Specters of Slapstick and Silent Film Comediennes 0231179464, 9780231179461

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Specters of Slapstick & Silent Film Comediennes

F ILM A ND CULT UR E S ER I ES

F ILM A ND CULT UR E A S E R IE S O F CO LUM B IA UN IV ER S I T Y P R ES S EDI T ED BY J O HN B E LTON

For a complete list of books in this series, see pages 359–362.

Maggie Hennefeld

Specters of Slapstick & Silent Film Comediennes

Columbia University Press New York

Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York Chichester, West Sussex cup.columbia.edu Copyright © 2018 Columbia University Press All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Hennefeld, Maggie, 1984– author. Title: Specters of slapstick and silent film comediennes / Maggie Hennefeld. Description: New York : Columbia University Press, [2018] | Series: Film and culture | Includes bibliographical references. Identifiers: LCCN 2017047038| ISBN 9780231179461 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780231179478 (paperback) | ISBN 9780231547062 (electronic) Subjects: LCSH: Comedy films—History and criticism. | Silent films—History and criticism. | Women comedians. | Women in motion pictures. | Human body in motion pictures. | Sex role in motion pictures. Classification: LCC PN1995.9.C55 H46 2018 | DDC 791.43/617—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017047038

Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. Printed in the United States of America Cover and book design: Lisa Hamm Cover image: Daisy Doodad’s Dial (Turner, 1914).

To Alex Tolleson, for your incredible warmth, joyful humor, boundless intelligence, and loving support. z

Contents

List of Illustrations ix Acknowledgments

Introduction

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1

Part 1. Early Film Combustion 1. Early Cinema and the Comedy of Female Catastrophe 31 2. Female Combustion and Feminist Film Historiography 54

Part 2. Transitional Film Metamorphosis 3. Slapstick Comediennes in Transitional Cinema: Between Body and Medium 85 4. The Geopolitics of Transitional Film Comedy: American Vitagraph Versus French Pathé-Frerès 111 5. D. W. Griffith’s Slapstick Comediennes: Female Corporeality and Narrative Film Storytelling

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Part 3. Feminist Slapstick Politics 6. Film Comedy Aesthetics and Suffragette Social Politics 7. Radical Militancy and Slapstick Political Violence

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Postscript: Haunted Laughter at Late Comediennes 233

Annotated Filmography Notes

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Bibliography 307 Index 319

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Illustrations Fig. 0.1 Frame enlargement from Rosalie et Léontine vont au Théatre [Jane and Betty Go to the Theater] (Bosetti, 1911) 3 Fig. 0.2 Frame enlargement from Kiss Me! (Biograph, 1904)

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Fig. 0.3 Frame enlargement from Cunégonde Reçoit sa Famille [Cunégonde Has Visitors] (Lux, 1912) 14 Fig. 0.4 Frame enlargement from Cunégonde Reçoit sa Famille [Cunégonde Has Visitors] (Lux, 1912) 21 Fig. 0.5 Publicity still of Gale Henry, 1919. Wikimedia Commons, https:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gale_Henry#/media/File:Gale_Henry .jpg 23 Fig. 1.1

Frame enlargement from Mary Jane’s Mishap (G. A. Smith, 1903) 31

Fig. 1.2 “A Correct View of the New Machine for Winding Up Ladies, 1820.” Art and Picture Collection, New York Public Library 37 Fig. 1.3 Illustrated caricature of the popular crinoline hoop skirt

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Fig. 1.4 Frame enlargement from La Femme Collante [A Sticky Woman] (Gaumont, 1906) 46

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Fig. 1.5 Frame enlargement from La Femme Collante [A Sticky Woman] (Gaumont, 1906) 46 Fig. 2.1 Frame enlargement from Mary Jane’s Mishap (G. A. Smith, 1903) 61 Fig. 2.2 Frame enlargement from Mary Jane’s Mishap (G. A. Smith, 1903) 61 Fig. 2.3 Frame enlargement from Baron Munchausen’s Dream (Star, 1911) 64 Fig. 2.4 Frame enlargement from La Boîte à Cigares [The Cigar Box] (Chomón, 1907) 68 Fig. 2.5 Frame enlargement from Laughing Gas (Edison, 1907)

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Fig. 2.6 Frame enlargement from Madame a des Envies [Madame’s Cravings] (Gaumont, 1906) 79 Fig. 3.1 Frame enlargement from Lea e il Gimitolo [Lea and the Ball of Wool] (Cines, 1913) 86 Fig. 3.2 Frame enlargement from Daisy Doodad’s Dial (Turner, 1914)

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Fig. 3.3 Frame enlargement from Les Ficelles de Léontine [Betty Pulls the Strings] (Pathé Comica, 1910) 105 Fig. 3.4 Frame enlargement from Les Ficelles de Léontine [Betty Pulls the Strings] (Pathé Comica, 1910) 106 Fig. 3.5 Frame enlargement from Daisy Doodad’s Dial (Turner, 1914) Fig. 4.1 Frame enlargement from The Thieving Hand (Blackton, 1908)

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Fig. 4.2 Frame enlargement from A Florida Enchantment (Vitagraph, 1914) 118 Fig. 4.3 Frame enlargement from La Peine du Talion [Tit-for-Tat] (Pathé, 1906) 126 Fig. 4.4 Frame enlargement from Le Spectre Rouge [The Red Spectre] (Pathé, 1907) 131 Fig. 4.5 Frame enlargement from The Electric Hotel (Chomón, 1908)

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Fig. 4.6 Frame enlargement from Princess Nicotine (Vitagraph, 1909) 136 Fig. 4.7 Frame enlargement from Princess Nicotine (Vitagraph, 1909) 138 Fig. 5.1 Frame enlargement from Those Awful Hats (Biograph, 1909)

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Fig. 5.2 Frame enlargement from The Wooden Leg (Griffith, 1909)

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Fig. 5.3 Frame enlargement from An Unseen Enemy (Griffith, 1912)

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Fig. 5.4 Frame enlargement from The Mender of Nets (Griffith, 1912) Fig. 6.1 Publicity still for The Hunger Strike (British & Colonial, 1913)

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Fig. 6.2 Pétroleuse, 1871. Wikimedia Commons, https://it.wikipedia.org /wiki/P%C3%A9troleuse#/media/File:CommunePostcardMarchMay1871.jpg 187 Fig. 6.3 Publicity still for The Pickpocket in Illustrated Film Monthly, 1913. Mary Evans, the March of the Women Collection, https://www .diomedia.com/stock-photo-suffragette-silent-film-the-hungerstrike-image18079175.html 194 Fig. 6.4 Photograph of Madeleine Pelletier. Bibliothèque National de France, http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b53114341d 200 Fig. 7.1

“Madam How Would You Like to Sit Behind the Hat You Are Wearing,” 1912. Prints and Photographs Online Catalog, Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/2012645955/ 217

Fig. 7.2 Frame enlargement from Milling the Militants: A Comical Absurdity (Clarendon, 1913) 223 Fig. 7.3

Frame enlargement from Milling the Militants: A Comical Absurdity (Clarendon, 1913) 224

Fig. 7.4 Frame enlargement from The Derby (Pathé, 1913) 230 Fig. P.1 Frame enlargement from Mickey (Normand, 1918)

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Fig. P.2 Frame enlargement from Mickey (Normand, 1918)

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Fig. P.3 Publicity still for Synthetic Sin (First National) in Photoplay Monthly, 1929 236

Acknowledgments

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his project was initially inspired by a seminar on “Women and Film” that I took my last semester in college. Professor Karen Redrobe had arranged to hold weekly screenings in an old West Philadelphia movie theater, “The Cinemagic”—a space where you might have imagined Norma Desmond’s ghost would be marathoning the silent classics of her heyday. It was the middle of February, the thermostat was broken so the theater was freezing, and the screening featured two feminist silent film comedies (what else?), both directed by women: Alice GuyBlaché’s Matrimony’s Speed Limit (Solax, 1913) and Lois Weber’s Two Wise Wives (1921). It was something about the combination of the wrongful obscurity of the female filmmakers, the total improbability of the setting, and the completely genius absurdity of the films themselves that made me decide firmly on that evening to devote my career to understanding whatever it was this screening had stirred up. Karen is an inspiring mentor, a dedicated teacher, and a hilarious friend. This book would not have been possible without her. I am so lucky to have had the guidance and mentorship of my PhD director, Philip Rosen. I could not have asked for a more insightful or amusing adviser. Phil always listened to my tangents and helped me put my finger on what it was I was trying to say—and he never lost his sense of humor once during the process! Mary Ann Doane’s feedback made me smarter.

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She always set the bar as high as possible, and I am so grateful to have had the opportunity to work with her. I cannot thank Ellen Rooney enough for her generous patience and exceedingly incisive questions. She kept me afloat through the whole exam and dissertation process. Many thanks also to the supportive and brilliant faculty at Brown University: Ariella Azoulay, Wendy Chun, Tony Cokes, Joan Copjec, Denise Davis, Bonnie Honig, Lynne Joyrich, Gertrud Koch, Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg, Elizabeth Weed, and Deborah Weinstein. And thanks especially to Susan McNeil, Liza Hebert, and Richard Manning. I am so grateful to have had such a warm and stimulating cohort of PhD colleagues in Brown’s Department of Modern Culture and Media: Kenny Berger, David Bering-Porter, Eugenie Brinkema, Josh Guilford, Hunter Hargraves, Nathan Lee, Aniruddha Maitra, Rijuta Mehta, Brandy MonkPayton, Matt Noble-Olson, Pooja Rangan, Mauro Resmini, Julie Russo, Paige Sarlin, and Michael Siegel. I am very thankful also to have crossed paths at Brown with Meredith Bak, Michelle Cho, and Stephen Groening. These amazing people made grad school not only survivable but actually very enjoyable! No book would be possible to write in this day and age without friends. Nicholas Baer, our long email threads, frequent Skype talks, and pithy silly debriefs have sustained me through this process. Thanks to Nick for always giving the best advice and for his remarkable ability to articulate rigorous insights as Jewish puns. I am incredibly lucky to be surrounded by such stimulating, passionate, and thoughtful fellow travelers: Laura Horak, Gunnar Iversen, Alex Bush, Annie Fee, Doron Galili, Kristina Köhler, and Franziska Heller. This book has been enriched and inspired by all our conversations and collaborations—with many more to come! Several chapters in this book were shaped by prior publications in journals or volumes. A condensed version of chapter 1, “Early Cinema and the Comedy of Female Catastrophe,” and chapter 2, “Female Combustion and Feminist Film Historiography,” appear in Discourse 36.2. So many thanks to James Cahill, who read through multiple versions of this article and provided invaluable feedback about the challenges of theorizing spontaneous female combustion. A version of chapter 3, “Slapstick Comediennes in Transitional Cinema: Between Body and Medium,” was published in Camera Obscura 29.2, and benefited enormously from Patricia White’s insightful comments. Thank you to Karen Redrobe for suggesting the title of a section in chapter 4,

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“Of Mites and Women,” when I workshopped a version of this project at the University of Pennsylvania Cinema Studies Forum in 2012. A version of chapter 5 (on D. W. Griffith’s slapstick comedienne inheritances) is also included in Charlie Keil’s Blackwell Companion to D. W. Griffith, and singularly exists because of his encouraging, methodical, and inspiring editorial feedback. Thank you to my two manuscript reviewers, who provided thoughtful, generous, and invaluable feedback that guided my revisions in sculpting these dissertation and article materials into a book. The joy and labor of writing this book was fueled by the warm support, gleeful comradery, and brilliant ideas of so many scholars and friends in my field: Kristen Anderson Wagner, Annie Berke, Mireille Berton, Liz Clarke, Katherine Fusco, Amelie Hastie, Sarah Keller, Alison Kozberg, Beck Krefting, Katharina Loew, Dolores McElroy, Kristi McKim, Dan Morgan, Renée Pastel, Jennifer Peterson, Julie Turnock, Yiman Wang, Althea Wasow, and too many others to name. Whether they read and commented on a chapter, emailed me glam photos of Joan Crawford, or chatted with me in a conference hotel about women combusting in early cinema, this book would not have been possible without them. This profession is worthwhile because of its emphasis on mentorship. I cannot thank Shelley Stamp and Charlie Keil enough for all their kind feedback, inspiring commitment, and boundless motivation. Alison Griffiths has been so incredibly generous to me throughout this whole process— I cannot imagine having reworked the dissertation into a book without her insightful feedback and warm encouragement. I treasure my dialogues with Jennifer Bean about feminist comedy and silent film archiving (particularly about issues of slapstick violence and female limb dismemberment). So many thanks also to Richard Abel, Kathleen Carlyn, Timothy Corrigan, Donald Crafton, Jane Gaines, Tom Gunning, Tony Kaes, Rob King, Leslie Midkiff DeBauche, Linda Mizejewski, Charlie Musser, Joanna Rapf, Mark Sandberg, Wanda Strauven, and Linda Williams. Thank you to my wonderful, meticulous, and insightful editors at Columbia University Press: Philip Leventhal and John Belton—and to Miriam Grossman, Ben Kolstad, Marisa Lastres, my brilliant indexer Cynthia Savage, and all the editorial teams and staff at CUP. The archival research involved in this project was made possible by Elif Rongen-Kaynakçi, Steve Massa, Mike Mashon, Dorinda Hartmann, and the staff and projectionists at Library of Congress, MoMA, the British Film Institute, the Amsterdam

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EYE Filmmuseum, and the Performing Arts Collection of the New York Public Library. Many thanks also to my film-festival friends for always sharing their love, knowledge, and passion for silent cinema at the Pordenone Giornate and the Bologna Ritrovato. Thanks in particular to Mark Fuller, Valerio Greco, Hilde d’Haeyere, Lorenzo Marmo, Katherine Nagels, Natasha Poljakowa, Uli Ruedel, and Stefanie Tieste. Thank you to Jay Weissberg for opening the Giornate to Laura’s and my program on “Nasty Women.” Thank you to the Giornate del Cinema Muto for your profound generosity including this book in the 2018 festival donor bag. This book is so much richer for all the people I was lucky enough to cross paths with in Toronto during a Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellowship on “Humour, Play, and Games” in 2014–2015. Many thanks to the incredible staff and to my cohort of fellows at the Jackman Humanities Institute: Matt Cohn, Pete Jones, Louis Kaplan, Oisín Keohane, Katie Larsen, Katie Price, Bob Gibbs, and Kim Yates. And to Pamela Klassen for helping make that post-doc year happen. My year in Toronto would also not have been as productive or meaningful without Corinn Columpar, Alice Maurice, Annika Orich, Nic Sammond, Theresa Scandiffio, Tess Takahashi, Mike Zryd, and many others! Thank you to my colleagues and friends at the University of Minnesota. Cesare Casarino has been an inspiring mentor and went to bat for me repeatedly to help me secure precious research time and resources. Michael Gallope, Keya Gangulay, Richard Leppert, Alice Lovejoy, Jason McGrath, Laurie Ouellette, Paula Rabinowitz, and Christophe Wall-Romana have also provided invaluable advice and support to me as a new junior faculty member. My colleagues in Cultural Studies & Comparative Literature (CSCL) have been incredibly welcoming and encouraging, and my faculty cohort in Moving Image and Media Studies (MIMS) has made it easy to enjoy living and working here. I could not have completed my revisions without the generous support of a faculty-in-residence fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Fall 2016. Thank you to all the other fellows, directors, and staff at the IAS for making that semester so generative and energizing (especially given the challenges of November 8, 2016). Immense gratitude also to Vanessa Cambier, whose enthusiasm and labor are behind the endnotes of this book (at least)! Thanks to Claire Anderson, Barb Lehnoff, Jillene McWhite, and the CSCL staff. Thank you to the PhD students in CSCL for being so welcoming, and for always vigorously voicing

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your ideas, aspirations, and insights. Thank you to the brilliant and energetic students in all the courses I’ve taught while writing this book, particularly my “Film Comedy” undergraduates at Brown in Spring 2012—their insights and enthusiasm helped me get this project off the ground. My family has been heroically supportive throughout this whole crazy process. I am profoundly lucky to have, in fact, “the best feminist mom in the world”: Marianne DeKoven is my role model and beacon of inspiration. I have my father, Julien Hennefeld, to thank for my sense of humor! Dan Hennefeld, thanks for being the coolest and nicest big brother. Much love also to my amazing sister-in-law, Jivelle Callender; my sweet baby niece, Sidney Mazie Hennefeld (I adore her); the incredible Tollesons; and the always delightful and encouraging Abeel family. Shout-out also to our cats Schmutz and Kibbutz; the family canines, Sammy and Lani; and in memory of Phoebe, my best pal. I also want to thank all my wonderful friends from various past and alternate lives, especially Emily Haydock, Peter Clark (who gave me the gift of my first Joan Crawford biography), my college roommates (who endured many VHS screenings of black-and-white movies), the Mie JETs of 2007 (for our fun and edifying adventures), the Greenbergs (who watched Turner Classic Movies with me every weekend during high school), and so many others! Too many to name. Most of all, thank you to Alex Tolleson. You are the best one, and I love you so much!

Specters of Slapstick & Silent Film Comediennes

Introduction

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his book is dedicated to the legacy of early slapstick film comediennes, who underwent horrific on-screen injuries to provoke spectator laughter. It was not unusual for a woman in early 1900s cinema to explode out of the chimney, to melt when sprayed with soda water, to dismember her own limbs to finish her housework on time, or to be dunked repeatedly into a pond as punishment for her political activism. Such comedienne catastrophes provided disturbing but evocative images for comprehending the momentous gendered social upheavals occurring at the same time in the world beyond the screen. Tropes of female physical fluidity helped navigate the rapidly shifting places of women’s bodies in the public sphere, in civic politics, and in the industrial workforce. From housemaids whose dresses caught fire while cooking (mockingly called “crinoline conflagrations”) to suffragettes who endured brutal police violence and prison force-feedings in their fight for voting enfranchisement, women’s violent domestic and activist histories found comical outlets in cinematic scenes of female transfiguration. “Slapstick,” literally a stick used for slapping someone (from the batacchio of the Italian commedia dell’arte1), has often missed the mark when it comes to women’s bodies. Viewers express discomfort about laughing hysterically at even lighthearted images of women being beaten. Due to the gender politics of knockabout violence, the topics of assault and

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battery are considered best left to the domestic sphere as scandalous private secrets rather than flaunted out in the open as playful sight gags. Film comediennes skirted these tensions between joyful laughter and gendered violence by means of their fluid and often spectral corporeality. In contrast to the iconic male clowns, who could get whacked in the head with a club or flattened by a runaway automobile, women tended to disappear and reappear, combust spontaneously, dismember their limbs, miniaturize their bodies, dissolve into paintings and billboards, or metamorphose into supernatural creatures (such as satanic butterflies, micrographic nicotine fairies, or cannibalistic spiders). These prolific comedienne histories pose major challenges to the foundations of our ideas about the slapstick genre and its gendered conventions. Specters of Slapstick reveals the gender politics of comedy and the comedic potentials of feminism through careful consideration of early slapstick silent films. Important work has been done on establishing the presence of women in silent slapstick film and on theorizing the foundations of feminism through early cinema’s public spheres. However, no other work has laid out the history of early cinema and its relation to feminism through close analysis of female bodily performance in slapstick film comedy. The timeframe of this book, from the mid-1890s to the late 1910s, follows the decades of cinema’s emergence: a period marked by constant transformation and experimentation before the solidification of the Hollywood industry’s narrative codes and ideological conventions by around 1917. I look at hundreds of slapstick comedienne films, many of which no longer exist (over ninety-five percent of American silent films are currently lost), discussing and contextualizing them through trade-press reviews, fan scrapbooks, paper print-fragments, and other archival resources. The films I focus on were both remarkable and unexceptional in their depictions of female bodily mutilation aimed at inciting uproarious laughter within early cinema’s transformative public spheres (figure 0.1). The trajectory of the book begins with “Early Film Combustion,” looking at short films from 1894 to 1907 in which women’s bodies spontaneously erupt in a variety of ways (out of the chimney and into the polis, or in haphazard defense against their vulnerability to sexual predators). From these early spectacles centering on combustive one-off gags, I move to the paradigm of “Transitional Film Metamorphosis.” In films from 1907 to 1914, women’s bodies adapted to the emergent codes of narrative film storytelling

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FIGURE 0.1 Frame enlargement from Rosalie et Léontine vont au Théatre

[Jane and Betty Go to the Theater] (Bosetti, 1911)

through their fluid transfigurations (metamorphosing, melting, and selfminiaturizing) rather than through their spontaneous combustions. From this periodization of female physical comedy (early combustion versus transitional metamorphosis), I survey the broader picture of “Feminist Slapstick Politics.” I analyze a broad range of suffragette film comedies, some sympathetic to the cause and others brutally derisive of it. Regardless of their intentional politics, I argue that these films use female slapstick as a gendered corporeal mode to navigate the slippery relationship between popular culture, public sphere upheaval, and the paradoxes of modern feminism. Across these three sections, my overriding focus is on issues of female slapstick corporeality, which I articulate through the interrelations between theories of laughter, historiographies of early cinema, and social histories of gender politics. Slapstick, the exaggerated performance of make-believe violence, provided a gateway into the untapped and previously unimaginable possibilities of female identity in modern society. At the same time, women’s flexible corporeality offered filmmakers blank slates for experimenting with the

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visual and social potentials of cinema. In hundreds of vividly memorable but widely forgotten slapstick comedienne silent films (from 1894 to 1919), the age-old debates about laughter and society take on new meaning and renewed relevance through the lived histories of early twentieth-century gender politics and the living archives of early popular visual culture.2

Comedy and Its Relation to Feminism: “Humorless Killjoys” and “Unruly Women” The project of writing comediennes back into film history demands a broader understanding of the relationship between feminist theory and comedy scholarship. Interpretations of comedy have long struggled with the status of real-world bodily violence, which slapstick bodies exaggerate ad absurdum. Comic clowns are both painfully vulnerable to injury and cartoonishly invincible to permanent damage. What is the cultural and political aftermath of spectator laughter at such barbarically gruesome but farcically innocent representations? In comedy studies, the lines of this debate are frequently drawn between “disciplinary” and “carnivalesque” interpretations of comedic violence: between Henri Bergson’s punitive definition of laughter as a “social corrective” and Mikhail Bakhtin’s utopian celebration of festive joy as a collective horizon for reimagining social politics.3 This is the tension at the heart of critical comedy studies. Does uproarious laughter, on the carnivalesque side, have the capacity to effect lasting social changes in the world? Or, on the disciplinary side, does aggressive laughter merely serve as a tool for shaming wayward bodies into normative social conformity? In a feminist context, the “disciplinary” versus “carnivalesque” debate concerns the degree to which laughter itself should be regulated—or indiscriminately unleashed—in the struggle for gender liberation. There have been two diametric approaches to critiquing the gender politics of laughter. First, feminists have refused to laugh in complicity with the misogynistic power dynamics of the joke whenever women are reduced to its butt or punchline. Against this anti-laughter polemic, other feminists have emphasized the radical potential of an unruly laughter that shatters the patriarchal codes of normative language and desire. It is a truth well established that dominant forms of humor tend to empower the sadistic male laughing subject (while objectifying women)

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and to amplify this patriarchal laughter under the auspices of humor in general. To this end, feminists have positioned their laughter against the misogynistic extremes of humor in general. I would characterize this as the “killjoy” line of feminism’s anti-laughter ethos, inherited from the antipleasure polemics of second-wave feminism. In 1973, Laura Mulvey famously called for the “destruction of pleasure as a radical weapon,” pushing back against women’s systematic disempowerment and objectification by mainstream cinema’s visual codes of narrative representation.4 Echoed by Mary Ann Doane, Kaja Silverman, Teresa de Lauretis, and Annette Kuhn,5 this anti-pleasure critique has been fiercely reclaimed by presentday feminist theorists of affect and emotion, who address the more diffuse ways in which neoliberal capitalism’s “mandate to enjoyment” coerces and constrains gendered everyday life.6 In this vein, Sara Ahmed describes “killing joy as a world-making project”; but it is by no means joyless—as she writes, “There can be joy in killing joy.”7 For Ahmed, and for Lauren Berlant (who now works on “humorlessness”8), feminist liberation hinges on shattering the mundane pleasure dynamics of laughter that repeatedly demean and objectify women while alienating their labor and emotion. This is no doubt why women have often been excluded from comedy and disregarded as “killjoys,” “humorless,” or “angry feminists”—not because their feminism lacks laughter but because this laughter forcefully denies the misogynist tendencies of humor in general.9 In contrast to the “killjoy” or “anti-pleasure” line, feminist revelers have sought to recuperate offensive laughter through the radically carnivalesque figure of the “unruly woman.”10 Unabashedly grotesque, the unruly woman flaunts her anti-normative, excessive, leaky, noisy, smelly, and generally disruptive corporeality against the traditional constraints of femininity and female decorum. In contrast to the feminist killjoy, who tells us explicitly not to laugh when the joke reinforces gendered systems of social oppression, the unruly woman laughs anyway; but her laughter positions itself beyond the patriarchal scripts of universalized humor. However empowering and affirming she is, the unruly woman, I argue, also has critical limitations. She is a disruptive presence, but she can only communicate or effect change on her own terms while largely sidestepping the gender politics of how women have predominantly figured in histories and realities of popular comedy. She abjects herself rather than risk objectification, thus placing herself outside of the ingrained libidinal economies of subjectivity, language, and power.

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It is the goal of this book to find a third way, an alternative to the impasses of the killjoy’s refusal and the unruly woman’s disruption. When can involuntary laughter at fluid and shape-shifting images of female corporeality give rise to affective rupture and social transformation? This is the central question posed by so many excluded feminist works, which become invisible not just due to archival neglect or historical oversight but to ideological incomprehension.11 The tropes of female slapstick in early cinema defy dominant notions of comic clowning (epitomized by the male clown’s mugging deadpan and inoculation against injury that allow for the laughing spectator’s emotional distance and callous apathy). These images haunt the archives and provoke us to transform our retrospective gazes at the history of female representations in comedy and cinema. Recognizing both the presence of women in slapstick and the broader potentials of the genre beyond its most familiar conventions has revolutionary social and epistemological implications that will influence how we reimagine the past and thereby shape the future.

Wounded Attachments: Involuntary Laughter Versus Nonconsensual Enjoyment Feminism has always had an uneasy relationship with comedy. Popular humor can be spectacularly violent, offensively profane, sexually objectifying, or, more routinely, aggressively normative. It is thus not surprising that feminists would want to protect women from the symbolic and envisioned corporeal violence that frequently sparks laughter. Wendy Brown has referred to this in States of Injury as feminism’s “wounded attachments” or the investment of identity-based politics in foregrounding “the logics of pain in subject formation,”12 which escalate when “identity is unraveling . . . as rapidly as it is being produced.”13 As semiotic theory argues, subjectivity in language is always a trap, because the agency afforded by the ability to say “I” (whether the performative “I” of the utterance or the cinematic “I” of the camera) is simultaneously constrained by the differential systems underpinning the articulation of meaning in language. (Just as the ear might perceive “cut” in distinction to “cunt,” ideological stereotypes of femininity police gender roles through an endless war of relational oppositions: ingénue versus vamp, mammy versus Jezebel, killjoy versus unruly woman, et al.) Against the tyranny of the patriarchal signifier, feminist theories of semiotic

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critique necessitate the decentering of gendered subject positions in language: from he to s/he to zhe. In the aftermath of semiology’s decentered subject, individuals now carry the mantle of inventing and performing their own identity positions. “Wounded attachments” (or the fetishization of victimhood), according to Brown, offer traction for mitigating for the confusing dispersal of identities in the wake of the decentered subject. This messy unraveling of identity has tremendous implications for theorizing both the power politics of laughter and the gendered corporeality of slapstick. The attachment to injury—collateral damage from the deconstruction of patriarchal subjectivity—leaves little space for the comic’s ruthless mockery of injury. Whereas slapstick displaces the image of physical violence through underlying reassurances about the impermanence of its corporeal effects, feminisms based on “wounded attachments” instead approach all instances of gendered violence as irreversibly damaging. If slapstick treats the body as purely textual (a blank slate for inflicting a sadistic array of ultimately harmless injuries), then “excitable” feminisms (to invoke Judith Butler14) literalize even linguistic violence as a mode of aggravated assault. In this vein, juridical feminisms have further attempted to repair the residual harm of decentered subjectivity by regulating the expression of hate and aggression in cultural discourse.15 Mostly excluding comedy, these censorship debates have tended to focus on pornography and hate speech, though they are starting to implicate comedy more frequently due to the viral circulation of offensive stand-up via social media,16 and misogynistic abuses perpetrated by predatory Internet trolls.17 However, this regulatory drive is much murkier in the context of slapstick comedy, in which the body of the clown is repeatedly laughed off as pure text (invulnerable and unreal), even while the power dynamics of the gag can be egregiously humiliating. Where, then, does one draw the line between involuntary laughter at an offensive joke and the nonconsensual enjoyment one risks displaying before a demeaning representation? This has been the wager of feminism’s incitement to humorlessness (again, not a lack of humor, but a strategic refusal of complicit laughter). For example, in “Masquerade Reconsidered,” Mary Ann Doane analogizes the bawdy joke to classical film’s logistics of patriarchal voyeurism, citing the sight gag of “Un Regard Oblique”18 (an iconic photograph by Robert Doisneau) as “a kind of dirty joke at the expense of the woman.”19 Analyzing

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this photograph through Freud’s theory of smutty humor,20 wherein women must be absent from the scene of the telling in order to elicit erotic laughter, Doane argues that “our desire to laugh [at a sexist joke] must not blind us to the still pervasive ideological ordering of the sexual.”21 Although Doane concedes feminist counter-readings, in response to a critique of her own argument by Tania Modleski,22 this ultimately comes at the expense of the eruption of laughter itself. According to Doane, “the one who ‘gets’ the joke automatically, unthinkingly, colludes in the maintenance of the systems of sexual oppression which support its meaning.” Against this complicit involuntary laughter, Doane recalls, “I was able to read the Doisneau joke without really getting it, due to the historicity of the feminist enterprise.”23 In other words, feminist reading and spontaneous laughter here are mutually exclusive experiences (see figure 0.2 for another image in this vein, from Kiss Me!). The feminist impetus to relinquish “unthinking” (i.e., automatic) laughter has offered a prolific alternative to the thoughtless, misogynistic laughter provoked by many sexist sight gags in film. In the context of early cinema, Constance Balides focuses on the formal excesses of the image and its

FIGURE 0.2 Frame enlargement from Kiss Me! (Biograph, 1904)

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open-ended composition in order to derive humorous, feminist counterreadings that exceed the immediate visibility of the erotic sight gag. For example, in A Windy Day on the Roof (Biograph, 1904), a woman hangs laundry on a rooftop clothesline while a painter looks up her skirt from a lower vantage point at the side of an adjacent building. Balides explains that “a comic tension . . . is produced as the spectator’s attention is divided between the two activities.”24 She elaborates, While the pressure of expectation regarding the imminent gag—what will the woman do when she discovers the painter looking?—gives a priority to the painter’s activity, the fact that are no cuts, inserts, or shifts of camera position to focus the spectator’s attention, as one might expect in a classical Hollywood film, gives some autonomy to the woman’s activity; it is not simply subsumed within the terms of the joke.

Not exactly laugh-out-loud funny, the feminist counter-humor of this example derives precisely from its excess of possible readings that slow down or disrupt the eruption of the erotic gag: the painter looking up the woman’s skirt and the woman presumably reacting with injury or offense. Balides’ approach (adopted by numerous feminist scholars of early cinema, including Miriam Hansen, Judith Mayne, Lauren Rabinovitz, and Lynne Kirby), like Doane’s, assumes an incompatibility between instinctive laughter and the pleasures of feminist critique.25

Laughter at the Limits of Theory Some of the most exciting and generative theories of comedy have pursued the possibility of a simultaneous eruption of laughter and breakthrough in thinking or knowledge. In other words, the “thoughtless,” instinctive reaction to a funny joke would not be antithetical to speculative critique but essential to it. According to comedy theorists, including Georges Bataille, Charles Baudelaire, and Wyndham Lewis (three thinkers whom I will discuss throughout this book), the irresistible convulsions of laughter provoked by humorous thoughts and rapidly unexpected insights can be channeled beyond their short-lived embodied durations. Baudelaire refers to this as “laughing philosophy,” Bataille actively pursued it as “the consequences of unknowing,” and Lewis celebrated it as “the meaning of the wild body.”26

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In their accounts, laughter’s visceral upheavals become dually intellectual and corporeal gateways to philosophical breakthrough and social transformation: the shattering and overturning of established categories of knowledge, experience, and reason. When we laugh irresistibly and convulsively at suggestively destructive and disruptive images, do our laughing bodies make their marks upon the social formations that operate to constrain and contain them, or is laughter merely an outlet for discharging pent-up nervous energies? The tension released during laughter always comes from somewhere, but whether it’s from repressed libidinal fantasies, nervous muscle memories, or simply jocular escapism depends radically on the context and dynamics of laughter. Bataille, going beyond Freud’s notion of laughter at jokes as an emanation from the unconscious, suggests that laughter opens a gateway into the realm of the unknown. He articulates a philosophical view in which unknowing represents both the capacity to think insightfully while still in the grip of laughter’s destabilizing convulsions and, most importantly, the ability to remember the substance of these laughing insights afterwards.27 Such an alignment between sensory overstimulation and transformative critical thinking has also held an important place in feminist studies. Feminist phenomenological (or body- and affect-oriented) approaches to cinema have sought to intermingle the eruption of pleasure with the innovation of gendered critique. However, the mood or tone of these recuperative readings almost always excludes laughter. This is why Linda Williams pointedly rejects comedy as a “body genre,” “because the reaction of the audience does not mimic the sensations experienced by the central clown” (though the clown in question here evokes Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton, rather than Mabel Normand or Louise Fazenda).28 Unlike in melodramatic pathos, pornographic arousal, or horrified bristling, Williams argues, the laughing spectator of slapstick comedy is ultimately distanced and alienated from the bodily position of the harmlessly but sadistically violated clown. The rejection of comedy as a “body genre” apparently hinges on a more conservative definition of slapstick laughter, viewing it as antithetical to emotional sympathy or critical engagement, as epitomized by Bergson’s notion of laughter as a cruel or callous “social corrective.” (In general, brutality against women has been coded as melodrama while men enjoy far greater license to render their suffering as farcical—to defer the pathos of life’s horrible abuses.) Feminist scholarship on film-spectator emotion,

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exemplified by Williams’s approach here, forecloses its own speculative laughter: its potential alignment with critical efforts to capture the insights unleashed during laughter and to harness these ruptures toward transformative intellectual and social-political ends.29 These gendered exclusions of comedy thereby reinforce what has been an overriding disconnect—or a missed opportunity—between feminist and comedy-focused critical theories of knowledge and pleasure.

Carnivalesque Laughter: Body, Excess, Risk, Redemption In contrast to feminist works that focus on either advocating censorship or critiquing and complicating ideological pleasure, the carnivalesque has offered an alternative methodology for preserving the joys of “unthinking” laughter while valorizing visual displays of female bodily excess. Feminist comedy theorists have thus sought to recuperate the tendentious content and risqué carnality of many gleefully offensive examples of female physical comedy. Under the rubric of the carnivalesque, the very female bodies that would be abjected by normative, derisive laughter appropriate the logistics of the sadistic mockery aimed at them. The feminist carnivalesque celebrates images of female excess—loud laughter, grotesque corporeality, inappropriate exhibitionism, and anti-classical displays of femininity—to defy sexist conventions and to assert women’s entitlement to the exuberant pleasures of laughter and its liberating social potentials. If anti-laughter polemics have disarticulated “unthinking” eruption from feminist critical thinking, then carnivalesque approaches have tended toward the opposite extreme, embracing eruptive laughter unmoored from any social constraints or intellectual contexts. Drawing largely on Bakhtin’s analysis of comic-grotesque systems of imagery in medieval folk humor,30 scholars such as Kathleen Rowe, Mary Russo, and Natalie Zemon Davis have pointedly critiqued Bakhtin’s exclusion of women from the scene of the feast. (The medieval carnival is epitomized by its ritualistic cycles of temporary revolution, jubilant anarchy, and social renewal.31) Zemon Davis names this female grotesque figure the “woman on top,” focusing on visual representations and social practices of carnival in early modern Europe, while Mary Russo has adapted the historical specificity of carnival (which waned in the fifteenth century) to think about “the female grotesque” and her social signification in industrial modernity.32

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Rowe (and many other feminist media scholars, including Alison Kibler, Victoria Sturtevant, Patricia Mellencamp, and Linda Mizejewski) further innovate these concepts of the “female grotesque” and “woman on top” to analyze the iconography of female comedic disruption in twentieth and twenty-first century media representations.33 For example, in her opening to the Unruly Woman, Rowe describes the “contagious, uncontrollable laughter” of the unrepressed housewives who commit spontaneous, anti-patriarchal homicide in Marleen Gorris’s A Question of Silence (Netherlands, 1982). According to Rowe, “Their laughter is explosive and irresistible. It breaks boundaries, filling the void left by their refusal to speak, or bear witness, in the language of their oppressors.”34 Exemplified by this destructively gleefulhorrific scene, the carnivalesque laughter of unruly women actively refuses the symbolic constraints of comedic timing, a necessity for most sight gags and joke punch lines, instead deriving its forceful rebellion from its temporally and spatially unmotivated outbursts. Rowe further draws on psychoanalytic feminist writings about Medusan laughter beyond the Bakhtinian line, particularly Hélène Cixous’s 1976 essay “The Laugh of the Medusa.” In this foundational feminist text, Cixous explicitly rejects the patriarchal strictures of symbolic language by positioning feminist laughter outside of this system. She writes: “That which is ours breaks loose without our fearing any debilitation. Our glances, our smiles, are spent; laughs exude from all our mouths.  .  .  . We never hold back our thoughts, our signs, our writing; and we’re not afraid of lacking.”35 In other words, the eruption of Medusan laughter is emphatically sundered from any legible contexts in symbolic language. In this vein, Rowe argues that the unruly woman “wields laughter as a feminist weapon. . . . Female grotesques and female laughter . . . have the power . . . to challenge the social and symbolic systems that would keep women in their place.”36 The unruly woman and her comic-grotesque variants directly assert their subversive defiance through their refusal to acknowledge symbolic social norms, and this is manifested by their eruptive laughter and inappropriate corporeality. Though the cultural connotations associated with these excessive female bodies remain ambivalent—an important point that these feminist theorists all emphasize—the actions of their rebellion tend to be very straightforward and decisive. For example, in A Question of Silence,

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women laugh at the misogynistic jurists judging them for allegorically murdering the patriarchy (and for literally murdering its male subjects). At a San Diego Padres game, Roseanne Barr grabbed her crotch while singing the national anthem,37 which Rowe describes as a primary example of “female spectacle making” that puts derisive laughter back into Barr’s own hands as “a powerful means of self-definition and weapon for feminist appropriation.”38 Whether they are described as “unruly” (Rowe), “rank” (Kibler), “female-grotesque” (Russo), “Medusan” (Cixous), or simply “wild” (Sturtevant), the point is that these women become active agents of their own grotesque bodily difference, thereby asserting a feminist politics of the all-people’s feast intrinsic to carnivalesque folk ritual. Beyond Bakhtin’s account of the people, “a people who are continually growing and renewed . . . [to] transgress . . . the limits of their isolation,”39 these unruly women mobilize a micro-politics of festive rebirth and regeneration in industrial modernity’s gendered public spheres. In the context of silent cinema, Victoria Sturtevant characterizes the rotund comedienne Marie Dressler as a carnivalesque queen. Dressler played the quintessential country bumpkin, who becomes the victim and scapegoat of repeated comic torments in her screen debut as the title character of Tillie’s Punctured Romance (Keystone, 1914).40 However, as Sturtevant argues in A Great Big Girl Like Me, Dressler also epitomizes the “expression of carnival excess” through outbursts that “emphasize unassailably the life of her body,” such as her wild dancing, overt drunkenness, and haphazard clumsiness.41 These unruly gestures enable Dressler to assert her body as “temporarily, dangerously, and pleasurably out of control,”42 according to Sturtevant, who seeks to redeem Dressler’s demeaning humiliation by making her the intentional agent of her own comic degradation. In other words, this unruly woman, Dressler, is actually quite in control of her paradoxically out of control body: she defines the terms of its visibility and then powerfully assumes the consequences of whatever type of laughter her corporeal indiscretions might provoke. In contrast to the sadistically misogynistic comic scenes that many feminists have used as justification for condemning the gender politics of slapstick comedy (or, at least, for puncturing the eruptive spontaneity of its “unthinking” laughter), carnivalesque feminisms make women into the active agents (not the passive objects) of comedic violence and anarchic destruction.

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From Medieval Carnival to Slapstick Modernity Feminist scholarship, for the reasons I have outlined, typically favors engagement with carnivalesque representations of female unruliness, often sidestepping issues of sadistic violence or bodily violation. At its core, slapstick is about the displaced representation of physical violence: the appearance of gruesome injury that provokes laughter instead of terror (though often a palpable intermingling of these two entities), because the effects of this violence do not cause permanent damage or excessive suffering for the apparently invincible clown. Thus, slapstick comedies abound with comically exaggerated images of battered wives, assaulted housemaids, sexually harassed shopgirls, persecuted female bystanders, gruelingly overworked factory laborers, and vindictively tortured feminist activists and suffragettes. Although women fight back and even laugh last in some of these films, many of these examples do not primarily foster recuperative or carnivalesque readings (figure 0.3). These are clearly not, at face value, redemptive texts. They would certainly not provide useful material for feminist methodologies focused on positive examples, or even on actively subversive ones. Beyond these value estimations, there are many important and striking differences between comic slapstick clowns and carnivalesque-grotesque bodies. While the two possess similar characteristics—the appetite for disruption, as well as anti-social behavior, anarchic physicality, and delight in profanity—slapstick bodies are never intentional agents of their own difference. Slapstick bodies are utterly tormented by their hapless inability to

FIGURE 0.3

Frame enlargement from Cunégonde Reçoit sa Famille [Cunégonde Has Visitors] (Lux, 1912)

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conform to the physical and social laws of their environment. Carnivalesque bodies, in contrast, revel in their inappropriate spectacle. Their unconstrained speech and grotesque self-display enact temporary insurrections against the cultural codes dictating female behavior, knowledge, and pleasure. The dying-regenerating body that Bakhtin characterizes as carnivalesque is fundamentally open to the world and forms part of a cosmic unity of bodily and material belonging. Against this carnivalesque unity, slapstick comedienne bodies live in violent tension with their industrial landscapes. Their slapstick destruction is not a sign of their cyclical death and rebirth but an effect of their finitude. Their vulnerability stems from the danger and peril that shadow events of female pleasure and liberation, and from the existential threat to the very meaning of femininity posed by the emergence of feminist politics and its ongoing liquidation of separate public and private spheres. Slapstick bodies are always in the wrong place at the wrong time, moving at an inappropriate speed (too fast or too slow), with their desires or intents never quite adhering to the objects at hand. In contrast, the point of the carnivalesque is that all grotesque excess is given a temporary rightful place. Aesthetically, carnivalesque bodies revel in their own physical degradation, whereas slapstick bodies incessantly take flight from their own humiliation and abasement. Temporally, carnivalesque bodies assume their own eternal return and afterlife (their ritual excess undersigns a cyclical reassertion of state authority and religious teleology), whereas slapstick bodies enact fundamental uncertainties about the meaning of time and the endpoint of bodily efficiency. Socially, carnivalesque bodies take part in a “pageant without footlights . . . [that] does not acknowledge any distinction between actor and spectator,”43 whereas slapstick bodies perform uproarious gestures to provoke an active but removed spectator’s convulsive laughter.

Beyond Disciplinary Versus Carnivalesque Laughter These distinctions between carnivalesque femininity and female slapstick corporeality further reveal the slippery middle ground between disciplinary and revolutionary accounts of comedy’s social effects. As much as female slapstick corporeality offers an alternative to the strictures of traditional femininity, it also represents an inescapable response to industrial

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mechanization: an entrapment of the living body in the ceaseless production of revolutionary novelty. While there are moments of pure glee, to be sure, most of the examples that I look at in this book (and most that I have viewed during years of researching slapstick comediennes in early cinema) portray female comicality as a profoundly fraught and often agonizing state. For these (and many other reasons), I do not draw on the carnivalesque as a primary feminist-comedic methodology in this book. Corporeal excess and bodily invincibility are never uncomplicated gifts in the slapstick genre. For example, in chapters 1 and 2, I focus on films in which women spontaneously combust while doing housework (or undergo other horrific calamities such as decapitation and dismemberment in attempts to modernize their domestic labor). In chapters 3 and 4, I consider the limits of female metamorphosis in slapstick and trick film comedies. In films such as Princess Nicotine (Vitagraph, 1909), Tit-for-Tat (Pathé, 1906), The Red Spectre (Pathé, 1907), and The Cigar Box (Pathé, 1907), women get miniaturized and trapped inside of glass jars, sprayed and melted with soda water, incinerated, or cruelly dissected by scientists after undergoing interspecies transfigurations. While much has been written about the working-class politics of slapstick’s knockabout violence,44 less has been said about the gendered limits of when physical violence becomes funny. This is no doubt why the carnivalesque, again, has offered feminists such an appealing paradigm for recuperating the social excesses of sexual difference. The carnivalesque gives critics a way out of having to define that slippery line or boundary separating transgressive feminist violence from sadistic sexist abuse. This is another connotation of “specters” of slapstick: the inheritance of a corporeal plenitude that exceeds either critical dismissal or direct valorization. For example, in Eva Is Tired of Life (Pathé, 1911), an alienated female factory worker loses her job and then unsuccessfully attempts to commit suicide. Her efficient, technologized body, neither productive nor fun, becomes an impediment to her own finitude and longed-for mortality. She throws herself from a bridge and bounces back like a rubber band, she lounges in a hazardous construction zone as if it were a hammock, and then she survives multiple explosions completely unscathed. Eva is tormented by her mobility in the public sphere and actively disidentifies with the funmaking potential of her carnivalesque corporeality. Neither purely sadistic and automatically misogynistic nor transparently defiant and socially

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subversive, Eva Is Tired of Life exemplifies the social and aesthetic ambiguities of early cinema’s gendered slapstick practices. Films such as Eva call for new feminist methodologies in comedy theory and film historiography beyond the swinging pendulum of ideological critique and recuperative affirmation.

Laughing Methodology Instead of solely restricting my archive to redemptive examples, my gesture here is to inherit the “bad objects” along with the “good” ones. As a result, I have not limited my historiographic research or critical analysis to examples that portray women in a “positive” light (to invoke the “positive images” debates of the 1970s.)45 Nor do I contain my examples or close readings to films that explicitly represent female comedy as subversive or disruptive to the laws of patriarchal power and phallic desire. Most importantly, I never dismiss overt displays of gendered violence and sexual objectification, which often find alibis in the exaggerated mores of slapstick comedy, as beyond the pale of legitimate laughter. I do not regret any of my own laughs that slipped out during years of silent slapstick comedienne research. These laughs may have been spontaneous or even involuntary, but they were far from “unthinking.” My laughter at these images that most disturb me, that prick me and that call for further discussion and contextualization, has vividly shaped the feminist approaches to film comedy, archival historiography, and gendered social history that I pursue in this book.

Laughter’s Repressive Hypothesis One specter of my approach here is indebted to Michel Foucault’s notion of the “repressive hypothesis,” which posits that power operates subtly, often through the spectacle of its very transgression. In the context of Victorian prohibitions on sexuality, he argues, the regulation or censorship of inappropriate behavior often achieves precisely the opposite effect, giving rise to “a veritable discursive explosion.”46 For example, Foucault outlines the “steady proliferation of discourses concerned with sex . . . a discursive ferment that gathered momentum from the eighteenth century onward.” However, “more important,” he claims, “was the multiplication of discourses

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concerning sex in the field of exercise of power itself: an institutional incitement to speak about it, and to do so more and more; a determination on the part of the agencies of power to hear it spoken about, and to cause it to speak through explicit articulation and endlessly accumulated detail.”47 In other words, social prohibitions, more than just restricting the behaviors that they seek to eradicate, instead give rise to debilitating cultural obsessions with inciting, monitoring, and administering the substitute discourses they will inevitably spawn. This repressive hypothesis of sexuality, which, again, argues that power operates more oppressively by way of its alleged subversion, has major bearing on the proliferation of discourses around female comedy and women’s laughter in industrial modernity. For example, even before the escalation of the “women aren’t funny” debates,48 numerous turn-of-the-century etiquette manuals dictated women’s comedic decorum: the well-bred woman “never laughs or talks loudly in public; she never raises her lorgnette and tries to stare people she doesn’t know out of countenance on the street; she never wears clothing so singular or striking as to attract attention in public.”49 From out of the corset and into the polis, the iconography of female slapstick in early cinema gleefully defied many of these Victorian constraints imposed on women’s laughter and comedic display in early twentieth-century Western culture. However, as Foucault reminds us, the transgression of a prohibition rarely achieves its desired effect: the dismantling of a prohibition.

Specters at the Limits of Laughter: Combustible Housemaids, Farcical Ghosts, and Metamorphic Women Early cinema offers an especially generative paradigm for pursuing the social consequence of laughter due to its chameleonic alternative public sphere politics,50 its tentative integration of women’s bodies into traditionally all-male homosocial spaces (such as the burlesque show and the boxing arena), and its viscerally solicitous on-screen images. In this book, I focus on trick films and comedies that depict female rupture—dismembered limbs, decapitated heads, exploded torsos, and metamorphosed internal organs— in order to make broader claims about cinema’s function in displaying and negotiating rapidly shifting perceptions of femininity in modern culture. Laughter, a fraught social discourse with scandalously ambiguous

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signification, represented the physiological glue between on-screen images of fluid female corporeality and the everyday gendered landscapes of industrial modernity. Slapstick comediennes in early cinema die and return as ghosts, miniaturize themselves during satanic rituals, metamorphose into spiders or aliens, and mangle their bodies into a panoply of horrific and fantastic shapes to adapt to the rampant contingencies of modern life. Women’s bodies in early film provoke every imaginable variety of laughter: from relieved to aggressive-derisive to jubilantly insurgent. Meanwhile, the prolific tropes of female comedy allowed laughing spectators to have it both ways: to take sadistic pleasure in images of violence enacted against marginalized bodies while also finding visual relief and social promise in the genre’s broader spectacles of anarchic destruction and utopian regeneration.

Roadmap to Specters Part I: Early Film Combustion “It is the chasm lying between non-being, over which it is impossible for logic to throw any bridge, that, in certain forms of laughter, we leap. We land plumb in the centre of Nothing.” —Wyndham Lewis, “The Meaning of the Wild Body”

Laughter gains advantage from the element of surprise. Slapstick comediennes in early cinema assumed jolting, startling, and destructively transformative changes in appearance to provoke convulsive spectator laughter. Part I, “Early Film Combustion,” focuses on early slapstick comedies (1894–1907) that depict violent upheavals of female corporeality: housemaids spontaneously combusting, harassed women playing defensive pranks on male aggressors, and pregnant women instantaneously giving birth in public spaces. I situate these scenarios of female explosion in their gendered social contexts of reception, drawing on histories of women’s domestic accidents (from dresses catching fire to victimization by sexual predation) and their perilous leisure practices in modernity’s colliding public and private spheres (urban traffic, bumpy streetcars, and breathtaking entertainments).

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Early filmgoing provided both a break from mundane domesticity and a stimulating source of potential volatility, involving loud machines, hazardous fires (from overheated projectors inciting the flammable nitrate film stock), disruptively mobile spectators, unpoliced audience decorum, and corporeally solicitous on-screen images. In chapter 1, “Early Cinema and the Comedy of Female Catastrophe,” I consider these interrelations between slapstick comedienne metamorphosis, gendered social upheaval, and film-audience pleasures through critical theories of laughter and comedy. Laughter and its conjunctions with comic objects and bodies present unique challenges for theorists of everyday life and experience in modernity. Philosophers have long debated the relationship between comic corporeality and the idea of the human in modernity. While Bergson has famously defined laughter as a “social corrective” for training bodies not to become overly rigid or mechanical (like robotic automatons),51 Wyndham Lewis valorized laughter as a reaction to the inherent absurdity of the very notion of the human: the fantasy of a civilized species whose members allegedly always act as conscious, intentional, or rational agents. On the other hand, as I emphasize throughout this book, female humorists and women writers at the time asserted gender as a key stake of these social and epistemological debates about the meaning of laughter. As Virginia Woolf remarked in a short 1905 essay on “The Value of Laughter,” “Humor, we have been told, is denied to women.”52 Feminist writers, like Woolf, often positioned female laughter somewhere between rational masculine agency and cutting feminine instinct in their definitions of comedy and humor. As Woolf puts it, “To be able to laugh at a person you must, to begin with, be able to see him as he is.”53 She speculates: “It is because their laughter possesses this quality that . . . women are looked upon with such disfavor in the learned professions.”54 Beyond corrective, women’s laughter was feared for exposing the masculinist fallacies at the core of erroneous ideals of humanity and civilization. In response to Woolf ’s call for the social recognition of female humorists, I have mined the archives of early film comedy, unearthing myriad short films in which female corporeality substitutes for the trick apparatus itself. For example, rather than stepping on a garden hose to play a mild prank on a male gardener (L’Arroseur Arrosé, Lumière, 1895), women pick up the hose (or the bucket of ale, or the tub of water) to douse male predators head-on,

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FIGURE 0.4

Frame enlargement from Cunégonde Reçoit sa Famille [Cunégonde Has Visitors] (Lux, 1912)

as in films such as Trouble with the Washerwoman (Lubin, 1903), Trouble with the Milkmaid (Lubin, 1903), and The Bucket of Cream Ale (Biograph, 1904). Whether drenching male mashers or exploding the kitchen with battery-wired turkeys, these female bodies unleashed utter catastrophes in so many early film comedies (figure 0.4). Chapter 2, “Female Combustion and Feminist Film Historiography,” considers the trope of female explosion as a major challenge for rewriting early film history. Here, I look beyond debates about laughter and modernity to focus on issues of historiographic representation, building on the ongoing feminist project to reinvent film history through archival evidence of women’s prolific work in silent cinema. Unlike the male comic clowns (such as Chaplin, Keaton, Lloyd), who personify Bergson’s idea of a comic automaton, combustible comediennes derived comic energy not from their buffoonish rigidity but from their incredible flexibility. I outline eight key tropes of female slapstick fluidity (including combustion, dismemberment, and spontaneous metamorphosis), arguing that the image of female bodily transformation slows down around 1907 with the codification of narrative film practices and the impetus to draw out the shock of corporeal upheaval beyond the spectacle of combustion. I am particularly concerned here with what happens to the exploding housemaid after her combustion; for example, in Mary Jane’s Mishap (G. A. Smith, 1903), after Mary Jane erupts out of the chimney with her body parts raining down over the village skyline in dismembered pieces, she returns to haunt her own gravestone as a dancing specter. The seat of humor and its relation to gender in early cinema, I argue, often took root in images of female rupture: women’s bodies breaking,

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metamorphosing, exploding, disappearing/reappearing, and transforming. The chasm in perception that is impossible to bridge through logic—that can only be traversed through laughter—found fertile ground in the iconography of women’s slapstick comedy in early filmmaking.

Part II: Transitional Film Metamorphosis Part II, “Transitional Film Metamorphosis,” considers the film industry’s rapidly shifting codes of narrative storytelling through the versatile tropes of female metamorphosis in comedies and trick films of the transitional period (1907–1915). The spectrum of female comedy during this period was very broad: it ranged from conventional slapstick mayhem such as knockabout chase films to situational “comedies of manners” (which were flagships of the film industry’s campaign for social respectability). At the edges of comedy, there were uncanny trick films featuring a variety of metamorphic female figures (miniaturized women, housemaids with auto-dismembering limbs, and ghoulish line dancers). Although they are evidently interesting and spectacular, most of these slapstick comedienne films from the transitional period have been excluded from film historiographies, and even from feminist and comedy-centric scholarship: they represent critical blind spots for scholars of comedy, gender, and silent film history. There are multiple reasons why this is the case. First, feminist theorists interested in issues of female sexuality have looked primarily at early cinema (1894–1906) with its prolific sight gags about pornographic exposure (a topic I discuss in chapter 1). Second, most feminist comedy scholarship about silent cinema has emphasized the stars, focusing on archives of film stardom and problems of historiographic (in-)visibility. Writings by Victoria Sturtevant, Kristen Anderson Wagner, Steve Massa, Jennifer Bean, Rob King, Kristine Karnick, Lori Landay, and Joanna Rapf have made major inroads in archiving and recirculating the names of forgotten comedienne performers.55 However, most of the slapstick comediennes who have been recuperated by these silent film histories did not start making films until at the earliest 1914 (many with Mack Sennett at Keystone56) and did not reach peak productivity until the 1910s or 1920s. The early comediennes are thus left behind. Keystone clowns Marie Dressler, Louise Fazenda, Gloria Swanson, Alice Howell, and Polly Moran appeared in their first films in 1913–1914;

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Fazenda worked briefly with the IMP Company, playing Mrs. Schmaltz in Thou Shalt Not Rubber (IMP, 1913) and The Cheese Special (Universal, 1913), while Dressler debuted as the country rube character Tillie in Keystone’s first feature-length film comedy, Tillie’s Punctured Romance (Keystone, 1914)—followed by Tillie’s Tomato Surprise (Lubin, 1914) and Tillie Wakes Up (Peerless, 1917). Keystone’s most celebrated comedienne star, Mabel Normand, began with the Vitagraph and Biograph companies in 1910. Normand’s films present special historiographic challenges; she made just a few situational comedies with Vitagraph but dozens of melodramas under D. W. Griffith at Biograph. Feminist historians have not known quite what to do with Normand’s slapstick excess in studies of Griffith’s melodramas, while these films have been of at best tangential relevance to comedy historians. I look closely at Normand’s “voluptuary” roles in what I call Griffith’s “slapstick-inflected melodramas” in chapter 5. Other slapstick comediennes such as Gale Henry (known as “the elongated comedienne” due to her facial elasticity),57 Cissy Fitzgerald (whose trademark wink was allegedly insured for thousands of dollars),58 Fay Tincher, Josie Sadler, Gertrude Selby, Constance Talmadge, Marie Mosquini, Mildred Davis, and Olive Thomas also started acting in films in the mid- to late-1910s for companies including Reliance-Mutual Komics, Al Christie’s Film Company, Universal (in their “Joker” series), Vitagraph, Triangle, and Lehrman-Knockout Picture (L-KO) (figure 0.5). The best remembered and most extensively

FIGURE 0.5

Publicity still of Gale Henry, 1919. Wikimedia Commons, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Gale_Henry#/media/File:Gale_Henry.jpg

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archived silent comediennes (in addition to Normand, Dressler, and maybe Fazenda) played flapper and ingénue characters in the 1920s. For example, in Synthetic Sin (First National, 1929), It (Lasky, 1927), and The Patsy (MGM, 1928), actresses such as Colleen Moore, Clara Bow, and Marion Davies starred as party-going shopgirls who flirt with sexuality, commodity fetishism, and wild dancing as interregnums between their adolescence and their upward class mobility achieved through marital coupling. Again, this tendency to focus on individual stars and their surviving films has contributed to the relative invisibility of transitional film comediennes (1907–1915) and their provocative body of work.

transitional comediennes: archiving anonymity Any study of gender, comedy, and transitional silent film history must go well beyond recuperating the lost names of forgotten comedienne stars. Although there were slews of popular slapstick comedienne performers during the late 1900s and early 1910s (including Florence Turner, Flora Finch, Florence Lawrence, Kate Price, Alice Davenport, Dot Farley, and Bebe Daniels), their names are not of central relevance here. Early film stardom represented a promotional discourse of the film industry that often abetted its marketing campaigns to establish filmmaking as a legitimate art and a respectable middle-class institution. For example, Lawrence, Turner, Finch, Lillian Walker, and Mrs. Sidney Drew appeared in bourgeois domestic farces or situational “comedies of manners.” The films I discuss in this section often feature unnamed and unknown comedienne performers. I focus on their gendered gags and character archetypes, rather than speculate about their star identities or personal life stories. Chapter 3, “Slapstick Comediennes in Transitional Cinema: Between Body and Medium,” outlines the central protagonists of female comedy from 1907 to 1915, which include sadistic pranksters, vengeful housemaids, spinster old maids and mothers-in-law (who get blasted into outer space, mesmerized, and frozen alive), inadvertent vixens (i.e., women whose sexuality causes mass upheaval and mob riots), and uncanny shape-shifters (women who undergo dismemberment, miniaturization, and interspecies transfiguration). I look at dozens of films, with titles such as Saucy Sue (Lubin, 1909); Betty Pulls the Strings (Pathé Comica); The Servant’s Revenge (Lubin, 1909); Jane on Strike (Pathé, 1911); Freezing Auntie (Edison, 1912); and Edith’s Avoirdupois (Lubin, 1910). My focus in these studies is on the

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thematic of violence, a crucial component of slapstick comedy. I give particular consideration to the question of how violence inflicted on female bodies is motivated and narrativized in these popular film comedies in ways that conflicted with the film industry’s mandates for narrative clarity, middleclass respectability, and the storytelling integration of its visual and corporeal excesses. The desire to capitalize on the popularity of female spectacle was often in direct contradiction with the film industry’s own stated goals of narrative transparency and moral refinement. Chapter 4, “The Geopolitics of Transitional Film Comedy: American Vitagraph versus French Pathé-Frères,” explores the reception politics of female slapstick through emergent film industry discourses of American nationalism. Focusing on two leading production companies, Vitagraph and Pathé, I look at comic women’s bodies as sites of struggle over national differences during a moment in American film history when the industry increasingly emphasized and exploited these differences. Tropes of female metamorphosis and bodily elasticity were instrumental for adapting the shape-shifting conventions of filmmaking aesthetics to the uneven conditions of international film markets. French Pathé films, which were exhibited widely in America, reveal especially striking tendencies to motivate their cultural flexibility through images of female bodily fluidity. Films such as Princess Nicotine (Vitagraph, 1909), Elastic Transformation (Pathé, 1909), and The Acrobatic Maid (Pathé, 1908) depict images of women’s bodies being burned, melted, duplicated, and dissected. They provoke something between comic laughter and uncanny awe. Beyond just American filmmaking, the chapters in this section engage the narrative aesthetics and social politics of many European comedienne series, including Britain’s Tillie (Hepworth, 1910–1915) with Alma Taylor and Chrissie White; Italy’s Lea (Società, 1910–1916) with Lea Giunchi; and France’s Léontine (Pathé, 1910–1912) with an unknown actress, Rosalie (Pathé, 1911–1912) and Pétronille (both with Sarah Duhamel), and Cunégonde (Lux, 1911–1913) with another unknown actress. Unlike the polite domestic comedies increasingly fostered by American companies such as Vitagraph and Biograph, these French, British, and Italian films depict drunk housemaids destroying their employers’ homes, female pranksters terrorizing the public sphere, educated women aggressively agitating for equal rights, and salacious ladies exhibiting their sexuality with broadly comical and destructive consequences. Many of these films were censored in the United States or exhibited unevenly and then denigrated and condemned by trade press

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reviewers. (The American film industry was very invested in promoting its national exceptionalism and singular moral integrity.) Chapter 5, “D. W. Griffith’s Slapstick Comediennes: Female Corporeality and Narrative Film Storytelling,” further pursues the physical and emotional limits of the slapstick genre by considering its kinship with melodrama. I take up D. W. Griffith’s work in slapstick during his years at Biograph (1908–1913), when he made dozens of short comic films (such as Those Awful Hats, The Wooden Leg, and Deceived Slumming Party) while working with future Keystone comediennes (especially Mabel Normand) in his pathos-driven melodramas (including The Squaw’s Love, Her Awakening, and The Mender of Nets). I argue that slapstick tropes of female corporeality profoundly shaped and influenced Griffith’s emergent paradigms of film narration and systems of film editing—and, via Griffith, influenced American cinema more broadly. Above all, the chapters in this section argue that comedienne corporeality in silent cinema made its mark on the articulation of film style during the most formative moments in filmmaking history. These comedienne films represent meta-discourses for scholars to consider in rethinking the co-development of narrative film style, film industry cultural politics, and experiences of gender and laughter. They thereby provoke us to reenvision the tentative and punctuated emergence of narrative film form through the aesthetics of female slapstick corporeality and metamorphic bodily mutation. The immense challenge of understanding historical transitions—not as clean breaks but as messy and complicated processes—is at once an imperative to recognize the central places of female bodies in mediating these historical transitions. Slapstick comediennes are the specters of our earliest film histories.

Part III: Feminist Slapstick Politics Suffragette feminism provided a fertile source of visual humor for silent filmmakers. Women’s activist campaigns for voting rights provoked heated political debates and widespread societal ambivalences about the effects of women’s suffrage on everyday life, conventional gender norms, and public sphere politics. Early film comedies played a crucial role in navigating this relationship between unstable appearances of traditional femininity and the rapid pace of historical change in industrial modernity. From mean-spirited

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sight gags about androgynous suffragettes to revolutionary slapstick visions of total feminist transformation, silent cinema was haunted by the hilarity of suffragette feminism. The potential effects of women’s political empowerment are depicted in all their hyperbolic absurdity in films such as If Women Were Policemen (Clarendon, UK, 1908), The Elusive Miss Pinkhurst (Warwick, 1912), When Women Vote (Lubin, U.S., 1907), When Women Win (Lubin, 1909), When Women Rule (Selig, 1912), The Suffragette Sheriff (Kalem, 1913), Cousin Kate’s Revolution (Éclair, 1912), and A Cure for Suffragettes (Biograph, 1913). In these films, women apply their traditional domestic roles to political governance, giving rise to absurdly catastrophic consequences. For example, women attempt to “clean the streets” of crime-ridden neighborhoods with a dustpan and broom. In other films, women seize the reins of legislative control, necessitating a rebalancing of sexual power that reduces all men to gross feminine stereotypes: wearing frilly dresses, gesticulating daintily, and nearly losing their heads at the sight of a rodent. The question of these films’ social politics boils down to the consequences of the spectator’s laughter: can laughter give rise to lasting social changes, or is laughter’s liberation doomed to remain wholly ephemeral (like the fleeting film images that provoke and mediate laughter)? At once carnivalesque in their topsy-turvy scenarios and sadistically mean-spirited in their abundance of misogynistic sight gags, these suffragette comedies, moreover, challenge critical tendencies to divvy up the politics of comedy between carnivalesque revolution and disciplinary mockery. These prolific suffragette-themed comedies (both pro- and anti-) provide traction for articulating new feminist theories of comedy. In this section, I revisit conventional notions of laughter, complicating their explanatory logic through close considerations of feminist theories of social justice and the gender politics of representative democracy. In chapter 6, “Film Comedy Aesthetics and Suffragette Social Politics,” I discuss dozens of internationally produced suffragette comedies, situating them primarily in their American spectatorship contexts to reveal the intimate relationship between popular film comedy and activist social change. Chapter 7, “Radical Militancy and Slapstick Political Violence,” focuses on militant wings of the suffragette movement, particularly in Britain: women blowing up mail boxes, waging hunger strikes in prison, and then enduring violent force-feedings at the hands of the state apparatus. I look at slapstick depictions of this militant violence; no matter how horrific, and even

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when inflicted on female bodies, this physical violence was not off limits for slapstick representation. I argue that this slapstick political violence, which emerged from the very paradoxes of modern feminism, represented a fraught but crucial mode for comprehending the rapidly shifting relationship between female corporeality and modern democratic politics. In a brief postscript, I chase the specters of early comedienne slapstick into the late 1910s, when the codified grammar of narrative filmmaking rigidly constrained the comedienne’s bodily fluidity. Focusing on a close reading of a scene from the drama/comedy Mickey (Normand, 1918), in which Mabel Normand plays a miner’s daughter who moonlights as a substitute horse jockey, I describe the visual absorption of Normand’s slapstick corporeality by narrative cinema’s storytelling machine. While classical silent film form integrated the comic excesses of female corporeality into its narrative grammar—subsuming sexual difference as a driving antagonism finally to be tied up by the plot—moments of radical alterity erupted within this economical system, both working against it and yet produced by it. I pursue these moments of brief but potentially extravagant, morbid, and debilitating laughter solicited by the limits of female corporeality against the visual logistics of narrative filmmaking. The feminist specters of early slapstick film comedy continued to provoke haunted laughter long after the alleged obsolescence of their film aesthetics and social politics. In that haunting, they reveal the lasting impact of early slapstick comediennes on the history and form of American cinema.

Part 1 Early Film Combustion

1 Early Cinema and the Comedy of Female Catastrophe

FIGURE 1.1 Frame enlargement from Mary Jane’s Mishap (G.A. Smith, 1903)

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cenarios of women spontaneously combusting while doing housework offered irresistible subjects for early film representation. Mary Jane’s Mishap (G.A. Smith, 1903) provides an especially iconic example that, unlike many slapstick comedienne films, is still extant today. In this short comedy, a British housemaid accidentally blows herself to smithereens and erupts out of the chimney while attempting to light a hearth fire with paraffin. Mary Jane, played by the filmmaker’s wife Laura Bayley (one of several comically gifted Bayley sisters),1 then rains down in dismembered body parts over the village skyline, and finally returns to haunt her own gravestone as a dancing specter.

