Women at the Movies

Women at the Movies Irina Leimbacher Red Velvet Seat Women's Writing on the First Fifty Years of Cinema ed. Antonia Lant with Ingrid Periz, Verso, 2006. Women joined mass culture because of and through the institution of cinema, according to Red Velvet Seat: Women's Writing on the First Fifty Years of Cinema. In fact, the writings collected in Antonia Lant's new anthology, edited with Ingrid Periz, suggest, as Lant notes, "that cinema made women's new participation in public life evident and concrete as nothing before it had; that the female collectivity of the auditorium was part of female suffrage; that, in some way, cinema expressed that women had arrived." Yet women's responses to and perspectives on their cinematic experiences were far from homogeneous. Indeed, the more than eight hundred pages that make up this volume suggest a vast array of concerns, opinions, and approaches, as well as a remarkable passion and eloquence regarding the nature and import of cinema. Lant's selection of articles, authors, and themes aims for breadth and diversity, and it succeeds not only in raising numerous issues of interest to contemporary film studies, but also in reminding us of the tremendous significance of cinema and cinema studies for our understanding of the twentieth century. The historical and social experience of cinema-as lived, understood and written about by women in their infinite diversity-is brought to life by this anthology. We are privy to detailed descriptions of neighborhood theatres and picture palaces, of varied and often vocal audiences, and of the personal and political investment of eager or wary consumers, commentators and participants in this image industry. We can hear chatty audiences at ethnic theatres in lower Manhattan, and see the solitary mothers, "figures of weariness at rest," at the London matinees. We can smell "the dark, ill-ventilated little theatres in Vienna" where "men smoked and wore their hats, and . . . a boy with an apparatus . . . went round spraying the air" or share Elizabeth Bowen's excitement: "like a chocolate-box lid, the entrance is still voluptuously promising: sensation of some sort seems to be guaranteed." From Emily Post, we learn rules of etiquette when attending the movies in the early twenties: it's alright to attend a matinee with a man, but reading captions out loud is considered annoying. For Dorothy Richardson, however, a loquacious fellow viewer, whose commentaries accompany entire screenings, reveals to her that cinema is a public place where women can speak out loud and that "the onlooker is a part of the spectacle." With the coming of sound film, poet H.D. expresses her deep ambivalence about the new talkies-fine for Lindbergh and newsreels that try to generate international understanding, but devastating for the stars. On the other hand, sound gives Geraldyn Dismore hope for greater African-American participation in film, given the power and beauty of black voices. In addition to the critics, poets, activists, actresses, screenwriters, columnists, psychoanalysts, proponents and critics of censorship, and specialists in etiquette and fashion, the voices of women directors are also significant in this collection. Alice Guy Blache, Lillian Gish, Lois Weber, Germaine Dulac, Lotte Reiniger, and Maya Deren each give us their personal visions and hopes for cinema or describe their methods of work. Reiniger's essay is of particular interest, in the form of an imagined dialogue in which she argues the importance of the frame, composition, and what she calls "space-time diagonals," while Maya Deren's frank autobiographical piece for Mademoiselle illuminates her evolution as a young filmmaker. Nor is fiction excluded from Lant and Periz's anthology, when it so ably conveys the psychic investments of women in the world of cinema as in Katherine Mansfield's and Zelda Fitzgerald's finely honed stories of characters either deluded or empowered by their desire to be in the movies. …