#filmherstory

[abwwia]

Barbara Stanwyck (/ˈstænwɪk/; born Ruby Catherine Stevens; July 16, 1907 – January 20, 1990) was an American actress, model and dancer.

#BarbaraStanwyck pinged hard for her lesbian fans, even in movies where she had to pretend to be in love with a dude.

A gay actor named Clifton Webb, who played her husband in Titanic, called Stanwyck “my favorite American lesbian.” 

“Stanwyck’s screen characters defined themselves on their own terms,” writes Axel Madsen in The Sewing Circle: Female Stars Who Loved Other Women. “Stanwyck was emotionally honest, and the way she related to men was different.” 

She was deeply closeted, burying her secret underneath her well-defined and daunting career ambitions and a really shitty but relatively brief marriage to a gay vaudeville star that inspired the film A Star is Born. 

She ultimately spent thirty years with her publicist Helen Ferguson.

Alleged relationships & lovers: Joan Crawford, Marlene Dietrich, Helen Ferguson, Tallulah Bankhead

Source: #HERSTORY

Top 10 Most Sexually Prolific #Lesbians and #Bisexuals Of Old Hollywood

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#pioneer #filmindustry #womeninfilmindustry #PalianShow #OldHollywood #femaledirector #movies #oldcinema #filmherstory #solidaritywitheverywoman

[hamsterreel]

#hamsterreellife #hamsterreel #filmmaker #filming #filmoftheday #filmshoot #filmwave #filmphoto #director #cinematography #cinema #filmography #womeninfilm #womenempowerment #womendirectors #filmherstory #hirethesewomen #filmsbywomen #minorityfilms #lgbtqfilms #girlboss (at Colorado Springs, Colorado) https://www.instagram.com/p/CZFp-rDvFdw/?utm_medium=tumblr

[nollywoodmoviesreview]

Let's talk filmmaking! Reposted from @covenfilmfest Here's to all the people out there making movies where women actually have a voice! 👏 #MotivationMonday⠀ .⠀ .⠀ .⠀ #womenmakingmovies #filmsbywomen #womenartists #womendirectors #womenfilmmakers #womenscreenwriters #womenproducers #directing #filmmaking #screenwriting #directors #filmmakers #screenwriters #womeninfilm #femalelead #strongfemalelead #indiefilm #indiefilms #indiefilmmaking #filmherstory #shedirected #hirethesewomen #supportwomenartists #storytelling #storytellers #femaledirectors #femalescreenwriters #femalefilmmakers (at London, United Kingdom) https://www.instagram.com/p/B7jh6F6H6j3/?igshid=y5hhikgrohef

[vamuse]

Can't get over this amaaazzzinggg present - #SilentFilm actress Nita Naldi, the "female #Valentino " & the original #Vamp - Pages are from The Blue Book of the Screen, c. 1924, & #vintage postcards from Portugal. ❤❤❤ #NitaNaldi #SilentScreen #SilverScreen #Film #FilmHerStory #Hollywood #OldHollywood

[feminist-elizabethan]

  Feminist Elizabethan | Women in History: Mochizuki Chiyome (15??-????)                                                                                        

Kunoichi or female ninja are shrouded in mystery. Historians know very little about these women including what their profession exactly involved, what kinds of techniques they used or which specific individuals actually worked within this profession. However, of the little information that is available, it is known that Mochizuki Chiyome, a Japanese noblewoman who was a (believed) descendent of Kōga ninja and lived in the 16th century, founded the very first all-female ninja school and ran an intelligence ring.

The 16th century of Japan was marked by the introduction of Christianity and firearms to Japan, and the century-long battle of civil wars, better known as the sengoku-jidai, between the daimyos (feudal lords). The sengoku-jidai was of particular import during this time period, and of the several daimyos who were vying for control over Japan, Takeda Shingen was one of the most prominent.

Takeda was a man who was known for engaging in unconventional warfare, and he, unlike many men of his time, saw value in women and believed that women made ideal spies/messengers as they had access to places that men did not and were often overlooked. When Takeda’s nephew Mochizuki Nobumasa, the samurai warlord of Mochizuki Castle, died in 1561 in the Battle of Kawanakajima, Takeda decided to approach his nephew’s wife Mochizuki Chiyome, and he asked her to secretly recruit and train girls to be intelligence operatives. Mochizuki agreed to take up his task, and she opened a secret training grounds (which others would come to believe was a center that helped women) in the village of Nazu, in Chiisa-gun of Shinshu (present-day Nagano).