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Mary Jane’s Mishap enacts a more elaborate adaptation of the Irish housemaid comedy The Finish of Bridget McKeen (Edison, 1901), which itself was a two-shot remake of the single-shot film How Bridget Made the Fire (Biograph, 1900).2 In these latter two films, the famous female impersonator Gilbert Saroni plays an untidy maid who accidentally incinerates herself in the process of attempting to expedite her housework with kerosene. (Mary Jane’s poison is paraffin wax.3) Meanwhile, an Irish domestic is electrocuted by a battery-wired turkey in A Shocking Incident (Biograph, 1903), and a flirtatious Irish maid falls victim to an exploding bowl of flour when her employers’ son plays with fireworks in Nora’s 4th of July (Biograph, 1901). In these comedies of female catastrophe, the mundane routines of conventional domesticity and the dangerous effects of modern housekeeping technologies become innovative sources of exuberant fun and visceral surprise. But why were self-immolation and other forms of gendered domestic violence causes for joyous laughter rather than horror or pathos? This chapter focuses on the conspiratorial relationships between comical laughter, gender and sexual violence, and modern upheaval in early short-form filmmaking. Early films reveled in their very representability of movement: what would be cause for alarm or danger in real life (such as combustion, dismemberment, and assault) was a hilarious sight gag once projected onscreen. Due to its abrupt temporality of violence and minimal focus on the aftermath, early cinema parlayed corporeal apocalypse into visual curiosities, provoking extravagant laughter from weary spectators. By cutting apart the film strip and eliding interim images of the body, decapitation could appear bloodless, combustion quick and harmless, and sexual violence a mere opportunity for mischievous fun and tricky role reversals. The gender politics of how these cinematically dissected bodies became laughable bear further feminist analysis and historical contextualization. Female accident was a frequent hazard of modern industrial life in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As I will describe, women caught fire in their homes in deadly “crinoline conflagrations,” exposed their bodies to sexual predation in public spaces, exhausted their labor in grueling domestic work, suffered deplorable conditions in dangerous sweatshops, and tested the limits of their too-tight corsets against the physical upheavals of riding on streetcars or visiting amusement parks and fairgrounds. These incidents of female catastrophe were all too mundane in the modern

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public sphere’s gender-integrated spaces. Though not quite as spectacular as spontaneously combusting out of the chimney, many of these horrific accidents were reported in a derisive or jocular tone. Instead of lamenting the modern hazards of traditional feminine accoutrements (corsets, enormous hoop skirts, oversized bonnets), commenters mocked women for the incongruity of their feminine fashion juxtaposed with their volatile, technologized urban environments. The specters of traditional femininity were thus laughed off as ridiculous sight gags: modern horrors made fun through recourse to demeaning stereotypes of feminine rigidity. Comedy philosophers have encapsulated the comic spirit as the lithe body reduced to rigid absurdity. This is Henri Bergson’s still widely cited definition of comedy: “something mechanical encrusted on the living.” Debates about laughter, modernity, and mechanization have tended toward universalist abstraction, invoking the mechanical body of comic laughter as largely androgynous. Critiques of Bergson focus on his instrumentality (his notion of laughter as a mere tool for disciplining wayward bodies), and his problematic argument that laughter allows no space for emotional empathy. Yet what this abstract universalism further disallows is nuanced attention to the slippery gender and sexual politics of comic mechanization. When women’s bodies become funny in these early catastrophe comedies, it is always due to the recognition of something abruptly left behind: perhaps just a limb or a head, or perhaps something much deeper and more confusing to identify. Catastrophe, from the Greek katastrophem, meaning “overturning” or “sudden turn,” always has the potential to become comical: like catastrophe, comedy hinges on surprise, spontaneity, and punctual shock. More than just smoke screens for anxieties about women’s bodily infiltration of the public sphere, early comedienne catastrophe films become funnier the more they encroach on reenacting the very disasters that they purport to defer. In other words, laughter and terror provide mutual enablers for spectators to embrace the underlying instabilities of historical change. Women’s mangled, dismembered, and incinerated bodies were among the principal protagonists in this endless cycle of looming catastrophe and uproarious release. In these films, women reimagine their own femininity through promiscuous object and bodily attachments that always erupt in spectacles of gleeful destruction. As we have seen, a deadly paraffin bottle allows a bored

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housemaid to catapult herself into the public sphere in Mary Jane’s Mishap, while the ingestion of nitrous oxide gives a black woman immunity to police brutality and juridical punishment in Laughing Gas (Edison, 1907). After visiting her dentist, Mandy Brown (Bertha Regustus) spreads her laughter contagiously and indiscriminately to the police force, as well as to the white working-class, some gospel revelers, and a justice of the peace. In Madame’s Cravings (1906), one of over seven hundred films directed by Alice GuyBlaché, Guy plays a pregnant woman who exhibits her maternity cravings in public. The sight gag of her voracious appetite (as she devours a child’s lollipop, pickled herring, smoking pipe, and glass of absinthe) climaxes not with ingestion but with excretion, in the exhibitionist scene of her trick childbirth, rendered here by a spontaneous jump cut. The film is comical not because Guy plays a fool (though her husband is a bit of a sad sap), but because the terms of domestic femininity and its shape-shifting place in the polis are subject to continuous reinvention and corporeal mutation. Similarly, in comedies about sexual assault (of which there were too many to enumerate), women ward off predators by dissolving into billboard posters (as in Kiss Me!), acquire facial hair through trick cuts (A Sticky Woman, Gaumont, 1906), or partake in cross-racial masquerades through plays on dark lighting (What Happened in the Tunnel, Edison, 1903). The comic sight gag, often at the masher’s expense, was less about the “rigidity” of the male predator’s temporary emasculation than about the comic potentials of how these volatile, novel technologies could revolutionize the gendered social order. Mary Jane might lose her head (though she gets it back in the end), but the spectator will never forget the jolting impact of its sudden loss, even if the eruption of surprise quickly dissolves into laughter. Georges Bataille’s critique of Bergson is useful here. Bataille argues that laughter at automatic gestures is never wholly intentional or “corrective,” but profoundly revealing and potently transformative. Though by no means a feminist, Bataille placed his laughter on the side of risky unknowing: the nonknowledge that runs roughshod over masculine enlightenment rationality. It is precisely this instance of unknowing—of unleashing deeply desired but impractical possibilities through volatile upheavals of the body—that comedies of female catastrophe flaunted and celebrated. From emigrant Irish housemaids to migrant African American women and pregnant female consumers, comical visions of women undergoing simultaneously physical and social transformations haunted the silent screen.

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Crinoline Conflagrations and the Everyday Mishaps of Female Combustion The comedy of female catastrophe finds its source materials in the everyday dangers of female embodiment. The characters Mary Jane and Bridget McKeen were not spun out of whole cloth: “first as tragedy, then as farce,”4 the exploding maids of early cinema evoked recent and contemporary histories of women catching fire while doing housework. Crinoline, a stiff fabric made from horsehair and cotton, was widely used to enlarge the skirts of women’s petticoats and dresses. Although fashionable and conventional, these bulky, starchy dresses and bloated hoop skirts easily caught fire while women were attempting to heat their homes or cook meals for their families. Derisively referred to as “crinoline conflagrations,” such incidents were subjects of journalistic fascination throughout the nineteenth century. An 1858 article titled “The Perils of Crinoline” published in the New York Times reflects the impulse to transform these modern calamities into gendered objects of comic ridicule:5 Almost every fact in human life, we are told, has its serious and its comic sides, and each deserves attention. Of the availabilities of crinoline, considered comically, perhaps enough has now been made. . . . But the crinoline question has graver aspects, which are forced upon us afresh by accounts today of the frightful death in Boston, on Friday night last, of a young lady . . . who was standing near the chimney-piece when her garments suddenly took fire, and before the requisite pressure could be brought to bear upon them, were entirely consumed, inflicting injuries so many and so severe that she survived but a few hours.

To varying degrees, the intermingling of comedy, horror, and pathos was endemic to the discourse of crinoline conflagrations. First, the fashion of crinoline was viciously mocked. One writer lamented the “ridiculous nuisance” of crinoline: “There is no possible or probable situation or circumstance in which a woman can be placed in which its inconvenience and absurdity is not palpable—walking, riding, or dancing; in rail car, omnibus, church concert or theater . . . or any imaginable or supposable household duty.”6 Notwithstanding the fact that crinoline fashion was primarily dictated by male designers and dressmakers, it was widely decried as the folly

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of women for adorning themselves in such unwieldy fabric. Bergson should have said “something crinoline encrusted on the living.” To this point, the accidents or mishaps provoked by the awkward garb could be innocuously amusing, such as a woman knocking over a table rather than catching fire. The comicality of crinoline thus gains momentum from its simultaneous visible excess and unpredictable consequences. Like a jack-in-the-box, one knows it will go off, but is ever surprised and delighted when it manages to do so—unless its eruption becomes fatal. Second, the pervasive ridicule of crinoline provided an emotional alibi for its sad reality and tragic repercussions. Did women truly relish wearing crinoline? Victorian novelist Charlotte Perkins Gilman suggests not, in her essay on the redemptive potentials of film montage: If the last sixty years were shown in all their changes of women’s dress on the same figure, swelling and shrinking, rising and sinking, trailing on the ground, cut off to the knee, wasp-waist and no waist, high collar and naked back; if the thing were presented as a whole, with its increased change of speed, then we might be able to stretch our minds wide enough to ask why we must thus spin like a top under the lash of a salesman.

Gilman’s critique of female fashion trends, which in aggregate stretch women’s bodies to more astonishing extremes than the editing of an early trick film, reveals the social stakes of laughter at feminine absurdity (see also figure 1.2). In conservative definitions of comedy such as Bergson’s, it is always the external object of ridicule (outmoded fashion, a facial tic, absentminded behavior) that prevents comic outbursts from escalating into something uncontainable. The absurdity of crinoline, as a metonymic token of feminine excess and frivolous desire, is emphasized to provide mental relief from the messy contradictions between the vestiges (or at least vestments) of traditional gender norms and the contingent dangers of up-todate domesticity. Laughter momentarily contains the unresolvable conflicts that will eat away at social traditions—either progressively through reformist organization or violently through civic strife and revolutionary upheaval. Evidently, the comedy of female catastrophe was viewed as all too mundane. The Times article reports that an average of three deaths per week occurred from “crinolines in conflagration,” which “ought to startle the most thoughtless of the privileged sex; and to make them, at least,

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FIGURE 1.2

“A Correct View of the New Machine for Winding Up Ladies, 1820.” Art and Picture Collection, New York Public Library

extraordinarily careful in their movements and behavior, if it fails (which of course it will) to deter them from adopting a fashion so fraught with peril.” The reporter’s wry, mocking tone wavers between a consoling register of ridicule and a sober plea for cultural reform. The comedy of crinoline catastrophe haunted nineteenth-century journalistic discourse, inspiring derisive news articles including “The Crinoline Terror,”7 “The Spectre of Crinoline: Thrilling News for People Who Must Live in Crowds,”8 and (my favorite) “From Fig Leaf to Crinoline.”9 In these exposés, the comic and the horrific traffic in one another, diffusing atrocity through recourse to mockery while appealing to humor’s inherent ambiguities (between irrational play and playful rationality) in order to conjure the traumatic violence of people actually combusting. Female conflagration was in fact an everyday household danger in America throughout the entire nineteenth century. To stay warm during winter, it was common for women to wear upwards of thirty-seven pounds of clothing, nineteen of which hung from the corseted waist.10 The physical necessity of donning such bulky garb made women especially vulnerable to catching fire or bursting into flame when too close to the fireplace, which was the primary means for heating many homes.11 A woman’s flammability was such a common problem that Catherine Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe give advice for how to manage it in a section called “Miscellaneous Directions” in their widely read domestic manual, The American Woman’s Home: Principles of Domestic Science. Alongside myriad tidbits “about cleaning combs, fixing broken earthenware, and waterproofing gardening shoes,”12

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FIGURE 1.3 Illustrated caricature of the popular crinoline hoop skirt

the book counsels that “If your dress catches fire, do not run, but lie down and roll until you can reach something in which to wrap yourself tight.” The author goes on to advise that “young children [be kept] in woollen dresses in winter . . . to save from risk of being burnt.” While Mary Jane’s reckless overuse of the paraffin causes her to ignite, it is very possible that Mary Jane’s grandmother or mother could have immolated herself by grazing the hem of her dress against a hearth fire—or from a spark jumping out of the fire— even during moments of sober vigilance. Again, the sheer bulk of the garb, as well as certain pernicious fashion trends, made it physically impossible for women to stop, drop, and roll (figure 1.3).13 Virginia Woolf satirically depicts the awkward, constricting bulk of crinoline dresses in her novel Orlando, a comic history of the status of women in England since the sixteenth century: “Now that Orlando [after her transgender metamorphosis] was a grown woman . . . the lines of her character were fixed, and to bend them the wrong way was intolerable. So she stood mournfully . . . dragged down by the weight of the crinoline she had submissively adopted. It was heavier and more drab than any dress she had yet worn. None had ever so impeded her movements.”14 Indeed, crinoline conflagrations were the great equalizers, afflicting women regardless of social

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class. In 1857, the Paris correspondent of the New York Times reported a nonfatal, “singular accident, more or less connected with crinoline,” in which “two young women, elegantly dressed, with an abundance of the expansive material, were crossing the street in the most fashionable and crowded part of the Boulevard, when one of them was suddenly seen to be in a blaze of fire.”15 It was believed that a lighted cigar had rolled under one lady’s dress before she departed a café, “but the balloon-like form of her skirts and the confined air” delayed conflagration until she got up and started to walk outside. Her friend attempted to stanch the flame but also caught fire. Luckily, as this incident occurred in public, a crowd hastily collected, and the flames were extinguished.” Unlike the working-class domestics ignited at their employers’ hearthside, neither woman here was seriously harmed. Rather, upper-class women’s presence and visibility in public life was viewed as an easily manageable curiosity rather than cause for dire social alarm. Meanwhile, many American household servants lost their lives to the unwieldy flammability of nineteenth-century women’s fashion. In a fatal accident in 1863, a young servant named Wells, age fourteen, caught fire in her employers’ home in London: she “went about her housework in largely distended skirts. . . . [One day] her dress was forced into the fire hearth, and she was speedily enveloped in flames.”16 By 1863, the perils of crinoline had become a juridical matter: “ ‘Already in several places on the Continent, the authorities have formally prohibited crinoline, or limited the grand circumference of the female outer garment’  .  .  . [in] a sad reaction against the much vaunted doctrine of the ‘enlarged sphere’ of woman.”17 Making a joke out of the public sphere politics of women’s dress circumference, this letter from London deems women’s fashion apparel as a matter for the law. The bad pun of “enlarged sphere” represents a sorry attempt to manage women’s rising participation in public life by dictating the diameters of their domestic apparel. The relationship between sadistic laughter and traumatic violence bears further unpacking, because it is vital to both the history of crinoline conflagration and the early film trope of female combustion. When we laugh at something terrible, where does our laughter come from? Is it a way of taking flight from the unknowable horrors of grim reality, or of reinforcing interpersonal power dynamics at someone else’s expense, or, more innocently, just a way of blowing off steam? For Bergson, laughter is all about social power, enabled by the failure of the laugher ever to empathize with

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the object or victim of mockery. He writes: “at the touch of a fairy wand . . . how many human actions . . . would pass from grave to gay, on isolating them from the accompanying music of sentiment?” Though eloquent, this account offers an unconvincing explanation for the power dynamics of insulting laughter at women’s mortal crinoline conflagrations, in which the boundaries between horror, humor, and pathos are murky and unresolved. Georges Bataille’s critique of Bergson is helpful for approaching the possibility of a laughter that runs counter to its object or intention. In “Un-Knowing: Laughter and Tears,” Bataille views laughter as “part of a range of possible reactions” to a traumatic occurrence: “I have said that the problem of laughter should not be isolated, that it must on the contrary, be linked to the problem of tears, to the problem of sacrifice, and so forth.”18 Whereas Bergson invokes laughter as “a slight revolt on the surface of social life,” Bataille sacralizes laughter by locating it as the very essence of the unknown. “That which is laughable may simply be the unknowable. In other words, the unknown nature of the laughable would not be accidental, but essential. . . . The unknown makes us laugh.”19 By the “unknown,” Bataille is not simply reiterating Sigmund Freud’s familiar argument that laughter at jokes stems from the unconscious, temporarily giving license to the expression of otherwise deeply repressed fears and desires. For Freud, unconscious jokes must appeal to conscious reason even while subverting the laws of rational logic and social decorum. Freud refers to this as the joke’s “condition of intelligibility”:20 its comprehension by a third spectator (usually in a conspiratorial relationship at the expense of a woman who denies both the male jokester and male laugher free access to her body). More than slipping one past the superego censor, for Bataille, the laughter from nonknowledge metaphorically decapitates the laugher, where the head is the center of cognitive mastery and conscious rationality. (This is why Bataille named his secret society Acéphale, from the Greek “akephalos,” meaning headless.21) Bataille assigns laughter, or “comic sovereignty,”22 to an Unfinished System of Nonknowledge23 that has the capacity to effect subjective and societal revolution.24 Only by confronting primal terrors such as decapitation and morbid violence, according to Bataille, does the unknowing (or nonknowledge) mobilized during laughter have a chance of making lasting impressions on everyday habits and social practices.25 Bataille’s practice of anti-rational laughter has vivid implications for articulating the gender politics of female combustion. The laughter at

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“crinoline conflagrations” was an unknowing laughter from which the relentless mockery of crinoline served largely as a decoy. In other words, the onslaught of derisive commentary about crinoline attempted to create a stable boundary between comic laughter at the clownish fabric and the sober mourning of tragic death. Through its apparent failure to draw such a line, this perverse discourse betrays its own impotence over its female comical prey, further revealing the deeper temptations of laughter to confront social tensions around sexual difference. At once ludicrous and dangerous, crinoline epitomized the absurd persistence of traditional femininity against the constant novelty and unsettling contingency driving nineteenth-century cultural politics.

Immigrant Maids and Early Film Disasters The nexus between comic corporeality, gendered social politics, and female disaster found its medium in early cinema. Miriam Hansen has described early film publics as socially “chameleonic,”26 invoking both the tense intermingling of separate classes and the cross-class aspirations of immigrant and working-class spectators. The comedy of female catastrophe provided an evocative trope for navigating rife ambivalences about early cinema’s mixed spaces of reception. The woman who combusts on-screen is almost always a housemaid, newly arrived, culturally unschooled, and untidy if not actively promiscuous. The eruptive domestic thus offered a comic placeholder for addressing intersectional problems of immigrant labor and female sexuality. She is personified by the Irish maid Bridget, who recurred as a popular character in films throughout the silent era: from the singleshot lark How Bridget Made the Fire (Biograph 1900) to the more elaborate Bridget and the Egg (Lubin, 1911), in which Bridget attempts to crack open a tough egg by wielding a large axe. The slippage from sexual promiscuity to physical eruption in these early films indicates deeper social fears about the effects of a melting pot workforce on American culture. Following the Irish exodus in the wake of the Great Famine, over five million Irish immigrants arrived in the United States between 1845 and 1921. Peter Flynn notes that between 1895 and 1909, a total of 109 films representing the Irish in America were produced by the domestic industry. “Virtually all of these films are comedies . . . [and] twenty-eight

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feature the Irish maid, making Bridget far and away the most popular representative of the Irish in the earliest years of the American cinema. . . . Bridget is a broad caricature, a wild gesticulating clown, leaving chaos and destruction in her wake.” Neither just a demeaning sight gag nor a subversive unruly woman, Bridget’s prolific caricature was a symptom. From her solicitation of philandering husbands to her penchant for spreading infectious diseases, Bridget embodied the ethnic and labor tensions of her moment. Like Mary Mallon, who became known as “Typhoid Mary,” Bridget is repeatedly associated with unhygienic exposure and gross insanitation.27 According to Flynn, the Bridget trope harkens back to the unhygienic conditions in preindustrial American homes, which fell prey to “constant invasion[s] of ‘insects, barnyard animals, dust, dirt, and manure’ resulting in a profound domestic disorder and conditions ripe for the spreading of disease.” Nearly all of Bridget’s disasters take place in the kitchen. For example, in How Bridget Served the Salad (United States, 1898), an early foray in film pornography, Bridget misinterprets the instructions to “serve the salad undressed.” A similar pun on “spirits” (as booze and as ghosts) disciplines Bridget’s alcoholism in Why Bridget Stopped Drinking (1901). After getting electrocuted by a battery-wired turkey in A Shocking Incident, Bridget turns the tables on her employers in The Servant’s Revenge (Lubin, 1909). In this comic revenge film, Bridget sabotages a dinner party by connecting the garden hoses to the kitchen gas jets, coating the pots and pans with laxatives, and replacing her mistress’ beauty powder with burnt cork. The minstrelsy touch provides a racial sight gag to distract from the indoor flood and orgy of bodily leakage. It would be easy, though ultimately unsatisfying, to dismiss Bridget as a crude offensive caricature, and tempting to recuperate her as a carnivalesque unruly woman. Bakhtin does emphasize the misalliance of opposites, including death and gastronomy, in his iconography of the medieval banquet. He writes, “No meal can be sad. Sadness and food are incompatible (while death and food are perfectly compatible).” The duality of morbidity and appetite, for Bakhtin, represents “the potentiality of a new beginning instead of the abstract and bare ending.”28 In carnival’s grotesque system of imagery, “death is not a negation of life seen as the great body of all the people but part of life as a whole—its indispensable component, the condition of its constant renewal and rejuvenation.”29 However, Bridget’s culinary hazards do not function this way—that is, as carnivalesque renewals achieved

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through the temporary lifting of social taboos (as in the banquets of carnival). For example, in A Shocking Incident, there is still a vivid distinction at play between the spectator’s sadistic laughter and Bridget’s painful objectification, even while Bridget simultaneously finds joy and anarchic opportunity in her surprise electrocution. Bridget’s comedic excess is not that of the unruly woman, with her messy corporeality and unregulated sexuality; instead, her comedy stems from her disastrous technologization. From the Biograph catalog: “Willie connects the wires of an electric battery to the legs of a turkey, which is being prepared for the table. Bridget seizes the charged legs and at once executes a wardance, overturning the kitchen furniture and creating havoc generally.”30 Ironically, in A Shocking Incident, electricity provides an impetus for the food itself to become contagious: unhygienic raw turkey meat gets cooked through its encounter with Bridget’s body as oven. The battery-wired turkey as comic object thus mixes metaphors between updated device and gross insanitation, which erupt through Bridget’s ritualistic, catastrophic, kitchen-razing war dance. Bridget’s comic outburst is both gleefully destructive and a consequence of her adaptation to an unfamiliar household and hostile cultural climate. Laughter at Bridget, whether sadistic or nonsensical, unleashed anxieties endemic to the spaces of film spectatorship. It responded to conflicting desires for novel encounters between technology and the body and underlying terrors about the place of this electrified body in early cinema’s chaotic public sphere. Rampant uncertainties about immigrant labor, female sexuality, workplace harassment, and the normative family unit were vividly reimagined through the cinematic possibilities of an Irish maid’s domestic catastrophe.

Laughter Theory and Gender Politics Theories of comic spectatorship have struggled to articulate the dynamic between crazy slapstick bodies and uproariously laughing spectators. The language used to describe this slippery scene of film laughter, in both scholarly and popular discourses, has tended toward extreme hyperbole and figurative colloquialism. For example, early film magazines and trade-press reviews flaunted the laughing spectator’s metaphorically “hysterical,” “side-splitting,” “gut-busting,” and “convulsively writhing” hilarity.

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Although women were often discouraged from laughing out loud in public (that is, from showing their teeth, heaving their chests, or convulsing their diaphragms within their too-tight corsets31), early film audiences were consistently interpellated as eruptive bodies “moulded into one solid fit of hysterical laughter,”32 or as a collective entity that “blew up with spontaneous hilarious laughter.”33 In this regard, Lauren Rabinovitz compares moving picture shows to amusement parks, with their “mechanical rides, pyrotechnics, and recreations,” which she describes as contemporary training grounds for “moviegoers to become fascinated slapstick spectators . . . pleasure seekers at the cinema.”34 More than enthralled subjects, laughing spectators became corporeally bonded with their slapstick alter egos—the amusement park represented a parallel space in which these mimetic relationships could be negotiated. Key to Rabinovitz’s explanation of mimetic spectatorship is an unpublished conference paper by Jennifer Bean about the slapstick comedienne Marie Dressler, which Rabinovitz quotes at length. Bean argues that “the travesty of order onscreen is little more than a prelude for the staggering loss of bodily integrity available to the viewer; one who succumbs first to a ‘titter,’ devolves toward a ‘yowl,’ cranks up for a stimulating ‘bellylaugh,’ and races on to laughter’s apotheosis: the ‘boffo,’ or ‘the laugh that kills.’ ”35 Both Bean and Rabinovitz focus on the gender politics of slapstick corporeality, which they depict as funhouse relays of nervous energies between physiologically stimulated spectators and impossibly volatile slapstick bodies. The language used in contemporaneous descriptions to explain this dynamic is apparently figurative, often tending toward poetic hyperbole or evocative colloquialism (“writhing,” “yowling,” “gut-busting,” “the laugh that kills”). Figures of speech have thus served as suggestive placeholders for the limits of what we can actually know about the mental and physiological relationships between laughing spectator bodies and corporeally solicitous images. Philosophers of comedy have approached this chasm between the laughing spectator and the comical body through theories of the post-Cartesian subject, who is split unevenly between an unknowing mind and its unwieldy corporeal housing. Charles Baudelaire’s notion of “the laughing philosopher” has been key to this discourse.36 For Baudelaire, “laughter is the expression of a double or contradictory feeling: and it is for this reason that a convulsion occurs.” Baudelaire’s own incongruous feeling comes from his avowed superiority over “the beasts” (which is no doubt shot through with racial,

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sexual, and imperialist connotations), and “wretchedness in relation to the absolute being.” As in Bergson’s object-oriented and unempathetic definition of laughter, the doubleness of Baudelaire’s laughter refers to its dual motivation (of superiority and wretchedness) but does not extend to the relationship between laughing subject and comic object—with one crucial exception: Baudelaire writes, “It is not the man that falls down who laughs at his own fall, unless he is a philosopher, a man who has acquired, by force of habit, the power of getting outside himself quickly and watching, as a disinterested spectator, the phenomenon of his ego.” The laughing philosopher thus enjoys a cold, calculating exteriority to his own body in the throes of convulsion. The scene of early film spectatorship troubles this dynamic, assaulting the spectator with physiologically stimulating images that demand both corporeal response and intellectual recognition. As James Cahill argues, laughing philosophy becomes almost instinctive for the spectator of early cinema, particularly in the context of automobile-accident films (such as Explosion of a Motor Car, How It Feels to Be Run Over, and The ‘?’ Motorist). Cahill suggestively explains, “The essence of Baudelaire’s laughing philosopher—the acquired ability to perform a rapid and mirthful auto-analysis, to face the self as other in a split second, and to think the un-sublimated co-presence of contradictory forces and ideas—is distilled by spectacular scenes of an unexpected fall and falling apart occasioned by the accident.”37 In other words, the laughing spectator of early cinema is fundamentally a laughing philosopher: a violated body and an amused observer. The gender politics of Cahill’s insight provoke further elaboration. Laughter at gendered bodily upheaval in early accident films is often a hair’s breadth away from the terror of sexual violence and domestic assault (as Karen Redrobe and Lynne Kirby elaborate in Crash and Parallel Tracks). For example, in What Happened in the Tunnel, when the gag goes off, a white woman and a black woman have traded places to thwart a white male harasser. In A Sticky Woman, a man physically assaults a housemaid in the post office, a horrific scene that gets defused through the sight gag of their faces sticking together from all the postage glue on her lips and tongue (figures 1.4 and 1.5). This bears on Cahill’s point that the abrupt temporality and visceral immediacy of early film accidents all but force the spectator into a confrontation with “the self as other.” In these assault comedies, that “other” is the basis for the laughter that deflects sexual predation.

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FIGURE 1.4 Frame enlargement from La Femme Collante

[A Sticky Woman] (Gaumont, 1906)

FIGURE 1.5 Frame enlargement from La Femme Collante

[A Sticky Woman] (Gaumont, 1906)

Here, the woman’s unwieldy physicality provides comedic compensation for the sexual unavailability of her body. If Freud’s laughter at smutty jokes temporarily upends the rules of genteel civility (violating the woman in absentia), the early film spectator’s laughter revels in the scene of female survival—in the unexpected aftermath of her physical violation. Laughter erupts from the escalation and unraveling of proper sexual decorum and familiar gender conventions. Again, female calamity films find their sources in the modern spaces of everyday life. A self-proclaimed “philosophic citizen” from Philadelphia

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published an op-ed in 1897, bemoaning the tendencies of women to laugh in response to physical contact at having their seat upset while riding the streetcar. “All of us have probably had the experience of being thrown bodily across a car on to the floor or into somebody’s lap while going around a corner.”38 Regarding this everyday hazard of urban transportation, he contrasts the male rider’s stoic disgust, visible annoyance, or even flushed embarrassment with women’s sheer jubilance and unflagging amusement. He elaborates: The woman who gets slammed around until her hat is awry and her coiffure dislocated and after treading on the toes of seven other passengers is finally deposited out of breath in some other woman’s lap laughs aloud in a gleeful way. So does the owner of the lap, and so does nearly every other woman in the car. As a source of feminine mirth this experience seems never to stale.

Like early film viewings, public transportation offered a relatively unregulated site for women’s bodily stimulation and release through laughter and other forms of gestural expression. Indeed, the image of women riding public transportation was a popular subject of early film comedies, featured in Laughing Gas (Edison, 1907), 2 A.M. in the Subway (1905), Effects of a Trolley Car Collision (Lubin, 1903) and What Happened in the Tunnel (Edison, 1903). As “the philosophic citizen” observes, women who rode the cars everyday (as many women did) would likely be thrown off their feet at least twice a week and might witness other women so toppled every day. (Though this “philosophic citizen” does not say so explicitly, presumably the situation would be very different when a laughing woman falls into a male rider’s lap.) The question of feminine humor bedeviled male commentators. Women were warned that if they laughed too uproariously, they might even kill themselves (and not in the figurative sense of “dying from laughter”).39 Another journalist offered a rationale for this abiding suspicion of female mirth: “The real truth of the matter is that men don’t want women to have a sense of humor.  .  .  . They feel that as she is so quick to see the ridiculous side of things, she will be equally quick to see the ridiculous side of them, and that no man can stand.”40 In this vein, Woolf compares the fear of female laughter to prejudices against women working in learned professions: “All the hideous excrescences that have overgrown our modern life, the pomps and conventions and dreary solemnities, dread nothing so much

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as the flash of laughter which, like lightning, shrivels them up and leaves the bones bare.”41 Discrediting female laughter as purely foolish—an involuntary reflex to public life displayed uniquely by the “gentler sex”—was a key tactic in the war for ownership over laughter as a means of social power. In a very different context, Ralph Ellison has explored the racial counterpolitics of “extravagant laughter” through the playful metaphor of the “laughing barrel.” In the segregated Jim Crow, rural South, black people were forced to deposit their heads inside of barrels in the town square whenever they felt a laugh coming on, in order to purify the civic sphere of the irrationality assigned to black laughter. However, the rampant absurdity of black bodies laughing uproariously with their heads stuck inside of whiskey barrels became irresistible and contagious, causing whites to “suffer the double embarrassment of laughing against their own God-given nature while being unsure of exactly why, or at what specifically, they were laughing.” As Ellison puts it, this “meant that somehow the Negro in the barrel had them over a barrel.” Ellison mentions this racial joke in the context of an anecdote about his own extravagant laughter while attending the play Tobacco Road,42 during which he “laughed and laughed, bending and straightening in a virtual uncontrollable cloud-and-dam burst of laughter, a self-immolation of laughter over which I had no control. Yet I was hyper-sensitive to what was happening around me.”43 Though this story is extremely personal for Ellison, his “Extravagance of Laughter” (as opposed to Baudelaire’s “The Essence of Laughter”) can be extended to consider the feminist politics of early film spectator laughter at images of female bodily upheaval. We might even say that the combustible comediennes of early cinema went straight over the heads of their laughing spectators. Decapitation antics notwithstanding, caricatured comedies often entrapped viewers with the promise of easy, ego-reinforcing, Bergsonian mockery, and then proceeded to shatter this promise and blow it to pieces (to quote Mary Jane’s epitaph, “rest in pieces”). For example, as we have seen, the slovenly, lascivious maid Bridget gets her comeuppance for being an immigrant woman when her employers’ son Willie electrocutes her with a battery-wired turkey. Yet this spectacle of comic discipline quickly gives way to anarchic eruption with Bridget’s “war-dance” and her exuberant reclaiming of the domestic environment that nearly immolated her. It is precisely this confrontation of opposites, physical vulnerability and hellraising rebellion, that Ellison invokes when he describes his extravagant laughter as a civil

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war between his own split-subjectivity: “It was as though I had been taken over by embattled Siamese twins who couldn’t agree for disagreeing, and neither of whom could exit the scene, thanks to the detachment of one and the mirth-wracked state of the other.” It would be easy to imagine early film spectators laughing so extravagantly—doing violence to Baudelaire’s ethic of laughing philosophy—in uncontrollable response to the overwhelming social contradictions depicted in these scenes of comedienne combustion. The gleeful but destructive violence enacted against female bodies in early cinema further evokes the modernist writer Wyndham Lewis’ notion of the “wild body.” Lewis emphasizes the wildness of the body that erupts paradoxically through its head of reason, rather than necessitating the violent removal of this head (as in Bataille’s self-flagellating praxis of ritual decapitation44). While Ellison’s “Extravagance of Laughter” focuses more on his own memory and experience (his jubilant eruption of biting anger and painful humiliation), Lewis’s theoretical object returns to the position of the other: the scorned comic object. In “The Meaning of the Wild Body,” Lewis dismantles the dichotomy between the “laughing observer” and “the wild body” of the other, but with very different theoretical implications than Baudelaire’s paradigm of the laughing philosopher, Bataille’s self-decapitating laughter, or Bergson’s corrective laughter. Placing himself initially as the laughing observer, he narrates an anecdote about watching a fat man (whom he describes as “a sack of potatoes”) running to catch a train. Lewis is obsessed with the detached “coolness” of the man’s eye, which appears absurdly disconnected from the unwieldy heft of his body. He even provides an internal monologue for the man to accompany his actions: “When you run a line of potatoes like ME, you get the knack of them: but they take a bit of moving.”45 Since this man is exemplary precisely because his body appears to be running on autopilot to contain its unmanageable wildness, the caption offered by Lewis is written entirely from the point of view of his own position as observer. Lewis himself struggles to place his body across the line into the realm of anarchy, which he imagines achieving for only an instant: “But no man has ever continued to live who has observed himself in that manner for longer than a flash. Such consciousness must be of a thunderbolt. Laughter is only summer-lightning. But it occasionally takes on the form of absolute revelation.”46 (Ellison’s “cloud-and-dam burst of laughter,” then, would have struck Lewis as something from beyond the grave.) On balance, Lewis’s

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laughter at the “sack of potatoes” man is neither cruel and callous, nor selfannihilating and cataclysmic, but a little bit of both: it is the appearance of the human encrusted upon the wild body that provokes irresistible laughter and intangible comprehension for him. This is why Lewis cannot imagine himself as a wild body for more than a hot minute: it is too troubling to his fantasy of rational consciousness (i.e., the fallacy of the “human” that he eagerly dismantles) to put his body at risk in this way, either physically or epistemologically. These musings on the “wild body” have deeply suggestive implications for explaining the sadistic gendered violence parlayed into exuberant laughter by so many early film comedies.47 When women blow up machines with their un-photogenic faces (Old Maid Having Her Picture Taken) or with their ungainly bodies (Lady Plumpton’s Motor Car); when they combust (Mary Jane’s Mishap) or auto-dismember their limbs (Kitchen Maid’s Dream) to adapt to the changing conditions of modern housework; or when they start a mob riot with their cooking (Her First Cake), it is the disaster of femininity that becomes the locus of absurdity. There was nothing funnier than the idea of female survival in modernity—that is, the survival of classical ideals of femininity finding their places among the jolting, enervating, dirty, overpopulated, and continuously novel mass-mediated spaces of early film spectatorship. I have not found any concrete historical evidence to prove that female laughing spectators experienced anything like wild embodiment for more than a flash at early film screenings. Yet it is this very absence of definitive proof that makes its possible event so suggestive for speculation, or even for future reenactment.

Apocalyptic Violence and Female Sexuality If early cinema failed to transform its laughing spectators into wild bodies, it was not due to any lack of extravagant destruction. Early slapstick comedies frequently climax with the spectacle of apocalyptic and worldshattering violence. Eileen Bowser has suggested slapstick explosion as an early genre category in itself, teeming with erupting automobiles, combusting house maids, gentlemen dandies afflicted by fatal sneezing (The Fatal Sneeze, 1907), and a self-annihilating immigrant workforce whose members fail to read the warning signs and thereby blow themselves to smithereens

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(Another Job for the Undertaker, 1901).48 What better way to explore the representability of movement and the composition of filmic space than by scattering body parts and flinging them every which way across the frame? For example, in The Explosion of a Motor Car (Hepworth, 1900), an automobile spontaneously combusts, shortly after which, the dismembered body parts of its passengers rain down from the sky, piece by piece. Karen Redrobe argues in Crash that the early film trope of combustion refuses to give a settled place to the spectator. Instead, it opens up what she offers as a “conceptual third space or gap between the world and me . . . cinema’s technological, nonhuman gaze, a gaze from no-place.”49 In Lewis’s terms, the detached eye of the camera against the unwieldy movement of the bodies and matter in front of it never fails to produce the comical effect of absurdity. It was precisely the novelty of cinematic technology, coupled with the openended potential of how spectator bodies could experience it, that made the social effects of these anarchic comedies so potent. Beyond absurdity, these slapstick films, with their incessant depictions of apocalyptic violence and anarchic destruction, provoked their laughing spectators to the brink of wild extravagance. Again, the gendered implications of early cinema’s wild bodies are legion. Female corporeality provided a surrogate for the exploding machine, whose combustion represents the extreme violence marking the end of the film. In other words, the film ends when the apparatus explodes. For example, matronly wardens of public sexual decorum dole out comic beatings to male mashers in The Gay Shoe Clerk (Edison, 1903), Kiss Me! (Biograph, 1904), The Unappreciated Joke (United States, 1903), and Appointment by Telephone (Edison, 1902), all of which climax with burlesque scenes of women responding to sexual transgression with retributive violence. A woman beats a peeping tom with an umbrella at the end of Gay Shoe Clerk, while an eavesdropping wife publicly “horsewhips” her cheating husband in Appointment by Telephone. Feminist scholars such as Shelley Stamp, Miriam Hansen, Constance Balides, Judith Mayne, and Kristen Anderson Wagner have commented on the use of slapstick violence as a modality for temporarily resolving ambiguities about women’s places in modern commercial society.50 Most of these feminist writings focus on women’s comical negotiations of their fetishistic display (see Mayne’s The Woman at the Keyhole), bodily exposure (see Balides’s “Scenarios of Exposure”), and libidinal subordination

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(see Hansen’s Babel and Babylon). Even in comedies that objectify female sexual exposure, argues Balides, “the gag  .  .  . plays out the conflict over characters’ different relationships to space.”51 Comedies in which men look up a woman’s skirts, such as A Windy Day on the Roof (Biograph, 1904) or Trapeze Disrobing Act (Edison, 1901), assert an especially strong “association between the woman and the everyday, where space becomes meaningful in relation to the particular activity enacted within it,” as opposed to just the voyeuristic or fetishistic sightlines that it opens up for male peeping toms.52 Like the slapstick films that make sexual sight gags out of women’s public exposure, comedies of female catastrophe do not simply provoke laughter at women’s expense. Rather, laughter erupts from envisioning the pure nonsense of women’s bodies performing traditional tasks in cinematically revolutionized everyday domestic spaces and social landscapes. In these comedies of female catastrophe, the eruption of comical violence functions as a means of sheer survival for women. Women frequently repurpose everyday objects as comic devices to use for expedient ends, usually to ward off sexual aggressors. For example, Trouble with the Washerwoman (Lubin, 1903) concludes with a flood of water rushing towards the spectator, after a harassed washerwoman breaks the dishes and overthrows her washtub to deflect unwanted advances by a lascivious milkman (who has sadistically dropped cold ice down her chest). In this vein, Trouble with the Milkmaid (Lubin, 1903) climaxes with a milkmaid drenching an impertinent cowboy with a pail of freshly squeezed cow’s milk, after he repeatedly attempts to force himself on her with unsolicited kisses. An African American woman similarly pours an entire bucket of cream ale over the head of a drunk Dutchman after he violently flings a glass of beer at her in A Bucket of Cream Ale (Biograph, 1904). The title character of The Irate Model (United States, 1903) destroys an indecent portrait of herself, appropriately bashing it over the artist’s head. While a housemaid’s publicly dangling tongue catches the eye of an aggressive onlooker in the post office, the chemical glue becomes a protective shield for her in A Sticky Woman (1906), as the glue causes the maid and masher to get stuck together by the lips. (She even inherits part of his mustache after a postal clerk cuts them apart with a pair of scissors.) Last but not least, Scene in a Laundry (United States, 1903) depicts several washerwomen’s deflection of the everyday sexual predation that they face at work when they force a rude man into a tub, splash water all over him, and then pour a second bucket of water over his head.

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The gags in these films do not rely on comic devices that go off unexpectedly (as with the prankster who steps on a hose in the Lumières’ L’Arroseur, Arrosé (1895), thus causing a hapless man to get “all wet”). Instead, female self-defense (or retribution) is the impetus for comic explosion. Laughter does not come from the expectation of something dissolving into nonsense (“an affectation from the sudden transformation of a strained expectation into nothing,”53 as Kant has put it), but from a place of simultaneous comic aggression and anxious release at the image of women repurposing everyday things to ward off sexual abuse in borderline traumatic situations. In other films, it is the conjunction between female corporeality and new technology that produces the explosion. In The Old Maid Having Her Picture Taken (Edison, 1901), a woman destroys the camera with her homely visage, literally causing it to explode by posing an unrepresentable iconic object,54 while a pretty woman in An Artist’s Dream (Edison, 1900) spontaneously vanishes upon the incidence of male sexual arousal. Lauren Berlant, in The Female Complaint, invokes such a “conjuncture between extreme violence and the ordinary” as “a sort of slapstick of survival,” producing a “realism wrought from the absurd demands of power, contradictions of human attachment in scenes of inequality, and just the strangeness of difference itself.”55 The fantastic iconography of slapstick, according to Berlant, represents the only language in which the absurd incongruities of everyday power relations can be articulated. Whether too unsightly or too attractive, women’s bodies conspire with machine technologies—with the devices they wield, the apparatuses that record them, and the comic objects that solicit them—to produce altogether disastrous and violent consequences. From the spectacle of spontaneous domestic combustion to women’s uses of the slapstick as a means of self-defense against sexual assault, female corporeality in early film offered a fertile source of comical tension that often erupted in absurdist violence. More than anything, the technologization of female bodies in early film comedies was an utter catastrophe.

2 Female Combustion and Feminist Film Historiography

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he gender politics of female transformation in early slapstick film comedies, so important to theories of laughter, are just as crucial to the history of film itself. In this chapter, I focus on the effects of female combustion (and other spectacles of female bodily alteration) as experimental narrative devices in early filmmaking. In other words, I argue that provocative images of female catastrophe were absolutely central to cinema’s formal and narrative emergence as a storytelling medium. Starting with early jump-cut shorts about exploding women—for example, How Bridget Made the Fire (Biograph, 1900), wherein the short episode ends with the event of combustion—films played with the narrative potential of what women’s bodies might look like in the wake of their destruction. What were the powers and limits of cinema to depict violent scenes of female transfiguration? These images of female combustion—its anticipation, its aesthetic representation, and its ensuing consequences—presented major narrative challenges for visual representation. Moreover, they offered innovative frameworks for telling stories through the disjunctive relations between moving images, here strung together around the fantastic flammability of the female body. Early film comedies about female catastrophe pose unique provocations for feminist media scholarship. Averting the hazards of historical amnesia has been a methodological rallying cry of feminist film studies since

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at least the historical turn in the late 1970s—when the field began to prioritize archival research over semiotic theory and psychoanalysis. As Ann Gordon, Mary Jo Buhle, and Nancy Dye argue in their canonical 1976 essay “The Problem of Women’s History,” the project of writing “women into history necessarily involves redefining and enlarging traditional notions of historical significance. . . . Such a methodology implies not only a new history of women, but also a new history.”1 In order to write this new history, feminist historians have drawn on alternative forms of evidence and documentation.2 Personal memoirs, fan magazines and scrapbooks, urban street maps, women’s club minutes, and subtler affective and aesthetic traces have helped establish the prolific but excluded records of female participation in every aspect of silent filmmaking. Giuliana Bruno, in her study of the forgotten Italian silent filmmaker Elvira Notari, describes some of the challenges of relying on these alternative sources: “In the absence of texts, lost or destroyed, one can only speculate on the mode of production and reception, aware of the limitations of such speculation and its inability to account for differences.”3 In other words, the lack of archival evidence corroborates the ideological limitations of how history comes to be understood and reconstructed through such a narrow range of stories and concepts in the first place. In a very different context, while attempting to escape from Nazis in Vichy, France, Walter Benjamin described history as the “object of a construction” that must continuously be “exploded out of [its] continuum” with a selfserving image of the past, sustained by the hegemonic interests of the hereand-now.4 I thereby approach these female catastrophe comedies as fugitive specters from an undead past—their reappearance further reveals excluded notions of history and complex understandings of its temporal unfolding. I argue that metamorphic women internalized the instabilities of their outside world and the rampant contingencies of modern life through their constant recourse to bodily transformation. They responded to endemic experiences of loss and fragmentation by partially becoming, embodying, and metamorphosing into their impossible objects of everyday use and commercial desire. Their bodily fluidity thus provides a visual record for reimagining the contingency and productive unknowability of the past as such. Beyond supplementing the archive, feminist histories reveal the social impasses and intellectual challenges of the historical moments in which they are written. As Jane Gaines has put it, “For a historical explanation . . .

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to be received as adequate in its moment, it must demonstrate comprehensive explanatory power. . . . To ask why these women were forgotten is also to ask why we forget them.”5 What would it take, then, for a timely historical explanation to remain relevant beyond the instance of its immediacy? Feminist histories inhabit the gaps in official documentation, and they do so through methods that speak pointedly to the limits of their own present times, from the optimism of archival consciousness-raising (Armatage, Acker, Rich, Foster, Higashi, Schlüpmann6) to the prolific studies of female filmmakers in the wake of the alleged “death of the author”7 (Gaines, McMahan, Stamp, Ward, White, Williams8) and the ongoing experiential turn toward issues of memory, emotion, corporeality, and sensation (Bruno, Hansen, Hastie, Stewart, Zhen, and so many others9). In other words, even histories that yield new information will quickly be overlooked and superseded, if not reduced to cliché, without conceptual invention— without the imaginative double-vision that binds the historical erasures of the past to the most egregious injustices of the present. As Rosi Braidotti suggests in Metamorphoses, “The point is not to know who we are, but rather what, at last, we want to become, how to represent mutations, changes, and transformations. . . . In these times of accelerating changes, more conceptual creativity is necessary.”10 Such dilemmas between spectacular invention and diligent repetition are further compounded by the digital media climate in which archival discoveries now circulate: too much new information is always at hand, but researchers face increasing pressures to mark their findings as singularly timely, or they risk being overlooked. Shelley Stamp reminds us of this chronic threat of marginalization in her inaugural introduction to the journal Feminist Media Histories, noting that “scholarship produced by feminist media historians . . . has too often remained on a parallel track, confined to the peripheries of media history, relegated to sidebars set apart from the main text, cast as interesting marginalia in someone else’s story.”11 In this chapter, I look to the spectacle of spontaneous female combustion as a methodological baseline for wresting gendered histories from their parallel tracks. I focus on the variability of female-metamorphosis tropes, from spontaneous jump cuts to more sustained efforts to integrate female bodily fluidity into the emergent narrative discourses of early filmmaking. I ask, when does the playful fluidity of female metamorphosis become physically permanent in terms of cinema’s unstable aesthetic codes and narrative

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practices? Along with these debates in feminist historiographic research, I draw on feminist semiotic theories of narrative violence and epistemological rupture. Catherine Malabou’s idea of “destructive plasticity,” particularly her theorization of the tension between “elasticity” (reversibility) and “plasticity” (permanent change), is key to the concept of comedienne history that I outline in this chapter.12 Techniques in early film editing increasingly concealed the actual damage inflicted on slapstick comedienne bodies, from vanishing ladies who always reemerge unscathed to self-immolating housemaids who experience irreversible bodily destruction.

Comic Film Historiography and the Joke of Female Absence Early films were rife with gendered sight gags depicting female bodily combustion. Laughing spectators particularly relished the spectacle of traditional femininity confronted with modern mass society: women riding bicycles in hoop skirts (Lady Cyclists, 1899), jumping over fences chasing after eligible bachelors (Meet Me at the Fountain, 1904), or licking postage stamps and exposing their tongues to lascivious onlookers (A Sticky Woman, 1906). Tom Gunning invokes the gag as the basic component of slapstick film representation: “Gags are devices that explode, collapse, or fail in some spectacular manner. The self-destructing machine provides a vivid image of the dynamics of a gag.”13 As in the well-known early film L'Arroseur Arrosé (France, 1895), a boy steps on a man’s garden hose, thus preventing it from functioning properly and causing the gardener to spray himself in the face. The anarchic spectacle of the exploding gag (a simple scenario turned on its head) incites uproarious spectator laughter. In a more female-gendered example, Diving Lucy (Mitchell & Kenyon, 1904), a policeman walks onto a plank to rescue a drowning woman, and then seizes her by her “shapely ankles.”14 However, it turns out that the drowning woman is not a woman at all but a fake pair of woman’s legs with a sign attached to the submerged thighs that says, “RATS!” Just as the policeman discovers the hoax, the plank collapses, and he falls into the pond. The fetishistic substitution trick (the prosthetic parts for the wet whole) coincides with the eruption of the gag involving the destruction of the plank. If laughter at Mary Jane’s combustion bridges the image of her interim absence (i.e., the jump cut between her ignition and incineration), then

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sadistic laughter at the policeman’s submersion requires Lucy’s erasure as a corporeal entity. A specter of slapstick, the gendered comedy in Diving Lucy hinges on the disastrous visibility of female disappearance: the exploding machine is the vanishing woman. The early trick film was “defined not only by its use of effects,” argues Matthew Solomon, “but also by its magical or mysterious affect. Trick films were understood as creating a mystifying wonder about what one had just seen.”15 Solomon, like Rob King, invokes Neil Harris’s idea of the “operational aesthetic,” whereby tricks appeal to the delight in problem-solving and to the fascination with observing the inner workings of automatic mechanisms. Gendered tricks, evidently, overlay technological fascination with pornographic exposure, ranging from the woman who gets her skirt blown upward when walking over a hot-air shaft in What Happened on Twenty-Third Street, New York City (Edison, 1901) to the x-ray machine’s nonerotic excess of peeping-Tom voyeurism in The X-Ray Fiend (G.A. Smith, 1897). In a more complex example, An Artist’s Dream (Edison, 1900), a figurative painter falls in love with a woman in his own drawing and fantasizes that she comes to life and emerges from the flat surface of the artwork, only to witness her vanishing upon the instance of his sexual arousal. The mystifying mechanics of screen representation thereby motivate the joke of the artist’s sexual frustration, again animating the comical image of female absence. The spectacle of human combustion holds a crucial place in historiographies of early narrative film devices. Charles Musser emphasizes the causality of what comes after the explosion, analogizing Bridget and Mary Jane to the male rubes who spontaneously combust in films such as The Finish of Michael Casey (United States, 1901), The Smoking Lamp (United States, 1902), Little Willie’s Last Celebration (United States, 1902), and Another Job for the Undertaker (United States, 1901).16 Many of these films motivate their continuity editing post-mortem. For example, Another Job for the Undertaker depicts the plight of an illiterate Irishman who unwittingly extinguishes a gas jet marked “Don’t Blow Out the Gas Jet,” leading to the final scene of his funeral. This film evokes The Finish of Bridget McKeen (Edison, 1901) with its memorable epitaph, “Here Lies the Remains of Bridget McKeen Who Started a Fire with Kerosene.” However, unlike Bridget McKeen, Another Job for the Undertaker elides the image of human combustion by cutting directly to the Irishman’s wake. In contrast, housemaid combustion is an event to be witnessed and visually represented: an

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invitation to bodily experimentation. Male characters who blow themselves up tend to be rubes, country bumpkins, working-class mashers, and hapless child pranksters. Their destruction is depicted as a derisive moral endpoint but often spared overt representation. Housemaid-explosion, on the other hand, is both a spectacle to behold in itself and an opportunity for cinematic play. Exploding housemaids make domestic labor magical; they function like early film magicians. Their anarchic sorcery evokes Georges Méliès characters, such as the crazy scientist who decapitates and quadruples his own head (Four Heads Are Better Than One, 1898), who blows up his head like an inflatable balloon (India Rubber Head, 1901), or who extracts skeletons from living bodies using x-ray devices (A Novice at X-Rays, 1898). However, unlike Méliès’ selfportrayed magicians, women in his early magic films are often relegated to secondary roles—not themselves prestidigitators but blank display cases for projecting and embodying dazzling effects. For example, magical female bodies in Méliès’s films dance in hearts of flames in Beelzebub’s Daughters (Méliès, 1903); are chopped in half and then resurrected as six tiny bodies in A Maiden’s Paradise (Méliès, 1903); or are transmitted from a distance as corporeal telegrams in Long Distance Wireless Photography (Star Film, 1908). Yet their uncanny metamorphoses and bodily liquidity seem beyond their personal control and divorced from the everyday contexts that women’s bodies typically inhabited (such as kitchens or factories). The trope of housemaid combustion condenses the gendered roles of male magician and his enchanted female objects. Doing housework is parlayed into magical sleight-of-hand, with equally transformative and incredible consequences. Housemaid combustion thus becomes a visual opportunity for displaying the fantastic liquidity of women’s bodies in early slapstick film comedies. Moreover, unlike Méliès’ mystical maidens and satanic daughters, these catastrophic housemaids function within vividly mundane domestic and social settings. Their explosions appear as violent, gag-laden daydreams rather than as wholly irrational hallucinations abstracted from any familiar context or conceivable social scenario. As we have seen, not all explosion-themed slapstick comedies function this way to concretize the gender play of magical trick films. Repeatedly, combustion serves as a moral or disciplinary warning when it is the male rube’s (rather than the housemaid’s) body that ignites. For example, as Musser notes, Another Job for the Undertaker integrates somber actuality

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footage of a real funeral instead of the pithy epitaph and stagey backdrop featured in Bridget McKeen (not to mention Mary Jane’s gleefully dancing ghost).17 When Michael Casey lights his pipe while sitting atop a keg of dynamite, causing his body to “shoot up like a bullet from a gun” and then fall to the ground, the other laborers in the mine “flee the site in terror.” Meanwhile, Little Willie, after running to observe a slowly burning firecracker fuse in Little Willie’s Last Celebration, “receive[s] his reward in that place where all good boys go in stories.” Beyond the illiterate rubes who ignore the warning signs, Mary Jane winks at the spectator while heaping excess paraffin onto the fire: this vanishing lady knows exactly what she is doing—her addictive paraffin bottle is like a crazy magic wand, which she later reclaims at her own gravestone as a dancing ectoplasmic specter.

Mary Jane’s Mishap: Female Combustion and Storytelling Narration Although it is a remake, there is really no other film quite like Mary Jane’s Mishap (G.A. Smith, 1903), which I will analyze again here from a different perspective: looking at its place in the emergence of cinema as a storytelling medium. Unlike earlier films, Mary Jane actually depicts and narrativizes the aftermath of the maid’s physical eruption. The film unfolds through the interarticulation between Mary Jane’s bodily metamorphosis and its own cinematic tactics in post-production cutting and editing. In this film, Mary Jane explodes out of the chimney through a vaporous jump cut (figure 2.1): she bursts into a puff of smoke and then rains down over the village skyline in dismembered bodily pieces. Although her dismemberment is temporary, her violent metamorphosis is irreversible. At the end of the film, she returns as a specter at her own gravestone, reassembled but permanently altered into an ectoplasmic version of her former self. She terrifies bystanders in the cemetery and does a gleeful, taunting little dance in front of her own epitaph, which reads, “Here lies Mary Jane, who lighted the fire with paraffin: Rest in pieces” (figure 2.2). Just before departing again, Mary Jane conjures an ectoplasmic icon of her deadly paraffin bottle, reincorporating this destructive object into her translucent body. She holds the bottle over her head and then lowers it over her abdomen, eventually sinking with it and vanishing back into the earth.

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FIGURE 2.1 Frame enlargement from Mary Jane’s Mishap (G.A. Smith, 1903)

FIGURE 2.2 Frame enlargement from Mary Jane’s Mishap (G.A. Smith, 1903)

Both a feat of film editing and a fantasy of reincorporation, Mary Jane’s Mishap positions its spectator somewhere between the subject and the object of laughter. As an embodied, laughing spectator, Mary Jane’s viewer inhabits that nebulous space between the speaking subject of the film text and the living body of the film viewer. The laughing spectator’s relationship to the world of the screen shifts and slips along comically with Mary Jane’s various transfigurations, from the disheveled body to the dismembered body and at last to the ectoplasmic spirit. Mary Jane draws the viewer nearer

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and nearer to the phantom world of trick cinema when she literally incorporates her own comic prop into her trick corporeality. Mary Jane’s liquidity between subjective-person and objective-thing inflects this short trick film’s narrative organization. Her spectral return at the end of the film motivates a new innovation in its visual effects: the scene transitions from a close-up of her tombstone to a full view of her surroundings with a vertical wipe, an innovative and “very unique” use of this device, according to Barry Salt.18 The visual resemblance between the vertical wipe and Mary Jane’s ectoplasmic ascent is striking. More than just an aesthetic parallel, the trope of woman’s destructive metamorphosis provides an impetus for filmmaking to experiment with its own strategies of self-rupture— with the very techniques in visual fragmentation intrinsic to the plotting of film narrative. Metamorphic corporeality thereby co-emerged aesthetically with the articulation of narrative film grammar. Mary Jane’s disheveled appearance and explosive corporeality—neither carnivalesque-grotesque nor slapstick automaton—further exemplifies the methodological messiness of this film’s historiographic positioning. Curiously, this film has been of greater interest to formalist historians outlining the development of early film narration than it has been to feminists writing about sexuality, vernacular modernity, or gendered social politics. For example, Salt reads Mary Jane’s ascent from the ground via the transitional wipe as a gauge of the film medium’s technological sophistication in 1903. Yet gendered comic violence and film storytelling techniques co-developed in uneven relation to one another. Mary Jane reveals the aesthetic tensions between female corporeality and film articulation, or between the comic representation of violence enacted against women’s bodies and the narration of stories through discrete moving images. These entities often converged around the cataclysmic event of female combustion.

Feminist Approaches to Historiographic Rupture The explanation for how film aesthetics move from point A to point B— from single-shot exhibitionism to integrated multi-reel narration, or from debased vaudeville novelties to staples of bourgeois culture—represents a vital terrain of debate in recent film scholarship.19 Rereading film history

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through the archives of female combustion and alongside methodological debates about comedy and gender helps illuminate the spectrality inherent in historical research. This is precisely Jacques Derrida’s notion of specter: something that haunts the present because it is never fully contained in the past, but its future reincarnation always evokes a mixture of dread and desire. “At bottom, the specter is the future, it is always to come, it presents itself only as that which could come or come back.”20 Film historiography today is shaped by the tension between the limitless storage capacity of the digital archive and the irremediable lostness of the past (over ninety percent of silent films from 1894 to 1929 have been lost21). The spectrality of early film archives—never fully absent, always partially lost, and limitlessly savable—bears on longstanding historiographic debates about how to chronicle early film’s development. Beyond the teleological heroism of “firsts,” “origins,” and “linear chronologies” (the same methodologies that have long centered on Charlie Chaplin and erased Laura Bayley) or the colonialist rhetoric that labels preclassical cinema as “primitive”— film historians continue to wrestle with the problem of how to attribute significance without oversimplifying the hybridity of cinematic time and the messiness of nonlinear historiography. The confusing historicity of female combustion highlights the complexities of doing historical research: what it means for historians to understand and reconstruct how film industry standards changed over time. It is a truism that from the motion picture’s invention around 1894 to the solidification of film classicism around 1917, momentous upheavals in both film signification and industry economics were occurring routinely. Rather than corroborate the idea of early film history as a linear trajectory—an approach subject to significant criticism since at least the 1978 Brighton Conference22—my focus on the issue of female combustion helps to sharpen the significance of pre-classical cinema’s temporal hybridity. The messy aesthetics of destructive female metamorphosis reveal the uneven forces driving silent film history. As Jennifer Bean argues in her introduction to A Feminist Reader in Early Cinema, our present-day understanding of early film historiography is foremost shaped by its ellipses and blind spots: “The choice to bracket slightly more than three decades of cinema with the term ‘early’ has little to do with intimating resemblance and similitude and everything to do with claiming dissonance and difference as, precisely, the early period’s unifying

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trademark.”23 Of course, for Bean, emphasizing the thematic of difference reinforces the feminist politics of unearthing lost or forgotten histories about women’s extended (and since unprecedented) participation in every capacity of the early film industry.24 These gendered histories of early film rupture or, as Bean puts it, “the glorious ruins of our disciplinary terrain,” further evoke Catherine Malabou’s notion of “destructive plasticity”:25 Destructive plasticity enables the appearance or formation of alterity when the other is absolutely lacking. Plasticity is the form of alterity when no transcendence, flight or escape is left. The only other that exists in this circumstance is being other to the self.

Because both are preoccupied with the necessary but impossible condition of rewriting history over images of erasure, feminist film historiography and the idea of destructive plasticity stand to gain a great deal from a recognition of their intersections. For example, if we did not witness the vanishing lady’s return at the end of The Vanishing Lady (R. W. Paul, 1897) or Méliès’ dancing lady’s metamorphosis back from a spider into a human form in Baron Munchausen’s Dream (Star Film, 1911; figure 2.3), we might be left with disturbing questions about what really happened to these women

FIGURE 2.3 Frame enlargement from Baron Munchausen’s Dream (Star, 1911)

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during the interim. The comedic spontaneity of female metamorphosis would hit us like a thunderbolt, as unalloyed catastrophe. In other words, we might be forced to confront the image of disjuncture at the very heart of physical transformation, at first playful and amusing until rendered final and permanent. This is precisely Malabou’s concern, though her examples center on photography, literature, and neuroplasticity rather than on cinema. Malabou draws on Freud’s distinction between plasticity and elasticity, emphasizing the traumatic irreversibility bound up in certain forms of destruction. Invoking Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle, she writes: “Plasticity and elasticity are two forces which are irreducible to one another. What is the most significant difference between them? A plastic material, once shaped, cannot go back to its previous state. An elastic material on the contrary is able to return to its initial form after it underwent a deformation.” Plasticity for Freud stems from the indestructability of our earliest psychic formations, which he contrasts with the reversibility of conscious sense-impressions received after the ego-formations of the psyche have already been developed.26 What makes the archetypal plasticity of the psyche so destructive is precisely its ability to undo the complex formations of the developing ego. Early cinema, an explosively popular form of early twentieth-century mass culture, repeatedly represents and reenacts this double bind between enduring knowledge and spontaneous insight. Women’s bodies habitually appear (and disappear) as central figures in early cinema’s epistemological discourse. In their gendered contexts, elasticity and plasticity are useful concepts for understanding the dialectic between permanence and reversibility that shapes female corporeality in early comic and trick films. Women’s bodies in these films always reemerge, frequently unharmed but rarely unchanged by their comical accidents. As Karen Redrobe remarks in Vanishing Women, “The magician—perhaps even in cahoots with the smiling lady—distracts our attention away from the more insidious ideological work that takes places before our eyes, leaving us feeling—wrongly— content and relieved at the apparent absence of violence about which we were momentarily so concerned.”27 While this violence is made more visible in films like Mary Jane—in which the maid explodes out of the chimney— her subsequent bodily metamorphosis from opaque flesh to a translucent specter mitigates the calamity that it simultaneously flaunts.

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These comical images of gendered violence represent crucial provocations for rewriting film history. Such comedies of female catastrophe provoked spectators to laugh rather than shudder at their horrific visions of brutality exercised on women’s bodies, from accidental self-immolation and limb dismemberment to decapitation to punitive laceration. In the very different context of television-news discourse, Mary Ann Doane defines catastrophe as “discontinuity within an otherwise continuous system.”28 As Doane argues, catastrophe coverage asserts a unique instance of rupture and contingency against the ideologies of continuity and liveness intrinsic to televisual flow. Television thereby authenticates its own access to “the real” through recourse to catastrophe, natural disaster, and the interruption of its scheduled programming. Unlike late capitalist television, early trick films and comedies beat their spectators over the head with their own indexicality and aesthetics of contingency. What would it mean, then, to identify the discontinuity within a system already premised on foregrounding—rather than concealing—its own rupture and fragmentation? As Redrobe suggests, this latent image of catastrophe would emerge through the discarded shots in between the trick splice, not just via the excluded film frames themselves but through the ideological question of what happens to a woman’s body in the thick of her physical transformation. The female subjects of comedic catastrophe survive as historiographic specters. They haunt recurring archival interventions in the field of film history.29 The fragmentation of these female bodies, to invoke the Women Film Pioneers Project,30 corroborates the gaping methodological and archival oversights that led to women’s erasures from visibility in film history for so many decades. By confronting the destructive transformation and reassuring reversibility rehearsed by these catastrophic comedienne films, historians might gain footholds (or “eyeholds” as Redrobe puts it31) into the operative forms of disorder, accident, reversal, and contingency driving early film practices.

Beyond Combustion: Archiving Destructive Female Metamorphosis Like Mary Jane, who survives her own incineration and returns as a translucent specter, slapstick comediennes of early trick cinema experience a spectacular array of violent, destructive, and startling changes in bodily form.

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While the conventions of filmmaking (shot length, camera positioning, changes in location, complexity of characterization) changed from month to month, so did the aesthetics and politics of female destructive metamorphosis. Charlie Keil and Shelley Stamp, in their anthology on American Cinema’s Transitional Era, periodize the transitional cinema as the decade from roughly 1908 to 1917. They argue, “No other decade in U.S. film history encompasses such broad-ranging transformation . . . [reflecting] the sheer diversity of representational, institutional, and exhibition practices that co-exist during this moment of transition.”32 Although a trope as slippery as metamorphosis is difficult to categorize, it is possible to pinpoint eight discrete figurations of female shape-shifting, each of which enjoyed varying degrees of popularity at different moments from the 1890s through to the 1910s. These include: 1) Combustion (women exploding): Mary Jane’s Mishap (G. A. Smith,

2)

3)

4)

5)

6)

7)

1903), Nora’s 4th of July (Biograph, 1901), and How Bridget Made the Fire (Biograph, 1900). Micrographia (women figured in miniature): Princess Nicotine (Vitagraph, 1909), The Red Spectre (Pathé, 1907), and The Magic Mirror (France, 1907). (I discuss this trope of female miniaturization in greater depth in chapter 4.) Dismemberment (the live-action animation of female body parts): The Kitchen Maid’s Dream (Vitagraph, 1907), The Dancing Legs (Vitagraph, 1908), and An Odd Pair of Limbs (Vitagraph, 1908). Quick-Change Metamorphosis (like the vanishing-lady trick, this designates a total change in appearance or visibility, usually through a jump cut): Tit-for-Tat (Pathé, 1906), The Vanishing Lady (R. W. Paul, 1897), and Madame’s Cravings (Gaumont, 1906). Gradual Metamorphosis (like Mary Jane’s ectoplasmic specter rising from the ground, a gradual bodily transformation through dissolves, superimpositions, pans, wipes, etc.): The Cigar Box (1907), Daisy Doodad’s Dial (Turner, 1914), and The Elusive Miss Pinkhurst (Warwick, 1912).33 Tableau-Vivant (women posing as statues or paintings and then spontaneously rousing to life): Martyred Presidents (United States, 1901), Kiss Me! (Biograph, 1904), and The Poster Girls and the Hypnotist (Biograph, 1899). Undercranking (the absurd speeding up of bodily movements): Matrimony’s Speed Limit (Solax, 1913), Lea and the Ball of Wool (Cines, 1913), Jane and Her Phonograph (Pathé, 1911).

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8) Slapstick Corporeality (the reverse image of a metamorphosis where the

body refuses to undergo change, even if this means defying every conceivable law of physics): Aunt Sallie’s Wonderful Bustle (Edison, 1901), Eva Is Tired of Life (Pathé, 1911), and The Acrobatic Maid (Pathé, 1908).

The social and industrial contexts of these different figurations of metamorphosis varied dramatically. There is a world of difference between Mary Jane’s specter dancing at her own gravestone in 1903 Britain and a chorus girl dissolving into a cigar in the 1907 French Pathé trick film The Cigar Box. The cultural significance of these gendered techniques, although exported internationally and often reexhibited years later, depended to a large extent on their historical situations and national contexts of production. It is further important to note that not one of these techniques was used exclusively for representing women. For example, Mary Jane’s Mishap is a British adaptation of an American film The Finish of Bridget McKeen (Edison 1901) in which the famous female impersonator Gilbert Saroni plays Bridget. Male bodies are also routinely undercranked (Onésime, Clockmaker, France, 1912) and dismembered (The Thieving Hand, United States, 1908) in any number of Vitagraph, Pathé, or Gaumont trick films. Micrographia and tableau-vivant posing, and to a lesser extent quick-change and gradual metamorphoses, however, privilege female subjects.

