Specters of Slapstick and Silent Film Comediennes (eBook)

Maggie Hennefeld (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2018
Columbia University Press (Verlag)
978-0-231-54706-2 (ISBN)

Infos

In Specters of Slapstick and Silent Film Comediennes, Maggie Hennefeld examines little-known silent films that, she argues, provide disturbing but suggestive images for comprehending gendered social upheavals in the early twentieth century. Hennefeld shows how slapstick comediennes were crucial to the emergence of film language and experimentation.

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Women explode out of chimneys and melt when sprayed with soda water. Feminist activists play practical jokes to lobby for voting rights, while overworked kitchen maids dismember their limbs to finish their chores on time. In early slapstick films with titles such as Saucy Sue, Mary Jane's Mishap, Jane on Strike, and The Consequences of Feminism, comediennes exhibit the tensions between joyful laughter and gendered violence. Slapstick comedy often celebrates the exaggeration of make-believe injury. Unlike male clowns, however, these comic actresses use slapstick antics as forms of feminist protest. They spontaneously combust while doing housework, disappear and reappear when sexually assaulted, or transform into men by eating magic seeds-and their absurd metamorphoses evoke the real-life predicaments of female identity in a changing modern world.Specters of Slapstick and Silent Film Comediennes reveals the gender politics of comedy and the comedic potentials of feminism through close consideration of hundreds of silent films. As Maggie Hennefeld argues, comedienne catastrophes provide disturbing but suggestive images for comprehending gendered social upheavals in the early twentieth century. At the same time, slapstick comediennes were crucial to the emergence of film language. Women's flexible physicality offered filmmakers blank slates for experimenting with the visual and social potentials of cinema. Specters of Slapstick and Silent Film Comediennes poses major challenges to the foundations of our ideas about slapstick comedy and film history, showing how this combustible genre blows open age-old debates about laughter, society, and gender politics.

Autor

Maggie Hennefeld is assistant professor of cultural studies and comparative literature at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities.

Inhalt

List of IllustrationsAcknowledgmentsIntroductionPart I. Early Film Combustion1. Early Cinema and the Comedy of Female Catastrophe 2. Female Combustion and Feminist Film Historiography Part II. Transitional Film Metamorphosis3. Slapstick Comediennes in Transitional Cinema: Between Body and Medium 4. The Geopolitics of Transitional Film Comedy: American Vitagraph Versus French Pathé-Freres 5. D. W. Griffith’s Slapstick Comediennes: Female Corporeality and Narrative Film Storytelling Part III. Feminist Slapstick Politics6. Film Comedy Aesthetics and Suffragette Social Politics 7. Radical Militancy and Slapstick Political Violence Postscript: Haunted Laughter at Late Comediennes Annotated Filmography Notes Bibliography Index

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 27.3.2018
• Reihe/Serie: Film and Culture Series
• Reihe/Serie: Film and Culture Series
• Zusatzinfo: 43 film stills, called out in text.
• Verlagsort: New York
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Kunst / Musik / Theater ► Film / TV
• Themenwelt: Kunst / Musik / Theater ► Theater / Ballett
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Kommunikation / Medien ► Medienwissenschaft
• ISBN-10: 0-231-54706-4 / 0231547064
• ISBN-13: 978-0-231-54706-2 / 9780231547062