(no subject)

[skygiants]

Reading The Girl From God's Country: Nell Shipman and the Silent Cinema (picked up via a mention from osprey_archer) was an interesting experience, because the book is, like, 30% HIGH DRAMA FACTS ABOUT NELL SHIPMAN'S LIFE, 30% interesting sociohistorical background relevant to those high drama facts, and 40% intensely theoretical analysis.

And on the one hand the story of Nell Shipman -- early silent-film-heroine turned amateur zookeeper and aspiring director -- is an extremely dramatic and fascinating if eventually depressing one, and on the other hand I'm really out of practice with reading film theory, so when I hit passages like

a still photo of Wapi in close-up forms the uncharacteristic figurative background to the generic title 'Her Last Hope', dramatically marrying signifier and signified in one image underlying the relation of feminine desire to the animal subject. This rather complex relay of interspecies desire, it must be recalled, is the creation of the woman screenwriter and star. The dog, then, in the expression of its desire, must be seen as the representative of the excessive desire of femininity, a transgressive desire that exceeds the capacity for satisfaction through relations with the woman's human lover/husband

my immediate response is a rather plaintive "but -- can't we just have a dog movie without making the dog uncomfortably sexy?"

Much of the book is like that. On the other hand, much of the book is also like:

Shipman hilariously recalls shooting one of the scenes, in which a pack of wolves was to attack a moose. The moose was played by a black pony equipped with a set of papier-mache horns that wobbled pathetically as the 'moose' was 'wallowing hock-deep in drifted snow ... In hot pursuit yelped the dogs, malamutes doubling as wolves, which would have been good casting except that their bushy tails arched to their neck ruffs and wagged. Props had tried to overcome this by stringing the tails with ribbons of BB-shot but the dogs did not like this addition and were stopping to bite the shot. The moose was doing worse. He'd given up the chase and was lying down'.

So absolutely a worthwhile read, but really what it's done primarily is to convince me is that I need to track down Nell Shipman's memoir. Some facts about Shipman's life:

- shooting on location in a blizzard in Canada during her star-making film turn in Back to God's Country, one of her costars got pneumonia and died! another (her boyfriend) got frostbite and lost several toes! Nell Shipman, who did her own stunts driving a dogsled in fifty-below-zero tempatures, was completely fine
- she was hired at one point to direct a car commercial, and instead made a feature-length film about a hero driving his trusty vehicle through the desert! to rescue Nell Shipman! kidnapped by bandits!!! at which point he gets a blow to the head and spends the rest of the film unconscious while Nell Shipman drives them both home. (The trusty car was exhibited in theaters.)
- after making several films with her trusty animal companions, Nell Shipman packed dogs, bear, wild bobcats, and various other members of the menagerie -- along with her toddler and her frostbitten boyfriend -- up to Idaho and started her own production company, focusing on Heroic Girl And Animal Films
- (which almost immediately went bankrupt)
- (also the book goes into great detail about the fortitude and good humor with which Nell Shipman faced all of her solo stunt work but says very little about the stunt work which, presumably, was also required of the toddler, who appeared in various films as well ...)
- ANYWAY then she wrote several novels -- the book examines both the Very Autobiographical One and The Unfortunately Racist One in great detail -- and also a memoir and spent her twilight years trying to break back into the movie business while staying in hotels just long enough to rack up a bill, then fleeing before she could get caught
- a happy story? perhaps not; a compelling one: EXTREMELY YES

Comments

[sovay]

The dog, then, in the expression of its desire, must be seen as the representative of the excessive desire of femininity, a transgressive desire that exceeds the capacity for satisfaction through relations with the woman's human lover/husband

Whaaaaaaat.

I look forward to your report on Shipman's memoir, which I hope will have more pseudo-moose and less dog projection.

[skygiants]

A DOG AND A WOMAN CAN JUST BE FRIENDS. WE DON'T HAVE TO MAKE IT WEIRD. I realize Bear exists but it wasn't written until 1976 so I'm not actually sure it's relevant in this case, despite the author's attempts to convince -

[watersword]

Whatever happened to her child????

[skygiants]

He grew up, became a mildly successful film and TV writer, and complained a lot about paying all the bills his mother kept dodging!

(There's a whole chapter of the book consisting of a sample years' worth of letters to him, in which she tries to get him to quit his job and come work with her on a new film as soon as it gets funded, which it never does.)

[kore]

Ooh, this does sound neat.

[skygiants]

Nell Shipman's story is extremely compelling and definitely deserves to be turned into a popular nonfiction biography someday!

[castiron]

My day job's at a scholarly publisher that does film books, among other subjects. I've noticed that film scholarship has gotten much more readable over the years. 20-30 years ago, film scholarship wasn't being taken very seriously as a field, and the film scholars tended to go overboard on the jargon to prove that this was Real Scholarship. That's gradually changed, and while there's certainly still plenty of theory in film books, it's not nearly as over-the-top as it used to be.

[skygiants]

Oh, that's interesting to hear! Yeah, this was definitely one of the more egregious examples of its breed, too -- I read a fair bit of film scholarship in undergrad and grad school, and some of it certainly got florid but most of it (especially the more recent stuff) was not quite as self-parodically Like This.

[osprey_archer]

Yessss, the completely bonkers dog bits. "But why does the dog have to be a metaphor for desire?" I wailed, as I read that part of the book. "Why can't the dog... just be a dog???"

Also, the prevalence of early twentieth century action heroines with animal companions (Nell Shipman, Helen of The Hazards of Helen... that's two, that's prevalent, right?) is giving me thoughts about Disney princesses and their omnipresent animal companions.

Shipman's life sounds like such an adventure. But definitely a sad one in the end. The chapter about her life after she left Priest Lake, where she keeps almost getting the movie deal that will save them (or at least thinks she does; it's hard to know if she's really that close or if she just wants it so much that she thinks she's closer than she is) - it was just so hard to read. She had such big plans and so few of them came to fruition.

[skygiants]

EXACTLY. I realize the "I love dogs, I've always loved dogs" clip in Jupiter Ascending is iconic for a reason AND YET.

Ooh, that's a really interesting line to draw! I'm trying to remember if Lillian Gish or Mary Pickford were famously associated with animal companions too ... I feel like Lilliah Gish might have been shown fairly frequently with birds, but I absolutely could be making that up.

The thing that was really rough for me is the part where she accidentally lowball-sold her own film to a production company that folded because she was too afraid to wait for a better offer, and if she'd hung on a day or two more to take an offer from a better company they probably would have been fine. (Although, to be honest, it sounds like life on Priest Lake really wasn't all that much of a picnic either ... some high-drama scenes in there!)

[osprey_archer]

At least Channing Tatum is recognizably human in that scene and not A LITERAL DOG.

Unfortunately I haven't seen enough Mary Pickford or Lilian Gish films to comment, but it seems to me that Lilian Gish is a different type of silent film heroine anyway. Mary Pickford, like Nell Shipman and Helen, is often a plucky girl, but Gish tends to be a tragic heroine who dies, so I wouldn't expect her animal companions to function the same way if she has them. And of course, if she does have bird companions, that's a different aesthetic already than Shipman & Helen's dogs and horses and various other mammals.

Oh no, i'd forgotten the part where she sold her film to the lowball production company that folded, probably because it was so painful. SO CLOSE AND YET SO FAR. And it's just crushing how that one little mistake basically doomed her for life: she never really got a second chance. (Yes, there was that one regional movie in the 40s that has now been lost, but that was just a blip, it didn't kickstart a second career.)