FIGURE 2.4 Frame enlargement from La Boîte à Cigares [The Cigar Box] (Chomón, 1907)

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More pointedly, the temporality of female metamorphosis from the earliest years of the medium to the transitional period shifts decisively from too soon to not fast enough: from comic instantaneity to the dilation and slowing down of that instantaneity. By the late 1900s, the impetus for laughter at images of female destruction becomes drawn out or directed toward primarily narrative ends. Rather than exploding out of chimneys, domestic women dismember their limbs (The Kitchen Maid’s Dream, 1907), undercrank or miniaturize their bodies (Lea and the Ball of Wool, 1913; Princess Nicotine, 1909), or fall through the floorboards of multi-story homes while attempting to vacuum (Cunégonde Has Visitors, Lux 1912). Scholarship on early cinema now tends to designate three distinct period paradigms for the silent era: early (1894–1906), transitional (1907–1915), and classical (1916–1927). Jennifer Bean’s decision not to use this periodization but rather to group three decades of women’s film history under the term “early” helps to make clear the specifically feminist stakes of how temporal metaphors animate categories of film periodization. For Jennifer Bean, Diane Negra, Jane Gaines, Amelie Hastie, and others, bracketing the notion of “earliness” reinforces its connotations of social latency. In this narrative, women such as Alice Guy-Blaché and Lois Weber participated in motion picture production34—to an extent that women still have not rivaled to this day—because the medium was not yet “itself,” to invoke the Lumières brothers’ mythic (or likely apocryphal) assertion that cinema was an “invention without any future.”35 As Gaines puts it, “No one knew that motion pictures would become big business. This was not yet a significant industry and with so little at stake (so little power, so little capital), much more could be entrusted to women.”36 While preclassical film’s “earliness” implies a turn away from the teleological nomenclature of “primitivism” for scholars such as Tom Gunning and André Gaudreault, who instead emphasize the significance of its “attractions” or “kine-attractography,” the “early” in early cinema has been the locus of film’s historiographic politics for feminist scholars.37 Foregrounding the earliness that persists through transitional and classical paradigms reveals the catastrophic historicity of women’s bodily comedy: the looming disaster that accumulates when spectators (and film historians) turn a blind eye toward the uncontained destruction of female metamorphosis. “Earliness,” connoting both premature rupture and historical latency, crystallizes the gendered contradictions of “working on lacunae.”38 From early Bridget films in which the woman’s explosion marks the end of

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the film to the narrative integration of female bodily metamorphosis in the wake of the accident, the temporality of the comic itself undergoes repeated transformations. Whereas early film catastrophes hinge upon the temporality of the too soon, historically this dynamic has shifted with industrial efforts to make film metamorphoses conform to the dictates of film storytelling: invisible narration, moral uplift, middle-class legitimacy, efficient productivity, multi-reel duration, and commodity standardization. Women’s physical elasticity in trick comedy films effectively becomes caught between incompatible paradigms of eruption and duration. It is evident that female comic corporeality becomes more brittle and traumatic in conjunction with the industrial transformations of cinematic technologies. Women’s on-screen bodies bend over backwards and break apart in the process of accommodating the industry’s increasing emphasis on multi-reel duration, moral censorship, commodity standardization, and narrative transparency. For example, take the overworked and overtired housemaid in The Kitchen Maid’s Dream: in lieu of combusting, her limbs detach from her body and perform her chores for her while the rest of her body relaxes. Like Mary Jane and Bridget McKeen, the kitchen maid destructively transforms her own body to complete her household labor. “In mysterious manner, her hands become detached—Remove rug from floor and sweep room—Dishes wash themselves—Knives and forks do likewise, and unaided, climb into knifebox.”39 While most female limb-dismemberment antics (such as in The Dancing Legs and An Odd Pair of Limbs) focus on the legs, The Kitchen Maid’s Dream uniquely zeroes in on the hands. The kitchen maid sells her own body for parts in order to resolve the impossible contradictions between her expected productivity and her actual bodily limits. Meanwhile, the image of inanimate objects coming to life corroborates our understanding of the liveliness that’s already been sapped from her alienated soul. Perhaps this is why the socially transformative potentials of metamorphosis so often erupt into scenarios of destruction: in order for static objects to come to life, life must be removed from what we already believe to be animate. Performing the potential terror of an instantaneous cut between improvised exhibitionism and Taylorist planned production, an economic transition simultaneously underway in the film industry, the kitchen maid becomes inconsolable upon waking up when she realizes that her callous

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employers remain completely oblivious to her dream. In lieu of breaking off her hands, the kitchen maid shatters all the dishes and “assumes a commanding attitude awaiting further developments.”40 This woman experiences a political revelation upon rediscovering the physical gap between her own body and the objects that consume her labor. While the commodity formats for motion pictures were becoming more standardized and less flexible for recutting by exhibitors, the alienated kitchen maid must learn that in reality her hands cannot reattach post-dismemberment. In the end, the dishes break where the body will not. Mediating the disjuncture between the dream vision and realist frame scenario, the maid’s dismemberment heightens the importance of cutting in post-production editing. That is, in addition to increasing her labor productivity, the brittleness of the maid’s limbs provides a physical rationale for setting up the relations to the next shot. Her metamorphosis is intimately connected with the film’s integration of continuity-editing techniques. Cinematographically, in The Kitchen Maid’s Dream, stop-motion filmmaking overlays the momentous rupture of her embodied position (her spontaneous dismemberment) with incremental, frame-by-frame adjustments to the locations of her various parts. The kitchen maid’s dismemberment displays the film’s own hybridity between live-action recording and stopmotion animation, as its disjunctive camera and editing techniques parallel the maid’s own physical disassembly. These hybrid techniques also necessitate the film’s intermedial impurity, which encompasses stop-motion animation, profilmic realism, and vaudeville sketch comedy. In this vein, The Kitchen Maid’s Dream evokes Sergei Eisenstein’s latecareer writings on Disney animation in which he revised his early notion of attractions in conjunction with his new interest in something he called the plasmatic. Eisenstein’s earlier notion of attractions, which calls for the spectator’s aggressive subjection to “a sensual or psychological impact,” has been a vitalizing metaphor for describing early cinema’s mode of address.41 However, according to Eisenstein’s later notion, attractions were exemplified not by the circus act but by fire in order to designate the limitless transformative play among different forms and figures as they unfold over time. Eisenstein’s theory of the plasmatic is further suggestive for grappling with the aesthetic and gender politics of transitional film metamorphosis.42 When something significant can happen anywhere on the screen, and when any figure can potentially give way to any other figure—for example,

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a woman can leap out of a painting or transform into a racialized caricature of an ape-man—detonation provides closure to the problem of infinite metamorphosis. However, with the incentive to make longer films that could be exhibited interchangeably by theaters, the thematic of combustion or explosion no longer represented a hard and fast limit to the medium’s play of physical and temporal reversals. Rather, metamorphosis was transformed into a storytelling technique in film editing for explaining the disjunctive relations between shots. The impetus to depict the diegesis in the wake of a character’s own combustion offered a self-reflexive horizon for working through the film medium’s messy, uneven, and often inchoate narrative language.43

The Ethnic and Racial Limits of Female Plasticity Dual invocations of elasticity and plasticity motivate the identity-based politics of female metamorphosis in transitional filmmaking. The limits of female shape-shifting as a form of cinematic masquerade (i.e., not just for women to protect themselves from the probing camera gaze but for filmmaking to cover over the gaps in cinema’s narrative language) were repeatedly drawn around images of racial and ethnic corporeal difference. D. W. Griffith’s early Biograph short Deceived Slumming Party (1908) provides a stark example of how experiments in women’s trick metamorphosis preyed on fears about urban exposure and ethnic contamination. In this short film, a rural married couple, Esra and Matilda, visit Chinatown where they are startled by rats while inspecting a sausage machine. “Matilda is much interested in the operation when a Chink brings in a lot of rats which escape causing her to leap upon a table, and losing her balance falls into the machine and is soon transformed into a sausage. But by reversing the machine she is recovered, none the worse for her experience.”44 Here, Matilda’s physical metamorphosis is figured as totally impermanent and elastic. As an early iteration of Griffith’s melodramatic obsession with female rescue, and specifically with saving white women from ethnic impurity, Matilda’s trick mechanization foreshadows Griffith’s later uses of ethnic contagion and sexual vulnerability to generate desire and suspense. In contrast, in a rare trick short made early in the career of another prolific melodrama director, Lois Weber’s From Death to Life (1913),45 a woman

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is turned into a statue. This film depicts the plight of a Roman scientist who invents a formula for transforming living things into stone, thereby simultaneously preserving and annihilating all organic matter that comes into contact with it. Fortunately, the scientist discovers a second process whereby this fatal mummification can be made reversible. Representing fantasies intrinsic both to comedy and to film spectatorship (i.e., that living bodies can be dually preserved and reanimated), From Death to Life provoked intense responses bordering on hysteria from some female viewers. A 1914 issue of Universal Weekly touts the headline “Woman Deeply Affected By ‘U’ Drama Faints.” A report from a theater proprietor in Crosby, Minnesota, elaborated: “A queer thing happened tonight while I was running From Death-Life [sic]. It so affected a lady in the audience that she fainted twice before she could be taken home. Two doctors worked on her several hours before she came fully out of it. Hard lines, but good advertising for me.”46 Although trick effects make From Death to Life’s violence ultimately reversible, the panacea must be motivated by a diegetic object: the film dramatizes the invention of a prop remedy, an elixir, to make the woman turn back from stone into flesh. Therefore, unlike the sausage-ladies’ bodies in Deceived Slumming Party, the woman’s body in From Death to Life is more plastic than elastic. If there were no threat of permanent transformation, then finding an antidote to her metamorphosis could not be a matter of dramatic suspense. Destructive comic film objects trigger unstable laughing spectator subjects. Anca Parvulescu’s idea of laughter as “an inflamed gushing forth” resonates vividly with the liquidation and reassertion of boundaries performed by these comedies of female catastrophe.47 Female figures in early trick films internalize the constant potential for rupture and change, and the unknowability of objects themselves, by literally embodying the accident. They index the violence of the world around them by partially morphing into it and physically incorporating it. As in Deceived Slumming Party, in which Matilda’s bodily elasticity allows the film to defer her exposure to “the Chink’s rats,” many trick films depict identity reversal and racial masquerade as comic escapes from imminent horrific atrocity. Unlike the dancing women who morph into stenciled butterflies in artistic trick films such as Tit-for-Tat (Pathé, 1906), tropes of racial and ethnic masquerade depict the metamorphosis as figuratively impassable. The Subpoena Server (Biograph, 1906), a light-hearted

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example, varies the already exhausted formulas of the comic chase-film by portraying racial and gender elasticity as inexhaustible avenues for further disguise and escape. As Alice Maurice explains in Cinema and Its Shadow, “The disguise moments work two ways,” first by increasing “the tension of the chase” and then by generating new possibilities to “keep the chase going,” so identity play opens up alternative paths of flight.48 For example, in The Stolen Pig (United States, 1907), a black man who has stolen a white farmer’s pig first disguises himself as a scarecrow and then disguises the pig as his child in order to elude capture.49 Whereas gendered metamorphosis tends to smooth over the disjuncture between cuts by embodying it, disguise and masquerade defer awareness of ethnic, racial, and sexual difference through recourse to mocking caricatures of the other. Laughing Gas (Edison, 1907) draws on racist stereotypes of black corporeal excess and gestural caricature to mitigate anxieties about black women’s presence and participation in public life. As in Mary Jane’s Mishap, gas plays a key role in motivating a woman’s bodily encounter with destructive new devices. The film depicts the contagious hilarity of Mandy (played by Bertha Regustus), an African American woman who is administered nitrous oxide by her dentist. She infects passersby in the streets and on a tramcar with her gleeful hysteria, causes her white middle-class employers to upset their dinner table, and she even compromises the sobriety of a justice of the peace and several police officers who are attempting to indict her. However, the end of the film reverses its carnivalesque whimsies by reframing the device, the laughter-inducing nitrous oxide, as a red herring. Mandy goes to her allblack church, where everyone is carrying on as if the whole edifice had been bombed with laughing gas. Jacqueline Stewart aptly interprets this as a resolution rather than a continuation of the film’s destructive antics: “Mandy’s uncontrollable laughter is virtually indistinguishable from the gesticulations of Black religious ecstasy. . . . By showing that this Black female domestic is . . . a member of the Black community, the film segregates her safely away to achieve narrative closure.”50 Racializing her unruliness, Mandy’s visit to the black church resolves the potential for her corporeal difference to become contagious via technological mediation or mass cultural desegregation. Laughing Gas animates its black bodies while deploying racial stereotypes to naturalize what at first appeared to be an event of metamorphosis. The film’s most ostentatious trick, a substitution splice, occurs early during the dentist scene. The doctor removes from Mandy’s mouth an enormous

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FIGURE 2.5 Frame enlargement from Laughing Gas (Edison, 1907)

tooth that turns out to be nearly as large as her head. As Kyla Wazana Tomkins argues in Racial Indigestion, invoking bell hooks’s well-known anti-racist critique of “Eating the Other,”51 “the black mouth [can be] a site of political intensity itself. . . . [It] speaks, laughs, and eats in the face of the violent desires of white supremacy.”52 In its narrative context in Laughing Gas, however, Mandy’s absurdly oversized tooth is just a decoy metamorphosis that further corroborates the film’s racist suggestion that black bodies are naturally prone to hysterical behavior (rather than transformatively open to it). The giant tooth, an oral riff on the codes of blackface minstrelsy, feeds into racist and primitivist notions of the black body as excessive, grotesque, savage, and radically other (a caricature of a carnivalesque body). The image of the tooth as the locus of this racialized difference, an internal object to be extracted and expelled, further intermingles the comedy of minstrelsy with the terror endemic to dentistry and the fear of losing one’s teeth (which Freud associates with castration). As Sianne Ngai has put it in her discussion of race and animatedness, “The surprising interplay between the passionate and the mechanical” has transformed the animated, excessive body “into a racializing technology in American cultural contexts.”53 By representing the plastic body (which changes irreversibly) as actually elastic through recourse to racial stereotyping, Laughing Gas further derealizes its own referential violence.

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By interrupting and prolonging what is usually an instantaneous metamorphosis, Mandy’s bodily frenzy draws out the film’s racial ambiguity, provoking involuntary laughter from an ambivalent spectator. The film is framed by close-ups of Mandy—a conventional practice, famously used to assault the spectator in Edwin S. Porter’s The Great Train Robbery (1903)— her swollen head wrapped in gauze, visibly in pain but laughing back at the laughing spectator. Mandy’s emblematic shots reflect the laughing spectator’s own oscillation between comic distance and improvised identification. Evoking Bataille’s theory of laughter, Mandy’s hilarity traffics in the proximity between comedy and catastrophe: between jubilant glee and looming threat stirred up by the social contagions depicted in this film.

Spiritualism, Mediumship, Ghosts, and Hysterical Maternity The emergence of feminist politics was fostered by many of these perceived similarities between female embodiment and new media technologies in nineteenth-century American culture. “Mediumship,” a gendered vocation designating women’s politically active capacities to conjure the dead, provided avenues of resistance to traditional domestic norms throughout the 1800s. Under the pretext of imparting messages from beyond the grave, female trance speakers, spirit guides, and séance mediums transgressed the conventional constraints of femininity championed by the Cult of True Womanhood, which advocated feminine purity, piety, and passivity.54 Exaggerating these values to their metaphysical limits, spiritualist mediums traveled the country giving public speeches and performances, sometimes in tandem with leaders of the Women’s Movement such as Lucretia Mott, Lucy Stone, Susan B. Anthony, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. (In Europe, female spiritualist leaders such as the Madame Blavatsky and Georgie Hyde-Lees also conjured spirits and shaped modernist experiments with practices of theosophy, psychography, and automatic writing.55) As Ann Braude argues, “Spirit mediumship emboldened women to overcome internal fears about their capabilities as well as external social strictures. The calm confidence born of spirit guidance contrasted with the insecurity that kept most women off the public platform.”56 Of course, the reverse claim could be made as well: with women’s heightened access to the public

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sphere in the early twentieth century, mediumship politics gave way to sheer showmanship—hence, Mina Crandon’s “teleplasmic hand” that allegedly extended from her surgically altered genitalia and allowed her to produce physical manifestations during séances.57 Ghosts and spirits offered further templates for feminist humorists to illustrate the inherent absurdity of classical ideals of femininity whereby women were meant to embody the transcendence of carnal matter and ascendance of an ethereal spirit.58 As Charlotte Perkins Gilman quips, Now let us admit for the sake of argument that the individual persists after death, and that it is able to appear to us. What we see is a ‘spirit.’ But as we have no knowledge of the looks of a spirit we clothe it in what we are pleased to call a ‘spiritual body,’ which is a contradiction in terms as who will speak of a ‘physical soul.’ . . . Again for the sake of argument we will admit this anomaly, this stark paradox, a spiritual body, but can anyone believe in spiritual pantalettes? Can we seriously accept spiritual ruffles and embroidery, spiritual starch and, inevitably a spiritual laundress?59

It is unclear whether Gilman was familiar with the histories of “crinoline conflagration” or even with the iconography of female film combustion (she did write on cinema60) when she published “These Too, Too Solid Ghosts” in 1926. However, it is uncanny how perverse and satirically humorous she finds the female trappings of embodied spectrality. As the gendered social histories and feminist film archives that I have outlined exemplify, “spiritual starch” and the “spiritual laundress” were by no means novel anachronisms in 1926; rather, they were longstanding agents of combustion that had provoked affects oscillating between traumatic horror and laughing convulsions for both uproarious spectators and derisive observers alike. Braude traces these interlocking histories of gender politics and spiritualist mediumship in Radical Spirits. She discusses the distinguished professor of medical jurisprudence R. Frederic Marvin, who diagnosed women’s “mediomania” as a symptom of “utromania”: He argues that “the angle at which the womb is suspended in the pelvis” represents the dividing line between sanity and insanity. “Tilt the organ a little forward . . . and immediately the patient forsakes her home, embraces some strong ultraism— Mormonism, Mesmerism, Fourierism, Socialism, oftener Spiritualism. She

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becomes possessed by the idea that she has some startling mission in the world.”61 Marvin frequently associated the physical risks to inciting “utromania” with modern technologies such as the railroad, as well as the with the projection devices that women mediums used to abet their reincarnations of the dead. Womb tilt, he suggested, was a symptom of the effects of rupture and spontaneous movement on the female body, and a hazard endemic to women’s infiltration of public life. If spiritualist mediums parlayed the bodily jolts of modernity into metaphysical gateways for undead speech, female hysterics were accused of bodily possession for exhibiting symptoms far less spectral (such as hypersexuality, hiccupping, and somnambulism). As Rae Beth Gordon, Zhang Zhen, Lynne Kirby, and many others have demonstrated, women’s comic depictions in early cinema were often entangled with contemporaneous scientific discourses of neurasthenia.62 “The correlation between neurasthenia and modern life was made again and again.”63 Like neurasthenia, which was said to somaticize external stimuli, female metamorphosis internalizes its comic object (such as Mary Jane’s paraffin bottle) by attempting to embody the external potential for accident. These entanglements between motionpicture metamorphosis and scientific anxieties about “womb tilt” indeed bear further unpacking. Alice Guy-Blaché’s trick film about pregnancy, Madame’s Cravings (Gaumont, 1906), comically invokes latent anxieties about “utromania.” In this film, a voracious young pregnant woman on the cusp of her due date gads about town, wreaking havoc by promiscuously stealing various consumable items from bewildered bystanders; meanwhile, her desperate husband trails behind her doing damage control and toting their already born child in a pram. Madame’s cravings are fitfully heterogeneous: she seizes a lollipop from a little girl, a glass of absinthe from a “wine-lover,” a herring from a crippled beggar, and a smoking pipe from a traveling salesman. With each indulgence, the cut between visual desire and carnal pleasure is bridged by an exhibitionist view of Madame directly addressing the spectator while she consumes her treat. Finally, the couple chances upon a cabbage-patch, where their new child is born through a trick splice (a throwback to The Cabbage Fairy, Guy-Blaché’s 1896 trick fairytale about biological reproduction). At this point, the husband brings over the pram and makes room for the newborn baby alongside its older sibling.

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FIGURE 2.6 Frame enlargement from Madame a des Envies [Madame’s Cravings] (Gaumont, 1906)

It is curious and significant that Guy-Blaché reserves the main trick for the scenario of birth but not for those of physical consumption. Early films such as The Big Swallow (UK, 1901) certainly did not shy away from scenes of trick orality. In The Big Swallow, a still photographer is eaten alive by his own posing subject, Sam Dalton, and the cinematic spectator follows the cameraman down Dalton’s mouth and gullet. In contrast, Madame’s Cravings does not even go near Madame’s tonsils (let alone her abdomen), because the premature emergence of the trick might border too closely on inhabiting a pregnant woman’s womb. Even her stomach could be a site of profound anxiety for the film spectator. To invoke Tomkin’s notion of racial indigestion again, “For if digestive upset is provoked by the internalization of the foreign object through the mouth, indigestion . . . is a sign of what happens when the metabolic process is reversed, when the bowels speak back to the stomach.”64 If Madame were to test the cinematographic limits of her cravings, thereby swallowing the camera, now where would that place the spectator? In Cinematernity, Lucy Fischer reads vanishing-lady films through the lens of maternal ambivalence: the psychic terrors of the “dreadful woman” and the “domineering mother” motivate the womb iconographies that often surround trick vanishings.65 In its partial narrativization

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in Madame’s Cravings, the gendered trick splice—here at the very climax of gestation—deliberately lingers as an unrealized possibility throughout most of the film. A premature metamorphosis would threaten to collapse the tenuous line between laughter and terror that the trick film works so hard to safeguard. As Malabou argues in The Ontology of the Accident, the notion of a metamorphosis without a transition, of a spontaneous transformation that takes place too soon or before its time, is a potential site of absolute terror for the body that disidentifies with its own image. Malabou discusses Marguerite Duras, who represents herself in her novel The Lover as an “aged girl”: “A woman [changed] by accident, too soon, subjected to a destructive plasticity.” Duras recounts having changed overnight at the age of eighteen from a “pretty young girl” to a “ravaged” old woman. Her very being was “broken at an unlocatable point, forcing it to change direction, to become other . . . a snapshot of an absolute metamorphosis.”66 Rupturing the fluidity of elastic metamorphosis, plasticity is aligned with the stasis underlying movement: “a snapshot of an absolute metamorphosis.” In the context of trick filmmaking, Malabou’s metaphor is extremely suggestive: this snapshot of an irreversible metamorphosis resonates with the image of female rupture that slapstick comedienne films widely flaunt and thematize. What happens to the missing links of time captured by still photographs when they are animated and incited to continuous movement? They become the implied images in between the cut: missing links inferred by film spectators and suggested through a variety of narrative and editing devices. Female metamorphosis provided one such device for smoothing over the disjuncture between images while also visualizing this chasm through the depiction of jolting bodily transformations: women combusting, metamorphosing, auto-dismembering, speeding up, springing to life, and surviving catastrophe. Perhaps defensive about its particular basis in still photography (since the trick of the trick film hinges on the visual erasure of an interim image), this early 1900s cinema frequently plays on its own magical superiority to still photography. When the camera subject consumes the still photographer in The Big Swallow (cinema ingesting its allegedly inferior medium), the trick shot follows the photographer down the subject’s throat and gullet and then back out through his mouth and lips. In contrast, rather than risk exposing the viewer to even a proximate encounter with Madame’s uterus,

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Madame’s Cravings defers any encounter with its own line between stasis and movement—between the instantaneity of the trick splice and the lived duration of gestation and labor. Madame, the comic object of ridicule, can devour the whole public sphere if she pleases: her extreme behavior is no doubt driven by her hyperactive womb movement. Madame’s Cravings thereby literalizes the subjective instabilities of the comic through recourse to tropes of hysteria.67 The utromaniacal woman, goaded by her womb tilt, embodies the deeper terrors that motivate ambivalent laughter, and are further triggered by the libidinal upheavals endemic to modern industrial life. In the end, according to the film, difference can be safely quarantined inside an other’s irrationally behaving body and then, like the scientific reaction of combustion, instantly excreted with a trick splice. Like the leap into laughter that lands us “plumb in the centre of Nothing” (to invoke Wyndham Lewis), the place of this Nothing for laughing film spectators resides in the missing link between two violently incongruous images of female corporeality.68

Metamorphosis as Meta-Historiography Preclassical cinema (1894–1917) obsessively represents and rehearses its own processes of formal and industrial transformation through images of visual metamorphosis. From combusting housemaids to spontaneous public pregnancies and hysterical African American dental patients, the different temporal iterations of comic metamorphosis intersected with gendered political histories that extended well beyond the screen. In this chapter, I look at early and transitional trick films’ slippages of metamorphosis—of ushering figures spontaneously from one form to the next—in order to think about how they enact their own historiographic meta-narratives; namely, how they reflect upon the aesthetic and industrial changes that they simultaneously perform. I have argued that destructive metamorphosis represents an endpoint in early accident films, such as How Bridget Made the Fire (1900), but that it becomes articulated and deployed as an interim device in subsequent films ranging from Mary Jane’s Mishap (1903) to Laughing Gas (1907) to From Death to Life (1913). Vanishing women can dissolve into cigars, metamorphose into spiders, or moonlight in cross-ethnic drag before reappearing through a trick

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splice. They can disembody their own limbs in their stop-motion dreams, and undercrank their bodies to demolish their family homes. Yet, launching themselves forward in fantasy time, their films always seem to pull back from physical transformations that might occur too soon. Bridging the terror of a metamorphosis without any transition, these self-reflexive slapstick bodies spring from the absences and ellipses that haunt archival film histories. Like the aftermath of a film trick that invites us not to see transformation in process, these comedienne specters will return without warning, again to unleash their untimely destruction.

Part 2 Transitional Film Metamorphosis

3 Slapstick Comediennes in Transitional Cinema Between Body and Medium

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he female slapstick performer’s body in silent cinema displays a physical indestructibility and at the same time an incapacity to adapt to the world around it. Rough-and-tumble comediennes such as Mabel Normand, Marie Dressler, or Sarah Duhamel are more likely to survive a dynamite explosion unscathed than to bypass a puddle without undergoing severe physical humiliation. For example, in what a contemporary reviewer calls “a very laughable picture,” Eva Is Tired of Life (Pathé, 1911),1 an alienated, overworked female laborer with an “indestructible constitution” unsuccessfully attempts to put an end to her miseries: “She leaps over a bridge to bounce back again; she sits unharmed beneath a builder’s falling shaft; In the fireworks’ [sic] establishment she is rescued unharmed after a terrific explosion.”2 Making surplus leisure time “fun” for so many of the film’s female spectators, Eva’s staggering corpse paradoxically becomes hyper-energetic on the brink of its total collapse. The tensions between Eva’s corporeal antics and her bodily exhaustion motivate the film’s own madcap movements across a range of geographical and socioeconomic locations. Playing with different permutations of embodied spectacle and narrative continuity, the film harnesses Eva’s wild corporeality as an impetus for working through the industry’s own social and aesthetic contradictions: those between debased early attractions and bourgeois ideals of narrative

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FIGURE 3.1 Frame enlargement from Lea e il Gimitolo [Lea and the Ball of Wool] (Cines, 1913)

integration. (Figure 3.1, from Lea and the Ball of Wool, shows a similar instance of wild corporeality.) The slapstick genre emerged as a staple of entertainment during the most precarious years of the motion picture industry. American and European film industries from the mid-1890s through the 1910s can be characterized by their climates of instability and constant transformation. As I discussed in chapter 2, transitional cinema negotiates unevenly between two antithetical modes of address: an exhibitionist style typified by its anarchic violence and gleeful foregrounding of movement, and the integrated narrative system that was firmly established by 1917. Whereas the early “cinema of attractions” directly solicits the attention of the spectator (with frequent bows, smirks, and winks at the camera), narrative cinema attempts to absorb the spectator by effacing the visibility of its own signification. In this chapter, I focus on the adaptation of early cinema’s gendered comic tropes (combustion, sexual exposure, and other sight gags), which were made to conform to transitional cinema’s codified narrative grammar. I look closely at gendered representations of slapstick violence and trick metamorphosis in films from about 1907 to 1915, and particularly at the different ways in which women’s comical gestures were integrated into filmmaking’s emergent storytelling machine. In Eva Is Tired of Life, Eva’s indestructible body works to conjoin the various geographical locations that the film traverses: from a bridge

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overlooking the city, to a dangerous building shaft, to a factory that massproduces fireworks. Unlike the demonic objects or crazy machines of earlier comic chase films—such as The Wig Chase (Pathé, 1906); The Drunken Mattress (Gaumont, 1906); or The ‘?’ Motorist (Animatograph, 1906)—Eva’s body plays the role of the thing that has become out of control. In other words, unlike the bald lady who sprints across Paris in The Wig Chase, Eva is not in pursuit of a missing hairpiece or even a detached body part: she chases after her own mortality. Her simultaneously used-up and inexhaustible body thereby stands in for the out-of-control object (a device that is conventional to the comic chase film). Gendered trick films like Eva Is Tired of Life swivel between spectacle and narrative, between the body and the medium, in order to adapt visual tropes of female physical comedy to the formal constraints and moral strictures of narrative film storytelling and film industry culture.

Gendered Violence and the Laughter Debates There were heated debates in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, throughout the years of cinema’s emergence and codification, about the social meaning and cultural value of laughter. Typically, the argument goes that we laugh at someone as a form of cruelty in order to correct that person’s behavior. Henri Bergson defines laughter as “a social gesture that singles out and represses a special kind of absent-mindedness in men and in events.”3 Thomas Hobbes, Boris Sidis, James Sully, George Vasey, and many other philosophers and intellectuals all made versions of this argument: that laughter represents a corrective tool for keeping people in line. It is always premised on distance—emotional and psychological—between the laughing subject and the object of ridicule.4 Charles Baudelaire described laughter as “Satanic,”5 while James Sully regarded it as an expression of moral and psychological superiority “to laugh away something in [society’s] members which it sees to be unfitting.”6 These longstanding debates about comical laughter and its perceived social effects helped mediate the ongoing crises of decorum that governed female physicality in transitional silent film comedy. The gender dynamic of slapstick ridicule was always a major point of controversy for industry filmmakers working in the comedy genre.

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Mack Sennett, the director of Keystone comedies, lamented that “men don’t want to laugh at pretty girls, not convulsively anyway, and so the actresses who specialize in all-out slapstick tend to be women like Marie Dressler, Phyllis Allen, Louise Fazenda, Polly Moran, Dot Farley, Charlotte Greenwood, Martha Raye, and Judy Canova, whom the ordinary male wouldn’t think of romantically anyway.”7 Many Keystone films such as The Fatal Mallet (1914), Teddy at the Throttle (1917), and Tillie’s Punctured Romance (1914)— featuring Normand, Swanson, and Dressler respectively—were famous for their repetitive, violent knockabout gags and ingenious choreography of the clown’s bodily disintegration.8 Slapstick violence always teeters between episodic repetition and the risk of irreversible bodily damage; however, this anxiety becomes especially charged when women’s bodies take on the simultaneous hyper-vulnerability and physical invincibility of the slapstick clown.9 Sennett’s claim that men do not want to laugh convulsively at pretty women (because it transgresses classical ideals of femininity as uncorrupted and ethereal) misses the point of precisely why audiences were so excited to see women performing in the slapstick genre and why they were obsessed with witnessing every possible permutation of women’s bodily violation and rescue. Slapstick knockabout was a crucial component of this underlying fixation with testing the limits of female durability. Uncertainties about the boundaries governing female comic violence galvanize the plot of many transitional film comedies. For example, in the Keystone comedy Love, Speed, and Thrills (1915), Minta Durfee plays the wife of recurring series character Ambrose (Mack Swain), who has the misfortune of saving an evil villain Mr. Walrus (Chester Conklin) from hanging himself. After releasing the man from his noose, Ambrose invites him into his home, where Mr. Walrus proceeds to seduce Mrs. Ambrose, spurring a multi-car, extended chase sequence to save her from abduction and sexual violation. The bodies of everyone involved become completely fantastic and invulnerable to harm, with Mrs. Ambrose falling from a high-speed vehicle at least a dozen times without a scratch. By actualizing and exaggerating the violence that the chase pursuit is meant to prevent, Love, Speed, and Thrills lampoons the film industry’s Victorian obsession with safeguarding women’s bodies from exposure or injury in the public sphere. This preoccupation had become a plot point in a disproportionate number of film melodramas, epitomized by rescue films such as D. W. Griffith’s The Lonely Villa (1909)

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and Lois Weber’s Suspense (1913), both films about women who telephone for help on the brink of sexual assault by violent intruders.10 Women’s physical comedy sprang from a recurring, underlying tension about the viability of its own continued existence, ideologically, physically, and commercially. What would it mean for women’s bodies to become funny in new, dynamic, and surprising ways that worked against the bourgeois upward mobility and institutional standardization of the American film industry? As the Victorian novelist and philosopher George Meredith has put it, the test of “true comedy” should be its ability to elicit “thoughtful laughter”: “That slim, feasting smile, shaped like the long bow, was once a big round satyr’s laugh, that flung up the brows like a fortress lifted by gunpowder. The laugh will come again, but it will be of the order of the smile, finelytempered, showing sunlight of the mind, mental richness rather than noisy enormity.”11 Such fixations with extracting laughter from the body (to make laughter all about the mind, the spirit, or the soul) were eagerly adopted by the motion picture trade press throughout its social improvement campaigns. Moving Picture World columnist W. Stephen Bush warned exhibitors of “The Failure of the Premium Gag” in 1908, advising them to “realize the importance of women and children, without whom, indeed, the electric theater could not long exist.  .  .  . The rough and vulgar are in the minority everywhere, and the moment that you begin to cater to them, you place yourself on the sliding board.”12 (In this vein, the New York Herald in 1898 ominously instructed women to adopt something called “the new laugh”: “It is not so much of a laugh, to tell the truth—though it is intended to do duty as one. . . . It is a laugh, all but the sound, all but the opening of the mouth and the showing of the teeth.”13) Like the feminist writer Agnes Repplier, who invokes the ridiculous as the “just guardian of our minor morals,”14 Bush endeavors to clarify the distinction between “refined comedy” and “the rough, coarse, and vulgar laugh.” As James Sully has argued, “This hurtful edge in laughter becomes one of its valuable social properties.”15 Likewise, Bush admits that even “a saint must laugh at the man who suddenly loses his balance and falls on his back. It is not a degrading spectacle! It is goodnatured fun, calling for good-natured laughs.” The ambiguous line between degrading spectacle and good-natured fun fell especially hard upon women (figure 3.2).

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FIGURE 3.2 Frame enlargement from Daisy Doodad’s Dial (Turner, 1914)

Transitional Comedienne Tropes In the years following the American film industry’s coordinated reform and uplift campaigns (which escalated in 1908), and prior to the formation of Mack Sennett’s Keystone Film Company in 1914 (alongside Henry Lehrman’s L-KO, Al Christie’s company, and Komic Pictures16), comedy represented a major frontier in the social struggles over filmmaking’s artistic legitimacy and social respectability. Instead of combusting out of chimneys, housemaids were more likely to receive makeovers (A Lady and Her Maid [Vitagraph, 1913]) or to teach their employers lessons about social humility and moral decorum (One Can’t Always Tell [Vitagraph, 1913]). Similarly, the working women who warded off public assaulters and sadistic mashers in early films (1894–1906), instead of repurposing gag devices as sexual defense weapons (see chapter 1), would now more frequently play mild office pranks on their male employers that eventually resulted in romantic coupling and matrimony (The New Stenographer [Edison, 1908], Stenographer Troubles, and The Troublesome Secretaries17). Yet there were many exceptions to these defanged “comedies of manners” about bourgeois misunderstandings and mundane situational conflicts. The sheer range of slapstick comedienne films, I argue, reveals the inconsistencies of aesthetic style during

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this period (1907–1915) and the extent to which industry filmmakers and reformers lacked intentional control or ambassadorship over their own cultural commodities. The key tropes of comedienne slapstick during this transitional period can be summarized as follows: 1) Pranksters/Tomboys: Usually children, teenagers, or cross-dressing young women who defy the expectations of their proper femininity by playing sadistic pranks on their family members, romantic suitors, colleagues, and neighbors. Examples include Saucy Sue (Lubin, 1909), The Neighbor’s Kids (Essanay, 1909), Just a Bad Kid (Thanhouser, 1912), Miss Mischief (Thanhouser, 1913), and numerous European comic series, such as Pathé Comica’s Léontine (1910– 1912), Hepworth’s Tillie (1910–1915), and Cines’ Lea (1910–1916). 2) Revenge-Seekers: Like adult versions of the adolescent prankster characters, these women perform comical-destructive antics that are motivated by their overriding desires for revenge, usually against exploitative employers, unfaithful paramours, stifling family members, or irritating bystanders. Examples include The Kitchen Maid’s Dream (Vitagraph, 1907), The Servant’s Revenge (Urban, 1907) Nellie, the Beautiful Housemaid (Vitagraph, 1908), Mixed Babies (Biograph, 1908), The Servant’s Revenge (Lubin, 1909), The Colored Stenographer (Edison, 1909), The Fallen Idol (Edison, 1909), Too Much Dog Biscuit (Essanay, 1909), Jane on Strike (Pathé, 1911), Wifie’s New Hat (Lubin, 1911), Mandy’s Social Whirl (Lubin, 1911), Hypnotizing the Hypnotist (Vitagraph, 1911), and Lea and the Ball of Wool (Cines, 1913). 3) Old Maids / Ugly Spinsters / Henpecking Wives / Fat Ladies / Mothersin-Law: There was no limit to the number of mother-in-law jokes that might grace transitional silent film comedies. Most of these films rely on ridicule and mean-spirited sight gags about ungainly and unbearable women who get electrocuted, frozen, blown into outer space, mesmerized, and eaten alive. This genre justifies its inheritances from the vulgar device gags of early slapstick by alienating the spectator’s sympathies from the tormented female protagonists, whose aggravations and tortures are stretched out across multiple shots, scenes, and locations. Examples include Old Maid’s Temperance Club (Edison, 1908), Ma-inLaw Mesmerized (Gaumont, 1908), Magnetic Vapor (Lubin, 1908), Leap Year Proposals of an Old Maid (Vitagraph, 1908), The Jealous Old Maid; or, No One

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to Love Her (Vitagraph, 1908), And the Villainess Still Pursued Him (United States, 1909), What the Cards Foretold (Edison, 1909), Edith’s Avoirdupois (Lubin 1910), Missionary and the Maid (Edison, 1909), Eradicating Auntie (D.W. Griffith, 1909), A Queen of the Burlesque (Edison, 1910), Queer Folks (Vitagraph, 1911), and Freezing Auntie (Edison, 1912). 4) Vixens / Coquettes / Adulterers / Wronged Spouses: There is a certain amount of overlap between these characters and the revenge-seekers. What differentiates them primarily is that whereas revenge-seekers seek justice for their domestic exploitation, these women pursue relief from sexual harassment and/or spousal infidelity. Unlike the polite domestic comedies celebrated during this time (see category #6), these films depict violent gags, overt sexual exhibitionism, and anarchic escalations of destructive conflict. Examples include Under the Old Apple Tree (Biograph, 1907), Mashing the Masher (Vitagraph, 1908), Madam Flirt and Her Adopted Uncle (Lubin, 1908), The New Maid (Lubin, 1908), The Magnetic Eye (Lubin, 1908), A Very Fine Lady (Louis Feuillade, 1908), Flirtation Collar (Phoenix, 1909), The Pretty Milliner (Pathé, 1909), On the Wrong Scent (Essanay, 1909), The Vixen (Powers, 1910), The Lady Barbers (Selig, 1910), Close Combat (Romeo Bosetti, 1911), and The New Maid Is Too Much of a Flirt (Ambrosio, 1912). 5) Suffragettes/Feminists: There were hundreds of slapstick comedies about the perils and potentials of women’s suffrage and gender equality produced from the early 1900s through to the 1910s. Some of these films are extremely derisive of suffragettes while others support and empower women, but most are radically ambiguous in their political messages, using comedy as a modality to navigate uncharted gender terrain. (See chapters 6 and 7 for a thorough discussion of dozens of these films.) Examples include The Holy Hermit (British Gaumont, 1908), When Women Win (Lubin, 1909), How Women Win (Powers, 1911), When Women Rule (Selig, 1912), A Suffragette in Spite of Himself (Edison, 1912), Milling the Militants: A Comical Absurdity (Clarendon, 1913), The Suffragette Sheriff (Kalem, 1912), How They Got the Vote (Edison, 1913), and A Cure for Suffragettes (Biograph, 1913). 6) Comediennes of Manners: Situational antics, domestic misunderstandings, coy games of matrimony, cosmetic makeovers, commodity sprees, and perfectly respectable office pranks abound. Examples include the Mr. and Mrs. Jones series (Biograph, 1908–1909), Vitagraph’s domestic pairings with Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Drew (When Two Hearts Are Won, 1911; A Sweet Deception, 1913; A Lesson in Jealousy, 1913);

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and with Flora Finch and John Bunny (Her Crowning Glory, 1911; A Cure for Pokeritis, 1912; Pandora’s Box, 1912); and with Florence Turner and Maurice Costello (A Tin-Type Romance, 1910; The New Stenographer, 1911; When Persistency and Obstinacy Meet, 1912), and many others. (See chapter 4 for further discussion of the Vitagraph comedies, and chapter 5 for more on D.W. Griffith’s Jones series.) 7) Anarchic / Out-of-Control Bodies: (Most of these examples are European films, many of which were exhibited but also censored in the United States.) Again, there is a certain amount of overlap between, say, the hell-raising housemaid, the destructively attractive vixen, and the activist suffragette in their cinematic figurations. The out-of-control bodies in this category, however, create violent mayhem and mass uproar for no good reason. It is not because they want to vote, are too sexually attractive, or are seeking revenge against their abusers; they pursue visceral fun and invigorating destruction (dancing, making whoopee, chasing useless objects, inciting senseless violence) for no other reason than that it feels good, and what else are they going to do? Examples include Laughing Gas (Edison, 1907), The Merry Widow Waltz Craze (Edison, 1908), The Lady Lunatic’s Hat (Paul, 1908), Simple Home Dinner (Edison, 1909), Caught by the Coupon Craze (Edison, 1909), Cohen at Coney Island (Vitagraph, 1909), The Mechanical Mary Anne (Hepworth, 1910), A Woman’s Curiosity (Lubin, 1911), Eugénie, Straighten Up! (France, 1911), and numerous series such as Pathé Comica’s Rosalie et Léontine (France, 1910– 1912) and Pétronille (France, 1912–1916), Lux’s Cunégonde (France,1911–1913), and Cines’ Lea (Italy, 1910–1916). 8) Uncanny Metamorphoses / Dreamers: Women metamorphose into spiders, apes, butterflies, and satanic ghosts; get miniaturized and trapped inside of jars; dismember their limbs and clone their bodies; are chased by cannibals and then eaten alive (or eat others alive); and undergo any other sort of bizarre transfiguration imaginable. Their fluid corporeality oscillates between provoking comical awe and uncanny terror. The contexts of these metamorphoses are typically fantastic (magic films) or unconscious (films about women dreaming). (See chapter 2 and 4 for more thorough discussion of many of these films.) Examples include The Doll’s Revenge (Hepworth, 1907), The Kitchen Maid’s Dream (Vitagraph, 1907), Magic Mirror (France, 1907), The Red Spectre (Pathé, 1907), The Professor’s Secret (Gaumont, 1908), The Nursemaid’s Dream (Hepworth, 1908), Wonderful Eggs (Pathé, 1908), Princess Nicotine (Vitagraph,

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1909—see chapter 4 for an extensive close reading of this film), Tobacco Mania (1909), Bessie’s Dream (Selig, 1912), The Hoodoo Hat (Kalem, 1912), Daisy Doodad’s Dial (Turner, 1914), and A Florida Enchantment (Vitagraph, 1914).

Most of the films listed above have slipped through the cracks of historiographic research and attention. (For complete descriptions and archival information about many of these examples, see my slapstick comedienne Annotated Filmography in the appendix.) As I explain in the introduction to this book, for feminists interested in the comedy of female sexuality (Williams, Balides, Redrobe, Mayne, Hansen), early cinema has offered a more fertile terrain for theorizing the ambiguous gender politics of sight gags about female sexual exposure.18 Meanwhile, the vast majority of scholarship on silent film comediennes has centered on movie stars from the 1910s and 1920s (such as Mabel Normand, Colleen Moore, Clara Bow, Louise Fazenda, and Marion Davies) and on the anarchic slapstick politics of Keystone comedies (Keystone was not formed until 1914). Very few of the silent slapstick comediennes who have been recuperated by recent feminist film historiographies reached peak productivity before the mid1910s and 1920s.19 There are important exceptions to this practice of excluding slapstick comediennes from historiographic paradigms. For example, Jacqueline Stewart’s essay in Stamp and Keil’s volume on American Cinema’s Transitional Era, “What Happened in the Transition? Reading Race, Gender, and Labor Between the Shots,” focuses on racial representation and the uneven corporeal politics of U.S. filmmaking from 1907 to 1914.20 Stewart argues that “the fluctuation between Black figures as curiosities and characters, known and unknown, predictable and surprising is more pronounced during the transitional era than either before or after classical narrative style is codified.”21 In other words, the instability of transitional film conventions offered African American women opportunities to perform as something between stereotyped sight gags and cohesive film characters. For example, black women function as sight gags in early films such as A Kiss in the Dark (Biograph, 1904) and What Happened in the Tunnel (Edison, 1903), in which anxieties about white women’s sexual vulnerability in spaces of transit get parlayed into racist jokes about the exaggerated absurdity of racial miscegenation (i.e., white men unwittingly molesting black women). Similarly, black women are typically reduced to offensive

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stereotypes (“mammy,” “coon,” “jezebel,” “mulatto,” etc.) in 1910s and 1920s narrative film comedies, from the veiled African American lady whose race nearly drives a desperate bachelor to suicide in Matrimony’s Speed Limit (Solax, 1913) to the terrified, superstitious black maid (played by Gertrude Howard), who provides cover for Colleen Moore’s ingénue flapper character in Synthetic Sin (First National, 1929). Whereas racial stereotyping offers a form of narrative resolution in these films, transitional comedies such as Nellie, the Beautiful Housemaid (Vitagraph, 1908), Mixed Babies (Biograph, 1908), Laughing Gas (Edison, 1907), and Under the Old Apple Tree (Biograph, 1907) draw out their sight gags to narrativize the comedy of not just transitional filmmaking but also “blackness in transition.”22 Stewart’s reading of gender and racial performance in transitional filmmaking can be productively extended to describe more generally the position of female corporeality during this transitional period.

Transitional Comediennes in Silent Film Historiography From saucy stenographers to electrocuted mothers-in-law, comedienne characters posed vivid narrative and aesthetic challenges for filmmakers. Gendered gags now required greater motivation to justify both their filmic duration and the social value of their popular visibility.

Spinsters and Mothers-in-Law The derisive mockery of caricatured women (mothers-in-law, spinsters, old maids, etc.) provided a pretense for depicting gendered violence that was otherwise excluded from comedies of manners. At the same time, the sadistic destruction of these unwanted female bodies often conflicted with the need to prolong and complicate the logistics of the gag, producing a counter-aesthetics and contradictory politics of comedienne slapstick corporeality. Even cruel or callous laughter could still cut both ways. For example, in Freezing Auntie (Edison, 1912), Mr. and Mrs. Henpeck try to rid themselves of a pesky spinster relative by giving her “freezing serum.” Playing on the tableau-vivant gags used extensively in early films such as Kiss Me! (Biograph, 1904) and The Hilarious Posters (1906), auntie’s

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mobility between stasis and movement is further narrativized here. Wise to the Henpecks’ scheme, she only pretends to be frozen and then “transforms herself into a ghost” to haunt the family when they return from supper. Like Mary Jane’s dancing ectoplasm in Mary Jane’s Mishap, auntie’s spectral return reclaims the comic violence enacted against her (though she is frozen here rather than exploded). Moreover, the film explains her spectral comedy through the relationships between its characters, which allows for the duration of the gag beyond the novelty of its visibility. As with failed ridicule that can never be laughed off, this ambiguity of gendered laughter frequently takes the form of eerie haunting or uncanny obsession. For example, And the Villainess Still Pursued Him (1909) represents the plight of a young cad who is relentlessly pursued by a metamorphic spinster. She spooks and bedevils him by transfiguring into every other person that he encounters: the newsboy, his taxi driver, and the milkman. In Edith’s Avoirdupois (Lubin, 1910), a fat man’s fat wife purchases a book about physical fitness and then performs exhaustive aerobics and facial gymnastics in her attempt both to reduce flesh and to eliminate wrinkles. “It was bad enough when she lunched off excelsior and dined on baled hay . . . [but] when Edith’s husband saw those horrible grimaces he was certain that she had gone insane, and the doctor inclined to the same opinion.”23 The Missionary and the Maid (Edison, 1909) focuses on the torments of an ethical evangelist for Christ who is deployed to Africa as a missionary. He “could stand for the hot pots and the cannibalistic soup tureens of those who were living in the darkness and dinge of their own color, but when it came to receiving an osculatory imprint from those merry widow lips of sofa cushion dimensions and an embrace from the huge arms attached to her 400-pound form, that was too much.”24 Though blatantly demeaning and intersectionally offensive (it is hard to say whose corporeality is less recuperable: the male African cannibals’ or the voracious “dusky” maid’s), this film tips its hand, revealing the contradictory social imperatives adhering to its mean-spirited laughter at gender and racial difference. The Victorian misegolastic (anti-laughter) philosopher George Vasey captures this contradiction between ridicule’s social utility and its bodily consequences in in his Philosophy of Laughter and Smiling. He focuses on the fine line between corrective mockery and convulsive merriment: “Vices and failings  .  .  . are doubtless legitimate objects of laughter and ridicule . . . if by laughter and ridicule they can be gradually put down and

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finally abolished.”25 In other words, laughter can be enlisted as a corrective to the problem of laughter, which Vasey further describes as “distorting,” “idiotic,” “disagreeable,” and “unpleasing”: “the various species of laughter are all ridiculous, absurd, or impudent—vulgar or idiotic—presenting ugliness to the sight, and harsh and grating sounds to the ears.”26 It is no wonder, then, that transitional comedienne films so often thematize cannibalism, given laughter’s simultaneous use-value and its unredeemable association with corporeal excess: laughter had no choice left but to eat itself. Sadistic or derisive laughter became the paradoxical means for policing the demure refinement of film comedy. To this point, cannibalism offered an ideal narrative resolution to the comedic impasses of gendered violence. In Bessie’s Dream (Selig, 1912) a woman hunts “Jew fish” (i.e., grouper) and then is chased by cannibals, while in The Doll’s Revenge (Hepworth, 1907) a tormented younger sister possesses her own mechanical doll, which grows to monstrous proportions and then literally eviscerates and engorges her older brother: the doll “pulls the little boy to pieces and eats him.”27 Films used a variety of means to justify the social legitimacy of their instrumentally horrific depictions of female corporeality. Examples such as Missionary and the Maid or The Professor’s Secret (in which a homely woman is “monkified” into an ape and exhibited in a zoo) laugh off the images of corporeal difference that other film comedies (i.e., the refined and reformed comedies) were mandated to disavow or discard altogether.28 In other words, gendered slapstick survived the gentrification of film comedy but only by cannibalizing itself: indulging in the very forms of corporeal excess, convulsion, and upheaval that were simultaneously made into targets of censorship and erasure. Film comedies manufactured countless bizarre pretexts for including these unwanted female bodies. However, despite their physical fluidity (transfiguring, becoming frozen or mesmerized, and performing elaborate physical and facial acrobatics), their corporeality was flagged as abject and unrecuperable: they were beyond cosmetic makeovers or social integration. As The Moving Picture World put it in its synopsis of Missionary and the Maid, the man “could serve the heathen even though he was tortured, but not when he was the object of such pachydermal passion. The innermost core of the hottest hot pot was infinitely preferable to the lady’s love.”29 Apparently, barbaric cannibalism was a better target for civilization than “the love of a dusky damsel.” Similarly, a battered husband prefers having

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his ankles gnawed off by Lilliputians to the embrace of his mother-in-law in The Pygmy World (Gaumont, 1910), while an unattractive spinster is blasted into outer space in Leap Year Proposals of an Old Maid (Vitagraph, 1908). These tensions between means and ends in transitional female slapstick— using sadistic mockery to purify the social value of comedy—are evident in other tropes and categories of transitional slapstick. Beyond comedies about mothers-in-law, spinsters, old maids, fat ladies, “dusky damsels” and so forth, contradictions between the barbarity of laughter and its allegedly civilizing consequences haunted the silent screen.

Vixens and Spousal Discord Although less amenable to one-off blue sight gags (such as Bridget serving the salad “undressed” or some male rubes cheering on a “trapeze disrobing act”), transitional films take pains to narrativize the comedy of sexual arousal. The Magnetic Eye (Lubin, 1908) literalizes the double-meaning of “sight gag” by depicting the woes of a man who is bitten in the eye by a mosquito, which gives his eyes magnetic powers to attract the objects of his affection: for example, a woman’s body is physically flung toward his ocular orifices. Action springs from the force field of magnetism surrounding his eye, thus collapsing the relationship between voyeuristic distance and carnal intimacy. As chaos ensues, and would-be male protectors (the girl’s family, concerned bystanders, and several police officers) simultaneously race to the rescue and struggle to flee the scene, the problem is eventually solved by a boy prankster who uses his slingshot to beam the man in the magnetic eye with putty. “This makes him lose his power and the boy and old man wipe the sidewalk with him.”30 However, Moving Picture World makes no mention of the girl’s condition at the end of the film, after she’s spent at least several diegetic minutes glued to an evil eye, and the film itself is no longer extant. The apparent difficulty of actually visualizing a woman’s body stuck to an eyeball, or depicting this image at any length, provides more than ample cause for the film’s onslaught of competing distractions. (It is worth noting that average shot lengths in 1908 were often as short as six seconds, and a 520-foot length film like Magnetic Eye, projected at sixteen frames per second, could easily have contained as many as twenty-five or thirty cuts; a 520-foot film at sixteen frames per second would have run approximately 8.5 minutes.31) The mayhem of floating cars, hovering objects, vindictive

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relatives, and scandalized bystanders all radiate from this semi-unrepresentable central image of a woman struggling to break loose from a predatory eyeball. Sexual desire was frequently displaced onto the desire for commodity things. This emphasis of commodity fetishism over erotic attraction offered another provisional mechanism for narrativizing the comedy of sexual arousal without totally transgressing the incipient morality codes of filmmaking, which were increasingly adopted and fostered by the members of the Motion Picture Patents Company (formed in December 1908).32 Women’s clothing, hats, perfume, and other gendered things handily intervened between carnal lust and visual desire in transitional cinema. In Flirtation Collar (Phoenix, 1909), a woman’s tight, irritating blouse collar causes her to perform inadvertently sexual gestures and thereby to attract the wrong kind of attention from the opposite sex. The title character of The Pretty Milliner (Pathé, 1909) is “besieged by a crowd of admirers,” forcing her to her to take “refuge in an immense hat box, which she is carrying, whereupon the box rolls away.”33 The choice of device object in this film, the oversized hat box (presumably meant to contain an oversized hat), was not arbitrary, as women’s hats in 1909 easily exceeded thirty inches in diameter and fifteen inches in height. Male spectators frequently complained of being unable to see the film screen from behind a woman’s Merry Widow, Chantecler, Russian shako, or Parisian peach-basket hat.34 “The pretty milliner’s” hatbox provides both an expedient escape from sexual harassment and a visual cover that spares the spectator from the image of her roughand-tumble pratfalls and injury. Similarly, the odor of an unfamiliar perfume provoked unending marital discord and countless catfights on-screen. For example, in On the Wrong Scent (Essanay, 1909), after a wife recognizes a very familiar scent on another woman’s person while out to dinner with her husband, fisticuffs ensue. According to the Moving Picture World, “The efforts of the two women to hit with their fists, as they scratch and bite, are funny. The picture is accompanied by screams of laughter.”35 Although broad in its slapstick, the catfighting in this film, as in the mother-in-law comedies, is legitimized by its utility in circumventing the suggestion of salacious marital infidelity, thereby using corrective ridicule to parlay sexual indiscretion into knockabout burlesque. Apparently, nothing was funnier than watching men suffer violently as a direct consequence of female commodity fetishism. In Caught by the

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Coupon Craze (Edison, 1909), Mrs. Bilkins has the revelation that buying her husband cigars can earn her coupons to purchase the new lamp she desires, which nearly drives poor Mr. Bilkins to instantaneous lung cancer. These prolific gendered devices (e.g. women’s relentless drive for commodity consumption) mediate the otherwise tenuous dynamic between female bodies and exorbitant violence in the slapstick genre.

Prankster and Tomboys Not all slapstick comedienne films from this time leaned so heavily on the virtues of derisive ridicule and sexist/misogynistic mockery. For every Mrs. Bilkins, there was a “Saucy Sue,” a “Rebellious Betty” (whom I discuss in detail later in this chapter), a “Miss Mischief,” or an avenging housemaid. For example, in The Servant’s Revenge (Lubin, 1909), after being let go by her abusive employers, a vengeful housemaid sneaks back into their house during a fancy party and switches the pipes between the gas jets and the garden hose. “The guests become uneasy, and a geyser of water from the gas jets completes their discomfiture.” Meanwhile, “the mistress, who has gone upstairs to powder her nose, comes back with her face liberally coated with burnt cork.”36 Evidently, blackface and other tropes of racist minstrelsy served as reliable tools in filmmaking’s gendered bag of comic tricks. Here, the blackface sight gag works to derealize the physical violence and other catastrophic antics inflicted upon the mistress of the house and her sodden guests. Tomboys and girl pranksters were allowed even greater freedom to act out in violent and destructive ways. Their gruesome gags marked the time between adolescence and adulthood, prior to their mandatory heteronormative coupling. Laura Horak explains this psychosexual logic in Girls Will Be Boys: “Just as psychologist G. Stanley Hall argued that boys should go through a ‘savage’ phase in order to retain their virility when forced to play by the rules of industrialized adulthood, feminists argued that girls should experience a ‘boy’ phase in order to maintain their health when forced to play by the rules of middle-class womanhood.”37 Slapstick tomboy comedies double down on such an imperative. For example, in Saucy Sue (Lubin, 1909), “a very lively country girl” torments her rural family with constant pranks and violent practical jokes—“bad enough among the rough country people” but far from funny when set loose upon “her dandified cousin” in

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the city.38 The antics of Miss Mischief (Thanhouser, 1913), starring the unflappable Muriel Ostriche, are too much even for her rural kinfolk.39 Home on the family farm after being expelled from boarding school, Miss Mischief hides her father’s spectacles, puts tacks in his rawhide boots, ties a tin can to the dog’s tail, and distracts the boys from their work. When the boys offer to duel for her affections, she laughs in their faces (and instead convinces them to put on a cock fight). Freed from the mandates of bourgeois marriage, rural children enjoy unique license to act out and cause mayhem. However, everyday women in the metropolis could still concoct an alibi for destroying the public sphere; for example, they might be fleeing from sexual predators, chasing eligible bachelors, collecting discount coupons, eating dog biscuits that provoke them to bark uncontrollably (Too Much Dog Biscuit, Essanay, 1909), or simply attempting to open an envelope, as in A Woman’s Curiosity (Lubin, 1911). In this film, one curious woman incites mob riots and mass civil unrest in her relentless pursuit of a lost envelope, which, incidentally, turns out to contain a gas bill.

Betty Pulls the Strings and Comediennes Blow Up the Continent On the cusp of the eruption of World War One in 1914, comediennes portended the traumas of trench warfare by reducing their homes to catastrophic spaces completely uninhabitable for traditional domestic life. European films especially flaunted images of their slapstick comediennes running wild in front of the camera. Film actresses in Britain (such as Alma Taylor and Chrissie White, who star in the Tilly series); France (Sarah Duhamel, Mistinguett, and Musidora); Italy (Lea Guinchi, Valentina Frascaroli); and Germany (Wanda Treumann, Rosa Porten) continued to indulge in bawdy, demonstrative gags long after the social uplift campaigns further constrained comedienne physicality in American filmmaking. Leading up to and during the War, European comic sensibilities were much darker and more overtly sadistic than those of Americans. These European films revel in collapsing and confusing the relationship between slapstick’s referential violence and the genre’s own fantastic laws of bodily physics. For example, women’s gags routinely hinged on turning their domestic spaces into utter shambles, such as in the French comedienne series Rosalie

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(or Jane in the United States) (Pathé, 1911–1912) starring Sarah Duhamel; Léontine (or Betty) (Pathé, 1910–1912) starring an unknown actress; Pétronille (Pathé, 1912–1916), starring Sarah Duhamel; and Cunégonde (Lux, 1911–1913), also starring an unknown actress.40 The trenches on the Marne were probably better fortified against horrific destruction than Jane’s new apartment in Jane Moves In (Pathé, 1911), or Cunégonde’s employers’ domicile in Cunégonde Has Visitors (Lux, 1912). The instance of a woman taking a bath or acquiring a toy boat (Betty’s Boat, Pathé 1911) would almost certainly guarantee the erosion of every ceiling or floorboard in her home. French and other continental slapstick comedies, although internationally popular, were increasingly marginalized from American exhibition and distribution (an issue that I discuss more fully in the next chapter). The Pathé Betty series’ reception by the trade press from 1910 to 1911 demonstrates this trajectory. The Nickelodeon praised Betty’s premier installment, Rebellious Betty (1910), proclaiming, “We have already advertised the fact that Betty was comic, and now she is here. . . . Betty’s antics and pranks are distinctly fresh and laughable; she is a mischievous and willful tomboy who shrinks at nothing so long as she can get her own way.”41 The next film, Betty Pulls the Strings, received somewhat mixed reviews. In this film, Betty dodges an angry mob by impersonating a scarecrow, while the actual “inoffending scarecrow receive[s] the chastisement intended for her.” In more direct terms, it is lynched by an angry mob while Betty herself flees the scene. As another reviewer added, “Otherwise she might never have played any more tricks.”42 This perverse disavowal of Betty’s near annihilation, bracketed as a wishful suggestion that she be taught a firm lesson, was quickly followed by Betty’s own fall from grace. Unable to recover from the lasting consequences of corrective violence (beyond Betty’s cartoonish slapstick physicality), the Betty series rapidly lost favor among trade press reviewers, ultimately leading to the end of its distribution in American theaters, despite its continued production and international popularity.43 In its review of a subsequent episode, Betty is Punished, the Nickelodeon expressed its disapproval of Betty’s violent antics in very pointed terms. One reviewer wrote: “At last Betty comes to grief. Her activities at last force the landlord to order her out, and the removal is the direct cause of her punishment.  .  .  . Of course it is a funny picture. It couldn’t be anything else with Betty in it, but there is rather too much smashing and rough-house in it to make it desirable.”44 This pronounced difference in reception is at

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first glance puzzling, given Betty’s episodic repetition of the series’ typical roughhousing antics: the brusque devices that had always formed the basis of the comedienne’s popularity. While the social uplift argument provides one possible explanation for Betty’s sudden marginalization, this would not explain why it was initially embraced, since film morality had been policed across the American industry well before Betty’s July 1, 1910 premiere. From “Pathé’s much talked-about new comedienne” to an “undesirable rough-houser,” Betty’s reviews continued to decline.45 The next three Betty comedies, Betty Rolls Along, Betty’s Apprenticeship, and Betty’s Boat (in which Betty sails a toy boat indoors by filling her employers’ upstairs bedroom with water until the whole house is flooded), were all met with disdain. Although “almost any audience will laugh at” Betty’s Apprenticeship, as the MPW conceded, they nonetheless warned their readers that the “disposition [of this film] to make a rough house of [funny situations] is not to be commended.”46 (A different review noted that “the only trick that qualifies [as witty] was where she put a red balloon in the Edam cheese jar.”47 Upon opening the cheese jar, the red helium balloon then floats away.) Betty Rolls Along was flatly condemned without a trace of ambivalence as “one of those destructive comedies that has no real merit beyond a spree of horseplay, which should be banished from motion pictures.”48 It is a shame that Betty Guards the House was not widely exhibited in the United States. In this film, Betty receives her comeuppance for simultaneously flooding and incinerating her parents’ home, when she is forced to adopt all the stray dogs and orphaned babies in her neighborhood (she had posted a missingpersons advertisement in the newspaper after losing her “dog named Émile and her baby brother named Moustache”). From failed dog leash to averted umbilical cord, Betty’s string often drives the action and links the piecemeal antics together in her films; meanwhile, the raging lynch mob accumulates behind her. For example, after nearly asphyxiating her downstairs neighbor in Betty’s Tricks (1911), she wards off the angry horde by recruiting each new victim as a temporary obstacle, including a hysterical gentleman whose top hat she crushes, and a poor book vendor whose kiosk she destroys by tying the other end of the string to a temporarily parked automobile. (Though time is of the essence, Betty cannot resist lingering to watch the gag explode before resuming her flight.) Betty always narrowly escapes punishment, often by reclaiming her string. In Betty’s Tricks, she traps the mob pursuing her on a window

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washer’s balcony by locking the window and cutting down the only rope ladder. The film ends with an image of the victims’ faces exploding with anger and thwarted vengeful passions. From a disciplinary “straw man” to an out-and-out villain, Betty’s example further reflects the contradictory tensions between slapstick’s means and ends: the inevitable violence required to achieve the genre’s intended effects of purifying such violence. Film historians have commented on the thematic function of such dog-eats-tail cycles in silent cinema, repeatedly returning to the country-rube figure of early film renown. For example, Uncle Josh at the Moving Picture Show (1903) has taken on a particularly allegorical significance in exemplifying the transitional public sphere politics of corrective slapstick and film spectatorship. In this comical meta-film, a gullible country rube, Uncle Josh, fails to understand the difference between real human bodies and illusory film projections, eventually tearing down the film screen in anger in order to save a female character in the diegesis from being assaulted. As Thomas Elsaesser claims in “Discipline Through Diegesis,” “The punishment meted out to Uncle Josh by the projectionist is both allegorized as the reverse side of cinematic pleasure  .  .  . and internalized as self-control: in the cinema—as elsewhere in the new world of display and self-display—the new rule is ‘you may look but don’t touch.’”49 Elsaesser, Miriam Hansen, Stephen Heath, and others have thus argued that Uncle Josh’s follies instruct the spectator to stay put by means of his negative example. In this vein, Hansen asserts that “as comic allegory, then, the film implies certain lessons for the spectator of the film: lessons concerning the spatial arrangement of cinema, especially the role of the fixed screen; lessons of sexual economy, in particular regarding the image of woman; and lessons in film history.”50 Through corrective laughter, the audience desires to behave in the opposite way to Josh; they experience dissociative distance rather than conspiratorial identification. In other words, given the lack of a developed syntax to address and sedate audience bodies through filmic means, laughter stands in for spectator positioning. In contrast, the Betty films exhibit what happens when corrective ridicule fails to achieve this allegorical function or meta-social instruction. Betty Pulls the Strings represents an especially revealing example of the series’ overriding ambiguity between disciplinary violence and anarchic jubilation—as well as the spectator’s ambivalence between callous sadism and gleeful complicity.

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String is Betty’s weapon of choice throughout the series; she wields it demonically, tying human bodies and inanimate objects together until they all congeal into an amorphous, teeming mass hell-bent on violent retribution. Whether levitating pots and pans to terrify the house maid (Betty on Vacation), or simply mounting an obtrusive air fan to the front of her bicycle (The New Air Fan), Betty’s string is a thing to be feared. By the end of the series, her use of string becomes considerably darker, doubling as a noose for strangling her downstairs neighbor in Betty’s Tricks, and as a horsewhip for violently lashing a little girl in Betty Guards the House. In many episodes, women’s skirt hems, millinery tassels, dog leashes, jump ropes, or dangling shoelaces serve just as well as string to torment her victims while remapping the entire world around her predilection for total apocalypse. Betty Pulls the Strings is a quintessential example of the series. In this episode, Betty wanders through public spaces and executes increasingly violent, mischievous gags with her vile string. Never relinquishing the string, she attaches the other end to a stuffed animal to lure a hunter, and to a fake wallet to hoodwink a greedy shopper. Then she wraps it around various poles and street fixtures to torment passing bystanders. When the duped shopper in the first gag lurches toward the planted wallet, Betty hides out in a crate of perishables inches away from her victim, manipulating the string so that the wallet repeatedly just eludes his grasp. Betty’s physical presence quite literally indexes the eruption of the gag. Like a jack-in-the-box or a weathervane, Betty’s pointing and laughing arrives almost simultaneously with the comic accident itself (figures 3.3 and 3.4).

FIGURE 3.3 Frame enlargement from Les Ficelles de Léontine

[Betty Pulls the Strings] (Pathé Comica, 1910)

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FIGURE 3.4 Frame enlargement from Les Ficelles de Léontine

[Betty Pulls the Strings] (Pathé Comica, 1910)

In contrast to earlier device comedies in which infernal machines go haywire, such as in A Wringing Good Joke (Edison, 1900) or Explosion of a Motorcar (Hepworth, 1900), Betty’s body substitutes for the exploding gag or the crazy machine. Indeed, the gag is but a prelude to the force field of Betty’s body, which springs into action in the wake of the eruption, causing at least three times as much destruction as the device that preceded it. Aesthetically, the composition of the frame here collapses the space between rascal and victim that other comic gag films take pains to keep separate. For example, in A Wringing Good Joke, the boy prankster lurks at the edges of the screen, halfobscured by the nether-space of the unrepresentable world beyond the limits of the frame. In contrast, Betty hides out in the thick of the action, condensing separate worlds before they’ve even had a chance to collide. Her position here epitomizes the film’s impulse for narrative centering, an emerging convention that explicitly strays from what Noel Burch describes as early cinema’s “noncentered quality,” in which significant details might appear from any part of the image.51 Literalizing slapstick’s conventional organization of stringing together a piecemeal series of gags, the film’s narrative structure is made legible by Betty’s physical connection to the chain of incidents she incites. When Betty’s episodic antics escalate into an all-out chase sequence, she rides off into the woods on horseback to evade the angry mob that pursues

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her. Here she performs a climactic trick that sheds light on the film’s uneven articulation of its narrative spatial organization. Disguising herself as a scarecrow, Betty hovers mid-center of the frame while the angry mob completely misses her, still in pursuit of her horse, which is now mounted by an actual scarecrow. In the first part of the film, Betty stands in for the device or machine: the effect of disorder is contingent upon the proximity of her body to the site of the calamity. Now, it is the device or decoy that substitutes for Betty, leading her charging pursuers along a “forking path” (to invoke Gunning’s metaphor for slapstick narrative form52) that puts as much physical distance as possible between rascal and victim. This substitution joke forces the film to rely on increasingly abstract techniques of montage to cut between the parallel spaces of Betty’s invisibility act and the runaway scarecrow. Betty’s recurring position at the center of the frame, more effectively corporeal for the viewer due to her own temporary concealment within the diegesis, further solicits the ambivalent position of the film’s increasingly disembodied, individualized spectator during this film-historical moment. Laughing both against Betty’s recklessness and in complicity with her anarchic freedom, Betty’s 1910 spectator negotiates transitions in cinema’s body politics through the film’s ambiguous double coding. Oscillating between derisive, distanced mockery and gleeful, conspiratorial involvement, Betty’s laughing spectator effectively inhabits two contradictory positions simultaneously. And Betty’s dual corporeality—her aggressive invincibility and disciplinary vulnerability, which is made explicit through the scarecrow lynch scene—simultaneously suspends two mutually exclusive experiences of comedy: corrective distance and convulsive investment. Whether Betty is merely making the most of her psychosexual interregnum between adolescence and normative adulthood (though the series ends with her becoming unwilling caretaker for countless stray dogs and orphaned babies), or whether she allegorically embodies the contradictory mandates ascribed to broader constructions of femininity and laughter, her violent antics have material repercussions that elicit laughter with lasting social consequences.

Daisy Doodad’s Dial: On Female Face-Making and Its Consequences With the repression and containment of slapstick female corporeality by the conventions of narrative film storytelling, comediennes sought alternative

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means for unleashing their comedic mayhem. One of the American film industry’s very first stars, Florence Turner (a.k.a. “The Vitagraph Girl”) made extremely productive use of her face to convey her anarchic physical gestures. Famous for her facial impersonations as a former vaudevillian, Turner plays characters such as a bored house wife who is haunted by spectral superimpositions of her own comic-horrific funny faces (Daisy Doodad’s Dial [Turner, 1914]; see figure 3.2), a hypnotism subject whose face rebels against the physical manipulations of her body (Hypnotizing the Hypnotist [Vitagraph, 1911]), and generally performs a kind of deadpan facial neurosis that clashes with her feminine comportment (in films including The Face or the Voice; When Persistency and Obstinacy Meet, and The Wrong Patient). For example, Hypnotizing the Hypnotist, a satire about the assertion of male power by manipulating and controlling female bodies, centers its comic effects on Turner’s facial expressions. Her body becomes the object of two dueling male hypnotists’ performances of expertise. One requires the physical presence of her body, while the other works better in her absence by giving orders to her over the telephone. After falling victim to the proximate hypnotist’s powers of suggestion, Turner receives a call from the tele-hypnotist: “Make faces at him! Make faces, I say!” Springing to action, Turner somaticizes the alleged inner conflicts of her own psyche by performing a visible struggle between her bodily histrionics and her over-the-top facemaking gestures. She extends her arms and beats them violently while her eyes cross and roll back into her head and her mouth rehearses a series of comically grotesque grimaces. If Hypnotizing the Hypnotist stages a struggle between bodily gesture and facial impersonation, Daisy Doodad’s Dial circumvents this conflict by subordinating the body to the face altogether. It does this through frequent, spectral uses of the close-up.53 Although the close-up appeared in early trick films like India Rubber Head (1901) and Grandma’s Reading Glass (G.A. Smith, 1900), it did not become a formal storytelling convention until the mid-1910s. Daisy Doodad thematizes the close-up as a visual resolution to Daisy’s social exclusion from a masculine public sphere. A Florence Turner Production (1913–1916), Turner also co-directed the film with Larry Trimble and plays the title character, Daisy Doodad, a hopeful housewife who trains with her husband to perform in a face-making competition. Unfortunately, in her excess of enthusiasm, she impairs her mimetic muscles and is forced to stay home in bed with swollen cheeks while her husband goes on to win

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the glory. Given the lack of professional opportunities available to Daisy in her environment, making faces holds the key to her social recognition and empowerment. When a second face-making competition is announced in the paper, Daisy practices incessantly, day and night, provoking her arrest for public indecency on a moving train when she appears to have a psychotic break in front of another passenger. A coy intertitle states, “Practice makes perfect.” With the exception of Daisy, the world of the film is inhabited solely by men. Her participation in this world becomes disruptively contagious: the men around her involuntarily mimic her facial caricatures, even to one another over the telephone while they are trying to figure out how to resolve the trouble created by her presence. Eventually, Daisy decides to remove herself from public visibility, sealing herself off in her own bedroom. Alone in her room, Daisy has a bad dream in which she is visited, one after another, by a horde of spectral superimpositions of her own face performing the alternately humorous and grotesque expressions that she had rehearsed on the train and at the police station. These nightmarish close-ups, which terrorize Daisy while she seeks solace and refuge, oscillate between affects of laughter and terror. However, the film concludes with an uncannily magnified image of her face, unmoored from any specific diegetic place or location. (Known as the emblematic shot, the facial close-up was often used to establish a film’s central characters; it typically appeared at both the beginning and end of a film until about 1912.54) In its politicized rendering of the female close-up, Daisy Doodad’s Dial presents the woman’s face as an ambivalent and highly tenuous solution to the problems of female corporeality both on-screen and in everyday life. This throwback to the emblematic shot further underscores the film’s feminist comedy argument: that women’s faces can cause just as much disruption and violence as their bodies (figure 3.5). Moreover, attempting to eradicate both entities (female bodies and faces) from the public sphere will literally drive women insane. Daisy’s slapstick face-body problem motivates the film’s general organization of narrative space around the faciality of vision (rather than around the physicality of action). As such, Daisy’s haunting final close-up is clearly coded as a lingering source of trouble and conflict. Just as segregating Daisy will not expel the film’s social tensions, isolating her face as a discrete visual entity will not tame the charged aesthetics of its gender politics. Daisy Doodad’s Dial thereby reflects its own filmic historiographic position by making light of

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FIGURE 3.5 Frame enlargement from Daisy Doodad’s Dial (Turner, 1914)

the unresolvable contradictions between body versus face, gesture versus close-up, and exhibitionist gag device versus integrated narrative effect. Like Eva (in Eva Is Tired of Life) and Betty (in Betty Pulls the Strings), whose eruptive bodies substitute for the exploding gag or haywire machine in their films, Daisy mimics and impersonates the repressive effects of the film’s visuality on her own corporeal expression. Making faces at her own closeup, Daisy’s tortured laughter represents a ridiculous endpoint of the overriding tensions between the polite amusement and corrective convulsion that haunted transitional silent film comedies.

