Early Women Filmmakers: An International Anthology
24 Episodes
In the earliest days of the movies, women were responsible for some of the young medium’s most thrilling innovations. Unfortunately, many of these pioneering artists have been written out of film history, their contributions to the foundations of cinema long undervalued. International in scope, this eye-opening collection brings together a treasure trove of films made between 1902 and 1943 by directors like Alice Guy Blaché, Lois Weber, Germaine Dulac, Lotte Reiniger, Mary Ellen Bute, and Maya Deren. The films these women made were technically and stylistically inventive, pushing the boundaries of narrative, aesthetics, and genre and fundamentally shaping an art form in its infancy.
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59:06Episode 1
The Star Prince
Episode 1
Directed by Madeline Brandeis • 1918 • United States
Starring Zoe Rae, Dorphia Brown, John DorlandMadeline Brandeis was just twenty-one years old when she wrote and directed this fairy-tale fantasy about a boy who falls to earth on a star and his ensuing adventures. With a cast comprised entire...
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51:28Episode 2
The Cigarette
Episode 2
Directed by Germaine Dulac • 1919 • France
Starring Andrée Brabant, Gabriel Signoret, Jules RaucourtGermaine Dulac’s earliest extant film, LA CIGARETTE concerns a liberated young woman and her older husband, who believes she is having an affair—speaking to a real postwar crisis of masculinity i...
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The Blot
Episode 3
Directed by Lois Weber • 1921 • United States
Starring Claire Windsor, Louis Calhern, Philip HubbardThe last film made under the banner of Lois Weber Productions, this moral drama, also written by Weber, is a biting commentary on economic inequality. Through her portrait of the Griggs family—an...
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42:57Episode 4
The Smiling Madame Beudet
Episode 4
Directed by Germaine Dulac • 1923 • France
Starring Germaine Dermoz, Madeleine Guitty, Jean d'YdConsidered one of Germaine Dulac’s most feminist films, THE SMILING MADAME BEUDET is also a crucial step in her continuing de-emphasis of traditional narrative structures in favor of visual associati...
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1:29:46Episode 5
The Peasant Women of Ryazan
Episode 5
Directed by Olga Preobrazhenskaya and Ivan Pravov • 1927 • Soviet Union
Starring Kuzma Yastrebitsky, Olga Narbekova, Yelena MaksimovaReturning to a pre–Russian Revolution mode of narrative storytelling, this melodrama focuses on two peasant women—one the victim to an abusive father-in-law and t...
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46:13Episode 6
The Erl King
Episode 6
Directed by Marie-Louise Iribe • 1931 • France
Starring Mary Costes, Joë Hamman, Otto GebührThis early sound drama was Iribe’s second directorial effort and uses cinematic techniques to visualize Goethe’s 1782 ballad “Erlkönig” and Schubert’s later musical adaptation. Produced by Iribe’s Les Ar...
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1:05:18Episode 7
The Woman Condemned
Episode 7
Directed by Dorothy Davenport • 1934 • United States
Starring Claudia Dell, Lola Lane, Richard HemingwayWhen a radio star (Lola Lane) is murdered, a mysterious young woman (Claudia Dell) is accused of the crime. Can a wisecracking reporter (Richard Hemingway), who finds himself captivated by th...
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05:51Episode 8
Miss Dundee and Her Performing Dogs
Episode 8
Directed by Alice Guy Blaché • 1902 • France
Typical of Gaumont’s output at the time and an example of cinema’s early presentational style, this humorous “demonstration” film showcases a vaudeville act featuring a Miss Dundee and her trained performing dogs.
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03:03Episode 9
A Story Well Spun
Episode 9
Directed by Alice Guy Blaché • 1906 • France
In this pun-titled Gaumont comedy, a man rests in a barrel that gets pushed down a hill. The ensuing short is an advanced study on cinematic space and captures the continuity of motion as the rolling barrel moves from location to location, violently h...
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06:06Episode 10
On the Barricade
Episode 10
Directed by Alice Guy Blaché • 1907 • France
This historical drama, which depicts a young boy caught by accident in revolutionary conflict, is notable for its unceremonious depiction of a firing squad in action. Remarkable for its confident use of the full frame, it anticipates director Alice Gu...
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12:38Episode 11
Falling Leaves
Episode 11
Directed by Alice Guy Blaché • 1912 • United States
Starring Magda Foy, Marian Swayne, Mace GreenleafThis family melodrama echoes aspects of O. Henry’s 1907 short story “The Last Leaf” and depicts the clever attempts of a concerned young girl trying to save her older sister, who is dying of con...
