Why everyone should know and cherish Lois Weber
Thursday, June 3, 2021 at 7:00PM 
In such works as his Story of Film and Women Make Film, Mark Cousins has put forward the idea that film history is sexist by omission. That's undeniable when one considers the case of the many women film pioneers who saw their achievements overshadowed by and even misattributed to their male colleagues. Lois Weber, who's currently being celebrated on the Criterion Channel, is one of those filmmakers whose legacy has been usurped, forgotten, despite both its quality and importance. The fact most of her 140 films are lost doesn't help matters. However, the few that have survived speak of an accomplished visual storyteller, political artist, and fearless provocateur. I think every cinephile should know about Lois Weber, and here's why…
Despite regularly working with her husband Phillip Smalley as co-director, Lois Weber was consistently singled out as the principal artistic voice of her films. During the early 20th century, she became one of the most celebrated American filmmakers, both a producer, director and screenwriter. Before cinema affirmed itself as a profitable, ever-growing industry with cultural and economic cache, it wasn't unusual to find women innovating and developing the young artform. Indeed, while working for the Universal Film Manufacturing Company, Weber was one of the first American directors to make feature-length movies, with 1914's The Merchant of Venice often credited as her first production of that size. She also worked with newfangled editing techniques, split screens, and even made a short shot through a circular frame and superimposed rosary beads.
Unafraid of controversy, Weber liked to tackle social, earning herself the descriptor of "preachy" by many contemporary critics and later writers. There's a certain lecturing quality to many of her films, but I'd rather describe her as political rather than preachy. Weber's craft and artistry helped make her pictures into something more than naked acts of cinematic activism. While inflamed by social concerns, her films were also emotional triumphs that rarely, if ever, sacrificed entertainment in the name of morality. Both the quality and polemic nature of her work brought upon much success. By 1917, she had started her own production company and became the highest-paid director in nascent Hollywood. Consequentially, during the 1910s and early 20s, she was often grouped with other such artists as Griffith, DeMille, and Chaplin as the best directors of their time.
After 1922, her career started to wane, her influence declining while the industry made positions of authority a male privilege. Her divorce didn't help matters, though Weber would continue working as a director into the 1930s while Smalley never directed another film. She died in 1939, leaving behind a rich legacy, often reduced to the ability to foster and encourage the careers of up-and-coming silent movie stars. There's been a reappreciation in the past decades, but Weber's reputation continues to be much lesser than it should be. Even if you only watch her five pictures streaming on the Criterion Channel, it's possible to denote the efforts of a great artist with a keen eye.
SUSPENSE (1913)
Starting with the earliest film in the selection, we have what's perhaps Lois Weber's best-remembered creation, 1913's Suspense. As one can surmise from its title, this 10-minute short is an exercise in creating dramatic tension as the audience's anticipation of dread mounts to vertiginous levels. Using a dizzying collection of early film mechanisms, Weber intercuts between three individuals whose fate is tragically intertwined. A woman is left alone in an isolated house with her baby, while a vagabond criminal plots to invade the home and her husband stays working late, away from his family. There's a voyeuristic allure to some shots, a persnickety love for reflections, and other devices that highlight the dynamics between those observed and those who observe them.
We can find the precedents of Suspense in some 1900s French films and plays, which typified the archetypal story of quiet domesticity put in peril by a violent intruder. However, there's a finesse to Weber's film that elevates it above other examples of the subgenre. Beyond the formalistic splendor, I find the acting especially good, and the rhythmic variation is deftly handled. Like most of Weber's work, Suspense is rooted in realism and a perspective that's generous enough to extend complex agency to all its principal players, including the director herself as the threatened mother. In pursuit of that realism mentioned above, Weber often shot on location and tried to organize her productions so that scenes were filmed in narrative order, perchance facilitating her actors' immersion in the parts.
SHOES (1916)
Next up, there are three films released in 1916. They are Discontent, Shoes, and The Dumb Girl of Portici. This last one is Weber's longest surviving picture. Clocking at nearly two hours, it tells a story of peasant revolt in Spanish-controlled Italy. It's mostly remembered for being ballerina Anna Pavlova's first screen appearance, but what most dazzles about the historical epic is Weber's portrayal of revolution as a gradual process, simmering until it explodes in red-tinted carnage. Discontent is a minor work that advocates for war veteran's care, while Shoes humanizes an anecdote about prostitution, expanding it into a tale of unfair wages and dispossessed despair. Her use of mirrors is beautiful, as is the tactile materiality she evokes with nifty close-ups of clothing details, decayed textures, subtle expressions.
