Authors: S. Louisa Wei and Yuka Kanno
Camera Obscura 120, Volume 40, Number 3 *DOI 10.1215/02705346-11959173 © 2025 by Camera Obscura *Published by Duke University Press
Feminist film historians have made vital interventions in established film history, revealing an ardent desire to deviate from “linear, vertical, or diffusionist models of historiography” by highlighting matriarchs like Alice Guy-Blaché, Lois Weber, Germaine Dulac, and Dorothy Arzner, whose contributions defy assumptions about the early film industry.! The Women Film Pioneers Project (WFPP), led by Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, investigates women pioneers’ working conditions and achievements worldwide.? While Kiki Loveday questions the Eurocentric origins of the “pioneer paradigm,” she encourages multicultural perspectives and urges us to explore further how the past can challenge or influence the power dynamics of the present.? As film historians working in Asia, we appreciate WEPP’s inclusion of figures long forgotten because of their gender, race, and intercultural or multicultural status. The internal links within each article or profile entry enable users to navigate easily between cross-referenced individuals, countries, and films. The project’s open access aligns with the idea of constructing a gendered “world cinema” or a public domain of global women’s cinema.4
Following the above inquiries and combining cross-cultural and trans-lingual comparative analysis with gendered historiography, this essay examines three women whose film careers overlapped before and during World War II: Dorothy Arzner (1897 – 1979), the only female director early in Hollywood’s sound era between 1929 and 1943; Sakane Tazuko (坂根田鶴子) (1904 – 1979), Japan’s first female director and the only one until 1953; and Esther Eng (伍錦霞) (1914 – 70), the first woman to direct talkies in China and Hong Kong and the first Chinese American woman to produce a film in Hollywood. While Arzner has been extensively studied since her rediscovery in the 1970s, research on Sakane and Eng has been limited because of lost films. However, it is expanding with advances in media archaeology and “cine-feminism.”5
Taking advantage of digitized periodicals from the twentieth century, we will investigate three main areas. First, before entering the film business, all three women were from well-to-do families and shared a passion for cinema. Their fathers’ connections helped them land their first positions, but they took the director’s chair and sustained their careers for over two decades through their own wisdom and efforts. What were their working conditions like? How did they succeed? What challenges did they face as female directors? Second, the US joined World War II in December 1941, but Japan and China were in wars from 1931 to 1932 and 1937 to 1945. All three women were unavoidably engaged in wartime propaganda production to different degrees. How does the gender-nation dynamic present itself in their films? Did such propaganda work help them elevate their careers? Third, when their photographs are juxtaposed (fig. 1), we cannot help but be amazed by the resemblance in their hair and clothing styles, which signaled their queer identities. Did the journalists of their time find out about their queerness? If yes, how were they described? Were their personal lives exposed in the press? Historical evidence suggests that all three women lived as open (or not wholly closeted) lesbians. By drawing on queer historiographical methods, especially Judith Mayne’s close readings of press reports on and unpublished photographs of Arzner, we examine how the gender fluidity of Sakane and Eng provided opportunities and posed challenges for their film careers. Using Arzner as a benchmark when examining Sakane’s and Eng’s careers and achievements, we also hope to shed new light on Arzner’s impact in Asia.
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