29 Figure 4: Publicity photograph of Mabel Normand in 1921, USA. © Associated First National Pictures. Figure 5: Tsuru Aoki and Sessue Hayakawa, William Worthington (dir.), THE DRAGON PAINTER, 1919, USA. Short films – defined by various institutions, including the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences and AFI as films with running times of 40 minutes or less – are fundamental to our understanding of cinema and the contributions of underrepresented artists; however, they are “virtually unknown to film and media studies,” as noted by Cynthia Felando, who also discusses the “paucity of published material” on the topic (2015: 2). Leonard Maltin, one of the few film historians to publish books about shorts, has pointed specifically to the need for a comprehensive “encyclopedia of short subjects,” because they have yet to be acknowledged, documented, and examined in the historical canon (1972: x). Furthermore, there is little attention to the survival of early short films like there is for feature-length films; for example, the omission of shorts from the Library of Congress’s seminal report on extant feature films (which used the AFI Catalog as a primary source) demonstrates the general devaluation of shorts in academic scholarship and underscores the importance of creating a new dataset that can be used to quantify the number of shorts that have survived (Pierce 2013: 1). Nevertheless, short films that were produced in the first decades of American film history provide fertile ground for exploring popular themes in American society and they illustrate the historical significance of documenting motion pictures, particularly those that are lost. AFI has chosen to focus on this early period in motion picture history, as it is a time in which, according to scholars such as Jane Gaines, “more women held positions of power than at any other time in the U.S. motion picture industry” (2018: 9). During the 1910s and 1920s, the American film industry offered unique job opportunities for women, unheard of in other times and workplaces. As Karen Ward Mahar writes, female stars like Mary Pickford and Gloria Swanson earned some of the highest salaries in the world, and many more women worked in creative roles behind the camera…When in 1920 the Ladies Home Journal predicted that within five years the female influence will be fully ‘fifty-fifty’ in ‘Studio Land,’ it was more than wishful thinking (2006: 2). Black filmmakers also took to the silent screen in defiance of the racist depictions of African Americans in the highly canonized THE BIRTH OF A NATION (1915), which marked a milestone in the beginning of feature-length filmmaking. Though Black independent filmmakers were not working as prolifically as women, the 1920s marked “boom years” for African Americans who were “scrambling to embrace a
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