4 The Geopolitics of Transitional Film Comedy American Vitagraph Versus French Pathé-Frères

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pectacles of female metamorphosis were instrumental for navigating the ongoing transitions and transformations in cinema’s narrative form, market imperatives, and cultural value throughout the transitional period. From transgender housemaids to magical butterfly women, the aesthetics of female shape-shifting varied widely depending on their regional and national contexts of production and exhibition. As this chapter explores, these gendered aesthetics take on profound geopolitical importance, which becomes tangible through the stark contrasts between two exemplary film companies: the American Vitagraph and the French Pathé-Frères. Whereas Pathé has received significant historical attention recently as a leading manufacturer of early trick pictures, Vitagraph’s stylistic diversity remains undervalued and largely unnoticed. Scholars (including William Uricchio, Roberta Pearson, Robert Spadoni, and Kristin Thompson) have relegated Vitagraph to the annals of middleclass aspiration, focusing almost exclusively on its limited output of “quality” film adaptations; namely, its condensed versions of the great works of theater and literature such as King Lear (1909), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1909), and Oliver Twist (1909). Why has a company as productive and versatile as Vitagraph (which produced well over two thousand films between 1907 and 1915) been characterized by such a limited portion of its overall

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output? Another way to phrase this question is to ask, Why are slapstick comedienne films written out of film histories focused on Vitagraph? Histories of 1910s silent film comedy overwhelmingly focus on the Keystone Company (a leading producer of anarchic slapstick pictures for the masses). In contrast, research on Vitagraph largely excludes consideration of its prolific comic and trick pictures, many of which feature talented slapstick comediennes such as Florence Turner (“the Vitagraph Girl”), Mabel Normand, Flora Finch, Lillian Walker, Josie Sadler, and Kate Price. These funny women have been marginal in scholarship on Vitagraph because their presence would vividly conflict with notions of the company’s marketing identity. Histories of film comedy are thus impoverished by specters of the film industry’s corporate formations. Vitagraph, in its project to establish cinema’s middle-class gentrification and artistic legitimation, attempted to disassociate itself from the knockabout slapstick gags celebrated by some of its competitors. At the same time, however, Vitagraph still wanted to cater to the wider masses of laughing spectators mobilized by leading comedy producers such as Essanay, Lubin, Selig, Pathé Comica, and later Keystone (which was founded by Mack Sennett in 1912 when he defected from Biograph). These tensions between social respectability and mass popularity are evident through reconsideration and close readings of Vitagraph’s slapstick comedienne films, particularly the company’s transitional comedies that feature female transfiguration. Rather than spontaneously combusting, women’s bodies in these films take on a variety of corporeal shapes and aesthetic forms (miniaturization, dismemberment, interspecies metamorphosis) in order to accommodate the contradictory goals of the film industry marketplace and the conflicting desires of its uproariously laughing audiences. By mediating between the public’s mass taste and the industry’s artistic aspirations, these films exemplify the uneven and fragmented trajectories of film aesthetics and reception politics. The signifier “transitional,” then, does not represent a bridge between early versus classical modes of address. Rather, comediennes’ wayward bodily gestures perform the inconsistency and incongruity of films from this period. The vivid relationship between comedienne shape-shifting and film historiography is key to understanding this protean moment and its potential to disrupt linear or compartmentalized ideas of historical transition. In their experiments with the possibilities of narrative storytelling across different genre conventions and aesthetic practices, both the Vitagraph and

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Pathé companies played with women’s bodies as if they were lab rats. They both sought to establish their artistic prestige through “quality” productions that could at the same time cash in on the mass appeal of film spectacle. While their films expressed remarkably similar aesthetic impulses, they did so through very different stylistic strategies. This is because Pathé, unlike Vitagraph, faced increasing resistance and often overt cultural hostility in its American distribution and reception contexts. The theme of female bodily mutation thus played a key role in allowing Pathé to adapt to the contradictory identities driving nationalist spectatorship politics. Nowhere is this dynamic clearer than in the trick genre.

Vitagraph’s Social Uplift In filmmaking from this transitional period, the artistic legitimacy of genre comedy depended on eliciting the spectator’s inner laughter as opposed to her or his uproarious release. In other words, the spectator was invited to enjoy the film’s humor but not to laugh at it too boisterously or volubly. Vitagraph responded to this mandate by churning out “comedies of manners” featuring early film stars such as John Bunny, Florence Turner, Sidney Drew, Clara Kimball Young, Lucille McVey, and other dignified mirthmakers. Films such as Troublesome Secretaries (Vitagraph, 1911), A Mistake in Spelling (1912), and Goodness Gracious (1914) adapted George Meredith’s nineteenth-century ideal of “thoughtful laughter” from literature to moving pictures. In this vein, much of the scholarship on transitional cinema emphasizes goals of middle-class uplift and the codification of narrativefilm storytelling conventions. In the case of Vitagraph, historians focus on either its prestigious adaptations from great works of literature and theater1 or secondarily its bourgeois domestic comedies.2 Issues of female corporeality and gendered slapstick violence, particularly as they pertain to practices of film narration, are overshadowed by discussions of the film industry’s social uplift, artistic legitimation, and emerging apparatus of stardom.

From Convicts to Comediennes Vitagraph’s transitional trick films integrated spectacular images of bodily excess, exhibiting the company’s conflicting aesthetic impulses and

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contradictory social politics. The New York Dramatic Mirror reveals this tension in an article from 1908 about “Encouraging Education Pictures,” in which the author contrasts an uplifted spectator with the commonplace variety, whom he interpellates as a “hoodlum.” He pleads: “For every hoodlum who might object to it, there are almost unlimited people of a desirable kind to be attracted to the exhibitions. . . . The future of moving pictures demands elevation along this line.”3 With the 1905 construction of their new Brooklyn studio, Vitagraph filmmakers had ample space to orchestrate elaborate comical chase scenes, which also furthered the company’s interests in representing fugitive delinquency. Vitagraph was a prolific producer of convict-themed comedies, including The Disintegrated Convict (1907), Juvenile Chicken Thieves (1906), Acrobatic Burglars (1906), The Jail Bird and How He Flew! (1906), and The Thieving Hand (1908). In these films, male bodies break apart, snake through holes in barrels, and disintegrate into thin air to elude capture and reincarceration. The convict’s escape, dispersal across multiple scenes and locations, and eventual rearrest thus provided thematic motivation for Vitagraph to innovate techniques in parallel storytelling (well ahead of Griffith at Biograph, as Peter Kramer and Jon Gartenberg have argued).4 Vitagraph’s spacious new studio was replete with Cooper Hewitt lights and specially designed prismatic glass to refract light and conceal shadows; this location was instrumental to fostering many of the company’s technical advances through the comedy genre around 1905. However, from 1906 to 1909, amidst the campaigns for cinema’s moral reform and its narrative integration, Vitagraph films began to change: they started to look different, and the subjects they thematized shifted as well. These films underwent a transformation: from conventional depictions of funny chase scenes about escaped convicts on the run to fantasy scenarios displaying images of female bodily mutability and mutation. Women of every imaginable form—from disgruntled kitchen maids to intergalactic spinsters and micrographic “nicotine fairies”—replaced the so-called “hoodlum” protagonists of the slapstick genre. Many of these gendered trick films further staged their elaborate effects profilmically by manipulating women’s bodies in front of the camera rather than in postproduction, as was done for the convict trick films. Vitagraph thereby attempted to aestheticize the medium’s moral improvement, from convicts to comediennes, by aligning itself with the legitimate stage. It enframed

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its comediennes, exercising scrupulous control over women’s performing bodies, in order to promote the company’s intermedial inheritances from literature, painting, and theater, and thereby to shore up cinema’s respectable status as “the seventh art.”

Narrating Limb Dismemberment Female limb dismemberment offered a convenient device for motivating the piecemeal narrative structure of Vitagraph’s transitional slapstick and trick filmmaking. This is evident in examples such as The Kitchen Maid’s Dream (1907), The Dancing Legs (1908), The Boy, the Bust, and the Bath (1907), and An Odd Pair of Limbs (1908). For example, The Dancing Legs and An Odd Pair of Limbs both revel in the chaos of women’s disembodied appendages wreaking havoc in the public sphere, disrupting everyday commerce, and reattaching themselves haphazardly to male and female bodies alike (figure 4.1). A Kitchen Maid’s Dream (which I also discuss in chapter 2) depicts an overworked, overtired kitchen maid who imagines that she can dismember her own limbs to finish her housework on time. The impetus to narrate stories through the alternation between shots and locations (such as interior and exterior spaces), instead unfolds through the variation between the maid’s supine dreaming body and her hyperactive detached limbs. This film itself does not add up to the sum of its parts. Female dismemberment

FIGURE 4.1 Frame enlargement from The Thieving Hand (Blackton, 1908)

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thus guides the spectator to substitute body parts, simple both to see and to understand despite their radical implications, for the otherwise vast range of meanings and questions these texts raise. (Unfortunately, but perhaps appropriately, these films all survive only partially through their paper print fragments.5)

Dream Films Dreaming further offered a useful premise for motivating bizarre and extreme spectacles of female metamorphosis, including dismembered limbs, dancing objects, figural miniaturization, and sexually experimental bodily permutations. In these films, characters dream in the language of cinema: they dream of the impact that film techniques might have on their bodily limits and everyday physical experience. For example, in Daisy Doodad’s Dial (see chapter 3), a bored but ambitious housewife practicing for a face-making competition has nightmares about her own multiplying, disembodied heads that spectrally hover over her body and grimace at her while she sleeps. Vitagraph filmmakers trafficked in a vivid array of dream wishes as pretenses for representing all of the fun and unrealized possibilities of moving images. In addition to The Kitchen Maid’s Dream, examples include The Soldier’s Dream, A Curious Dream, and The Piker’s Dream (all 1907); A Policeman’s Dream, A Workingman’s Dream, and A Dream of Wealth (all 1908); and The Dramatist’s Dream, The Sculptor’s Dream, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream (all 1909). The dream dropped out as a title premise around 1910, though it remained useful as a framing device in films with greater narrative ambitions than just depicting a single dream scenario (such as the haunting Daisy Doodad’s Dial and multi-reel Florida Enchantment). This trajectory from 1907 to 1909 is further revealing, as the subjectdreamer undergoes an evident class transformation that parallels the ways in which the film industry represented the social status of its implied spectator. From working-class maids and pikers, to aspirational artists, to the Athenian aristocracy as depicted by Shakespeare (A Midsummer Night’s Dream), dream scenarios also became increasingly logical in their representation. For example, in A Workingman’s Dream (1908), another trick film about labor politics, an unemployed worker hallucinates that a magical fairy has materialized to grant him three wishes. The dream section of

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the film—a fantastic sequence about female transfiguration—provides a pleasant distraction from the labor crisis afflicting the workingman in the frame story. Moreover, the content of the dream subtly motivates events that remain beyond the man’s control: while he dreams about literal wish fulfillment (the wish-granting fairy-woman), a worker at a local factory gets horribly maimed in an industrial accident. However, the bodily violence of the accident is quickly glossed over, because the other worker’s injury is necessary for the man’s new job opportunity. More than just marking time between a labor crisis and its expedient resolution, the dream images of female transfiguration (i.e. the magical metamorphic fairy) provide a cover for the actual violence of the workplace accident, in which the other worker gets seriously hurt. By derealizing the image of bodily mutilation, the shape-shifting fairy-woman thus conceals the film’s labor antagonisms: its happy outcome at the expense of an anonymous worker’s safety and livelihood. Female metamorphosis in A Workingman’s Dream, although contained to the dream sequence, effectively holds the film together both visually and ideologically.

Dream Visions of Race and Sexuality A slightly later example, The Florida Enchantment (1914), epitomizes the use of dreaming as a safety valve for containing the images of free play and bodily experimentation that the premise of dreaming otherwise licenses.6 This controversial film depicts the plight of a middle-class white lady, Lillian Travers (Edith Storey), who ingests magical seeds from Africa that cause her to transform spontaneously into a man: she grows a beard, now desires to pursue women, and assumes an overtly masculinist affect and demeanor. Since it would clearly be inappropriate for her, now a man, to have a female attendant, she coerces her African American maid, Jane (Ethel Lloyd), to swallow the seeds as well. While the seeds change Lillian into a dapper rake, they mutate sweet Jane into a minstrelsy caricature: she becomes a sex-crazed, violent, and savage African male—something out of a racist Jim Crow cartoon (figure 4.2). Finally, when Lillian’s husband, Dr. Frederick Cassadene (Sidney Drew), also swallows the seeds, he—unlike Lillian and Jane—is completely incapable of passing as the opposite sex. Whereas the ladies’ sexual reassignments suggest erotic desire, Dr. Cassadene’s sex change reads as pure farce; moreover, it nearly causes

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FIGURE 4.2

Frame enlargement from A Florida Enchantment (Vitagraph, 1914)

him to get lynched by an unruly mob. Fortunately, Lillian wakes up just in time to save Cassadene from this gruesome fate (waking up often disrupts the movement from laughter to terror at the climax of the dream story). Unlike Vitagraph’s earlier transitional films (such as Kitchen Maid’s Dream, Workingman’s Dream, and even Midsummer Night’s Dream), Florida Enchantment asserts a rigid distinction between its feature-length dream sequence and its frame story. The unresolvable violence of her husband’s imminent lynching finally jolts Lillian out of her vivid fantasy. The increasing sense of tension about the repercussions of the character’s sexual fluidity and physical malleability demands that the line be drawn somewhere—in a place that is formal-aesthetic rather than corporeal. This stark barrier between reality and dream further attempts to police the gap between gender identity and sexual anatomy, wherein gender play is pure fantasy projection with no lasting bodily effects. To this point, it is Frederick’s failed cross-gender performance that forces the film’s cut between dream experimentation and its realistic explanation. Though Frederick’s gender change is initially coded as farcical, rather than erotic like Lillian’s, it quickly escalates to horrific violence that cannot be recuperated as make-believe slapstick (otherwise, there would be no need for Lillian to wake up). This rupture from angry lynch mob to gently stirring housewife comes across as both disturbingly abrupt and incongruously ridiculous. Despite this film’s attempt to mark that gap, the event of transition (both sexual and formal-aesthetic) is far from a clean break or linear process. Laughter haunts the film’s porous delineation between various gender identities (which the film repeatedly fails to inscribe as corporeal) and

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between conflicting narrative spaces (dream fantasy versus frame reality). Florida Enchantment thus offers a messy object lesson in film historiography, revealing the shifts, starts, ruptures, and mutations underpinning the film industry’s own social and aesthetic transformations during this period.

Pathé Metamorphosis: Female Shape-Shifting and Economic Flexibility While Vitagraph films attempted to resolve their social contradictions by aesthetic means, often by implicating women’s shape-shifting bodies in the process, Pathé films operated more flexibly. Magical women slipped easily between dream sequences and their realistic frame contexts. These relatively direct formal practices correlated with Pathé’s unstable position in the global film market. Pathé’s flexible accommodation of the film industry’s aggressive economic practices profoundly inflected its slapstick comedienne iconography. Pathé was a dominant film company but increasingly vulnerable to the nationalistic organization of the international film industry. Because Pathé was the largest global film producer and distributor, its products were utterly pivotal to fueling the United States’ nickelodeon boom from 1905 to 1907.7 Pathé maintained over 8,500 exhibition sites in the United States by 1908 as well as vertically integrating control over the French and other European film markets. However, its formidable success also made it a target, especially for American producers who were keen to seize the reins of their domestic economy. As Richard Abel poses the issue, “So what was the problem? Briefly, the enormity of Pathé-Frères’ success made it a threat (and a foreign threat at that) to other companies within the American market, and that success turned out to be dependent on an infrastructure that was anything but invulnerable.”8 As Abel argues, Pathé responded to the cultural policing of national film identity by focusing on “quality” productions, affiliating itself with the industry’s new cultural institutions such as Film d’Art and SCAGL (Société cinématographique des auteurs et gens de lettres). Women’s enhanced range of bodily contortions and physical mobility in Pathé films differ sharply from the tropes of female bodily rigidity endemic to Vitagraph films. Where women’s limbs would break apart in a Vitagraph

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film, they would bend and stretch beyond human proportions in a Pathé film. This obsession with female elasticity arguably correlates with Pathé’s broader needs for cultural, geographical, and technological flexibility. What methodologies are adequate for asserting such a relationship between liquid market politics and shape-shifting filmmaking aesthetics? I suggest the Marxist-semiotic theorist Louis Althusser’s notion of overdetermination as a helpful framework for explaining the dynamic between market forces and their cultural manifestations, which, Althusser argues, represent mutually determining but partially autonomous influences.9 For example, Pathé covered its bases by investing in the material production of film negative, aspiring to rival Eastman Kodak (a decision that Pathé committed to fully in 1912).10 Also during this time, Pathé was forced to omit productions that would strike American spectators as overtly French or foreign from its increasingly limited distribution access to the United States market. These economic and cultural constraints made female slapstick corporeality an especially expedient trope for negotiating both the international whims of the market and the rapidly shifting codes and standards of narrative-film conventions. Again, Althusser argues (against the Stalinist vulgate of base-superstructure) that the uneven development and dialectical relations between culture and economy are graspable through speculative analysis. Reading into the trick film’s gendered iconography implicates not just the conflicting desires of the laughing spectator’s unconscious (as in Freud’s psychoanalytic model of overdetermination11) but also the contradictory processes of filmmaking’s international spread as a major cultural industry. Subtly but tangibly, Pathé rehearsed its geopolitical and financial positioning through the range of techniques used to depict female corporeality across many of its trick and comedy productions.

Of Red Roosters and Metamorphic Women Culturally marginalized and economically censored in its key United States markets by what Abel has aptly described as a “red rooster scare” (after Pathé’s trademark rooster logo), Pathé’s visual strategies reflected its bid for competitive viability.12 The aesthetic and formal flexibility of its film products arguably co-developed with the company’s adaptation to a fickle international market. This co-emergence of narrative form with industry

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economics spurred an abundance of products that had to remain culturally malleable. Intensifying the interdependence between cultural aesthetics and market economy, Pathé modularized its business tactics while loosening its visual strategies. In contrast, Vitagraph built itself a monument, literally erecting an imposing “Vitagraphville” in Brooklyn after its Nassau Street studio burned down in a fire on July 2, 1910.13 The aesthetic and economic contrasts between Vitagraph and Pathé, based on the different national contexts driving their voracious development, crystallize through the striking oppositions in female bodily representation that each studio pursued in its filmmaking. Again and again, slapstick comedienne performances were enlisted to support the rapidly shifting cultural politics of popular filmmaking. The trope of shape-shifting in films ranging from Elastic Transformation (1909) to The Acrobatic Maid (1908) emerged from the volatile reception climate that Pathé faced in the United States. Pathé’s prolific commercial successes elicited a range of reactions from the bourgeoning industry trade press. Journals such as Motion Picture World and New York Dramatic Mirror often showered Pathé productions with effusive praise for their technical mastery while at the same time insinuating xenophobic remarks to cast doubts about these films’ social mores. For example, journals condemned Pathé’s comedies (newsreels and comedies were the company’s most lucrative genres) as “pointless” or “offensive”—though as “undoubtedly sources of amusement in the countries they represent.”14 Abel has pointed to the crucial importance of these negative reviews for American film producers, who were attempting to establish a cohesive sense of American national film identity by branding Pathé films through their insurmountable foreignness. “During these years [of industry ‘uplift’],” argues Abel, “Pathé’s foreign subjects provided one of the principal ‘others’ against which to construct an American difference.”15 The great irony is that Pathé films were utterly indispensable for the very survival of American motion picture culture from the early 1900s through the nickelodeon boom. While production at Edison, Biograph, Vitagraph, Selig, and Lubin was often held up by patent wars, Pathé proved a continuously reliable source of quality filmmaking to appeal to domestic audiences.16 Even after the formation of the Motion Picture Patents Company in 1908, which offered Pathé conditional inclusion in the “Edison Trust,” the company continued to produce a diverse range of films that oscillated wildly in their aesthetic strategies and genre conventions, particularly

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within comic and trick modes.17 Shape-shifting women in Pathé films were over-coded with too many meanings at every level—meanings that were overdetermined by their films’ international distribution and market circulation. Female aesthetic mutability thereby signified Pathé’s rigorous versatility, from its surplus production of technical film stock to its imperative cultural fluidity, which was spurred by its precarious position in the international film market. This economic function of comedienne mutability is further apparent in the rhetoric of American trade press reviews. While Pathé magic films were showered with praise for their amazing artistry, narrative comedies were frequently condemned for their vulgar antics and cultural depravity. For example, mesmerizing spectacles such as Jean Durand’s Elastic Transformation (1909), Chomón’s Modern Magic (1908) and Wonderful Rose Designs (1909) garnered approval for “their wonderful effects . . . that will leave spectators spellbound.”18 These films exercise simple but aweinspiring tricks upon women’s bodies. Elastic Transformation converts several glasses of water into female faces, out of which sprout the rest of their figures. The film thereby suggests a metonymy between the liquidity of water and the fluidity of female corporeality. Wonderful Rose Design similarly transforms living women’s bodies into blooming Pathécolor roses, also using female display as a springboard for advertising Pathé’s patented stencil-based coloring system.19 In contrast, more context-dependent instances of female metamorphosis in Pathé films such as The Acrobatic Maid (1908), Betty’s Fireworks (1910), and Romance of a Lady Cabby (1909) provoked critique and condemnation. A review of Betty’s Fireworks is especially symptomatic in its slippage between physically destructive gags and the film’s potentially damaging cultural influence (see chapter 3 for discussion of the Betty or Léontine series). Betty’s fireworks take on a figurative weight for the Moving Picture World, which describes the film itself as “frayed at the edges.” More bluntly, the reviewer censures the depiction of marital relations in The Barber’s Revenge (1908) as a “questionable flirtation . . . not classed as funny in America” (Dec 1908, italics mine). Simply put, artistic, nonnarrative trick films were highly praised for their aesthetic virtuosity while films attempting to situate comedic antics in concrete regional or diegetic contexts elicited condemnation as immoral and perverse corruptors of American culture.

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Pathé’s genre-distribution patterns shifted to accommodate the strategically fickle whims of the American film market. Meanwhile, comedienne performers, already prone to bodily transformation, just about broke into pieces in response to these rapidly changing aesthetic and cultural norms. Pathé’s representations of female metamorphosis, which were overdetermined by the company’s tenuous market position, played a subtle but pivotal role in constructing America’s own national film identity. The comedy of female shape-shifting thereby opened onto the ruthless business politics of national film culture. These slippages between aesthetic production and trans-Atlantic reception vividly took shape through the gendered bodily and visual play of the trick genre.

Tricks of the Trade Pathé’s transitional trick films exhibit two overarching but distinct tendencies for representing female metamorphosis: 1) Mystical trick films that conceal or abstract their spatial and cultural mark-

ers. In these films, women’s bodies materialize out of hats or umbrellas (Modern Magic, 1908, and The Mysterious Boudoir, 1907); get miniaturized in front of magician’s mirrors (Wonderful Mirrors, 1907 and Satan at Play, 1907); and metamorphose into butterflies and various hovering creatures (Tit-for-Tat, 1906 and The Cigar Box, 1907). Whatever forms they occupy, these transformations remain unmotivated by either regional contexts or narrative cues. Like artisanal holdovers from the “cinema of attractions,” these films make little to no attempt to anchor their magical acts in any concrete time, space, or location. 2) Slapstick comedienne films emphasizing comic rather than fantastic modes

of bodily metamorphosis. In contrast to de-narrativized trick films that could very well take place anywhere, these films received openly hostile reception from the trade press.

In December 1908, Mayor George McClellan ordered the shutdown of every nickelodeon theater in New York City due to concerns about

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degenerate subject matter and hazardous screening conditions. Meanwhile, The Moving Picture World had this to say about The Acrobatic Maid:20 This film can perhaps suit the Moulin-Rouge of Paris, but it is not a very proper film to show to an American audience. If some ignorant spectators laughed at the exhibit of women showing their limbs in their tumbling acts, many other persons, especially ladies, could hardly refrain from disdain.

Repeatedly, French comedies were criticized for telling stories or referencing conventions that would be at best “unclear to Americans” and at worst “distasteful, unsavory, and culturally repellent subjects on the part of Pathé that should be censored.”21 In response to The Amateur Detective (1909), the Moving Picture World allowed that “American audiences may be pardoned if they need a diagram to make the fun apparent.”22 Jane Is Unwilling to Work (1909) was panned for its excess of rough-housing, while Spanish Marriage (1909) made the link between comedy and regional customs more explicit: “One of those pictures which depict a phase of foreign life that seems wholly foreign to Americans and American ways. . . . It gives a sense of how lightly some of the more serious phases of life are considered by these pleasureloving people.”23 Exemplified by the acrobatic maid, shape-shifting comediennes embodied the wrong kind of spectator laughter: the convulsive laughter of the body as opposed to the thoughtful laughter of the mind. Comediennes further provided rhetorical figures for isolating and extracting the slippery movement of laughter: its collision between the physical body and the disembodied spirit. These tensions between laughter’s corporeal and ideational designations—between the convulsing body and the tickled soul—repeatedly surfaced through the industry’s gendered categories of taste. Whether intentionally or unconsciously, the film industry constructed a powerful cultural dichotomy. When metamorphic women appeared purely for the purpose of aesthetic display, they personified the medium’s artistic aspirations; however, when their shape-shifting antics became integrated into the flow of the narrative, they represented corrupting influences detrimental to the very legitimacy of filmmaking as a cultural institution. By constructing this opposition between shape-shifting women as good images but bad characters, the American trade press further attempted to police the social contradictions of narrative film storytelling. After all, by 1908 the industry was facing “a crisis in film narrative . . . when

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longer and more complex stories were being attempted with methods that often could not make them clear to audiences.”24 The gaping chasm between ends and means (between the industry’s lofty ambitions and its concrete material situation) needed to be traversed instantaneously, at the pace of a jump cut. Women’s elastic bodies in trick films thereby provided a temporary solution to the uneven historical development of narrative film language during this period.

Colorful Display and Racializing Metaphor As already discussed, female metamorphosis, especially in European films, was valorized when unmotivated. For example, according to Moving Picture World, the film A Fan (1909) arranging “various types of beautiful girls in classic poses” represented “an artistically colored film . . . [and a] masterpiece of trick photography.”25 Other Pathé magic films, such as Japanese Butterflies (1908), Orientalized the bodily metamorphosis of white women:26 After undergoing a number of changes, presenting to the astonished eye of the spectator the most glorious display of colors, which blend from the darkest shades into the most delicate hues. This marvelous color dream over the butterfly transforms itself once more and a charming young woman makes one soon forget the beauties of the previous wonder by eclipsing it with a most graceful and fascinating Loie Fuller dance.

Color in this film slips between a special effect and a racializing metaphor as stenciled butterflies metamorphose into French serpentine dancers (à la Loie Fuller). Women’s bodies in Japanese Butterflies thereby provide neutral backdrops for displaying innovations in stenciling techniques and trademarked Pathédye colors.27 “Blend[ing] from the darkest shades into the most delicate hues,” this review further blurs between the technology of mechanical stenciling and the racial whitening of Japanese butterfly women. The manifest confusion here between colored dye and racial skin tone authenticates the film’s slippage between the female body and filmmaking technique. Even in semi-narrativized depictions of magical French butterfly women, such as Tit-for-Tat (Pathé, 1906), the thematic of physical violence

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FIGURE 4.3

Frame enlargement from La Peine du Talion [Tit-for-Tat] (Pathé, 1906)

is derealized when inflicted on women’s bodies. In this film, an evil scientist gets his farcical comeuppance for performing experiments on butterfly women. The scientist snatches up women—who prance about the woods metamorphosing between human and animated forms—and subjects them to his scrupulous, dissecting gaze. When the scientist is later pinned down by the vengeful Lepidoptera order, he is depicted from a comical birds-eye-view as he squirms in place; in contrast, the butterfly women are represented as stenciled drawings and never as live-action human bodies when under the gaze of the magnifying glass (figure 4.3). In this way, Tit-for-Tat rigidly divorces slapstick laughter (at the male scientist) from magical amazement (at brightly colored drawings). Stencil-colored animation thus mediates between the premise of interspecies metamorphosis and the potential visual terror of watching women’s bodies probed as if they really were insect specimens. Like Japanese Butterflies, Tit-for-Tat was applauded for its enchanting effects, which negate the bodily violence of male slapstick comedy with the abstract artistry of female transfiguration.

Debased Acrobatics In contrast to magical butterfly women in nonnarrative trick films, working-class women in French trick comedies, such as the Acrobatic Maid, were scapegoated for everything potentially corrupt or perverse about film

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culture. Acrobatic Maid depicts the plight of a well-meaning young woman hired as a maid by a family of athletes and gymnasts. The film’s comedy derives from the failures of the maid’s own bodily elasticity:28 They show her to the kitchen, where she gets mixed up with the pans and kettles and makes a terrible mess of the place in her vain effort to be strenuous. Next she goes into the dining room, where, she smashes everything in sight, and finally lands in the bedroom, where another lady teaches her how to turn hand springs [sic] on the bed. She gets so strenuous here that she leaves the place looking as if a cyclone struck it.

Like Eva in Eva Is Tired of Life (see chapter 3), the acrobatic maid motivates the film’s editing with her bodily pratfalls. The film follows this handspringing domestic from the family gymnasium to the kitchen, dining room, bedroom, and then through the rest of the house. It is not so much that the film’s sequential editing techniques are especially remarkable (though it is difficult to say since the film itself no longer exists); what is striking is the extent to which narrative space and interior location are organized around the nervous gestures and sprawling actions of the maid’s body. The film does not simply follow her from room to room while she breaks things (as in Lea and the Ball of Wool or Cunégonde Has Visitors). Rather, the visual construction and physical destruction of narrative space emerges through the very limits of the maid’s shape-shifting corporeality. Although not as graceful as her athletic employers, the maid proves lithe enough to do handsprings and, while wearing boxing gloves, to engage in “an interesting and scientific bout . . . with another female.” Yet unlike Eva, whose suicidal body becomes comically indestructible, the acrobatic maid repeatedly injures herself. This is the running joke of the film: every new person or object she encounters, from the family’s resident handspringing expert to their kitchen teapots, proves a fierce physical combatant that episodically causes her body to suffer injury and pain. The maid’s repetitive beating is necessary for the film to move onto the next gag. Thus, the house gets destroyed, reduced to a “complete wreck,” as the maid time and again reaches the threshold of her own physical agility. Female elasticity and comedic film articulation thereby work hand in hand (or, rather, hand in foot) in The Acrobatic Maid.

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Inoculation Against Laughing Convulsion Walter Benjamin has famously described audience laughter at slapstick film violence as an inoculation against mass psychosis: “Dangerous tensions . . . [that] have [been] engendered in the masses at large—tendencies which at a critical stage take on a psychotic character. . . . Collective laughter is one such preemptive and healing outbreak of mass psychosis.”29 However, American reception of these French trick films and comedies reveals a very different notion of how on-screen corporeality could serve a therapeutic function for nervous, neurasthenic, or overstimulated spectators. Whereas fluid, nonnarrative metamorphosis provoked inner awe and amazement, the acrobatic maid’s taut corporeality allegedly triggered the wrong kind of laughter for the laughing spectator. Against these bad objects of laughter, metamorphic women in nonnarrative trick films were designated to encompass the artistic potentials of cinema. Their effortless and entirely reversible physical mutations moreover emphasized the benign impact of film experimentation on the spectator’s body—on the nervous muscle memories triggered by fantastic film images. Women could shape-shift into a Japanese fan, blossom out of a flower, or materialize from a stencil-colored umbrella, thereby also soothing the jolting impact of spontaneous trick effects on potentially nervous or neurasthenic film spectators.30 These self-reflexive contrasts—between convulsive laughter at working women’s brittle bodies and inner awe at dancing ladies’ graceful transformations—served a broader ideological function to negotiate the class tensions that shadowed transitional filmmaking. Between trick metamorphosis and degrading carnality, this rigid bifurcation of female corporeality amounted to no less than an effort to strip comedy of its physical basis in material reality—whether that reality refers to the excesses of the laboring female body, or to the foreignness of other regional cultures, or to gross materiality as such. As Alenka Zupančič puts it in The Odd One In, comedy is “profoundly materialistic  .  .  . not simply [in] that it reminds us of . . . the mud, the dirt, [the] dense and coarse reality as our ultimate horizon (which we need to accept)  .  .  . [but] because it gives voice and body to the impasses and contradictions of this materiality itself.”31 The attempt to segregate nonnarrative tricks from integrated physical antics, in addition to undermining Pathé’s global influence, sustained the basic antagonisms between bodily pleasure and

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cultural value that drove the industry’s market development at this transitional film moment.

Segundo de Chomón’s Weird Fantasies Segundo de Chomón’s trick films for Pathé exemplify the tensions between the female body and film technique, and between artistic spectacle and narrative language in transitional filmmaking.32 In these films, women do bizarre and mystifying things with their bodies not only to exhibit the aesthetic capacities of the technology but also to move the story action forward. For example, magic films such as Wonderful Mirrors (1907) and The Red Spectre (1907) display a female magician (Julienne Mathieu, Chomón’s wife) who contorts her own body as if she were pulling rabbits out of a hat. By taking up her own body as a magical object, Mathieu’s performance becomes an impetus for the visual integration of moving-image signs. Wonderful Mirrors places the camera on the corner shelf of a woman’s vanity to highlight the animation of her antique buttons; Mathieu’s enframed torso springs to life from inside of her bracelet, and then her entire miniaturized body rises inside of her jewelry and performs a balletic dance in live-action. Whether rotating in a proscenium display alongside a leap-frog mascot amidst magical billows of brightly colored smoke (The Frog, 1908) or conjuring tableaux-vivant historical pageants from across the stage with her wand (Metamorphoses, 1912), Mathieu directs her spectator’s gaze through the collusion between her prestidigitation and her own embodied tricks. In these films, we do not observe from Mathieu’s position, but what we see is powerfully inflected by the different shapes, sizes, textures, and colors that Mathieu’s magical body inhabits. Fortunately, unlike most of the Vitagraph comedienne films that I discuss in this chapter, many of Chomón’s film are still extant. Due to special interest in their amazing trick effects and stencil-coloring techniques, these films have been recently and painstakingly restored from 35mm archival print holdings in French, Italian, and Spanish film archives.33 They have also been curated at international film festivals and silent cinema retrospectives, as well as digitized for the Internet Archive and released on a 2010 DVD, “The Genius of Segundo de Chomón.” Not exactly laugh-out-loud funny, these trick films mobilize contradictory experiences of affect and sensation

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through their loosely integrated representations of female bodily fluidity. However, despite the increased visibility of Chomón’s films, issues of laughter and bodily comedy have remained at best marginal to the recent scholarship about them. Film historians (including Matthew Solomon, Joan Battlori, Joshua Yumibe, and Richard Abel) who have written about Chomón’s mystical films tend to emphasize his technical artistry and aesthetic experimentation. Yumibe focuses on the mechanization of Pathé’s coloring process, especially ambiguities arising from Pathé’s artisanal use of stenciling in films marketed as hand-colored. According to Yumibe, “Pathé strove to convey a sense of handcrafted aura to the colors of its films through a disavowal of their mechanical origin.”35 This fetishization of handiwork, despite the film’s mechanized coloring processes, further implicates questions of genre and affect. Are these films meant to provoke convulsive laughter or disembodied wonder, or perhaps some strange coordination between these two seemingly opposed entities? Although not genre comedies, Chomón’s magic films open onto the possibility of a more nuanced understanding of spectator laughter. Their comical aesthetics—somewhere between slapstick trickery and pure modernist fantasy—provoke a strange intermingling between aesthetic awe and bodily suggestibility for their potentially laughing spectators.

Laughter or Awe? The fascination of Chomón’s films extends precisely from their ambiguity of motivation: objects do not come to life for the sole purpose of amusing or terrifying their human subjects, as in country-rube comedies like Edison’s Uncle Josh (1902) or Vitagraph’s Haunted Hotel (1907).36 Chomón titles frequently thematize the slippery relationship between supernatural imagery and automated technologies, in such films as Rebellious Walking Stick (1906), The Red Spectre (1907), Wonderful Mirrors (1907), Weird Fantasies (1907), Haunted Kitchen (1907), Living Silhouette (1907), Satan at Play (1907), The Fantastic Umbrella (1907), Microscopic Dancer (1908), and The Electric Hotel (1908). Carried along by a relentless chain of displacements between object animation and subjective hallucination, Chomón’s films provoke a confusing slippage of affect and identification. Terror gives way to awe, which gets reincarnated as laughter as spontaneously as a film itself

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FIGURE 4.4 Frame enlargement from Le Spectre Rouge [The Red Spectre] (Pathé, 1907)

bridges from a realistic scenario to an entirely uncanny one. Trick effects exercised on women’s bodies in these films are at once completely fantastic and yet grounded in everyday domestic routines such as brushing one’s hair or disrobing after a long day. For example, in Wonderful Mirrors the stone encrusted in Mathieu’s bracelet comes to life and performs a classical ballet repertoire through a miniature reincarnation of her own body. In Panicky Picnic (Pathé, 1909)— an adaptation of Walter Booth’s comedy The Vacuum Cleaner Nightmare (Urban, 1906)—the silhouette of an old woman undressing in front a white sheet spontaneously gives birth to a moving train, and in this same film a crazy vacuum cleaner ingests the entire body of a housemaid, never to spit her back out again. Chomón’s devices take on simultaneously concrete and hallucinatory qualities, thereby provoking incongruously mystifying and nervously comical affects. Although these films often construct comical scenarios, these are typically resolved or displaced through metaphysical and supernatural means. For example, Panicky Picnic oscillates between the mystifying and the ridiculous. When a group of panicky picnickers hungrily slice into a link of sausage, the meaty innards crumble into dust and then transmogrify into crawling bugs; meanwhile, the hard-boiled eggs hatch into white mice. Panicky Picnic repeatedly muddies the line between comic humiliation and magical hallucination: between the impetus to laugh at buffoonish human characters and the displacement of this laughter into awe or amazement at mystically moving and evaporating objects. The rapid oscillation between these

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two registers—bodily comedy and spectral animation—creates a blurring between different, often incompatible, comical affects and visceral sensations. In Panicky Picnic, two oafish young men accidentally raises a horde of female ghosts from the dead by accidentally exploding their kettle while attempting to boil water. Women clad in white materialize from the fireplace and then float above it in circular rotations. The white ghost ladies then transform into vengeful spirits and encroach upon the young men, who attempt to fight them off, before the ghosts fade away again and vanish. This magical haunting then rapidly dissolves into a scene of comical knockabout fisticuffs between the two men. Moreover, unlike the poor rubes who are goaded into dueling for a woman’s affections by way of a grotesquely absurd cock fight in Miss Mischief (see chapter 3), the comical violence of rivalry or aggression in Chomón’s films always becomes a trigger for further magic or experimentation: this violence is suggested but never fully actualized— displaced or diluted rather than laughed off. In Panicky Picnic’s chain of visual and sensorial displacements, spectator-positioning switches rapidly and repeatedly back-and-forth between comic distance and mystical invigoration, from straight slapstick clowning to the supernatural animation of undead female bodies.

Vitagraph Versus Pathé Pathé and Vitagraph repeatedly appropriated trick devices and comical scenarios from each other’s films. This list includes Vitagraph’s Haunted Hotel (1907) and Pathé’s Electric Hotel (1908), about automated devices that bedevil country travelers; Vitagraph’s Kitchen Maid’s Dream (1907) and Pathé’s Scullion’s Dream (1908), about the uses of limb dismemberment to expedite labor efficiency; Vitagraph’s The Disintegrated Convict (1907) and Pathé’s The Invisible Thief (1909), about metamorphic convicts who disintegrate or become invisible to elude reincarceration; and Vitagraph’s The Thieving Hand (1908) and Pathé’s Diabolical Pickpocket (1908), about the autonomous criminality of detached appendages. It would be pointless to try to attribute originality or to denigrate reduplication between these film sources and their innovative adaptations. However, the psychological and visual implications of the spectator’s positioning in relation to these trick effects differ dramatically between the Pathé and Vitagraph versions. Vitagraph’s tricks usually emanate from an individual character’s point of

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view (such as a feverish author, a daydreaming kitchen maid, or an oafish country traveler), and thus provoke mocking laughter at the expense of their distressed, irrational subjects. In contrast, Pathé’s tricks are given corporeal rather than psychological motivations that blur between characters’ hallucinatory perceptions and the sheer powers of cinematographic representation. For example, Vitagraph’s Haunted Hotel was best known for a long-take sequence in which a self-pouring pitcher of wine terrifies a rubish country traveler.37 In contrast, in Pathe’s Electric Hotel, stop-motion cinematography gets exercised on human bodies rather than just on objects that coexist with humans in the diegesis. Electric Hotel depicts the mystical adventures of two travelers (played by Chomón and Mathieu) who arrive at an ultra-modern roadhouse where various automatic devices perform their mundane daily tasks on their behalf.38 The inn is haunted not by spooky undead ghosts but by cinematic technologies. In one segment, a woman stares directly into the camera while an animated brush works through her hair, and then the object spins her around while itself transforming into a comb that braids her long tresses (figure 4.5). (Before tending to Mathieu’s hair, that same brush had polished Chomón’s character’s shoes.)

FIGURE 4.5 Frame enlargement from The Electric Hotel (Chomón, 1908)

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In Pathé’s Scullion’s Dream (produced just months after Vitagraph’s Kitchen Maid’s Dream), a kitchen crew rushes to prepare a big dinner on time while a snoozing kitchen boy has vivid dreams that blur with the context established by the frame story. The dreams infuse the workers’ physical reality, thereby preventing the crew from channeling their labor energies toward their actual responsibilities. Whereas the kitchen maid uses dreaming in order to resolve the contradictions between her labor time and her impossible workload, the scullion’s dream only generates further layers of corporeal difference. For example, in Scullion’s Dream, a magical dwarf goes around the room chopping off everyone’s hands. If limb detachment motivates wish fulfillment in Kitchen Maid (to finish the chores on time), in Scullion’s Dream it is purely aesthetic. However, surprisingly, it is given a bodily cause or explanation (i.e. the magical dwarf), which is absent in Kitchen Maid. The kitchen maid’s dismemberment explicitly remains her own private fantasy: a visual resolution to her physical limitations—though her employers remain patently oblivious to its substance after she awakens. In the Pathé version, however, the dream sequence materializes as a collective hallucination. By the end of the film, the entire kitchen crew becomes complicit in the scullion’s fantasy. The group’s collective participation in the scullion’s dream in the Pathé/Chomón version creates a deliberate ambiguity between the film’s mystical trick imagery and the social relations established in its frame story: the hierarchy among the kitchen workers who must hustle to finish preparing the big meal on time. The film’s trick effects are numerous: hands get sliced off like hunks of bread, utensils levitate with ease, and at one point a buzzing fly draws a sketch caricature on a snoozing bald man’s head. By providing tangible (albeit incredible) motivations for its trick fantasy hallucinations, and by rendering these fantasies as an emanation from the collective unconscious shared by the kitchen workers, Scullion’s Dream effectively undermines the separation between surrealistic dream interlude and its realistic narrative framing. These semi-motivated visions thereby emerge from the film’s tensions between its visual spectacle and its narrative integration. Given the American trade press’ painstaking attempts to assert a binary between debased foreign comedies and exoticized trick attractions, it is crucial to emphasize the hybridity and slippage between these opposed entities. I would locate Chomón’s films on the cusp of this divide between mockery and amazement. Their real sleight of hand is the dexterity with which they

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conceal or obscure their concrete social themes (such as domestic labor) and their often vividly comedic scenarios. Women’s magical availability for physical metamorphosis, to this point, effectively obscures the radical instability between comical and uncanny imagery at the heart of Chomón’s films. These aesthetic ambiguities open onto larger issues of the subjective incoherence and even madness provoked by Chomón’s experimental aesthetics. Rather than compartmentalizing between human rubes and ingenious things, these films explore the duality and ultimate instability of either entity. They evoke Wyndham Lewis’s example of a cabbage reading Flaubert to illustrate the absurdity of the very notion of the human encapsulated by Lewis’s idea of “the wild body” (see chapter 1). In fact, such an image (of a cabbage reading Flaubert) is not a far cry from the world of uncannily anthropomorphized objects that inhabit Chomón’s diegeses, which include dancing mirror reflections, automatic hair brushes, disintegrating delinquents, and bald men’s heads repurposed as cartoon sketch tablets. What makes this imagery read as fantastic, surrealist magic rather than as uproarious, absurdist comedy? In Chomón’s films, the overriding liquidity between human agents and instrumental objects challenges the stability of either entity, further disturbing the subjective position of the laughing film spectator.

“Of Mites and Women”: Princess Nicotine; or, The Smoke Fairy Both Pathé’s and Vitagraph’s transitional slapstick comedienne films experiment with irrational techniques and perverse cultural scenarios to develop strategies for positioning the spectator in the thick of the narration. The trope of female miniaturization represents an especially revealing example of this overdetermination between gendered meaning and trick film aesthetics. In Chomón films such as Red Spectre, Wonderful Mirrors, The Easter Eggs, and Microscopic Dancer, tiny women get trapped inside of glass bottles, materialize out of Easter eggs, or even clone their own mirror reflections, which get dislocated from their corresponding bodies. This iconography of female miniaturization (of spontaneously shrinking women’s bodies) both fosters the film’s aesthetic experimentation and motivates the articulation of an individualized vantage point for the spectator. In other words, the tiny isolated body of the woman reinforces the delimitation of a personalized, masterful, and inscribed spectator position.

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Vitagraph’s film Princess Nicotine; or the Smoke Fairies (1909) plays with this tension between visual irrationality and voyeuristic access—and between mystifying amazement and sadistic mockery—and takes them to their absurdist, hallucinogenic limits. In 1912, Frederick Talbot described Princess Nicotine as “a distinct novelty . . . dainty in its conception, fascinating in its themes, and finished in its production. . . . All the subterfuges known to the cinematographic trick art were pressed into service, rendering it completely mystifying from beginning to end.”39 Princess Nicotine derives its innovative optical techniques from its baffling social themes. The film depicts the domestic plight of a gentleman smoker who dreams that he is visited by two impish, doll-sized nicotine fairies. The fairies (one played by Gladys Hulette, the other uncredited) hide out in his cigar box. One lodges herself in his pipe, which he is then unable to light; and the other hands him a flower, in which her own head is embedded. He literally chokes on her close-up when he leans in to smell the flower and she blows a puff of cigarette smoke into his face. A stop-motion sequence transforms the rose into a cigar, which the smoker is again unable to enjoy because the fairy siphons away all the smoke. Finally, he manages to light a Sweet Caporal brand cigarette, while Princess Nicotine performs a fire dance with his matchsticks (figure 4.6). This alarms the smoker, who

FIGURE 4.6 Frame enlargement from Princess Nicotine (Vitagraph, 1909)

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extinguishes the fire with soda water, accidentally spraying himself in the process. The hoser gets hosed, but the trick here overshadows the gag: doused with soda water, Princess Nicotine literally melts and then disappears from the image just as the film ends. Rather than spontaneously combusting (à la Bridget or Mary Jane), her body proves more liquid than combustible, provoking a more disturbing affect of comicality than instantaneous, eruptive laughter. Princess Nicotine draws on a slew of gag devices: jokes about incongruities in scale between the full-size man and the tiny fairies, the seltzer bottle that goes off and sprays the man in the face, and the comic violence of spontaneous physical transformation. The film takes up these comic conventions and pushes them to their gendered aesthetic and corporeal limits by inflicting them on the film’s central objects of fascination: the tiny bodies of the nicotine fairies. Listing several key aspects of this process will help to tease out the film’s tensions between female bodies and cinematographic vision: 1) The trick apparatus, which creates an intense juxtaposition between the

tiny bodies of the fairies and the almost grotesque scale of everyday life. 2) The gendered dynamic of the smoker’s aggression toward the fairies, and

the way his cruel taunting of them evokes broader experiences of urban modernity. For example, in one image, the man blows puffs of smoke in Princess Nicotine’s face, which swallow up her tiny body like the onslaught of industrial fuel exhaust. 3) The fairies’ elemental attraction to fire, which they seem impervious to (rather than spontaneously combusting), and the intriguing finale when Princess Nicotine melts and disappears after the smoker squirts her with soda water. 4) The broader implications of this film for thinking about how the slapstick comedienne’s body gets caught up in filmmaking’s negotiations between exhibitionist spectacle and narrative storytelling: between Vitagraph’s unique innovations and the standardization of its films as exchangeable commodities.

Princess Nicotine is both utterly singular and all about its own commodification: it would certainly not be inaccurate to read Princess Nicotine as a glorified advertisement for Sweet Caporal brand cigars and cigarettes.

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For example, in a transitional sequence, when Blackton’s stop-motion animation transforms Princess Nicotine’s flower into a Sweet Caporal cigar, the miracle of spontaneous appearance gets literalized as an impetus for the exchangeability of value. This transubstantiation from cinematic conjuring to commodity standardization adheres to the nicotine fairies’ own contradictory positions between irrational performance and fetishistic objectification. At one point, the younger fairy moons the smoker, who frequently peers at her through his magnifying lens. The elaborate on-set optics, which use trick mirrors, larger-than-life props, and hidden wires, solidify the film’s orchestration of disavowal. In a bizarre apparatus of interlocking commodity, psychosexual, and technological fetishisms, this film is all about the aesthetic possibilities of what it means to defer a “traumatic look” (which is, of course, how psychoanalysis defines fetishism).40 Indeed, the representability of the fairies requires a completely different framing and set of objects than the full shots of the smoker in his armchair. Looking at these women involves transforming the spectator’s perception of what it means to look. Cuts to the closer views of the fairies are framed by the smoker’s gaze through his magnifying glass. In their solo shots, the use of enormous trick props dwarfs the images of the fairies (figure 4.7). These include a cigar box large enough for the fairies to stand upright in it,

FIGURE 4.7 Frame enlargement from Princess Nicotine (Vitagraph, 1909)

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a corn-cob pipe with a bowl as large as a barrel, and prop matchsticks measuring thirty inches in length.

Uplifting the Miniature Susan Stewart discusses the ideological implications of aesthetic scale in On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, The Gigantic, The Souvenir, The Collection. According to Stewart, “miniature writing” (micrographia) “depends upon the contrast between the physical and the abstract features of the mark. . . . In those examples of micrographia which form a picture we see an emphasis upon healing the skewed relation between meaning and materiality.”41 (Stewart focuses on the popularity of miniature books in the nineteenth century.) Among her main concerns is the lack of parallelism between material size and symbolic import: for example, the miniature object utterly transforms the physical scale of the sign, yet its meaning remains relatively stable. Perhaps this is also why Stewart posits the miniature as an ideal form for commercial advertising: it acts upon colossal things, from epic sagas to statuesque pillars, and makes them ever more portable, accessible, convenient and handy for everyday use and consumption. The commercial appeals of the miniature were not lost on Vitagraph’s Albert E. Smith and J. Stuart Blackton, who were famous for churning out adaptations of great literary works as single-reel short-film commodities. As Anthony Slide remarks, their “ability to condense a full-length novel or play to ten minutes of screen time is quite staggering.”42 Vitagraph’s adaptationsin-miniature include Francesca di Rimini; or, The Two Brothers (1907), Romeo and Juliet (1908), Macbeth (1908), East Lynne; or, Led Astray (1908), Richard III (1908), Oliver Twist (1909), Les Misérables (1909), and Shakespeare’s Tragedy, King Lear (1909). “Even D.W. Griffith at Biograph could not boast such an output of literary adaptations.”43 Special effects adapted from the language of trick cinema were frequently enlisted in Vitagraph’s efforts to elevate motion pictures to an intertextual art. For example, in their ambitious multi-reel production of The Life of Moses (1909), as A. E. Smith recounts in his autobiography Two Reels and a Crank, the problem of how to film the parting of the Red Sea was resolved through recourse to trick photography and the use of multiple exposures. “The closing-of-the-Red Sea episode was made at a place where one might

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least expect a biblical odyssey of such scope to take place—Coney Island. The scene was done in double exposure.”44 Blackton first shot the Egyptians walking along the wet stony beach, and then exposed two huge waves breaking over the soldiers. “In the finished shot the huge waves cracked effectively against the soldiers from both sides.”45 (Historians might consider Life of Moses in relation to what Lauren Rabinovitz has defined as slapstick’s genre of “Coney Island Comedies.”46) Miniaturization was a notably gendered special effect in Vitagraph’s discourse of social uplift, which, again, hinged on addressing the spectator as a private body and an individual subject as opposed to as a member of an unruly mass public. The trope of micrographia appears in numerous quality film productions by Vitagraph. Marketed with chichi French labels as “films de luxe,” these intertextual adaptations attempted to smooth over the incoherence of their narratives-in-miniature by making magical appeals to the spectator. For example, plot ellipses in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream are quickly forgotten when Puck (as a miniaturized body) translates an overly wordy intertitle through a series of special effects. Titania magically disappears and reappears, while Puck gets a running start from the back of the stage to “uplift” himself into the sky. The film follows Puck (who is also played by Gladys Hulette, the younger of the nicotine fairies) across several cuts, through a dreamy split-frame traveling matte shot signifying some kind of ethereal space to an overlit field where he plucks the herb, and back again on a return journey that mirrors and inverts the first three shots. Talbot explains this pseudo-narrative proliferation of tricks as an effort to condense the picture play “to the irreducible minimum without forfeiting coherency.”47 Aestheticizing Puck’s narrative antics with a dreamy series of traveling matte shots, Midsummer Night’s Dream provides a visual supplement to the lengthy intertitles that sandwich this sequence without having to unpack them. In other words, the plot is told through written words, and then stripped down and made visually compelling through trick images. A 1910 issue of the Vitagraph Bulletin advertised the film in this way: “Students of the great dramatist’s works will thoroughly enjoy the careful pictorial presentation of the many scenes, while the whole play is so clearly portrayed that it will not fail to delight the spectator who is not familiar with the works of Shakespeare.”48 Literalizing the narrative condensation of meaning with their magically tiny bodies, micrographic women further

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represented the fantasy of spectatorship as a private or personalized experience. Whether framed through a magnifying glass or on behalf of a wordy intertitle, miniaturized women physically corroborated cinema’s social project to address the spectator as an autonomous individual, separate from the other bodies in the audience.

Beyond Multiple Exposures: Comediennes’ Profilmic Bodies Unlike Midsummer Night’s Dream, which focuses on promoting its Shakespearean source text, Princess Nicotine constructs its theatrical legitimacy by staging its tricks in depth in front of the camera instead of manipulating them in post-production editing. For example, the shots featuring both the smoker and the fairies refrain from the less sophisticated technique of double exposure (used in the Red Sea scene in Life of Moses), instead achieving their gross distortions of scale with elaborate on-set optics. Blackton and cameraman Tony Gaudio shot these sequences by placing the fairies on a large platform in front of the camera and filming them through a mirror positioned well behind the smoker, so that the fairies appear tiny in relation to him. The cinematographic trick here hinges on the fairy performers’ mimetic discipline: their scrupulously precise blocking in front of the trick mirror. Like the fairies, whose mirror images appear as cinematic distortions rather than as transparent reflections, the film’s spectator oscillates between aesthetic distance and visceral proximity. Affectively, this uncertain visual orientation reinforces the film’s unresolved comic tone. What is perhaps most interesting about Princess Nicotine, like Mathieu’s uncanny mirror tricks in many of Chomón’s films, is the undecidability of its comic gestures. Is laughter even the appropriate response when the man blows smoke at the fairy, covering her in a Sweet Caporal brand haze? Moreover, what kinds of gendered and political anxieties does this film awaken, and what does it mean when these anxieties become funny? With Princess Nicotine, the spectator’s laughter is palpably ambivalent. Even the film’s ironic premise as a traditional fairytale spawned from the desire for modern nicotine consumption comes across as kind of a sad joke. The fairies’ performances, although playfully comic, also had to be physically meticulous, lest an errant gesture expose the film’s apparatus of deception.49

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Metamorphic Historiography As the range of examples discussed here demonstrates, comediennes’ bodily performances played vital roles in negotiating industrial and geopolitical transitions in filmmaking. Female corporeality offered the means by which filmmakers could articulate a new aesthetic language that would allow the film industry to transcend or avoid (or both) the medium’s instability in both social prestige and marketability. However, this process unfolded in very different ways. From Pathé’s virtuosic trick films and debased slapstick comedies to Vitagraph’s socially uplifting images of metamorphic female corporeality (dismemberment, miniaturization, sexual reassignment), tropes of female bodily liquidity were overdetermined by the film industry’s fragile social status, contradictory market imperatives, tenuous narrative aesthetics, and radically unstable affective modes of spectatorship.

5 D. W. Griffith’s Slapstick Comediennes Female Corporeality and Narrative Film Storytelling

“To me the ideal type for feminine stardom has nothing of the flesh, nothing of the note of sensuousness. My pictures reveal the type I mean. Commenters have called it the spirituelle type. But there is a method in my madness as it were. The voluptuous type, blooming into the full-blown rose cannot endure. The years show their stamp too early. The other type—ah, that is different.” —D. W. Griffith, Photoplay interview

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hroughout his long film career, David Wark Griffith was completely obsessed with “spirituelle” women, whom he frequently analogized to latent blossoms and other dormant perennials. Griffith favored fleshless heroines, epitomized by Lillian Gish, Mae Marsh, and Mary Pickford. Yet, as with every notable star fetish, the spirituelle had a doppelganger: the voluptuary, whose qualities preoccupied Griffith in nearly equal measure. As a result, behind every virginal Pickford or selfabnegating Gish, there lurked a slapstick comedienne like Mabel Normand, Flora Finch, or Florence Lawrence. These “full-blown roses [who] could not endure” proved aesthetically and ideologically crucial for Griffith’s construction of the spirituelle ideal. The image of a woman who “has nothing of the flesh” would be meaningless without the emphatic display of her opposite:

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a representation of femininity that vilifies all the excesses of the body. The one cannot exist without the other. Indeed, many of the paradoxes and problematics of female embodiment in early silent film are encapsulated in Griffith’s dialectic between these voluptuary and spirituelle women. I argue that female performances in Griffith’s films function as sounding boards for his own articulation of film syntax. Extending the paradigm beyond Griffith’s slate of “nonsensuous” female stars to look at the repressed status of the “voluptuous type” in his films complicates notions of his vision of femininity and its relationship to his film style. Across his Biograph career (1908–1913), when his experimentation with the discourse of narrative cinema was still very much in its formative stage, there emerged a productive tension between film form and female corporeality. Repeatedly, female bodily excess was flaunted and exploited in order to work through the uneven development and codification of narrative film grammar. The aesthetic and ideological oppositions between “the spirituelle” and “the voluptuary” were part and parcel of Griffith’s formulation of a new film language. Here, I focus on Griffith’s films not to reinscribe the mythic genius of his authorship but to do precisely the opposite: to debunk this myth of male authorship by revealing the repressed places of slapstick comediennes as counter-authorial forces in his filmmaking. Griffith’s films make conspicuously similar uses of women’s bodies across genres, from knockabout slapstick to suspenseful melodrama, to fill in the missing links in narrative filmmaking’s visual arsenal. In other words, melodrama is never purified from other modes. Griffith’s language of pathos often draws on comic images of female excess to represent dramatic action and to articulate character motivation. However, film historians have focused too narrowly on Griffith’s innovations in melodrama. The theory of transitional cinema as a messily negotiated set of practices aiming for ideals of social uplift and artistic legitimacy therefore calls for a broader recasting and rereading of Griffith’s formative works. The market need for Biograph to produce funny slapstick comedies, such as The Jones series, Those Awful Hats (1909), Deceived Slumming Party (1908), and The Wooden Leg (1909), dogged Griffith from the beginning of his filmmaking career (figure 5.1). Yet these comedies have received almost no historical consideration or critical attention: they represent historiographic blind spots in an otherwise hyper-visible film corpus. Acknowledging their absence raises crucial questions about the dual construction of gender

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FIGURE 5.1 Frame enlargement from Those Awful Hats (Biograph, 1909)

norms and genre conventions across transitional filmmaking. Slapstick comedy devices made their marks on Griffith’s narrative techniques, especially in his Biograph films, in which performers’ bodily gestures express corporeally that which these films could not quite convey visually through cutting and editing. Many comedians, such as Mabel Normand and Mack Sennett, got their starts at Biograph playing in both straight slapstick comedies and what I am calling slapstick-inflected melodramas. This latter category refers not just to moments of levity in melodrama but also to the deployment of techniques and devices carried over from slapstick comedy. For example, excessive bodily gestures that border on clowning take on a pathetic expressivity in Griffith’s transitional melodramas. Moreover, the idea of slapstick-inflected melodrama raises questions about the conventional limits that distinguish comedic clowning from nonhumorous forms of affect and sensation. The line between comedy and drama, and between laughter and pity, is often rigidly drawn in scholarship on humor. Bergson’s account has had an unduly long afterlife, as he argues, “for laughter has no greater foe than emotion.” He clarifies this broad claim: “I do not mean that we could not laugh at a person who inspires us with pity, for instance, or even with affection, but in such a case we must, for the moment, put our affection out of court and impose silence on our pity.”1

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Yet, as is so often apparent, it can be a slippery slope between dramatic excess and outright absurdity. The figure of the voluptuary, or of the overly corporeal and therefore necessarily wicked woman, resides at the limits of melodrama in many of Griffith’s films from this era. Rather than provoking mirth for the spectator, the voluptuary’s bodily affectations work to mask the generic hybridity intrinsic to film’s storytelling conventions. This chapter will trace lines of influence between Griffith’s slapstick comedies and corporeal melodramas at Biograph, arguing that film histories using Griffith as an exemplar for outlining broader social and artistic transformations in film form must be rethought intergenetically: melodrama is only part of the picture. Moreover, the frequent trope of feminine doubling between the fleshy voluptuary and “fleshless” spirituelle provided a moral framework for obscuring the key function of female slapstick corporeality during this period of narrative filmmaking: so much sympathetic spectator emotion was elicited by means of the sight gag of female voluptuary excess. The specter of comedienne slapstick thereby haunts this canonical film director’s extremely productive early Biograph career.

Comedy, Genre, and Feminist Film Theory The importance of co-historicizing the emergence of film form with narrative experimentations in comedienne clowning evokes longstanding debates about the place of the body in feminist film theory. For theorists of the gendered gaze, including Laura Mulvey, Mary Ann Doane, Molly Haskell, Carol Clover, Kaja Silverman, and Teresa de Lauretis, slapstick comedy’s inherent distance between the laughing spectator and its comic object ultimately exacerbates the problem of women’s structural exclusion from visual desire. As Doane puts it, “women’s relation to desire . . . is at best a mediated one,” because women are both too close to and too far from the image itself.2 For Doane, Freud’s theory of jokes exemplifies the structural problem of female objectification through mechanisms of visual desire. As Freud argues, many jokes provide an alternative form of pleasure to substitute for the absence of women’s sexual availability to men. “In order for a dirty joke to emerge in its specificity in Freud’s description,” Doane explains, “the object of desire—the woman—must be absent and a third person (another man) must be present as witness to the joke  .  .  . once again insur[ing] a masculinization of

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the place of the spectator.”3 Feminist scholars have therefore long privileged melodrama over comedic genres for theorizing and critiquing structures of gendered spectatorship and libidinal desire in narrative cinema. Echoing Bergson’s 1911 definition of laughter as inimical to emotional empathy, Linda Williams pointedly excludes comedy from her feminist recuperation of debased body genres (porn, horror, and melodrama): “Physical clown comedy is another ‘body genre’ concerned with all manner of gross activities and body functions. . . . Nonetheless, it has not been deemed gratuitously excessive, probably because the reaction of the audience does not mimic the sensations experienced by the central clown.”4 However, given the hyper-visibility of Griffith’s films for historicizing categories of melodrama in American cinema, looking closely at the relationship between female pathos and physical clowning could help to reopen feminist interrogations of visual desire and the place of the female body in narrative filmmaking. Although there is of course a difference between straight slapstick clowning and slapstick-inflected melodrama, I would argue that all laughter at some level derives from the desire to be taken seriously. Louise Fazenda once reflected, long after the end of her silent slapstick career:5 “I believe that every comedienne is the child of an inner tragedy. I don’t know if all the funny men are ‘clowns with aching hearts,’ but I do know that all the funny women are, if they’ll be honest about it. . . . Every time I look at a funny still of mine, a knife goes through my heart.”6 Although Fazenda emphasizes the inner suffering of the marginalized female clown, her remarks have broader implications for understanding the ambivalent position of the laughing female spectator. To invoke the sixteenth-century physician Laurent Joubert, who discussed the pain of laughter in a very different context than Fazenda, “The joy we experience [in laughter] can never be unalloyed”; laughter can never be wholly separated from sadness “given that everything ridiculous arises from ugliness and dishonesty.”7 Like bodies themselves, film genres are porous; ignoring the fluidity of film genres threatens to reinscribe the very hierarchies of difference that have long reinforced the exclusion of certain women’s films deemed too “gross” or “excessive” to be taken seriously. The critical stakes of rethinking this relationship between Griffith’s onscreen female bodies and their purported derealization by his filmmaking grammar opens onto further questions about histories of filmic narration. Griffith historiographies tend to situate the director’s work at Biograph

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as a hinge between early exhibitionism and proto-classical integration. However, as I have emphasized in this book, it is important to articulate the messiness of this process of transformation between early and classical film styles (not just to acknowledge this messiness, but to continue to describe and understand it). As Tom Gunning and many other film historians have argued, the bodily exhibitionism celebrated by early cinema does not simply disappear or even get pushed to the margins by psychologically motivated and emotionally absorbing film characters.8 Rather, bodily performance persists as the condition of possibility for the integration of excessive film images that might otherwise be unclear or unwieldy in their narrative signification. Griffith’s gendered ideology of feminine types—the debased “voluptuary” versus the “spirituelle” ideal—provides an organizing framework around which narrative difference is made legible. Gunning explains in “Weaving a Narrative” that the storyteller pulls the strings, “suspends, interrupts, and yet knits together actions within narratives.”9 Griffith’s actresses often assume the film storyteller’s function to hold the narrative together. From Mabel Normand to Mary Pickford, Griffith’s heroines play bodily surrogates for the very processes of filmic narration meant to disembody the spectator—to immerse the spectator as a psychologically absorbed subject rather than a living corporeal entity. Anthony Slide muses, “What made a Griffith girl? Physically, they were all small, slim, and young, the last attribute being perhaps the most important.” He then quotes Griffith: “We sit in the twilight of the theater and in terms of youth, upon faces enlarged, we see thoughts that are personal to us, with the privilege of supplying our own words and messages as they may fit our individual experiences in life.”10 Although a bit hyperbolic, Slide’s notion of film spectatorship as emotional projection can be pushed even further, beyond the aesthetic proximity of the close-up and toward the overwhelming scale of the female body. For example, in a Mabel Normand melodrama The Eternal Mother (1912), Normand’s corporeal unruliness provides a central image of legibility for framing the film’s pathos of moral oppositions.11 The film plots Griffith’s spirituelle/ voluptuary dichotomy in perhaps the most overt terms of all his singlereelers featuring Normand: it poses Blanche Sweet as the title character (named Martha) against Mabel Normand as “Mary the neighbor, restless and thoughtless.” Whereas Martha, “the eternal mother,” sacrifices her own marriage and renounces all bodily pleasures for the remainder of the

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film (which follows her into old age), Mary’s “prematurely bloomed rose” fades and withers with the onset of motherhood. The temporality of the actress’s “soul” is literally a moral proposition here: it represents a desire for self-sacrifice and asceticism, and precludes any meaningful screen encounter with bodies that might strike the spectator as excessively fleshy or material. In other words, Mary/Normand’s physical inability to sustain herself reinforces the spirituelle’s metaphysical virtues. This moral renunciation of the voluptuary’s body thus provides a warning for renouncing any visual identification with her. For example, when first introduced, Mabel effectively shadows the position of the camera, distorting vision with her imposing nearness to the place of the spectator. With Mary/Normand’s excessive visual proximity represented here by her overwhelming physical scale, female corporeality functions as a limit case for visual identification. The voluptuary walks a fine line between framing enjoyment and totally oversaturating it. More pointedly, motherhood, or—as Griffith has it, subordinating the pleasure of the drives to the necessities of biological reproduction—is the beginning of the end for the voluptuary’s fleeting duration. After giving birth to John’s child (John is married to Mary but clearly better suited for Martha), Mary spends the remainder of her screen time languishing in the lower left corner of the frame, waiting to die. With motherhood proving fatal to Mary’s voluptuary womb, “the eternal mother” Martha adopts the child as her own and raises it while many years pass. Having “nothing of the flesh” herself, Martha does not seem to mind enduring several decades of living next door to John before allowing him “to find rest in [her] arms.” The eternal mother seeks reconciliation, not temptation (as an intertitle reminds the spectator in between images of a young and, later, an aged Martha looking out at John in the field); she only lets John back into her home when the image in the reverse shot (i.e. John) has proven sufficiently bent-over and arthritic. This scene evokes Miriam Hansen’s interpretation of Lillian Gish’s eternal mother character in Intolerance (1916). “The Cradle Shot,” Hansen argues, “undermines its own attempts to structure the excess of femininity that troubles Intolerance, to organize it into clear-cut oppositions and parallels. . . . [However,] pitting a fatal femininity against an innocent maternity allows these oppositions to slide into affinities.”12 Lacking the multi-reel ambitions and transhistorical complexities of Intolerance, The Eternal Mother lays bare Griffith’s own “affinities” by cranking them out as clear-cut oppositions.13

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Characteristically, Slide debunks the spirituelle’s “ethereal” mythos by resorting to gender dichotomies: “It is always said, foolishly, that the Griffith heroine was always ethereal.  .  .  . If anything a Griffith heroine had many masculine traits, in that she would fight for what she desired, and if she did not get it, it was not through want of trying.”14 Misogynistic implications of equating masculinity with the persistence of desire notwithstanding, Slide seems to miss the point of his own metaphor. Evidently, in The Eternal Mother it is the persistence of Blanche Sweet’s desire to renounce her own desire that marks her as the most “spirituelle”—or the more spirituelle, since Martha’s emblematic identity is relentlessly contrasted with Mary’s, who even bears Martha’s child for her so that Martha’s motherhood can remain a divine conception. The Eternal Mother’s simultaneous damnation of and fascination with female corporeality can be traced back to Griffith’s very early films at Biograph. If Griffith’s 450-plus film corpus (most of which survives on 35mm or 16mm, with more and more circulating digitally) has been made too historically legible, the key words enlisted to abet this transparency would be “father,” “pioneer,” “auteur,” and “virtuoso.” Edward Wagenknecht sums it up by quoting James Agee: “To watch his work is like being witness to the beginning of melody, or the first conscious use of the lever or the wheel: the emergence, the coordination, and the eloquence of language.”15 This obsession with historicizing Griffith’s techne (or his “eloquence of language”), however, has rendered invisible the crucial function of female physical comedy: comedienne corporeality greased the wheels of visual articulation in Griffith’s narrative storytelling machine.

