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The Gender Studies Program of the University of Melbourne is proud to present the 7th International Conference on Women and
the Silent Screen in association with the Victorian College of Music and Art
Women and the Silent Screen VII: Performance and the Emotions
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Women and the Silent Screen VII: Performance and the Emotions
Presented by the Gender Studies Program at the University of Melbourne
in association with VCAM and supported by the Miegunyah Distinguished Fellow program and the Macgeorge Bequest, the City of Melbourne, CoAsIt, the National Film and Sound Archive, and the New
Zealand Film Archive -Ngā Kaitiaki o Ngā Taonga Whitiāhua.
Sunday 29 September Registration: 3 – 3:30pm
Welcome and Opening of the Conference 3:30 – 4pm
Professor Barbara Creed (Cinema Studies), Professor Jeanette Hoorn (Director of Gender Studies), Dr. Victoria Duckett (VCA)
Opening Keynote Address 4 – 5pm
Pam Cook, University of Southampton
Natacha Rambova: Designing Culture, Staging Exoticism and Performing Identity in the 1920s
Reception 5-6pm Screening 1: 6 – 7.15pm
NZFA Venus of the South Seas, dir. James R. Sullivan, New Zealand Dominion Productions, 1924, 47 mins.
Preceded by: Pathé News No. 67, 1924, 1.30 mins.
[Hamilton Shingle & Buster Competition], 1926, 3 mins. [Motion Picture Bathing Beauty Contest], 1925, 1 min.
Accompanied by Mauro Colombis
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Monday 30 September Registration: 9 – 9:30am
Keynote: 9.30
Richard Abel, University of Michigan
“A Great New Field for Women Folk" Newspapers and the Movies, 1911-‐1916
Morning Tea 10:30 – 11am Session 1: 11 – 1pm
1A: Feminisms and partnerships on the early
Australian screen
Room 1
1B: Displacing conventions: Reviewing
genre and gender in early film
Room 2
1C: Women writing
Room 3
Chair: Deb Verhoeven Ann-Marie Cook (Queensland University of Technology) (Re)Assessing the Demise of the McDonagh Sisters Margot Nash (University of Technology Sydney) Lottie Lyell: the silent work of an Australian film pioneer Virginia Fraser (Independent Researcher) Strategic Identity: Senora Spencer “the only lady operator in the world” Deb Verhoeven (Deakin University) Courting Independence: The sensational case of Señora Spencer, ‘The Only Lady Cinematograph Artist in the World’
Chair: Jeanette Hoorn Stephen Gaunson (RMIT) The Lady Bushranger: Bushwomen and bushranging Susan Potter (University of New England) Frame, Space, Sexuality: D.W. Griffith’s An Unseen Enemy (Biograph, 1912) Jacqueline Anderson (Pratt Institute) Rescuing Women, or Society? D.W. Griffith’s Broken Blossoms, Lois Weber’s Where are my Children? And Family Melodrama Jane Gaines (Columbia University) A Melodrama Theory of Feminist Film Historiography
Chair: Shelley Stamp Canan Balan (Istanbul Şehir University) A Literary Feminist Experience of Silent Cinema: The Case of Halide Edip Elisa Cuter (Freie Universitaet Berlin) “In the mood of our modern times”: The Problematic Relationship Between Capitalism and Women’s Liberation as Explored Through the Work of Emilie Altenloh Amelie Hastie (Amherst College) The Eye of the Star: Critical Writings by Louise Brooks Amy Shore (SUNY Oswego) Nell Shipman and the Nature of Cinema
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Lunch 1 – 2pm
Session 2: 2 – 3:30pm 2A: Social Reform,
Exploitation films and the fight for equality:
Explorations in women and social change
Room 1
2B: In dialogue with the past: Reinventing the
modern woman
Room 2
2C: Dance on screen
Room 3
Chair: Barbara Creed Mark Lynn Anderson (University of Pittsburgh) The Unremarkable Film Authorship of Dorothy Davenport Reid and the Women’s Voice in Late Silent Cinema Chika Kinoshita (Shizuoka University of Art and Culture) Something More Than a Seduction Story: Abortion and Entertainment in the 1930s Japanese Film Culture April Miller (Barrett College, Arizona State University): Madness, Murder, and the Anti-Pastoral in Victor Sjöstrom’s The Wind
Chair: Hilary Hallett Jacqueline Dutton (University of Melbourne) Femmes futuristes. Representing Parisiennes in early French futuristic films Felicity Chapman (Monash University) La Parisienne on the Silent Screen: Charles Chaplin’s A Woman of Paris Patricia Di Risio (University of Melbourne) The New Woman in Early Silent Film
Chair: Rachel Fensham Mary Simonson (Colgate University) Restaged Onscreen: Anna Pavlova, Rita Sacchetto, and “Dance Pictures” Minette Hillyer (Victoria University) To Dance the Native Dance Tami Williams (University of Wisconsin) Sensations and Sentiments: Gestural Abstraction, Gender and Intermediality in the Performing Arts of Belle Époque Paris
Afternoon Tea 3:30 – 4pm Screening 2: 4 – 5.40 pm
NFSA: The Girl of the Bush (Franklyn Barrett, 1921), 95 min La Fee aux Fleurs (Pathe) stencilled 90 secs
Accompanied by Mauro Colombis !!!Move to Elisabeth Murdoch Theatre at the University of Melbourne Parkville Campus!!!
