Women Behind the Camera During the Silent Era w/ Dwight Cleveland
About this Event
Thurs., November 5th – 7:30 PM [SMALL THEATER]
“CONFESSIONS OF A FILM POSTER ADDICT: From Golden Age Completist to Big Paper Film Classics and Women Leaders Behind the Camera” – Illustrated Lecture with film historian & collector Dwight Cleveland
During his illustrated talk, longtime film historian and poster collector Dwight Cleveland will walk us through his 50-year collecting odyssey, sharing images from around the world hoping to energize our aesthetic and awareness of why these fragile paper posters are important documents of U.S. cultural and cinema history. He will focus on the often-overlooked and under-recognized women of Silent Era (directors, writers and producers) who played leadership roles and were essential to development of the cinema business as we know it today.
Dwight will have limited copies of his book "CINEMA ON PAPER: the Graphic Genius of Movie Posters" available for purchase and signing at the event.
Bio:
Dwight started collecting film posters as a high-school senior in 1977 and has owned more than 250,000. In 2016, he sold his archive which represented 115 years of film history and was comprised of over 45,000 items. There were posters from 58 countries and all 83 "Best Picture" Academy Award Winners. Dwight wrote the first article on film posters to appear in a major arts publication, The Antique Trader, in 1981 while a student at Columbia College in New York. Since then he has published books on various categories of his personal collection including 1920's and 1930's lobby cards, big paper representations from famous titles, and as varied as Mexican Golden-Age Diva María Félix. He has lent images to newspapers, magazines and books over the years including Light + Noir: Exiles and Émigrés in Hollywood, 1933-1950 at the Chicago Holocaust Museum. His first exhibition was at the 2014 Minneapolis–Saint Paul International Film Festival. He has donated significant posters to institutions around the United States including the Academy Museum in Los Angeles, the Library of Congress, and to the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum. And among those internationally, the Bill Douglas Cinema Museum at the University of Exeter.
In July 2019, a portion of Dwight's collection was displayed at the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach, Florida. The exhibit, titled Coming Soon: Film Posters from the Dwight M. Cleveland Collection, included over 200 rare posters (and 1,250 movie 'Coming Attraction' glass slides) that span across multiple film genres from the early 20th century to the late 1980s. The exhibit ran from July 12 through October 29, 2019. Dwight's book, CINEMA ON PAPER: the Graphic Genius of Movie Posters was published by Assouline in 2019. Ben Mankiewicz, host of Turner Classic Movies and grandson of Herman J. Mankiewicz screenwriter of CITIZEN KANE (1941), wrote the foreword.
Dwight’s latest collection is comprised of over 10,000 silent film lobby cards focused on films relating to the careers of over 1,000 women whose careers have heretofore gone unnoticed and unrecognized. This collection was on exhibition under the title Behind the Camera: The Unknown Women of Hollywood at Poster House in New York City from April 7th thru October 9th, 2022. In March 2024, Cleveland organized his sample collection of lobby cards in Glamour & Grace: The Anna May Wong Legacy Unveiled, a focused exhibition at the San Diego Chinese Historical Museum highlighting the career and cultural impact of the pioneering actress. The show ran from March 1–10, 2024. These were then part of the exhibition Unmasking Anna May Wong at The Chinese American Museum in Los Angeles which ran from May 24, 2024 through April 27, 2025. In 2026, selections from Dwight’s collection of Maria Félix posters were on exhibition at the American University of Paris from March 24 thru April 17. This was the first-ever retrospective on the most recognized Spanish speaking star of the Mexican Golden Age who made 47 films in Argentina, Spain, Italy and France.
Cleveland has been the subject of two episodes on NBC's The Hunt for Amazing Treasure with a story on discovering the earliest known Mickey Mouse poster from Barn Dance (1929) and later a large find of U.S. movie window cards used as insulation in a house built during the early 1930s. He has been interviewed, quoted, in a broad range of news outlets including the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Hollywood Reporter, Classic Images, Classic Chicago, Movie Collector's World, the Chicago Tribune, The Sun Times, BuzzFeed, The London Independent, Forbes Magazine and The ROBB Report. In 2022, Dwight collaborated with Dartmouth College's Media Ecology Project by allowing them to digitize 10,000 silent lobby cards from his collection as part of the Early Cinema Compendium. Dartmouth received a National Endowment for the Humanities Grant to fund the digitization. MEP is a sustainability project that develops literacies of moving image and visual culture history and functions as a collaborative incubator, fostering new research questions and methods. Those range from traditional arts and humanities close-textual analysis to distant reading, which relies on computational methods to help analyze graphics and visual culture components as data. For his contribution of scale to the project, Dwight was named to the newly created post of Associate Visual Cultural Curator. In 2023, Dwight gave a fellowship to Columbia University in honor of Frederica Sagor Maas which supports historical research on women artists from the 20th century silent film industry. The scholarship cultivates and encourages students’ abilities to preserve the work of female filmmakers, making possible the future expansion of archival resources and exhibits.
Doors open at 7:00 PM, presentation at 7:30 PM at The 418 Project, 155 South River Street, downtown Santa Cruz at the Dragons Gate.
$10 in advance, $15 at the door.
Where is it happening?
Event Location & Nearby Stays:
USD 12.51