We feel the social humiliation and physical pain of the girl who sells her body for a new pair of shoes. As she walks in the rain, the holes in her soles get bigger and more ragged, cardboard patches dissolving in the mushy soil. The 1921 feature The Blot follows a similar visual strategy as it tells of a teacher's family suffering from the patriarch's meager pay. The narrative is commonplace, but it's the characters Weber privileges that make the difference. Instead of focusing on the tale's noble men, the camera prefers to observe the women who, in other lesser films, would be relegated to the periphery, marginalized in supporting roles. As the teacher's wife, Margaret McWade's performance is a thing of beauty. Rather than falling into clichéd saintliness, she sketches a complex woman who struggles with both poverty and her own pride. Through such nuanced characterizations, The Blot transcends melodrama to reveal the crushing of a family's spirit under the weight of misery, its small indignities, and painful privations.
HYPOCRITES (1915)
Beyond the films the Criterion Channel has chosen to present, Weber's surviving filmography includes other gems. Chief among them, 1915's Hypocrites is an ambitious moral tale that, as the title suggests, decries the hypocrisy of those who call themselves religiously virtuous while failing to uphold any code of ethics in their behavior. Like most Weber's works, it's a visually sophisticated narrative whose moral message is hard to ignore or dismiss. The contradictions of puritanical values are synthesized in a community's outrage against a statue depicting Truth as an unclothed woman. Not only does this manifestation of immaterial concepts haunt the entire flick with surreal allegory, but the title cards further articulate Weber's point with equal parts bluntness and poetry: "The people are shocked by the nakedness of truth." Hypocrites caused a ruckus upon its original release because of its ample use of nudity in an expected but no less funny turn of events.
I won't lie and say that all of Weber's films are perfect or worthy of invariable praise. Despite my appreciation for that aggressively direct messaging in Hypocrites, the director could indeed be a bit over-reliant on clunky intertitles. Furthermore, not all of Weber's political standings stand the test of time. While Where Are My Children? and The Hand That Rocks the Cradle defend a valuable pro-birth control agenda, they're marred by an embrace of eugenic rhetoric. There's also a vague verve of anti-immigrant xenophobia lurking around many of Weber's films, even great pictures such as The Blot. I want to think those aspects of Weber's oeuvre aren't reason enough to dismiss her entire lifework, especially when the much more pernicious cinema of her colleagues continues to be exalted as medium-defining classics. Weber deserves her place on the pantheon, on the canon, on the pages of history.
THE BLOT (1921)
You can find the aforementioned Lois Weber pictures on the Criterion Channel, while some of her other creations are freely available on Youtube. For more information on silent film, I heartily recommend visiting Movies Silently, and, if you want to know more about early women directors, go to the Women Film Pioneers Project.
Reader Comments (5)
Someone needs to release a set of those films in whatever form they're in. I discovered Alice Guy-Blache last year and saw some of her shorts and man, she was way ahead of her time.
thevoid99 -- There are some collections of early films by women director pioneers that include restorations of Weber's work. I know there's a Kino Lober Blu-Ray release out there, and I also have one from the BFI that further includes films by Germaine Dulac, Alice Guy, and others.
It's stunning how much of a short shrift Weber has been given in the major film history textbooks used in film programs around the United States. For a while, when she was producing films in the teens and 20s, she was considered one of "the big three" filmmakers well known to the general public. (The other two were D.W. Griffith and Cecil B. DeMille.) But at best, when the history of film started getting written in the later part of the 20th century, she'd get a couple of sentences in the primary textbooks. Some of them didn't mention her at all. That trend has continued. I haven't checked for a few years, since I haven't been teaching Film History, but when I looked at the various textbook options about six or eight years ago. I was stunned that, say Peter Weir was mentioned over an over and Weber would be mentioned, maybe once.
Film scholars with an accurate sense of film history have routinely contacted the major textbook companies over the last twenty years to ask why she's not covered. We've been told "we'll look into it" by textbook company representatives. Then another edition comes out and she's still not there given more than the single paragraph or whatever. The great work of people like Mark Cousins, the folks at Criterion and Kino Lorber, and scholar Shelley Stamp (author of the excellent book LOIS WEBER IN EARLY HOLLYWOOD) are doing a great service by trying to get her work the attention it deserves in cinema history.
Who gets in textbooks and who gets left out is of great importance. I studied film history back in the 70's and it was one long chain of male pioneers. Mark Cousins "Women Make Film" was a revelation for me. Thanks for this article, there is absolutely no reason why the work of Lois Weber shouldn't be acknowledged and given the respect it deserves.
Love this. We once considered writing a musical about Weber. Her life is fascinating and she was a musician as well. As I recall, she made money later in life by playing piano bars in LA. Crazy.