When we talk about the early years\u00a0of cinema, there is no separating \u201cthe history of women in film\u201d from \u201cthe history of film.\u201d Women have been there from the beginning, and have shaped the medium in transformative ways.<\/p>\n
Early Women Pioneers in the Shadows of Men<\/strong><\/p>\n The idea that films could tell stories as opposed to documenting reality was hit upon by a woman, Alice Guy-Blach\u00e9<\/strong><\/a>, who\u00a0made the very first narrative movie, the 60-second-long La F\u00e9e aux Choux (The Cabbage Fairy)<\/em> in 1896. (It was also the longest film made up to that point.) And the filmmaker who arguably created the modern documentary form was Leni Riefenstahl with 1935\u2019s <\/span>Triumph of the Will<\/span><\/i>. (More on her and that film in a bit.) Women have always gotten short shrift when it comes to acknowledging their contributions, but that\u2019s not a reflection of the inestimable value of their work. Movies simply would not look and feel the way they do today without the input of women artists and innovators.<\/span><\/p>\n https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=CYbQO6pwuNs<\/p>\n The very first films of any kind, in the late 19th century, documented mundane events: surgical operations; studies of people with physical ailments; and most famously, those clips of workers leaving a factory and a train pulling into a station. The first film generally considered, in retrospect, to be a documentary \u2014 though the word had not yet been coined \u2014 is 1922\u2019s <\/span>Nanook of the North<\/span><\/i><\/a>, an ethnographic study of an Inuit family in the Canadian Arctic. But just as the field was being born, women were already starting to be erased from it. Filmmaker Robert J. Flaherty is credited as the sole creator of Nanook<\/em> as well as other similar, successful films \u2014 including 1926\u2019s Moana<\/em>, about a young Samoan man in the South Pacific \u2014 but the evidence is strong that his wife and creative partner, <\/span>Frances H. Flaherty, was in fact very much his co-director, co-writer, and co-producer on many if not all of \u201chis\u201d films. [<\/span>Read more about early silent ethnographic and “adventure” documentaries<\/a>.<\/span>]<\/span><\/p>\n Much the same can likely be said of Osa Johnson<\/a><\/strong>: her legacy has languished in the shadow of her husband, Martin Johnson. Adventurers as well as filmmakers, they turned a two-year African safari into 1923\u2019s hugely successful <\/span>Trailing Wild African Animals<\/span><\/i>. The sensationalism of their earlier, equally successful films \u2014 such as 1918\u2019s <\/span>Among the Cannibal Isles of the South Pacific<\/span><\/i>, documenting another of their trips \u2014 may be all that prevents them from being deemed authentic \u201cdocumentaries,\u201d and thus predating <\/span>Nanook<\/span><\/i>. In Martin Johnson\u2019s <\/span>own words<\/span><\/a>, Osa could do \u201ca man\u2019s share\u201d of work with a camera, and was \u201ca perfect partner\u201d for him as a \u201cMotion Picture Explorer.\u201d Yet only Martin Johnson is credited as director of the films they made together.<\/span><\/p>\n