Nell was a big noise in silent movies
She was interested in action films. She was a role model for women ELLEN
NELL Shipman was a badass a century before the word existed. One of the pioneers of silent cinema, she wrote, directed, produced and starred in her own films. And did her own stunts.
Shooting on location? Nell did it before Charlie Chaplin had thought of packing his bag. Getting her kit off for the camera? She was one of the very first to do that too.
Yet she died penniless and forgotten, her groundbreaking work lost, her contribution to the first days of movies ignored or credited to someone else.
Now a new generation of film historians and researchers is rediscovering Nell and scores of other extraordinary women from the earliest days of cinema.
Scots have a chance to see one of Nell’s most important films, The Grub Stake, at the Hippodrome Silent Film Festival in Bo’ness, West Lothian, later this month. It will be shown in the town’s beautiful 1912 cinema, with specially commissioned music played live.
There are also discussions and talks on the role of Nell and other women in the industry at the start of the last century.
Nell Shipman was born in Canada and moved to Seattle with her family as a teenager.
She was a writer and actress on the stage before moving to Hollywood in 1915 with her much older husband.
They sold the rights to one of Nell’s stories to Universal Studios and she also starred in several mainstream movies.
Even then, she was shaping up as a maverick. She shot Back to God’s Country on location in Canada. The writer and Nell fell out when she changed the gender roles of the key players to make her character Delores the heroine who saves the male lead.
She also appeared on screen in icy water, naked from the waist up.
Film lecturer Ellen Cheshire said: “Nell was always out of kilter. She didn’t have blonde curly hair – the Mary Pickford look – but wasn’t the vamp either.
“She was interested in action films. We see her trudging through knee-high snow and driving a dog sled. She was a real
dozen survived. While others were sticking cameras up and filming workers leaving factories and trains arriving at stations, she was getting costumes, using props and making up stories.”
In 1896, Alice directed the Cabbage Fairy, about finding babies in the cabbage patch.
Ellen added: “It’s thought across the industry that first narrative film, even though it’s under a minute, was directed by a woman.”
She moved on to satire and, in 1906, made the Consequences of Feminism. In it, men stay at home looking after babies – when they are not being sexually harassed by women at work.
But despite their chutzpah and ambition, women like Alice and Nell faced the same pressures familiar to working women today. Ellen said: “In their early to mid 20s, lots of them were doing great things. Then they start fading out. In their 30s and 40s, they disappear altogether.”
The arrival of sound and the studio system marked the end of the road for the female pioneers.
Ellen said: “The industry became commercialised, unionised, it needed business backers and bankers. And women were excluded.
“It was a few more decades before people recognised the value of silent films. Now we think of them as something to celebrate in festivals.”
In that period, huge swathes of film stock were binned.
Ellen said: “For British silent films, 85 per cent were destroyed. Even worldwide, we have only 20 per cent or 30 per cent of what there was.”
For Nell, this had practical and disastrous consequences. Ellen said: “She and Alice Guy-Blache spent decades trying to get their names into history books. They fought for years to have their names up there alongside the rest of the silent film canon.
“Nell was in desperate poverty towards the end of her life. She tried to get money from Hollywood organisations supporting out of work actors.
“Despite being a major film star before she went off and did her own things, she spent years writing to them and trying to find proof of who she was.
“Finally, in 1969, they told her that they could find no record of her name in any film credits. She died the following year.” ● The Grub Stake is at the Hippodrome, Bo’ness, on March 22 at 7.30pm. Ellen Cheshire’s talk, Not So Silent Women, is at 2.30pm. For tickets and information, see www.falkirk communitytrust.org.
Nell spent years trying to get her name into the history books ELLEN