, widely popular among the elites, and the art that purportedly stirs the masses to react to what they see on screen in ways no other modern art could. The arrival of this new art of film became a phenomenon and induced capital to propel silent cinematography as a major industry. After 1926 film and cinematography evolved to sound, and talking movies made fortunes for a long list of producers, directors and tycoons. Not all gained from the bounty, and women entrepreneurs and artists who were deeply committed to the film industry, art and production were relegated to the back seat. The beginnings and developments of the moving image were for them a springboard to finally own their labor and attain self-realization. And, most importantly, the movies could change spectator views upon perception of women. Silent films are nowadays mostly unavailable, keeping us from further exploring women's work in the new art. For them, cinema was a magnifying tool of a no-before-apprehended reality, and for many, a way to step up from the common and traditional to a sensation of free movement, freedom to be modern women.

In Europe as in the United States, the art of filmmaking evolved with other artistic revolutions and got the attention of the avant-garde practitioners, both men and women. European women worked in the movies, produced and directed.⁹ But it is in the leading Hollywood industry where we find more women enmeshed in all aspects of production. Artists, such as Alla Nazimova and Natacha Rambova together created avant-garde, revolutionary filmmaking, in line with other European experiments by Germaine Dulac, Lotte Reiniger, Robert Wiene, Luis Buñuel, Fritz Lang or Man Ray (American adopting Paris for most of his artistic career).¹⁰

The avant-garde moved together with the foundations of the moving image. Creators of discordant art movements, heirs to Oscar Wilde's aestheticism, many of his admirers, rolled in with passion and desire into photographic and plastic experiments bound with the new art, the movies. Art and its revolution encountered women ready to revolt in a sense that they wanted to embrace new ways of being a woman, and women within these movements, in the thrust of modernity, behaved differently than their ancestor sisters, and changed mores, behavior and appearance. While the men who formed the avant-garde movements (Tzara, Breton and their cohorts) kept treating women, even their colleagues in art, as appropriations for they were enraptured by their “mystique”, women painters and filmmakers were empowered through their provocative image-making aimed at controverting traditional codes of femininity as well as transgressing gender essentialism. A list of women painters, such as Sophie Teauber-Arp, Lee Miller, Remedios Varo, Lenora Carrington, Maruja Mallo, and many others, transformed with their creations how we look at women and invented new symbols for them. Women in fashion and creators for the new film art, designers of stages, clothes, apparel emerged in the cultural revolution energized by cinema and its reception by devoted spectators, these being from all walks of life. Thus, the industry and the intellectual-artist milieu saw unprecedented gains, but both superstructures were ruled by men. Some women fought then to acquire a similar status and rule the same spaces. Other women, many of whom were artists coming from learned upper classes, decided to design their own space. And they became writers, producers, actors, designers, fashion trade blazers, and they, like Nazimova and Rambova, also mingled theater with the plastic and performing arts (opera, ballet) creating new and provocative modes of representation, of which filmmaking attracted more spectators.

The first years of film brought old myths to the screen, famous movies creating grandiose scenes, like D.W. Griffith's Intolerance (1916) on the fall of Babylon, which employs novel shots and sets.¹¹ Hollywood was in the first 20 years of filmmaking “pumping fantasies into the world”.¹² Among the most remarkable of these fantasies was the star system. The studios and the magazines publicized their favorite ones, and they made women props that earned for them large quantities of money while under paying actors both male and female. Emily Leider, who relates Valentino's career, has studied through archival material how the industry used actors for their own enrichment, with ridiculous salaries—Valentino's, for instance—in the contracts offered by the “rich, aggressive production companies”.¹³ Actresses like Nazimova criticized the system, disliking the “silly movies” she was forced to do. But her prestige at the box office granted her a healthier compensation unknown to others and was able to leave Metro and open her own production company.¹⁴

Tracing the winding road of new imaginings at the time when film was being born, Oscar Wilde maintains a key point of excess and aesthetic gusto in the turn of the century. His life and works were a steppingstone into modernist elucubrations as the avant-garde saw it. One of his one-act plays, Salomé, a new version of the biblical myth, introduced to the world's fancy the “Dance of the Seven Veils”. Herodias saga accounts for numerous paintings and tales since the Middle Ages. A Wilde's contemporary, in a disconcerting, modernized version, Mallarmé wrote his famous hermetic, long poem of self-conflicting seduction, “Hérodiade”, a difficult piece, bugging anyone's mind who attempts interpretation. What Wilde purportedly tried to do was to exhibit the “dancer” as an icon of sensuality and pleasure for a new, “aesthetically” modern era. Little did he know that Alla Nazimova would recreate the suggestive ballet in film, the proper medium. The modernist popularity of the sensuous girl was propelled by Richard Strauss and his opera, Salome. Her attraction endured through film and the musical media, being a favorite in operatic performances. Strauss's Salome was interpreted to perfection in post-war American culture by Ljuba Welitsch at the Met in 1949–1952.¹⁵ And Spanish dancer, Carolina Otero, star name, “La Bella Otero”, feared and admired by both men and women, performed the sensual dance at the Folies Bergère in Paris to enchanted audiences. Her licentious stage and life performances exemplified what Wilde intended in writing the famous dance into his play. He built on what Andrea Deagon has termed “a motif” that “entered a literary rage in the end of the 19th century, inspired by Heinrich Heine's At...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Table
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part I: Women, Vanguardism and the Film/Advertising Industries
• Part II: Archetypal Femininity and Its Contradictions in Mexican, Italian and Hindi Cinema
• Part III: Cultural Icons: Problematizing the New Woman Narratives
• Part IV: Visual Pleasure and the Counter-Gaze
• Epilogue by Leticia Pérez Alonso
• Contributors
• Index