Photo: Bettmann Archive/Getty Images
Though her works have largely been lost, Lois Weber made at least 138 films before 1940 — many of which addressed social issues like capital punishment, urban poverty and birth control.
Early movies were made of highly flammable nitrate, which is one reason many have not survived. In the case of the filmmaker Lois Weber, another reason might have to do with being a woman.
Howie Movshovitz reports at National Public Radio [NPR], “As Hollywood continues to struggle with the underrepresentation of women behind the camera, most people have forgotten that 100 years ago, one woman ruled.
“Her name was Lois Weber. Counting shorts and feature-length movies, she directed at least 138 films — all before 1940. She became the first American woman to direct a feature-length dramatic film with The Merchant of Venice in 1914.
” ‘In her day, she was considered one of the three great minds of the early film industry, alongside D.W. Griffith and Cecil B. DeMille,’ says Shelley Stamp, a film historian at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
“Today, most of her works are virtually impossible to see. But two of her most important films have now been restored and released to theaters and on disc.
“Shelley Stamp wrote a book about Weber and the notes for the new DVDs. She says the filmmaker often took a different tack from her contemporaries.
” ‘She was a very vocal advocate for cinema’s ability to portray complex social issues in a popular narrative form,’ Stamp says. ‘She considered cinema what she called “a voiceless language.” And by that I think she meant cinema had an ability to convey ideas to anybody, regardless of their educational level, regardless of their command of English, right, at a period when there were many immigrants to the U.S. who did not speak English as a first language.’
“Weber was born in 1879 outside Pittsburgh to a religious middle-class family. She was a child prodigy pianist who spent two years playing organ and evangelizing around the city.
” ‘She started preaching on shop corners, and when she went to New York, she started working at these Salvation Army-type places to help people,’ Dennis Doros says. With his wife Amy Heller, Doros co-founded and runs Milestone Films, which is releasing the restored version of Weber’s movies. ‘She was never really a preacher, but she was always an activist for the poor.’ …
“Before she became a filmmaker, Weber left evangelizing to tour the country as a concert pianist — until one night a key broke and shattered her nerve to perform. She left the concert stage for the theater stage, and eventually directed her first short film in 1911.
“From early on, she advocated for complex roles for women and for serious engagement with social issues. According to Stamp, Weber made films about the fight to abolish capital punishment, about drug addiction, about urban poverty, about the campaign to legalize contraception.
“Weber took up the cause of young women going to work in her 1916 film Shoes, which has been released by Milestone with a new score. …
“The same year that Weber wrote and directed Shoes, she was entrusted with Universal Pictures’ anchor film, The Dumb Girl of Portici (dumb as in mute). It stars internationally famous Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova in a sweeping historical epic.”
More at NPR, here. I was sad to read this part: “Lois Weber died penniless in 1939. Friends paid for her funeral.”
I am fascinated by the detail of a piano key shattering! What an amazing woman–and how awful/typical that she’s mostly unknown. I wonder how many incredible works of art have been lost, simply because they were made by women and not valued . . . .
Indeed. I’ve heard that all the poems by Anonymous are by women, and I believe it. But that suggests our own timidity may have played a role in our obscurity. I can certainly imagine generations of women thinking, “Not worth the fight.” Especially if they didn’t have their own source of income.