Abstract

The rediscovery of the early cinema in the 1980s brought about a change in film historiography that the women’s movement had in essence already proposed in the 1970s. At the time, at issue here were not only women directors, forgotten by film historiography, but also the varied and primarily anonymous group of women working in the realms that classical film history did not register: those working in film laboratories, in film coloring, as film editors, on the screenplay and (not least) as actresses, something that is not identical with the function of stars, shaped by men. Using the figure of the actress (and Asta Nielsen in particular) and concentrating on the cinema of the seconde époque, this paper explores women’s liberation from male domination. It argues that the actress places the reality of perceptual play in a public space. Thanks to her, a form of communal life that the women formed in and with the home is freed from the walls of the private.