Clarke examines films depicting various armed conflicts in American history, from the Revolutionary War through to a push for military preparations prior to the American entry into the First World War. Of the 500 films she set out to analyze, more than half are set in the Civil War, then a 50-year-old conflict, with white women protagonists often bridging gaps between the two sides and helping to heal a divided nation.<\/p>\n
The book grows out of Clarke\u2019s PhD dissertation work, which began as a study of masculinity in war movies. But as she dug into trade journal publications of that era seeking titles and plot summaries and later visited silent film archives at the Library of Congress, the George Eastman House museum and the Museum of Modern Art, she made a surprising discovery.<\/p>\n
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The American Girl Goes to War is available to order from Rutgers University Press.<\/p><\/div>\n
Of the 500 or so silent films about war she wanted to investigate, only about 50 survived. And of those 50, a huge proportion featured a female protagonist.<\/p>\n
Whether acting as spies feeding key intelligence to George Washington or patriots donning male soldiers\u2019 uniforms to serve American interests, women played key roles in so many of the films that Clarke had to refocus her dissertation to account for the discovery.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is why I’ve fully embraced the field of feminist film history,\u201d says Clarke. \u201cI came to it not because I was a feminist first and wanted to find a project to fit with that ideology, but because the evidence showed me that films of that decade were made by women, made for women and made about women in ways that we as scholars haven’t tackled yet.\u201d<\/p>\n
Clarke says that film prints that have lasted for 100 years are typically those that were most popular with audiences, because the more prints there were in circulation, the greater the chance that one will exist in an archive or collection somewhere. And yet, many of the films in the book have rarely been discussed.<\/p>\n
\u201cFilms that have been restored and made widely available as DVD releases, especially the war movies, are predominantly the traditional types that are about male heroics, because that fits in with our expectations of the genre as it evolved in the 1920s,\u201d says Clarke. \u201cThere’s a big difference between what survives but sits collecting dust in an archive versus what is made available for students and popular audiences.\u201d<\/p>\n
It\u2019s an erasure of female participation in the industry that extends to female filmmakers, as well, which is where Clarke\u2019s research is now focused.<\/p>\n
\u201cPart of the assumption is that the film industry has always been structured to exclude women, but if we look back to the early origins of Hollywood, there are all kinds of female directors, cinematographers, editors and writers,\u201d says Clarke. \u201cSo, the question is actually why did Hollywood come to exclude women, and why has film history excluded these women?\u201d<\/p>\n
Clarke says that many silent films have become more widely available thanks to digitization projects and online platforms, but until the canon changes, they may be underutilized. To this end, she is now collaborating on an edited volume that will feature essays on lesser-known films so that anyone hoping to teach them might have a resource.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt’s a book about teaching silent film featuring short essays that could be assigned to students if you wanted to choose to teach a film that is not canonical and hasn\u2019t been written about as much as the more traditional titles,\u201d she says. \u201cThere are so many fascinating and incredibly diverse films that have become available to screen for students that can allow them to see that the traditional film history narrative that it was an art form made by men, and for the most part white men, was actually not the case.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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