The Long Road of Women's Memory: Lillian Hellman and Julia (1977)

Hollywood has a long history of producing films that explore the fragility and ambiguity of memory, biography, and history. Recent work in film and cultural studies has also documented the studios' attempts to cater to female audiences and their tastes for popular history and adaptations of historical literature. But Hollywood has produced few films that self-consciously narrate historical questions of agency, objectivity, place, fame, and heroism from a woman's perspective. "Julia" (1977) is the exception. Adapted from the memoirs of famed American screenwriter and playwright Lillian Hellman, the dual biography of Hellman and her childhood friend Julia looks at the many surfaces of history, memory and biography. In this paper, I will explore the film's construction of a narrative space for women's memory and historical experience. Hellman's most creative periods of writing and narrating the past occur at the very edges of America or on the borders of 1930s Europe, echoing the marginal status of memory as a historical mode and the problem of an authentic national space for making women's history. This paper will explore Julia's cinematic representation of women's history from 1920 to 1938 in conjunction with the film industry's contemporaneous development of a woman's historical narrative on screen. In addition to consulting the film's production records and Hellman's writing on fame, history, memory, and her recollections of “Julia,” the paper will discuss major studio-era films about famous and unknown American women from "Show Boat" (1936) to "Gone with the Wind" (1939) and "Kitty Foyle" (1940) to Hellman's own works, "These Three" (1935), "The Little Foxes" (1941), and "The Watch on the Rhine" (1943). All of these films pursue twin themes of historical movement and transition in the lives of the female protagonists and in the narrative structures.