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Performing New Media, 1890â"1915
By Kaveh Askari, Scott Curtis, Frank Gray, Louis Pelletier, Tami Williams, Joshua Yumibe Indiana University Press
Copyright © 2015 John Libbey Publishing Ltd
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-86196-910-4
CHAPTER 1
Lois Weber at Rex: Performing Femininity Across Media
Shelley Stamp
Lois Weber's 1913 film Suspense, her extraordinary re-working of the well-worn last-minute rescue scenario, remains the best-known work from her early career at Rex. As Charlie Keil remarks, it is 'one of the most stylistically outré' films of the entire transitional period. Re-making the most familiar of cinematic tropes, and playing the Griffith-esque heroine herself, Weber signals her interest in popular images of femininity circulating in commercial entertainment culture at the time. Two other, lesser-known Weber shorts released the previous year depict the production and circulation of female images in related media: Fine Feathers (1912) is set amidst the art market and in A Japanese Idyll (1912) commercial postcards feature prominently. Clearly allegorising cinema's own enterprise, both films were made as the star system solidified – with female stars at its heart – and as Weber was becoming a celebrity in her own right. Tracing Weber's career at Rex, we can read the filmmaker's evolving public persona against her own cinematic meditations on popular images of femininity, foregrounding her explicit interest in how feminine ideals were constructed across multiple media forms. Increasingly positioned as a celebrity herself, Weber was evidently keenly aware of cinema's role in producing and circulating commodified images of women, both onscreen and off.
Weber established her professional reputation at Rex in the early 'teens. She and her husband, Phillips Smalley, joined in the company in the fall of 1910, shortly after it was formed by Edwin S. Porter. They began work on Rex's second production (ultimately its first release) The Heroine of '76 (1911), in which Weber played a young woman who discovers a plot to assassinate George Washington and dies saving his life. By February 1911 Rex had completed twenty films and began a weekly release schedule, issuing fifty-six titles that year, then moving to a twice-weekly schedule in 1912. Weber began writing one scenario per week and continued this prodigious output for at least another three years. She and Smalley acted together in most of their productions and shared work directing. Always careful to credit his wife, Smalley told an interviewer, 'she is as much the director and more the constructor of Rex pictures than I'. Later recalling the time she spent at Rex with her husband, Weber remembered, 'we worked very, very hard'.
As Porter's attention began to focus elsewhere – first on the amalgamation of independent producers like Rex under the umbrella of Universal Pictures and then on the formation on Famous Players – Weber and Smalley were increasingly left in charge of day-to-day operations at the company. When Porter formally severed his ties with Rex in the fall of 1912, the couple assumed leadership of the brand. Early in 1913 the company relocated from New York to new facilities at Universal City in Los Angeles, where Weber, especially, began to assume a leadership role on the lot.
Rex films were immediately celebrated by trade commentators. They represented 'quality of the dependable, consistent variety', according to the New York Dramatic Mirror, which praised the company's well-written and carefully constructed narratives centered on a small number of well-developed characters, setting them against large-scale, action-oriented productions made at other outfits. Critics praised the strong performances and sophisticated cinematography. Rex's 'characteristic style' was increasingly associated with the Smalleys, with Weber often given primary credit even in these early days, her 'feminine hand' recognisable in many releases. Early in 1913 Moving Picture World's George Blaisdell praised Weber's 'fertile brain', a comment echoed later that year when the same paper declared her 'famous through filmdom for her ability to inject psychological power into her writings'. The following year another critic proclaimed, 'something substantial is always to be expected from the pen of Lois Weber'. Characterising individual filmmakers as expressive artists aided the industry's larger bid to elevate cinema's stature during these years, as Keil reminds us, a fact all the more true with female artists.
Though first marketed by Rex as an actress and 'picture personality', Weber quickly shifted the spotlight to her creative role as screenwriter and filmmaker. The subject of interviews and profiles in trade publications like Moving Picture World and Universal Weekly, she was also written up in mass-circulation outlets like Gertrude Price's syndicated newspaper column and Sunset magazine's 'Interesting Westerners' feature. As Eileen Bowser has pointed out, 'sending pictures of beautiful women to the press was a time-honored way for the newer production companies to get some publicity', and often female players carried the banner of their respective companies. But Weber turned the tables on this practice, emphasizing her creative labor over glamour. She appeared particularly conscious of using her stature as a screenwriter to speak about her broader goals for the fledgling industry. In one of the earliest such profiles, a 1912 item entitled 'Lois Weber on Scripts', she bristled against formulaic plots that relied on happy endings and climatic sequences artificially engineered through murders, suicides, and elopements. 'Don't let us all cut out after the same pattern', she cautioned, resisting the trend toward standardisation. A strong advocate for scenario writers, Weber's comments not only drew attention to this newly-identified craft, giving it weight and depth, they also articulated a forceful view of quality motion pictures. When a professional group of scenario writers began to form that same year, excluding women from its initial planning meetings, Weber protested and received a published apology from Epes Winthrop Sargent in his column 'The Photoplaywright'. 'We are sorry now that we barred the ladies', he wrote, declaring Weber 'a high degree playwright' who had 'written a lot of clever plays' and inviting her to subsequent meetings.
