Wednesday, June 1, 2022: Museum of Modern Art — 11 West 53rd st. New York
6:00 pm — Archivists panel + screening. Museum of Modern Art — Titus 2 Theater
Columbia University — Morningside Hts & Manhattanville campuses
Thursday, June 2: Lenfest Center for the Arts/KOB Screening room 2nd fl. — single-strand
9:00 — 9:30 am — Registration — Lenfest Lobby
Friday, June 3 — AM: Dodge Hall & PM: Lenfest Center for the Arts/KOB Screening Room
Saturday, June 4 — AM: Dodge Hall & PM: Lenfest Center for the Arts/KOB Screening Room
Sunday, June 5 — AM: Dodge Hall & PM: Lenfest Center for the Arts/KOB Screening Room
Monday, June 6 — Lenfest Center for the Arts — Domitor screenings in person — KOB Screening room
Women & Silent Screen XI Online: Zoom Webinar link: TBA
Tuesday, June 7 — 8 (New York Time) June 7 — 9 CST (China time)
Online Program Schedule
Women & Silent Screen XI – Online China Time
June 7 – 8 EDT (New York time) / June 7 – 9 CST (China time)
Tuesday, June 7, 2022/Wednesday June 8, 2022
8:30 – 10:00 AM EDT/ 8:30 – 10:00 PM June 7 CST
Panel 1.Women of Shanghai
Panel Chair: Jin Chen, City University of Hong Kong
“The Star Image of Yang Naimei in Her Time”
April Gailan WEI, Beijing Normal University — Hong Kong Baptist University United International College
“Pu Shunqing and Her Screenwriting Practice in the Early Film Industry”
Jin Chen, City University of Hong Kong
“Usherettes of Early Chinese Cinema: The Exception for Lower-Class Women”
Jingrui Yan, Peking University
10:00 – 11:30 AM EDT/ 10:00 – 11:30 PM June 7 CST
Panel 2.Shanghai Early Cinema
Panel Chair: Rongyi Lin, Northwestern University
“Shanghai Silent Cinema and the Melodrama of Feminist Film Historiography”
Rongyi Lin, Northwestern University
“Claiming Modernity: Class-based Female Moviegoing in 1920s and 1930s Shanghai”
Yumo Yan, University of Washington
“Disguised or Exposed Female Identity: Cross-dressing in Early Chinese Cinema”
Ailin Zhou, Columbia University
7:30 – 7:45 PM EDT/ 7:30 – 7:45 AM June 8 CST
Show-and-Tell #1: “My Great Grandmother: Chinese-American Marion E. Wong”
Chris Kumaradjaja, Columbia University
7:45 – 8:00 PM EDT/ 7:45 – 8:00 AM June 8 CST
Show-and-Tell #2: “Women on the Chinese silent screen: A free online film repository”
Christopher Rea, University of British Columbia
8:00 – 10:00 PM EDT/ 8:00 – 10:00 AM June 8 CST
Round Table #1: Discussion: Women in Film: Contemporary and Historical Comparison –
Subtitle TBA
Screening: TBA
Round Table # 1 Moderator/Coordinator: Christopher Rea
3 China academics: TBD
Wednesday, June 8, 2022/Thursday June 9, 2022
8:00 – 8:15 AM EDT/ 8:00 – 8:15 PM June 8 CST
Show-and-Tell #3: “First Ladies of Shanghai Cinema, 1922-1929”
S. Louisa Wei, City University of Hong Kong
8:15 – 8:30 AM EDT/ 8:15 – 8:30 PM June 8 CST
Screening: First Ladies of Shanghai (14 min)
8:30 – 10:30 AM EDT/ 8:30 – 10:30 PM June 8 CST
Round Table #2: Discussion: Women in Film – Contemporary and Historical Comparison – Female Representation in Shanghai Film Industry and Beyond
Vimeo screening: Daughter of Shanghai (Michelle Chen, 2019, 90 min)
Round Table #2 Moderator/Organizer: Louisa Wei
3 China academics: TBD
10:30 – 12:00 AM EDT/ 10:30 – 12:00 PM June 8 CST
Panel 3.To Be the First
Panel Chair: Enrique Moreno Ceballos, Festival Internacional de Cine Silente México — Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México
“She’s Speaking: Multilingual Women as Media in Chinese Documentary”
Xiaoyang Pan, Columbia University
“Mrs. Gardner’s Travels or Mexico’s First Women Exhibitor”
Enrique Moreno Ceballos, Festival Internacional de Cine Silente México — Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México
“The Artful Masquerade of ‘First Chinese Star Lady Tsen Mei”
Ramona Curry, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
TBD “The First Chinese Female Actors on the Screen”
Yue Pan, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne
12:00 – 12:15 PM EDT/ 12:00 – 12:15 AM June 9 CST
Show-and-Tell #4 “How Does Tradition Play Its Colorful Role In Omitting First Iranian Actresses From Cinema?”
