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Women Film Pioneers

The Women Film Pioneers Project is based at Duke University, where it is chaired by Professor Jane Gaines.

Women Film Pioneers
The 1990s marked a turning point in feminist film studies. After the theoretical project of the 1970s-the "golden age" of feminist film theory-the field seemed to stand still. It was then that scholars realized how much more historical research needed to be done and that there were many more women involved in the international film industry in these years than was first considered in the 1970s. To discuss this, a group of feminist film scholars met in New York in September, 1995, a meeting that lead to the creation of the Women Film Pioneers Project.

What is the Women Film Pioneers Project?
The Pioneers project began as a collaborative effort to advance research on the accomplishments and history of women filmmakers from the early years of cinema through to the coming of sound. The original emphasis was on directors, writers, and producers. Recently, the project has expanded to include editors, exhibitors, publicists, and others working in the early years. The interest in directors, writers, and producers has been linked to a large archival project inspired by the need to discover, restore, preserve, exhibit, and distribute extant 35mm films. However, this emphasis does not exclude the parallel interest in women audiences in the silent period.

A managed email list is maintained for communications and the group meets annually at the Society for Cinema Studies Conference. A series of conferences is evolving. After the first conference meeting in October, 1999, at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands, "Women and the Silent Screen" was held in November, 2001 at the University of California-Santa Cruz. A fourth international conference is planned for June 2006 in Guadalajara.