BackSpecters of Slapstick & Silent Film Comediennes
(book in English)
- Type
- Studies
- Subject
- History of Cinema
- silent cinema, woman, history of cinema, slapstick
- Publishing Date
- 2018
- Publisher
- Columbia University Press
- Collection
- Film and Culture Series
- Language
- English
Dimensions
- Physical desc.
- Paperback • 384 pages • 29 €
6 x 9 inches (15 x 23 cm) - ISBN
- 978-0-231-17947-8
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Book Presentation:
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.
See the publisher website: Columbia University Press
> From the same author:
Death by Laughter (2024)
Female Hysteria and Early Cinema
by Maggie Hennefeld
(in English)
Subject: Silent Cinema
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