Nasim Ghazizadeh, Iranian Association of Film Critics and Writers
4:15 – 4:30 PM EDT/ 4:15 – 4:30 AM June 9 CST
Show-and-Tell #5: “Women’s March to the Japanese Screen”
Timothy Amatulli, Columbia University
4:30 – 6:00 PM EDT/ 4:30 – 6:00 AM June 9 CST
Panel 4.Japan Actresses
Panel Chair: Yuki Irikura, Waseda University
“Universal Actresses in Japan: Grace Cunard and Mary MacLaren”
Yuki Irikura, Waseda University
“Female Actors Who Were Born in Japan”
Daisuke Miyao, University of California San Diego
“Migrating Fashions, Mobile Bodies: ‘Modern Girls’ in Japanese Silent Cinema”
Kerstin Fooken, University of Hamburg
6:00 – 7:30 PM EDT/ 6:00 – 7:30 AM June 9 CST
Panel 5.The Orient and the West
Panel Chair: Yiman Wang, University of California Santa Cruz
“When “Orientals” Became “Indians”: Gender, Race, Masquerade in “Indian Westerns””
Yiman Wang, University of California Santa Cruz
“The Romance of Orientalism and the Passions of Pearl White”
Jennifer M. Bean, University of Washington-Seattle
“Unsung Melodrama: Staging the Aural in Indian Silent Film”
Anupama Prabhala, Loyola Marymount University
7:30 – 9:00 PM EDT/ 7:30 – 9:00 AM June 9 CST
Panel 6.Early Chinese Cinema
Panel Chair: Kristine Harris, SUNY New Paltz
“Circuits of Mobility in Love and Duty” (we know it’s not a workshop)
Kristine Harris, SUNY New Paltz
Title TBD
Daoxin Li, Peking University
About the Conference
For 22 years, Women and the Silent Screen (WSS), a biennial international conference sponsored by Women and Film History International (WFHI), has brought together researchers focused on women’s pivotal roles in the first decades of motion picture history. WSS has supported the creation of a new view of the film industries that demonstrates the centrality of women in economic and labor history, criticism, aesthetics, narrative development, film culture, and film production in a globalized world.
In June 2022, Columbia University in New York hosts WSS XI: Women, Cinema, and World Migration to highlight new scholarship connecting early cinema history to the migration and social mobility that caught up women globally when motion pictures arrived more than a century ago. We invite students, scholars, distributors, curators, and archivists from around the world to return to where the U.S. film industry began to explore how the new medium intersected with women’s movement across boundaries of gender, ethnicity, race, and class, considering occupational and national borders that excluded some women and welcomed others. For the first time, WSS XI features Jump Start, a platform for research sharing before the conference begins.
In Manhattan: Women, Cinema, and World Migration opens with an archivists panel and screening at the Museum of Modern Art on the evening of June 1 (Wednesday), and then continues June 2–4 (Thursday to Saturday), at Columbia University’s Lenfest Center for the Arts and Dodge Hall. Conference panels, workshops, short presentations, and plenary sessions will take up questions of migration and mobility in the context of the development of motion pictures as this relates to histories of women worldwide.
Due to COVID, Women and the Silent Screen: Entr’acte (June 4–6, 2021) was held online. By popular demand, Entr’acte’s 4 topics—American & Chinese film connections, early Soviet women documentary makers, Alice Guy Blaché, and Digital Humanities—will be continued during the 2022 conference.
For more information, visit the conference site.