Mochizuki recruited...

[notawhimbrel]

Five women who should be in pictures

I sincerely hope this tumblr doesn't just turn into a repository for all the twitter stuff that won't fit into 140 characters, but since I didn't get to blather nearly enough about the women I tagged with #filmherstory over there, I'm going to say a whole lot more right here and now. Watch me. 

1. Eleanor of Arborea - Judge, queen, defender of birds. Grew up in a small independent section of Sardinia during its occupation by Spanish forces in the late 1300s. After her father died and her brother was killed, Eleanor became regent to her infant son, promptly rallied all Sardinia against the occupiers, and proceeded to take back most of the island. She was responsible for the Carta de Logu, a body of laws that lasted over four hundred years after her death and, among other things, preserved the property rights of Sardinian women. Eleanor also used her mighty legislative powers to protect a species of falcon that was later named in her honor.

2 for 2. The Kandakes (warrior queens) of Kush (modern Sudan), especially one-eyed Amanirenas, who's responsible for the condition of that decapitated bronze head of Caesar Augustus with the weird eyes that's currently housed in the British Museum. She and her army routed the Roman soldiers in Meroe, stormed Augustus's temple there, hacked the head off the statue of the emperor and buried it under the temple steps as symbolic gesture of their esteem. And also Amanitore, who commanded the building of numerous pyramids, temples, reservoirs -- oh, and this depiction of what is best in life.

3. Faith Hubley - The whole Hubley clan is amazing but Faith is just astounding. Political activist, artist, filmmaker, family woman, and all of them in equal measure. In the mid-1970s she was diagnosed with breast cancer, but continued working on freelance shorts and commercials with her husband. Then a couple of years later John Hubley died while they were in the middle of a project, and what did Faith do? Only finished animating the entire rest of the film all by herself, and then went on to make more than twenty-five more in as many years before finally succumbing to the disease that was supposed to have done her in a quarter century before.

Here’s Faith looking back on her early career in movies:

Dede [Allen] and I were trying to get hired in editing, and they would say, “No you can’t, because you’re a girl.” We’d say, “Well, why not?” They’d say, “Well you’re not strong enough.” Then we would gain a lot of weight and show them we could lift heavy boxes, and then they would say, “We’re not relaxed with you. You don't swear.” Then we would practice saying “fuck” and “shit,” walking through the studio saying, “fuck shit fuck shit,” and then they would say, “That’s no way for a girl to talk.”

4. Alice Kober - Professor, language nerd, codebreaker (almost). She taught classics at Brooklyn College during WWII, transcribed books and exams to Braille for the benefit of blind students, and studied a plethora of ancient languages on her own time, including an undeciphered script called Linear B, one of the oldest forms of written Greek. She died in her forties, only a couple of years too soon to see the code cracked, but her hours upon hours of investigation (which in the end filled over forty notebooks and 180,000 cards, some of them written on purloined checkout slips from the college library due to wartime paper shortages) provided the vital clue to a mystery that had been puzzling cryptographers for over half a century.

5. Roquia Sakhawat Hussain - Early 20th century feminist and scifi author in Bengal. Devout Muslim wife and mother who founded a school for girls and encouraged the participation of women in debates and discussions concerning their lives and rights in colonial India. From wikipedia:

In 1926, Begum Roquia strongly condemned men for withholding education from women in the name of religion as she addressed the Bengal women's education conference:

The opponents of the female education say that women will be unruly ... fie! They call themselves muslims and yet go against the basic tenet of islam which gives equal right to education. If men are not led astray once educated, why should women?

There are so many more names I could post -- firefighter Brooke Guinan from my last five things, for one. But time is short and the list of women who deserve to have their stories known is so very discouragingly long. Maybe group efforts like this can go some way toward making it shorter.

[acrocollective]

International Women's Day (with @AlltheWomen!)

http://wp.me/p5rQjg-3a @AlltheWomen brings us kickass women in history in celebration of #internationalwomensday #feminism #ladymafia #filmherstory

While we at Acro Collective believe that every day is a day for celebrating women’s accomplishments, International Women’s Day is an opportunity to remind ourselves to tell the women around us that we love and admire them. It’s also a chance to reassert the amazing achievements by women in history, which all too often fall through the cracks.

Today, we want to highlight @AlltheWomen, an instagram…

[abwwia]

Actress Barbara Stanwyck

#BarbaraStanwyck pinged hard for her lesbian fans, even in movies where she had to pretend to be in love with a dude.

