Lois Weber: “It Is Good to Be a Director”

Discovering what these “other effects” consist of does not require comparing Weber’s work to that of male rivals, but unlocking what made it so distinctive in its own right. Viewing the surviving films from Weber’s prolific career in silent cinema reveals a director with meticulous command of her mise-en-scène—for whom the frame was a canvas waiting to be filled with layers of imagery and revelatory detail or even multiple, parallel planes of action. At a time when American cinema was setting the pace for increasingly fast edits, Weber concentrated on painterly or complex visuals. When Hollywood led the way in slick entertainment with aspirational production values, she insisted on making films that contained difficult ideas, moral questions, and unglamorous characters, problem plays instead of comedies. Her films are visually ambitious, formally audacious, and infused with a passion for progressive social values.

One of Weber’s earliest works best illustrates her visual capacity. In the one-reeler Suspense (1913), she puts her own mark on the still-new race-to-the-rescue thriller. Weber stars as a woman secluded in a “lonely villa” with an infant, who calls her husband for help when she sees a prowler circling outside. It’s a Grand Guignol scenario that Griffith had already exploited in films such as The Lonely Villa (1909) and An Unseen Enemy (1912). Weber does something different with the story. Like Griffith, she parallel edits between locations, a newly established technique for cranking up the tension, but her narrative momentum is modulated by composition, not cutting. The frame becomes a triptych, showing intruder, wife, and husband simultaneously: the wife calling the husband, in panic, while the prowler pushes through the door and cuts the telephone line. Weber finds more ways to divide the frame and show two timelines at once. The prowler peers through a window in the background while Weber holds the baby; as the husband speeds home in a stolen car, the police appear in the rearview mirror. Always she’s guiding our perspective: extreme high-angled shots of the prowler apparently from an upstairs window mean that the wife’s fear isn’t something we witness but something we share. Suspense is a high-tempo nerve-rattler, but it’s also an experiment in filming the female gaze—something Weber would return to throughout her career.   

The following year, Weber became the first American woman to direct a feature film: The Merchant of Venice, an epic four-reel production sadly now lost. Two years later, in 1916, she adapted Daniel Auber’s opera The Dumb Girl of Portici as another feature-length costume drama, with the ballerina Anna Pavlova giving a remarkable dramatic performance as its mesmerizing heroine, and spectacular pictorial compositions. Pavlova dances barefoot in the role of Fenella, a mute Italian peasant in seventeenth-century Naples who is seduced by a Spanish nobleman, while her brother Masaniello (Rupert Julian) leads a revolt against the regime. Laemmle boasted about entrusting his talented director with a lavish budget—it was Universal’s biggest production to date—while Weber set about filling her scenes with details that ensured Portici would combine sweeping landscape views with enhanced realism: rats squirm in the corner of a prison cell. “A director cannot afford to slight a detail of the groupings, the acting, the lighting—anything,” Weber had written in 1915, “for upon the details depend the atmosphere so necessary to bring an audience en rapport with the play on the screen.” She uses close-ups, overhead shots, unusual angles, and cameras attached to carriages to capture the drama at its rawest, a pan to expose the poverty endemic in Fenella’s Naples, and double exposures to enhance the gracefulness of Pavlova’s dance scenes. It is absolute direction, on a grand scale.