*Meeting Canceled*
"Early Hollywood’s Mad Girls: Disability, Difference & Self-Destruction"
In 1918, Motion Picture Magazine reported that Fannie, “a country girl who was never taught anything,” wrote to Vitagraph studios vowing that, “To become a movie actress I could undergo all the tortures of the Inquisition of Spain.”
Availing herself of the new embellished language of media celebrity, the self-described “poor and melancholic dreamer” hints at an often-disregarded violence shadowing the auspicious rise of the US star system: her eager self-endangerment reveals that the economy of sacrifice and reward the early film industry affixed to Hollywood success particularly spoke to struggling moviegoers. The country girl’s readiness to endure unwarranted “tortures” in order to make it in Hollywood also exposes an intuitive awareness of the skewed power-dynamics and ruthless patriarchal elitism subtending the US film industry in the 1910s. Tellingly, the process Fannie offers to undergo is compared to a brutal moment of misogyny in Western history, where clergymen prosecuted women—many adolescent girls—for the crimes of heretic defiance. Such accusations, feminist scholars have shown, worked to justify a concerted institutional attack on women’s sororal communities and matrilineal knowledge. Published as an example of “movie-mad” girlhood, Fannie’s letter thus captures how a male-presided film industry responded to the advancement of a woman-centered film culture: by advertising the ambitions of young female fans as symptoms of broader pathologies.
This paper addresses the roles female fan suffering—from social alienation to disordered moods and generational strife—played in the reception and promotion of US cinema during World War I. I argue that by exploring first-person narratives found in private papers and the press, we gain insight into the yearning, grit, injury, and despair experienced by working, immigrant, and middle-class girls who hoped a star-driven industry would help them transcend the heterosexist strictures of white propriety, the grind of menial employment, the scarcity of rurality, and the segregation of urban life. Though easily read as artifacts of female failure, the suicide notes and criminal statements examined here emerge as testaments of queer film reception: a powerful nonnormative attachment to the pictures that willfully went against the grain of convention by instead embracing moral, social, and legal disobedience.
Bio: Diana W. Anselmo is a feminist film historian and a queer immigrant. Her work on female audiences has appeared in Screen, Camera Obscura, Film History, Feminist Media History, JCMS: Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, and Journal of Women’s History, among others. Her first book, A Queer Way of Feeling: Girl Fans and Personal Archives of Early Hollywood, is forthcoming with the University of California Press. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Film at California State University, Long Beach.
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