The Girl from God's Country: Nell Shipman and the Silent Cinema (review)

Nell Shipman's story started out well enough. Born in Victoria in 1892 as Helen Foster Barnham, she left home at the age of thirteen and within a few years had achieved her goal of becoming a vaudeville star in the United States. In 1910, Nell married another expatriate Canadian, the impresario 'Ten Percent Ernie' Shipman. It was Ernie who suggested Nell write silent film scripts. Within a year, she had starred in a film made of one of those scripts and the following year not only starred in but directed another. The Shipmans then formed a production company. Returning to Canada, their modus operandi was to arrive in a city, raise production money from the locals, and shoot a film guaranteed to make all concerned rich and famous.

The plan worked. In 1919, Ernie and Nell persuaded a consortium of Calgary businessmen to underwrite Back to God's Country. Based on a dog story by the Jack London-esque writer James Oliver Curwood, the plot was rewritten by Nell to de-emphasize the dog. Instead, the protagonist would be the on- and off-screen persona Shipman had already created for herself. 'The Girl from God's Country' was a strong and resourceful denizen of the natural world. In contrast, the men around her were either villainous or desperately in need of her rescuing. Her only reliable friends were other women or, more frequently, a menagerie of forest creatures including Brownie the Bear (who rode in the back seat of Shipman's car for years thereafter).

Making Back to God's Country was every bit as dramatic as the silent feature that finally appeared on the screen. During the midwinter shoot north of Edmonton, Nell's leading man caught pneumonia from which he eventually died. Nell improvised a nude scene with Brownie. Just off screen, she was having an affair with the film's production manager, for whom she would shortly leave Ernie. And Curwood - on whose reputation the production money had been raised - was hopping mad about his dog hero being upstaged. Despite these upsets, Back to God's Country was a hit, providing its investors with a 300 per cent return on their money. It has to this day a secure place in the canon of Canadian cinema.

Nell's celebrity led to her writing, directing, and starring in two more silent melodramas with a similar ethos: The Girl from God's Country (1921) and The Grub-Stake (1923). Then, after she made a short in 1924, her career petered out. Hollywood's industrialization and misogyny systematically expelled the women filmmakers who had helped define the medium. The remaining forty-six years of Shipman's life were a string of failed comebacks, bad deals, weak husbands, and flights from creditors worthy of a silent film climax.

Kay Armatage's The Girl from God's Country: Nell Shipman and the Silent Cinema chronicles Shipman's life and times in equal doses. The biography and even the film critiques disappear for pages while Armatage explores broader issues: the evolution of feminist film theory, the place of women in silent cinema, women and the automobile, the image of animals in literature and film. The stated aim is to provide a context for understanding Shipman as, simultaneously, the extraordinary human being she was and a construction of her times, her medium, and her gender.

For the most part, Armatage can have her Foucault and eat it. The author, herself a long-time player in Canadian women's film as well as a professor of both cinema and women's studies, mediates her own broad reading with a deeply felt personal attachment to her subject. She commiserates with Shipman's 'bad partner choices,' envies her wardrobe, constructs for her a highly speculative sisterhood of her contemporary women filmmakers, and feels her subject's physical presence when touching Shipman's unpublished papers. Most tellingly, Armatage identifies the...