The Museum of Modern Art – June 1, 2022
&
Lenfest Center for the Arts, Columbia University in the City of New York – June 2-4, 2022
&
Barrymore Film Center, Ft. Lee, New Jersey – June 5-7, 2022
The call for papers for the conference, “Women and the Silent Screen XI: Women, Cinema, and World Migration” is now open. The deadline to submit abstracts by is 7 January 2022.
For 22 years, Women and the Silent Screen (WSS), a biennial international conference sponsored by Women and Film History International (WFHI), has brought together researchers focused on women’s pivotal roles in the first decades of motion picture history. WSS has supported the creation of a new view of the film industries that demonstrates the centrality of women in economic and labor history, criticism, aesthetics, narrative development, film culture, and film production in a globalized world.
In June 2022, Columbia University in New York hosts WSS XI: Women, Cinema, and World Migration to highlight new scholarship connecting early cinema history to the migration and social mobility that caught up women globally when motion pictures arrived more than a century ago. We invite students, scholars, distributors, curators, and archivists from around the world to return to where the U.S. film industry began to explore how the new medium intersected with women’s movement across boundaries of gender, ethnicity, race, and class, considering occupational and national borders that excluded some women and welcomed others. For the first time, WSS XI features Jump Start, a platform for research sharing before the conference begins.
In Manhattan: Women, Cinema, and World Migration opens with an archivists panel and screening at the Museum of Modern Art on the evening of June 1 (Wednesday), and then continues June 2–4 (Thursday to Saturday), at Columbia University’s Lenfest Center for the Arts and Dodge Hall. Conference panels, workshops, short presentations, and plenary sessions will take up questions of migration and mobility in the context of the development of motion pictures as this relates to histories of women worldwide.
In Ft. Lee, NJ: On Sunday, June 5, we’ll make the same commute as early cinema workers, crossing the Hudson River at 125th Street via ferry—thanks to NY Waterway!—to Ft. Lee, the “Film Town.” At the new Barrymore Film Center the all-day “International Serial Queens” program will feature the American Pearl White and the Chinese White Rose Woo (吴素馨). WSS XI will continue June 6–7 at the Barrymore with screenings including “#MeToo” silent era films. Due to COVID, Women and the Silent Screen: Entr’acte (June 4–6, 2021) was held online. By popular demand, Entr’acte’s 4 topics—American & Chinese film connections, early Soviet women documentary makers, Alice Guy Blaché, and Digital Humanities—will be continued during the 2022 conference.
| Prospective topics include: |
- female spectators at work & play
- the global and/or the local in the silent era
- cinema & social class mobility
- archival practices & digital research innovation
- women who started film industries: Europe and beyond: East Asia, South Asia, Eastern Europe, Latin America, Australia, the Middle East & former British colonies
- xenophobia: past & present
- long-lost connections: theater & motion pictures
- immigration stories as family melodrama
- early 20th-century European turmoil: political migration & cinema
- cinema & cultural cross-pollination
- #MeToo in the silent era workplace on & off the set
- critical race theory & cross-race casting
- Marxism, feminism, mass culture
- women screenwriters & screenwriting manuals
- origins of film pedagogy in New York City
- funny, weird, amazing, quirky women
- women as avant-gardists & documentarians
- scandal, sex & salacious publicity
- below-the-line jobs: animators, colorists & lab assistants
- The “New Woman”: myth & reality
- The Great Migration & Black spectatorship
- silent era “race women”
- gender & technology
- queerness, cross-dressing & gender-bending
- music, affect & melodrama
For more information on how to submit, click here.
WFTHN 