From her point of view

 

Sally Kelton (played by Sally Forrest) pleads with Steve (Leo Penn) in Ida Lupino’s 1949 film “Not Wanted.” Lupino’s work was the focus in the first of a series of seminars on women filmmakers now under way at Ventfort Hall in Lenox, Mass. Courtesy photo/Kino Lorber

 

By KATE ABBOTT
Contributing writer

LENOX, Mass.

A young woman sits in a hospital bed, holding her infant son, and she is crying.
To take care of him, she would have to go back to her job at the mill. But then who would stay with him during her shifts? She has a few days left to decide whether to give him up for adoption, and she is trying to imagine what his life will be if they stay together.

“I know what they call children like that,” she tells the woman who runs the home where she’s staying for these few weeks. “He must never hear that word.”

In 1949 in Los Angeles, at the height of U.S. censorship, Ida Lupino succeeded in making a film about unwed mothers.

“Not Wanted” portrays Sally Kelton (played by Sally Forrest) with honest empathy. In an era before the advent of the birth-control pill and well before Roe vs. Wade, more than 100,000 young women every year wound up in maternity homes like the one depicted in this film.
Lupino had been a Hollywood star before she and her husband formed an independent film company. She would go on to direct films about subjects and perspectives Hollywood rarely showed: people living with polio in “No Fear,” a woman surviving rape in “Outrage.”

Lupino was bold, says Nannina Gilder, a Berkshire screenwriter and historian with an interest in the history of women in film. And Lupino was not alone: Even in the early decades of film, women were making movies in the United States and around the world.

In January, Gilder introduced Lupino and her work to an absorbed audience at Ventfort Hall in the first of a series of seminars on women directors and filmmakers before 1960. The seminars continue on Thursday evenings through Feb. 13.

Women have directed and invented in film since its beginnings in the 1890s, Gilder said. They made powerful work through 30 years of silent films, into sound era in the 1920s and through two world wars.

But those early leaders and visionaries now are often forgotten, she said. They are left out of histories, and people too often talk of a woman in film as “the only one” -- which makes women filmmakers sound rare and solitary, and discourages people from looking for them.
“I’m amazed at the breadth of how many women were directing film then,” Gilder said.
Many of those women were known and acclaimed in their day, and their films were successful, critically and commercially.

In 1916, Universal Studios had six women directors on its payroll, Gilder said, and they were known and important. The leader of that group, Lois Weber, was the highest paid director in Hollywood, known then as at least the equal of D.W. Griffith and Cecil B. DeMille, two men considered among the top U.S. directors of the era.

 

The birth of film
Women were often pioneers, Gilder explained as she shared a cup of tea in Lenox before her opening talk. In fact, she said, the first film director, and the first filmmaker to tell a fictional story on camera, was a woman.

In the earliest days of film, people in Paris might have seen Alice Guy standing on a platform with a tripod, guiding her actors and crew.

Guy was a 22-year-old secretary at the Gautmont camera company in Paris, Gilder said, when she saw the Lumiere brothers demonstrate their newly invented motion picture camera. They had taken a short documentary-style clip of factory workers leaving a mill. They thought the technology would be a brief curiosity.

Guy thought it could be a tool for telling stories. She convinced her bosses to let her make short films to show customers.

“She and Georges Melies were the first two who developed film for storytelling,” Gilder said.
From those early scenes, Guy founded the Gautmont studio and ran it from 1896 to 1906. She made sound films -- with synchronized phonograph records -- 25 years before sound came to Hollywood.

“She made music videos,” Gilder said.
Guy also liked to film outdoors, Gilder said, and she developed ways of blending scenes of Paris with close-up shots of the actors’ faces she filmed indoors in her studio, establishing emotions. In one comic short film, a pregnant woman walks through a park with a mischievous gleam, savoring a lollipop, a glass of absinthe, a pickled herring -- while her beleaguered husband races after her, pushing their toddler in a pram.

“Pay attention to gender roles” in Guy’s work, Gilder said, smiling. “She likes to play with the dynamics between men and women.”

In 1909, Guy moved to the United States with her husband and became one of the first women in film to open her own studio, Solax.

But a history of the Gautmont studio, written while she was still alive, credited Guy’s films to a younger filmmaker -- a man she had taught, Gilder said.

And until recently, her films have been hard to find. Many early films have been lost, Gilder said, and those preserved may only exist in a film canister decades old. It takes time and resources to restore them and transfer them to a form people can now watch at home.

A recent revival in interest in many women filmmakers and directors has been enough to encourage independent film distributors to restore some of these classics. In the fall of 2018, the New York City company Kino Lorber releases a boxed set of silent films directed by women, and Gilder said she has seen other, similar efforts.

“I’ve been thinking about this seminar for a year,” Gilder said. “More films have been made available recently.”

Kino Lorber also has re-released several of Ida Lupino’s films in beautiful quality, she said.
“It changes the experience to have a beautiful, crisp presentation,” Gilder said.

 

Path to a director’s chair
In “Not Wanted,” bright sun falls across Sally’s face as she sits with a stark pattern of light and shade on the wall behind her, looking back on a hard year. Lupino is known for her eye for light and shadow in the films she directs, and for innovation and compassion.

Sally is 19. She is lithe and exuberant, inexperienced and playful. She is a young woman working in a cafe in southern California who had to leave school to help her parents.

Imagine her at home in a din of constant nagging, getting ready for a night with friends, sliding the wide neckline of her dress down off her shoulder. At work, she is listening to the pianist practicing next door. Her chestnut hair is bound back and falls in a soft fringe on her forehead.
Lupino was filming in city streets, boarding houses and parks, not in a Hollywood backlot. Her down-to-earth approach was rare, Gilder said. She cast actors she had found and recognized, not known stars, though she knew the scene.

