Presenting The Smalleys, 'Collaborators in Authorship and Direction'

This study analyses the discourse surrounding celebrity portraits of Lois Weber and her husband and collaborator, Phillips Smalley, arguing that metaphors of marital harmony that sought to explain the couple's creative partnership ultimately could not contain the challenges their working relationship presented to dominant models of gender relations. Significant though Weber's films were, the director's elevated reputation had as much to do with the kinds of pictures she made, as it did with the type of woman she presented herself to be – married, matronly, and decidedly middle-class.