Keynote Address: 6.30 – 7:30pm
Miegunyah Lecture: Mary Ann Doane, University of California, Berkeley
The Face in Silent Cinema and the Discourse of the Universal
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Tuesday 1 October Registration: 9 – 9:15am
WIFI soft launch, Jane Gaines 9:15 – 9:30am
Keynote Address: 9.30 – 10:30am
Shelley Stamp, University of California, Santa Cruz
Feminist Media Historiography and the Work Ahead
Morning Tea 10:30 – 11am Session 3: 11 – 12.30pm
3A: The expanding screen: performance and
intermediality
Room 1
3B: Colonial Cinemas: Exploring Indigenous
Representation
Room 2
3C: Women and transnational cinema
Room 3
Chair: Victoria Duckett Eirik Frisvold Hanssen (Norwegian University of Science and Technology) “Measured in its emotional possibilities”: A Doll’s House and the Performance of Gender in American Silent Cinema Elena Mosconi & Maddalena Bodini (University of Pavia) On the stage. Mimì Aylmer’s public and private life as a performance
Chair: Jane Landman Sheila Schvarzman (Anhembi-Morumbi University, São Paulo) The Guarany: the myth of nation´s founding in the Brazilian silent films Jani Wilson (University of Auckland) Wāhine Wahangū (Silent Māori Women): Wāhine Māori in Silent Feature Film Jane Landman (Victoria University) The silent women of the Australian South Seas colonial adventure
Chair: Tami Williams Louis Pelletier (Université de Montréal) Pauline Garon’s Transnational Career and French Canadian Identity Piotr Kulesza (Film Museum Lodz) Pola Negri. Legend of the cinema and first European movie star in Hollywood Caroline Eades (University of Maryland) A Turning-point in Alice Guy-Blaché’s Life and Work: from Paris to Fort Lee, N. J (1904-1914)
Lunch 12:30 – 1:15 pm
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Screening 3: 1:15 – 3.00 pm NZFA: The Bush Cinderella, dir. & prod. Rudall Hayward, New Zealand, 1928, 85
mins. Accompanied by Mauro Colombis
Afternoon Tea 3 – 3.20 pm
Session 4: 3:20 – 5:20 pm
4A: Questions in National Cinemas
Room 1
4B: Leading Ladies: Divas, Stars, and Serial
Queens
Room 2
4C: Addressing the audience: spectatorship, perception, and movie-
going
Room 3 Chair: Richard Abel Katja Lee (McMaster University) No, our Mary: (Re) Claiming Mary Pickford for Canada Donna R. Casella (Minnesota State University) Women in Front and Behind the Camera in Irish Cinema of the Silent Period Michele Leigh (Southern Illinois University Carbondale) Leading Ladies and the Studio Bosses: The Representation of Women in Pre-Revolutionary Russian Studio Publications Giuliana Muscio (University of Padua) Historiography of Women and the Silent Screen: Europe/US/World
Chair: Monica Dall’Asta Emiliana Losma (Independent Researcher) Divas: Goddess of the silent screen Aviva Dove-Viebahn (Arizona State University) From Pauline’s Perils to Charlie’s Angels (and Back Again): Tracing the Past and Future of ‘Serial Queens’ Anna Gardner (La Trobe University) Colleen Moore: Star Auteur? Monica Dall’Asta (University of Bologna) Obscured by starlight: Women Comedians and sporting actresses in early Italian cinema
