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Populär Culture Review
Pickford’s little-girl persona hinges on the complicated relationship that
Americans in the early twentieth Century had with the phenomenon of
time. Themes involving time— urgency, the desire to control or stop
time, and the need to make the most o f time— characterize Pickford’s life
and the social milieu o f her day. Pickford’s “little Mary” character
figures prominently in both.
In Stop the Clocks! Time and Narrative in Cinema, Helen Powell
notes that “ [t]here have been two major periods in our history where our
relationship to time and our experience o f it has [sic] been radically
rework ed” (26). The most recent has been since the 1980s as human
perception has been altered by digital technology, rendering time and
place obsolete; however, “[t]he first occurred in the period from the midnineteenth Century to the outbreak o f W orld W ar I, a time noted . . . for
its vast ränge o f inventions that permeated everyday life. It was o f course
within this period that cinema was bom ” (Powell 26). It was also the
time when M ary Pickford was bom , entered movies, and achieved
unprecedented stardom. In the early years o f the twentieth Century,
people’s relationship to time was affected by the massive cultural
changes caused by industrialization, urbanization, and modemization.
Caught up in a technological revolution, Americans were overwhelmed
by the dizzying speed at which life was moving, creating a desire to slow
down or stop time. As Jeffrey Nealon and Susan Searls Giroux observe,
“W ithout question, we experience time in individual, often idiosyncratic
ways, but these experiences are also shaped by larger social processes”
(122). The new invention o f movies, which made Mary Pickford an
international celebrity, had the ability to capture images, freezing time. It
is not inaccurate to say that movies subtly made audiences think about
time. They feil in love with the good but plucky little girl on the screen
and didn’t want her to grow up. Pickford, in tum , developed sa w y and
sensitivity in her own understanding o f the passage o f time. Pickford’s
perception o f time and the temporal qualities o f the silent screen
contribute to the development o f her early twentieth-century celebrity.
M ary Pickford began her film career in April 1909. The
impoverished young actress, who had trained for the stage with the
renowned director David Belasco, was seventeen and needed money.
Since her father’s death when she was almost six, she had been the sole
means o f Support for her mother Charlotte, and two younger siblings,
sister Lottie and brother Jack. At the insistence o f her mother, Pickford
reluctantly presented herseif to filmmaker D.W. Griffith at the Biograph
Studio to ask for temporary work in the fledgling movie industry until