A gay actor named Clifton Webb, who played her husband in Titanic, called Stanwyck “my favorite American lesbian.”

“Stanwyck’s screen characters defined themselves on their own terms,” writes Axel Madsen in The Sewing Circle: Female Stars Who Loved Other Women. “Stanwyck was emotionally honest, and the way she related to men was different.”

She was deeply closeted, burying her secret underneath her well-defined and daunting career ambitions and a really shitty but relatively brief marriage to a gay vaudeville star that inspired the film A Star is Born.

She ultimately spent thirty years with her publicist Helen Ferguson.

Alleged relationships & lovers: Joan Crawford, Marlene Dietrich, Helen Ferguson, Tallulah Bankhead

Source: #HERSTORY

Top 10 Most Sexually Prolific #Lesbians and #Bisexuals Of Old Hollywood https://www.autostraddle.com/10-old-hollywood-stars-who-enjoyed-scissoring-343227/

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#pioneer #filmindustry #womeninfilmindustry

#femaledirector #movies #oldcinema #filmherstory #lesbianvisibilityweek #PalianShow #OldHollywood

#solidaritywitheverywoman

[abwwia]

Dahomey by Mati Diop, a documentary focusing on the 2021 return to the Republic of Benin of twenty-six royal artifacts stolen by French soldiers in the nineteenth century, has won the Berlin International Film Festival’s Golden Bear.

Read: artforum.com/news/documentary-on-repatriation-looted-benin-artworks-captures-top-honor-at-berlin-film-festival-550103/

Mati Diop (born 22 June 1982) is a French-Senegalese filmmaker and actress, most known for her role in the 2008 film 35 Shots of Rum, and niece of the prominent senegalese filmmaker Djibril Diop Mambéty.

At the 2019 Cannes Film Festival, her feature debut film Atlantics, for which she became the first African female director to be in contention for the Palme d'Or, won the Grand Prix (2nd place).

Her second feature, the documentary Dahomey, won the Golden Bear, at the 74th Berlin International Film Festival, the festival's top prize.Via Wikipedia

#MatiDiop poses with the #GoldenBear for Best Film at the 74th Berlin International Film Festival, February 24, 2024.Photo: Tobias Schwarz/AFP/Getty Images

#artforum #news #documentary #benin #artworks #berlinfilmfestival #Senegalese #french #Senegalesefrench #frenchfilmmaker #PalianShow #filmsbywomen #womenfilmdirectors #artbywomen #film #movie #filmherstory #cinematography

[abwwia]

Audrey Hepburn (b. Audrey Kathleen Ruston; #bornonthisday 4 May 1929 – 20 January 1993) was a British actress and humanitarian.

Recognised as both a film and fashion icon, she was ranked by the American Film Institute as the third-greatest female screen legend from the Classical Hollywood cinema and was inducted into the International Best Dressed List Hall of Fame. via Wikipedia

#AudreyHepburn #Herstory #WomeninFilm #PalianShow #womeninfilmindustry #retrocinema #filmherstory

[abwwia]

Ava Lavinia Gardner in 1942, 19 years-old, Employment ID photo at MGM

Ava Lavinia Gardner (Dec 24, 1922 – Jan 25, 1990) was an American actress. She was of English and Scots-Irish ancestry. via W

#AvaLaviniaGardner #oldmovies #blackandwhitecinema #filmherstory #retrostyle

[abwwia]

Isabelle Adjani in La Raine Margot, 1994

Isabelle Yasmina Adjani LdH (born 27 June 1955) is a French actress and singer.

She is the only person in history to win five César Awards;

she won the #BestActress award for Possession (1981), One Deadly Summer (1983), Camille Claudel (1988), La Reine Margot (1994) and Skirt Day (2009).

She was made a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour in 2010 and a Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters in 2014.

photo source via Kasbah Salome (fb) : www.facebook.com/516480298409807/posts/5132621956795595/

#IsabelleAdjani #womeninfilm #filmherstory

[abwwia]

The female gaze: 100 overlooked films directed by women

https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/female-gaze-100-overlooked-films-directed-by-women

In this list we aim to write women back into film history by championing 100 female-directed hidden gems that have been forgotten or unfairly overlooked – with contributions from Jane Campion, Greta Gerwig, Claire Denis, Isabelle Huppert, Agnès Varda, Tilda Swinton, our regular contributors listed below and many more special guests.

