1927: Fashions for Women; Get Your Man; 10 Modern Commandments. 1928: Manhattan Cocktail. 1929: The Wild Party (+ role). 1930: ?The Gallows Song?Nichavo? sequence in Paramount on Parade, Anybody?s Woman; Sarah and Son; Behind the Makeup (co-director); Charming Sinners (co-director, uncredited). 1931: Honor among Lovers; Working Girls. 1932: Merrily We Go to Hell. 1933: Christopher Strong. 1934: Nana (Lady of the Boulevards). 1936: Craig?s Wife. 1937: The Bride Wore Red; The Last of Mrs. Cheyney (co-director, uncredited). 1940: Dance, Girl, Dance. 1943: First Comes Courage.
1922: Blood and Sand (Niblo) (editor). 1923: The Covered Wagon (Cruze) (editor). 1924: Inez from Hollywood (A. E. Green) (editor, scenarist/scriptwriter); The Bread of the Border (scenarist/scriptwriter); The No-Gun Man (scenarist/scriptwriter). 1925: Red Kimono (W. Lang) (scenarist/scriptwriter); When Husbands Flirt (Wellman) (scenarist/scriptwriter). 1926: Old Ironsides (Cruze) (editor, scenarist/scriptwriter). 1936: Theodora Goes Wild (Boleslawski) (producer).
1919?typist for William C. de Mille, at Famous Players-Lasky (Paramount); 1922?editor for ?Realart,? a subsidiary of Paramount; 1926?wrote and edited Old Ironsides; 1929?directed Paramount?s first sound film, The Wild Party; 1943?retired from directing.
Honored at First International Festival of Women?s Films, New York, 1972, and by Director?s Guild of America, 1975.
San Francisco, 3 January 1900.
Studied medicine at University of Southern California.
In La Quinta, California, 1 October 1979
Dorothy Arzner?s career as a commercial Hollywood director covered little more than a decade, but she had prepared for it by extensive editing and script-writing work. Ill health forced her to abandon a career that might eventually have led to the recognition she deserved from her contemporaries. One of only a handful of women operating within the structure of Hollywood?s post-silent boom, Arzner has been the subject of feminist critical attention, with film retrospectives of her work both in the United States and United Kingdom in the 1970s, when her work was ?rediscovered.?
Most feminists would recognize that the mere reinsertion of women into a dominant version of film history is a dubious activity, even while asserting that women?s contributions to cinema have been excluded from most historical accounts. Recognition of the work of a ?popular? director such as Arzner and an evaluation of her contribution to Hollywood cinema must be set against an awareness of her place in the dominant patriarchal ideology of classic Hollywood cinema. Arzner?s work is particularly interesting in that it was produced within the Hollywood system with all its inherent constraints (time, budget, traditional content requirements of particular genres, etc.).
While Arzner directed ?women?s pictures??classic Hollywood fare?she differed from other directors of the genre in that, in place of a narrative seen simply from a female point of view, she actually succeeded in challenging the orthodoxy of Hollywood from within, offering perspectives that questioned the dominant order.
The films often depict women seeking independence through career?a burlesque queen and an aspiring ballerina (Dance, Girl, Dance), a world-champion aviatrix (Christopher Strong). Alternatively, the escape route can be through exit from accepted female positions in the
The films frequently play with notions of female stereotyping (most notably in Dance, Girl, Dance, with its two central female types of Nice Girl and Vamp). Arzner?s ?nice girls? are likely to have desires that conflict with male desires, while narrative requirements will demand that they still please the male. While these tensions are not always resolved, Arzner?s strategies in underlining these opposing desires are almost gleeful at times.
In addition, Arzner?s films offer contradictions that disturb the spectator?s accepted relationship with what is on screen?most notably in Dance, Girl, Dance, when dancer Judy O?Brien turns on her burlesque (male) audience and berates them for their voyeurism. This scene has been the focus for much debate about the role of the spectator in relation to the woman as spectacle (notably in the work of Laura Mulvey).
Although the conventions of plot and development are present in Arzner?s films, Claire Johnston sees these elements as subverted by a ?women?s discourse?: the films may offer us the kinds of narrative closure we expect from the classic Hollywood text?the ?happy? or the ?tragic? ending?but Arzner?s insistence on this female discourse gives the films an exciting and unsettling quality. In Arzner?s work, Johnston argues, it is the male universe which invites scrutiny and which is ?rendered strange.?
Dorothy Arzner?s position inside the studio system has made her a unique subject for debate. As the women?s movement set about reassessing the role of women in history, so feminist film theorists began not only to reexamine the role of women as a creative force in cinema, but also to consider the implications behind the notion of women as spectacle. The work of Dorothy Arzner has proved a rich area for investigation into both these questions.?