A belated and partial report from the always inspiring Women and Silent Screen conference. This biennial event, which began in Utrecht in 1999, is for me one of best academic conferences around on topic of cinema history. Not only is the conference small enough that it has almost a family get together sort of feeling, but the quality of the research is uniformly excellent and typically addresses uncharted territory in film history. In addition, the screenings at each of the conferences (I have been fortunate to attend four of the five held) are filled with rarely or unseen gems of the cinema (and usually with jaw dropping gorgeous prints). This year was no exception, and I want to start out by sending out a big thank you to Astrid Soderbergh Widding and Sofia Bull and their crew in Cinema Studies at Stockholm University for their all hard work, hospitality, and indefatigable good cheer. Other acknowledgements for conference organization efforts should be sent out to Jane Gaines, Annette Kuhn, and Tytti Soila. In addition, the collective efforts of Annette Forster, Elif Rongen-Kaynakci from the Netherlands Film Museum and Kajsa Hedstrom and John Wengstrom from the Swedish Film Institute on the conference screenings were simply amazing to say the least — beautiful, fascinating, rare, and pristine 35mm prints were shown each day of the event.
Astrid Soderbergh Widding and Laura Horak’s presentations separately examined the phenomena of cross-dressing in the silent era. Soderbergh Widding looked at the 1926 Swedish comedy by Karin Swanstrom, FLICKAN I FRACK/THE GIRL IN TAILS (a restored version was premiered at the conference), which uses the device as a narrative strategy to question gender roles, while Horak’s talk explored the “Biograph Boy,” Edna/Billy Foster, whose roles were not so much cross-dressing but rather working from the theatrical tradition of male impersonation. Again, we were fortunate enough to see an example of the “Biograph Boy” in a screening of the D.W. Griffith film, BILLY’S STRATAGEM (1912) although the radicality of the gender role twist is countered with Griffith’s usual dualistic vision of race/ethnicity, and indeed gender, since Billy’s role is in fact to save “his” sister from marauding Indians, a plot structure we know all too well from the director’s career.
Cross-dressing could be much more stylized or performative as Victoria Duckett’s paper on Sarah Bernhardt underlined the largely overlooked or unappreciated “theatrical film” in early cinema. Often seen as an anachronism, Duckett made a compelling case for thinking of Bernhardt’s films as falling outside of the silent film classifications of “attractions” or “classical narrative.” Anne Morey examined similarly a cross-over from the theatrical tradition in her presentation on Geraldine Ferrar, a Metropolitan Opera star who strangely enough made only one film, CARMEN (Cecil B. DeMille, 1915) which was an adaptation from the opera stage. As Morey notes, Ferrar’s casting was an effort by Hollywood to bring in mass audiences to the cinema with an appeal to “high class” performances, but here the sheer presence of Ferrar rather than the art form itself was the designator of the “class” act.