The Los Angeles-based American Film Institute Thursday received a $350,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to study gender parity in American film.
Named for director Lloyd Bacon’s lost 1928 film, “Women They Talk About,” the study will explore how gender parity was nearly achieved in the early decades of film — an era in which more women held positions of power than at any other time in the U.S. motion picture industry, according to AFI.
The project will be led by the research team at the AFI Catalog of Feature Films, the free database of every American film released in the first 100 years of the art form.
“Women They Talk About” will use cutting-edge technology to discuss gender roles in the AFI Catalog’s vast collection of more than 500,000 credits in the first century of the film industry, providing new empirical data to support women’s inclusion in the historical narrative, according to AFI.
“`Women They Talk About’ is a game-changer for the story of women’s roles in film,” said Sarah Blankfort Clothier, manager of the AFI Catalog. “This essential project will bring forgotten female film pioneers into the cultural vernacular, and secure their contributions in the canon of American cinema.”
The AFI researchers will study employment and gender parity statistics during the first century of American film, while examining the place of women in film and television Thursday — with the goal of contributing to a more inclusive entertainment community, as well as more diverse role models for younger generations.
The NEH on Thursday announced a total of $28.6 million for 233 humanities project nationwide, including 18 in California. The grants “support cultural infrastructure projects, advanced scholarly research, humanities exhibitions and documentaries, and the preservation of historical collections,” according to the independent federal agency.
“These new NEH-supported projects will help shore up the nation’s most valuable assets,” said NEH Chairman Jon Parrish Peede. “NEH is proud to support the advancement of learning and sharing of knowledge nationwide.”
Other NEH grant recipients in Southern California include:
— the Getty Research Institute, which received $255,000 for long-term research fellowships. The funding will cover 16 months of stipend support — two fellowships — per year for three years and a contribution to defray costs associated with the selection of fellows;
— Japanese American National Museum, which was awarded $75,000 for planning of a traveling exhibition, public programs and a catalog examining Japanese immigration and life in rural California and Hiroshima through the photographs of Wakaji Matsumoto (1889-1965);
— UCLA, which was awarded $35,000 for a one-year project aimed at developing a freshman-level interdisciplinary course sequence on the Middle East and North Africa;
— Cal Poly Pomona Foundation Inc., which was awarded $65,152 for the training and mentoring of 10 discussion leaders to conduct two humanities-based discussion series for veterans and military dependents, one on-campus and one in the wider community, both focused on Californians’ experience of war and military service; and
— USC, which was awarded two grants, including a $300,000 award to be used to develop an educational version of Walden, a game, including new features, videos, curriculum guides, outreach and instructor training. USC also landed a $125,000 match grant toward the formulation of a fabrication workshop for exhibition mounts and interactive elements to support ongoing exhibitions of the USC Pacific-Asia Museum’s nearly 16,000 artifacts and works of art that represent more than 5,000 years of Asian and Pacific Island history.