Updated: 2 January 2022

Time for a disclaimer: this list is far from definitive, but we hope it gives a sense of some of the great, unduly neglected films made by women throughout film history from all over the world – and of the many others

— Isabel Stevens

#directedbywomen #femaledirector #womeninfilm #filmherstory #PalianShow #JaneCampion# GretaGerwig #ClaireDenis #IsabelleHuppert #AgnèsVarda #Tilda Swinton #womeninfilmindustry

[feminist-elizabethan]

Feminist Elizabethan | Women in History: Marie-Louise-Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun (1755-1842)                                                                                        

Marie-Louise-Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun was a French painter of the 18th Century who was known for her flattering portraits of women. She painted several famous and influential figures such as Marie Antoinette, the Duchess of Polignac, Princesse de Lamballe, Duchesse d'Orleans, Comte de Vaudreuil, Giovanni Paisiello, Empress Catherine II, and the Prince of Wales just to name a few. Vigee-Lebrun was a Rococo painter who had a penchant for lighthearted and witty paintings done in bright pastels, gold, and curves and expressed neoclassical techniques within her work. She disliked the fashion of the time so she often dressed her female subjects in simple dresses (instead of a hoop skirt) with a draped scarf (she was known for her use of drapery), wearing no powder and with bangs swept across the forehead. Though Vigee-Lebrun painted with special attention to detail, she was the Vogue of her time and tended to Photoshop her female subjects. She knew what women strove and desired to look like and so took it upon herself to erase any perceived imperfections. Vigee-Lebrun did not do the same for her male subjects. Her male subjects were painted in more exact detail, most notably in the hands. In Vigee-Lebrun's female portraits, the hands were noticeably soft, lacking detail and the perspective was incorrect, but in her male portraits, the hands were detailed, realistic and reflected her male subjects' profession (e.g. rich = soft and unblemished, military = calloused). Her male portraits also expressed her subjects' true personalities instead of veiling their expressions through a perceived sense of aesthetic perfection. Vigee-Leburn painted an estimated 900 paints within her lifetime, 600 of which were portraits...

[feminist-elizabethan]

Feminist Elizabethan | Women in History: Mary Elizabeth Bowser (1839? - ????)                                                                                        

Mary Elizabeth Bowser was a badass spy. She was so badass that it isn't even known whether the picture above is really her or not nor is it known what year she was born. In fact, not much is known about Bowser. She went by many different aliases, and any documentation of her was either purposely destroyed in order to protect her identity or was accidently thrown out.  However, it is guestimated that she was born in 1839, and it is known that she was born in Richmond, Virginia as a slave to John Van Lew. John Van Lew was a wealthy hardware merchant, and when he died in 1843, his daughter Elizabeth convinced his wife to free his slaves. Bowser was one of the slaves who were freed.

Out of goodwill, Elizabeth sent Bowser to a Quaker school so that she could receive an education. After Bowser completed her schooling, it is rumored that she joined a missionary community in Liberia. She did not like it there so she moved back to Richmond and rejoined the Van Lew household as a paid servant. A year later, in 1861, she married a man named Wilson Bowser just four days after the Civil War had begun. Their marriage was slightly unusual in that they were married in a predominately White and wealthy church. Elizabeth may have had something to do with this arrangement since she was a strident abolitionist and had influence. She was the sort of person who liked to fight and stand up for people. In fact, when the Civil War began, Elizabeth actually took on a batty, muttering persona in order to hide that she was secretly maintaining a large spy network for the Union in the Confederate capitol and was hiding escapees in her own home. It also so happens that, near the beginning of the war, Elizabeth recruited Bowser as a spy...

[feminist-elizabethan]

 Feminist Elizabethan | Women in History: Yaa Asantewaa (1840-1921)                                                                                        

Yaa Asantewaa was the queen mother and regent of Ejisu in the Asante Empire (Ghana) during the 1800s, and she is known for inspiring the Asante people and leading an uprising against British colonizers.

Asantewaa was assigned the title “queen mother” by her brother Nana Akwasi Afrane Okpese, the ruler of Ejisu. When her brother died in 1894, she appointed her grandson as ruler of Ejisu. However, Asantewaa’s grandson did not last long as the ruleru as he, the King of Asante (Prempeh I) and other members of the Asante government were banished to Seychelle by the British in 1896. At the time, the British were trying to colonize the area and had been taxing the people, taking over their state-owned gold mines (which provided the majority of Asante’s income) and had been establishing missionary schools in Asante. Their banishment of Asante’s rulers was a means to disenfranchise the Asante people and to discourage any rebellion.  

After most of Asante’s officials had been banished, in a move to further establish their dominance, the British demanded...