Male (Vamp) and Female (Director)

The divisions between MALE and FEMALE were a big topic of discussion in the 1920s movie magazines of the time. (Is there a time when they haven’t been? Examples welcome!) What should women be doing? What should men be doing? How should they relate? And what should they look like on film? Long story short, as I’ve mentioned before, these discussions were related to other changes in gender relations (such as women’s suffrage, more women in universities, changes in fashion).

In the pop fiction world, Elinor Glyn was the queen of sensational novels of man/woman relations. She coined the term “it” as a term for personal magnetism. Her book Three Weeks (1907) about an affair between an English nobleman and a married queen was made into a popular film in 1924. There are many articles about or by her in the film magazines. Maybe I'll cover one in a future post.

Coverage of E. M. Hull’s The Sheik and the film also focused on man/woman relationships. Sexy women actresses (in particular seductive and exotic female actresses) were vamps and sexy men actors were sheiks. Articles asked ‘do ladies want a dominant man?’ Stories of sheiks and Western women in love drew out the contradictions and tensions of these discourses.  In the romances and films of the 1920s, sheiks are dominant male figures and the heroines submit to them. But at the same time, as Westerners and flappers the heroines represent the rise of modernity.  And in the films the actors were the focus of female spectators’ gaze (see Laura Mulvey’s theories about 'the male gaze'  in classic cinema and later theorists such as Mary Ann Doane's arguments that female spectatorship was very also important). 

And here is a Dinosaur Comic about 'the male gaze' as linked to in the previous blog: http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=859.

 

Which leads us to today’s article, from Photoplay Volume 17-18, Jan –June 1920 (on the Internet Archive, as usual). While not strictly about sheik romances, it’s about the film-making at the time and I love it.

Teach me to make Love!

And you can see that the typical fan is a woman

The first wonderfulness of this article is the caption to the picture on the top left: “Miss Parks telling Mr. Cody how to make love.” Miss Parks is the Female (director) and Mr. Cody is the Male (vamp).  And it is either very cold in that studio or Miss Parks is wearing an artistic scarf. Or both!

The article starts out with a reference to “the law of opposites” and Emerson. If anyone knows what Emerson has to say about “opposites attract” I would love to be filled in! It’s a bit beyond my area of expertise, I’m afraid.

Anyway, the article posits that there’s a natural balance to things: for a long time there were female ‘vamp’ actresses who were directed by men. But now: 

“there comes into our midst a bizarre creature with the appellation of ‘male vampire’ and he startles us by stating that he believes women are the ‘coming’ directors because they have more imagination than the average man and then proceeds to act upon this uncanonical opinion by adding to his exotic fold of studio assistants a woman director, the wife of a Frenchman.”

And, of course, of the two female directors (the other one being Lois Weber), being a brunette, Lew Cody picked the blonde director! So says the article. 

Then the article suggests Miss Parks might “be a descendant of the Amazon Queen, Califria, who, according to De Montalvo’s rosily romantic tale of 1510, with her warlike companions carrying golden spears, were the sole inhabitants (guarded by the griffins) on the then-an-island California”. 

Googling ‘Califria’ lands you with a page of misspelled Californias, so don’t even try it.  I think it should be Calafia . Suggestively for our purposes, the Wikipedia summary of de Montalvo’s novel says that Califia, the Amazon Queen, is “a pagan who is convinced to raise an army of women warriors and sail away from California with a large flock of trained griffins so that she can join a Muslim battle against Christians who are defending Constantinople”. But I’m pretty sure Photoplay is not suggesting that Ida Parks is a secret Muslim.

Read the Wikipedia article, though! It reveals that there used to be a Califia ‘multimedia experience’ at Disneyland where the part of Califia was played by Whoopi Goldberg.

This article also makes me confused about what directors did at the time, because it includes a quote from Ida Parks saying that she had never directed a man before, but enjoyed it so much that she now prefers to direct men. If you’ve got a movie with both men and women in it (and most movies of the time did) don’t you have to direct them both?

Anyway, Ida Parks apparently at the time wrote her own continuity (silent films didn’t have scripts in the same way films do now) and cut (aka edited) the film as well. She got into directing because her husband was a director (she was initially a stage actress).

Did I mention that the movie is called “The Butterfly Man”? Photoplay also reveals that the star, Lew Cody, had recently signed a three-year contract to make more ‘male vampire’ movies, a contract which “stipulates also that Mr. Cody cannot during that period commit the faux pas of marrying.” So that tells you something about female spectatorship at the time and what studios thought female fans expected from their male stars…

Next up… the actual conclusion of Immortal Flower.