Griffith Does Slapstick Griffith’s early comedies in particular have been disregarded as ephemeral flirtations produced out of economic necessity, of little critical interest to researchers now, and as distractions from the larger project of narrating the trajectory of Griffith’s career. For example, his early farce Deceived Slumming Party (which I discuss in chapter 2) about a Chinese sausage machine that transforms white women’s bodies into sausages and then back into white women when run in reverse has been deemphasized in its linkages to Griffith’s nascent film style. Cooper Graham speculates: “There was

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probably another director involved besides Griffith. . . . It would be interesting to know how much of this film was simply filmed using vaudeville and burlesque sets and actors.”16 Rather than corrupt Griffith’s historical trajectory, Kristin Thompson makes a similar move in her commentary about A Politician’s Love Story (1909): “It seems to reflect more the talents of its star, Mack Sennett, here giving one of his early star turns in a film that prefigures his Keystone days.”17 The Wooden Leg (1909) is an especially instructive example of this critical erasure, since it has often been cited to emblematize why Griffith’s early comedies do not merit serious critical attention. Kelly Brown demonstrates this tendency in her 1999 biography of Florence Lawrence: “Other subjects are so insignificant that a half-reel seems infinitely long for them. The Wooden Leg is one of these; Florence was Claire, a girl who successfully rebuffed an unwanted suitor by pretending to have a wooden leg.”18 Steven Higgins echoes Brown’s suspicions in his commentary about The Wooden Leg in the Griffith Project: “In attempting to meet the overwhelming demands of the Biograph Company’s heavy release schedule . . . sometimes [Griffith] had to settle for filler.”19 Higgins enumerates the film’s many deficiencies: “It is acted in a slipshod manner and staged with an awkwardness uncharacteristic of Griffith even in his most disinterested moments. . . . Mack Sennett acts a very broad tramp indeed, and it is only his mugging to the audience while partially hidden in the armoire at screen right that lets us know this is supposed to be a comedy.”20 While it is by no means my intention here to rescue The Wooden Leg from the nadir of historiographic value judgment, nor to suggest it as even a minor “failed masterpiece” in the spirit of Hansen’s resurrection of Intolerance, I do find it troubling that Wooden Leg has been deemed so “insignificant” that it should be altogether beyond signification or interpretation. Even slipshod works of debased burlesque lineages warrant critical reading. The film unfolds in four scenes across two different framings and locations. First, the father (John Cumpson) introduces Claire (Florence Lawrence) to a marital prospect whom the Biograph Bulletin describes as “a wealthy old fossil, of whom he [her father] knew little but the extent of his pecuniary assets.”21 We cut to a different location where Claire enjoys an intimate moment with her boyfriend Harry (David Miles), then back to her father’s office while he expresses his disapproval of Harry’s prospects. Most of the action unfolds in the fourth scene, which takes place in the

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second location (presumably Claire’s boudoir). In despair, Claire wields a small knife, threatening to take her own life, while Harry consoles her. He grows enthusiastic as he spies something through the window: an encouraging vision that turns out to be none other than Mack Sennett pantomiming “broadly” as an amputee hobo. Harry and Claire stuff the tramp in the wardrobe, and outfit Claire with his surrogate leg. Some time later, Harry returns with “the wealthy fossil.” The brusquely staged and farcical ruse between Claire (with the amputee hobo’s fake limb) and her “fossil” unfolds with Harry and the tramp frequently and haphazardly ducking out from behind the couple’s backs (from behind the bedpost and inside of the wardrobe respectively) to express gleefully conspiratorial reactions that complement the “fossil’s” increasing alarm (figure 5.2). Despite the film’s many technical shortcomings (as it were), it makes a significant effort to spatialize character motivations and psychological reactions within a single framing, displacing the relations that would be articulated between shots onto tropes of bodily limb fragmentation. Just on the cusp of the wooden leg’s exposure, character-blocking obscures the simultaneous visibility of Harry behind the bed and the tramp peeping out of the wardrobe. These partially concealed counter-views forge a syntax of alternating reactions to the film’s exhibitionist climax, staging a collision between its different modes of address: bawdy spectacle and traces of psychological framing. In retrospect, for present-day viewers, perhaps

FIGURE 5.2 Frame enlargement from The Wooden Leg (Griffith, 1909)

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the device of female-limb fragmentation here naturalizes the signs of narrative cutting achieved through blocking. We expect to see different parts cut up and staged within the same frame and therefore cease to think about what their positioning might signify. In The Gibson Goddess (1909), Marion Leonard moonlights as an attractive limb prankster who, at the bidding of her devious maid, wards off potential mashers at the seaside by stuffing her stockings with raw cotton, “which gives her a Gargantuan appearance, at least as to her nethers.” (In a touching conclusion, Leonard accepts the stiff-upper-lipped commodore who dutifully sustains his affections even while believing that her legs are thicker than average.) The New York Dramatic Mirror, a recent convert to the potential merits of the dubious motion picture medium, was not impressed by the film, dismissing the ending as “neither clever nor convincing. . . . This sort of thing can be done on the vaudeville stage without offence.”22 Charlie Keil, who intriguingly suggests The Gibson Goddess as an antidote to Griffith’s heavy-handed October 1909 lineup (including A Change of Heart, His Lost Love, and The Expiation), at the same time echoes the New York Dramatic Mirror’s skepticism by describing the film as “basically a throw-away.”23 Unlike Brown or Higgins, however, Keil engages with the film’s psychosexual signification, despite its lack of formal complexity: he discusses its exploration of “the voyeurism/fetishism inherent in cinematic fascination.” Still, in most of these commentaries, value judgment stands in for critical engagement. Accounts of the film’s “lack of interest” to film scholars or attribution to a different author (such as Sennett) characterize the entries on Griffith’s early comedy in The Griffith Project—the place, I would argue, where his comedies have been dealt with the most extensively and comprehensively. As already discussed, Griffith’s early works at Biograph draw on an irreconcilable variety of different genres and discourses: slapstick comedy (Eloping with Aunty), suspenseful melodrama (Adventures of Dollie), cowboy Western (The Red Man and the Child), African jungle film (The Zulu’s Heart), urban drama (The Song of the Shirt), high literary adaptation (Edgar Allen Poe), crime drama about psychic delinquency (The Criminal Hypnotist), and many other modes. The historical trajectory of Griffith’s innovations in film narration represents a decisively uneven and nonlinear process of development. Nowhere is this unevenness more evident than in his overlooked negotiations between melodrama and comedy.

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Returning to issues of female corporeality in Griffith’s early comedies has major historiographic implications for thinking about the emergence and solidification of his “narrator system.” The practice of generating suspense by interrupting actions on the cusp of their unfolding continued to lean on images of female bodily fragmentation (such as gendered limb antics), a technique carried over from the early days of his frenetic productivity at Biograph. Griffith adapted the humorous premise of inciting deception or misunderstanding via a woman’s temporary bodily self-difference to the relations established between shots.

An Unseen Enemy: At the Limits of Pathos Griffith’s deployment of film language as a differential system (in which meaning emerges through the differences between shots rather than through the positivity of their sequential progression) is contingent on embodied differences as much as semiotic ones. An Unseen Enemy (1912) enacts a fundamental conflict between vision and the body: between the visibility of danger and an anxiety about the physical perils of its premature articulation. Somewhere between comedy and melodrama, this suspenseful film leans heavily on female bodily gesture to clarify its confusing oversaturation with visual and formal signs (figure 5.3). The title character of

FIGURE 5.3 Frame enlargement from An Unseen Enemy (Griffith, 1912)

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Unseen Enemy refers to the “slattern maid” (Grace Henderson), who plots to rob two sisters (Lillian and Dorothy Gish) of their inheritance at gunpoint after the death of their physician father. The paradoxical hyper-visibility of the “unseen” enemy, whose ominously brusque and disheveled introduction foreshadows her literal visibility to the sisters through a hole in the wall at the scene of the crime, provides a distraction from a subtler thematic of feminine doubling that unfolds between the Gish sisters. Formally, aesthetically, and ideologically, unseen distinctions between the sisters provide concrete motivations for the organizational logic of the film. These nuances between “the younger sister’s nerve” and the lack of adjectives and gestures used to define the older sister, Lillian, shadow the broader, overstated contrasts between the slattern maid and the innocent girls. The film’s three planes of action alternate among (1) the maid and her confederates attempting to break open the safe, (2) the terrified sisters at the other side of a wall attempting to phone the brother while ducking the maid’s gunshots through an uncovered stove-pipe hole, (3) and the brother forming a rescue crew and racing to the scene of the crime. The physical barrier of the wall provides an impetus for parallel cutting between victim and perpetrator, which the physical trespass of the maid’s revolver dramatizes. A parallel series of physical obstructions delays the brother’s arrival: he must learn of the sisters’ danger through the less expedient aural means of the telephone, obtain a car from a friend, rally his vigilante team, and traverse a veering bridge that seems timed specifically to foil his heroism. As the situation escalates, cuts between different planes of vision are often motivated by diegetic impasses: the safe will not budge, the gunshots trap the sisters in a corner, and the bridge waylays the brother. As in many of his suspenseful rescue films, such as Lonedale Operator (1911), Lonely Villa (1909), and A Girl and Her Trust (1912), Griffith interarticulates these suspenseful interruptions of vision through cutting via literal roadblocks to the unfolding of the action. The film’s activation of its own pathos depends upon its repeated postponement of imminent traumatic confrontations. From the girls’ absent father to their physically remote older brother and the younger sister’s “boyish lover,” the film dramatizes the chronic absence of its masculine authority figures. Moreover, the physical menace of the slattern maid in the next room and the protruding phallic gun that she wields through a peephole in the wall are more menacing not because of what they will do but because of what they will have done (i.e. kill the sisters) before the men return.

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A triangulation among these three spaces and temporalities—the “now” of the sisters, the “will have been” of the slattern maid, and the “not yet” of the male rescue team—dictates the film’s immersive unfolding. The film’s navigation of various temporal possibilities is kept balanced by its rigorous spatial policing of different gender roles. If melodrama trades on the fantasy temporality of the “too late!” and comedy on the spontaneity of premature eruption, then An Unseen Enemy experiments with different bodily and affective possibilities for organizing its own diegetic temporality.24 Repeatedly, the actors’ somatic gestures are enlisted to explain the film’s spatial and sequential organization: to act out the relations between shots, making them legible not just emotionally but cinematically. In cuts between the two sides of the wall, between the progression of the maid’s burglary plot and the sisters’ attempts to duck for cover while calling for help, the film’s complex suspenseful unfolding is pantomimed by the two sisters. For example, just as the older sister discovers the burglary plot, her attempts to communicate this information to her younger sister mirror the film’s own editing. The older sister carves out a V-shape with her movements: she inches toward the door and then retreats abruptly as if magnetized to her sister’s location in the back-right corner of the frame. Erecting an imaginary physical barrier to mimic the danger at the other side of the wall, the older sister’s initial attempts at aural and gestural explanation elicit a revealing misunderstanding from her younger sister, who mistakes these signs of danger as provocations for arousal and excitement. This sensory miscommunication between sisters emphatically heightens the narrative stakes of preserving a distance between shot and counter-shot. It acts out a reassurance for the spectator: the certainty of a gap between comprehension and signification—a certainty that is intrinsic to melodramatic pantomime’s distinction from slapstick. In slapstick comedies like The Fatal Mallet (Keystone, 1914) starring Sennett and Chaplin; and Mabel’s Strange Predicament (1914) starring Normand and Chaplin, actions and their meanings become legible primarily through their mystification. For example, in Mabel’s Married Life (1914), when Charlie (Chaplin) believes his wife Mabel (Normand) has cuckolded him with what turns out to be a boxing dummy that she purchased to help toughen him up, the joke derives from the viewer’s excess of prior comprehension: we laugh harder as Mabel and Charlie continue to fall victim to a violent misunderstanding that should have been resolvable before it even got off the ground. In contrast,

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melodramatic sympathy is animated by the deferral of violence. To return to An Unseen Enemy, the younger sister’s initial ignorance of her own vulnerability, which results from the older sister’s misconstrued bodily signaling, helps keep at bay the violence that would long since have erupted in a slapstick comedy. Significantly, this partial deferral of visual knowledge arises through the attempt to stage its transmission through a theater of bodily gestures. Excessive pantomime, which might otherwise border on clowning, becomes distinctly pathetic here due to its instrumental function as the deferral of a traumatic visual revelation. The two sides of the wall that we can see will remain separate, kept apart by a concrete (though not impenetrable) physical barrier, so long as there continue to be linguistic interruptions to the physical communications staged between the sisters inside their room. Repeatedly, the space of confinement (the room where they are trapped) becomes a scene for rehearsing the various forms of difference and relation that underpin the film’s entire narrative universe. This conversion of cinematic vision into bodily performance translates into three forms of exchange: visual, economic, and gendered. First, physical sensation gets transposed into visual premonition: the aural and gestural communications among the siblings (between the sisters and into the telephone) bear a mystifying but credible connection to the film’s parallel horizons of interweaving locations. Second, perhaps to cover over the heavy reliance on corporeality to carry the film’s meanings, the body itself is abstracted as a form of currency for economic exchange. For example, the sisters’ physical vulnerability is repeatedly wagered against the value of their inheritance, which is stashed precariously in the safe on the other side of the wall. The locked room in which the terrified sisters contemplate exchanging their own physical safety for the purpose of preserving their financial inheritance becomes alternately a scene of risk and a site of opportunity. This exchangeability between economic value and physical vulnerability again corroborates the film’s integration of its own visual forms of imbalance. (In her notes on the film, Lea Jacobs emphasizes its continuity errors and omissions of critical details that would reinforce narrative and character motivations.25) In the third form or mode of exchange, the gendered thematic of doubling and its obstruction by the wall buttress the moral dichotomies between virginal purity and feminine evil. These moral oppositions take on an affective reality that both exceeds and becomes instrumental to the film’s

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signification. The older sister’s almost supernatural “sense”—like the character of the eternal mother in Intolerance, she literally possesses the ability to see between shots—is offset by the younger sister’s physical “nerve.”26 An Unseen Enemy divides up the dualities within a single comedienne persona such as Mabel Normand: in her roles, Normand possesses both of these bodies (one hyper-vulnerable and one seemingly invincible) and a double morality (one naively sentimental and one carelessly cruel). The ability to suspend simultaneously two mutually exclusive realities is key to the humorous logic of slapstick. In contrast, films like An Unseen Enemy divvy up comedy’s menu of contradictions by pinning their paradoxical simultaneities onto separate female bodies. The spirituelle older sister is “fleshless,” the slattern maid is all-flesh, and the nervy younger sister oscillates between different affective temporalities, freed up by the strong moral framing established by the oppositions between spirituelle and voluptuary. The ideological implications of these distinctions between the older sister’s sense and the younger sister’s nerve bear further interpretation. Unlike the good-woman/bad-woman oppositions that haunted Normand during her brief career with Griffith, the moral contrast between the slattern maid and the “well-kept” sisters serves primarily as a decoy for the subtler but equally instrumental difference between the two sisters. In his 1923 Photoplay interview about the qualities he looks for in screen-actress beginners, Griffith projects nearly every paradox of the medium itself onto his image of the ideal actress. “The girl, to have the real germ of stardom, must suggest—at least in a sketchy way—the vaguely formulated ideals of every man. Again, she must suggest—and this is equally important—the attributes most women desire.”27 From his difficulties articulating the ideals of both male and female viewers, Griffith then waxes metaphysical: “To me the ideal type for feminine stardom has nothing of the flesh, nothing of the note of sensuousness. . . . Commentators have called it the spirituelle type.”28 Griffith’s most iconic spirituelle, Lillian Gish, epitomizes this quasitheological image, manifesting an uncanny ability to transcend physical sensation with cinematic vision. Proximate cutting to the maid at work on the safe in An Unseen Enemy, although not subjectively anchored, seems to emerge from Lillian’s preternatural knowledge of the image at the other side of the wall. The film literalizes this slippage between visual knowledge and physical danger during a dramatic escalation in the home robbery plot. When the maid breaks open the stove-pipe covering to erect a hole between

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the two sides, remarkably neither party utilizes its visual opportunities. Instead, the possibility for voyeurism, the secret look, is rendered redundant or obsolete by Lillian’s miraculous conversion of physical sense into disembodied vision. Voyeurism, which relies on the privacy and physical concealment of the viewer, is precluded here by direct physical penetration. The slattern maid wields a handgun that she fires haphazardly through the hole in the wall into the sisters’ room to keep them at bay (away from the telephone or the window) while she and her crew attempt to blow open the safe. The narration of this scene, the way in which its discontinuous looks and interrupted actions become legible for the spectator, is circuited through Lillian’s pantomime: her gestures to her younger sister, the physical symptoms of her “silent voice” relayed over the telephone, and the way that Griffith spatializes her increasing terror through blocking. In Gerard Genette’s terms (whom Gunning frequently invokes), she is the film’s voice: “The traces of telling left in the text through which we sense a storyteller addressing a real or implied audience.”29 As a side note, one registers surprise that the Moving Picture World at the time did not think more of the “beginner” sisters’ performances: “The little girls are charming; they are not yet actresses, but in a good place to learn acting.”30 Perhaps Griffith’s novice ideal—the “rose” that has not yet but presumably one day “will have bloomed”—was too convincing for his critics. Here, performance style props up the film’s suspenseful techniques in narration: both come to be paradoxically in the future-perfect tense. The future-perfect predicament of “what will have been” is the narrative motor of melodramatic suspense. Whereas film as a medium indexes “what was” and projects it as “what is,” Griffith’s narrator system adapts these paradoxes between present and past to dramatize their potential meanings for the future. The suspenseful temporality of the film’s ensuing robbery- and rescueplots motivates these imbalances between present bodily action and foreboding narrative anticipation. Lillian tries to reach her brother on the telephone while Dorothy stands in the background, looking quite as much excited as she does intimidated. Her image strikes a middle ground between Lillian’s terrified composure and the maid’s scheming untidiness, which is represented in the next shot. In a desperate attempt to get the girls away from the phone, the maid picks up a gun and decides to flaunt it through the uncovered pipe hole in lieu of unlocking the door. After the intertitle “They silence the children while they work,” a dramatic close-up depicts

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the picture frame in the sisters’ room falling off the wall, and a handgun sliding through in its place. The gun directly addresses the camera, seemingly breaking the fourth wall. The next shot depicts a frantic progression: while the older sister screams into the phone, the younger sister flails her arms in the background, and the maid’s arm lurches out of the hole to fire from the left-hand side of the frame. As in The Gibson Goddess, though now more finely interwoven into the narrative apparatus, female-limb dismemberment does the work of formal articulation. The maid’s protrusion motivates the unmotivated, prefacing a cut back to the clerk who is trying to summon the girls’ brother, and it also explains the unseen movement of the sisters’ bodies to the back-left corner of the room. A cut-in reveals the girls’ emotional turmoil, with Dorothy standing taller and covering most of Lillian’s body—most but not all: Lillian’s large, piercing eyes jut out and grab our attention, upstaging the girls’ cowering bodies. In an ideological flourish to reinforce our already solid comprehension of the maid’s “slattern” ways, she takes a break from her strenuous gunwielding to chug a few mouthfuls of liquor, which gives the younger sister a golden opportunity to make her move. The following shots somewhat confusingly depict simultaneous actions, so that we see each event consecutively from three different locations. The maid puts down her gun and takes a long drink; the brother is located and led to the other end of the telephone line; and we watch the maid’s hand retreat and vanish back into the wall. In a somewhat elliptical negotiation between the aural and the visual, the film cuts back and forth atemporally between the brother shouting into the telephone and the younger sister making her move across the room after the recession of the gun. A cut-in to the sisters’ corner refuge focuses on Dorothy, whose gliding movement out of the frame toward the off-screen telephone gradually uncovers her sister’s cowering body. Lillian reaches for Dorothy’s body just as it exceeds the limits of her grasp, and then for some reason covers her ears, which prompts a cut back to the other end of the telephone line. Dorothy reaches the telephone in safety and is able to communicate the urgency of the situation to her brother while her older sister gazes intently off-screen in the direction of the next room. Hearing these developments, the slattern maid returns to her post, now haphazardly firing bullets into the room with the sisters, despite her inability to focus on (or to avoid mortally wounding) her targets, whom she had originally intended to intimidate, not to annihilate. The brother overhears the gunshots and

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drops the phone to rally his rescue team, while Dorothy manages to crawl back to her corner. In the end, the girls are rescued by the men, who appear just in the nick of time. The bodily immediacy of the sisters’ sensory perception somehow helps to defer their imminent mortal danger until the men can finally reach the house. An Unseen Enemy’s representation of female aurality differs sharply from its coding in classical Hollywood melodramas, in which women’s heightened capacity for sensory perception becomes a fatal form of their paranoia. For example, in Anatole Litvak’s Sorry, Wrong Number (1948) Barbara Stanwyck plays a hysterical cripple stalked by a murderer over the telephone, her own confined field of vision an alibi for the uncertain status of events in the plot. Seeing is believing in the classical cinema, and, unlike the voice, the image never lies. In contrast, Griffith’s thematization of female paranoia over the telephone in An Unseen Enemy proves decisive in its prophetic capacities. When the sisters sense something amiss, the film cannot wait to cut in to substantiate their premonitions, sometimes even reversing the order of their plotting. As long as Lillian Gish can hear a window opening ominously in the next room or see across a telephone circuit, women in transitional cinema have every right to be paranoid! Indeed, their paranoia is crucial for making the film’s plotting legible to the spectator. Their physical sense perception explains the excess meanings articulated by the narrative through its complex interweavings as it struggles to establish a voice that will be truly “transparent.” To use Griffith’s own terms, the spirituelle may have “nothing of the flesh,” but she is not completely ethereal either. Her embodied deployment as a narrative sign again represents that which remains: “the voice,” “the trace of telling left in the text,” and the plenitude of meaning sustained by film’s narrative discourses while the codes themselves were still in flux (not that they ever became entirely fixed or static). Rather than abetting the total disembodied absorption of the spectator, which is the fantasy of a pure cinema of integration, the spirituelle provides a moral cover for the film’s recourse to exhibitionism and to more gestural modes of articulation. In our intermittent side views of the maid firing bullets, her acting evokes something between an epileptic fit and a demonic possession. Repeatedly, aural or auditory tensions (the maid’s voice, telecommunications, and the bridge delay) stand in for visual devices, such as the peephole’s use for tactile instead of visual ends. While the brother is held up at the bridge, the

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younger sister again makes a break across the room during a respite in the gunfire. This is announced by the intertitle “The Younger Sister’s Nerve.” The scene depicting this nerve is especially memorable. With the older sister in the background extending her arms outward in terror, the younger slowly approaches the hole, wavering between wanting to peer into it or to reach out for it—an indecision between seeing and touching that the older sister’s arm-gestures reinforce from behind her head. Lillian attempts to restrain Dorothy, whom she cannot reach and who cannot see her, solely for the benefit of the spectator. The visual contrast between Dorothy’s nerve and Lillian’s apparent nervousness drives the tension of this dramatic escalation. Yet again, the maid’s gun juts out from the hole, causing the younger sister to faint and collapse (a grand reaction to an otherwise repetitive occurrence that evokes Charlie’s and Mabel’s antics with the boxing dummy in Mabel’s Married Life). Griffith, in his Photoplay interview, elaborates, “The imaginative type can picture the glamorous future with its possible great success—and is always nervous. Imagination—and nerves—are highly essential.” The word “nerve,” literally meaning the sinew or tendon that relays impulses between the brain and the spinal cord, also denotes “boldness, audacity, impudence, and impertinence.” Nervousness, in contrast, denotes “acute apprehension and uneasiness.” Walter Benjamin theorizes “nervousness” as a defense against the constant potential for shock and rupture that characterizes modern experience: like laughter, nervousness wards off shock by partially internalizing it.31 However, “to be nervous” and “to have nerve” designate very different modes of experience. Whereas “nervousness” invokes an excess of sensitivity to the potential for shock, “nerve” implies an imperviousness to this potential. This dulled sensitivity to danger is literalized by Dorothy’s fainting in response to the gun’s entirely foreseeable third reemergence from the wall. In other words, her character is not even nervous enough to anticipate the reappearance of the gun that Benjamin’s traffic-crosser (see previous note), for example, would have spotted coming from a mile away. Griffith’s slippage in his Photoplay interview between the “nervous” and one’s “nerves” sheds light on the broader contradictions internal to his definition of the “spirituelle” type. These contradictions arguably become muted in their rhetorical opposition to the voluptuary: “the full-blown rose [who] cannot endure.” An Unseen Enemy provides a particularly helpful example for teasing out these internal contradictions because it does not represent

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any “voluptuary” type as such: the “bad woman” is portrayed as drunken and untidy, not lascivious,32 and the younger sister, although audacious, is clearly marked as presexual by her coy reluctance to kiss her “boyish suitor” (Bobby Harron) before his departure for college. Moreover, the ideological triangulation of “woman” among three different types—“slattern,” “nervous,” and “nervy”—sheds light on the ways in which narrative truth gets hierarchized through the senses, from vision on down to aurality and tactility. The film’s triangulation of feminine types corresponds with its hierarchy of narrative discourses: the older sister’s uncanny ability to see into the next shot, the younger sister’s nervy bolt for the telephone, and the maid’s characterization by sensual gluttony and unkempt physical appearance. An Unseen Enemy thereby exposes the limits of the image’s narrative transparency, which erupt in its many visual traces of slapstick female comedy.

“The Weakness”: A Slapstick Comedienne in Three Melodramas Mabel Normand’s brief but substantial career as a member of Griffith’s stock company further exemplifies the gendered bodily system at work in his films: their uses of excessive female corporeality to act out bodily what they sometimes struggle to express visually. I will focus on three key roles played by Normand in Griffith melodramas: in addition to The Eternal Mother (which I have discussed), these include Her Awakening (1911) and A Mender of Nets (1912). In the actress’s second featured role for Griffith, Her Awakening, Mabel plays a more complex version of her “thoughtless neighbor” character: “the thoughtless daughter.” Noticeably self-conscious about her humble means, the daughter all but literally throws her poor old mother (Kate Bruce) “under the bus” to save face in front of a potential suitor. Despite her extensive sacrifices for her beloved offspring, the impecunious mother represents a source of abject shame for her self-absorbed daughter. Overcome with sorrow upon realizing this, the heartbroken mother wanders away, and is traumatically run over by an automobile. Here, the good-woman/badwoman dichotomy undergoes a temporal alteration. Mabel’s ambiguous corporeality is resolved through the sacrifices of her mother: the rag woman in the attic. The mother spares herself physically so that her daughter might

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experience some sort of spiritual awakening and learn to renounce the fleeting comforts of material temptations. The film’s narration of the daughter’s redemptive exchangeability with her more spiritual mother is nothing short of sensational. The suitor, attempting to return an umbrella that the daughter had left behind on their date, encounters mother and daughter in the street. With all three occupying the same frame—the clueless suitor, the narcissistic daughter, and the saintly mother—Mabel casts her mother a glance whose meaning needs no translation. “Her old heart broken,” the mother banishes herself to the next shot and then walks headlong into moving traffic. Instead of the voyeurism that would constitute the climax of a thoroughly classical maternal melodrama like Stella Dallas (1947), in which maternal sacrifice means occupying the concealed position of the spectator, Griffith opts for a more corporeal resolution. Just before her accident, the mother gazes vertically off-screen at the sky. Having spent her life visibly abstaining from the temptations of commodity fetishism, the ragpicking mother now parlays capitalist exchange value into a form of spiritual currency. Later, while the mother “is sinking” on her deathbed, the daughter prays in the next room, shocked into spiritual awakening by her mother’s horrific accident. The meaning here is by no means self-explanatory. What we see includes two women trading looks behind a man’s back, a forlorn woman’s departure and look up at the sky, and then a sudden and violent change of course with an unanticipated automobile collision. From these looks and events, the spectator gleans psychological motivations and narrative causations as well as abstract theological subtexts. Her Awakening culminates in a happy romantic reunion after the mother’s funeral. Mabel’s visual and narrative wavering between spirituelle and voluptuary identities meets somewhere in the middle with heteronormative coupling. Throughout the film, anticipation of the daughter’s moral redemption allows Mabel to shift between two different juxtapositions: to her poor old mother (sympathetic but worn out) and to a slattern shop colleague (coarse and beyond redemption). In an early scene, the daughter, positioned in the left foreground, toils away at the laundry where she works while a buxom, gum-chewing employee in the background flirts saucily with every gentleman who walks into the store. In a world without Pickfords or Sweets or Gishes (in other words, without spirituelles), Mabel’s own moral ambiguity more or less opposes itself: the necessity of this voluptuary’s eventual

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transformation into a spirituelle creates a moral and physical split within her own character which can only be resolved through her eventual “awakening.” Meanwhile, the ragpicking mother’s invisibility (her visual and physical disappearance) provides a justification for the voluptuary daughter’s vice, even during the moments when Mabel’s dubious ways feel the most palpable. By erasing herself from the picture (throwing herself bodily into moving traffic—a gruesome image of masochism that we do not actually see), the mother sacrifices her life for her daughter’s moral salvation. Mabel is pure voluptuary in The Mender of Nets. This film, a seaside melodrama about a murderous love quadrangle, is obsessed with the thematic of eternity: a fantasy also embodied by the ethereal spirituelle. The circularity of the film’s narrative structure provides a guarantor of the spirituelle’s own everlasting life. The film opens and closes with nearly identical fading images of a girl (Mary Pickford) sitting by the sea and mending a fishing net. Yuri Tsivian invokes Ecclesiastes in his notes on the film: the “last shot—a mirror image of the first—seems to say ‘What has been will be again’ (1:9).”33 Like the Moirai, the three female weavers of fate in Greek mythology, the girl’s net-mending in this parable bears mortal ties to the lives of the characters around her. This is the mythical element of the film’s narrative organization: the implicit but otherwise unmotivated connection between Mary’s net-mending and the eruption of social relations between the men in the village around the divisive figure of the voluptuary. For Griffith, this vital metaphor of mending becomes enmeshed with the film’s own visual articulation of its recurring, interweaving narrative threads. Interestingly, Griffith associated the thematic of recurrence with the aesthetics of the seaside. In The Unchanging Sea (1910), inspired by the Charles Kingsley poem “The Three Fishers,” a young husband suffering from amnesia after a shipwreck at last regains his memory by spending years watching his children virtually relive his own experiences: what recurs biographically will return psychically. However, events and motivations that remain opaque and ambiguous in The Unchanging Sea become almost narratively transparent in The Mender of Nets. This clarity is achieved primarily by associating the film’s own plotting with the net-mender’s quasi-metaphysical viewpoint. For example, recurring images of the village fishermen toiling along the shore are framed in connection to the net-mender’s position while often depicting her looking away or up at the sky in a reverse shot. These juxtapositions to the net-mender sitting on her rock include her sweetheart

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walking along the waves after their betrothal and an atypically busy (for this film) full shot of the workers carrying their loads. This has the effect of organizing the film’s thematic visions of seaside labor around her position without literalizing them as her subjective visions; instead, it mystifies them as images seen suggestively only while she is looking away. In contrast, the voluptuary woman gets marked as too partial and fragmented to be either seen or unseen. As in The Eternal Mother, Mabel’s character in The Mender of Nets (here allegorically named “The Weakness: His Old Infatuation”) lurks around the edges of the image, often leading “The Sweetheart” (Charles West) to a murky off-screen space extending from the lower right corner of the frame. “The Weakness” creates a ripple in the film’s visual symmetry, a form of difference or violence that provokes narrative tension and must ultimately be gathered up and mended back together. While the net-mender spools some string and lounges with her sweetheart by the seaside, a visibly perturbed and disheveled Mabel possesses the reverse shot. Though the Weakness may veer toward the edges of the frame, she herself can certainly see straight. This disturbing image of the Sweetheart and net-mender is both perfectly centered and unambiguously anchored in the Weakness’s point of view: her subjective reverse shot. At this moment, the net-mender’s eternal vision is physically suspended by the Weakness’s temporary substitution for the position of the spectator. Mabel beckons the boy from her lookout atop a rock, addressing him in secret behind the mender’s back. Meanwhile, the Weakness’s thick-bodied older brother spies the Weakness and Sweetheart together and swears vengeance against the boy for dishonoring his sister. On the cusp of irreversible physical violence, the metaphorically all-seeing net-mender regains her vision. She borrows her father’s binoculars to look out from behind her usual position in front of the sea, in search of her beau, who has now been absent for quite a long time. Using a technical instrument to reclaim her visual authority, she spots the men exchanging fisticuffs. This visual reversal initiates another form of narrative difference between the spectator’s comprehension of the reverse shot and the net-mender’s. Misinterpreting her own artificially extended position, the net-mender springs into action. She sees the men fighting while blind to the cause: her voluptuary doppelganger who has steamrolled the net-mender’s courtship before it even had a chance to blossom (figure 5.4).

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FIGURE 5.4 Frame enlargement from The Mender of Nets (Griffith, 1912)

Whereas the net-mender’s cinematic vision is primarily metaphorical (she sees the ebb and flow of the tides as they wash over everyday life), the Weakness commits the mortal sin of embodying vision. The Weakness’s jealous, sideways looks at the happy couple from atop her perch initiate the cycle of misrecognitions that threaten to damn the whole village. An intertitle announces, “The net-mender, ignorant of the cause of the quarrel, attempts to save her sweetheart.” The narrative difference between the mender’s subjective position and her cinematic vision propels her to recuperate physically that which she has relinquished visually. Thus, the drama escalates with a complex series of visual reversals. The brother stalks the Sweetheart through a window and then lunges at him with a gun just as the net-mender herself arrives at the window; meanwhile, the Weakness languishes in the next room, having been silenced by her vengeful brother. Just as bad goes to worse, the net-mender drops a counter-stitch by flinging herself bodily into her own point-of-view shot. She throws herself in front of her sweetheart while the mad brother closes in on him with a gun. The reconciliation occurs, and at last the spirituelle and the voluptuary are allowed to occupy the same frame. The little mender pantomimes her terrible discovery while the Weakness shudders despairingly, only about half of her body visible at the right edge of the frame. Finally, “the little mender learns the truth of the other girl’s sorrow.” From here, the film’s proximate

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cutting serves more to assert connections than to psychologize differences. The three wander in and out of different frames, the net-mender exiting and reentering the front door of the cabin, and all end up in the same room again, hand in hand. Rejected by the net-mender, the Sweetheart finds comfort in his old infatuation while the title character announces, “I’ll mend the nets.” Again, the film closes with a mirror image of its opening (as Stephen Heath might put it, the film moves from S→S1).34 Writing on Hollywood classical cinema in “Film, System, Narrative,” Heath declares “What distinguishes the fiction film is not the absence of a special work of the signifier, but its presence in the mode of denegation, and it is well known that this type of presence is the paradox—or better the tourniquet—of the narrative: denegation, it brings with it, states, the heterogeneity and process it seeks to contain.”35 In other words, denegation represents the undoing of the transparency of the cinematic sign: the negation of its negation. Widely mythologized as the great father who gave birth to this film syntax, who simultaneously inaugurated and covered over the visual tools for rendering film meaning, Griffith often framed this “denegation” as a moral opposition between ethereal and excessively embodied iterations of “woman.” Given Griffith’s inordinate political baggage (which encompasses everything from tropes of blackface minstrelsy to the suspenseful romanticizing of racist vigilante violence), these juxtaposed portrayals of women do an enormous amount of work to moralize all of cinema’s dubious inheritances from Griffith’s formatively signifying film systems.

If “Comedy Is a Man in Trouble,” Then Is a Woman in Trouble Always Melodrama? While melodrama sublimates its incessant physical suffering, thriving on an ethics of martyrdom, slapstick comedy gleefully puts suffering on display. Like melodrama turned on its head, slapstick provokes mirth by displaying an abstract ideal and then exposing its concrete, even idiotic, construction. For example, in Mabel at the Wheel (1914), a film Mabel Normand directed at Keystone shortly after her departure with Sennett from Biograph, Mabel recklessly flees from her abusive lover by hopping onto the back of Charlie Chaplin’s motorcycle. A suspenseful chase sequence between Charlie and Mabel’s boyfriend (Harry McCoy) quickly shifts from melodrama to

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comedy when the bike hits a bump and Charlie accidentally submerges Mabel in a muddy puddle—a gag made all the more hilarious when Charlie carries on his conversation with Mabel as if she were still seated on the back of his bike. Charlie’s shtick of failing to realize that Mabel has fallen from the vehicle concretizes the way in which this film comedy encourages the spectator to compartmentalize between Normand the woman and Mabel the clown.36 While Mabel Normand’s voluptuary excess provided a foil for the spirituelle in Griffith’s melodramas, there is a similar duality at play in her comedic roles. In these films, Normand must act both parts at once—the reckless body and the glamorous screen icon—while constructing these two entities as somehow mutually exclusive. Like the mad king who really believes that he is a king, to invoke Alenka Zupančič’s Hegelian study of humor, the comic “subject-actor appears as that gap through which the character relates to itself, representing itself,”37 embodying “an impossible sustained encounter between two exclusive realities.”38 As Wyndham Lewis puts it in “The Meaning of the Wild Body,” “But there is nothing essentially ridiculous about the stone. The man is ridiculous fundamentally, he is ridiculous because he is a man, instead of a thing.”39 In a gendered inversion, Normand’s characters frequently appear ridiculous in spite of being acknowledged intermittently as women. These characters incite laughter by simultaneously performing the contradictory, industry-dictated double standards that haunted slapstick comedienne stars. As Alan Dale argues in Comedy Is A Man In Trouble, in a quotation that bears repeating, “Sennett affirmed, men don’t want to laugh at pretty girls, not convulsively anyway.”40 Alice Howell (also known as “the scream of the screen”) frequently lamented being pigeonholed as a slapstick clown because, unlike other actresses, “I had no scruples . . . [about] rough-andtumble comedy.”41 If, as Christine Gledhill observes, “with Mary Pickford emerged the world’s first experience of full-blown film stardom,”42 then with comediennes like Howell, it was not her stardom but her corporeality that was “full-blown.” Howell recounts a revealing anecdote about filming a mob scene in a Keystone police raid, which is when Sennet discovered her: “Suddenly I threw myself into the fray. The other women drew back. We all had on evening gowns and the other girls didn’t want to spoil them. . . . I fell downstairs and literally wiped up the floor with my gown.”43 Interestingly, the comic violence described in this incident takes as its

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target not Howell’s body but its trappings of femininity: the gown, the hair, the hat, and other accessories. In Mabel’s Biograph melodramas, these gendered contradictions intrinsic to comedy, such as the tensions between female corporeality and the rigid conventions of femininity, provoke sentiment by dividing them between dueling female figures: the voluptuary and the spirituelle. In contrast, the slapstick body condenses this contradictory duality between excess corporeality and ethereal spirit into a figure who is at once hyper-vulnerable and fantastically indestructible. Repeatedly in his transitional melodramas, Griffith attempted to extract the body from the comedienne as a clown without laughter, yet the specters of slapstick linger and haunt the voluptuary’s overdetermined association with the evil and sin behind human suffering and moral unraveling. Indeed, if “comedy is a man in trouble,” then melodrama has revolved around the pathos of a woman in pain. But this pathos of female pain is not always so pathetic: sometimes it is very funny.

Part 3 Feminist Slapstick Politics

6 Film Comedy Aesthetics and Suffragette Social Politics

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s women lobbied for voting enfranchisement, equal rights, and greater participation in civic sphere politics, the iconography of suffragette activism offered irresistible material for silent film representation in the early 1900s and 1910s. Hundreds of suffragette-themed films were produced during this time, reflecting both the immense cultural visibility and mass societal ambivalence about the politics of suffragette movements. Comedy was the primary mode for depicting the vicissitudes of feminist activism and women’s civic-sphere participation. Some of the many, many titles include If Women Were Policemen (1908), The Elusive Miss Pinkhurst (Warwick, 1912), When Women Vote (1907), When Women Win (Lubin, 1909), When Women Rule (Selig, 1912), How They Got the Vote (Edison, 1913), Courting Across the Court (1911), Milling the Militants (Clarendon, 1913), For Mayor—Bess Smith (1913), The Suffragette Sheriff (Kalem, 1912), Cousin Kate’s Revolution (Éclair, 1912), Love and the Law (1913), The Girl and the Mayor (1913), Suffragettes and the Law (1913), Down with Men (1912), and A Cure for Suffragettes (Biograph, 1913). A typical film would depict women gaining some portion of political power—anything from absolute sovereignty to the love interest of the mayor—with imminent disaster looming. The political potentials and social consequences of feminism were thus imagined and episodically resolved through film-spectator laughter.

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Rather than allow for incremental social changes, the extreme scenarios depicted in these films represented all forms of suffragette empowerment as inherently catastrophic. Women no longer erupted out of the chimney onto the public sphere; instead, they blew up the entire public sphere in a variety of horrific, hilarious, and inventively repetitive ways. For example, Bedelia and the Suffragette (1912) depicts the havoc unleashed by an “autocratic kitchen queen” whose appropriation of patriarchal power creates a mass “state of turmoil.”1 Suffragettes cause traffic jams that suspend all commerce, activity, and progress in films including How They Got the Vote (1913), A Cure for Suffragettes (1913), and A New Use for a Bike (1912). In the latter film, Sophie Pancake’s relentless pursuit of a champion cyclist incites a domino effect of traumatic and violent traffic accidents. Similarly, When Women Win depicts the utter train wreck of mixing women’s work with civic governance: spotlessly cleaned trollies break down, fastidiously reformed neighborhoods erupt with street crime, and legislative meetings are reduced to societal tea parties. As one film reviewer coyly observed, “But this is not the end of progress”: When Women Win concludes with the image of a husband acquiring the biological capacity to give birth. The reviewer continues: “At last the suspense is over and the proud physician announces to the waiting wife that it is a boy and that father and child are both doing very well, thank you.”2 When Women Win reinscribes gendered social change as corporeal sexual difference, negating the impetus for politics to exceed anatomical essentialism. Films such as When Women Win exhibit overriding tensions between their farcical aesthetics and their recuperative social messages. They attempt to circumvent gendered challenges to the political sphere through the ambiguous language and ambivalent effects of comedic hyperbole. As I argue in this chapter, the absurd iconography of suffragette film comedies intersected with the paradoxical terrain navigated by feminist and suffragette politics (figure 6.1). Riddled by internal debates about the scope of feminist change and the very articulation of sexual difference, suffragette movements frequently confronted the blatant illogic of their opponents’ rhetoric. Humorous and satirical strategies provided ammunition for feminists to counter the patent nonsense of anti-suffragette arguments while also helping to navigate internal divisions within the movement. I focus on the American suffragette climate in this chapter, leading up to the official schism between mainstreamed and radicalized contingents in 1913 (chapter 7 looks closely at the politics of radical militancy in the context of the British

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FIGURE 6.1 Publicity still for The Hunger Strike (British & Colonial, 1913)

feminist movement). These internationally prolific suffragette film comedies were widely exhibited in American film theaters from the early 1900s through the ratification of the nineteenth amendment in 1920. The tensions and contradictions of emergent feminist and suffragette politics, I argue here, become legible through their often violently comedic and grotesquely exaggerated figurations in popular filmmaking. Suffragette Laughter: Paradox, Violence, and the Laws of Slapstick Father, What Is a Legislature? A representative body elected by the people of the state. Are women people? No, my son, criminals, lunatics, and women are not people. Do legislators legislate for nothing? Oh, no; they are paid a salary. By whom? By the people. Are women people? Of course, my son, just as much as men are.3

As a theory of democracy, feminism seeks to extend the same individual rights of liberalism to all citizens; however, as a theory of sexual

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difference, feminism emphasizes collectivity and the needs for special rights to protect a marginalized constituency of people. As Denise Riley has put it, “a peculiar transience is in play” here, “for when women are named by their protagonists as those who are excluded, this platform must aim at its own dissolution—the melting-back of women into the order of humanity by means of the franchise.”4 Riley emphasizes the ambiguities between gender identity and sexual difference under the law: on the one hand, women are equal to men; on the other hand, equality is not the same thing as equity, and women might require special laws to facilitate their equal access to opportunity. To this point, society would benefit both from embracing the positive values and mitigating the adversities of gender and sexual difference. These antagonisms between identity and difference have always haunted discursive constructions of woman—psycho-sexually, linguistically, socially, and politically. As a practical matter, they became major points of contention about how feminist transformation should even be envisioned throughout the escalation of suffragette voting rights campaigns in the early twentieth century. Suffragette physical comedy—perhaps more emphatically than any other mode of slapstick—capitalized on sight gags about sexual difference. The hilarity of men knitting and giving birth while women run government and thump their chests provided opportunities for laughing off anxieties about the dissolution of longstanding gender conventions and social norms. For example, in The Suffragette’s Dream (1909), an oppressed housewife has a vivid dream sequence in which all stereotypical gender roles are precisely reversed. Not only do women take over the legislature, abandon the domestic sphere, and exhibit masculine libido, they further appropriate the violence and aggression associated with patriarchal power. For example, a suffragette street cleaner “spies a helpless man and turns the hose on him with vengeance,” and “when he appeals to some other women standing by to protect him they turn and handle him in no gentler manner, and he is hurried off to the station by two female cops.”5 At a suffragette meeting, women virulently denounce the opposite sex and then march through the streets to enact their decrees, while men are spotted in public acting as nurse maids, and “one big, husky fellow is crocheting for dear life” on a park bench. More than just exploiting the incongruity of spontaneous gender reversals (i.e., masculine women and feminine men), Suffragette’s Dream emphasizes the retributive violence that might ensue in the aftermath of women’s political

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inclusion and legal enfranchisement. In other words, the film exaggerates what equality might entail when it is transposed from an abstract ideal to an imperative administered by the state apparatus. Fittingly, Suffragette’s Dream ends with the mirror image of its slapstick dream sequence: the would-be radicalized housewife wakes up to the sad realities of her domestic abuse. The Moving Picture World sparingly summarizes the film’s grizzly restoration of order: “Suddenly the scene changes and the dreamer awakens from her beautiful dream to find that her husband has just come in; the latter is so enraged because his dinner is not ready that he gives his frightened wife a sound beating.” As I have noted, slapstick thrives on the bait-and-switch between real physical violence and its exaggerated but harmless performance. (Again, the term derives from a wooden stick that creates a jarring, violent sound while delivering a disproportionately mild blow to the body.) However, here the specter of slapstick—its displaced effect of violence—is actualized as domestic battery. Unlike the explosive bodily gags of early cinema in which housemaids spontaneously combust and mothers-in-law are blasted into outer space, the cartoonish abuse inflicted on suffragette bodies receives more pointed and concrete justification. Slapstick violence, in the end, is represented as thoroughly mundane but socially necessary in order to enforce the return of domestic and political order. The final scene of The Suffragette’s Dream depicts a brutal but ordinary domestic assault: un-spectacular private violence that vividly negates the public mass thrashings administered to the men in the suffragette’s dream sequence.6 The dreaming suffragette does not spontaneously combust or even miniaturize her body and then melt when sprayed with soda water (as in Princess Nicotine); violence here is rendered unremarkable. Instead of fantasizing about dismembering her own limbs to increase her labor efficiency (as in Kitchen Maid’s Dream), the housewife dreams of gender equality, but with the outcome of disrupting her own domestic activity. To solicit her labor, the woman is therefore subjected to corrective spousal abuse, which provokes derisive spectator laughter. The comic effect of this conservative resolution (indeed, Suffragette’s Dream was meant to read as broad farce) contrasts vividly from the absurd social reversals of the dream sequence (e.g. men crocheting “for dear life”). In graphically unsettling suffragette comedies, such as Suffragette’s Dream, slapstick violence is motivated not by its exaggerated or absurdist effects but by its imagined

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social necessity and moral justification. The ending of Suffragette’s Dream comes across as something between slapstick violence and “just violence”: with its double meaning as both mundane and legitimate, under the pretense of disciplinary retribution.

Callous or Carnivalesque? Films such as Suffragette’s Dream or The Suffragette Sheriff (Kalem, 1912), in which a politicized housewife jokingly threatens her husband with the death penalty in a gendered kangaroo court, are frequently described as “carnivalesque.” For example, in her chapter on “Civic Housekeeping” in Movie-Struck Girls, Shelley Stamp invokes Mary Russo’s notion of “the female-grotesque,” adapted from Bakhtin’s theory of carnival. According to Stamp, suffragette comedies “with titles like When Women Vote (Lubin, 1907), When Women Win (Lubin, 1909), and When Women Rule (Selig, 1912) all imagine life after women have been granted full citizenship,” and therefore epitomize the carnivalesque’s radical negation of the law.7 Giorgio Agamben has compared the carnivalesque to the productively law-breaking “states of exception” (which, he argues, form the secret basis of constitutional or representative democracy). These carnivalesque exceptions, he writes, “inaugurate a period of anomie that breaks and temporarily subverts the social order.”8 Such carnivalesque outbursts are always tolerated by the powers-that-be (the church, the government, the sovereign state) because they help the public to blow off steam and, moreover, animate the “secret solidarity between anomie [lawlessness] and the law.”9 Beyond this structural notion of carnival as the temporary subversion that ultimately legitimates oppressive forms of power, feminists have affirmed the figure of “the female-grotesque” (Russo), “the woman on top” (Zemon Davis), and “the unruly woman” (Rowe)10 to align the subversive text of carnival with the public sphere mobility of excessive, anti-classical, and grotesquely comical female bodies. Images of suffragettes temporarily usurping both the law and the tropes of masculinity would thus seem to authorize these feminist appropriations of carnival. According to these accounts, the very abjection of female corporeality becomes the locus of its power to liberate carnival: to spread the effects of carnivalesque upheaval beyond the event of the festum itself. In other words, the feminization of the carnivalesque-grotesque body has invested carnival with

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greater mobility and endurance—outside the boundaries of carnival’s limited time and location. The gender politics of carnivalesque exaggeration in suffragette silent film comedies are extremely complex. Women’s temporary subversions of patriarchal power are ultimately contained at the end of the film through any means, from physical beatings and mass arrests to ovulating husbands and predatory rodents. Moreover, carnivalesque exaggeration blurs with slapstick corrective violence in these films, producing a gendered ambiguity about its social messaging and implied address. In other words, do the comic effects of physical violence and corporeal excess across these examples provoke disciplinary mockery or, rather, revolutionary laughter? Does the spectator laugh off her or his desire to identify with the image of sexual difference, or does this image linger and become a modality for envisioning permanent feminist social transformations? In Suffragette’s Dream, scenarios of anarchic reversal do not merely justify the sad, pseudo-comic conclusion in which a woman is beaten by her husband: they authenticate the film’s legibility as slapstick comedy—as fun violence that provokes happy laughter rather than horror or pathos. In contrast, in films such as Was He a Suffragette? (1912), A Discontented Woman (1910), and Too Much Suffragette (1912), towering Amazons terrorize their diminutive husbands into adopting the cause for women’s civic enfranchisement. Such representations, which waver between misogynistic ridicule and feminist rebellion, exceed the framework of the carnivalesque in both their aesthetic conventions and their social implications. While the unruly, grotesque, and disruptively anti-normative woman represents a vital recuperative figure for feminist comedy scholars, feminist film theorists have tended to avoid engaging with the slapstick genre. “Slapstick comedy has attracted relatively little attention from feminist and queer film theorists,” suggests Karen Redrobe, because these scholars have positioned themselves “against the comedian who is against his wife.”11 In other words, slapstick violence against women—in its confusing intermingling of sexist brutality and comedic nonsense—has missed the mark of either feminist critique (beyond pithy dismissal) or carnivalesque valorization. Where, then, do suffragette comedies position their potential laughing feminist film spectators? Indeed, these films were produced in the thick of feminism’s mainstream cultural emergence and radical rearticulation. Suffragette feminism gained cultural visibility and political traction as an

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urgent social cause throughout the early 1900s and 1910s, often through barbed and satirical attacks on the absurd illogic endemic to anti-suffragette arguments. Feminism’s aims then ranged from localized reformist projects to broader-scale visions of social revolution, wherein enfranchisement would represent a mere steppingstone to the dissolution of gender roles and a structural transformation of the political order.12 As Alice Duer Miller satirically encapsulates feminism’s spectrum of political positions in Are Women People?13, “We are waging—can you doubt? . . . Sometimes in profound seclusion, / In some far (but homelike) spot, / We will make a dark allusion: / ‘We’re not opposed to you-know-what.’ / No one knows / What we oppose, / For we call it ‘You-Know-What.’”14 The ambiguity of feminism’s potential political power (its “you-know-what”) found its modus operandi in comedy’s capacities for simultaneous indirection and emphatic exaggeration—particularly its loaded double-meanings that suggested unknown yet inevitable social consequences.

Identity and Difference: The Law According to Suffragettes Feminist arguments during the early 1900s and 1910s focused on women’s need for self-representation under the law or, as the lawyer Catherine Waugh McCulloch put it, for women to protect themselves broadly from “discriminatory man-made laws.”15 To combat these claims, anti-suffrage propaganda dramatized the potentially extreme societal disruption of women’s enfranchisement. Describing women’s suffrage as “petticoat government,” anti-suffragette propaganda used images of the broken homes and dysfunctional legislatures that would surely ensue if women were granted the vote. Whereas suffragettes emphasized the urgency of their needs for self-representation, anti-suffragettes and traditionalists exaggerated the catastrophic potentials of political reform. Sexual difference thereby came to stand in for the paradoxes of the law under representative democracy, specifically the paradoxes between universal citizenship and pervasive disenfranchisement. Questions of change hinged on the negotiation between identity and difference—both sexual and democratic—which at once subjected citizens to the law but barred them from the means to participate in altering it. Democracy’s deeper contradictions between abstract rights and material exclusions were thus repeatedly mapped onto the social and psychosexual differences between men and women.

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Suffragette activists were often tasked with explaining how some change could be different from all change, and how partial rights could be admitted while deferring the trauma and instability of total social upheaval. The lawyer Harriet Burton Laidlaw perhaps put the matter to rest rhetorically in 1912 when she said, “Insofar as women were like men they ought to have the same rights; insofar as they were different they must represent themselves.”16 As Duer Miller humorously captures this slippery play between difference and equality, “Democracy is this—to hold / That all who wander down the pike / In cart or car, on foot or bike, / Or male or female, young or old / Are much alike—are much alike.”17 The suffragette trick film comedy, How They Got the Vote (Edison, 1913) figures such democratic ambiguities in vividly cinematic terms. In this film, a suffragette’s suitor possesses two statues: one called “Sleep,” which creates immediate stasis, and another called “Progress,” which returns everything to motion. He woos his suffragette by using the statues to halt traffic, paralyzing all life and activity on the London Bridge, Piccadilly Circus, and the Bank of England, until Parliament grants women the vote. The film thus aligns suffragettes’ rights-based political demands with the very movement of commerce and industry—and with the most infinitesimal substance of matter and instant of temporality. Time will stand still and motion will freeze as long as political enfranchisement is deferred.

Paradoxes of Modern Feminism Suffragette arguments during this period were further made to explain the paradoxes of representative democracy through the lens of sexual difference. The contradictions whereby some citizens were bound by a law they could have no voice in legislating mapped all too seamlessly onto the sexual division of labor. The opposition between active-male citizen and passivefemale dependent also sustained the separation between public versus private spheres; productive versus reproductive labor; reason versus irrationality; and civic governance versus domestic housekeeping. The range of strategies for dissolving these oppositions varied widely within the movement. Reformist proponents of small-scale participation butted heads with feminist advocates of structural transformation. For example, whereas Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Olive Schreiner urged women to “exercise their full human capacities in useful work of all

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sorts,” Ellen Key and Havelock Ellis attacked Gilman and Schreiner for setting their sights on arenas already dominated by men.18 Key pushed for the state recognition of traditional forms of women’s work, lobbying for “maternity protection” laws whereby the state would compensate unwed and single mothers for their reproductive labor. She sparred publicly with Gilman, exaggerating the consequences of women working outside the home as “socially pernicious, racially wasteful, and soul-withering.”19 Caricatures of suffragettes as mannish, shrewish, or Amazon women—such as Sophie Pancake in A New Use for a Bike (1912) or Caroline Spankhurst in A Cure for Suffragettes (Biograph, 1913)—reflect Key’s alarmist depictions of the consequences of women’s overpoliticization.20 In contrast, Gilman, who described her politics as “humanist,” feared that feminism would valorize women’s work without transforming it: “Even those modern protagonists of women whom we call ‘feminists’ find some difficulty in proving equality; much more, superiority in women, as we know them.”21 Gilman’s transformative vision of feminist empowerment struggled not with the place of women but with the status of femininity in democratic politics. This is the issue that suffragette comedies literalize ad absurdum: what happens to the cultural conventions of femininity and masculinity once women get the vote? Will legislative meetings erupt in furor at the mere sight of a rodent if women are included, as in Oh! You Suffragette (1911), The Suffragettes’ Downfall; or Who Said ‘Rats’ (1911), and The Revolt of Mr. Wiggs (1915)? Moreover, will women’s traditional domestic tasks all fall by the wayside? In A Cure for Suffragettes, a political demonstration distracts radicalized women from their maternal duties, causing their neglected babies to become wards of the municipal traffic squad. A traffic jam ensues, inciting mass uproar, public anarchy, and a cacophony of honking horns, screaming babies, and protesting suffragettes. Katherine Anthony asserted at the time that feminism had two “dominating ideas:” “the emancipation of woman both as a human-being and as a sex-being.”22 For example, the humanitarian Jane Addams emphasized the interrelation between municipal reforms and domestic rights with her notion of “civic housekeeping,”23 and the ideal of integrating women into municipal affairs was often invoked as “housekeeping on a large scale.”24 Sanitation and public health regulations, fresh food and pure water standards, and the police enforcement of public morality all had a direct bearing on the quality

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of life in the home, which was still widely perceived as woman’s “natural sphere.” More radical feminists prioritized state or national government over local legislation. In the United States, this defining conflict between municipal reform versus federal enfranchisement caused a major splintering within the national organization when, in 1913, the Congressional Union (later reformed as the National Women’s Party) broke from the National American Woman’s Suffrage Association (NAWSA). Whereas militants, including the Pankhursts in Britain and Alice Paul and Lucy Burns in the United States, insisted on universalism and on deploying force when necessary to inherit the deferred promises of representative democracy,25 reformist leaders of NAWSA (Anna Howard Shaw, Carrie Chapman Catt, Jane Addams) focused on the social expediency of women’s partial enfranchisement. Abandoning the objective of a federal amendment, NAWSA leaders worked on state-level and municipal campaigns to carry out targeted civic reforms such as improving public health and safety standards. As Cott argues, these “divergent emphases did not cause real fissures within Feminism at the time. Rather . . . they represented Feminism’s characteristic doubleness,” the contradictions between identity and difference that have shaped and defined modern feminism—both its broad social alliances and its concrete political objectives.26 Even the most absurdly hyperbolic suffragette film, upon closer reading, reveals an underlying fantasy that is often quite pointed in its aims. As Shelley Stamp argues, “Although wives oppress husbands in these alarmist dramas, their inverted structures all but acknowledge that existing divisions of labor might also be less than fair.”27 To disregard these films as merely sexist would undermine the complexity of their historical contexts. The extreme and anarchic reversals depicted in these films really serve as decoys from their active entanglement with open questions about sexual politics—not just whether equality would be of value to society but, given that change was already in process, precisely what issues it would have to navigate. Silent films exhaustively thematized women’s infiltration of the professional workplace and civil government. Women take over the police force (The Suffragette Sheriff [Kalem, 1912]) and fire brigade (Fire! Fire! Fire! [1911]); become municipal leaders (When the Men Left Town [1914]); get elected to government office (When Helen Was Elected [1912]); preside over jurisdictions (Courting Across the Court [1911]); enlist as army cadets (When Their

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Wives Joined the Military); seek justice against their male tormentors (Down with the Men [1912]); and become consumed with politics to the exclusion of their traditional duties (Lea, the Suffragette [1910]). As a result, there is a degree of confusion about how society could or should be governed given the liquidation in these films of traditionally separate spheres. Would neglected babies spontaneously appear and then hamper civil officers to the detriment of all society (not that abandoned or unattended babies were a societal problem specific to feminist activism)? Would men then be forced to contribute to domestic housework? Were women even tough enough for politics, or were their naturally delicate constitutions better suited for other capacities (like prostitution, laborious and often dangerous housework, sweatshop labor, and childbirth)? The point is that these films were not ridiculous accidentally: they were ridiculous deliberately. Men give birth and burlesque about in hoop skirts, machines break down, traffic halts, time itself freezes, innocent men are wrongly convicted and sentenced to prank executions, and nations go to war on a whim. Nonsense was a tactic for managing both the terror of the unknown and the necessary forms of tension and confusion that any forms of social change must engender.

“Women Make No Allowances for Slowness” Comedy lends itself to ambiguity. Even the most vividly chauvinistic and mean-spirited anti-suffragette film could remain open to alternative readings and feminist appropriations. For example, a satire about female police officers provoked a wide range of conflicting reactions. One anti-suffragette writer for the Moving Picture World (using the pseudonym “LADY IN THE BATHS”) applauded The Lady Police (1912) for “furnish[ing] all manner of fun.” She elaborates by saying, “I do not know how it pleased my suffragette sisters, but I cannot imagine they were overjoyed at seeing it. Personally, believe me, I enjoyed it, because I have no sympathy with the suffragette cause.”28 Despite LADY IN THE BATHS’ narrow reading, this film is actually quite open-ended in its social connotations. The Lady Police depicts the schemes of a suffragette leader (most likely played by Mae Hotely29), who causes a male prison overpopulation crisis by redecorating its jail cells in the fashion of a woman’s dormitory: “It wasn’t long before the jail had a waiting list.”30 Soon, women were protesting outside of the prisons, shouting

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“Home is the place for husbands, not jail” (as opposed to usual suffragette rallying cries, such as “Votes for women!” or “How long must women wait for liberty?”). Given the iconography of suffragettes in prison, which stirred up images of mass arrests, forceful incarceration, and violent humiliating force-feedings, such images as featured in The Lady Police would have been broadly evocative for their spectators. The most absurd thing about this film is its absence of violence (i.e., the violence associated with political imprisonment), not its exaggerated gender reversals. It is unclear what exactly motivated spectator laughter at these oddly specific scenarios (i.e., women protesting their husbands’ fetishization of female-run prison interiors). Laughter might stem from relief at the exigency of unrealistic problems; it might come from a place of aggressive hostility and imagined superiority over these errant suffragette protesters; or it might simply spring from the abrupt appearance of unexpected incongruities, such as women demonstrating to return their men to their rightful place in the home. Usually laughter intermingles some combination of these three motives: relief, superiority, and incongruity. (Especially considering the importance of female consumers as motion picture viewers, it would be hard to believe that this prolific spate of suffragette comedies only offered pleasure for anti-suffragette spectators.) The ambivalent feelings and shifting spectator positions awakened by laughter, situated in their concrete historical contexts, became ever more slippery to capture in their oscillation between anti-female violence versus suffragette activist upheaval.

Frothing(ham) at the Mouth Beyond LADY IN THE BATHS’ reductive attribution of laughter to the film’s surface mockery, the most vocal anti-suffragette leaders often made absurd claims to silence and discredit feminist activism. The American clergyman and anti-suffragette orator Octavius B. Frothingham argued that women’s excess of “emotional intuition,” while ideally suited to the private sphere, “renders her essentially an idealist. . . . She can make no allowances for slowness. . . . Her reforms are sweeping. She would close all the bars and liquor saloons, and make it a crime to sell intoxicating drink.”31 In other words, woman is essentialized as both too delicate and too destructive for the public sphere, and her purported emotional fragility becomes

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the alibi for how she would inevitably overpower both civic rule and public life. Woman’s “alleged weakness, nervousness, and proneness to fainting would certainly be out of place in polling booths and party conventions.”32 Alice Duer Miller lambasts such blatantly contradictory logic in her poem, “If They Meant All They Said:” “And how tears heighten women’s powers! / My typist weeps for hours and hours: / I took her for her weeping powers— / They so delight my business hours.”33 More hyperbolically in suffragette film comedies, such as The Suffragettes’ Downfall; or, Who Said Rats? (1911), women are figured as simultaneously powerful enough to seize the reins of governance in one fell swoop and pathetically squeamish enough to relinquish them at the first sign of conflict or tension. In this film, a henpecked husband resegregates what had been his haven of a stag golf course by unleashing a cage of rats on his terrorized wife. As Duer Miller has put it, “Timidity in girls is nice. / My cook is so afraid of mice. / Now you’ll admit it’s very nice / To feel your cook’s afraid of mice.”34 While anti-suffragists (or “antis”) burlesqued the hysterical excesses of feminine force, suffragette humorists lampooned the aggravatingly apparent contradictions between popular caricatures of female delicacy and the necessities of enlisting women’s strenuous labor (both in the home, the industrial factory, and the commercial sphere). Moreover, both sides crafted popular comedy out of the humorous incongruities between conflicting yet ingrained cultural stereotypes about the conventions of femininity— particularly the ramifications of how these conventions might break down, give way, or erupt altogether. The Reverend Walsh delivered fiery orations condensing these inconsistent (and sexist) philosophies before mass audiences for the Anti-Women’s Suffrage Organization:35 The best wife and mother and sister would make the worst legislator, judge, and police. The excessive development of the emotional in her nervous system, ingrafts on the female organization, a neurotic or hysterical condition, which is the source of much of the female charm when it is kept within due restraints. In . . . moments of excitement . . . it is liable to explode in violent paroxysm.  .  .  . Every woman, therefore, carries this power of irregular, illogical and incongruous action; and no one can foretell when the explosion will come.

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Harking back to the pétroleuse of Revolutionary France—the violent, unruly, and sexually dangerous woman who iconized the Paris Commune—the threat of social catastrophe and “the excess of emotional development in [woman’s] nervous system” emerged as co-conspirators: the subordination of women represented the very health of the state (figure 6.2). Like the housemaid Mary Jane who spontaneously combusts out of the chimney while doing housework in Mary Jane’s Mishap (1903), suffragette feminism was accused of endangering fragile, nervous women with violent paroxysm, hysteria, and other socially disruptive forms of figurative or bodily explosion.

FIGURE 6.2 Pétroleuse, 1871. Wikimedia Commons, https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/P%C3%A9troleuse#/media/File:CommunePostcardMarch-May1871.jpg

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The Vicissitudes of Feminist Empowerment The New York Clipper warned, “Things in general are going to be vastly different When Women Win.”36 As a writer for Variety described this terrifying transformation, “If women ever come to the fore in civic and state supremacy—women postmen, policemen, court officers and other public officials are shown with knee-length skirts over the long pantaloons of the male gender.”37 Civic empowerment is further envisioned as a spontaneous reversal of physical gender norms in a variety of ways: while men give birth in When Women Win (Lubin, 1909), or “crochet for dear life” in The Suffragette’s Dream, Amazon women bully and tower over their emasculated husbands in Was He a Suffragette? (Republic, 1912) and in Man Suffragette for Abolition of Work for Women (1910). Most of these films enact extreme role reversals, which occur immediately upon women’s enfranchisement and then are quickly reversed when they make society completely unlivable for anyone else. While women gain power easily in these films, they are comically illequipped for using it. For example, in When the Men Left Town, women learn the hard way that “ ‘tidying up the whole town was subtly different than dusting the parlor and tying the velvet bows on the what-not.’ Trolley cars grind to a halt because ‘nobody dared to monkey with the dingusses that make the car go.’ ”38 A Day in the Life the Life of a Suffragette (1908) depicts women in “battle pitch  .  .  . drunk with their own words  .  .  . and screaming revolutionary songs. . . . [Their] female onslaught is so powerful that the poor policemen fall sprawling to the ground, and as the female wave sweeps over their prostrate bodies they have reason to regret their rash attempt.”39 In the end, violent upheaval escalates, the government imposes martial law, and the state military eventually subdues the uprising women. The suffragettes meekly withdraw and then rue their own activism. These contradictory portrayals of femininity, as at once overwhelmingly volatile and unimaginably vulnerable, became impetuses for laughter when traditional ideals of womanhood were forced to reconcile with the iconography of modernity and of modern state institutions. Fighting Suffragettes (1909) comically literalizes the endpoint of these incongruous figurations of femininity as at once dangerously eruptive and vulnerably hysterical. In this film, two “fighting suffragettes” decide to resolve a political dispute, oddly, through recourse to aristocratic codes of

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masculine honor by having a duel. Not realizing that their guns are filled with blanks, they faint morbidly in response to their uncertainty about whether they had actually been shot (or had shot their rival). Apparently, “this has the effect of scaring both seconds and witnesses into a faint so they all collapse.”40 Both volatile enough to shoot on sight and thin-skinned enough to faint immediately upon doing so, suffragettes were iconized as speed demons who would be the last ones to accept or to live with the consequences of their impulsive decisions. Again, as Frothingham warned, women “make no allowances for slowness, for tentative or compromising measures.” At the end of this film, the police arrive on the scene and arrest all of the now-unconscious women. If women are reduced to incongruity gags as eruptive-dainties, less mention is made of the police force’s preference to execute its reforms while the women are still comatose. Despite their paradoxical language, premised on the free play of opposites, these films of course were also deeply complicit in thwarting crucial suffragette claims. Whereas Lucy Stone argued that women required a direct legal voice to ensure sexual justice, citing the puny sentences meted out to convicted rapists and sex crime perpetrators and the absurdly low age of consent in most states,41 Jane, the Justice (1914) portrays a female judge who swoons over a handsome criminal and then pardons him in a juryless trial. Similarly, The First Woman Jury in America (Vitagraph, 1914) depicts an all-female jury—composed mostly of old maids, mothers-in-laws, and spinsters—who acquit a handsome, corrupt journalist because he flirts with them. Most often it is women who end up behind bars in these films. In The Pickpocket (1913), a husband tricks his suffragette wife into accepting theater tickets, which he then reports as stolen, refusing to bail her out until “extorting a promise from her to retire from the suffragette club.”42 More anarchically, women storm the mayor’s office and start a small riot after an exciting meeting at their suffragette club leads to mass arrests in the Italian comedy, Lea, the Suffragette (Cines, 1910), which was widely praised and exhibited in the United States. “In her cell in prison, Lea has ample opportunity for calm reflection and quite rapidly her political ardor cools.” In the end, the remasculinization of the men and return of women to their proper domestic sphere provide for a total restoration of traditional order. In their most extreme visions, suffragette comedies shatter the law and then attempt to resolve all of the law’s inherent contradictions by asserting its absolute, unquestioned reinstatement.

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Suffragettes in the Mainstream The Suffragette will smash the pane And dynamite the jail, Drive tall policemen half insane, Make men of moment pale; Yet people say with manner wise, “You’ll never see a lass Or portly matron sternly rise And smash a looking-glass! “You’ll never see her grab a brick And heave it true and straight, With noble aim to shatter quick A slivered clear French plate; For woman’s vain as vain can be, And always without end The mirror serves her—surely she Would never harm a friend.” But oh, beware of tempting her! ‘Twould never do to set Bright mirrors where show windows were Before the suffragette. She’d quickly on her sisters call And they would raise a storm. Then smash those mirrors one and all To see themselves perform!43

Around 1913, suffragette-themed film comedies were transitioning from the most extreme nightmares about women’s political rule to polite romances that distilled suffragette ambitions to their mildest reformist agendas. From anarchic visions of women’s law-making violence (always followed by the reassertion of men’s law-preserving violence),44 film comedies began to censor such images of feminist rupture. In suffragette comedies, female corporeality and feminist politics alike became sites of profound rupture in between contradictory modes of filmic address. As the

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poem quoted above indicates, suffragettes were both widely visible but often sinisterly characterized in 1913. The impossible temporality of this poem’s climax, which describes suffragettes watching themselves through mirrors that are themselves in the act of being shattered, reveals the broader ambivalences intrinsic to suffragette depictions. Although derisive, this poem is especially illuminating. It formulates an indecision between the desire for popular recognition and the impetus for destructive transformation: a major contradiction within mass feminist movements. It was of course also in 1913 that the American militants Alice Paul and Lucy Burns formed the radical Congressional Union (CU), breaking ties with the more conservative National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). Nancy Cott describes this split within the national organization: “Paul’s and Burns’ iconoclasm, leading the CU to act boldly even if that caused affront, to reject the predictable decorousness of NAWSA and to affirm that women had political strength (if only they would show it), appealed to women who held the broader agenda of Feminism.”45 Whereas suffragism aimed at concrete ballot- and rights-oriented objectives, feminism instrumentalized these goals as part of a broader coalition movement for structural transformation. Disagreement over which societal and economic differences this transformation should encompass only added fuel to the flame for feminist leaders. Visibility was a key tactic for feminist and suffragette activists, who attempted to effect lasting changes through spontaneous, spectacular ruptures in societal perceptions of women. “The more fashionable or renowned the perpetrators of unladylike deeds on behalf of suffrage, the more sensational and newsworthy their behavior appeared.”46 As with humor, wherein sudden reversal comes easily but lasting change is always tenuous, the spectacle of suffragette politics walked a fine line between punctual shock and permanent transformation. It was therefore just as crucial for suffragettes to codify a visual language of reformist political difference even while it remained necessary to keep this language open for the possibility of rupture and astonishment. Therein lay the paradox of suffragette aesthetics in the 1910s. Reformist spectacles such as annual parades, incendiary speeches, propaganda films, and tactical transgressions of stilted social norms (such as chaining oneself to a public railing) did not simply commodify the potential for political transformation. Indeed, militant tactics went way beyond

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this (see chapter 7), including bombing mailboxes, breaking windows, destroying valuable artworks, and harassing cabinet ministers. Rather, these reformist (i.e., nonradical) tactics represented just one front of a struggle between the iconography of incremental progress and the iconoclasm of structural revolution. These conflicting drives for imminent rupture and for future-perfect stability (new developments that will have endured) emerged from democracy’s deeper paradoxes between political freedom and the precedence of the law. Comedy did an enormous amount of work to navigate this double bind between the impetus for spectacular novelty and the political endpoint of stability and legitimacy.

