These fragments from mostly-lost films can hurt--like trailers getting one excited for a movie they'll never be able to see. Lois Weber's "Idle Wives," with its meta film-within-film construction is right up my alley, too. It, along with who knows how many other lost films--a lot, surely, may've been masterpieces. But, alas, here we are left with 23 minutes, the first two reels and maybe a bit less, of an originally 7-reels feature-length production. Enough of my bemoaning the woes of the destruction wrought by time, neglect and willful annihilation of art and history, though, and let's celebrate what nitrate does endure now over 100 years later. After all, at least some it survives, which is more than may be said of most of Weber's oeuvre, but there I go again.
From the picture I've gathered now from seeing 20-some films of Weber's and reading Anthony Slide and Shelley Stamp's respective books on her career, "Idle Wives" was peak Weber--almost as though much of her career had been leading up to its culmination. Most of the writing on Weber seems to tend to focus on the social messages of her films and secondarily on their technical accomplishments, but going by what's accessible today and that I've seen from 1910s cinema, what most impresses me is that she was a rare filmmaker whose work was fairly consistently reflexive of the art she made. Perhaps, the only somewhat comparable filmmaker from the time that comes to my mind would be from halfway around the world in Russian director Yevgeni Bauer, as well as perhaps some early Danish features. Both made one of their best films about ballet and death, Bauer's "The Dying Swan" (1917) and Weber's "The Dumb Girl of Portici" (1916), and other films that were poetic and focused heavily on visual arts. As I've mentioned elsewhere, Weber included statue in "From Death to Life" (1911), painting in "Fine Feathers," reproduced photographs in "A Japanese Idyll" (both 1912) and "How Men Propose" (1913, although Weber's involvement in the latter remains unconfirmed), acting in "Lost by a Hair," theatre in "False Colors" (both 1914), and mirrors and reflections in "Suspense" (also 1913), "Hypocrites" (1915) and, later, "Too Wise Wives" (1921). And, those are just her films for which at least some footage remains and not including the courtroom-as-stage in such a film as "Where Are My Children?," the focus on literature and shop windows in "Shoes" (both 1916), or camera masking and song in "The Rosary" (1913).
So, it seems natural that Weber would eventually make a picture with the most direct of reflexive devices, of the film-within-the-film. And, while there were quite a few movies about going to the movies even back then (there's an entire thread devoted to the topic at the Nitrateville message boards), from "The Countryman and the Cinematograph" (1901) to "Sherlock Jr." (1924), few are integrated so thoroughly and none quite in the same way as in "Idle Wives." Indeed, Weber was a cinematic lecturer, so the inner film here is also a lecture and one that is within the larger lecture that is "Idle Wives." One film for us to identify and be instructed and a film inside for the characters and surrogate audience on screen to do the same. Quite the consistent parallel of an abstraction. Us watching our doubles on screen watching their doubles on another screen. Moreover, the inner film is titled "Life's Mirror" and is advertised at the movie theatre in the film as "by Lois Weber." Talk about exposing the artifice, which is what reflexive filmmaking does in the first place by reminding the spectator that they're watching a movie. Forget the hooey about so-called suspension of disbelief; Weber wanted movie-goers to be thinking, including in her best work about the art form or diegesis in which her lectures were presented. How else is a spectator not supposed to treat a film as a mere entertainment to be easily consumed and as quickly disposed of thereafter, although the irony is that's exactly what happened to "Idle Wives" for most of its history so far anyways.
Nothing definitive may be said of a film fragment, but the teaser that remains suggests other potentially interesting ways in which the meta-construction is devised. The film-within-the-film seems to be mostly represented by crosscutting between it and the audience reactions--perhaps further blending "reality" and fiction. There are also flashbacks or internal visualizations within the "reality," and the film stars a female stenographer, which perhaps like Weber's "Scandal" (1915) may reference Weber as the writer of the film. The movie theatre here, too, is no nickelodeon that one might see in earlier such films--even Keystone comedies. It's a theatre that reflects the middle-class aspirations of Weber's filmmaking address.
Also similar to "Scandal," interesting here is the roles played on and off screen by Weber and her husband and alleged-co-director Phillips Smalley. Note that they're both credited for "Idle Wives," but only Weber is given authorship of "Life's Mirror." Unlike in earlier films, too, Weber is credited before her husband in the outer film. As Stamp's book and her essay, "Presenting the Smalleys, 'collaborators in authorship and direction," point out, the couple were prominently presented in the press as an idealized bourgeois couple bringing their relative gendered qualifications to their filmic collaboration. In contrast, in what remains of "Idle Wives," the two on screen play a married couple who've drifted apart. And another couple represents the traditional gender dichotomy of the housewife and husband in the workforce. It's not always clear what is more true or false, or the gradations within on all levels, between the world and press outside the film, the world within the film and the film within that film. Life's mirror, indeed.
