1 - Art, Truth, Representation: Lois Weber’s Dumb Girl of Portici

Summary

Abstract

In 1916, the acclaimed silent film director Lois Weber made the big-budget epic The Dumb Girl of Portici starring ballerina Anna Pavlova. Based on an opera set in seventeenth-century Naples, the film problematizes the relationship between life and art, truth and representation. To analyze its pictorial power and especially the art-film intersections in Weber's work, this chapter focuses on six themes: (1) movies that take visual artists as a main subject; (2) images of fine art and popular culture at the center of her narratives; (3) attention to the physical world of the characters and the close-up; (4) shooting on location to achieve maximum realism; (5) costumes, composition, and technical strategies; (6) sources of her knowledge of fine art.

Keywords: Lois Weber, Phillips Smalley, Anna Pavlova, Blind Girl of Portici, silent cinema, women filmmakers

“‘To the greatest woman producer in the world – Lois Weber.’ Thus spoke Anna Pavlowa [sic], as she drained her glass at the Hotel Alexandria in Los Angeles, on the night of Wednesday, September 8, 1915. The dinner was given in honor of the famous Russian dancer by Lois Weber, celebrated producer of the Universal Company who, in conjunction with Phillips Smalley, directed the production of The Dumb Girl of Portici, in which the great Russian played the many-sided role of Fenella, the dumb girl.”

The above review refers to Lois Weber's epic silent film The Dumb Girl of Portici (1916), based on the opera in five acts by Daniel F. E. Auber. Although little-known today, from the time of its premiere in 1828 into the early twentieth century it was a much-performed production generally regarded as the earliest French grand opera. Convincing Pavlova to take on her first movie role was a coup for Universal Pictures. Assigning Weber to direct it demonstrated the faith both star and studio had in her to realize one of its most ambitious productions, with an oversized budget to match. Originally entitled Masaniello, ou La Muette de Portici, it told the tale of Fenella – a wordless fisher-girl – living during the Spanish occupation of Naples in the mid-seventeenth century. Her seduction and abandonment by a Spanish nobleman, coupled with the cruelty and crippling taxation of their foreign oppressors, incited her brother Masaniello to foment a revolution.