Lupino had worked in film since she was 14, in Britain and then in the United States, and by 1941 she had top billing in “High Sierra” with Humphrey Bogart.

“She played tough dames,” Gilder said. “And she was one. In Hollywood then, you didn’t get to choose the films you performed in. The studio chose for you, and they could suspend you if you refused. She was a contract star for Warner Bros., and she was suspended often.
“And when she wasn’t working, she would watch the directors, the cameramen, editors, lighting people … and ask questions.”

In 1949, Lupino married a producer at Columbia, and they started an independent film studio together. When the director they had hired had health trouble as shooting was about to begin on their first film, she stepped in.

 

Finding ways to tell stories
As Gilder describes it, Lupino launched in joyfully, telling the stories she wanted to tell. She cared about real people. She took on difficult subjects, and she researched them thoroughly.
She visited maternal homes while she was writing “Not Wanted” (in a collaboration with Paul Jericho), and she saw young mothers from many backgrounds living together -- young white women like Sally as well as black, Latina and Chinese women. She wanted to show them all in her film, Gilder said, and though her producers refused, she does show a black baby among the newborns at the home and young Asian woman among the young mothers Sally gets to know.
Later, Lupino wanted to make a film in the Mexican community, but she could never get funding to produce it, Gilder said.

It took finesse, she said, for Lupino to get “Not Wanted” onto the screen.
“In 1949 and 1950, she’s dealing with the censors,” Gilder said. “The Hays Code is in effect, and she’s battling them to get stories on screen.”

The Hays Code, formally known as the Motion Picture Production Code, was a moral code adopted by the film industry and enforced most strictly from the mid-1930s to the mid-1950s. It set limits on film plots and characters to keep them within what it deemed the moral standards of the time. Sex outside of marriage was condemned, any act considered criminal had to be punished, and any character considered criminal could not be portrayed as sympathetic.
Lupino could not even use the word pregnancy in the script, Gilder said. But she told a human story from a woman’s perspective, putting her audience into the skin of a woman in labor.
“She’s known for her point-of-view shots,” Gilder said.

When Sally has her baby, the camera shows her moved from her bed onto a gurney and wheeled into a delivery room, and then the lens turns to look up into the doctors’ hazy faces. Lupino shows us the scene through Sally’s eyes

 

From a woman’s perspective
When women have a say in film, they can explore relationships not often seen. In “Not Wanted,” Lupino shows a mother and child.

And a director like her mentor, Dorothy Arzner, can bring out complicated friendships between women.

Gilder’s second talk focused on Arzner, who worked in film from 1919 to 1943. She was a director for 15 years, with major Hollywood studios and on independent films, and she made the transition from silent film into sound.

Arzner was at Paramount in the early days of the “talkies,” as actors were trying to adjust to having fixed microphones on sets. The actors had to stay still to record clearly, Gilder said, and in Arzner’s first sound film her leading woman, Clara Bow, felt stilted. Arzner hung a mike from a fishing pole and arranged it to follow Bow around the set, so she could move freely. She invented the boom mike.

She brings a similar freedom and nuance to relationships, Gilder said.
“I’ve always loved old films, and when I see films by women of that era, I’ll think, ‘This is what I’ve been missing,’” Gilder said. “Women screenwriters are important too, but a woman at the helm does change the way a movie looks -- and the way it looks at the women in it.”

She described a powerful team in Arzner’s “Dance Girl Dance,” with Lucille Ball and Maureen O’Hara as dancers trying to make a living. Ball’s character, practical and comic, sees burlesque as a path to money and success. O’Hara’s character wants the freedom to dance as an artist.
“Maureen O’Hara is a ballet dancer working as a show girl,” Gilder said.

“They are two different women, both driven, and they are friends. There’s complexity to the friendship. There’s rivalry. They help each other and undercut each other. … Maureen O’Hara’s character is firm. She knows what she wants, and she is not afraid to ask or demand it.”
Arzner herself could be honest, with rare courage, about who she was and whom she loved.
“Arzner was boldly out in the 1930s and 1940s,” Gilder said.

She had a relationship for 40 years with dancer and choreographer Marion Morgan.
Like Lupino, she had to express some of her beliefs and passions obliquely in her work.
Jacqueline Audry, the focus of Gilder’s Feb. 13 talk, would express ideas of sexuality and gender that a U.S. filmmaker could hardly touch.

Working in France after World War II, Audry also faced censorship, Gilder said, but under different standards.

U.S. censors would have clamped down on any suggestion of love between men or women. Audry pushed at that boundary.

“A film like ‘Olivia’ could have definite Sapphic overtones,” Gilder says. “She was not hiding the queer elements in it, or at least she was hiding them in plain sight. The two women leading the school are clearly shown as a longstanding couple with a fraught relationship. She couldn’t have shown it in Hollywood.”

Audry also became known for film adaptations of works like Colette’s novels “Gigi” and “Mitsou.” Comic or sad, they show women looking for independence, freedom of mind and companionship.
These are qualities Gilder finds in women filmmakers and directors and wants to recognize, companionship included.

Women who worked in film were friends, she said. They would mentor and support each other. Alice Guy knew Lois Weber; Dorothy Arzner encouraged Ida Lupino.

If a young woman wants to become a director, she explained, it’s easier if she feels the dream is within reach and someone is listening.

Nannina Gilder’s “Women in Film” seminar series continues from 7 to 9 p.m. Feb. 6 and 13 at Ventfort Hall in Lenox. On Thursday, Feb. 6, she will discuss Lotte Reiniger, a pioneer in animation, and on Feb. 13, she will focus on Cannes award winner Wendy Toye and French filmmaker Jacqueline Audry.