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14:51Episode 12
Making an American Citizen
Episode 12
Directed by Alice Guy Blaché • 1912 • United States
Starring Lee Beggs, Blanche CornwallAlice Guy Blaché depicts the pressures to assimilate faced by immigrants in this tale of an Eastern European couple who come to the United States, where the husband learns four lessons in “Americanism.”
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13:20Episode 13
The Girl in the Armchair
Episode 13
Directed by Alice Guy Blaché • 1912 • United States
Starring Blanche Cornwall, Mace GreenleafThis drama about a gambling addict and the woman who loves him reveals Alice Guy Blaché to be a master of cinematic space as she skillfully stages action in the foreground and background of the frame an...
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Suspense
Episode 14
Directed by Lois Weber and Phillips Smalley • 1913 • United States
Starring Lois Weber, Val Paul, Douglas GerrardLois Weber stars as a young mother who is home alone when a tramp enters the house in this visually captivating and stylistically inventive thriller, featuring a striking chase scene...
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12:54Episode 15
Mabel’s Strange Predicament
Episode 15
Directed by Mabel Normand • 1914 • United States
Starring Mabel Normand, Charles Chaplin, Chester ConklinThis short farce is often only discussed as the screen debut of Charlie Chaplin’s Tramp (here more lecherous and inebriated than in later incarnations). However, director Mabel Normand, who ...
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25:16Episode 16
Discontent
Episode 16
Directed by Lois Weber and Allen G. Siegler • 1916 • United States
Starring J. Edwin Brown, Charles Hammond, Katherine GriffithDirector Lois Weber also provided the script for this short family drama, which follows a discontented Civil War veteran who leaves the home for aging soldiers where he...
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Harlequin
Episode 17
Directed by Lotte Reiniger • 1931 • Germany
Lotte Reiniger had already completed her full-length masterpiece THE ADVENTURES OF PRINCE ACHMED when she made this animated tale of romance. A love story set to a baroque score, HARLEQUIN is a delicate black-and-white ballet rendered through exquisite...
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09:49Episode 18
A Night on Bald Mountain
Episode 18
Directed by Claire Parker and Alexandre Alexeieff • 1933 • France
Taking eighteen months to make, this dizzyingly surreal pinscreen animation interprets music by Mussorgsky as interplay between shadow/light, permanence/impermanence, motion/stillness, human/animal, and night/day. Claire Parker an...
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10:59Episode 19
The Stolen Heart
Episode 19
Directed by Lotte Reiniger • 1934 • Germany
Based on a fable by Ernst Keienburg, this short drama exhibits an entrancing sense of space. Its story about a monstrous man who steals a town’s musical instruments has led scholars to make the case that THE STOLEN HEART is an anti-Nazi allegory. When ...
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Papageno
Episode 20
Directed by Lotte Reiniger • 1935 • Germany
An example of Lotte Reiniger’s animated music films based on opera, PAPAGENO is filled with impeccable attention to detail. Papageno, a bird catcher from Mozart’s “The Magic Flute,” idles away the time with his avian companions, fights an undulating sn...
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18:00Episode 21
Day of Freedom
Episode 21
Directed by Leni Riefenstahl • 1935 • Germany
Taking its title from the Nuremberg Rally of 1935, this short documentary presents the armed forces of the Third Reich as an efficient system of bodies and machines in motion. The film is a dangerous celebration—through dynamic visuals and careful ed...
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Parabola
Episode 22
Directed by Mary Ellen Bute and Ted Nemeth • 1937 • United States
Produced by Mary Ellen Bute’s company, Expanding Cinema, and made in collaboration with Ted Nemeth and sculptor Rutherford Boyd, PARABOLA is a celebration of film’s ability to create new ways of seeing the forms around us. Creatin...
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08:30Episode 23
Spook Sport
Episode 23
Directed by Mary Ellen Bute, Norman McLaren, Ted Nemeth • 1940 • United States
SPOOK SPORT announces itself as a new kind of film ballet comprised of “color, music, and movement” and is a lively interpretation of a night at a graveyard, where colored shapes representing bats, ghosts, and spooks ...
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14:47Episode 24
Meshes of the Afternoon
Episode 24
Directed by Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid • 1943 • United States
Starring Maya Deren, Alexander HammidCinematic trance-maker Maya Deren and her husband Alexander Hammid launched an underground revolution with this avant-garde landmark—shot in their Hollywood home, but a world away from the co...