Kathleen on Lois Weber

WELCOME TO SOUL TELEGRAM: MOVIES & MEANING - a weekly newsletter by Kathleen Norris and Gareth Higgins exploring how cinema helps us understand our lives, expand our horizons, and live better. Each week Kathleen or Gareth writes an essay about a movie, a filmmaker, or a theme arising in cinema; accompanied by a sketch of three things one of us is thinking about these days. We hope to encourage meaningful reflection on familiar movies, and to introduce works of surpassing beauty, wisdom, and provocation that aren’t so well known. Ultimately we want to nurture a good conversation about life and art, and we’re glad you’re here. Please do join the conversation by commenting on these pieces, and if you like what we’re doing, please share with others - thank you friends.

Kathleen Norris on Lois Weber: “FORGOTTEN WITH A VENGEANCE”

If you don’t know that Lois Weber (above) was a pioneer filmmaker, the first American woman to direct a feature film, and the first to have her own production studio, it’s no accident. Before 1920 Weber was the best-paid director in Hollywood and her films were more popular than those of Cecil B. DeMille and D.W. Griffith. But in the words of one film historian she was soon “forgotten with a vengeance.”

Her erasure happened in part because in her forty features and hundreds of shorts made between 1911 and the early 1920’s, she focused on women and tackled controversial subjects: anti-Semitism, birth control, abortion, domestic violence, class prejudice, and wage inequality. Her films were popular with the public, but her 1921 film, What Do Men Want? went too far. Weber often juxtaposed contrasting stories, and in this film she presents a young woman who imagined that marriage would bring a lifetime of loving companionship. She feels she’s done her best to be a good wife and mother, but she and her three young children are deserted by a husband attempting to recapture his youth with a “fast” woman. The other story is about a woman whose fiancee suddenly jilts and abandons her. She suffers a breakdown and drowns herself in the town lake. This was too much for Paramount, which canceled Weber’s lucrative distribution agreement. Within a few years she was forced to close her studio.