Not only was Weber active in promoting the fledgling art of screenwriting during these years, she also fostered connections to the influential network of women's clubs. In the summer of 1913, for instance, she addressed the Woman's City Club of Los Angeles on 'The Making of Picture Plays That Will Have an Influence for Good on the Public Mind', sharing the podium with a female member of the local censorship board. Here Weber explicitly aligned her background in Christian social work with her filmmaking, noting the 'blessing' of working in 'a voiceless language', capable of speaking to so many on such a large scale. Clearly she was aware not only of cinema's budding role in popular discourse, but also the importance of her own profile as activist bourgeois clubwoman working within the industry. Female filmmakers brought a unique vision to filmmaking and a unique mode of working in the industry, she suggested. She urged her audience to abandon 'the indifferent and often-condemning attitude held up by refined people toward motion pictures', embracing instead the 'artistic and educational potential' cinema held.
By using her growing renown to promote her creative work as screenwriter and filmmaker and by using her public persona to convey a feminine presence behind the scenes in Hollywood, Weber showed herself to be keenly self-conscious about how female identity might be fashioned in movieland. She took an even bolder step when she ran for Mayor of Universal City on an all-female suffrage ticket in the fall of 1913, shortly after California granted women the right to vote, but well before women could vote in most other states, attracting national press attention and not a little ridicule. Reports, predictably, lampooned the feminist ticket, with the Los Angeles Examiner noting that Universal City's 'scenic beauty' had been 'perturbed' by 'vociferous election speeches, soap box oratory and woman suffragist campaigning'. Universal countered this rhetoric, suggesting that their newly elected roster of female officials were 'ladies of culture and high ideals ... some of the brainiest as well as most beautiful women in America'. As Mark Garrett Cooper has shown, a newly opened Universal City presented itself as a novel environment where work and play intermingled and where traditional gender roles might be reversed, a feature Weber clearly exploited in her campaign.
As these examples demonstrate, Weber's evolving public persona pushed on familiar tropes of femininity – first to assert an image of craft and artistry against the notion of female stardom; next to interject a feminised social conscience into commercial cinema; and finally to connect her filmmaking to a more-or-less explicit feminist politics. Alongside this persona, two of Weber's films stand out for their reflexive examination of female representation: Fine Feathers and Japanese Idyll interrogate the reproduction, circulation and commercialization of female imagery in the art market and commercial postcards respectively, each plainly standing in for cinema itself.
In Fine Feathers Weber plays Mira, a young woman working as a maid for an artist, Vaughn (played by Smalley). Vaughn becomes famous after painting two images of Mira: the first created after he glimpses her cleaning his studio at night, disheveled and sweaty from work; and a second created when Vaughn again catches her unaware, this time modeling an elegant robe he had left lying in the studio. Capturing and circulating to others scenes that only he has been fortunate to witness, Vaughn asserts his privileged, proprietary role over Mira, while at the same time turning her into an object of exchange. Enthralled by Vaughn's images of Mira, his patron falls in love with her, sight unseen.
Vaughn's exploitation of Mira's image is bound up in his subsequent sexual exploitation of her body, a point the film makes clear when he buys her a dress to celebrate the success of his art show. The dress, and its association with masquerade, lays bare the linked economic and sexual exploitation at the core of Vaughn's interest in Mira. It marks the shift in their relationship from employer/employee and artist/model to lovers, for in the next scene we see Mira wearing the dress as she entertains guests in his home, assuming the mantle of the bourgeois housewife even though the couple remains unmarried. Mira's movement through Vaughn's apartment also articulates the different stages of their relationship. As she evolves from maid to model to lover Mira penetrates deeper into his living quarters, moving from his public teaching studio to the smaller private painting studio adjacent, then from his front parlor to (we presume) his bedroom, with the lateral trajectory of her movement mirroring the circulation of her portrait in the art world. The exchange of her image, in other words, is matched by the sexual effects on her body.
That this shift in the couple's relationship pivots on the dress is an ironic reversal of the earlier episode in which Mira had donned a costume in Vaughn's studio in order to fantasise a more glamourous self-image, the notorious 'fine feathers' of the film's title, an allusion to the ironic proverb 'fine feathers make fine birds'. If at first Mira was playing with class masquerade, fantasising how malleable social boundaries might be; here she is masquerading as married, a fact that outrages Vaughn's patron when he discovers she is not wearing a wedding band. Humiliated, Mira asks Vaughn to marry her and 'legitimate' their sexual liaison. When he refuses to do so, she leaves, casting off the dress, and in doing so rejecting the roles Vaughn has created for her as surrogate spouse and glamourous woman. Indeed, the 'fine feathers' Mira had longed for are false: one cannot simply pretend to be woman of privilege in order to transcend one's class background anymore than one can perform a semblance of marital propriety to mask a carnal relationship.
Though Vaughn does consent to marriage in the end, their liaison is forever compromised by its illegitimate performance. It is presented as nothing more than the evolution of Mira's role from cleaning obligations in the backroom to hostessing obligations in the front room and (unspoken) sexual obligations in the bedroom.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Performing New Media, 1890â"1915 by Kaveh Askari, Scott Curtis, Frank Gray, Louis Pelletier, Tami Williams, Joshua Yumibe. Copyright © 2015 John Libbey Publishing Ltd. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
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