Just to her. Dorothy Arzner in Hollywood in the 1930s, in the middle of the Golden Age. It all started in those years: viewers heard the voice of the actors in the halls, the studios began to give work to the crowd, the people of flesh and bone became a myth; and the number of films multiplied. The photo caught him working, with the speaker in his mouth, next to the camera. Arzner, the director, at the time when that position was reserved for men.

He started to squeeze the typewriter into the studios, because the film industry was paying him three dollars more a week than the coffee he was working on. From texts to frames. From cutting frames to edit. And from editing to correction: In an interview they did in 1974, he explained that the union of a film was given to him after he threatened to leave the study Guitar-Lasky, which would then become Paramount. A woman directing the news: the news came out in the newspapers.

Abrasive route

The retrospective will start in San Sebastian with The wild party, premiered in 1929, but earlier debuted with the 1927 muda Fashions for women. The protagonist character of Esther Ralston, Lola, is a strong and sometimes aggressive woman, and some critics have highlighted that these types of characters have appeared throughout the director's later trajectory, although Arzner questioned those similarities.

In 1928 he directed the first sound film (Manhattan cocktail) and was the first woman to do so. It is also said that he was the inventor of the pertiga microphone, as he used the microphones associated with a reed to record the voices of the films.

For another fifteen years he worked in the film industry and passed through his hands many of the most important stars of the time (Clara Bow, Katharine Hepburn, Fredric March, Rosalind Russell, Claudette Colbert, Maureen O’Hara, Joan Crawford). His latest work was First comes courage (1943), by the producer Columbia. The film, set in Norway on Nazi resistance, was hard to shoot because, among other things, Arzner himself got sick, kept him standing for almost a year with pneumonia. He made the decision just as firmly as he had to start directing: he wasn't going to make more movies.

Gender roles upside down

Then the silence was made. For a long time, Arzner’s name was kept in a corner of the collective memory, until the 1960s came and feminist movements regained their work. Then they realized to what extent the director had been ahead of his time. There is nothing more to do with the theme of some films: he questioned the gender roles of the time, reflected on the role of women in society and brought to light contemporary issues such as sexual harassment at work.

He then performed advertising work and taught film classes at UCLA University, with which Francis Ford Coppola learned. He died in 1979, but he is still the woman who directed the most films in Hollywood history. Times have not changed so much.