In celebration of the centennial anniversary of Women’s Suffrage, the AFI Catalog has been rapidly expanding its stores of information regarding the foundational influence of female filmmaking in the silent era—and making it accessible for free at AFI.com. Behind the camera and in front, women were prolific contributors to the establishment of narrative cinema, but their names have…

HER HONOR THE MAYOR (1920) tells the story of young lady who is elected mayor over her misogynist opponent, the town’s District Attorney. The movie was based on a successful 1918 play by Arline Van Ness Hines, who imagined a world in which women could vote well before this right was secured by Congress with the…

Documentary filmmaker Jennie Livingston spent over five years making PARIS IS BURNING on a shoestring budget of grant funding. A recent college graduate, Livingston moved to New York City as a photojournalist and discovered young black men “voguing” in Washington Square Park. Although Livingston was an outsider, she was able to document the significance of…

In a fifty-year career that spanned the transition from silent film to sound and color, Chinese-American cinematographer James Wong Howe filmed over 130 feature films and pioneered camera technologies, including deep focus, wide-angle lenses and hand-held cameras. Howe also directed three features, beginning with CHIJKU WO MAWASURU CHIKARA (1930), the little-known, first Japanese-language sound film made in Los Angeles….

Tatum O’Neal had previously been prevented by her father, actor Ryan O’Neal, from accepting any lead roles until the age of 16. But after she became the youngest person to win an Oscar® at age 10 for her debut performance in PAPER MOON (1973), she was hired to star in THE BAD NEWS BEARS for a…

Did you know? SOMETHING GOOD-NEGRO KISS, released in either 1898 or 1903, is believed to be the first onscreen representation of African-American intimacy. When the film was rediscovered in 2017 and entered into the National Film Registry in 2018, it showed a significant contrast to the racist and caricatured representations of black culture that were...

Fifty years ago this year, MIDNIGHT COWBOY was the first X-rated film to be nominated for and win an Academy Award. It won an Oscar for Best Picture, Directing and Writing at the 42 Academy Awards on April 7, 1970. Despite the X-rating, which prevented a wide release, it became one of the top-grossing films…