Mary Pickford—as Written by Frances Marion (original) (raw)
Related papers
Celebrity Studies, 2017
In the mid-teens of the twentieth century, when cinema had just reached its status as ‘big business’, one of the silent screen’s most prolific and powerful stars, Mary Pickford, addressed her large and growing audience through a syndicated celebrity advice column, ‘Daily Talks’ (1915–1917). These columns, often in the form of ‘letters’, reveal how Pickford’s star image was in the midst of being constructed and adjusted both textually (in the columns and other print publications) and visually (in her films and photographic material in wide circulation). They also illustrate how early forms and discourses of movie star celebrity culture addressed serious matters such as gender politics in the largest sense and reflected on and conversed with social, political and economic trends in contemporary culture. As such, the discourse in ‘Daily Talks’ attempts a precarious balance between Pickford’s working-class girl origins and her successful businesswoman stature, between proto-feminist or progressive attitudes on gender and work and a peculiar a-feminist, conservative reflex, which would become increasingly at odds with her own career and private life.
Lovability and Problematic Gunshots: Mary Pickford, Her Films and Finnish Film Culture
Not so Silent: Women in Cinema Before Sound, 2010
Hollywood makes stars because stars sell movies, as Richard Dyer has put it. It goes without saying that this function is not restricted to American markets. When Hollywood films were imported to Finland in increasing numbers in the years following The First World War, names and images of Hollywood stars began to appear on the pages of local papers and magazines. Both Finnish film distributors and exhibitors used stars systematically to advertise latest motion pictures. Various magazines directed public’s interest into private lives of stars by publishing star related articles. In the new star discourse Finnish film culture got amalgamated with Hollywood films and promotional material. In the late 1910s and early 1920s one of the biggest Hollywood stars in Finland was Mary Pickford – “America’s Sweetheart”. Lovability was a major characteristic also of her Finnish star image. However, in 1921 her sweetness was momentarily beclouded by the critical reception of one of her major films. Even though Hollywood kept marketing its products as politically free entertainment foreign audiences made sense of them on their own terms. Hence even an actress whose star image was as immaculate as that of Pickford could become a political concern.
Editorial: Women and the Silent Screen
Screening the Past, 2015
What are the gaps in current film histories? Who has been forgotten and why? How can we write histories of cinema that are more inclusive while not eliding processes of exclusion or other dynamics of power? The essays in this special dossier respond to these questions, demonstrating the significance of gender in relation to early cinema. The essays emerge from the VII Women and the Silent Screen Conference that Victoria Duckett convened with Jeanette Hoorn at the University of Melbourne in 2013. This was the first time that this conference was brought to Australasia; the following iteration was taken to Shanghai in 2017.
Not so Silent: Women in Cinema Before Sound
2010
"The work of the Women and the Silent Screen Conferences [...] is to collectively create a new realm of cinema history, neither 'the' history, nor 'a' history, but a strange double world." These words are from Jane Gaines in her keynote address for the fifth Women and the Silent Screen Conference, held at the Stockholm University in 2008. This proceedings volume gives a representative picture of the breadth of the conference. The rich and varied contributions address theoretical issues around this double world of "cinematification" and feminist historiography, advancing questions on the authorship of pioneering female filmmakers and the role of female stars in early cinema. Other topics explored include transnationalism, the performance of femininity, fandom and fashioning, and branding within the studio system. The diversity of subjects in this volume reveals both the complexity and the problems of the field of research that the Women and the Silent Screen Conferences represent. Not only do these papers deal with well-known, concrete issues within feminist scholarship, but they also consider a more fundamental question: that of the medium as such in its early years, and its conceptualisation within a feminist scholarly framework."