The Suffragette Parade Earlier into this decade (from 1910 to 1913), the cultural mainstreaming of American suffragette politics constituted an event in itself. Less than a year before Paul and Burns coordinated a spectacular 1913 Washington D.C. suffrage parade the day before President Wilson’s inauguration, suffragettes in New York City marched down Fifth Avenue in their annual procession. A news report from the time remarks on a decisive turn in public opinion about the parade participants:47 All along Fifth Avenue . . . were gathered thousands of men and women of New York. They blocked every cross street on the line of march. Many were inclined to laugh and jeer, but none did. The sight of the impressive column of women striving five abreast up the middle of the street stifled all thought of ridicule. . . . Women doctors, women lawyers . . . women architects, women artists, actresses, and sculptors; women waitresses, domestics; a huge division of industrial workers . . . all marched with an intensity and purpose that astonished the crowds that lined the streets.

From laughter to astonishment, reactions to the New York City parade indexed broader shifts in suffragettes’ cultural reception. Despite the mistreatment of some marchers by rowdy spectators, the 1913 D.C. parade asserted a similar triumph of iconic display over political agitation. (The desire to project a widely palatable image of suffragette culture led to further conflict and exclusion within the movement itself when racist delegates persuaded Paul to segregate African American women from the main

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processions.48) Newsreel Company filmed actuality footage from the protest of an elegant fashion tableau and pageant staged on the steps of the Capitol. Inez Milholland led the parade in a crown and long white cape while sitting atop a large white horse named Gray Dawn. She had five mounted brigades, ten bands, twenty-six floats, and eight thousand marchers in tow. Moving Picture World (MPW) boasted of the celebrity power documented in actuality footage of the parade: “Among the mounted Amazons are shown splendid personal pictures of Mrs. Gus Rublin, wife of the famous athlete, and Miss Florence Lawrence.” The writer adds, “Even their Antis are forced to admire the manner in which the American Amazons win the ‘right of way’ through a throng that might easily throw into confusion a St. Patrick’s Day Parade.”49 MPW reviewers did not hesitate to cash in on the star power that adorned the parade, emphasizing among “the floats and various features of the pageant . . . a view of Florence Lawrence on a finely caparisoned charger. She faces the camera with her most charming smile.” (Many readers sent letters after the parade inquiring whether Lawrence was herself a suffragette, which the MPW refrained from affirming with any certainty.) The Woman’s Journal and Suffrage News headlined by emphasizing the suffragettes’ fashionable iconicity, defying the many instances of crowd mockery and sexist abuse. Captions like “Nation Aroused by Open Insults to Women,” “Cause Wins Popular Sympathy,” and “Striking Object Lesson” are juxtaposed with enormous photos of women marching in historical costumes, movie stars, decorative floats, and Inez Milholland atop her great white horse.50 Mainstream filmmaking about suffragettes rehearsed a similar trajectory from mockery to commodification in dozens of motion pictures from 1912 to 1915. Bunny for the Cause (1913), How They Got the Vote (Edison, 1913), Jane, the Justice (1914), Votes for Women (1912) and The Eternal Feminine (1915) all glamorize politics in order to reframe popular notions of women’s enfranchisement.

Fat Men Join the Parade Bunny for the Cause (1913) exemplifies this integration of suffragette iconicity by mainstream film culture. (The Vitagraph Company shot this comedy partly on-location in Washington, D.  C. with John Bunny and Rose Tapley marching in the Suffragette Parade.) Bunny plays a member of the

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virulently anti-suffrage “Fat Men’s Club.” From the outset, any uncertainty about the image of women in politics is neutralized by the comic spectacle of these fat men, who preach to the choir that women do “not [have] enough brain capacity to qualify them for the ballot.”51 Tapley plays Bunny’s wife, who counsels him and helps him out of business difficulties through her “excellent judgment” so many times “that he change[s] his mind” about suffragette politics. It is worth noting that this film was released the same year as The Pickpocket (1913), another Vitagraph comedy in which Bunny appears across from his usual partner Flora Finch, whose scrawny stature and avian features lend themselves to slapstick humiliation considerably more than Tapley’s normative image of femininity. (Bunny’s two very different but contemporaneous romantic co-stars reveal the inconsistent signification of suffragette femininity at this particular moment.) In The Pickpocket, Finch’s “excursions into feminine politics leave Bunny in the lurch” (figure 6.3). The MPW adds, “There will be many hearty laughs as the worm turns and the whip falls [back] into his hand.”52 Rather than subjecting feminism to social correction through laughter, Bunny for the Cause surprises its spectator by insisting that suffragettes are, after all, also “women”

FIGURE 6.3 Publicity still for The Pickpocket in Illustrated Film Monthly, 1913. Mary Evans, the

March of the Women Collection, https://www.diomedia.com/stock-photo-suffragette-silent-filmthe-hunger-strike-image18079175.html

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(in the traditional sense, slightly adapted to modern times). Bunny is converted and elects to march in the Suffragette Parade of his own volition, a humorous but strangely sincere sight gag. He also persuades several of his fellow “Fat Men” to champion the cause. The film thereby animates dual notions of suffragette femininity as transgressively unconventional and as more or less socially acceptable. Humorous play, then, arises primarily through the apparent fluidity of conflicting and shifting social perceptions of women in politics. More formulaically, the milder comedies would envision a political compromise between suffragettes and antis that arises through romantic coupling. Many films, including Love and a Lemon (1912), The Girl and the Mayor (1912), as well as suffragette-produced publicity films, such as Eighty Million Women Want—? (1913),53 allowed for women’s partial civic inclusion as long as this remained subordinate to their heteronormative romantic coupling with men in official positions of power. From biopolitical nightmares of women using civil force to police male pregnancy (When Women Win), derisive but potentially disruptive laughter gave way to polite amusement. Suffragettes were typified less as “mannish” or hysterical hellcats bent on revolution and more as attractive, well-meaning but slightly misguided women exploring the social possibilities available between latency and matrimony.

Mediating Suffragette Excess Even in films that subordinate the politics of social change to the necessity of ideological and biological reproduction, suffragette tropes represent excesses that can never fully be integrated into the plot. These excesses themselves drive the organization of the narrative. In Gwendolyn Pates’s For Mayor—Bess Smith (1913), a machine party candidate, Joe Jones, gets caught on a phonograph attempting to bribe his female mayoral opponent, Bess Smith, to drop out of the race. Despite this incriminating evidence of Jones’s corruption, Smith decides to accept his proposal of marriage because “in case she lost the office, it might be a good thing to be the wife of a mayor.”54 The political danger inherent in this new form of evidence (the phonograph record) never really gets dealt with; rather, its media implications are bracketed through its instrumental role in the narrative. The film suggests that

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spousal influence represents a necessary antidote to men’s potential vulnerability to corruption, documented by the phonograph. The film advocates neither for nor against enfranchisement; rather, it seeks to manage the complexities of how cultural instruments might abet feminist politics. During this time, suffragettes were persuasively incorporating motion pictures, audio recordings, photographic slides, and other media tools into their publicity campaigns to great effect. From prolific pro-suffrage newspaper illustrations to popular songs of women’s suffrage such as “Shall Women Vote?” and “Daughters of Freedom” and propaganda films produced by the Pankhurst family, suffragettes embraced mass culture as an ideological weapon. As Amy Shore argues in Suffrage and the Silver Screen, the “activist use of film was one of the first instances in the United States that a social movement recognized and harnessed the power of cinema to transform consciousness and, in turn, transform the social order.”55 In other words, cinema provided not only a powerful tool for advancing feminist politics but a malleable visual medium for articulating feminism’s often contradictory goals and paradoxical needs. For Mayor—Bess Smith, for example, concedes some ground: it acknowledges the inevitability of women’s shifting social positions and the possible expediency of their municipal reforms, but it does so at a price. The phonograph as an instrument or means is neutralized by dictating the extent of its object or ends. The phonographic recording becomes a device for motivating a romantic encounter rather than a possible weapon in a more profound form of political and ideological struggle. Shelley Stamp emphasizes the commodification of feminist politics in Movie-Struck Girls. Like anything else involving women and societal change, this dynamic cuts both ways: consumer culture both provided women a platform for reaching popular audiences while also filtering all of their political demands through the desires of commodity consumption. Stamp quotes a very revealing 1913 issue of Ladies Home Journal: “A suffragette has been defined . . . as a woman who wants something and thinks it’s a vote. . . . There are women who want the vote as a suitable personal attribute, as they might covet a pearl necklace, or a house, or a frock.”56 In general, suffragettes managed these caricatured perceptions of femininity by tactically aligning voting-rights activism with the productivity of commodity capitalism. Women compared electoral decisions to comparison shopping, arguing that prudent shoppers (i.e., women) made for responsible voters.

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By 1918, George Earnshaw asserted in his Infants Department magazine that “had the suffragettes been able to work through the department store instead of through women’s clubs, churches, and lectures . . . the feminine vote would no doubt be universal by now.”57 From motion picture propaganda and fashion tableaux staged on the lawn of the Capitol to a variety of commodity goods including Kewpie dolls, sunflower badges, and “womanalls” (overalls for the modern women), suffragettes embraced these capitalist accessories as tools for advancing a spectrum of political causes. The drive for enfranchisement stemmed from the very gap between commercial desire and its insatiability by the commodity object itself. In other words, while the law said “no” to women, women shifted the impetus for this “no” through strategic recourse to the fluidity of referents in capitalist media culture. It is very fitting, then, that the radical anarchist Emma Goldman would disown enfranchisement. She proclaimed, “Our modern fetich is universal suffrage. . . . Woman clings tenaciously . . . to the very power that holds her in bondage, . . . condemn[ing] woman to the life of an inferior . . . [as] a modern prison with golden bars.”58 Within both the suffragette movement and among the various institutions that sought to commodify feminist discourse, there was a severe degree of anxiety about just where this marriage between rights and goods might lead.

Commodifying Rights The driving uncertainty between activism and commodification is manifest in many suffragette films, which oscillate between polite and derisive provocations for laughter. Suffragette film comedies, doubly coded to mobilize and to civilize, were constantly yo-yoing between spectacles of humiliation and models of civilized decorum. Perhaps no other film better exemplifies this double coding of laughter as both brutally derisive and placidly amusing than The Suffragette Sheriff (Kalem, 1913). “A laugh provoking satire on Western politics,” this film is all about the slippage between shifting appearances and changing realities.59 The plot is indeed ludicrous: old man Rattlesnake Bill’s wife, under the influence of her spinster suffragette older sister, gets herself elected to the office of mayor. She “left the kitchen to enlighten those of her sex who dwelt

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in darkness. Bill, unaccustomed to work of any kind, found the household duties decidedly irksome  .  .  . [so] he unfolded the deep-laid plot.”60 Bill would pretend to commit a murder, with his friend Old Judge Soft presiding over his trial; meanwhile, Bill’s wife, the sheriffess, would be moved to shirk her duties and abandon the law in order to save her husband, thereby restoring her to her “natural” place in the home. “The trial was a weird affair. Bill could scarcely control his laughter and the judge more than once forgot his dignity as he beheld the spectacle which the lady officials presented by their earnestness.”61 After overhearing the juvenile men scheming against her, the wife doubles down on the charade and calmly proceeds with her husband Bill’s death sentence. She abandons him to the retributive justice of the law: “The sheriff attended to the adjusting of noose and trap with unusual dexterity. Bill’s cry of ‘this has gone far enough!’ was ignored.” The film ties up its unraveling string of misunderstandings with a climactic gag, somewhere between gallows humor and slapstick nonsense: “The trap was sprung and the schemer fell—not into oblivion, but into a tank of water which had been installed by the sheriff and her deputies.” The water gag at the end of Suffragette Sheriff invokes an old stunt, used in films from the Lumières’ L’Arroseur Arrosé (1895) to Princess Nicotine (1909) (see chapter 4), the latter in which a man accidentally sprays himself in the face with a seltzer bottle after using it to melt a miniature nicotine fairy-woman. Suffragette Sheriff similarly (though less surrealistically) avoids addressing the social issues that the film raises by way of the final gag. The wife might belong in the home or she might do more good in civil society; the husband’s buffoonery might outshine the spinster suffragette sister’s misguided ambitions or it might not; the gag at the end might resolve all of the differences in the narrative and restore normalcy, or it might just herald the beginning of further social upheaval. The point is that laughter and feminism act as co-conspirators for authorizing their respective contradictions. To give an example, the trial farce activates two modes of address: the polite, civilizing laughter mediated through the wife’s awareness of the charade, and the raucous, boisterous laughter of the infantile men, which becomes increasingly irrational as their deep-laid plot unravels. Laughter in this film keeps getting out of hand, only to be resubjected to fresh layers of rationalization. The possibility of an actual feminist politics, meanwhile, hangs in the balance with each new mocking pretense and then with the imminent irruption of that potentiality. Politics are explicitly not foreclosed

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so that they can remain freshly available for compulsive disavowal, and laughter repeatedly opens up unforeseen social possibilities, which then dissolve in order to incite ever more laughter.

Gender Play and Cross-Dressing Suffragettes If normatively feminine suffragettes provoked polite laughter in romantic comedies, then barbarous laughter was reserved for anarchists, socialists, foreigners, transvestites, rabble-rousers, militants, Amazons, androgynes, and racial and ethnic minorities. The roughest or most crude gags tended to get inflicted on male actors cross-dressing as suffragettes. In A Busy Day (1914), Charlie Chaplin moonlights as a militant suffragette rabble-rouser who gets into fisticuffs while inadvertently blocking the view of several cameramen recording a military parade. After knocking out a handful of policemen, flashing at least half of the crowd, and undergoing various “unladylike” pratfalls, Charlie’s character finally falls into the river, wherein she performs several aquatic somersaults before sinking. As Kay Sloan puts it, “Sputtering and spewing, Chaplin’s caricature slowly sank, and no one came to her rescue. The final bubbles rising from the water’s surface seemed to promise the last gasp of the votes-for-women movement.”62 While newsreels like Suffragettes Again (1913) evoked mass unease by depicting British militants setting official buildings ablaze, audiences were encouraged to laugh off these destructive antics by inflicting counter-violence on suffragettes’ cross-dressed male surrogates.

Femininity as Subordination Though Chaplin’s cross-dressing in A Busy Day appears as broad farce, suffragette cross-dressing and the public display of masculinity offered options for combatting what Elizabeth Cady Stanton elsewhere referred to as women’s cultural inheritance of perceived ineptitude in civic engagement.63 Stanton argued that the ballot and civic participation would liberate woman from her entrenched place in the home. For the radical French feminist Madame Madeleine Pelletier (Stanton’s contemporary), in order for women to free themselves from domestic servitude, each woman would be individually responsible for shattering the conventional images of femininity.

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“The vote, she thought, would have a ‘virilizing’ effect on women by eliminating one of the more powerful structural supports of female/feminine difference. . . . The goal of feminists must be to eschew feminine behavior.”64 Whereas Stanton emphasized the ballot as a way out of the vicious circle between women’s perceived inferiority and their concrete political exclusion, Pelletier saw the vote as an instrument to virilize women. At once a radical individualist and a social masculinist, she typically donned a man’s suit, bowler hat, and cane (figure 6.4). In her dual performance of singular individuality and androgynous commonality, her image was not dissimilar from that of Chaplin, perhaps even bearing a strong resemblance.

FIGURE 6.4 Photograph of Madeleine Pelletier. Bibliothèque National de France, http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b53114341d

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Pelletier drew a direct line between the law of the state and the lives of its subjects, arguing that the goals of feminists must be to renounce feminine behavior. She scorned all women who clung to the signifiers of femininity. As Scott notes, Pelletier once declined to perform an abortion for a woman in the postal service who had been raped while both were involved in a strike, and then declared, “May all feminists who are only half-feminists be treated the same.”65 When Laura Lafargue, daughter of Karl Marx, was named vice-president at an international congress of socialist-feminists, Pelletier described her mockingly: “She appeared with her face swathed in a thick veil; from afar she looked like a package of cloth.” Pelletier condemned the overall display: “Naturally the socialist women were very careful not to appear sexually liberated. Rosa Luxembourg wore a long dress, long hair, a small veil and flowers on her hat. . . . In those days hats were held on with large pins, and when Clara Zetkin spoke from the podium, her broad gestures made [her] hat flop from right to left—the effect was comic.”66 Pelletier’s derisive laughter went beyond mockery: it was a battle cry. It evokes discourses in political theory, from Aristotle to Hobbes, that associate laughter with warlike struggle. Hobbes asserts in his Elements of Law, “The passion of Laughter is nothing else but a sudden glory arising from sudden conception of some eminency in ourselves by comparison with the infirmities of others, or with ourselves formerly.”67 In other words, laughter is the stake for legitimizing one’s own value or worth for civic inclusion. Who deserves to inherit rights, and who is beneath these entitlements? Through laughter, Pelletier sought to appropriate the ideological power that justified women’s subordination under the law by refusing to reduce female citizenship to the gender norms of conventional femininity. Yet, as Laura Horak argues in Girls Will Be Boys, cross-dressing in silent cinema often served a conservative function: the notion of sexual reversal as inherently subversive is a “specious fallacy.”68 Female-to-male crossdressing, according to Horak, offered a tactic for the film industry’s artistic legitimation campaigns by linking the movies to longstanding theatrical traditions (Horak focuses on the hundreds of transitional films depicting women cross-dressing as men from 1908 to 1919). If female-to-male crossdressing signaled legitimacy (in cinema, as in politics), then male-to-female cross-dressing often had the opposite effect, appearing as a farcical sight gag meant to lampoon and debase through mere association.

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For example, in Billy the Suffragette (1913), a young man impersonates a famous suffragette leader named Mrs. Spankhurst—smoking, drinking, cursing, and behaving outrageously—in order to reeducate his potential love interest about her proper feminine duties. His secret betrothed, Ada, wears a pretty sash with “Suffragettes” on it, but her shrewish aunt Mrs. Cockle will not permit the engagement. Billy’s ridiculous caricature of a militant suffragette forecloses the danger of Ada renouncing her proper behavior, by performing all gender mobility as inherently absurd—lest young Ada go the way of Aunt Cockle. While Pelletier donned masculine garb and derided feminine hats as a political tactic, cinematic cross-dressing widely served as an ideological instrument for policing gender normativity. Moreover, as Billy’s drag signifies, male cross-dressing’s coding as ludicrous adhered to the image of suffragette masculinity with the express aim of figuring all gender fluidity as pure farce.

Ethnic Identity and the Origin of Rights Tropes of cross-dressing, to invoke Horak’s argument, further allowed filmmakers to depict suffragette burlesque without compromising the social status of the implied cross-class spectator (for example, in films such as A Busy Day, Billy the Suffragette, and The Comedian’s Downfall). In contrast, racial and ethnic masquerade rehearsed crude ideological experiments on minority subjects. Native American culture was repeatedly enlisted as a testing zone for suffragette politics in abject spectacles of compressed modernization. In these film comedies, feminist ideas infect idyllic tribal society like the smallpox and can only be eradicated through romanticized, racist notions of the physical and moral simplicity of indigenous people. For example, in The Indian Suffragettes (1914), “Dishwater, a member of the Oompah tribe, returns from the Government school a militant suffragist.”69 Although she encounters initial resistance from the other women in her tribe, Dishwater beats the skeptics into submission using a quintessential feminine commodity prop: her umbrella (presumably financed by taxpayer dollars). “As the result of their demand for equal rights, the squaws succeed in assuming the occupations formerly pursued by the braves, while the latter take care of the papooses and do the housework.” Primitivist order is restored when the “squaws” go on a hunting expedition and encounter a war party from a rival tribe, forcing them to call upon their henpecked

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husbands to rescue them. “The suffragettes’ pleas for help are ignored by their own braves until a solemn promise is registered that in the future the women consent to play second fiddle. This done, the Oompah warriors help defeat their foes.” Irony notwithstanding—that suffrage would be the most detrimental threat to Native American tradition (as opposed to settler colonialism and state genocide)—the film’s racist tropes of noble savagery authenticate its sexist division of labor. The Oompah women are all too vulnerable to the lures of commodity fetishism, which become irresistible vehicles for their feminist indoctrination. Oompah masculinity, depicted as both primitive and virile, thus saves modern society from its inevitable crises of gender roles when women acquire capitalist purchase on political power. Indian Suffragettes further evokes Frederick Engels’ argument in Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State that “the division of labour between the two sexes is determined by causes entirely different from those that determine the status of women in society.”70 Engels refers to the nineteenth-century cult of domesticity, whereby woman’s place in the home was enshrined through ideological notions of femininity as passive, pious, pure, and submissive. As he puts it, “The social status of the lady of civilization, surrounded by sham homage and estranged from all real work, is infinitely lower than that of the hard-working woman of barbarism.”71 In contrast, Indian Suffragettes condenses modern tropes of femininity with racist depictions of native savagery. Agreeing “to play second fiddle” again in the hierarchy of labor, the Oompah women signify a capitalist anachronism: the “ladies” of what is clearly figured as a precivilized tribal order. The inherent absurdity of the scenario—manifest in details such as the name “Dishwater,” the umbrella, and the blurring between warrior violence and papoose domesticity—serve as decoys from the film’s underlying contradictions. Indian Suffragettes substitutes purportedly natural gender roles— “natural” because they are made to seem naturally occurring in a premodern society—for the sexual divisions of labor both endemic to and destabilized by commodity capitalism. Many suffragette comedies use marginal or subaltern characters to legitimize male outrage at the apparent perversion of gender roles by modern civilization. In The Revolt of Mr. Wiggs (1915), a gypsy fortune-teller encourages a cowed husband to suppress his militant suffragette wife (who is leading a suffragette parade on horse-back) by informing him that he is

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the direct descendant of gladiators and fighters. In The Suffragette (1913), Waggy Bill and his cowboy friends masquerade as Native Americans and abduct an elderly suffragette orator, Samantha Roundtree. The men visit a curio shop where they rent their costumes, thereby commoditizing tribal artifacts in order to traffic in native identities. A Western satire in the vein of The Suffragette Sheriff, the film uses ethnic masquerade as a pretense for inflicting colonialist violence on politicized women’s bodies. The men “tie her [Samantha] to a tree and pile brush about her as if to make a funeral baked feast.” Again, the perception of native savagery justifies the desire to maintain separate spheres. However, rather than depicting the suffragette as an unnatural presence within racially normative white modernity, these comedies enlist the ethnic other as a foil for making an argument that was starting to seem unpalatable (or at least unpopular) when figured too directly: the case against female enfranchisement and pervasive empowerment. As Charlie Musser argues, 1913 marked a turning point in public perceptions of feminist politics: he calls it “a cultural transformation that made feminism and suffrage mainstream issues.”72 Writing about intermediality in the arts, Musser focuses on the ideological values championed by star actresses, especially the French stage performer Sarah Bernhardt. From dismissing the “Votes for Women” campaign because she believed “sex isn’t rational” and characterizing British militants as “fools” in 1912, Bernhardt warmed up to the cause by the Annual Suffragette Parade in New York City in 1913: “I think it is a shame that women do not have the vote. . . . If they are capable of controlling and operating commercial undertakings, it is only just that the woman proprietor who has 50 or 100 men working for her should have a vote in the affairs of her country as well as the men she employs in her business.”73 Bernhardt’s statement here further reveals the attempt to elide class divisions within international suffragette movements, instead invoking suffragettes (at least aspirationally) as members of the property-owning class. Meanwhile, it was the caricatured ethnic other (like Dishwater) who authenticated anti-suffragette ideology. Motion picture culture and stardom played key roles in making suffragette politics not only widely visible but also commercially desirable. Suffragettes increasingly allied themselves with the language of popular culture—and with the visuality of capitalistic desire—as the means to drive home their case for popular sovereignty.

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Suffragettes and the Decline of the Trick Film In one of his most ambitious (and also one of his last) films, the great trick filmmaker Georges Méliès plays Professor Crazyloft, a mad scientist who races a rival party of balloonists to the pole. The Conquest of the Pole (1912) teems with spectacular flourishes, including trick effects, jump cuts, multiple exposures, toy props, fantastical machines, astonishing acrobatics, and unmotivated transmutations—none of which are subordinated to the economic constraints of the film’s narrative, which is very loose. Although Conquest spans two reels, as in many of Méliès’s popular early films, the science-fiction narrative provides at most a weak pretext for visual spectacle. Early in the film, before the voyage, “suffragettes who want to go along interrupt the Assembly’s serious work,” which at that moment is focused on congregating in front of a globe and gesturing at an image of the ship that resembles a cross between a dinosaur and a hot-air balloon. “The Delegation of Suffragettes” storms in with picket signs, one of which avows, with tongue-in-cheek, that women would like to go “à bas” (“to the bottom”) along with the men. (This phrasing is especially peculiar considering the scientists’ objective to reach the North Pole.) The suffragettes are all clad in silk knee-breeches, a throwback to mid-nineteenth-century French fashion of the moderate bourgeois revolutionaries against whom the “sans-culottes,” radical leftist urban-laborers positioned their economic and civic demands. Like the anachronistic iconography of Professor Crazyloft’s wonderful aeroplane, which strikes its contemporary spectator as at once au courant and prehistoric, the suffragettes are envisioned as a throwback to a moderately revolutionary historical theater. According to Méliès, the women’s problem is precisely that they are not funny enough (unlike his own mad scientist character). The suffragettes resemble a liberal vanguard, too concerned with appearance to get left behind with the crazy visionaries of history (again, unlike himself); they will move forward through their very desire to temper the potentiality for historical change. If the suffragettes cannot ride to the North Pole in Professor Crazyloft’s wonderful aeroplane, perhaps it is not they who have been excluded from the future of the voyage but Méliès himself, who must absent himself from history in an already outdated imagination of time travel (and also of trick film comedy). On the cusp of his company Star Film’s bankruptcy, Méliès’s emphasis on aesthetic spectacle and magical mystification no longer

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captivated international film audiences, who were increasingly persuaded by a growing web of trade press discourses to value narrative and moral uplift above wild fantasy and comedic experimentation. Méliès’s products simply did not travel well. While reformist suffragettes gained mainstream cultural viability and political traction in their advocacy for rights-based representation, Méliès’s irrational visions of historical movement—premised on comical rupture and aesthetic mutation above technological progress and moral reform—would hypothetically have to journey as far as the moon or the North Pole to find an audience.

“Our Modern Fetich” The radical anarchist Emma Goldman, who frequently acted as a gadfly to push suffragette movements to the left of their reformist agendas, offers a very different understanding of the relationship between feminist politics and fetishistic spectacle. She proclaimed, “We boast of the age of advancement, of science, and progress. Is it not strange then that we still believe in fetich worship? True, our fetiches have different form and substance, yet in their power over the human mind, they are still as disastrous as were those of old. Our modern fetich is universal suffrage.”74 Goldman accused American suffragette campaigns of fetishism, beyond their embrace of capitalist commodity culture, because they relinquished real power for its mere substitution: that of legal inclusion for structural transformation— the part for the whole. Instead of confronting the “modern prison[s] with golden bars” that “condemn woman to the life of an inferior” (i.e., the State, civil society, religion, war, and the home), she asks why “woman clings tenaciously,” again, “to the very power that holds her in bondage.” In other words, women’s suffrage performs a political baitand-switch, equating voting with the purification of the political when in fact, as Goldman claims, it merely covers over the hopeless injustice of modern state institutions. Thus, female reformists in states where women had already gained the vote, including Colorado, Idaho, Wyoming, and Utah, increasingly premised their enfranchisement on the exclusion of those who would discredit it: prostitutes, militants, anarchists, labor agitators, women of color, and working-class women with few economic options who would provide a less appealing face or a less tolerable voice for the cause. For these reasons,

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Goldman characterizes the American suffrage movement as a “parlor affair, absolutely detached from the economic needs of the people” (an overriding antagonism between feminism and labor politics that, as we have seen, had a long afterlife). In a sense, Goldman accuses suffragette reformists of aestheticizing politics—of fighting a campaign centered on visibility and token inclusion in exchange for the possibility of a radical disidentification with their own marginalized positions. There are striking resonances between Méliès’s caricatured depiction of suffragettes in The Conquest of Pole and Goldman’s call for “the necessity [of woman] to emancipate herself from her emancipation.”75 In contrast to the flying women who moonlight as star and orbital formations during Méliès’s “impossible voyage” to the extremities of the earth, the suffragettes get left behind from the magician’s band of scientific misfits. This moment has been read narrowly as a sign of the film’s sexism and even as an index of how Méliès’s own filmmaking style was rapidly going out of fashion.76 Though masterful in temporal illusion, the magician had somehow fallen behind the times, both aesthetically and ideologically. Trick devices, no longer financially viable as visual attractions in themselves, were increasingly integrated as narrative effects, used to enhance the filmic illusion rather than to flaunt its incredible fabrication.77 As Motography writer Harrison Dent lamented in 1911, “Tricks popular a few years ago are being abandoned. Sophisticated audiences demand that the ideas be worked out in a logical way. This forced manufacturers to drop the obvious or merely ingenious and have recourse to news topics.”78 The vicissitudes of suffragette visibility—oscillating between mainstream icons and militant iconoclasts—offered film manufacturers apt material to fill in for “the obvious or merely ingenious,” i.e. decontextualized attractions. Instead, the astonishment and anticipation associated with suffragette politics often stood in for the sheer spectacle of illusionist film tricks. While trick films lost their place in the cultural marketplace, suffragette movements gained wider attention and political legitimacy. On August 18, 1920, the United States Congress ratified the Nineteenth Amendment, which prohibits any citizen being denied the right to vote on the basis of sex. Throughout the 1910s and 1920s, women gained both municipal and national voting rights across Western Europe, Soviet Republican States, Latin America (Ecuador, Uraguay, and the Yucatán), and remaining

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territories in the Oceanic where they were not already enfranchised. For the most part, these rights-based victories precipitated the dissolution of feminist movements, which were factionalized by separate interests (class, ideology, race, ethnicity, sexuality, nationality, municipality) lacking a common central objective.

The Politics of Formlessness In defining the emergence of feminism, Nancy Cott emphasizes coalition building across contradictory political goals and psychosocial positions. Cott characterizes the emergence of feminism by its politics of formlessness, “conceding the revolutionary openendedness and sometime internal contradictions of their project and making that formlessness, that lack of certain boundaries, that potential to encompass opposites, into a virtue.”79 In other words, feminism’s lack of unified goals and range of tactical objectives represented a potential strategic advantage for the movement, but one that could be easily undermined by the need to establish its cultural legitimacy and conventional recognition. This politics of formlessness becomes further visible through close readings of 1910s suffragette film comedies, which bear symptomatic traces of feminism’s fundamental contradictions between strategic mutability and symbolic legibility. The contradictory signification of suffrage collided with the ambivalent laughter provoked by its filmic representations. For example, Cousin Kate’s Revolution (Éclair, 1912), a French trick film comedy made shortly after Méliès’s Conquest of the Pole, uses its tricks instrumentally (rather than spectacularly) in order to transform the very meaning of feminism. Cousin Kate depicts an overt alliance between labor struggle and domestic duty. In this film, the Strongs, a “strenuous suffragette” and her “puny husband” who writes “moribund romances,” are visited by their rural spinster cousin Kate. The Strongs “are both ‘victims of the artistic temperament.’ Their home shows it, from the dirty-faced children to the untidy rooms and the slovenly maid.”80 They are moreover doubly coded as bourgeois idlers and freeloading citizens: their untidiness is due to laziness induced by sexual role reversal and not to economic deprivation. “They leave cousin Kate alone to make herself at home. The way in which she does this—starting in to make the house clean and orderly—is one of the most amusing film

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plays ever put on the screen.”81 Kate’s body becomes motorized in fastmotion when she attempts to engage an engine-powered vacuum cleaner, and she narrowly skirts self-immolation (unlike Mary Jane) when using an electric iron. The “revolution” invoked in the film’s title becomes a pun on both Kate’s modernization—as she comically learns to wield up-to-date domestic devices—and her reassertion of tradition in the Strongs’ morally backward home. The implicit argument of the film is that squalor arises from immoral ideology instead of from class exploitation or political oppression. This is humorously narrated through rural stereotypes, focusing on Kate’s idiosyncratic methods for housecleaning. Although primitive, Kate’s devices counter urban modernity with rural tradition, reasserting domestic order against women’s civic empowerment. The spectator’s derisive laughter at the strenuous suffragette wife finds a relatively innocuous outlet in Kate’s domestic gags. Marx’s call to modernize the rural peasantry (as a precondition for revolutionizing the social relations of production) is instead instrumentalized here as a counterweight to the reversal of sexual divisions of labor depicted in this film. Kate becomes technologically modern so that the Strongs can remain ideologically backward. Not exactly carnivalesque in its extreme reversals but not entirely disciplinary in its laughing effects, Cousin Kate’s Revolution provides a suggestive example for articulating a deeper relationship between slapstick laughter and feminist politics. What is the source of laughter at exaggerated violence enacted against women’s bodies in this film? Kate’s corporeality becomes the locus of the exploding gag, though it is not her own body that gets “blown up” but Mrs. Strong’s assumed masculinity (i.e., the basis of her husband’s moribund effeminacy and her children’s abject dereliction). This is the gendered slapstick displacement of the film: not from the containment of violence to the exaggeration of its effects (as with the batacchio) but from the appearance of violence (inflicted on Kate) to its ideological consequences (exercised on the Strongs). In other words, the suffragette gag of this film parlays gendered corporeal violence into antifeminist ideological reform, but indirectly, through the opposed juxtaposition between Cousin Kate and Mrs. Strong. Rather than exploding out of the chimney and onto the public sphere as Mary Jane does so iconically, Kate’s corporeal eruption works to purify the public sphere from the home. To invoke Alice Duer Miller once more

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(a boundless source of humorous suffragette insight), “There are no homes in suffrage states, / There are no children, glad and good, / There, men no longer seek for mates,/ And women lose their womanhood. / This I believe without debate,/ And yet I ask—and ask in vain— / Why no one in a suffrage state / Has moved to change things back again?”82 Between the tangible effects of feminist politics and the comedic malleability of their mediation through laughter, there was an exploding woman.

7 Radical Militancy and Slapstick Political Violence

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hile American reformist suffragettes staged parades and fashion tableaux, produced romantic comedies about civic housekeeping, and promoted their own commodity lines (jewelry, hats, playing cards, buttons, badges, and tea sets), more radical wings of the movement enlisted force to lobby for structural reform. The British Women’s Social and Political Union, led by Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughters Christabel and Sylvia, engaged in violent protests and led hunger strikes in Holloway Prison after their arrests. Militants blew up mailboxes, tampered with fire alarms, threw stones at the windows of parliament, upturned voting urns, and committed spectacular acts of martyrdom, throwing themselves bodily in front of moving traffic to draw attention to the injustice of their political exclusion. As F. W. P. Lawrence put it, “Women have rightly realized that even if their action be lawless . . . it is better to break the law in defence of liberty, than by a tame submission to unjust laws to allow liberties to be filched away.”1 In December 1912, the British government claimed that over “5,000 letters had been damaged— by red ochre, jam, tar, permanganate of potash, or varnish and various inflammable substances, especially phosphorous—while some 425 false fire alarm calls had been made.”2 A number of militants were incarcerated at Holloway Prison, where they demanded recognition and treatment as political prisoners; when denied this, they led hunger strikes, inciting violent

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force-feedings that gained them mass sympathy and further radicalized the female protesters involved. Popular filmmakers represented this political violence—enacted both by and against women’s bodies—in a variety of modes, from the absurd to the melodramatic. Pankhurst parodies abounded, as we saw in chapter 6, giving rise to caricatured militants such as Sophie Pancake (New Use for a Bike [1912]), Caroline Spankhurst (A Cure for Suffragettes [Biograph, 1913]), and Mrs. Spankhurst the elder (Billy the Suffragette [1913]). In contrast, Asta Nielsen plays Nellie Panburne in the five-reel melodrama Die Suffragette (1913), released in the United States in 1914 under the title A Militant Suffragette. In this sweeping film, Panburne is torn between her identity as a radical militant and a heart-struck woman in love with the Prime Minister, Lord Ascue (H. H. Asquith served as Britain’s Liberal Prime Minister from 1908 to 1916). Panburne takes part in hunger strikes and other radical tactics, incidentally implicating herself in a deadly plot to plant a bomb in Lord Ascue’s palace. As Lesley Mason describes the spectacular finale in Motion Picture News, “The climax is indeed a climax—anticipated, perhaps, but reached by ways that keep the audience breathless and wondering until the summit is attained.”3 Throughout her review, Mason emphasizes the careful separation between Panburne’s conflicting personas: “The balancing of the divided interest between Nellie Panburne, the suffragette, and Nellie Panburne, the woman in love, is admirably effected. There is no conflict.” While melodramas such as Die Suffragette derive dramatic suspense from their dual depictions of suffragette femininity—for example, erupting with the drama of a woman who realizes that she has unwittingly planted a deadly bomb in the home of her lover—comedies (especially slapstick comedies) were considerably messier in their political and corporeal signification. The trauma of hunger strikes and force-feedings were not off-limits for slapstick filmmakers, as epitomized by a farce titled Milling the Militants: A Comical Absurdity (Clarendon, 1913), which I will discuss in detail. Slapstick’s derealized physical violence provided a suggestive modality for burlesquing the disturbing hypervisibility of images of radicalized women who were brutally tortured and murdered at the hands of the state apparatus. Beyond the dreaming housewife’s domestic abuse at the end of The Suffragette’s Dream (see chapter 6), though not unrelated to it, images of violence against women transgressed their containment to the private domestic sphere, administered now by the police force, prison guards, the British

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parliament, the U.S. government, and a slew of other repressive state institutions. The iconography of this gendered political violence erupted through the publicity-generated activism unleashed by radical suffragette militants. Meanwhile, slapstick film comedy often assumed the awkward and dubious role of cultural mediator between escalating feminist protests and their sensationalist media depictions.

Self-Hurt as a Radical Weapon Against State Violence Suffragettes in the United States, led by Alice Paul who had worked with the Pankhursts in Britain, integrated militant tactics into their federal amendment campaigns. Paul and Lucy Burns formed the Congressional Union (CU) in 1913 (reformed as the National Women’s Party in 1916), which, as mentioned in chapter 6, splintered off from the more conservative National American Woman’s Suffrage Association [NAWSA]). The CU advocated aggressive tactics to campaign for the federal amendment, while NAWSA espoused less destructive approaches to gaining piecemeal reforms. Although the CU for the most part avoided unlawful violence, many of its members were jailed on trumped-up charges under the Espionage Act for leading public protests outside of the White House after the United States entered World War I. During the protests, they waved banners comparing President Wilson to the German Kaiser. On November 15, 1917, also known as the Night of Terror, dozens of suffragette protesters were brutally beaten by the police and suffered cracked ribs, lacerations, and severe concussions after being knocked unconscious. Women’s Party protesters were jailed in the Occoquan Workhouse in Virginia, where they organized hunger strikes to demand recognition as political prisoners. As in Britain, force-feedings were initiated, which only added fuel to the fire of protest and gained wider public sympathy for the women protesters’ cause. A British suffragette reflected on her radicalization in prison: “Every woman came out of prison more determined than ever to fight for the cause unto the end. She went in a suffragette, she came out a living flame.”4 While liberal American suffragettes sought political reforms by revising the laws of the state through the fluidity of commodity desires, radical militants enlisted direct force, making a spectacle of the gaping aporia between the law and life itself. Lawrence invokes the rallying cries of

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eighteenth-century French Republicanism: “Revolutions cannot be made with rosewater. . . . The blame for them rests, not with those whose sense of liberty compels them to rebel against injustice, but upon those who by denying justice make revolution the only available means to obtain redress.”5 Suffragettes’ bodily protests emerged strategically from the excesses of the law: physical rebellion was staged to signify the material gap between juridical right and the will of the people. Without the consent of the masses—whether obtained ideologically or through coercive repression—the law’s enforcement in both Britain and America was at best uneven and precarious. Women’s public rebellion and spectacular self-annihilation aimed to draw attention to the aspects of the law that defied popular sovereignty. As Lady Constance Lytton declared in a 1910 speech (articulating “the first political theory of the hunger strike,” according to Ewa Ziarek), self-hurt as a weapon represented “a political strategy of the last resort by an ‘army’ of the dispossessed.”6 Marion Wallace Dunlop first employed this tactic in June 1909 in Holloway prison, adapting a method used notoriously by Russian inmates of state prisons: “The hunger strike is passive resistance carried to its extreme limits. It offers no active resistance to wrong, but it frankly stakes life in the effort to win justice.”7 The paradox whereby the most extreme form of passivity comes to stand in for active rebellion represents an all too logical outcome of female subject-formation and its myriad double binds. Suffragettes on hunger strikes practiced corporeal self-annihilation in order to appropriate the repressive violence of the state apparatus. This ongoing dissolution between state law and its application was directly exercised on women’s bodies, giving rise to a schism not only between “the woman” and “the suffragette” but between political violence and self-injury as radical resistance.8 In other words, suffragette women offered up their own bodies as vessels: for making visible the symbolic violence of the law that at once represents female subjects while tangibly excluding them from participation in governance. Suffragettes’ self-annihilating protest tactics literalized the contradictions of gender’s inscription under democratic law, with directly corporal consequences. Meanwhile, the sensationalist mediatization of militant suffragette activism provoked a variety of conflicting embodied reactions from mass publics.

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Suffragette Spectatorship: Between Living Body and Filmic Subject Although suffragette films (both pro- and anti-propaganda) sought to mobilize citizens politically, they had broader, often less instrumental effects on everyday life and surplus leisure time. The Moving Picture World reported a very revealing incident that took place in a British film theater in the spring of 1913:9 American exhibitors showing suffragette pictures be prepared! At a metropolitan picture palace the other evening a lady applauded the representation of a burnt-out mansion, the work of the militant suffragettes. A member of her own sex sitting behind her showed her disapproval by smartly bringing down her umbrella on the other’s hat. Then the manager had the delicate duty of separating the two hostile women.

Beyond spurring women to action in the streets, suffragette films inhabited the gap between film images and their embodied reception: between the speaking subject of the text and the living body of the spectator. Captured by this film magazine’s mocking summary of the events, which recasts a fight about politics as a clash of commodities (hat versus umbrella), struggles over the injustice of the law inflected the everyday experience of slapstick corporeality and motion-picture spectatorship. The example from Moving Picture World quoted above is puzzling and at the same time potentially elucidating because it seeks to eradicate a social conflict by means of its commodity symptoms: the hats and umbrellas. (The hat and umbrella both represent classic slapstick comedienne props in films ranging from Those Awful Hats [Biograph, 1909], about the visual problems posed by women’s overly large hats in film theaters, to The Gay Shoe Clerk [Edison, 1903], in which a voyeuristic male shop worker is punished by a matronly woman who weaponizes her umbrella.) Here, derisive mockery of the ladies’ accessories offers a tactic for disarming the more disturbing, inappropriate laughter at play: the lady’s gleeful reaction to militant violence. It is, of course, significant that the incident takes place in a “metropolitan picture palace” between “a lady applauding” and a “disapproving member of her own sex.” Further, the burnt-out mansions on screen—wealthy domiciles in ruins—point to the potential vulnerability of

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the film’s exhibition venue. Could this metropolitan picture palace meet a similar fate as a result of the violence that might erupt between the “two hostile women?” While popular cinema provided an important means for disseminating political ideology, film theaters came to shadow the official venues wherein suffragettes organized their activist protest. How do you fight back against a screen image with nothing behind it? The film magazine’s derisive mockery attempted to stabilize this destructive volatility by emphasizing the contrast between violence and decorum: a “lady” applauded the film’s ruined “mansion” at a “metropolitan picture palace,” and the other spectator “smartly” brought down her umbrella upon the first woman’s hat; thus, the manager had the “delicate duty” of separating the hostile women. Between the women’s polite dress and their eruptive behavior, gendered humor emerged from the incongruity between contrasting corporeal markers in order to conceal the unsettling potential of a laughter that might exceed its intended social uses or consequences. Female publics always posed problematic interests for filmmakers, who both courted women to help establish cinema’s market viability and middleclass legitimacy while also denigrating the feminizing effects these women (with their large hats, “sob clubs,” and screaming babies) had on the conventions of film culture (figure 7.1).10 Suffragette spectatorship compounded all of these issues about the status of women as privileged movie audiences. As Shelley Stamp argues in Movie-Struck Girls, “In virtually any other context . . . the use of cinema by respectable, reform-minded women . . . would have held unanimous appeal for the early film industry. But the feminist polemics of the suffrage cause . . . on the screen and in theaters” opened onto the broader ambivalences “that cinema’s expanding female audience provoked.”11 At once signifiers of middle-class respectability and potential agents of spectator upheaval, these female audiences indexed the profound instability of shifting film publics. In the suffragette context, female spectators heralded the unwanted political consequences of women’s growing presence and participation in the public sphere at large. The suffragette-spectator resided in that ambiguous, semi-conscious space between the film image and its viewing public: between the spectator positions constructed by film texts and the embodied conditions of their visual reception. Just as suffragette-citizens inhabited the aporia between sovereign law and citizen life, suffragette-spectators occupied the

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FIGURE 7.1 “Madam How Would You Like to Sit Behind the Hat You Are Wearing,” 1912. Prints

and Photographs Online Catalog, Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/2012645955/

gap between the speaking subject of film language and the living body of the film viewer. Very generally, we might say that the film viewer’s laughter is always motivated by a simultaneous knowledge and disavowal of the ideal conditions of the screen—giving rise to a perpetual conflict between imaginary absorption and bodily awareness. Just as film images refer to the world beyond the screen, spectator embodiment is grounded in the social conditions of everyday viewing habits. Between film form and contingent corporeality, the place of the suffragette-spectator extends from the suffragette-citizen’s political suspension between the rigidity of the law and the fluidity of the social. Film laughter provided a crucial context—and an inevitable reaction—for exploring these myriad, gendered contradictions between life and the law. These antagonisms between speaking subject and living body inhabited three separate but interlocking terrains: (1) citizenship; (2) spectatorship; (3) psychosexual subjectivity. 1) The suffragette-citizen was bound by a law that she herself could not

actively participate in legislating.

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2) The suffragette-spectator was complicit in legitimizing a mode of address

that favored the language of the screen over the bodily conditions of its reception. 3) The psychosexual-suffragette-subject attempted to signify a different image of femininity through recourse to a linguistic structure that necessitated her subordination in order to be able to signify anything. As the Lacanian feminist theorist Jacqueline Rose puts it, “The question of what a woman is . . . always stalls on the crucial acknowledgement that there is no guarantee that she is at all. But if she takes up her place . . . then her sexuality will betray, necessarily, the impasses of its history.”12

There is a fundamental paradox common to these three entities: that is, the necessity of women’s physical subjugation to the legibility of the very form that she seeks to participate in molding. Women’s struggles—as citizens, as spectators, and as psychosexual subjects—emerged from the gaps between structures of language and their contingent enunciation. It is my argument here that slapstick comedy provided a co-conspirator for suffragettes to navigate the incoherent terrain between life and the law. Comedy, with its slippery borders between repressive mockery and irrational play, and slapstick, with its gleeful confusion between gruesome violence and light-hearted exaggeration, adhered to the figure of the suffragette between her cinematic figurations and her activist protest.

Milling the Militants: A Comical Absurdity Derisive but potentially transformative laughter proliferated on both sides of the debate, as well as on both sides of the screen. The British slapstick film Milling the Militants: A Comical Absurdity (1913) exemplifies the type of anti-suffragette filmmaking that might provoke the wrong kind of laughter: either brutal, vindictive laughter or a less pleasurable burst of affect entirely (terror, rage, or disgust). This film opens with a typical scenario of role reversal: Mrs. Brown leaves her husband, Mr. Brown, in charge of their two kids so that she can go march in a suffragette parade. The wife wields a hammer and dons a native headdress along with an apron bearing the bold-lettered words “WOMEN’S SUFFRAGE: BE MILITANT.” The henpecked husband watches the

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procession out of his window while balancing one child under each arm as if they were bags of golf clubs, and the film cuts back and forth between him and the actuality footage of the suffragette protest. The film’s structure of parallelism emphasizes the domestic tolls of women’s civic engagement: domestic disorder analogizes rising civil anarchy. The film fabricates footage of a dozen suffragettes, led by the wife still with hammer and headdress, smashing a window and then lighting a bonfire while dancing around it. Meanwhile, the husband calls in the maid to tend to the children and dreams of his retributive justice while nestling in a cozy lounge chair. The comical dream sequence is bracketed by an intertitle: “Brown sleeps and dreams that he is the Prime Minister. He legislates for the suppression of the suffragettes.” The film dissolves back to Brown dozing in his chair. As he dreams, he imagines waking up when two male officers bring him a document announcing his appointment as Prime Minister. Brown declares, “Gentlemen! We’ll make the punishment fit the crime.” After a brief interlude of Brown orating furiously in a small parliament room with an all-male group of cabinet ministers voting unanimously on every question, “Brown’s new laws are put into effect.”

Brown’s Four New Laws for Suffragettes “Misdemeanor No. 1. Punishment for striking policeman. 14 days hard labor in the streets.” A window-shopping suffragette in a fancy hat that vaguely resembles the wife’s headdress is arrested by the police. While the actual misdemeanor is omitted from the scene (we only see the woman gazing in the window and then her arrest, without the image of her violence against the police), her punishment is depicted at length. She and several other women shovel heaps of horse manure into a cart while three police officers stand over her. (Their grueling labor evokes images of animality, disgust, and physical abjection often associated with the maternal body). She tries to stop several times, but they physically place the shovel back into her hands and force her to continue. This disciplinary effect intermingles physical force with social suppression, “making the punishment fit the crime.” The women actively struggle to resist their constrained physical labor (shoveling horse manure from the streets was typically men’s work). The use of force to prolong their punishment is thereby justified to emphasize an “unnatural opposition.”

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The tension between female and male labor generates a contradiction that is sustained through violence by the police officers, and presumably laughed off by the spectator. The next scene emphasizes the link between disciplinary violence and corrective role reversal. A group of suffragettes break rocks with a hammer (like men on a chain gang) while several gentlemen in top hats and coattails bark instructions at them. One suffragette, still in her “Votes for Women” sash, smokes a pipe. She coughs and drops the pipe into the street, but one of the gentlemen picks it up and forces it back into her mouth. In stark opposition to Foucault’s biopolitical subjects of the Panopticon, who internalize a surveillant gaze in order to learn how to police their own social behavior, the prisoner here is disciplined through direct force to reenact rather than to suppress all of her deviant symptoms.13 The humiliation of behaving “mannishly” in public stands in for social rehabilitation, as the prisoner must perform precisely the behavior for which she is tauntingly condemned. Laughter, which often parlays imaginary perceptions of movement into physical eruptions of gesture, here mediates between disciplinary violence and the spectacle of social reversal. As Jennifer Bean has helpfully paraphrased Freud’s notion of “ideational mimesis” in her article on Charlie Chaplin, “Suspended in the instant, the ‘same moment’ of acting like the other and remembering the norms of the self, the energy generated for mimetic play is recognized as unnecessary, or ‘superfluous,’ and ‘free for use elsewhere.’ The elsewhere, that is, of laughter.”14 In other words, when we see a comic buffoon expending an excess of physical energy to perform a relatively simple task, we mimic the buffoon’s gestures in our imagination and then laugh off the surplus. Both unlike the comic “art of imitation” that Bean invokes and unlike the disciplinary self-surveillance that Foucault describes, the corrective performance of gendered mimicry (i.e., mimicking gender conventions) in Milling the Militants is administered through direct force by the police. The real wish fulfillment of Mr. Brown’s “absurd” dream is his desire to realign the social power of laughter with the physical virility of conventional masculinity. In other words, she who laughs last, according to this film, ends up on a burlesqued transvestite chain gang. “Misdemeanor No. 2. For annoying cabinet ministers.” Women are put in the stocks, exchanging the harsh consequences of sexual equality (forcing women to smoke pipes) for this medieval apparatus of public humiliation. The aggrieved party (i.e., the pestered cabinet ministers) rallies a large

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crowd against the women, and then departs once the mob encircles the women while laughing and pointing at them. Again, here, repressive force is enlisted to police the social corrective of laughter, lest it was unclear to the spectator whom the subjects and objects of laughter should rightly be. In reality, militants deployed a variety of tactics to make their point after women were strictly prohibited from attending cabinet ministers’ speeches for “heckling the audience.” First, they sought out ministers at other times and locations; second, they entered the halls furtively and delivered their protest speeches from the roof; third, male friends asked about the vote on women’s behalf at meetings; fourth, women held street demonstrations outside of the meeting halls, and then threw stones at windows when the streets were barricaded. All of these tactics elicited punitive violence and preemptive suppression by the police. In addition to “an immensely increased police force, street barricades, and the use of subterranean passages by Cabinet Ministers,”15 they provoked “special taunt[s]” by critics: “ ‘If it was men acting in hot blood,’ they have said, ‘this agitation might be serious; but bah! It is only women playing at revolution.’ ”16 Like the corporal ridicule depicted in Milling the Militants, this police violence relied upon a similar redundancy of derisive jest and physical violence. Alice Duer Miller captures precisely this redundancy of might upon mockery in her enumeration of “Our Own Twelve Anti-Suffragette Reasons”: “11. Because women cannot use force. / 12. Because the militants did use force.”17 To counter this absurd contradiction between female violence and the specter of its own impossibility, some suffragettes literally armed themselves with satirical weapons. Teresa Billington-Greig, organizer of the British Women’s Freedom League, favored the dog whip, which she vigorously deployed in protest and humorously advocated in prose. In her 1907 essay “The Woman with the Whip,” she states bluntly in response to the abusive treatment of women at meetings and protests, “Insult of this kind could only come from curs, and for them the dog-whip was the fitting punishment.”18 More than an expedient defense against physical harassment while campaigning, the dog whip symbolized a political tactic, which she frequently wielded as a rhetorical weapon “against the accumulated wrongs of centuries.”19 Milling the Militants represents a defensive response to such satirical threats: an attempt to seize the very impetus for laughter, lest popular mockery swing the other way and become aligned with feminist resistance instead of its punitive suppression.

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“Misdemeanor No. 3. For firing pillar boxes. Six weeks in trousers.” This scene evokes actuality footage of a parade, anchoring the camera in the lower left corner of the frame while a procession of women draws nearer from the background. Dressed as mendicants, many with their heads buried in kerchiefs, women are again forced to exaggerate versions of their transgressive behavior. It is hard to say how “the punishment” (marching in trousers) “fits the crime” (blowing up mailboxes) in this example, other than to note that the camera’s placement also coincides with the potential location of a pillar box. We might say that the impetus for punishment (the destroyed object) haunts the spectator’s visual positioning, while the objects of ridicule (the suffragettes in trousers) loom toward the spectator’s immediate field of vision. The film’s comical syntax thus initiates a split between different forms of spectator positioning: the place of the camera versus the object of laughter (the suffragettes in trousers). This visual composition compounds the film’s peculiar effects—its laughing-suffragette mode of address—by blurring between positive and negative cues for spectator positioning. The location of the camera emplaces the spectator while the encroaching spectacle of the suffragettes displaces this position. Unconsciously but pointedly here, the film explores a comical mode between subject positioning and its bodily reception. “Misdemeanor No. 4. For Hunger Strikes.” In by far the most disturbing of the comical dream scenarios, a protesting suffragette prisoner on hunger strike, instead of getting force-fed, is tied to a chair attached to a long lever and then dunked repeatedly into a pond (figure 7.2). Substituting mandatory rehabilitation (force-feeding) for medieval humiliation (milling), this image is perhaps the baldest in its motivations: to reassert the unity of the law against the fissures in its application by soliciting laughter. In a perverse gendered take on Freud’s notion of gallows humor (the hangman’s right to laugh in the face of his own execution20), this scene is truly funny only insofar as humor provides an escape from the disturbing referentiality of these images. The scene echoes the film’s underlying fantasy to reassert the mass appeal of repressive patriarchal sovereignty. Brown the dreamer, a surrogate for the spectator, legitimizes the Prime Minister’s populist legitimacy by himself assuming that authoritative position. Brown becomes both the one who decides and the one who invests feeling on behalf of all those who live with the decision.

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FIGURE 7.2 Frame enlargement from Milling the Militants: A Comical Absurdity (Clarendon, 1913)

In a final appeal, the husband’s fantasy is given physical motivation in reality. His wife rudely awakens him by heaving a bucket of cold water on his head just as his fantasy suffragette is about to be submerged yet again (figure 7.3). (In a nightmarish echo of a familiar slapstick convention, this comedy’s social ambiguities and ideological tensions are resolved “in a splash.”) Mr. Brown comes to with a jolt and cowers in terror while his wife, still in headdress and “BE MILITANT” apron, approaches him with her hammer. The film cuts to black with domestic violence looming. (Unlike Suffragette’s Dream, the closing image of private assault here sustains the film’s overriding sight gag of gender reversal, with Mrs. Brown “punching up” against her husband’s sadistic, misogynistic fantasies of having just reformed her.) Rather than resolving the driving tensions of the narrative, the closing scene retroactively motivates the terrifying laughter of the dream sequence. The fundamental conflict of this film springs from the recurring ambiguity between the law and its application: between sovereign authority and its social legitimacy. Again and again, Milling the Militants attempts to unify its mechanisms of persuasion—physical force versus ideological consent—through a

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FIGURE 7.3 Frame enlargement from Milling the Militants: A Comical Absurdity (Clarendon, 1913)

combination of bodily repression and repressive mockery. While physical coercion holds the suffragette’s on-screen body in place, derisive mockery presumably keeps the suffragette-spectator in line affectively. Moreover, by forcing suffragette perpetrators to masquerade as men (holding a pipe in her mouth while her sisters break rocks), the film also polices the disarticulation between masculine and feminine subject positions in language. Social rebellion is reduced to sexual inversion and thereby preserves woman’s imaginary place as a negation of the phallus. To invoke Rose again, “Woman is not inferior; she is subjected.”21 By representing a visual transition from Brown’s punitive dream images of suffragette milling to his rude awakening by the wife splashing him with cold water, the film further asserts its imaginary unity between social fantasy and coercive violence.

Suffragette Absurdity; or, Cat-and-Mouse Biopolitics The structure of this film mimics the logic of its comic political argument. The frame story provides a concrete, material motivation for the specific images of the dream scenario while also granting them plausible deniability. The otherwise horrific scene of dunking a woman who is protesting her

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imprisonment by refusing to eat—with actual images of suffragette prisoners’ force-feedings all too present on the public’s mind—is here presented as a “comical absurdity.” Some women, such as Grace Roe and Kitty Marion, were force-fed over two hundred times under Britain’s 1913 “Cat and Mouse Act,” which stipulated the temporary release and then reincarnation of prisoners suffering life-threatening conditions due to hunger strikes. Parliament’s cat-and-mouse game of state-sanctioned suffragette torture inevitably loomed large circa 1913 in the minds of Milling the Militant’s laughing spectators. Bergson, in one of the more apt passages from Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, describes absurdity as an inversion of common sense. The absurd “consists in seeking to mould things on an idea of one’s own, instead of moulding one’s ideas on things,—in seeing before us what we are thinking of, instead of thinking of what we see.”22 Bergson cites the famous example of Don Quixote mistaking a windmill for a giant, thus perceiving a material resemblance through his own imaginary fixations, as an instance of comical absurdity. The dream sequence of Milling the Militants, then, must strike us as purely absurd in its revision of social reality to conform to obsessive patriarchal fantasy. The morbid eeriness and abject perversity of its “comical absurdity” derives precisely from the lack of distance between referential reality and fantasy image: between news headlines about forcefeedings and the film’s comical visions of suffragette millings. Gendered slapstick political violence here drives the film’s displacement from comical bodies to corporeal politics. Milling the Militant’s comical absurdity therefore does not just impose its social fantasies on material things; it barbarously inflicts them on women’s bodies. An emblematic antisuffragette film, it reveals a deeper fantasy beyond its vividly perverse dream sequence: it envisions an abiding wish fulfillment for the top-down unity of the law and for the seamless execution of the law’s enunciation. Absurdity, “moulding things on one’s fantasy,” defers the mechanisms of a biopolitical apparatus: “the infinitely small of political power . . . like a faceless gaze that transformed the whole social body into a field of perception.”23 The penal subject in this film does not internalize her own potential surveillance by a nefarious social field, her conduct is not regulated through invisible instruments of power, and she is not even “made to live” as the hunger-striking suffragettes in Holloway Prison were when food was piped into their stomachs through rubber tubes inserted into their nose or mouth. Rather, the

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film’s manifest fantasy of physical control derives from its underlying insecurity about its own mode of address: are suffragettes funny? As I have discussed, around 1913 suffragette culture was widely mainstreamed. No longer characterized as torch-wielding furies of the Paris Commune, suffragettes became fashionable protagonists advocating the partial expediency of societal reform.24 The splintering of suffragette movements between palatable reformists and force-fed militants precipitated a crisis of suffragettes’ cultural representation. The reformist cause now evoked sympathy above ridicule, while laughter at the militant movement could no longer be disentangled from horrific images of state violence.

“Just Violence” Since its earliest theorization, laughter has offered a barbed instrument, often literalized as a physical weapon in both interpersonal and political conflict. As Aristotle put it, “Jesting is witty contumely . . . the disgracing of another for his [the jester’s] own pastime.”25 The trickster in ancient tribal societies frequently performed oracular rites that were fatal against the enemy. For example, in ancient Ireland derisive poets were called upon to levy taxes, enlisting “the point of satire” when the “point of the sword failed.”26 In his social contract theory outlined in Elements of Law, Natural and Politic (1640), Thomas Hobbes analogizes the state of nature to the logistics of laughter: “To fall on the suddaine, is disposition to Weepe, to see another fall, disposition to Laugh.”27 When invoked in the context of political violence, laughter nearly always represents a cruel or callous assertion of power and superiority: the tactical elevation of the self at the expense of the other. In contrast to the barbed jest of laughter at war, the carnivalesque exception has offered a different model for theorizing the use-value of comedy in practices of state sovereignty. As I explain in chapter 6, Bakhtin’s notion of carnival (the anarchic feasts and ritual anti-rites performed from antiquity through medieval times) has been appropriated by political theorists to illustrate the paradoxical structures of modern state sovereignty, through which the law operates by means of its exception. In other words, the law is entrenched through the sovereign’s very power to exceed the law under exceptional circumstances, revealing the paradoxical structure of decisional politics.

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Riffing on the history of iustitium, the Roman term for “standstill” or “suspension of the law,” Giorgio Agamben argues that the carnivalesque “brings to light in a parodic form the anomie [lawlessness] within the law, the state of exception as the anomic drive within the very heart of the nomos [law].” He further claims that “the most unbridled anomie shows its parodic connection with the nomos, . . . point[ing] toward the real state of exception as the threshold of indifference between anomie and law.”28 The periodic feasts of Saturnalia, “characterized by unbridled license and the suspension and overturning of normal legal and social hierarchies,” thus exemplify the parodic imperative of sovereign exception: the basis of decisional sovereignty.29 The extreme politics of suffragette militancy—law-breaking violence, hunger strikes, and martyrdom—provoke a very different idea of political laughter than either barbed jest or carnivalesque subversion. Beyond the externalized aggression of derisive laughter as a tactic of political warfare, suffragette militancy internalized the violence of pointed ridicule. Epitomized by the spectacle of hunger strikes, this “cat and mouse” game of radical militancy reflected comedy’s deeper encroachment on suffragette politics. Milling the Militant’s parodic representation of the hunger strike was not just an exception that proved the rule (as in Agamben’s model) but an underlying symptom of the cultural climate, wherein bodily comedy provided a necessary modality for comprehending the shape-shifting vicissitudes of female corporeality in its transformative political landscape.

Revolutionary Laughter and Feminist Justice Revolution always has the capacity to become funny: it appeals to a humorous temporality by asserting a future that has yet to emerge. As Bonnie Honig argues in Emergency Politics, claims for new rights reveal the paradox inherent in revolutionary time because “they presuppose the world that they seek to bring into being.”30 Honig further explains: “This is what new claims and new orders do: elicit laughter, especially at the moment of their still contested emergence or, as with the revolutionary calendar, after they have failed.”31 In other words, the cutting laughter of revolutionary upheaval, in the wake of its dissolved spontaneity, quickly gives way to the mean-spirited, mocking laughter at the anachronism of failed revolution.

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In this vein, feminist theories of language and justice have repeatedly renounced the possibility of revolutionary laughter, which too easily swings from disruptive transgression to abusive objectification. For example, Catherine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin have controversially sought codified protections from all forms of symbolic violence enacted against women’s bodies (including comedy).32 Against feminist anti-pornography and anti-hate speech arguments, Judith Butler instead poses the question of censorship as a problem of agency in language. She asserts this matter pointedly in Excitable Speech: “When we claim to have been injured by language, what kind of claim do we make? We ascribe an agency to language, a power to injure, and position ourselves as the objects of this injurious trajectory.”33 For militant suffragettes, the claim of injury by language was a tactical approach—to appropriate their own abuse by emphasizing the sexist symbolic violence of the law. Feminists have tended to arm themselves against the slippages between textual and corporeal violence through any means other than laughter. (Indeed, problems of comedy are typically bracketed or omitted entirely from feminist debates about censorship and legal justice. In contrast, female comedic violence is usually invested with subversive agency, with examples proliferating in both avant-garde art and mainstream popular culture but rarely in matters pertaining to the law and juridical right.34) Why, then, has feminism repeatedly disowned the corporeality of female comedy when it fails to do the immediately recuperative work of disruptive transgression? Reading the language of militancy through Hannah Arendt’s concept of revolution,35 Ewa Ziarek argues that radical suffragettes rearticulated many of these rights-based questions as structural contradictions. “It is the experience and justification of female militancy that propelled suffragettes to redefine the right to vote as a more fundamental women’s right to revolt.”36 Negated by language—politically, cinematically, and psycho-sexually—militants inherited the necessity of their own annihilation and transformed it beyond a cultural weapon into a corporeal tactic. They waged their political protest through the specter of slapstick. Between the grotesque carnality attributed to the open-ended carnivalesque body and the aggressive distance policed by derisive mockery, radical militants effectively weaponized their own symbolic and corporeal destruction.

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Beyond Muybridge: Emily Wilding Davison Under All Four Hooves On June 4, 1913, the British suffragette Emily Wilding Davison threw herself in front King George V’s horse Anmer and was trampled to death at Epsom Derby. Davison, a militant activist for the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), had been jailed nine times and force-fed fortynine times at Holloway Prison. Controversy persists among historians about whether Davison had meant to martyr herself or whether she had really stepped out onto the racecourse in order to attach a WSPU banner to the horse’s bridle (an effective sight gag). Gaumont Graphic captured the event in an actuality that was quickly marketed and distributed as Exciting Derby Race Film:37 What is undoubtedly the most remarkable topical film ever brought to this country reached New York from the Gaumont Company of London. This film covered the recent derby race at Epsom Downs, in which Emily Davison, a militant suffragette, threw herself in front of King George’s horse and sustained fatal injuries. On the occasion of this year’s Derby the Gaumont Company had fifteen cameramen stationed on the course, two being located at the famous Tattenham Corner. This is the most interesting spot in the whole Derby course, and here it was that Miss Davison chose to sacrifice her life in order to call attention to the cause that she advocated.

Activists and media publicists alike immediately seized upon the event as a spectacular act of suffragette martyrdom. The ambiguities about Davis’ intentions (her possession of a return railway ticket, and apparent intention to hang her WSPU banner) only added fuel to the flame of the film’s irresistible fascination. The photographic depiction of galloping racehorses has long served as an animating metaphor for film studies. In 1872, Eadweard Muybridge settled a bet for his friend, California Governor Leland Stanford, by taking a photograph of a horse mid-trot with all four hooves suspended from the ground simultaneously. Muybridge’s subsequent obsession with capturing a racehorse mid-gallop has been invoked frequently as an example of a protocinematic use of photography to represent movement. In order to illustrate this equine snapshot beyond a shadow of doubt, in 1878 Muybridge placed a series of large glass-plate cameras along the edge of a racetrack, each of

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which was then triggered by a small thread as a horse passed near to the photo apparatus. These finely tuned temporal slices of action were then displayed as moving images using Muybridge’s zoopraxiscope projector.38 Like Muybridge’s galloping photographs, Davison’s violent collision with Anmer the horse quickly and widely proliferated as a media image. Film spectators at the time subjected themselves to repeat viewings to try to catch a glimpse of Davison wandering onto the track before the accident. In the film actuality footage, a camera positioned in the stands and across the track at Tattenham Corner captures Davison from afar, foremost registering the disruption posed by her presence. However, the scale of her body is diminished by distance and obscured by the passing horses. Her presence does not become legible visually until after the horse and jockey have already fallen, with her body obscured by an onslaught of bystanders rushing onto the track (figure 7.4). Davison’s violent accident and its political visibility, as captured by Gaumont’s footage, always unfolds in the future perfect tense: this will have been. Again, her presence is not fully registered until after she has already fallen (trampled under all four hooves simultaneously?). Moreover, questions about whether martyrdom was the endpoint of her disruptive corporeal self-sacrifice fostered the public’s morbid fascination with the unknowns that might still be gleaned (despite their apparent invisibility)

FIGURE 7.4 Frame enlargement from The Derby (Pathé, 1913)

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before the film’s inevitable depiction of her crash and fall with the horse. Unlike Davison, who died four days later from a fractured skull and severe internal injuries, the king’s horse Anmer bounced back rapidly. (Anmer, named after a small English village in Norfolk, further evoked the Saxon mythic symbolism of the king’s horse as a sign of sovereign fertility.) After falling and trampling Davison with his hooves, Anmer did a somersault and then got up again to resume running the race, apparently uninjured by the accident. Meanwhile, suffragettes undermined the king’s decisional authority “to let live” with hunger strikes alongside sustained practices of violence: aggressive disruptions of government meetings, window breaking outside of parliament, and the destruction of government property such as pillarboxes. In this context, watching the main event of the film documentary in the future perfect tense (this will have been), suffragettes and antis alike would inevitably associate the shock of Davison’s bodily collision with the potential transformation of the law represented by women’s suffrage. If Emily Wilding Davison will be trampled to death, again and again, might that also mean that one day women will gain the vote—and who knows what else? Anything from men’s biological inheritance of the capacity for pregnancy, to the apocalyptic destruction of all of Western civilization would ensue according to popular suffragette film comedies of the time. Unlike in Milling the Militants, the corporeality of Davison’s spectacular fall missed the mark of slapstick displacement: from her mortal injury to Anmer’s amazing resilience. The tragic effect and feminist message of the accident only reinforced the glorified sovereign symbolism of the king’s horse and his rapidly sustained motion. As with Muybridge’s proto-cinematic photography, the fluidity of equine cinematic movement worked to resolve the violence of its surrounding corporeal impact and jarring temporal discontinuity. As Tom Gunning has described the controversy and incredulity provoked by Muybridge’s initial horse photographs, “The positions of the horses’ legs in Muybridge’s images were considered absurd, ungainly, and impossible. Indeed, Muybridge employed his device . . . to prove that these odd positions could be synthesized into a continuous visible movement.”39 While Muybridge’s zoopraxiscope projector smoothed over the rupture and contingency of modern temporal hybridity (as many film theorists have argued40), Davison’s hypervisible trampling had a radically uncanny cinematic afterlife.

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Politicizing the impetus for capturing racehorses in motion, Davison’s incessantly repeatable fall represents a specter of slapstick: the violated female body’s imaginary invincibility and unending renewal. Perhaps haunted by the missing interim image from Mary Jane’s spontaneous jump-cut combustion out of the chimney, the collision between militant body and animated horse here emanated from the very the image of female rupture elided by so many suffragette film comedies. In its thick social and political contexts, Exciting Derby Race Film emphatically failed to provoke laughter.

