Throughout the history of cinema, women have played a key role in the success of the film industry. Although their roles in films have changed over the years, women have remained an important driving force behind film innovation and production. Recently it was discovered that women had played a pioneering role in the beginning of the film industry. Alice Guy-Blache is credited with directing the first fiction film. In addition, she produced “hundreds of short films in France and later in the United States, and more than twenty feature films through her film company, Solax” (White, 125). Lois Weber, another prolific film-maker, created many movies that helped “illuminate links between early twentieth-century middle-class feminism and the emerging cultural role of cinema” (White, 125). Although forgotten until recent discovery, these two film-makers played important roles in the initial emergence of the film industry. Both women serve as examples of the fact that although the roles of women in the film industry vary over time, their impact is powerful, and has served a large role in molding film production into what it is today.
Hill, John and Pamela Church Gibson. The Oxford Guide to Film Studies. New York: Oxford University Press,1998. Print.
-David Zwick
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