Chair: Wendy Haslem Bindu Menon Mannil (Delhi University) Chronicles of a Disappearance: Caste and Gender in South Indian Silent Screen Greta Nordio (Columbia University) Specta-Attractography and the “Public-Whisperer”: Debates on female spectatorship in Italian Film Magazines from 1910-1927 Wendy Haslem (University of Melbourne) Spectral Colours, Temporalities and Sensation in Early Cinema
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Roundtable plenary with NFSA & NZFA: 5.20 – 6.10 pm
Gender and the Archives
Minette Hillyer (Victoria University of Wellington), Mark Sweeney (NZFA), Meg Labrum (NFSA), Helen Tully (NFSA), Deb Verhoeven (Deakin University)
Conference Dinner: 7:30pm onwards
Wednesday 2 October Registration: 9 – 9:30am
Keynote Address: 9.30
Hilary Hallet, Columbia University
The Rise of Early Hollywood
Morning Tea 10:30 – 11am Session 5: 11 – 1pm
5A: Doubles, copies, clones: reproducing women in early film
Room 1
5B: The subversions of language and sound
Room 2
5C: Drama and Documentation
Room 3
Chair: Mary Ann Doane Jeannette Delamoir (CQUniversity) All the Mary Pickfords Lisa Bode (University of Queensland) ‘Kisses on the screen!’: Silent Screen Actresses and the ‘Double Exposure’ Film Cycle of the 1910s Rachel Joseph (Arizona State University) Lulu’s Boxes: Screened Stages, Theatricality, and the Emergence of Monstrous Reproducibility in Pandora’s Box
Chair: Elena Mosconi Maree Macmillan (RMIT) The many voices of Lulu: auditory interpretations of Louise Brooks’s Lulu in Pabst’s Pandora’s Box (1929) Jon Dale (University of Adelaide) Active in Visibility: Ewa Partum’s Concrete Poetics Tessa Dwyer (University of Melbourne) Female Stars, Foreign Accents and Unruly Voices: The Transition from Silence to Sound
Chair: Jane Gaines Barbara Evans (York University) A Shetland Romance: The Films of Jenny Brown Emma Sandon (Birkbeck, University of London) Cape to Cairo Denise McKenna (University of Southern California) Beatriz Michelena and Alternative Western Mythologies Kristin N. Harper (New York University) “Sweet Belles Jangled,
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Paul Young (Vanderbilt University) Starring Mary Pickford as Unity: STELLA MARIS and the Early Classical Paradigm
Yiman Wang (University of California, Santa Cruz) Speaking in a “Forked Tongue”: Anna May Wong’s Linguistic Cosmopolitanism
Out of Tune”: Filming Female Hysteria and War Madness in The Great War
Lunch 1 – 2pm, Hub Seminar Room Women and Film History International meeting convened by Michele Leigh. All
welcome to attend Session 6: 2 – 3:30pm
6A: New Materials for Feminist Film History
Room 2
6B: Focus: Asian Cinema
Room 3
Chair: Susan Potter Kerri Welsh (University of California, Santa Cruz) Radical Remembering: Contemporary Feminist Aesthetics and the Silent Screen in Amy Ruhl’s How Mata Hari Lost Her Head and Found Her Body Emily O’Connor (Independent Scholar & Artist) The Killing of Sister George II Whitney Monaghan (Monash University) A “polyphonic play of features”: Bela Belazs, Louise Brooks and Tumblr
Chair: TBA Cristina Colet (University of Turin) Xin nuxing: the coAstruction during 1930s in China of a new model of woman (the modern woman) as a symbol for a new modern China Sean O’Reilly (Harvard University) Screening History: Japan’s First Bakumatsu Boom and the History Film, 1925-1945 Danny Ben-Moshe (Deakin University) Bollywood’s First Women: The Jewish Stars of India’s Silent Era
3:30 – 4pm Concluding Remarks
