Red Velvet Seat: Women’s Writing on the First Fifty Years of Cinema (review)

This hefty transatlantic compendium covers fifty years of women’s writing about cinema. It draws its title from frequent references to the experience of sitting in an auditorium furnished with “small cushioned seats,” “deep-piled velvet divans,” and “soft plush cushions” (42), and explores what cinema meant to women over this period. “This is literature by women, writing about women at the cinema, often for a female readership. It is triply swirled with an alertness to gender” (35). It addresses a variety of reasons for women’s engagement in production, distribution, exhibition, and criticism.

Broadly, the book is divided into sections devoted to the audience, the aesthetic specificity of film, the social and political uses and potential of the medium, review and critical material, and work in the industry. An additional section is devoted to biographies of personnel. The style of writing ranges from the theoretical to the instrumental to the anecdotal to the gossipy, indicating how particular commentators (including Maya Deren, writing to make money to further her filmmaking) wrote differently in different contexts. Many of the selections are made from well-known sources (Emilie Altenloh’s Zur Soziologie des Kino, Iris Barry’s Let’s Go to the Pictures, C. A. Lejeune’s Observer columns, E. Arnot Robinson’s columns for the Manchester Guardian and Dilys Powell’s correspondence for the Sunday Times, Catherine de la Roche’s essays for The Penguin Film Review, Dorothy Richardson’s, H. D.’s, and Bryher’s articles for Close Up) with the addition of new treats, such as Mrs. Henry Mansergh’s “An Idyll of the Cinematographe” (1898). Marie Seton, an early biographer of Sergei Eisenstein, unexpectedly comments on television in 1938. Journalists acknowledged include Adela Rogers St. Johns, the model for Hildy Johnson in His Girl Friday (Howard Hawks, 1940). Many of the contributors, here writing on cinema, are better known for their work in other areas of literature: Colette, Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bowen, Winifred Holtby, Charlotte P. Gilman, and Janet Flanner. The inclusion of Zelda Fitzgerald’s entertaining and astute “Our Own Movie Queen” (1925), with its original illustrations, a short story previously credited to her husband, gestures towards a more general problem of attribution—in certain circumstances, in film writing as elsewhere, women have elected to write under a pseudonym. There are also memoirs from, and interviews with, women who made their careers in front of and behind the camera, in features and in documentaries—Alice Guy Blaché, Jessica Borthwick, Lotte Reiniger, Frances Hubbard Flaherty, Germaine Dulac, Mary Field, Lois Weber, Anita Loos, Lillian Gish, Betty Balfour—many women progressing from acting roles to screenwriting, direction, and production (notably, but not only, Mary Pickford). Actresses here recount the various sacrifices made for the sake of their art—Gene Gauntier, actress turned screenwriter turned producer and critic, in “Blazing the Trail” (1928), reporting how she almost drowned on location. There is commentary from less familiar writers on well-known films such as D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1916), Victor Fleming’s Gone With the Wind (1939), and Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1926)—for which Lang’s wife, Thea von Harbou, coauthored the screenplay. Eva Jessye’s “The Truth about Hallelujah” provides a revealing and salutary insight into the conditions of employment for the performers in King Vidor’s celebrated 1929 film.

These insiders’ accounts are matched by observations from outsiders concerned with the influence of cinema on audiences—for good or for ill. While some women took fashion tips on dress and décor from the screen (when not griping about other women’s hats obstructing their view in the auditorium) and some gushed over the display of boxers’ bodies and over Rudolph Valentino’s luxuriantly brilliantined head (alive or dead), Marie Stopes, predictably, was interested in film as an instrument of education and of social reform. Many black writers complained...