Postscript Haunted Laughter at Late Comediennes

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s an epilogue to the suffragette Emily Davison’s violent trampling by the King’s horse in 1913, I would like to draw attention to a scene featuring the famous slapstick comedienne Mabel Normand as a substitute horse jockey in the feature-length romantic comedy Mickey (Normand, 1918). Released more than five years after Pathé News capitalized on the funeral of The Woman Who Dared (1913), Mickey depicts the plight of an orphan raised in a mining settlement by the former partner of her father (after her father dies in a gold mining accident). Promoting Normand’s talent as a slapstick comedienne, Mickey uses the star’s physical agility primarily for coordinating suspenseful stunt work rather than for provoking uproarious laughter. As I discuss in chapter 5, Normand was well known for performing many of her own stunts in Keystone’s 1910s slapstick comedies. In one scene, Mickey (Normand) decides at the very last minute to stand in for a horse jockey who is planning to throw the race on which Mickey’s friend (and potential love interest) has placed a substantial bet. A series of binocular views, intercut between reverse shots of recognizable characters viewing the race from the stands, reveal Mickey in close-up as she deftly maneuvers the horse. Just after the corrupt schemer accuses his partner, “You doublecrossed me,” Mickey falls from her horse. The image of the fall bears a vivid

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FIGURE P.1 Frame enlargement from Mickey (Normand, 1918)

resemblance to the prolific actuality footage of Davison, with the camera placed across the track and at a distance from the incident (figure P.1). In the scene leading up to Mickey’s duplicity, Mickey, having heard of the plot, falls by diving headlong through a trapdoor onto the horse and knocking out the jockey just before the riders are about to run through the gate. A series of impossible angles fragment her position on the cusp of her first fall from passive spectator to active racer: (1) Filmed from somewhere above, Mickey leans out above the paddock as the mounted racers pass by below her; (2) filmed from below in the paddock, Mickey looks off-frame at the horses entering the track; (3) the film cuts to a flashback of Mickey overhearing the devious plot, shot from a visually centered position; (4) there is a repetition of shot #1 in which more horses pass by; (5) the spectator is placed at a level view from the horse in question, alone in the frame, with Mickey’s torso hanging through the trap door as she prepares to fall by leaping into the paddock (figure P.2); and (6) we watch Mickey jump onto the horse from a bird’s-eye-view. Editing in this scene of Mickey’s first jump onto the horse, which is filmed as a fall, obviates the need for her physical mangling during the more traumatic incident of her second fall after the race is underway. Since her intentional fall has already been depicted at length, her accidental fall can be elided—its violence is implied, not actualized. Rather than encouraging the spectator to laugh off Mickey’s physical injury, film editing thus guides the

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FIGURE P.2 Frame enlargement from Mickey (Normand, 1918)

spectator to overlook the traumatic effects of her horrible accident. Mickey’s complex continuity editing—its quick temporality, parallel cutting, and varied uses of different angles, positions, and scales of distance—epitomizes Hollywood film grammar. Language is established through the relations between shots, with no need for the woman’s body as an intermediary to make these implied relations legible to the spectator. Here, the corporeal violence of female slapstick comedy is purely abstract: Mickey’s dismemberment takes the form of a visual relation with no impact on the character’s body. It does not matter that Mickey falls a second time, this time “for real,” because the film’s editing has already internalized the physical eruption and fragmentation of her body. Female slapstick corporeality was depicted primarily as a visual relation rather than as a visceral encounter. Yet beneath this aestheticization of female physicality, slapstick’s spectacular violence and messy corporeality lurk. Like Normand, other slapstick comediennes of the 1910s and 1920s (such as Colleen Moore, Gale Henry, Olive Thomas, and Louise Fazenda) used their physical malleability primarily as gestural effects into the Hollywood studio era. Although slapstick never disappeared from these comediennes’ performances, the formal implications of their clowning underwent radical transformations. For example, in Synthetic Sin (First National, 1929), Colleen Moore plays an ingénue aspirational starlet (Betty Fairfax) who seeks to gain gritty

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FIGURE P.3 Publicity still for Synthetic Sin (First National) in Photoplay Monthly, 1929

real-life experience by exposing herself to urban danger and gang warfare (figure P.3). Rather than making her body corporeally invulnerable to repeated injury (a trope of slapstick), the film must repeatedly manufacture bizarre and unexpected explanations to defuse the inevitability of her sexual violation: transforming a potential rapist into a moral evangelist, or enlisting racist tropes of minstrelsy to displace Betty’s slapstick corporeality onto

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the body of her black maid, Cassie (Gertrude Howard). Rather than celebrating the hilarity of bodily explosion, these films conceal their missing images of female rupture and gendered slapstick upheaval. They provoke a haunted form of spectator laughter that is always slightly out of sync with its own trigger: the make-believe violence and bodily violation driving slapstick’s thrust toward uncontrollable, consuming, irrational hilarity. As I have argued in this book, the specters of female slapstick in early cinema do ghostly historiographic work to mediate and contextualize the endless abundance of our cultural memories. Whether breaking in half, metamorphosing into an octopus, or exploding out of the chimney, these fluid female bodies provoked laughter within their own times to help rationalize the overwhelming uncertainty of historical rupture and limitless potentials for social transformation. Our laughter at these women is neither thoughtless nor immoral, but socially necessary. The ability to laugh in the face of crisis and in the wake of ruins is, after all, the premise of why we commit to archival research: to make visible the forgotten histories of feminist social struggle and of women’s cultural visibility, not just in their own right but against the recurrence of their political obstruction and historical annihilation. Recognizing these cinematic specters of the past, and allowing their difference to become sites of feminist haunting into the future, makes way for reimagining the social and aesthetic possibilities of the present. From their vast influence on the emergence of cinema to their provocations for envisioning the future survival of film history, slapstick comediennes challenge us to ask more of the gender politics of our laughter.

Annotated Filmography

This select annotated filmography includes only silent comedies that feature slapstick comediennes. Other films mentioned in the book are not listed here.

Archival Key: ARF = Fundación Cinemateca Argentina (Buenos Aires) AUC = National Film and Sound Archive (Canberra) BEB = Cinémathèque Royale de Belgique (Brussels) BRR = Cinemateca do Museu de Arte Moderna (Rio de Janeiro) CAQ = Cinémathèque Québécoise (Montreal) CHL = Cinémathèque Suisse (Lausanne) CUH = Cinemateca de Cuba (Havana) DEI = Filmmuseum München (Munich) DEK = Deutsche Kinemathek / Museum für Film und Fernsehen (Berlin) DEW = Deutsches Filminstitut—DIF (Frankfurt) DKK = Danish Film Institute (Copenhagen) ESM = Filmoteca Espa.ola (Madrid) FRB = Centre National du Cinéma et de l’Image Animée (Paris / Bois d’Arcy) FRC = Cinémathèque Française / Musée du Cinéma (Paris) FRL = Lobster Films (Paris) FRS = Gaumont Pathé Archives (Paris) GBB = BFI National Archive (London) GBY = Yorkshire Film Archive (York)

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HUB = Magyar Nemzeti Digitális Archívum Es Filmintézet (Manda) (Budapest) ITB = Fondazione Cineteca di Bologna (Bologna) ITC = Fondazione Cineteca Italiana (Milan) ITG = Cineteca del Friuli (Gemona) ITN = Fondazione Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia—Cineteca Nazionale (Rome) ITT = Museo Nazionale del Cinema—Fondazione Maria Adriana Prolo (Turin) MXN = Filmoteca de la UNAM (Mexico) NLA = Eye Film Institute Netherlands (Amsterdam) NZW = Nga Taonga Sound & Vision / The New Zealand Archive of Film, Television and Sound (Wellington) ROB = Arhiva Nationala de Filme—Cinemateca Romana (Bucharest) SES = Svenska Filminstitutet (Stockholm) USB = UC Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) (Berkeley) USF = Academy Film Archive (Los Angeles) USI = Harvard Film Archive (Cambridge) USL = UCLA Film & Television Archive (Los Angeles) USM = Museum of Modern Art Department of Film (New York) USR = George Eastman Museum (Rochester) USW = Library of Congress (Washington) UYS = Archivo Nacional de la Imagen y de la Palabra—SODRE (Montevideo)

The Vanishing Lady (1897) Company: R. W. Paul; Country: UK Archive: GBB Synopsis: “Over thirty years ago, when short skirts, lipsticks, and cocktails were almost unknown, some humourist made a trick film and called it ‘The Vanishing Lady.’” From this opening title, an artist fantasizes that the woman in his painting magically springs to life. He catches hold of her dismembered legs while the rest of her body vanishes (including the length of her skirt hem).

The X-Ray Fiend (1897) Company: G. A. Smith; Country: UK; Cast: Laura Bayley Archive: GBB Synopsis: While a peek under the clothes is always desirable, a look beneath the skin is more than the spectator bargained for in this early comedy about the powers of an X-ray machine.

How Bridget Served the Salad Undressed (1898) Company: American Mutoscope and Biograph Co.; Country: U.S. Archive: USW Synopsis: Bridget misinterprets her employer’s instructions “to serve the salad undressed” by instead removing her clothes.

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Her First Cigarette (1899) Company: American Mutoscope and Biograph Co.; Country: U.S. Archive: USF Synopsis: A woman faints after several puffs of her first cigarette.

A Kiss in the Tunnel (1899) Company: G. A. Smith; Bamforth and Company, Ltd. of Holmfirth; Country: UK Archive: UYS, BRR, DEI, GBB, USL, GBY Synopsis: A man and woman steal a kiss when their train passes through a dark tunnel. (The film lives up to its title.)

Lady Cyclists (1899) Dir. James Williamson; Company: Williamson Kinematograph Company; Country: UK Archive: GBB Synopsis: Again, the title explains everything, except the logistics of how women managed to bicycle in those tight corsets and long skirts.

The Poster Girls and the Hypnotist (1899) Dir. Frank S. Armitage; Company: American Mutoscope and Biograph Co.; Country: U.S. Archive: NLA Synopsis: A hypnotist uses his powers to animate two female ballet dancers, whom he mesmerizes out of a billboard.

An Artist’s Dream (1900) Dir. Edwin S. Porter; Company: Edison Mfg. Co.; Country: U.S. Archive: USW Synopsis: A figurative painter falls in love with a woman in his own drawing and fantasizes that she is real, only to witness her vanishing upon the instance of sexual arousal. (Canvas interruptus?)

The Explosion of a Motor Car (1900) Dir: Cecil Hepworth; Company: Hepworth Mfg. Co.; Country: UK Archive: DEI, GBB, USL Synopsis: An automobile spontaneously combusts, and then the dismembered body parts of its passengers rain down from the sky, piece by piece, and limb by limb.

Grandma Threading Her Needle (1900) Company: G. A. Smith; Country: UK Archive: GBB Synopsis: An old woman makes ridiculous facial contortions as she tries with excruciating effort to insert a thread through the eye of a needle.

Grandma’s Reading Glass (1900) Dir: George Albert Smith; Company: G. A. S. Films; Country: UK Archive: CAQ, USL, GBB, USM, DEI, DKK, BRR, UYS Synopsis: Little Willie discovers new objects through the lens of grandma’s reading glass. His sightline displays close-ups of a newspaper, a bird cage, a cat, and grandma’s own charming visage.

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How Bridget Made the Fire (1900) Company: American Mutoscope and Biograph Co.; Country: U.S.; Cast: Gilbert Saroni Archive: USW Synopsis: The answer is by blowing herself up.

Let Me Dream Again (1900) Company: G. A. Smith; Country: UK Archive: UYS, DEI, GBB, USL Synopsis: A pleasant dream of erotic flirtation dissolves into the realities of domestic aging when an elderly man fantasizes that he and his wife are young again.

The Old Maid’s Valentine (1900) Company: G. A. Smith; Country: UK; Cast: Eva Bailey Archive: GBB Synopsis: Poor old Miss Pimple thinks she’s finally found true love (other than her cat), but her much anticipated Valentine turns out to be junk mail.

Aunt Sallie’s Wonderful Bustle (1901) Company: Edison Mfg. Co.; Country: U.S. Archive: USW Synopsis: Aunt Sallie sits on a wall, where she loses her bonnet to a gust of wind, and has a great fall. But unlike Humpty Dumpty, Aunt Sallie has a “wonderful bustle,” so she rebounds without breaking into pieces.

The Finish of Bridget McKeen (1901) Dir. Edwin S. Porter; Company: Edison Mfg. Co.; Country: U.S.; Cast: Gilbert Saroni Archive: BFI, USL, USW Synopsis: Bridget’s tombstone in the last shot explains everything: “Here lies the body of Bridget McKeen, who lighted the fire with kerosene.”

Nora’s 4th of July (1901) Company: American Mutoscope and Biograph Co.; Country: U.S. Archive: USW Synopsis: A flirtatious Irish maid falls victim to an exploding bowl of flour when her employers’ son plays with fireworks.

The Old Maid Having Her Picture Taken (1901) Dir. George S. Fleming, Edwin S. Porter; Company: Edison Mfg. Co.; Country: U.S.; Cast: Gilbert Saroni Archive: USF, USL, USW Synopsis: A homely woman destroys various inanimate objects with her unphotogenic looks, including the photographer’s camera, which explodes in a puff of smoke.

Trapeze Disrobing Act (1901) Dir. Edwin S. Porter; Company: Edison Mfg. Co.; Country: U.S. Archive: USW, USF

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Synopsis: A female trapeze artist performs a strip tease to the great delight of two male rubes. They become hysterical as she removes her skirt, shoes, stockings, garters, and eventually petticoat.

What Happened on Twenty-Third Street, New York City (1901) Dir. Edwin S. Porter; Company: Edison Mfg. Co.; Country: U.S.; Cast: Florence Georgie Archive: USW, USF, USL, GBB Synopsis: A woman has her skirt blown upward by a gust of wind from a hot air shaft, but she’s not embarrassed. She winks at the spectator.

Why Bridget Stopped Drinking (1901) Dir. Edwin S. Porter; Company: Edison Mfg. Co.; Country: U.S. Archive: Not extant. Synopsis: Bridget is terrorized by a bad pun. When she develops a taste for the rum in her boss’s “Spirit Closet,” he rigs up a skeleton and bucket of water to teach her that it is always better to stay “dry.”

Appointment by Telephone (1902) Dir: Edwin S. Porter; Company: Edison Mfg. Co.; Country: U.S. Archive: USW, GBB, USF, USL Synopsis: A wife catches her unfaithful husband on a date. From the Edison catalog: “She confronts the pair in the restaurant in a state of great anger just as the waiter is serving champagne; then the trouble begins. The table and chairs are wrecked, and the husband and young lady are severely horsewhipped by the enraged wife.”

Beelzebub’s Daughters (1903) Company: Georges Méliès; Company: Georges Méliès Country: France Archive: Not extant. Synopsis: Magical women dance in hearts of flame without burning.

The Effects of a Trolley Car Collision (1903) Company: S. Lubin; Country: U.S. Archive: USR Synopsis: The sexual consequences of a railroad accident when the gender co-ed train cars are standing room only.

The Gay Shoe Clerk (1903) Dir: Edwin S. Porter; Company: Edison Mfg. Co.; Country: U.S. Archive: DEI, USR, USW, USM, CAQ, USL, GBB, USF Synopsis: A frisky shoe clerk sneaks a peek at a young woman’s ankle, and is promptly reprimanded by her matronly chaperone, who wields a large umbrella.

An Irate Model (1903) Company: S. Lubin; Country: U.S. Archive: Not extant. Synopsis: A female model becomes irate after catching a glimpse of her portrait, and then promptly smashes the artwork over the painter’s head.

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A Maiden’s Paradise (1903) Company: Georges Méliès; Country: France Archive: Not extant. Synopsis: Women are chopped in half and then resurrected as six tiny bodies.

Mary Jane’s Mishap (1903) Dir. G. A. Smith; Company: G. A. Smith Films; Country: UK; Cast: Laura Bayley Archive: UYS, DEI, GBB, USL Synopsis: A housemaid spontaneously combusts out of the chimney after pouring too much paraffin wax onto the fire. Her dismembered bodily pieces rain down over the village skyline and then she returns as a dancing specter to haunt her own gravestone (which has the epitaph, “Here lies Mary Jane—Rest in Pieces”).

Scene in a Laundry (1903) Company: S. Lubin; Country: U.S. Archive: Not extant. Synopsis: Three washerwomen working in a laundry are harassed by a male co-worker. Since he will not leave them alone, they splash him with soapy water and then dump another bucket of water over his head.

A Shocking Incident (1903) Company: American Mutoscope and Biograph Co; Country: U.S. Archive: USW Synopsis: Bridget demolishes the house after being electrocuted by a battery-wired turkey.

Trouble with the Milkmaid (1903) Company: S. Lubin; Country: U.S. Archive: Not extant. Synopsis: A saucy cowboy forces himself on a milkmaid, but she defends herself by drenching him with a pail of freshly squeezed cow’s milk.

Trouble with the Washerwoman (1903) Company: S. Lubin; Country: U.S. Archive: Not extant. Synopsis: A harassed washerwoman breaks the dishes and overthrows her washtub to deflect unwanted advances by a lascivious milkman (who has also sadistically dropped cold ice down her chest). The film concludes with a flood of water rushing toward the spectator.

The Unappreciated Joke (1903) Dir: Edwin S. Porter; Company: Edison Mfg. Co.; Country: U.S. Archive: USW, USM, USL Synopsis: A man accidentally shares a naughty joke with an old woman after she trades places with his friend on the streetcar. He laughs hysterically, punches her in the gut and slaps her legs. Unappreciative (both of the joke and of being assaulted), she causes him to shrivel in embarrassment.

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What Happened in the Tunnel (1903) Company: Edison Mfg. Co.; Country: U.S. Archive: USW, USL Synopsis: The original “trading places” comedy, a white woman and her black maid play a funny trick on a white male passenger when their train enters a dark tunnel. Spoiler alert: the punch line involves miscegenation.

A Bucket of Cream Ale (1904) Company: American Mutoscope and Biograph Co.; Country: U.S. Archive: USW Synopsis: An African American woman pours a bucket of cream ale onto a drunk Dutchman after he sprays her with her beer.

Diving Lucy (1904) Company: Mitchell & Kenyon; Country: UK Archive: Not extant. Synopsis: A policeman attempts to save a drowning woman, seizing her by her “shapely ankles.” However, it turns out that she is not a woman at all, but a surrogate pair of fake woman’s legs, with a sign attached to the thighs: “RATS!”

A Kiss in the Dark (1904) Company: American Mutoscope and Biograph Co.; Country: U.S. Archive: USW Synopsis: A white man accidentally molests a black woman because he mistakes her for a white woman (the white woman had orchestrated the whole mix-up to avoid being assaulted herself).

Kiss Me! (1904) Company: American Mutoscope and Biograph Co.; Country: U.S. Archive: USW Synopsis: A vaudeville poster comes to life and seduces a male ogler, who is reprimanded by a matronly onlooker.

Lady Plumpton’s Motor Car (1904) Dir. Lewin Fitzhamon; Company: Hepworth Mfg. Co.; Country: UK; Cast: Emily Custance Archive: Not extant. Synopsis: A plump lady named Lady Plumpton causes her chauffeur’s car to combust when it stalls in a puddle due to her girth.

Meet Me at the Fountain (1904) Company: S. Lubin; Country: U.S.; Cast: Gilbert Saroni Archive: USW Synopsis: An eligible bachelor advertises for a wife in the paper, but is greeted by an unruly mob of hell-bent suitors. After a lengthy chase scene, he picks the bride who would make the best body guard.

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A Windy Day on the Roof (1904) Company: American Mutoscope and Biograph Co.; Country: U.S. Archive: USW Synopsis: A woman hangs laundry on a rooftop clothesline while a painter looks up her skirt from the side of a nearby building.

2 A.M. in the Subway (1905) Company: American Mutoscope and Biograph Co.; Country: U.S. Archive: USW, USF Synopsis: Drunken revelers flash a constable on an underground platform. The police are surprised when a woman’s bare legs turn out to be a prankster’s pair of prosthetic limbs.

La Course à la Perruque [The Wig Chase] (1906) Dir: Georges Hatot; Company: Pathé Frères; Country: France Archive: FRB, GBB, DKK, ATF, FRL Synopsis: An old woman (played by a man in drag) has her wig cruelly snatched off her head by some boy pranksters. This theft unleashes an anarchic chase sequence across all of Paris.

La Femme Collante [A Sticky Woman] (1906) Dir. Alice Guy-Blaché; Company: Société des Etablissements L. Gaumont; Country: France; Cast: Alice Guy-Blaché Archive: FRB Synopsis: A housemaid is assaulted by an aroused male onlooker while she licks stamps in the post office. Their lips are stuck together by residue from the glue. Eventually, a boy clerk must snip them apart with scissors—transferring half the man’s mustache to the sticky woman’s face!

Her First Cake (1906) Dir. James Williamson; Company: Williamson’s Kinematograph Co.; Country: UK Archive: DEK Synopsis: A neophyte bride’s first forays in the kitchen result in the baking of a cake that is subsequently repurposed as a brick, and basically starts a neighborhood civil war.

Madame a des Envies [Madame’s Cravings] (1906) Dir. Alice Guy-Blaché; Company: Gaumont; Country: France; Cast: Alice Guy-Blaché Archive: GBB Synopsis: A pregnant woman exhibits her maternity cravings in public. Her objects of oral desire include a child’s lollipop, a wino’s glass of absinthe, a crippled beggar’s pickled herring, and the smoking pipe of a traveling salesman. Eventually, her baby is born from a cabbage patch in a trick jump cut.

Le Matelas Épileptique [The Drunken Mattress] (1906) Dir: Romeo Bosetti and Alice Guy-Blaché; Company: Société des Etablissements L. Gaumont; Country: France Archive: FRB, GBB Synopsis: A drunken hobo crawls into a mattress while a woman is mending it. She has quite a time lugging it home with a grown man making whoopee inside. She and her husband are in for quite a surprise in bed that night.

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La Peine du Talion [Tit-for-Tat] (1906) Dir: Gaston Velle and Albert Capellani; Company: Pathé Frères; Country: France Archive: DEI, USW, USM, GBB, ATM, DEK, AUC, CAQ, ITB, FRL, USF, ITT, CHL, NLA Synopsis: An evil scientist ensnares magical butterfly women and dissects them in his lab, but the vengeful Lepidoptera gives him a taste of his own scientific curiosity.

The ‘?’ Motorist (1906) Dir: Walter R. Booth; Company: Paul’s Animatograph Works Ltd.; Country: UK Archive: GBB, USL, CAQ Synopsis: A phantom motorcar is on the run from both the law of the state and the laws of physics. The car flattens and dismembers a traffic cop, drives up the side of a building, takes a joyride around the rings of Saturn, and crashes through the ceiling of a courtroom.

The Subpoena Server (1906) Company: American Mutoscope and Biograph Co.; Country: U.S. Archive: USW Synopsis: No one likes being served with a subpoena, especially not when you are a caricature of the millionaire fat-cat John D. Rockefeller. There is no limit to the alternate identities this man will assume to evade his subpoena server.

The Vacuum Cleaner Nightmare (1906) Dir: Walter R. Booth; Company: Charles Urban Trading Co.; Country: UK Archive: ITN Synopsis: An insane vacuum cleaner eats up women’s bodies and spits them out again, new and improved.

The Boy, the Bust, and the Bath (1907) Company: Vitagraph; Country: U.S. Archive: USR, USM, GBB Synopsis: A young hooligan fools a series of male voyeurs by placing a plaster bust of a nude woman in a boarding house bathtub.

La Boîte à Cigares [The Cigar Box] (1907) Dir: Segundo de Chomón Company: Pathé Frères; Country: France Archive: DKK, ARF, USM, CAQ, NLA Synopsis: A magician conjures women’s bodies out of a cigar box while the remaining cigars, when lighted, dissolve into dancing ladies.

The Doll’s Revenge (1907) Dir: Lewin Fitzhamon; Company: Hepworth; Country: UK; Cast: Gertie Potter, Bertie Potter Archive: USW Synopsis: A younger sister seeks revenge against her older brother for dismembering her favorite toys. She does this by possessing her mechanical doll, which grows to monstrous proportions and then engorges her older brother. The doll “pulls the little boy to pieces and eats him.”

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The Kitchen Maid’s Dream (1907) Company: Vitagraph; Country: U.S. Archive: Not extant. Synopsis: An overworked kitchen maid fantasizes that she can dismember her own limbs to finish her housework on time.

Laughing Gas (1907) Dir: Edwin S. Porter; Company: Edison Mfg. Co.; Country: U.S. Archive: USI, USW, USM, FRL Synopsis: An African American woman given nitrous oxide by her dentist spreads her laughter contagiously throughout the public sphere—to streetcar riders, police officers, a justice of the peace, and church revelers.

Le Miroir Magique [Magic Mirror] (1907) Dir: Segundo de Chomón Company: Pathé Frères; Country: France Archive: USW Synopsis: A female magician sprays magical serum on her vanity mirror and conjures miniature dancing clones of her own body. The buttons of her cameo jewelry spring to life, and her everyday objects transform into animated women.

The Servant’s Revenge (1907) Company: Charles Urban Trading Company; Country: UK Archive: GBB Synopsis: A physician fires his maid and valet for helping themselves to his leftover breakfast. They seek revenge by changing his office sign to “Veterinary Surgeon,” and he is soon mobbed by a zoo of ailing animals, including a pig, a donkey, a goat, and an orangutan. The intense mental strain causes him to believe that he is a monkey.

Le Spectre Rouge [The Red Spectre] (1907) Dir: Segundo de Chomón Company: Pathé Frères; Country: France; Cast: Julienne Mathieu Archive: ITT, FRL, ITB, DEW, GBB, SES, USF, USL, USM, USW, USR, ESM, ITG Synopsis: The devil conjures three women who appear to him in a secret grotto. He levitates their bodies, makes them burst into flames, and miniaturizes them so they must dance and play music while trapped inside of glass jars. A Good Spirit arrives and vanquishes the devil with a bucket of water: he disintegrates into a skeleton.

Under the Old Apple Tree (1907) Company: American Mutoscope and Biograph Co. of America; Country: U.S. Archive: USW, USM Synopsis: Pulchritudinous Polly is having trouble fending off all her potential suitors. A sailor named Jack throws apples at a local rube named Phineas while he tries to make love to Polly, but then Lord Foppington arrives on the scene in a very dapper checked suit. Who will Polly choose?

The Acrobatic Maid (1908) Company: Pathé Frères; Country: France

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Archive: Not extant. Synopsis: An inexperienced maid is hired by a family of gymnasts, who demand that she complete her chores as if performing in a burlesque revue.

Une Dame Vraiment Bien [A Very Fine Lady] (1908) Dir: Louis Feuillade and Roméo Bosetti; Company: Société des Etablissements Gaumont; Country: France; Cast: Renée Carl Archive: ITG, USR, USM, USL, USF, GBB, FRL, FRB Synopsis: A beautiful woman in corseted dress and feathered chapeau bedevils male laborers and causes general mayhem throughout the public sphere. A window-washer douses a matronly bystander; a bicyclist crashes into a café; a driver topples a baby carriage; and a worker nearly concusses the entire police force with a step ladder.

The Dancing Legs (1908) Company: Vitagraph Co. of America; Country: U.S. Archive: Not extant. Synopsis: A disembodied pair of dancing legs saunters through the public sphere, detaching and reattaching itself to bodies, all of whom catch the dancing craze.

Deceived Slumming Party (1908) Dir: D. W. Griffith; Company: American Mutoscope and Biograph Co.; Country: U.S. Archive: Not extant. Synopsis: A rural couple on a big city tour visit an opium den in Chinatown. They are conned out of their savings, but escape with their lives—despite an incident in which Matilda is temporarily transformed into a sausage by a machine that restores her to human form when run in reverse.

The Holy Hermit (1908) Company: Société des Etablissements L. Gaumont; Country: UK Archive: Not extant. Synopsis: An autocratic hermit dictates matriarchal law in a secluded village to punish and humiliate the men who once defied him. When satisfied with his punishment, the hermit restores the rule of law to the men.

The Jealous Old Maid; or, No One to Love Her (1908) Dir: Van Dyke Brooke; Company: Vitagraph Co. of America; Country: U.S.; Cast: Mary Fuller Archive: Not extant. Synopsis: An old spinster grows weary of all the attentions bestowed on her attractive young niece. The Moving Picture World dismissed it as “coarse” and bemoaned its lack of realism, noting that “both the girl and old maid should have drifted farther on the water before being rescued and the boys and fishermen should not have been so well prepared for both rescues.”

The Lady Lunatic’s Hat (1908) Dir: Jack Smith; Company: Robert W. Paul; Country: U.S.

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Archive: Not extant. Synopsis: A lady wearing a large hat is blown to the moon.

Leap Year Proposals of an Old Maid (1908) Company: Vitagraph Co. of America; Country: U.S. Archive: FRB Synopsis: An unattractive spinster is blasted into outer space (hence the pun, “leap year”).

Long Distance Wireless Photography (1908) Dir: Georges Méliès; Company: Star Film; Country: France Archive: USW, USL, USF, FRL, FRB Synopsis: Women’s bodies are transmitted from a distance as corporeal telegrams.

Madam Flirt and Her Adopted Uncle (1908) Company: S. Lubin; Country: U.S. Archive: Not extant. Synopsis: A manicurist named Madam Flirt (what else?) juggles a clientele of elderly male admirers. When she accepts Mr. Baldhead’s proposal to become her adopted “uncle,” Mrs. Baldhead intercepts the letter, and then the real trouble begins.

Ma-in-Law Mesmerized (1908) Company: Société des Etablissements L. Gaumont; Country: France Archive: Not extant. Synopsis: A beleaguered son-in-law makes his overbearing mother-in-law disappear by practicing mesmerism.

Magnetic Vapor (1908) Company: S. Lubin; Country: U.S. Archive: Not extant. Synopsis: A henpecked husband tries to improve his lot with a “magnetic vapor,” which gives him hypnotic powers over his overbearing wife and her friends. Eventually, he runs out of vapor and is then even more miserable than before.

Mashing the Masher (1908) Company: Vitagraph Co. of America; Country: U.S. Archive: Not extant. Synopsis: A creepy male ogler (a.k.a. masher) harasses women, who seek revenge by luring him to a date in his finest attire. They drop boxes of rubbish and pails of water on his head from a second-story window, taking great delight in the spectacle of his humiliation.

Mixed Babies (1908) Dir: Wallace McCutcheon; Company: American Mutoscope and Biograph Co. of America; Country: U.S. Archive: Not extant. Synopsis: An ethnic melting pot of mixed up babies roils a horde of bargain hunting mothers when their local department store offers a “baby check” service on the day of a massive sale for

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infants’ wear. Among the most offensive lines: “Why, dear, how sunburned baby is!” remarks Mr. J., to which Mrs. J. responds hysterically: “Sunburned?! Good gracious, it’s a coon.” Oy.

Nellie, the Beautiful Housemaid (1908) Company: Vitagraph Co. of America; Country: U.S. Archive: USW, USF Synopsis: Three old sailors advertise for a housekeeper. They select an applicant named Nellie White, who describes herself as a “good-looking brunette with amiable disposition and a first-class cook and laundress.” The old men are scandalized when Nellie White turns out to be an “enormous colored woman,” but the day is saved because she is also good at housework.

An Odd Pair of Limbs (1908) Company: Vitagraph Co. of America; Country: U.S. Archive: Not extant. Synopsis: Two boy pranksters steal a pair of false calves from the display window of a department store and wreak havoc, leaving the odd pair of limbs in at least as odd places.

Old Maids’ Temperance Club (1908) Company: Edison Mfg. Co.; Country: U.S. Archive: Not extant. Synopsis: The old maids of the Temperance Club accidentally get soused when the janitor leaves behind his “Surefire” whiskey. They get very silly, and are then coaxed by a mad scientist to test his machine that will spontaneously transform them all into young beauties. What a difference “a wee drop will make in human nature.”

The Magnetic Eye (1908) Company: S. Lubin; Country: U.S. Archive: Not extant. Synopsis: A man gains magnetic ocular powers (literally magnetic!) after being bitten in the eye by a mutant mosquito. He then “attracts” the object of his affection, impelling a young woman’s body to fling itself headlong toward his eyeballs.

The Merry Widow Waltz Craze (1908) Dir: Edwin S. Porter; Company: Edison Mfg. Co.; Country: U.S.; Archive: USW Synopsis: Mr. Lightfoot has caught the Merry Widow Craze, and apparently no woman can say “no” to being his dancing partner—including the young lady he abducts at the theater, causing his own ejection by an usher. He spreads his love for that Hungarian melody to his family, his housemaid, a butcher boy, an organ grinder, and a veiled lady on the street (which devolves into a gyrating racial sight gag). Finally, the police seize him, and he waltzes into a jail cell.

The New Maid (1908) Company: S. Lubin; Country: U.S. Archive: Not extant.

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Synopsis: The new maid has caught the kissing bug, but no man seems to mind—least of all the baker, the Iceman, a Dutchman named Heinie, a booking agent, several policemen, her dignified employer, and even a pastor. Fun!

The New Stenographer (1908) Company: Edison Mfg. Co.; Country: U.S. Archive: Not extant. Synopsis: Two male business partners, Joy and Hope, advertise for a new stenographer, but Mrs. Joy gets jealous when she overhears a friend promising to send them a “peach.” She barges into their office, so obviously Mr. Hope cross-dresses as the “peach,” while the real stenographer hides in the closet. The disguise plot unravels, climaxing with Mrs. Joy modeling a bathing suit and Mr. Hope losing his wig.

The Nursemaid’s Dream (1908) Dir: Lewin Fitzhamon; Company: Hepworth; Country: UK; Cast: Gertie Potter Archive: Not extant. Synopsis: A nursemaid dreams that fairies save her baby from giants.

Les Oeufs Merveilleux [Wonderful Eggs] (1908) Dir: Segundo de Chomón Company: Pathé Frères; Country: France; cast: Julienne Mathieu Archive: Not extant. Synopsis: A woman transforms a basket of eggs into various grotesque faces and uncanny bodies.

The Professor’s Secret (1908) Company: Société des Etablissements L. Gaumont, Kleine Optical Co.; Country: France Archive: Not extant. Synopsis: A homely woman is “monkified” into an ape and exhibited in a zoo.

And the Villainess Still Pursued Him (1909) Company: Selig Polyscope Co.; Country: U.S. Archive: Not extant. Synopsis: A young bachelor is bedeviled by a metamorphic spinster, who masquerades as his taxi driver, his milkman, and his newspaper delivery boy. Who will she be next?

Caught by the Coupon Craze (1909) Company: Edison Mfg. Co.; Country: U.S. Archive: Not extant. Synopsis: Mrs. Bilkins realizes that she can earn coupons to buy a new lamp from her husband’s cigar purchases, which nearly drives poor Mr. Bilkins to lung cancer.

Cohen at Coney Island (1909) Company: Vitagraph Co. of America; Country: U.S. Archive: Not extant. Synopsis: Mr. Cohen visits Coney Island with his wife and children. “They visit Steeplechase, Dreamland, Luna Park, and, in fact, take in all of the interesting sights of the pleasure

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centers; the roulette wheel, soup bowl, shooting the chutes, take a ride on the camel, see the Salome dance, and wind up the day with a plunge in the ocean.”

The Colored Stenographer (1909) Company: Edison Mfg. Co.; Country: U.S. Archive: Not extant. Synopsis: A henpecked husband hires a very attractive stenographer, Miss Dimples, much to the consternation of his overbearing wife, Mrs. Bunk. He tries to fool her by forcing Dimples to trade places with an African American scrub woman, but the wife is onto him. A fight ensues, and the two women team up by destroying the stenographer’s “Merry Widow” hat.

Eradicating Auntie (1909) Dir: D. W. Griffith; Company: Biograph Co.; Country: U.S. Archive: USW, USM Synopsis: The only thing worse than an overbearing mother-in-law is a pesky aunt, particularly Aunt Matilda Scroggins and her crony Reverend Joshua Whittington. Who is better at “eradicating” an unwanted outsider than a “fire-eating cowboy?” Aunt Matilda and Pastor Joshua are so terrorized that they run away by leaping onto a moving train.

Une Excursion Incohérente [A Panicky Picnic] (1909) Dir: Segundo de Chomón Company: Pathé Frères; Country: France Archive: GBB, CAQ Synopsis: Picnickers are bedeviled by a series of weird happenings that transform their food into bugs and dust. They are later haunted by female ghosts clad in white, while an old woman appears to give birth to a moving train.

The Fallen Idol (1909) Company: Edison Mfg. Co.; Country: U.S. Archive: Not extant. Synopsis: A young fan idolizes an opera star, and lands her dream job as his house maid. But he is an utter tyrant, so she swears revenge against him by destroying his home. In the end, he must miss his big performance to stay home and clean up the mess. The moral of the story: male divas will inherit the housework.

Fighting Suffragettes (1909) Company: Éclipse; Country: France Archive: Not extant. Synopsis: Two fighting suffragettes have a duel, but both faint at the sound of gunfire. Their seconds and witnesses also faint. Now that the women are comatose, the police come and arrest them (which they had been unable to do during a protest when the women were not unconscious).

Flirtation Collar (1909) Company: Phoenix Film Co.; Country: U.S. Archive: Not extant. Synopsis: A young woman in a too-tight collar makes inadvertently seductive gestures at various men, which basically causes her to be mistaken for a prostitute, much to her dismay.

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The Gibson Goddess (1909) Dir: D. W. Griffith; Company: Biograph Co.; Country: U.S.; Cast: Marion Leonard, Kate Bruce, Dorothy West, Mary Pickford, Gertrude Robinson Archive: USW, USM, USF Synopsis: An attractive young woman pretends to have swollen legs in order to discourage various unwanted suitors.

Missionary and the Maid (1909) Company: Edison Mfg. Co.; Country: U.S. Archive: Not extant. Synopsis: A white male African missionary is driven from the continent by the love of a “dusky damsel.” “He could stand for the hot pots and the cannibalistic soup tureens of those who were living in darkness and the dinge of their own color, but when it came to receiving an osculatory imprint from those merry widow lips of sofa cushion dimensions and an embrace from the huge arms attached to her 400-pound form, that was too much.”

Mr. Jones at the Ball (1909) Dir: D. W. Griffith; Company: Biograph Co.; Country: U.S.; Cast: Florence Lawrence Archive: USW, USM Synopsis: In this episode of the “Mr. and Mrs. Jones” series (11 episodes, 1908–1909), about the habitual domestic squabbles of a bourgeois married couple, Mr. Jones gets trapped in a dressing room with another man’s wife. Mrs. Jones is horrified and threatens to kill him, so he must escape in his underwear from a third story window. Other episodes in the series include Mr. Jones Has a Card Party, Mrs. Joneses’ Lover, The Lady Book Agent, and The Smoked Husband.

The Neighbor’s Kids (1909) Company: Essanay Mfg. Co.; Country: U.S. Archive: USW Synopsis: Two girl pranksters torment their family. They unleash caged mice on their mother’s card party; they trap the cat in the piano; they intrude on the maid and her police officer boyfriend by pinning his coat tail to the maid’s ironing; and then frame their father for adultery with the laundry maid. In the end, they all have a good laugh, because kids will be kids!

On the Wrong Scent (1909) Company: Essanay Film Mfg. Co.; Country: U.S. Archive: Not extant. Synopsis: Fisticuffs ensue when a woman recognizes the “wrong scent” on another woman’s person while out to dinner with her husband.

Princess Nicotine; or, The Smoke Fairy (1909) Dir: J. Stuart Blackton; Company: Vitagraph Co. of America; Country: U.S.; Cast: Gladys Hulette Archive: ITG, USW, USL, USF, FRL, ITC, NLA

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Synopsis: A gentleman smoker hallucinates that he is visited by two miniature fairies, who play tricks on him and moon him. He blows smoke in their faces, traps them in a glass jar, and melts their bodies with soda water (accidentally spraying himself in the face).

The Pygmy World (1909) Company: Société des Etablissements L. Gaumont; Country: France Archive: Not extant. Synopsis: A trick film about a man who is abused by his mother-in-law and escapes to a fairyland of Lilliputians no higher than his ankle (unlike his mother-in-law, who was likely very tall).

The Pretty Milliner (1909) Company: Pathé Frères; Country: France Archive: Not extant. Synopsis: The title character is “besieged by a crowd of admirers,” forcing her to take “refuge in an immense hat box, which she is carrying, whereupon the box rolls away.”

Saucy Sue (1909) Company: Lubin Mfg. Co.; Country: U.S. Archive: Not extant. Synopsis: “A very lively country girl” torments her rural family with constant pranks and violent practical jokes, “bad enough among the rough country people” but far from funny when set loose upon “her dandified cousin” from the city.

Simple Home Dinner (1909) Company: Edison Mfg. Co.; Country: U.S. Archive: Not extant. Synopsis: Two newlyweds try to cook a nice dinner but instead destroy their new kitchen. They accidentally glue themselves to the floor with too much flour and dough, while several escaped lobsters claw at their faces.

The Servant’s Revenge (1909) Company: Lubin Mfg. Co.; Country: U.S. Archive: Not extant. Synopsis: After being let go by her abusive employers, a vengeful housemaid sneaks in during their fancy party and then switches the pipes between the gas jets and the garden hose. “The guests become uneasy, and a geyser of water from the gas jets completes their discomfiture.”

The Suffragette’s Dream (1909) Company: Pathé Frères; Country: France Archive: Not extant. Synopsis: A suffragette dreams of a world in which all gender roles are reversed. Women run government while men nurse babies and “crochet for dear life.” But the suffragette’s absurd dreams distract her from her housework, and her angry husband beats her up when he arrives home and there is no dinner on the table.

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Those Awful Hats (1909) Dir: D. W. Griffith; Company: Biograph Co.; Country: U.S.; Cast: Flora Finch, Linda Arvidson, Florence Lawrence, Gertrude Robinson, Dorothy West, Anita Hendrie Archive: ARF, USW, USM, USL, ROB, USF, FRL Synopsis: There is nothing worse than attending a film where you are seated behind a woman wearing an enormous hat! This hat problem bedeviled film exhibitors and male spectators alike in the early 1910s. In this short promo film, an ingenious exhibitor solves the hat crisis by installing a large ceiling crane that forcibly removes women’s hats— sometimes along with their bodies, as demonstrated here.

Too Much Dog Biscuit (1909) Company: Essanay Film Mfg. Co.; Country: U.S. Archive: Not extant. Synopsis: The cook accidentally mixes her employer’s breakfast food with dog biscuits, which causes him to bark, growl, and behave like a dog. The transformation is so convincing that he lands himself in the dog catcher’s paddy wagon.

What the Cards Foretold (1909) Company: Edison Mfg. Co.; Country: U.S. Archive: Not extant. Synopsis: Old Mammy Sue broke the cardinal rule of prophecy: do not try to tell your own fortune. As her comeuppance, she becomes the butt of every joke or amusement that she had foreseen in her own future.

When Women Win (1909) Company: Lubin Mfg. Co.; Country: U.S. Archive: Not extant. Synopsis: Feminism ad absurdum: women steamroll the public sphere and city governance while men acquire the biological capacity to give birth.

The Wooden Leg (1909) Dir: D. W. Griffith; Company: Biograph Co.; Country: U.S.; Cast: Florence Lawrence Archive: USW, USM Synopsis: An attractive young woman pretends to have a wooden leg (which she borrows from a hobo) in order to discourage an unwanted suitor.

Edith’s Avoirdupois (1910) Company: Lubin Mfg. Co.; Country: U.S. Archive: Not extant. Synopsis: A fat man’s fat wife purchases a book about physical fitness and then performs absurd bodily and fascial acrobatics in her attempt to lose weight and eliminate wrinkles.

The Lady Barbers (1910) Company: Selig Polyscope Co.; Country: U.S. Archive: Not extant. Synopsis: The arrival of female barbers in a rural hamlet causes a crisis regarding the sexual division of labor.

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The Mechanical Mary Anne (1910) Dir: Lewin Fitzhamon; Company: Hepworth; Country: UK Archive: Not extant. Synopsis: A clockwork maid wrecks a house.

A Queen of the Burlesque (1910) Dir: Ashley Miller; Company: Edison Mfg. Company; Country: U.S. Archive: Not extant. Synopsis: A cheap burlesque show is coming to town, and the naughty children are angry when they are forbidden to attend. In revenge, they frame the village spinster for prostitution, using a stolen pair of stockings from her clothesline.

A Tin-Type Romance (1910) Company: Vitagraph Co. of America; Country: U.S.; Cast: Florence Turner Archive: FRL Synopsis: A couple has a misunderstanding over a tin-type photograph, so both resolve to commit suicide, but the water is too cold, and then they are saved by a dog.

The Vixen (1910) Company: Powers; Country: U.S. Archive: Not extant. Synopsis: Madge the Vixen fights off various mediocre suitors, all of whom have the tendency to spill things on her dress. In revenge, she snatches Willie Fatboy’s toupee, kicks Awkward Arthur in the shins, and dumps a bucket of ice water on Humdrum Harold’s head. In the end, she marries a man named Jack, who tricks her into loving him by pretending to commit suicide.

The Baron Munchausen’s Dream (1911) Dir: Georges Méliès; Company: Star Film; Country: France Archive: ROB, DEW, CUH, BRR, SES, ITG, ARF, HUB, FRS, USW, AUC, ITT, FRB, NLA Synopsis: An aristocratic gentleman overdoes it on the rich food and drink at dinner, which causes him to have exceptionally vivid dreams. Women turn into monstrous animals and a giant female spider nearly entraps him in her web. The spectator watches these hallucinogenic visions projected onto the giant mirror behind the Baron’s bed.

Bridget and the Egg (1911) Company: S. Lubin; Country: U.S. Archive: Not extant. Synopsis: Bridget attempts to crack open a tough egg by wielding a large axe.

Eugénie, redresse-toi [Eugénie, Straighten Up!] (1911) Director: Jean Durand; Country: France; Cast: Berthe Dagmar, Marie Dorly Archive: NLA Synopsis: A humpbacked woman named Eugénie is straightened out (because that’s how it works), but then she is so tall without her humpback that she becomes a walking cyclone. Finally, all her problems are solved with the help of a sword swallower.

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Eva Is Tired of Life (1911) Company: Pathé Frères; Country: France Archive: Not extant. Synopsis: An overworked woman with an “indestructible constitution” unsuccessfully attempts to commit suicide.

Her Crowning Glory (1911) Company: Vitagraph Co. of America; Country: U.S.; Cast: Flora Finch, Helene Costello, Kate Price Archive: GBB, USL Synopsis: A new governess with “Godiva” tresses seduces her employer while abusing his child and maid. In revenge, the little girl cuts off the woman’s “crowning glory”: her hair— which causes the father to fire the governess and mock her appearance.

How Women Win (1911) Company: Powers Picture Plays; Country: U.S. Archive: Not extant. Synopsis: A staunch anti-suffragist named Mr. Braggo is slowly persuaded of the merits of feminism. Eventually, he becomes so committed to the cause that he marches in a Manhattan parade (alongside half the women in Manhattan he’d once ejected from his office).

Hypnotizing the Hypnotist (1911) Company: Vitagraph Co. of America; Country: U.S.; Cast: Florence Turner Archive: GBB Synopsis: A woman pretends to be hypnotized over the phone to fool a charlatan hypnotist into falling victim to a parody hypnotist’s practice of tele-hypnosis.

Le Torchon Brule [Close Combat] (1911) Dir: Roméo Bosetti; Company: Pathé Comica; Country: France; Cast: Sarah Duhamel Archive: NLA Synopsis: A married couple’s fight at the dinner table quickly escalates into a public spectacle. They wrestle each other in the town square, through the sewer system, and into a police station. The police are more amused than concerned, and the film ends where it started: with domestic violence.

Mandy’s Social Whirl (1911) Company: Lubin Mfg. Co.; Country: U.S. Archive: Not extant. Synopsis: Mandy is a country rube who is mistaken for a debutante. She is on her way to the big city to start her new job as housemaid, but due to a mix-up, gets to become a lady for a day. It is hilarious to watch “such a crude girl as Mandy” touring around in fancy automobiles and so forth. In the end, the mistake is revealed and Mandy goes to “work in earnest.”

Queer Folks (1911) Company: Vitagraph Co. of America; Country: U.S.

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Archive: Not extant. Synopsis: A love quadrangle among players in a freak show. The living skeleton loves the fat woman, who loves the strong man, who loves the bearded lady, who loves the living skeleton. It all works out though, when the skeleton proves his masculinity to the fat woman by beating up the strong man, who falls for the bearded lady after she saves him.

The Troublesome Secretaries (1911) Dir: Ralph W. Ince; Company: Vitagraph Co. of America; Country: U.S.; Cast: Mabel Normand Archive: USW, USF Synopsis: Betty is in love with her father’s male secretary, but this does not please her father, so he vows to hire a new male secretary who is at least sixty years Betty’s senior. Little does he suspect that the old dinosaur is in fact Betty’s young lover incognito. There’s no crisis of gendered spheres or familial relations that can’t be solved by a false beard!

A Woman’s Curiosity (1911) Company: Lubin Manufacturing Company; Country: U.S.; Archive: Not extant. Synopsis: An excessively curious woman incites mass civil unrest through her relentless pursuit of a lost envelope, which turns out to contain a gas bill.

When Two Hearts Are Won (1911) Company: Kalem Co., Inc.; Country: U.S.; Cast: Alice Joyce Archive: GBB Synopsis: A man named Alcibiades marries a sweet young girl with a foul temper, most of which is focused on accommodating her impossibly intrusive and destructive dog. Via her dog, the blushing bride causes a mass layoff of railway workers, a bribery scandal, and a housemaid labor crisis. In the end, the husband wises up and assaults his wife, which teaches her a lesson.

Wifie’s New Hat (1911) Company: Lubin Mfg. Co.; Country: U.S. Archive: Not extant. Synopsis: Wifie is obsessed with her new hat. When there is a run on the bank, Hubby withdraws fifty-thousand dollars and stashes it in the family safe. But then there’s not enough room for Wifie’s prized chapeau! So she carelessly tosses their life’s savings into a desk drawer. When burglars break in, the hat is destroyed but the money is untouched (hidden in plain sight). A true parable of commodity capitalism—only female consumer hysteria will save the domestic economy.

Bessie’s Dream (1912) Dir: Colin Campbell; Company: Selig Polyscope Company; Country: U.S. Archive: Not extant. Synopsis: In her dream, a woman named Bessie hunts “Jew fish” (i.e. grouper) and then is chased by cannibals.

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Cousin Kate’s Revolution (1912) Company: Éclair American; Country: U.S. Archive: Not extant. Synopsis: Mr. and Mrs. Strong are a feminist couple: the wife is a “strenuous suffragette” and the husband a writer of “moribund romances.” When their backward spinster cousin Kate visits from the countryside, they each learn a lesson about tradition and modernity: Kate restores normative gender roles, while the Strongs introduce her to updated household appliances.

A Cure for Pokeritis (1912) Dir: Lawrence Trimble; Company: Vitagraph Co. of America; Country: U.S.; Cast: Flora Finch, Leah Baird, Rose Tapley Archive: USW, USM, USL, USF, FRL Synopsis: Mrs. Sharpe’s husband has a gambling problem. When he plays cards behind his wife’s back, his unconscious guilt betrays him and he talks in his sleep: “Pass, Raise, Three Queens.” Wife’s cousin Freddie, a member of the Mental Improvement Society, dresses up as a policeman to scare the husband into moral awakening. In the end, he chooses domestic reform over mock incarceration.

A New Use for a Bike (1912) Company: Lux; Country: France Archive: BFI Synopsis: A suffragette named Sophie Pancake causes violent traffic accidents in her singleminded pursuit of a champion cyclist, Sporty. Due to a labor strike, Sporty must enlist his cycling friends to help move his furniture on their bicycles; meanwhile, Sophie Pancake hides out in the grandfather clock.

The Elusive Miss Pinkhurst (1912) Company: Warwick Trading Company; Country: UK Archive: Not extant. Synopsis: A cabinet minister tries in vain to catch an elusive suffragette leader.

The Face or the Voice (1912) Company: Vitagraph Co. of America; Country: U.S.; Cast: Florence Turner, Leah Baird Archive: Not extant. Synopsis: A man must choose between two sisters, Myna and Undine, who respectively possess a beautiful face and a melodious voice. At first, he pretends that they are both the same person, but then chooses the voice over the face in a moment of righteous integrity.

Freezing Auntie (1912) Company: Thomas A Edison, Inc.; Country: U.S. Archive: GBB Synopsis: Mr. and Mrs. Henpeck try to rid themselves of a pesky spinster aunt by giving her freezing serum.

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The Hoodoo Hat (1912) Dir: Pat Hartigan; Company: Kalem Company; Country: U.S. Archive: Not extant. Synopsis: A woman’s ridiculous monstrosity of a hat nearly scares horses to death and is widely mocked at a picnic. In despair, she vows to destroy it, but somehow the hat keeps finding its way back to her completely intact. Beyond waking life, the hat penetrates her unconscious and haunts her nightmares.

Just a Bad Kid (1912) Company: Thanhouser Co.; Country: U.S. Archive: Not extant. Synopsis: Sometimes colonialism starts at the home front. A “bad kid” is seemingly incorrigible, until a devout farm couple adopts her. Missionaries themselves, they realize that “there were other heathens, right at home.” In the end, whiteness trumps barbarism.

The Lady Police (1912) Company: Lubin Mfg. Co.; Country: U.S.; Cast: Mae Hotely Archive: Not extant. Synopsis: A female police force causes a prison overpopulation crisis by enticing all the men in town to get arrested. The convicts’ wives protest, asserting that a husband’s place is in the home and not in jail. After a heated confrontation between the wives and “lady police,” the men are released.

La Nuova Cameriera è Troppo Bella [The New Maid Is Too Much of a Flirt] (1912) Company: Società Anonima Ambrosio; Country: Italy; Cast: Nilde Baracchi Archive: GBB, CHL, ITB, ITT Synopsis: An episode of the Robinet and Robinette series (starring Baracchi and Marcel Perez), a wife fires her maid for using her toiletries. But the new maid she hires is extremely attractive. Rather than hating on each other, the wife and maid team up and plot to expose and humiliate all the men in the house for their sexual predation.

Pandora’s Box (1912) Dir: Lawrence Trimble; Company: Vitagraph Co. of America; Country: U.S.; Cast: Flora Finch, Kate Price, Lillian Walker Archive: Not extant. Synopsis: The new maid, Pandora, creates a chaotic love triangle when she is unable to resist her curiosity to open someone else’s box—an innocent gift thus becomes the source of a profound misunderstanding. In the end, Pandora is taught a lesson by being tricked into opening a box full of mice! The plot is a bit tedious, but worth it for the ingenious title pun.

A Suffragette in Spite of Himself (1912) Dir: Bannister Merwin; Company: Thomas A. Edison, Inc.; Country: U.S.; Cast: Miriam Nesbitt, Ethel Browning Archive: USW

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Synopsis: The gentleman is a virulent anti-suffragist, but when some boy pranksters place a “Votes for Women” sign on his back, he becomes embroiled in the militant cause. Misrecognized as an activist rabble-rouser, the man is saved from jail by suffragettes, who rise to his defense. Apparently sight gags do have political ramifications.

The Suffragette Sheriff (1912) Dir: George Melford; Company: Kalem Company; Country: U.S.; Cast: Alice Joyce, Jane Wolfe Archive: Not extant. Synopsis: Rattlesnake Bill’s wife is elected sheriff, so he pretends to commit murder to force her resignation—because obviously she wouldn’t execute her own husband! She learns of this ruse and seeks revenge by pretending to go through with the death penalty. But the gallows are nothing more than a tank of water. Women laugh last in this comedy.

When Persistency and Obstinacy Meet (1912) Dir: Van Dyke Brooke; Company: Vitagraph Co. of America; Country: U.S.; Cast: Florence Turner, Edith Halleran Archive: USM, GBB, USW Synopsis: A woman shuns her lover after he insults her dog. He follows her everywhere, even cross-dressing as a woman to infiltrate her theater box. After stalking her for several weeks to no avail, he breaks into her automobile and forces himself upon her until she forgives him for insulting her dog. If only women would be more reasonable, men wouldn’t have to assault them!

When Women Rule (1912) Dir: Joseph J. Sullivan; Company: Selig Polyscope Company; Country: U.S.; Cast: Myrtle Stedman, Agnes Appel Archive: Not extant. Synopsis: Mrs. O’Connell runs for mayor while her husband is saddled with all the housework. Once elected, she reforms the municipal government, starting with the police and fire departments. The effects of suffragette rule are exaggerated, and there are differences of opinion within the film about whether these changes are desirable.

The Cheese Special (1913) Writer: Allen Curtis; Company: Universal Mfg. Co.; Country: U.S.; Cast: Louise Fazenda Archive: Not extant. Synopsis: A comedy that takes place on a beach resort. It marks the debut of comedienne star, Louise Fazenda, who appeared in over 250 films and was widely revered for her country bumpkin caricature.

A Cure for Suffragettes (1913) Dir: James Kirkwood; Writer: Anita Loos; Company: Biograph Co.; Country: U.S.; Cast: Dorothy Gish, Blanche Sweet, Dorothy Bernard, Kathleen Butler, Gertrude Robinson Archive: USM Synopsis: “A farce of suffragettes and comic cops.”

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A Lady and Her Maid (1913) Company: Vitagraph Co. of America; Country: U.S.; Cast: Norma Talmadge, Florence Radinoff, Lillian Walker, Kate Price, Flora Finch Archive: GBB, NLA Synopsis: A homely lady and her oafish maid are not considered very attractive. In despair, the lady vows to commit suicide. When her maid saves her life, the two women treat themselves to a makeover. The effect is astounding: now they rebuff the sexual advances of every man who had once scorned them. In the end, they are so empowered by their transformation that they set off to pursue matrimony with wealthier men of a higher social class.

A Lesson in Jealousy (1913) Dir: Harry Lambart; Writer: Louise Beaudet; Company: Vitagraph Co. of America; Country: U.S.; Cast: Clara Kimball Young Archive: NLA Synopsis: A jealous husband teaches his overly flirtatious wife a lesson.

Biddy on Her Mettle (1913) Company: Komic Pictures Company; Country: U.S. Archive: Not extant. Synopsis: Biddy has true grit (i.e. mettle), but no one appreciates her because she is also such an interloper (or meddler).

How They Got the Vote (1913) Dir: Ashley Miller; Company: Edison Company; Country: U.S.; Cast: Bessie Learn, Elizabeth Miller Archive: Not extant. Synopsis: A man wants to woo the daughter of a suffragette, so he makes a political appeal to her matriarchal family. He visits a magician, who grants him the power to stop time, which he wields as a weapon of protest to negotiate women’s enfranchisement. In the end, he gets the girl, women get the vote, and time is unfrozen.

The Hunger Strike (1913) Company: British & Colonial Kinematograph Co.; Country: UK Archive: Not extant. Synopsis: A suffragette political protester on a hunger strike hallucinates that she attends a large feast while in prison.

Matrimony’s Speed Limit (1913) Dir. Alice Guy-Blaché (Guy); Company: Solax Co.; Country: U.S. Archive: ITG, USW, USB, AUC, FRL, NLA Synopsis: A man must find a wife before his inheritance expires. He runs around frantically proposing to every woman in sight, but tries to kill himself after accidentally proposing to a veiled woman of color. (It turns out that the speed limit to matrimony is racial miscegenation.) Luckily, he is saved by his girlfriend, who arrives just in the nick of time with a preacher in tow.

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Milling the Militants: A Comical Absurdity (1913) Dir: Percy Stow; Company: Clarendon Film Company; Country: UK Archive: GBB Synopsis: A henpecked husband of a militant suffragette fantasizes that he is appointed prime minister and can assume autocratic powers to discipline all the suffragettes who had ever emasculated him.

Miss Mischief (1913) Dir: Lloyd Lonergan; Company: Thanhouser Film Corporation; Country: U.S.; Cast: Muriel Ostriche Archive: USW Synopsis: Home on the family farm after being expelled from boarding school, Miss Mischief hides her father’s spectacles and puts tacks in his rawhide boots, ties a tin can to the dog’s tail, and distracts the boys from their work, but laughs in their faces when they offer to duel for her affections (instead she convinces them to hold a cock fight).

One Can’t Always Tell (1913) Dir: Van Dyke Brooke; Writer: Marguerite Bertsch; Company: Vitagraph Co. of America; Country: U.S.; Cast: Mary Maurice, Kate Price, Lillian Walker, Rosemary Theby, Rose Tapley, Louise Beaudet Archive: Not extant. Synopsis: Three sisters mistake their fastidious but sensibly dressed aunt for the new maid. The aunt convinces the maid to trade places with her; meanwhile, the girls work their “new maid” (i.e., aunt) to the bone, and ruthlessly mock their “aunt” (i.e., the maid) behind her back for her rough manners. The aunt reveals her true identity in a huff and storms off vowing to disinherit her three nieces. The hilarity of shifting appearances becomes a moral lesson about humility.

Pétronille gagne le grand steeple [Petronilla Wins the Great Steeplechase] (1913) Company: Société Française des Films Éclair; Country: France; Cast: Sarah Duhamel Archive: NLA Synopsis: In this episode of the “Pétronille” series (1912–1916), Pétronille substitutes for a horse jockey no more than half her size. To everyone’s astonishment, she wins the steeplechase by leading the other riders on an off-track spree through the city. They whiz alongside moving trains, barge through a canal, and gallop against the busy street traffic. Pétronille’s unwieldy heft turns out to be an advantage for surviving the modernized race course.

Stenographer Troubles (1913) Dir: Frederick Thompson; Company: Vitagraph Co. of America; Country: U.S.; Cast: Florence Turner, Flora Finch, Lillian Walker Archive: USF, NLA Synopsis: The boss is frustrated that his pretty young stenographers just want to chew gum and flirt with the young clerks. He hires a new stenographer, who exhibits the exact same behavior, but also shows interest in flirting with him, so the crisis is resolved.

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A Sweet Deception (1913) Dir: Ralph Ince; Writer: Gladys Rankin; Company: Vitagraph Co. of America; Country: U.S.; Cast: Anita Stewart, Mary Maurice, Louise Beaudet Archive: Not extant. Synopsis: A wife’s desire to go out every night, against the wishes of her husband, puts a strain on their marriage, so they separate. But when mother-in-law visits, they must keep up appearances, which allows them to rekindle the old flame. In the end, they decide “to be more considerate of the other’s likes and dislikes.” (It is unclear what this will entail.)

Thou Shalt Not Rubber (1913) Company: IMP; Country: U.S.; Cast: Louise Fazenda, Billie Bennett, Adelaide Bronti Archive: Not extant. Synopsis: Very little is known of this film. It split a reel with another short comedy titled Hilarities by Hy Mayer. (Presumably rubber refers to writing a rubber check, but it might be a sexual double-entendre.)

Daisy Doodad’s Dial (1914) Dir: Florence Turner and Larry Trimble; Company: Turner; Country: UK; Cast: Florence Turner Archive: GBB, USW Synopsis: A woman trains tirelessly for a face-making competition, but is arrested for public indecency when she makes insane grimaces on a street car. She then shuts herself up in her bedroom and has nightmares that she is visited by a horde of spectral superimpositions of her own comic-horrific face-making.

The Fatal Mallet (1914) Dir: Mack Sennett; Company: Keystone Film Co.; Country: U.S.; Cast: Mabel Normand Archive: ITG, GBB, USL, USF, CAQ, ITB, FRL, DKK, ITT, NLA Synopsis: Three men fight over a girl, throwing bricks and whacking each other over the head with a large mallet. She accidentally gets hit several times, since they seem more concerned with their aggression toward one another than their interest in her. When Charlie steals a moment alone with Mabel, she physically abuses him. Two of the men end up in a pond.

A Florida Enchantment (1914) Dir: Sidney Drew; Writer: Marguerite Bertsch; Company: Vitagraph Co. of America; Country: U.S.; Cast: Edith Storey, Lucille McVey, Ethel Lloyd, Lillian Burns Archive: USW Synopsis: A woman dreams that she inherits magical seeds from Africa that spontaneously turn her into a man. She then forces her black maid to ingest the seeds, but this intersectional sex change erupts in racist minstrelsy. The transformation is even rougher for her husband, who almost gets lynched by an angry transphobic mob. Fortunately, the wife wakes up from her stimulating dream just in time to save him from the gallows.

The Indian Suffragettes (1914) Dir: Frank Montgomery; Company: Kalem; Country: U.S.; Cast: Mona Darkfeather

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Archive: Not extant. Synopsis: Dishwater, a Native American woman, is radicalized as a suffragette but then rethinks her politics during a hunting expedition.

Mabel’s Strange Predicament (1914) Dir: Mabel Normand; Company: Keystone Film Co.; Country: U.S.; Cast: Mabel Normand, Alice Davenport Archive: ITG, DKK, ESM, ARF, GBB FRL, USF, FRB Synopsis: Mabel is harassed by a drunken hobo in a hotel lobby (in a very early appearance of Charlie Chaplin’s tramp character). Locked out of her own room, she hides under a stranger’s bed and causes him to get beaten up by his wife, who suspects adultery.

Nell’s Eugenic Wedding (1914) Company: Komic Pictures Company; Country: U.S.; Cast: Fay Tincher Archive: Not extant. Synopsis: The Moving Picture World’s review really says it all: “There is nothing funny or elevating in having a man eat soap and vomit all over creation as the result of his diet. Because most people will take this view it may be said that NELL’S EUGENIC WEDDING does not belong.” (Presumably this last line is a pun on eugenics.)

Pétronille suffragette (1914) Company: Société Française des Films Éclair; Country: France; Cast: Sarah Duhamel Archive: Not extant. Synopsis: Little is known about this episode of the “Pétronille” series—featuring a popular comedienne character who typically appeared alongside other series clowns including Gavroche (Paul Bertho), Casimir (Lucien Bataille), and Onésime (Ernest Bourbon). Other extant episodes in the Pétronille series include Gavroche et Pétronille Visitent Berlin (Gavroche and Pétronille Visit Berlin [1913]), Le Singe de Pétronille (Pétronille’s Monkey [1914]), and Le Désespoir de Pétronille (Pétronille’s Despair [1915]).

Tillie’s Punctured Romance (1914) Dir: Mack Sennett; Company: Keystone Film Co.; Country: U.S.; Cast: Marie Dressler, Mabel Normand Archive: USL Synopsis: A country bumpkin named Tillie is lured by a man to the big city, where she is abused and exploited for her money. She gets drunk, which is fun for her, but also lands her in jail. She turns out to be an heiress, so the con man and his girlfriend, who pretends to be a housemaid, convince Tillie to take over her rich uncle’s villa. When the uncle, who is believed to be dead, surprisingly returns, Tillie and Mabel join forces and Charlie gets arrested. The future is bright for female friendship in America’s first featurelength film comedy.

Ethel Gets Consent (1915) Company: Komic Pictures Company; Country: U.S.; Cast: Fay Tincher Archive: Not extant.

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Synopsis: Chapter 17 of the “Ed” series. Consent is not what you think it is here. Ed’s potential fiancée, Ethel, struggles to get his father’s consent for their marriage—which she extracts due to a misunderstanding between Ed’s parents. They end up in a restaurant, with the two men hiding under the table, eventually negotiating their consent. (Presumably Ethel also consents, but this is never specified.)

Love, Speed, and Thrills (1915) Dir: Mack Sennett and Dell Henderson; Company: Keystone Film Co.; Country: U.S.; Cast: Minta Durfee Archive: USL, NLA, DEK, FRL, CAQ, GBB, USB, USF, USW, USR, ARF Synopsis: In this episode of the “Ambrose” series, Mr. Ambrose has the misfortune of saving an evil villain from hanging himself. Ambrose invites this bad egg, Mr. Walrus, into his home, where Walrus proceeds to abduct Mrs. Ambrose, spurring a multi-car, extended chase sequence to save Ambrose’s wife from rape and adultery (never mind that she falls off the high-speed bike repeatedly during the chase).

Tillie’s Tomato Surprise (1915) Dir: Howell Hansell; Company: Lubin Mfg. Co.; Country: U.S.; Cast: Marie Dressler, Eleanor Fairbanks, Clara Lambert Miller, Sara McVicker Archive: USW Synopsis: It is time at last for Tillie Toddles to come out as a debutante, but her gauche instincts threaten her social standing. She performs an outrageous parody of an Isadora Duncan dance at her coming-out party, and then disappears into the sky after volunteering to test “the Bat’s” flying apparatus. The “tomato surprise” refers to Tillie’s financial inheritance: an ugly store-bought cushion pin that she tries to regift to her eccentric aunt.

Teddy at the Throttle (1917) Dir: Clarence G. Badger; Company: Keystone Film Co.; Country: U.S.; Cast: Gloria Swanson Archive: ITG, USR, USW, USM, CAO, USL, USF, CAQ, FRL, DEK, NLA Synopsis: A woman tied to the railroad tracks is saved by a dog in a climactic struggle to protect her fiancé’s inheritance from swindlers.

Tillie Wakes Up (1917) Dir: Harry Davenport; Writer: Marion Frances; Company: World Film Corp.; Country: U.S.; Cast: Marie Dressler, Rubye De Remer, Ruth Barrett Archive: BEB, USM, USL, USF, FRL Synopsis: The Tinkelpaws and Pipkins are neighbors that have one thing in common: a failing marriage and eyes for the others’ spouses. Through a series of misunderstandings, the various spouses all become jealous of each other. This reforms their behavior and saves both marriages.

Mickey (1918) Dir: F. Richard Jones, James Young; Company: Mabel Normand Feature Film Co.; Country: U.S.; Cast: Mabel Normand, Minta Durfee, Laura La Varnie, Minnie Devereaux

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Archive: BEB, USW, USM, GBB, ROB, ITG, USL, MXN Synopsis: Mickey, an orphan and tomboy ward of a gold miner, is sent to live with her aunt in the city to become a respectable lady. However, her aunt has financial troubles, and plans to marry off her own daughter to a wealthy mine owner, who is incidentally in love with Mickey. On the cusp of wild adolescence and normative adulthood, Mickey uses her gender mobility to navigate a very sticky libidinal arrangement.

It (1927) Dir: Clarence G. Badger; Writer: Elinor Glyn; Company: Famous Players-Lasky Co.; Country: U.S.; Cast: Clara Bow, Priscilla Bonner, Jacqueline Gadson, Julia Swayne Gordon, Elinor Glynn Archive: USR, USW, GBB, USL, USF, SES Synopsis: “A salesgirl with plenty of ‘it’ (sex appeal) pursues a handsome playboy.” A more precise definition of “it” would emphasize the contradiction between promiscuous sexuality and puritanical modesty that can only be resolved through marriage.

The Patsy (1928) Dir: King Vidor; Company: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer; Country: U.S.; Cast: Marion Davies, Marie Dressler, Jane Winton Archive: USR, USW, USL, ITT, AUC Synopsis: An awkward teen, hopelessly in love with her older sister’s boyfriend, convinces her family that she is clinically insane (i.e., a female hysteric) while impersonating various celebrity vamps to try to seduce the sister’s boyfriend, whom she knows she loves because both are interested in architecture (the sister is uninterested in architecture).

Synthetic Sin (1929) Dir: William A. Seiter; Company: First National Pictures, Inc.; Country: U.S.; Cast: Colleen Moore Archive: ITC Synopsis: Betty Fairfax is an aspirational starlet who seeks to gain gritty real-life experience by moving to an urban boarding house that is also a notorious gang den. Her black maid struggles to explain to her that not all violence is make-believe, as the dangers of slapstick become a matter of racial perception. In the end, Betty learns that some violence is real and therefore decides to give up acting and marry a theater director.

