Introduction: Transnationalizing Women's Film History

The papers gathered in this dossier represent a selection from presentations given at the workshop on "Transnationalizing Women's Film History," co-organized by the Women's Film History Network—UK/Ireland and the Columbia University Seminar as part of a larger weekend event held in March 2010.¹ This included public screenings of newly restored women's films at MoMA, a graduate conference, and a concluding review of the Alice Guy Blaché retrospective held earlier at the Whitney Museum. The workshop was one of a series organized by the British-based Women's Film History Network, which has received modest Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) startup funding. The aim of the workshops is to establish the remit of the network, a sustainable mode for its organization, and a brief for future construction of an online center where researchers can share findings and resources and that will also function as a gateway to relevant archives and special collections.

In establishing the network, the British initiative faces a number of compelling questions. First, what does it mean to put "women" in front of film history and, indeed, in front of history itself? Thus the network's first workshop brought together feminist film historians with specialists in women's history to investigate what we can learn from each other. Crucial questions included the following: Is women's film history a matter of filling gaps in an already established history of male inventors, moguls, and great artists, or does posing questions of gender change the way we do film history and therefore that history itself? Second, is film history only about film? Given that many women became involved in filmmaking through working in other media—as writers of adapted material or as scenario and screenwriters, as designers and costumiers, as theatrical performers and music-hall entertainers, as journalists, critics, fans, and social campaigners, and in the many roles offered by television—the first workshop joined with experts in literary, theatrical, and publishing history to examine some of the issues raised for women's film history by the relationship between different arts and media.

The third question asked what it means to put "British" in front of film history. Practically speaking, we needed a term that would encompass England, Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland, and the Irish Republic—hence the somewhat awkward UK/Ireland tag in the title. However, nationality raises wider questions about how to assign national identity, particularly when film workers so frequently cross national borders. Given the early internationalism of the film industry, the overwhelming presence of American films on British and Irish screens, and more recently the intensification of cross-national co-production consequent on globalization and increasing transnational circulation through digital technologies, the question arises whether the organization of film histories in national boxes impedes research and is any longer intellectually viable. In particular, in the creation of national archives and the writing of national film histories, does "nation" obscure questions of gender? On a practical level, we need to develop research methodologies, connect resources in different national archives, and develop new ways of organizing findings to enable us to research, interpret, and write border-crossing, transnationally interconnected histories. It was with these questions in mind that the workshop brought together American, British, and European film scholars, archivists, library managers, and digital designers to explore the research issues involved in "transnationalizing women's film history."

A central issue underpinning the ambition to transnationalize women's film history was posed at the start by Monica Dall'Asta, who pointed out the distinction between a transnational film history focused on global economics and the construction of the Women Film Pioneers Project in terms of biography. To bring about a convergence between women's career biographies and the subjective dimension these imply with the apparently objective nature of economic history will, she suggested, change the co-ordinates of film history itself. For as a number of the following papers show, the very endeavor of researching the history of women's film careers requires conceiving the film industry and its practices differently.

Histories of early film, as Bryony Dixon points out...