![]() ![]() ![]() Questions of nation and nationhood, and women’s inclusion or exclusion within these terms, are examined in connection to issues of cultural globalization. While giving a new impetus to the idea of transitional cinema, the collected essays also illuminate the importance of film’s transnational circulation. Much emphasis is given to the transitional period of silent cinema (1910s to the early 1920s), which emerges as the field where feminist film scholars are beginning to claim their own theoretical and historical ‘place’. The volume builds on the thematic, methodological, and material diversity that characterized earlier efforts in women’s film history, and the originating context of the sixth Women and the Silent Screen conference (Bologna, 2010). What motivates feminist film research today? Exploring women’s contribution to silent cinema, scholars from across the globe address questions of performance, nationality, industry, technology, labor, and theory of feminist historiography. These triangulations between spectator bodies, women’s hats, and moving-picture images had an enormous impact on the emergence and uneven codification of industry film culture from roughly 1907 to 1916, a period characterized by the simultaneous standardization and constant transformation of the meaning and experience of filmgoing. As the mayor of Macon, Georgia, put it in 1912, in his futile efforts to pass an ordinance banning ladies’ hats from film screenings, “many a man goes to the moving picture show, pays his dime and for it sees a beautiful hat but no picture.” More than just a physical obstacle to the visibility of the screen, the woman’s hat represented a whole constellation of social and aesthetic problems that afflicted the motion-picture industry. Adorned with everything from exotic bird plumes, to entire fruit baskets, to miniature barnyard animals, women’s early twentieth-century hat fashions butted heads with the sheer logistics of film screen visibility. Perhaps no other visual or physical obstruction posed a greater annoyance to 1910s motion-picture spectators than the woman’s hat. ![]()
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