Our Lady Cinema

Abstract

This article examines eleven personifications of cinema from the UK during the period 1912–1929, personifications that unanimously ‘sexed’ the medium female. It demonstrates that femaleness was not an inevitable characteristic of personifications of this particular medium and so explores why these female personifications came about when they did, showing that they both a) unconsciously symptomatized several distinguishing features of the medium during the period (including its potential to function aesthetically, its emergent mediativity, its sensationalist content, the unusual availability of both the space of the cinema auditorium and film work to women, its affinities with various elements of modernity that were already coded female and its own challenges to forms of tradition that were coded male) and b) (in most cases) were deliberately fashioned to classify the new medium as having a particular affinity with women, in an effort to improve its public image.