Newly restored, these first two reels of Idle Wives offer an astonishingly reflex­ive consideration of filmmaking and film viewing. Characters in the film attend a movie entitled Life’s Mirror (pointedly di­rected by one ‘Lois Weber’), where they watch parallel, cautionary versions of their own lives. A shop girl ‘stepping out’ with her boyfriend sees her screen surro­gate conceive a child and retire to a home for unwed mothers. An estranged married couple watches as the wife’s onscreen counterpart leaves an uncaring husband to return to her post as a settlement work­er. A working family struggling to make ends meet learn the perils of living be­yond their means. In each case the recognition of oneself onscreen proves revela­tory – film viewing provides opportunities for identification and affect unavailable anywhere else. Idle Wives shows Weber, at the height of her career, considering cin­ema’s extraordinary impact on American culture as it became the nation’s leading mass entertainment in the 1910s.