The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences presented a lecture by UC Santa Cruz film and digital media professor Shelley Stamp on December 3, at the Linwood Dunn Theater in Los Angeles.
The Academy Scholars presentation by Stamp--about her recently published book, Lois Weber in Early Hollywood--was followed by a screening of Weber’s 1916 film Shoes, with live musical accompaniment, from a print recently restored by the EYE Film Museum in Amsterdam.
Based on a short story by Stella Wynne Herron, Shoes tells the plight of a young girl whose financial desperation leads her to prostitution.
Stamp’s book about Weber was published in April, and was recently included in a Huffington Post article about the best film books of 2015.
One of the most prolific directors of the silent film era, Weber was also a writer, producer, actress, and head of her own production company, who paved the way for filmmakers who envisioned film as an opportunity to inject their own ideas and philosophies into a rapidly growing entertainment industry.
“Her work is incredibly interesting because she wrote and directed popular narratives in the 1910s that took on controversial subjects of the day--poverty, addiction, capital punishment, and the fight to legalize birth control,” said Stamp. “She believed cinema was a ‘voiceless language’ capable of presenting these issues for a mass audience, a new medium on par with a newspaper's editorial page.”
Stamp’s talk was the 13th in a series of lectures spotlighting recipients of the Academy Film Scholars grant.
