How History Is Lost

The more a thing gets repeated, the more it will be believed and accepted as true. This repetition works whether the information is factual or not. I was reminded of this last night while browsing Twitter.  I saw a post from AmyPoehlerSmartGirls (@smrtgrls) that celebrated the great American director, Dorothy Arzner, on what would have been her 120th birthday.

The tweet included a link to a short film about Arzner's work and life. I was overjoyed to see this recognition but the film itself perpetuated some misinformation that just goes to show how women's history is lost. Arzner's described as the "ONLY American film director working in the 1930s" and as the "First woman to join the Directors' Guild of America."

This is all perfectly well-intended, but these two statements are simply not true. Or, rather, the first is not true and the second is misleading.

In the early 1930s, Dorothy Davenport Reid (sometimes "Mrs. Wallace Reid") was still directing in a long career of acting, directing, writing and producing that started in 1910. I have recently watched three sound films that she directed or co-directed in the 1930s:

• Sucker Money (1933, co-directed with Melville Shyer)
• The Woman Condemned (1934, dir. “Mrs. Wallace Reid”)
• The Road to Ruin (1934, co-directed with Melville Shyer)

In regard to the second statement about Arzner's membership in the DGA, this is misleading. The Motion Picture Directors' Association was founded in 1915.  This organization was the predecessor of the Directors' Guild of America, which took over in 1936. The interesting story of how and why the transition occurred can be found here, http://www.dga.org/BeforeTheGuild.

Photoplay Oct. 1916
Source information

The point is, though, that in 1916, one year after its founding, Lois Weber was selected as a member. At the time, Weber was the mayor of Universal City, the "top director" at Universal Film Manufacturing Company, and "the first woman inducted into the Motion Picture Directors' Association" (Shelley Stamp, Lois Weber in Early Hollywood, U of Cal P, 2015, 4).

So, notice how the laudable desire to celebrate the achievements of Dorothy Arzner can so easily become an eliding of history to overlook, and bury deeper, the achievements of other women, in this case Lois Weber and Dorothy Davenport Reid.

In fact, in the introduction to her book, as elsewhere in the text, Stamp demonstrates how "onliness" can backfire, particularly if social and industry changes work together to marginalize women. I won't recite that argument here--read the book, it is a wonderful exploration of early Hollywood--but in celebrating the uniqueness of one woman's achievements (that individualism has great appeal to Americans), we may send the message that such achievements are only possible for unique women or that they can achieve in certain areas (only) because they are women. 

Weber started as a director for everyone, but was gradually pressed farther into "women's pictures" and discovering and shaping female stars. From controlling the whole show, she became merely a handmaiden to talent, because she was the "only" one with the uniquely female status. Hollywood became more male (both in assumptions about the jobs involved and in its population) during the 1920s and, thus, the histories that were written were the histories of male achievements and if women are there at all they are not the main story, they remain at the margin, female, unique and "only." As Stamp says, "Before her career was even over, Weber was effectively written out of the story" (8).

I have not (yet) become that familiar with Dorothy Arzner's story.  I do know that it is quite different from Weber's and Davenport Reid's. I also know that she is one of very few early women directors featured in any film history texts I have used (there might be a sentence about Ida Lupino and a paragraph about Arzner). The work of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of women in the early days of film is rarely given so much as a sidebar, and when it's in a sidebar, that is the visual representation of marginalization. It speaks to lost history, history that is there but for which we must dig in archives and old trade publications, and when we accept women's status as "only" then we tacitly accept the way history has been handed to us. We ourselves need to examine the language of these celebrations and what it implies and we must always examine the context in which these "only" achievements took place.  Otherwise, we bury the achievements of other women just a little deeper.