COMIC SERIES “LÉONTINE” (OR “BETTY”) SERIES (25 episodes, 1910–1912) Company: Pathé Comica; Country: France Synopsis: Known as “Betty” in the United States, and nicknamed “Titine” in France, perhaps no other comic character took greater joy in mischief and destruction than Betty. Sadly, the actress who played her is still unidentified. (She also appeared in other Pathé comedies, such as The New Air Far and Precipitous Cleaning.) These Betty/Léontine films are truly insane and hilarious. In Betty’s Boat, she attempts to sail a toy boat in her employer’s bathtub and ends up flooding the whole house. Betty’s Electric Battery lives up to the explosive promises of its title. Betty nearly gets herself lynched after playing a series of cruel pranks on the

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town folk in Betty Pulls the String—narrowly escaping the gallows by trading places with a scarecrow. As The Moving Picture World summarized the series in 1910 (before taking a sharp U-Turn and censoring Betty for its anarchic roughhousing), “If she is as vigorous, not to say destructive, in the entire series, few people or anything else will be left when the series is finished. The way she annihilates everything in sight because she can’t have her way is a caution. . . . It will be unknown which misfortunes will follow her appearance.” Extant Episodes:

Les Ficelles de Léontine [Betty Pulls the Strings] (1910) Archive: NLA

La pile électrique de Léontine [Betty’s Electric Battery] (1910) Archive: FRC

Léontine est incorrigible [Betty is Incorrigible] (1910) Archive: FRC

Léontine en apprentissage [Betty Tries to Learn a Trade] (1910) Archive: GBB

Léontine ne sortira pas [Betty Won’t Go Out] (1910) Archive: FRC, FRB

Léontine en vacances [Betty’s Holidays] (1910) Archive: FRC, FRB, AUC

Léontine déménage [Betty’s Moving Day] (1910) Archive: FRC, FRL

Léontine en pension [Betty’s Board] (1910) Archive: FRC, GBB

Les Malices de Léontine [Betty’s Tricks] (1911) Archive: GBB

Léontine a des roulettes [Betty Rolls Along] (1911) Archive: FRC, FRB

Léontine, enfant terrible [Betty, Terrible Child] (1911) Archive: FRC, FRB

Léontine s’envole [Betty Flies Away] (1911) Archive: FRC

Rosalie et Léontine vont au Théatre [Jane and Betty Go to the Theater] (1911) Archive: GBB, DEK, FRE

Le Bateau de Léontine [Betty’s Boat] (1911) Archive: SES, FRC, FRB, NLA

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Léontine Garde la Maison [Betty Guards the House] (1912) Archive: FRC, FRL Not Extant Episodes:

Les Pétards de Léontine [Betty’s Fireworks] (1910) Les Tomates de Léontine [Betty’s Tomatoes] (1910) Léontine Rebelle [Rebellious Betty] (1910) Pour Surprendre Léontine [Betty Is Surprised] (1910) Léontine Est Punie [Betty Is Punished] (1910) Léontine Devient Trottin [Betty Becomes a Tramp] (1910) Les Petits Frères de Léontine [Betty’s Little Brothers] (1910) Léontine Va Faire du Patin à Glace [Betty Goes Ice Skating] (1910) Les Farces de Léontine [Betty’s Jokes] (1911) Les Nouvelles Inventions de Léontine [Betty’s New Inventions] (1912) “TILLY” SERIES (18 episodes, 1910–1915) Dir: Lewin Fitzhamon; Company: Hepworth Mfg Co; Country: UK; Cast: Alma Taylor, Chrissie White Archive: GBB Synopsis: Tilly the Tomboy (Alma Taylor) is an adolescent prankster, a public menace, and an avid cross-dresser. She frequently appears alongside her best friend Sally (Chrissie White). Tilly’s antics often have a feminist politics. For example, Tilly helps expose local political corruption in Tilly at the Election. She and her buddy Sally commandeer a fire truck (a profession forbidden to women) in Tilly and the Fire Engines. She cross-dresses in at least several episodes, including Tilly in a Boarding House and Tilly Works for a Living. She and Sally save the maid from sexual assault in When Tilly’s Uncle Flirted, in which they play pranks on their uncle until he learns a lesson about not exploiting his position of power. Unfortunately, several episodes in the series are no longer extant because Cecil Hepworth destroyed them in order to extract their silver nitrate amid financial bankruptcy in the 1920s—but many of these films survive! Extant Episodes:

Tilly the Tomboy Visits the Poor (1910) Archive: GBB

Tilly the Tomboy Buys Linoleum (1910) Archive: GBB

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Tilly’s Party (1910) Archive: GBB

Tilly and the Fire Engines (1911) Archive: GBB, FRB

Tilly in a Boarding House (1912) Archive: NLA Not Extant Episodes:

Tilly the Tomboy Goes Boating (1910) Tilly at the Election (1910) Tilly’s Unsympathetic Uncle (1911) When Tilly’s Uncle Flirted (1911) Tilly at the Seaside (1911) Tilly—the Matchmaker (1911) Tilly and the Mormon Missionary (1911) Tilly and the Smugglers (1911) Tilly and the Dogs (1912) Tilly Works for a Living (1912) Tilly’s Breaking-Up Party (1913) Tilly at the Football Match (1914) Tilly and the Nut (1915) “CUNÉGONDE” SERIES (24 episodes, 1911–1913) Company: Lux; Country: France Synopsis: Starring an unidentified actress, Cunégonde (a pun on the French and Latin terms for female genitalia) is an abject woman. She typically appears as a housemaid— though sometimes as a jealous housewife or a sad old spinster. In Cunégonde Is Too Curious, her head is trapped in a window frame while village children throw rotten vegetables at her. In Cunégonde Has Visitors, she and her family gleefully demolish the master’s house under the auspices of cleaning it. The politics of Cunégonde’s antics thus swerve from sadly objectifying to liberatingly anarchic. Extant Episodes:

Cunégonde Femme Cochère [Cunégonde Female Coachman] (1911) Archive: NLA

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Cunégonde Membre De La Spa [Cunégonde Member of the Spa] (1911) Archive: FRB

Cunégonde Aime Son Maître [Cunégonde Loves Her Master] (1912) Archive: NLA

Cunégonde Femme Crampon [Cunégonde Won’t Let Her Husband Go Out Alone] (1912) Archive: NLA

Cunégonde Femme du Monde [Cunégonde Woman of the World] (1912) Archive: NLA

Cunégonde Recoit sa Famille [Cunégonde Has Visitors] (1912) Archive: NLA

Cunégonde Jalouse [Cunégonde Is Jealous] (1912) Archive: NLA

Cunégonde Ramoneur [Cunégonde Chimney Sweep] (1912) Archive: FRL

Cunégonde Trop Curieuse [Cunégonde Is Too Curious] (1912) Archive: NLA

Cunégonde Fait du Spiritisme [Cunégonde Practices Spiritualism] (1913) “LEA” SERIES (1910–1916) Company: Società Italiana Cines; Country: Italy; Cast: Lea Giunchi Synopsis: Lea was a feminist rabble-rouser, a hilarious prankster, and an athletic modern woman. Played by Lea Giunchi—a circus performer turned film star and leftist feminist activist—the character Lea appeared in dozens of Italian films from 1910 to 1916. In addition to helming her own series, Lea was also a regular in the Kri Kri series (starring Raymond Dandy), in memorable episodes such as Kri Kri Is Bald, Kri Kri, Lea and the Donkey, and Kri Kri Commits Suicide. In her own series, Lea episodically uses her joyful sense of humor and penchant for destruction to combat the stilted gender norms of bourgeois femininity. For example, in Lea and the Ball of Wool, Lea destroys her parents’ home as the result of a misplaced ball of yarn. When she is forced to stay in and knit instead of reading, she launches on a fast-motion rampage to find her lost ball of wool, which turns out to be attached to her back. Disguise and trickery are prolific themes in the Lea series—in Lea the Doll she overcomes the disapproval of her boyfriend’s parents by disguising herself as a large mechanical doll. She does pratfalls at his wedding ceremony, and sneakily signs the marriage papers on behalf of her boyfriend’s illiterate bride (disproving the common wisdom that women are less trouble when inanimate). In Lea’s Trick, she wards off an arranged marriage to her cousin by donning a fat suit. The cause of feminist activism is frequently thematized throughout the series, in episodes such as Lea, the Suffragette and Lea Wants a Vote. The surviving films in this series are so unimaginably funny, it boggles the mind that Lea Giunchi is not better remembered today.

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Extant Episodes:

Lea in Banca [Lea at the Bank] (1910) Archive: ITC

Lea In Ufficio [Lea in Office] (1911) Archive: ITB

Lea Salva la Posizione [Lea Finds a Way Out] (1911) Archive: ITN

Lea Sui Pattini [Lea Skating] (1911) Archive: ITC, NLA

Lea Spacca Tutto [Lea Breaks Everything] (1912) Archive: ITC

Riposo Festivo [The Gay Deceivers] (1912) Archive: NLA

Kri Kri e Lea military [Lea and Kri Kri in the Military] (1913) Archive: NLA

Lea Bambola [Lea the Doll] (1913) Archive: NLA

Lea E Il Gimitolo [Lea and the Ball of Wool] (1913) Archive: USW, ITT, GBB, ITB Incomplete List of Not Extant Episodes:

Lea in Convitto [Lea at Boarding School] (1910) Lea Femminista [Lea, the Suffragette] (1910) Lea va a Scuola [Naughty Lea] (1911) Lea fa Ginnastica [Lea as a Gymnast] (1911) Lea Disinfettata [Lea Disinfected] (1911) Lea Gelosa [Lea Is Jealous] (1912) Lea Modernista [Lea Wants a Vote] (1912) Lea non sa Ballare [Lea Learns to Dance] (1912) Lea Si Diverte [Lea’s Joke] (1912) Lea Dottoressa [Lea the Doctor] (1913) Lea Stiratrice di Kri Kri [Lea, the Laundress, and Bloomer] (1913)

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Lea Cameriera [Lea as Cook] (1914) Lea Indomabile [Indomitable Lea] (1916) “ROSALIE” (OR “JANE”) SERIES (1911–1912) Dir: Roméo Bosetti; Company: Pathé Frères; Country: France; Cast: Sarah Duhamel Synopsis: A heavyset clown with incredible slapstick agility, Sarah Duhamel was best known for playing two characters, Rosalie (or Jane) and Pétronille. Both make sight gags of the hilarity of utter destruction. In Jane on Strike, she leads a mutiny of housemaids who demolish the kitchen, spoil the food, and serve up a dinner of live rabbit, uncaged mice, and a petroleum bottle—and after exploding the kitchen, Rosalie spreads itching powder all over her employers’ bed sheets. She knocks down the walls of her new apartment in Jane Moves In and nearly starts a hysterical cholera epidemic in Jane Doesn’t Have Cholera. She also has an uncanny relationship with inanimate objects, which frequently spring to life in tandem with her own demonic energies. For example, when she is dispossessed of all her belongings, her pawned off things all follow her back home in Jane and Her Faithful Furniture. Her body is a force of nature, and there is no possible movement or transformation that cannot take place in the world of her films. Extant Episodes:

C’est le Faute de Rosalie [It’s Jane’s Fault] (1911) Archive: NLA

La Jour de L’An de Rosalie [Jane’s Birthday] (1911) Archive: FRC

Little Moritz Aime Rosalie [Little Maurice Loves Jane] (1911) Archive: USR, FRS, FRB, FRL, NLA

Little Moritz Enlève Rosalie [Little Maurice Drops Jane] (1911) Archive: ITG, FRS, DEK, FRC, FRL, FRB

Little Moritz Demande Rosalie en Mariage [Little Maurice Proposes to Jane] (1911) Archive: USR, FRS, FRB, FRL, NLA

Little Moritz Épouse Rosalie [Little Maurice Marries Jane] (1911) Archive: ARF, GBB, FRC, NLA

Rosalie a la Maladie du Sommeil [Jane Has Sleeping Sickness] (1911) Archive: FRB

Rosalie fait du Sabotage [Jane on Strike] (1911) Archive: USR

Rosalie en Ménage [Jane Moves In] (1911) Archive: BEB, NZW, FRB

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Rosalie et Léontine vont au Théatre [Jane and Betty Go to the Theater] (1911) Archive: GBB, DEK, FRE

Rosalie et ses Meubles Fidèles [Jane and Her Faithful Furniture] (1911) Archive: NLA

Rosalie et son Phonograph [Jane and Her Phonograph] (1911) Archive: NLA

Rosalie n’a pas le cholera [Jane Doesn’t Have Cholera] (1911) Archive: FRB

Rosalie Veut Maigrir [Jane Wants to Lose Weight] (1911) Archive: DEK

Un Ravalement Précipité [Precipitous Collapse] (1911) Archive: NLA

La Nuit des Noces de Rosalie [Jane’s Wedding Night] (1912) Archive: FRC, FRB

Les Araignées de Rosalie [Jane’s Spiders] (1912) Archive: MXN

Pour Feter Rosalie [Celebrating Jane] (1912) Archive: GBB, FRB

Rosalie fait du spiritisme [Jane Gets into Spiritualism] (1912) Archive: FRB, FRL, USF

Rosalie Danseuse [Jane the Dancer] (1912) Archive: DEK

Rosalie vend son silence [Jane Sells Her Silence] (1912) Archive: FRL, FRB

Notes

Introduction 1. The batacchio was a popular prop of the commedia dell’arte. Consisting of two adjoining wooden slats, it could be used to hit another actor, giving rise to a disproportionately violent sound effect while delivering a relatively mild physical blow to the body. 2. Feminist historians have established and recuperated the significant participation of women in every aspect of silent film production. For two key examples, see Jane Gaines, Radha Vastal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project (New York: Center for Digital Research and Scholarship, Columbia University Libraries, 2013) https://wfpp.cdrs.columbia.edu/; Denise Lowe, An Encyclopedic Dictionary of Women in Early American Films, 1895–1930 (New York: Haworth, 2005). 3. Henri Bergson, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic (New York: MacMillan, 1911); Milkhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2009). 4. Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16 (1975). 5. Mary Ann Doane, The Desire to Desire: The Woman’s Film of the 1940s (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987); Kaja Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008); Teresa de Lauretis, Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984); and Annette Kuhn, Women’s Pictures: Feminism and Cinema (New York: Routledge, 1982). 6. Slavoj Žižek, For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor (London: Verso, 2008), 237. 7. Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 2nd ed. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014), 224. https://feministkilljoys.com/

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8. Lauren Berlant, “Humorlessness (Three Monologues and a Hairpiece),” Critical Inquiry 43, no. 2 (Winter 2017): 305–40. 9. Feminist laughter is sometimes even criminalized. In May 2017, a Code Pink (Women for Peace) protester, Desiree Fairooz, was convicted for laughing at attorney general Jeff Sessions during his senate confirmation hearings. See Desiree Fairooz, “I’m Facing Jail Time for Laughing at Jeff Sessions. I Regret Nothing,” Vox, May 8, 2017. 10. See notes 32-24. 11. Vicki Callahan, ed. Reclaiming the Archive: Feminism and Film History (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2010); Jane M. Gaines, “On Not Narrating the History of Feminism and Film,” Feminist Media Histories 2.3 (2016): 6–31; Christine Gledhill, ed., special dossier on “Transnationalizing Women’s Film History,” Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media 51.2 (2010). 12. Wendy Brown, States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 55. 13. Brown, States of Injury, 53. 14. Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York: Routledge, 1997). 15. Andrea Dworkin and Catherine Mackinnon, Pornography and Civil Rights: A New Day for Women’s Equality (Minneapolis, MN: Organizing Against Pornography, 1988). 16. Rebecca Krefting, “Political Correctness Isn’t Killing Comedy, It’s Making It Better,” Zócalo, September 19, 2016, http://www.zocalopublicsquare.org/2016/09/19/political -correctness-isnt-killing-comedy-making-better/ideas/nexus/. 17. Lindy West, Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman (New York: Hachette, 2016). 18. “Un Regard Oblique” (Robert Doisneau, 1948) depicts a bourgeois couple regarding a painting through a shop window: the woman faces the window display (which is concealed from the view of the spectator but presumably modest in content) while the man gazes off to the side at a salacious painting of a nude woman. 19. Mary Ann Doane, Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis (New York: Routledge, 1991), 39. 20. “Generally speaking, a tendentious joke calls for three people: in addition to the one who makes the joke, there must be a second who is taken as the object of the hostile or sexual aggressiveness, and a third in whom the joke’s aim of producing pleasure is fulfilled.” These dynamics are always gendered: the male jokester and male laughing spectator form a libidinal pact at the expense of the objectified woman, as a compensation for their prohibition against more direct sexual contact. As Freud puts it, “The course of events may be thus described. When the first person finds his libidinal impulse inhibited by the woman, he develops a hostile trend against that second person and calls on the originally interfering third person as his ally. Through the first person’s smutty speech the woman is exposed before the third, who, as listener, has now been bribed by the effortless satisfaction of his own libido.” Sigmund Freud, Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious (London: Routledge, 1960), 118.

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21. Doane, Femmes Fatales, 41. 22. Modleski emphasizes the distinction between “getting” the joke and deriving pleasure from it. She argues, “Surely a woman (as woman) may at least ‘get’ the joke even if she doesn’t appreciate it. . . . It even seems reasonable to suppose that the oppressed person may see more deeply into the joke than the oppressor is often able or willing to do.” Tania Modleski, The Women Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock and Feminist Theory (New York: Routledge, 2005), 24. 23. Doane, Femmes Fatales, 41. 24. Constance Balides, “Scenarios of Exposure in the Practice of Everyday Life: Women in the Cinema of Attractions,” Screen (1993), 28. 25. See Miriam Hansen, Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994); Judith Mayne, Woman at the Keyhole: Feminism and Women’s Cinema: (Theories of Representation and Difference) (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990); Lauren Rabinovitz, For the Love of Pleasure: Women, Movies, and Culture in Turn-of-the-Century Chicago (New Brunswick: Rutgers, 1998); Lynne Kirby, Parallel Tracks: The Railroad and Silent Cinema (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997). 26. Charles Baudelaire, The Essence of Laughter (New York: Meridian Books, 1956); Georges Bataille, The Unfinished System of Nonknowledge, trans. Michelle Kendall and Stuart Kendall (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001); Wyndham Lewis, “The Meaning of the Wild Body,” in The Wild Body: A Soldier of Humour and Other Stories (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1928). 27. Georges Bataille and Annette Michelson, “Un-knowing: From Laughter to Tears,” October 36 (Spring, 1986): 89–102. 28. According to Williams, “body genres” emphasize “the spectacle of a body caught up in the grip of intense sensation or emotion . . . [and] ecstasy.” Moreover, “it seems to be the case that the success of these genres is measured by the degree to which the audience sensation mimics what is seen on the screen.” Linda Williams, “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess,” in Film Quarterly 44.2 (Summer 1991): 4. 29. For other examples of feminist phenomenological film theories that pursue the intersections between the eruption of feeling and the materialization of insight, but to the exclusion of humor, see Vivian Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004); Laura U. Marks, The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000). 30. Bakhtin emphasizes carnival’s subversion of hierarchies (practiced through rituals such as mock crownings), the mockery of official culture (such as ecclesiastical rites), and the celebration of the bodily lower stratum. He writes, “The essential principle of grotesque realism is degradation, that is, the lowering of all that is high, spiritual, ideal, abstract.” Bakhtin, Rabelais, 19. 31. For example, Mary Russo accuses Bakhtin of excluding women from most of his analysis, with one notable example: “the pregnant senile hags” on comic terra-cotta vases, which Russo describes as “the strongest expression of the grotesque” (1). She thereby

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33.

34. 35. 36. 37.

38. 39. 40. 41.

42. 43. 44.

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asserts a subtle alignment in Bakhtin’s writings between female corporeality and the carnivalesque-grotesque. Mary Russo, The Female Grotesque: Risk, Excess, Modernity (United Kingdom: Routledge, 1994). Natalie Zemon Davis, “Women on Top,” in Society and Culture in Early Modern France, Eight Essays (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1975); Russo, Female Grotesque. Alison Kibler, Rank Ladies Gender and Cultural Hierarchy in American Vaudeville (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999); Victoria Sturtevant, A Great Big Girl Like Me: The Films of Marie Dressler (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2009); Patricia Mellencamp, High Anxiety: Catastrophe, Scandal, Age, and Comedy (Arts and the Politics of the Everyday) (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992); Linda Mizejewski, Pretty/Funny: Women Comedians and Body Politics (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2015). Kathleen Rowe, The Unruly Woman (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011), 1–2. Hélène Cixous, “Laugh of the Medusa,” Signs 1 (1976), 878. Rowe, The Unruly Woman, 3. Rowe describes this spectacle: “Roseanne Arnold, the two-hundred-plus-pound star of the number one show on prime-time television, screeches the national anthem at a San Diego Padres baseball game, grabs her crotch, spits on the ground, then makes an obscene gesture to outraged fans booing from the stands” (3). Rowe, The Unruly Woman, 3. Bakhtin, Rabelais, 19. Tillie’s Punctured Romance (Keystone, 1914). In A Great Big Girl Like Me, Victoria Sturtevant emphasizes Dressler’s “assault” on the norms of both gender and genre, compiling close readings of Dressler films spanning from her Keystone shorts (such as Tillie’s Punctured Romance, Tillie’s Tomato Surprise, Tillie Wakes Up) to her independent Marie Dressler productions (The Agonies of Agnes, Fired, The Red Cross Nurse) and to her many talkie roles playing across from Moran, her fellow Keystone veteran (such as Prosperity, Reducing, Politics). Sturtevant, Great Big Girl, 35. Bakhtin, Rabelais, 7. For examples of scholarship on silent film slapstick and class politics, see The Fun Factory: The Keystone Film Company and the Emergence of Mass Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009); Christopher Beach, Class, Language, and American Film Comedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). See Diane Waldman’s critical book review of Positive Images: A Guide to Non-Sexist Films for Young People. Waldman poses the question pointedly: “In ascribing positive characteristics to certain depictions are we claiming a truth value for them?” “There’s More to a Positive Image Than Meets the Eye,” Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media 18 (1978), 32. Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality Volume 1: An Introduction (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), 17. Foucault, History of Sexuality, 18.

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48. For key readings on the longstanding, pernicious myth that “women aren’t funny,” see Linda Mizejewski, Pretty/Funny; Kristen Anderson Wagner, “‘Have Women a Sense of Humor?’: Comedy and Femininity in Early Twentieth Century Film,” Velvet Light Trap (Fall 2011), and Alessanda Stanley’s “Who Says Women Aren’t Funny?” in Vanity Fair (March 2008), a response to Christopher Hitchen’s notorious 2007 piece “Why Women Aren’t Funny” in Vanity Fair (January 2007). 49. “What! Never,” San Francisco Bulletin, (March 1888), suppl. p. 1. 50. Miriam Hansen defines early cinema as an “alternative public sphere” for women, immigrants, and working-class spectators: “A space apart and a space in between. It was a site for the imaginative negotiation of the gaps . . . between traditional standards of sexual behavior and modern dreams of romance and sexual expression, between freedom and anxiety” (Babel and Babylon, 118). 51. Bergson, Laughter. 52. Virginia Woolf, “The Value of Laughter,” in The Essays of Virginia Woolf. Volume I. 1904–1912, ed. Andrew McNeillie (London: Hogarth Press, 1986). 53. Woolf, “The Value of Laughter,” 60. 54. Woolf, 60. 55. See Kristen Anderson Wagner, “Pie Queens and Virtuous Vamps,” in A Companion to Film Comedy, ed. Andrew Horton and Joanne E. Rapf (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2013); Steve Massa, Lame Brains and Lunatics (Albany: Bear Manor Media, 2013); Jennifer Bean, Flickers of Desire: Movie Stars of the 1910s (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2011); Lori Landay, Madcaps, Screwballs, and Con Women: The Female Trickster in American Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998). 56. The Keystone Company was formed in 1914 by Mack Sennett, who had previously made a number of film comedies for Biograph. 57. Gale Henry, who was allegedly the inspiration for the character Olive Oyl in the Popeye comic strip, appeared in over 250 film comedies from 1914 to 1927: from the comic detective series Lady Baffles and Detective Duck (Allen Curtis, 1915) to the mental illness themed domestic comedy Soup to Nuts (Harry Watson, 1925). 58. Vitagraph took advantage of Cissy Fitzgerald’s signature saucy wink, featuring her in films such as The Win(k)some Widow (1914), Cissy’s Innocent Wink (1915), and How Cissy Made Good (1915).

1. Early Cinema and the Comedy of Female Catastrophe 1. Popular British theater comedienne Laura Bayley appeared in at least eight films produced by her husband, G. A. Smith, between 1897 and 1903, including The X-Ray Fiend (1897), A Kiss in the Tunnel (1899), and Let Me Dream Again (1900), with Mary Jane as her last role. Laura’s sisters Eva, Florence, and Blanche were also popular music hall performers. Eva appeared in several G. A. Smith film comedies, including The Old Maid’s Valentine (1900), Grandma Threading Her Needle (1900), and Scandal Over the Teacups (1900).

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2. Peter Flynn, “How Bridget Was Framed: The Irish Domestic in Early Cinema: 1895–1917,” Cinema Journal, 50.2 (Winter 2011), 1–20. 3. Paraffin wax was first created in the 1850s and became commonly used in American households throughout the early twentieth century. Kerosene was widely used as a source of fuel in the 1870s (replacing whale oil) and was reportedly responsible for nearly half the fires in New York City in the early 1880s. Otto Bettmann, The Good Old Days: They Were Terrible! (New York: Random House, 1974). 4. Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (New York: International Publishers, 2006), 15. 5. “The Perils of Crinoline,” New York Times, March 16, 1858, 4. 6. “Crinoline vs. Matrimony,” Wooster Republican, June 9, 1859, 3. 7. “The Crinoline Terror,” New York Times, February 14, 1893. This article reports on attempts to legislate prohibitions on “the sale, loan, or wearing of hoop-skirts.” 8. New York Times, February 5, 1893. 9. New York Times, July 21 1912. 10. This information draws on Susan Strasser’s research in Never Done: A History of American Housework (New York: Holt, 2000). 11. Strasser, Never Done. 12. Strasser, 58, 352. 13. Crinoline dress fashions were often associated with ideals of Victorian prudery. As Shannon Bell argues in “Victimless Leather,” these fashion conventions epitomized “the simultaneous excess and containment of wealthy, Victorian women” (64). Unlike nineteenth-century American women’s homes, which seemed to be littered with deadly booby traps for crinoline dress wearers, “It was widely suggested in Victorian times that doorways and staircases would have to be redesigned for the accommodation of the crinoline” (63). 14. Virginia Woolf, Orlando (United Kingdom: Hogarth, 1928). 15. “Paris Gossip,” New York Times, July 27, 1857. 16. “A Crinoline Death,” American Traveler, September 19, 1863, 3. 17. “News/Opinion,” Albany Journal, February 24, 1863, 2. 18. Georges Bataille and Annette Michelson, “Un-knowing: From Laughter to Tears” October, vol. 36 (Spring, 1986), 89–102. 19. Bataille, “Un-Knowing: Laughter and Tears,” 90. 20. Freud argues that one cannot laugh at one’s own joke. In order to ensure that one’s joke is truly funny and insightful, there must be a laughing spectator: the witness who laughs at a joke and confirms that its insights are foremost communicable. Freud refers to this as the joke’s “condition of intelligibility.” Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (London: Routledge, 1960), 286. 21. As Anca Parvulescu puts it in Laughter: Notes on a Passion, “The experience of laughter teaches Bataille an important lesson: sovereign is he who knows when to lose his head.” Parvulescu associates Bataille’s metaphor of decapitation with the Medusa-Perseus myth, providing a feminist spin. Laughter: Notes on a Passion (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2010), 85.

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22. Lisa Trahair aptly and succinctly summarizes Bataille’s complex notion of comic sovereignty as “the method relating restricted economy to the effects of general economy,” thereby opening discourses of determinate knowledge to the effects of unknowing and the unknowable. Trahair continues: “The unconscious can thus be conceived as the means of turning sense into nonsense—a psychical structure the very function of which is to carry out the ‘inner ruination’ that Bataille seeks to invoke with his notion of comic sovereignty.” The Comedy of Philosophy: Sense and Nonsense in Early Cinematic Slapstick (Albany: SUNY Press, 2007), 105. 23. The Unfinished System of Nonknowledge is a collection of Bataille’s writings, essays, short stories, and aphorisms. Many of the writings published in this volume follow up on Bataille’s La Somme Athéologique: a self-professed “mystical” and critical multi-volume response to Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologica. Georges Bataille, The Unfinished System of Nonknowledge, trans. Michelle Kendall and Stuart Kendall (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001). 24. “One of the most remarkable aspects of the domain of the unforeseeable unknown is given in the laughable, in the objects that incite in us this effect of intimate overturning, of suffocating surprise, that we call laughter.” Georges Bataille, The Unfinished System of Nonknowledge, 133. 25. It is worth noting that Bataille’s experiments with unknowing often involved risky and dubiously consensual sex with women whose agency is negated by Bataille’s avowed politics of ego-abandonment. 26. Miriam Hansen, Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994). 27. An immigrant from Cookstown in Tyrone County, Ireland, Mary Mallon (better known as “Typhoid Mary”) was identified as an asymptomatic carrier of the pathogen associated with typhoid fever. She was accused of infecting over fifty people (several of whom died) throughout her career as a cook in New York City, and was twice forcibly quarantined. She also inspired numerous cultural caricatures in print and film. Flynn, “How Bridget Was Framed.” 28. Milkhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2009), 283 29. Bakhtin, 50. 30. “A Shocking Incident,” Biograph Bulletin, 55 (Nov. 27 1905): 191. 31. Although there were many efforts to make women’s corsets more elastic and to ban tight-lacing practices in the mid- to late-nineteenth centuries, fashion trends often dictated the most dangerous extremes of corsetry (for which female vanity was always blamed). There were also reported deaths from tight-lacing and extreme corsetry. For example, see “Death from Tight Lacing,” Augusta Chronicle, November 12, 1888, 6. 32. “Dr. Herman’s Act Novel and Funny,” Variety (Jan. 1911): 32. 33. “Enlivened the Play: Sentiment and Impromptu Humor at a Moving Picture Show,” Hobart Daily Republican, June 3, 1914: 2.

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34. Lauren Rabinovitz, Electric Dreamland: Amusement Parks, Movies, and American Modernity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 140. 35. Rabinovitz, 140. 36. Baudelaire, The Essence of Laughter. 37. James Leo Cahill, “How It Feels to Be Run Over: Early Accident Films,” Discourse, 30.3 (Fall 2008): 289–316. 38. “Women’s Humor: Are They More Good Natured Than Men? Is Now the Question,” Philadelphia Press (republished in the Fort Worth Register, Fort Worth, TX): January 12, 1897, 3. 39. Maggie Hennefeld, “Death from Laughter, Female Hysteria, and Early Cinema,” differences (2016): 45–92. 40. “Feminine Humor,” Duluth News Tribune (Duluth, MN): April 4, 1909, 12. 41. Virginia Woolf, “The Value of Laughter,” in The Essays of Virginia Woolf. Volume I. 1904–1912, ed. Andrew McNeillie (London: Hogarth, 1986), 60. 42. Tobacco Road is a satirical novel by Erskine Caldwell, published in 1932 and adapted into a successful play in 1933. (It enjoyed an eight-year run on Broadway.) It depicts the incestuous plight of a poor, white, racist Southern sharecropper named Jeeter Lester who convinces his daughter to seduce his other daughter’s husband so that Lester himself can steal his son-in-law’s most valuable possession, which is a bag of turnips. 43. Ralph Ellison, “An Extravagance of Laughter,” in The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison (Modern Library, 1995), 653. 44. Bataille uses decapitation as an animating metaphor for the laughing praxis of dethroning the head of reason, allegedly once offering himself as a victim for ritual beheading in his secret society Acéphale. 45. Wyndham Lewis, “The Meaning of the Wild Body,” in The Wild Body: A Soldier of Humour and Other Stories (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1928), 250. 46. Lewis, 246. 47. Lewis was a notorious sexist and sparred publicly with Virginia Woolf, whom he accused of plagiarizing James Joyce. Frederic Jameson has described Lewis’s politics in Fables of Aggression as “virtually beyond sexism. Misogyny in Lewis no longer exists at the level of mere personal opinion. . . . In Lewis, therefore, such impulses are freed to acquire their own figuration; his artistic integrity is to be perceived not as something distinct from his regrettable ideological lapses (as when we admire his art, in spite of his opinions), but rather in the very intransigence with which he makes himself the impersonal registering apparatus for forces which he means to record, beyond any whitewashing and liberal revisionism, in all their primal ugliness.” Frederic Jameson, Fables of Aggression: Wyndham Lewis, the Modernist as Fascist (Brooklyn: Verso, 2008), 20–21. 48. Eileen Bowser, “Preparation for Brighton: The American Contribution,” in Cinema 1900/1906 (1982): 3–29. 49. Karen Redrobe Beckman, Crash: Cinema and the Politics of Speed and Stasis (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 43.

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50. Shelley Stamp, Movie-Struck Girls: Women and Motion Picture Culture After the Nickelodeon (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2000); Miriam Hansen, Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994); Constance Balides, “Scenarios of Exposure in the Practice of Everyday Life: Women in the Cinema of Attractions,” in Screen (1993) 34:1, 19–37; Judith Mayne, The Woman at the Keyhole: Feminism and Women’s Cinema (Theories of Representation and Difference) (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990); and Kristen Anderson Wagner, “Have Women a Sense of Humor? Comedy and Femininity in Early Twentieth-Century Film,” in Velvet Light Trap (Fall 2011), 35–46; and “Pie Queens and Virtuous Vamps,” in A Companion to Film Comedy, ed. Andrew Horton and Joanne E. Rapf (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2013), 39–59. 51. Balides, “Scenarios of Exposure,” 28. 52. Balides, 28. 53. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. J. H. Bernard (New York: Hafner Publishing, 1951), 172. 54. This film also stars Gilbert Saroni, the famous female impersonator. 55. Lauren Berlant, The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), 40.

2. Female Combustion and Feminist Film Historiography 1. Ann Gordon, Mari Jo Buhle, and Nancy Dye, “The Problem of Women’s History,” Liberating Women’s History, ed. Berenice A. Carroll (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1976), 89. 2. Shelley Stamp has compiled an extremely helpful annotated bibliography of key works in feminist silent film historiography. See “Women and the Silent Screen,” in Oxford Bibliographies in Cinema and Media Studies, ed. Krin Gabbard (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017). 3. Giuliana Bruno, Streetwalking on a Ruined Map: Cultural Theory and the City Films of Elvira Notari (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 132. 4. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History, XIV,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1968), 261. 5. Jane Gaines, “Film History and the Two Presents of Feminist Film Theory,” Cinema Journal 44.1 (Fall 2004): 113. 6. Ally Acker, Reel Women: Pioneers of the Cinema 1896-Present (New York: Continuum Publishing Group, 1993); Kay Armatage, The Girl from God’s Country: Nell Shipman and the Silent Cinema (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003); B. Ruby Rich, Chick Flicks: Theories and Memories of the Feminist Film Movement (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998); Gwendolyn Audrey Foster, Women Film Directors: An International BioCritical Dictionary (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1995); Sumiko Higashi, Virgins, Vamps, and Flappers: The American Movie Silent Heroine (St. Albans: Eden Press Women’s Publications, 1978); Heide Schlüpmann, The Uncanny Gaze: The Drama of Early German Cinema, trans., Inga Pollmann (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010).

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7. Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author” (1967), in Image/Music/Text (New York: Hill and Wang), 142–148; Carla Benedetti, The Empty Cage: Inquiry into the Mysterious Disappearance of the Author (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005); Michel Foucault, “What Is an Author?” (1977), in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980), 113–118. 8. Jane Gaines, “Of Cabbages and Authors,” in Feminist Reader in Early Cinema, ed. Jennifer M. Bean and Diane Negra (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 88–118; Alison McMahan, Alice Guy Blaché: Lost Visionary of the Cinema (New York: Continuum, 2002); Shelley Stamp, Lois Weber in Early Hollywood (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015); Karen Ward Mahar, Women Filmmakers in Early Hollywood (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006); Patricia White, “Nazimova’s Veils: Salomé at the Intersection of Film Histories,” in Feminist Reader in Early Cinema, ed. Jennifer M. Bean and Diane Negra (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 60–87; Tami Williams, Germaine Dulac: A Cinema of Sensations (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2014). 9. Bruno, Streetwalking on a Ruined Map; Amelie Hastie, Cupboards of Curiosity: Women, Recollecting, and Film History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007); Jacqueline Najuma Stewart, Migrating to the Movies: Cinema and Black Urban Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); Miriam Hansen, Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991); Zhen Zhang, An Amorous History of the Silver Screen: Shanghai Cinema, 1896–1937 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). 10. Rosi Braidotti, Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming (Cambridge: Polity Books, 2002), 2. 11. Shelley Stamp, “Editor’s Introduction,” Feminist Media Histories 1, no. 1 (Winter 2015): 1–3. 12. Catherine Malabou, “Plasticity and Elasticity in Freud’s ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle,’” Parallax, 15.2 (April 2009): 41–52. 13. Tom Gunning, “Mechanisms of Laughter: The Devices of Slapstick,” in Slapstick Comedy ed. Rob King and Tom Paulus (New York: Routledge, 2010), 139. 14. “Diving Lucy,” Biograph Bulletin, 23 (Feb. 23, 1904): 111. 15. Matthew Solomon, Disappearing Tricks: Silent Film, Houdini and the New Magic of the Twentieth Century (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010), 72. 16. Charles Musser, The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). 17. Musser, The Emergence of Cinema. 18. Barry Salt, “Film Form 1900–1906,” 39. 19. An excellent resource for exploring these debates about transitional cinema is American Cinema’s Transitional Era: Audiences, Institutions, Practices, ed. Charles Keil and Shelley Stamp (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004). 20. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, The Work of Mourning, and The New International (New York: Routledge, 2006), 48.

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21. Caroline Frick, Saving Cinema: The Politics of Preservation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 90. 22. The FIAF (International Federation of Film Archives) Symposium of “Cinema 1900– 1906,” held in Brighton, England, was a groundbreaking event that incited a wider “historical turn” in film studies. See Cinema 1900/1906: An Analytical Study, 2 vols. ed. Roger Holman (Brussels: FIAF, 1982). 23. Jennifer Bean, “Introduction: Toward a Feminist Historiography of Early Cinema,” in Feminist Reader in Early Cinema, ed. Jennifer Bean and Diane Negra (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 6. 24. For more information about research on women’s extensive participation in all aspects of the early film industry, see the website of Women and Film History International, http://www.wfhi.org/. 25. Malabou, Ontology of the Accident (Cambridge: Polity, 2012), 11. 26. Freud worked through this dialectic between elasticity and plasticity, between the reversibility of psychic impressions and the indelible traces of repressed unconscious experience, during WWI in an essay titled “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death,” 44. 27. Karen Redrobe Beckman, Vanishing Women: Magic, Film and Feminism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 8. 28. Mary Ann Doane, “Information, Crisis, Catastrophe,” in Logics of Television, ed. Patricia Mellencamp (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 228. 29. Allyson Field recently published a book only about films that no longer exist: African American films made at the Tuskegee and Hampton Institutes during the 1910s. See Uplift Cinema: The Emergence of African American Film and the Possibility of Black Modernity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015). 30. “The Women Film Pioneers Project (WFPP) is a freely accessible, collaborative online database that showcases the thousands of women who worked behind-the-scenes in the silent film industry as directors, producers, editors, and more.” https://wfpp.cdrs .columbia.edu/about/. 31. Redrobe Beckman, Vanishing Women, 10. 32. Keil and Stamp, American Cinema’s Transitional Era, 2. 33. In this 1911 trick film about the British suffragette activists Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst, whose hunger strikes in prison later elicited women’s force-feedings under the 1913 “Cat and Mouse Act,” trick photography is used to depict a chase scene between a cabinet minister and suffragette. 34. Shelley Stamp associates Weber’s empowerment as an “independent” producer and filmmaker in the 1900s with the rhetorical and economic marginalization of independents in the film industry. See Lois Weber in Early Hollywood. 35. James Leo Cahill discusses the likely apocryphal origin of this famous quotation in his article “.  .  . And Afterwards? Martin Arnold’s Phantom Cinema,” Spectator 27, Supplement (2007): 19. 36. Gaines, “Of Cabbages and Authors.”

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37. André Gaudreault, Film and Attraction: From Kinematography to Cinema (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2011). 38. Bean, Feminist Reader, 13. 39. “Vitagraph Films: 12 Cents Per Foot; A New Comic Novelty: The Kitchen Maid’s Dream,” Advertisement, New York Clipper, November 2, 1907. 40. “Vitagraph Films,” November 2, 1907. 41. Eisenstein, “Montage of Attractions,” 66. 42. For further reading on Eisenstein’s concept of the plasmatic, see Gertrud Koch, “Are Films Experiments on Human Beings?” in Animating Film Theory, ed. Karen Redrobe Beckman (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014). 43. The idea of early cinema as a “self-reflexive screen” extends from Miriam Hansen’s notion of “vernacular modernism,” which she defines as “a sensory-reflexive horizon [discursive form] for the experience of the contradictions of modernity and modernization” (10), and ”a matrix for the articulation of fantasies, uncertainties, and anxieties” (Babel and Babylon, 14). 44. Paolo Cherchi Usai and Eileen Bowser, eds., The Griffith Project (London: BFI, 1999– 2008), 34. 45. For more on Lois Weber, see Stamp, Lois Weber in Early Hollywood. 46. “Woman Deeply Affected by ‘U’ Drama Faints,” Universal Weekly, no. 5 (January 31, 1914): 32. 47. As Parvulescu summarizes Bataille in Laughter: Notes on a Passion (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2010), “Laughter is . . . ‘an inflamed gushing forth,’ in which the subject is consumed, joyfully. The now-proverbial and much-abused ‘death of the subject’ is understood by Bataille as a death by laughter” (92). 48. Alice Maurice, The Cinema and Its Shadow: Race and Technology in Early Cinema (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 67. 49. From a review: “Darkey gets home, puts pigs in cradle, and is calmly ‘rocking the baby to sleep’ when the pursuers arrive. Not being able to find the pig, they go away, and Rastus and his mammy have plenty of young, tender pork to eat.” Billboard (May 18, 1907): 35. 50. Jacqueline Najuma Stewart, “What Happened in the Transition? Reading Race, Gender and Labor Between the Shots,” in American Cinema’s Transitional Era: Audiences, Institutions, Practices, ed. Charles Keil and Shelley Stamp. (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004), 103–130. 51. bell hooks, “Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance,” Black Looks: Race and Representation (Brooklyn: South End Press, 1992), 21–39. 52. Kyla Wazana Tomkins, Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the 19th Century (New York: New York University Press, 2012), 9. 53. Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 92. 54. For further feminist reading on this subject, see Barbara Welter, “The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820–1860,” American Quarterly 18, no. 2, part 1 (1966): 151–174. 55. The Russian occultist and spirit medium Helena Petrovna Blavatsky co-founded the Theosophical Society in 1875, a nonsectarian organization devoted to the pursuit of God and truth through the practice of spiritual ecstasy. Georgie Hyde-Lees, like

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60. 61. 62.

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Blavatsky, was a source of influence and inspiration for numerous modernist writers and artists. Hyde-Lees developed the practice of psychography, or automatic writing, wherein the writer becomes a vessel for the flow of words that erupts from another realm (the unconscious, the supernatural, the divine, etc.). Anne Braude, Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth-Century America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 96. For further reading on Mina Crandon’s “teleplasmic hand,” see Karen Redrobe Beckman’s “Power From Elsewhere: Charismatic Authority and the American Female Medium,” in Anne Wehr, ed., Imponderable: The Archive of Tony Oursler. Exhibition catalogue. (Zurich: LUMA Foundation, forthcoming July 2015), English with French translation. Nineteenth-century photography was widely used as a medium for capturing the dead, who often allegedly appeared as ectoplasms molded onto the photographic negative. For further reading on this fascinating topic, see Marina Warner, Phantasmagoria: Spirit Visions, Metaphors, and Media into the Twenty-First Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “These Too, Too Solid Ghosts,” in Laughing Their Way: Women’s Humor in America, ed. Martha Bensley Bruère and Mary Rilter Beard (New York: Macmillan, 1934), 217. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “Mind-Stretching,” in Red Velvet Seat: Women’s Writings on the First Fifty Years of Cinema, ed. Anotnia Lant (Brooklyn: Verso, 2006). Braude, Radical Spirits, 160. “Neurasthenia, similar to hysteria, but less marked in the way the symptoms manifested themselves, became ‘the malady of the century’ in the first decade of the twentieth century . . . the symptoms of the disease consisted of suggestibility, an exaggerated exaltation of the nervous system, and lack of will.” Rae Beth Gordon, Why the French Love Jerry Lewis: From Cabaret to Early Cinema (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2002), 228. Gordon, Jerry Lewis, 228. Tomkins, Racial Indigestion, 100. Lucy Fischer, Cinematernity: Film, Motherhood, Genre (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006). Malabou, Ontology, 55. The word hysteria, of course, comes from the Greek word “hystera,” meaning uterus. Wydham Lewis, “The Meaning of the Wild Body,” 246.

3. Slapstick Comediennes in Transitional Cinema 1. Eva Is Tired of Life is no longer extant in any form but lives on through its trade reviews and synopses. 2. New York Dramatic Mirror, September 11, 1911. 3. Henri Bergson, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic (New York: MacMillan, 1911), 46.

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4. Thomas Hobbes, Elements of Law, Natural and Politics (London: Cass, 1969); Boris Sidis, Psychology of Laugher (New York: D. Appleton, 1913); George Vasey, A Philosophy of Laughter and Smiling (London: J. Burns, 1877). 5. Charles Baudelaire, The Essence of Laughter (New York: Meridian, 1956). 6. James Sully, An Essay on Laughter: Its Forms, Its Causes, Its Development, and Its Value (London: Longmans and Green, 1902), 411. 7. Alan Dale, Comedy Is a Man in Trouble: Slapstick in American Movies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 105. 8. For an excellent account of the gender politics of Keystone’s slapstick film comedies, see Rob King, “From ‘Diving Venus’ to ‘Bathing Beauties’: Reification and Feminine Spectacle, 1916–1917,” in The Fun Factory: The Keystone Film Company and the Emergence of Mass Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 210-46. 9. For more on the displacement effects of the batacchio, see Tom Gunning, “Mechanisms of Laughter: Devices of Slapstick,” in Slapstick Comedy, ed. Rob King and Tom Paulus (New York: Routledge, 2010). 10. For an excellent account of aural paranoia and the telephone motif in transitional silent cinema, see Tom Gunning, “Heard Over the Phone: The Lonely Villa and the de Lorde Tradition of the Terrors of Technology,” Screen 32, no. 2 (1991): 184–196. 11. George Meredith, An Essay on Comedy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1956), 140. 12. W. Stephen Bush, “Hints to Exhibitors,” Moving Picture World 4 (1909): 317. 13. “HERE’s THE NEW LAUGH: Really Not So Much a Laugh as a Vocal Ripple of Merriment,” Dallas Morning News (September 11, 1898—reprinted from the New York Herald): 10. 14. Agnes Replier, “A Plea for Humor,” in The World’s Wit and Humor: An Encyclopedia of the Classic Wit and Humor of All Ages and Nations, ed. Lionel Strachey (New York: The Review of Reviews Company, 1905–1906). 15. Sully, An Essay on Laughter, 256. 16. Henry Lehrman formed L-KO (“Lehrman KnockOut”) Kompany in 1914; Al Christie started the Nestor Company in 1911, which was absorbed by Universal the following year; Komic Pictures produced over one hundred film comedies from 1913 to 1915, featuring stars such as Fay Tincher and Tod Browning, with titles including Biddy on Her Mettle (1913), Nell’s Eugenic Wedding (1914), and Ethel Gets Consent (1915). 17. In The Troublesome Secretaries (Vitagraph, 1911), Mabel Normand plays the attractive daughter of John Bunny, who employs a handsome male secretary. The secretary ultimately woos Mabel by disguising himself as an old man to avert the father’s suspicions. This was a very typical comic plot for a comedy of manners. Instead of displacing the effect of bodily violence, these films used disguises and situational misunderstandings to defer the inevitability of marital romance. 18. See chapter 1 for detailed explanation, citations about, and examples of the comedy of female sexual exposure in early cinema. 19. See Jennifer Bean, Flickers of Desire: Movie Stars of the 1910s (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2011); Victoria Sturtevant, A Great Big Girl Like Me: The Films of

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Marie Dressler (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2009); Kristen Anderson Wagner, “Pie Queens and Virtuous Vamps”; Rob King, The Fun Factory Steve Massa, Lame Brains and Lunatics (Albany: Bear Manor, 2013); Joanna Rapf, “Marie Dressler,” in Idols of Modernity: Movie Stars of the 1920s, ed. Patrice Petro (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2010); Lori Landay, Madcaps, Screwballs, and Con Women: The Female Trickster in American Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998). Jacqueline Najuma Stewart, “What Happened in the Transition? Reading Race, Gender and Labor Between the Shots,” American Cinema’s Transitional Era: Audiences, Institutions, Practices, ed. Charles Keil and Shelley Stamp (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004), 103–130. Stewart, “What Happened,” 109. (See also Jacqueline Najuma Stewart, Migrating to the Movies: Cinema and Black Urban Modernity, [Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005]). Stewart, “What Happened,” 105. “Edith’s Avoirdupois,” The Film Index 6 (July 1910): 23. “The Missionary and the Maid,” Moving Picture World 5 (July 1909): 97. Vasey, A Philosophy of Laughter and Smiling, 95. Vasey, 109. “The Doll’s Revenge,” Moving Picture World (April 1907): 124. “The Professor’s Secret,” Moving Picture World (April 1908): 328. “Missionary and the Maid”: 97. “The Magnetic Eye,” Moving Picture World (February 1908): 83. These statistics come from the Cinemetrics database: an online database dedicated to helping film historians calculate average shot lengths. Cinemetrics, “Cinemetrics Database,” http://www.cinemetrics.lv/database.php. The Motion Picture Patents Company (or Edison Trust), formed in 1908, included Edison, Vitagraph, Pathé, Biograph, Essanay, Selig, Lubin, Kalem, and Star Film. The formation of the MPPC has been associated with the standardization of film exhibition practices, regulation of aesthetic and moral standards for film production, and exclusion of foreign companies (with the exception of Pathé and Star) from the American market. “A Pretty Milliner,” Nickelodeon 1, vol. 2 (February 1909): 62. D. W. Griffith, Those Awful Hats (Biograph, 1909) 35mm film, from the Internet Archive, “Those Awful Hats,” https://archive.org/details/ArchiveThoseAwfulHats. “On the Wrong Scent,” Moving Picture World (December 1909): 800. “A Servant’s Revenge,” Moving Picture World (November 1909): 769. Laura Horak, Girls Will Be Boys: Cross-Dressed Women, Lesbians, and American Cinema, 1908–1934 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2016), 76. “Saucy Sue,” Variety 15 (June 1909): 48. Muriel Ostriche was one of Thanhouser’s most popular stars. For more information on her life and career, see Thanhouser Company Film Preservation Inc., http://www .thanhouser.org/people/ostrichem.htm.

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40. Many of these films and actresses appear on the DVD released by the Ciniteca di Bologna in 2010, Comic Actresses and Suffragettes: 1910–1914, curated by Mariann Lewinsky. 41. “Rebellious Betty,” Nickelodeon 4 (July 1910): 6. 42. “Betty Is Still at Her Old Tricks,” Moving Picture World 7 (Oct. 1910): 876. 43. Though trade journals made a practice of circulating stars’ names to increase audience excitement about these actors’ films and characters, the name of the actress who plays Betty was never cited in any of the prolific reviews and responses to her films (her identity remains unknown). 44. “Betty Is Punished,” Nickelodeon (October 1 1910): 211. 45. “Pathé Pointers,” Billboard (June 25, 1910): 28. 46. “Betty’s Apprenticeship,” Moving Picture World 8 (February 1911): 431. 47. “Betty’s Apprenticeship,” Nickelodeon (February 1911): 223. 48. “Betty Rolls Along,” Nickelodeon (January 28 1911): 116. 49. Thomas Elsaesser, “Discipline Through Diegesis: The Rube Film Between Attraction and Integration,” in The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded, ed. Wanda Strauven (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006), 213. 50. Hansen, Miriam. Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), 26–27. 51. Noel Burch, “Primitivism and the Avant-Gardes: A Dialectical Approach,” in Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader, ed. Philip Rosen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986). 52. Tom Gunning, “Crazy Machines in the Garden of Forking Paths: Mischief Gags and the Origins of American Film Comedy,” in Classical Hollywood Comedy, ed. Kristine Brunovska Karnick and Henry Jenkins (New York: Routledge, 1995). 53. Florence Turner made this film in England at her independent production company “Turner Films,” with her former Vitagraph director Laurence Trimble shortly after leaving Vitagraph in 1913. 54. The emblematic shot appeared regularly at the beginning and end of early films such as The Great Train Robbery (Edwin S. Porter, 1903). According to Burch, the “primitive” emblematic shot represented both an attempt to emphasize character through visual proximity and to establish eye contact between actor and spectator (Burch, “Primitivism and the Avant-Gardes”), 488.

4. The Geopolitics of Transitional Film Comedy 1. William Uricchio and Roberta Pearson, Reframing Culture: The Case of the Vitagraph Quality Films (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993); Robert Spadoni, “The Figure Seen from the Rear, Vitagraph, and the Development of the Shot/ReverseShot,” Film History 11, no. 3, Early Cinema (1999), 319–341; Kristin Thompson, “Narration Early in the Transition to Classical Filmmaking: Three Vitagraph Shorts,” Film History. 9, no. 4, International Cinema of the 1910s (1997), 410–434.

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2. Sumiko Higashi, “Vitagraph Stardom: Constructing Personalities,” in Reclaiming the Archive: Feminism and Film History, ed. Vicki Callahan (Wayne State University Press, 2010): 264–288. 3. “Encouraging Education Pictures.” New York Dramatic Mirror, December 18, 1908. 4. See John Gartenberg, “Vitagraph Before Griffith: Forging Ahead in the Nickelodeon Era,” in Studies in Visual Communication 10 (4): 7–23; Peter Kramer, “Vitagraph, Slapstick, and Early Cinema: Peter Kramer Reports from Pordenone,” Screen 29 (1988): 98–105. 5. Prior to the codification of motion picture copyright practices in 1912, a number of film producers protected their products by registering films as photographs. The Library of Congress holds tens of thousands of these registered photographs— spanning more than three thousand titles and two decades—from films made between 1894 and 1915. As filmmakers would often register multiple photographs from within a given film, the Library of Congress has transferred these images to 16mm and 35mm stock for projection; out-of-order snippets from lost films are thus available for viewing by researchers. For this book, I watched all of the surviving paper print fragments at the Library of Congress of Vitagraph films from 1905 to 1914. 6. For an excellent analysis of The Florida Enchantment and the social contexts of female to male cross-dressing in American early film-entertainment culture, see Laura Horak’s book, Girls Will Be Boys. 7. Richard Abel, The Red Rooster Scare: Making Cinema American, 1900–1910 (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999). 8. Richard Abel, “In the Belly of the Beast: The Early Years of Pathé-Frères,” in Film History 5, no. 4 (Dec. 1993): 370–71. 9. Ben Brewster defines “overdetermination” in his 1969 Althusser glossary, which has been published in recent editions of Reading Capital and For Marx. Althusser adapts this theory from psychoanalysis: “Freud used this term to describe (among other things) the representation of the dream-thoughts in images privileged by their condensation of a number of thoughts in a single image (condensation/Verdichtung), or by the transference of psychic energy from a particularly potent thought to apparently trivial images (displacement/Verschiebung-Verstellung). Althusser uses the same term to describe the effects of the contradictions in each practice constituting the social formation on the social formation as a whole.” 10. Abel, “In the Belly of the Beast,” 376. 11. For Freud, overdetermination refers to the apparent illegibility and cryptic encoding of repressed unconscious meanings in joke and dream symbolism. Although at face value inscrutable, Freud posits, these distorted images are not beyond interpretation. 12. The Motion Picture Patents Company (MPPC) limited each trust producer to a maximum of four thousand feet of Pathé positive film stock per week (see Abel, Red Rooster Scare, 371). 13. In an article about her “Trip to Vitagraphville” for Motion Picture Magazine (1915), reporter Agnes Kessler exclaims, “Well, I’ve gone and done it! I’ve had the greatest,

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most delightful and thrilling day of my life! Where? In that modern wonderland, Vitagraphville, Flatbush-By-the-Sea. I am going to nickname this little world and call it ‘Happyville-By-the-Sea,’ for that is what it really is” (83). “The Acrobatic Maid.” Moving Picture World (September 1908): 479. Abel, Red Rooster Scare, 122. The height of the U.S. Patent Wars took place between 1897 and 1902, when Edison filed numerous lawsuits against rival companies including Vitagraph and AM&B for alleged camera patent infringements. These patent wars continued for over a decade, often impeding the output of leading American production companies, who were frequently embroiled in expensive lawsuits about camera- and projection-technology minutiae. The Motion Picture Patents Company (or Edison Trust), formed in 1908, included Edison, Vitagraph, Pathé, Biograph, Essanay, Selig, Lubin, Kalem, and Star Film. The formation of the MPPC has been associated with the standardization of film exhibition practices, assurance of aesthetic and moral standards for film production, and isolation of foreign companies (with the exception of Pathé and Star) from the American market. “Wonderful Rose Designs.” Moving Picture World (August 1909): 207. For more information about Pathécoloring, stencil design, tinting and toning, see Barbara Flueckiger’s website Timeline of Historical Film Colors, http://zauberklang.ch /filmcolors/. “The Acrobatic Maid,” Moving Picture World 3, (December 1908): 476. “Acrobatic Maid,” 476. “The Amateur Detective,” Moving Picture World 5, (August 1909): 415. “Spanish Marriage,” Moving Picture World 5, (November 1909): 841. Eileen Bowser, The Transformation of Cinema: 1907–1915 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 42. “A Fan.” Moving Picture World (July 1909): 31. “Japanese Butterflies,” Moving Picture World, (May 1908): 105. In some cases, women’s bodies were made more visible through their censoring or concealment by awkward hand-coloring. Josh Yumibe and Alicia Fletcher argue that color sometimes functioned as a form of censorship for covering up scantily clad women in French magic films. They cite a clipping from the Davide Turconi Collection from Chomón’s Les Tulipes (1907) in which hand-coloring provides a moral corrective to machine stenciling: “stenciled in the original, with the bare legs and arms of the women crudely hand-colored red, probably by a censor.” Joshua Yumibe and Alicia Fletcher, “From Nitrate to Digital Archive: The Davide Turconi Project,” in The Moving Image 13, no. 1 (2013): 19. “The Acrobatic Maid,” Views and Film Index (Dec. 1908): 11. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Reproducibility,” in Selected Writings: Volume 3, 1935–1938, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, trans. Edmund Jephcott, Howard Eiland, et al. (Cambridge: Harvard Belknap, 2002), 101–133. Leon Baer warned Portland filmgoers in 1908 that “the worst evil, however, of attending moving picture shows, lies in the fact that such undue excitation of nerves and

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31. 32.

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eyes tend to physical and mental injury. We adults sit in the darkened show place with tense brows and fixed eyes, while the film sputters its hurried course before our bewildered and strained vision. . . . For hours afterward, we experience a faint and almost imperceptible tightening of the eyeballs, and the lids bat nervously. Statistics show that a very great part trouble so much commented upon among the children in our public schools is due to constant attendance at moving picture shows.” “Portland’s Moving Picture Shows: A Lot of Material Facts, Some Caustic Criticism, A Little Praise, Humane Humor and Preachment,” Morning Oregonian-Portland (OR), November 1, 1908: 6. Alenka Zupančič, The Odd One In: On Comedy (Cambridge, MIT Press, 2008), 47. Joan Battlori asserts in her study of Chomón that “he would become, precisely, the highest authority at Pathé in anything that required the intervention of trick photography” (18). In addition to overseeing the trick photography of other directors’ films (working closely with Gaston Velle before his departure for the Italian Cines Company in 1907), Chomón directed dozens of trick films for Pathé. See Segundo De Chomón: Beyond the Cinema of Attractions (1904–1912) (Barcelona: Filmoteca de la Generalitat de Catalunya, 1999). According to FIAF records in the International Index to Film Periodicals, there are ninety-nine separate entries for films directed or co-directed by Segundo de Chomón. Not all of these archival holdings are available in a format that researchers would be able to view—some exist only on 35mm nitrate negative. The dozens of archives holding Chomón films include the French Cinémathèque, the Library of Congress, the British Film Institute, the Filmoteca de Catalunya, the Deutsche Kinemathek. Joshua Yumibe, Moving Color: Early Film, Mass Culture, Modernism (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2012), 82. In The Haunted Hotel (the trick film that helped Vitagraph dominate the European market in 1907), a rubish traveler staying at a rural inn witnesses mysterious and spectral forces manipulating his food and clothing: “A house that changes into a goblin— A table set by invisible hands—Living Dishes—A knife that ACTUALLY CUTS slices of BOLOGNA and bread—Wine, tea, and milk that pour THEMSELVES out . . . ALL WITHOUT THE SIGN OF A HUMAN HAND . . . while the poor, frightened traveler is in bed shivering with FRIGHT.” “Can You Solve the Mystery of the Haunted Hotel?” New York Clipper, March 7, 1907, 68. The Vitagraph version sold 150 copies in Europe through the company’s Paris office alone, inspiring French filmmakers to employ similar techniques in stop-motion cinematography (Abel, Ciné Goes to Town, 280). Unlike Méliès and Blackton, who frequently featured themselves in the role of the magician, Chomón most often cast his magician wife Julienne Mathieu in this role. Mathieu appeared as the magician or trickster in over twenty-five trick films, including Easter Eggs, Modern Sculptures, Wonderful Mirror, The Magic Album, The Frog, Microscopic Dancer, The Enchanted Pond, Sleeping Beauty, and Satan at Play. Frederick Arthur Ambrose Talbot, Moving Pictures: How They Are Made and Worked (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1914), 242.

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39. The fetish, for Freud, provides a crucial form of defense against the reality of the split ego, “coming to a halt halfway” and “fixing on the last impression before the uncanny or traumatic one” (154). 40. Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 38. 41. Anthony Slide, The BIG V: A History of the Vitagraph Company (London: Scarecrow Press, 1987), 21. 42. Slide, The BIG V, 21. 43. Albert E. Smith, Two Reels and a Crank: From Nickelodeon to Picture Palaces (New York: Doubleday, 1952), 218. 44. Smith, 218. 45. See Rabinovitz, “Coney Island Comedies: Slapstick at the Amusement Park and the Movies,” in Electric Dreamland, 136–161. 46. Talbot, 146. 47. “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” Vitagraph Bulletin, December, 1909. 48. The hallucinating smoker in Princess Nicotine was not the only one to be duped by the photographic visibility of fairies. In 1917 and 1920, a series of photos were taken of “the Cottingley Fairies”: four dancing fairies who revealed themselves in photographs taken of two young girls, Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths, in Cottingley, England. Although the girls much later admitted that the photographs were faked, the Cottingley Fairy scandal elicited widespread belief and fascination, including by the novelist-spiritualist Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. See Arthur Conan Doyle, The Coming of the Fairies (Hodder and Stoughton, 1922).

5. D. W. Griffith’s Slapstick Comediennes 1. Bergson, Laughter, 11. 2. Mary Ann Doane, The Desire to Desire: The Woman’s Film of the 1940s (Bloomington, University of Indiana Press, 1987), 12. 3. Mary Ann Doane, Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis (New York, Routledge, 1991), 30. 4. Linda Williams, “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess,” in Film Quarterly 44, no. 4 (1991): 4. 5. Keystone comedienne Louise Fazenda appeared in over 250 films from 1913 to 1939, from early slapstick shorts such as The Cheese Special (Allen Curtis, 1913), Almost an Actress (Allen Curtis, 1913), and When Their Wives Joined the Regiment (Allen Curtis, 1914), to numerous appearances in 1930s talkies, including Doughnuts and Society (Lewis Collins, 1936), Ever Since Eve (Lloyd Bacon, 1937), and The Old Maid (Edmund Goulding, 1939). 6. Gladys Hall, “Have You Got the Makings of a Comedian?” Movie Classic (December 1934): 68. 7. Laurent Joubert, Treatise on Laughter (1579), trans. Gregory David de Rocher (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1980), 44.

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8. See Hansen, Babel and Babylon; Rabinovitz, Electric Dreamland; King, The Fun Factory. 9. Tom Gunning, “Weaving a Narrative: Style and Economic Background in Griffith’s Biograph Films,” Quarterly Review of Film Studies 6, no. 1 (1981): 24. 10. Anthony Slide, The Griffith Actresses (South Brunswick: A. S. Barnes, 1973), 13–14. 11. Although partly biographical projection for Griffith, perhaps an attempt to make amends to his wife Linda Arvidson after having jilted her for Dorothy West, The Eternal Mother presents a strong allegorical message. 12. Hansen, Babel and Babylon, 211. 13. Griffith curiously inverts Martha’s and Mary’s roles in the New Testament, as if this film were a response to the word of God: “As Jesus and his disciples were on their way, he came to a village where a woman named Martha opened her home to him. She had a sister called Mary, who sat at the Lord’s feet listening to what he said. But Martha was distracted by all the preparations that had to be made. She came to him and asked, ‘Lord, don’t you care that my sister has left me to do the work by myself? Tell her to help me!’ ‘Martha, Martha,’ the Lord answered, ‘you are worried and upset about many things, but only one thing is needed. Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her’” (Luke 10:38). 14. Slide, Griffith Actresses, 15. 15. Edward Wagenknecht, “Griffith’s Biographs: A General View,” Films in Review 26, no. 8, (1975): 467. 16. Cooper Graham, Deceived Slumming Party,” in The Griffith Project, Volume 1, Films Produced in 1907–1908, ed. P. C. Usai (London: BFI, 1999), 74. 17. Kristin Thompson, “Politician’s Love Story,” in The Griffith Project, Volume 2, Films Produced in January–June 1909, ed. P. C. Usai (London: BFI, 1999), 19. 18. Kelly Brown, Florence Lawrence, The Biograph Girl: America’s First Movie Star (Jefferson: McFarland, 1999), 31. 19. Steven Higgins, “The Wooden Leg,” in The Griffith Project, Volume 2, Films Produced in January-June 1909, ed. P. C. Usai (London: BFI, 1999), 47. 20. Higgins, 47–48. 21. “His Wooden Leg,” Biograph Bulletin (1909). 22. The New York Dramatic Mirror did not review or comment on films, nor was this paper widely circulated among film exhibitors and insiders until the appearance of Frank E. Woods’s column “The Spectator” in June 1908. According to (admittedly exaggerated) testimony by Linda Arvidson from 1969, “Woods dissertated through some columns on the merits and demerits of the movies, and thus became their first real critic” (63). Arvidson associates Woods’s efforts with a broader movement to establish film’s artistic legitimacy. “Frank Woods now set about to criticise the pictures with the same seriousness he would have criticised the theater” (Higgins, 65). 23. Charlie Keil, “The Gibson Goddess,” in The Griffith Project, Volume 3, Films Produced in July-December 1909, ed. P. C. Usai (London: BFI, 1999), 78. 24. Williams, “Film Bodies,” 9. 25. Lea Jacobs, “An Unseen Enemy,” in The Griffith Project, Volume 6, Films Produced in 1912, ed. P. C. Usai (London: BFI, 2002), 128–131.

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26. Although it is beyond the limits of this chapter to do so, it would be interesting to explore the connections here between visual “sense” and physical “nerve” of Dorothy and Lillian’s roles in An Unseen Enemy and as the blind Louise and her sister caretaker Henriette in Griffith’s French Revolutionary melodrama Orphans of the Storm (1921). 27. D.W. Griffith, “What Are the Chances of a Beginner?” Photoplay (1923): 35. 28. Griffith, Photoplay, 35. 29. Tom Gunning, D.W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991), 16. 30. “An Unseen Enemy,” Moving Picture World (September 1912): 1179. 31. In The Writer of Modern Life, looking at Baudelaire’s description of a traffic-crosser as a “kaleidoscope endowed with consciousness,” Benjamin discusses nervousness as a technique for training individuals to navigate the constant potential for shock characteristic of modern life. “At dangerous intersections, nervous impulses flow through him in rapid succession, like the energy from a battery” (Benjamin, Writer of Modern Life, 141). 32. Although “harlot” is a secondary denotation of the word “slattern,” the maid is not presented as particularly sexual or lascivious. 33. Yuri Tsivian, “The Mender of Nets,” in The Griffith Project, Volume 6, Films Produced in 1912, ed. P. C. Usai (London: BFI, 2002): 2. 34. For Heath, “S” and “S-1” (or S-prime) refer to different forms of stasis at the opening and closing of the classical film narrative respectively, before difference is initiated and after order is restored. Stephen Heath, Questions of Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982). 35. Stephen Heath, “Film, System, Narrative,” in Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology, ed. Philip Rosen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 137. 36. In her 1934 autobiography My Own Story, Dressler relates another Normand anecdote that reveals the actress’s comic hybridity, blending hyperbolic cruelty and saccharine sentimentality. Mabel was asked by a reporter, “What is your favorite recreation?” “Her voice was dripping with naivete: ‘Must I tell you the really-truly truth?’ . . . ‘Well,’ said Mabel dreamily, ‘I love windy days when houses blow down on old people and squash ‘em. I adore watching criminals crim, and I dote on mothers who neglect their children because it shows they have the good of the child at heart. But best of all,’ her voice had grown softer and softer, ‘best of all, I love to break babies’ legs . . . nice little fat babies legs with white stockings on ‘em!’ ” (Dressler, 244–245). Mabel uses cruelty as a tactic for managing the incessant incitements to sentimentality that she encountered as a female comedian. 37. Alenka Zupančič, The Odd One In: On Comedy (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008), 36. 38. Zupančič, 54. 39. Lewis, Wild Body, 249. 40. Dale, Comedy Is a Man in Trouble, 105–106. 41. Alice Howell specialized in rough-house slapstick knockabout, starting with Keystone in 1914 and moving to L-KO to work with Henry Lehrman in 1915. She formed her

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own production company, Century Comedies, in 1917. Howell appeared in over one hundred films from 1914 to 1927, including Lizzie’s Shattered Dreams (L-KO, 1915), Tillie’s Terrible Tumbles (John Blystone, 1916), and The Cabbage Queen (Century, 1918). As Steve Massa has aptly described her, “The character Howell developed was a slightly addled working class girl, and she specialized in waitresses and maids. A round Kewpie-doll face, with large eyes and bee-stung lips was topped off with a mountain of frizzy hair piled high on her head producing the effect of smoke billowing from an active volcano” (Steve Massa, “Alice Howell,” in Women Film Pioneers Project, Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, Center for Digital Research and Scholarship, New York: Columbia University Libraries, 2013). 42. Christine Gledhill, “Mary Pickford: Icon of Stardom,” in Flickers of Desire: Movie Stars of the 1910s, ed. Jennifer Bean (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2011), 43. 43. “‘Lunatics and Politics’ Making at Emerald Studio,” Moving Picture World (June 26, 1920): 1742.

6. Film Comedy Aesthetics and Suffragette Social Politics 1. “Bedelia and the Suffragette,” Moving Picture World (February 1912): 804. 2. “When Women Win,” Moving Picture World (October 1909): 769. 3. Alice Duer Miller, Are Women People? A Book of Rhymes for Suffrage Times. (New York: George H. Doran, 1915). Available at Full Books, http://www.fullbooks.com /Are-Women-People-.html. 4. Denise Riley, Am I That Name? Feminism and the Category of “Women” in History (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 68. 5. “The Suffragette’s Dream,” Moving Picture World (March 1909): 282. 6. Jacqueline Rose notes in Women in Dark Times that there is no correlation between women’s attainment of democratic rights and the mitigation of violence against women: “We blind ourselves if we respond to stories from Tahrir Square or Saudi Arabia by insisting that women are simply freer, that such things do not happen to women, in the West.” Women in Dark Times (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014), 262. 7. Shelley Stamp, Movie-Struck Girls, 157. 8. Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 71. 9. Agamben, 71. 10. See introduction for a thorough discussion of feminist theories of carnivalesque comedy. 11. Karen Redrobe Beckman, Crash: Cinema and the Politics of Speed and Stasis (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 66. 12. The enactment of Prohibition alongside the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment was championed by suffragettes, who were concerned with the rampant social problem of men drinking up their wages and then drunkenly beating their wives and children. 13. Are Women People? A Book of Rhymes for Suffrage Times was first published by George H. Doran Company in 1915. It consisted of a collection of Alice Duer Miller’s satirical verse adapted from her weekly column (of the same title) in the New York Tribune.

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14. “A Suggested Campaign Song,” in Are Women People? 15. Aileen S. Kraditor, The Ideas of the Woman Suffrage Movement, 1890–1920 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965), 55. 16. Kraditor, 111. 17. “Democracy,” in Are Women People? 18. Nancy Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), 41. 19. Cott, 48. 20. Sophie Pancake and Caroline Spankhurst are both very thinly veiled references to the Pankhursts, who were British militant suffragette leaders (see chap. 7). 21. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, His Religion and Hers: A Study of the Faith of Our Fathers and the Work of Our Mothers (New York: Century, 1923), 235–236. 22. Cott, Modern Feminism, 49. 23. For more on Addams’ notion of “civic housekeeping,” see Jean Bethke Elshtain, Jane Addams and the Dream of American Democracy (New York: Perseus, 2002). 24. For example, see “City Housekeeping,” in The American Club Woman Magazine (October 1914): 68. 25. Unlike the militant suffragettes in Britain, who used extensive force (blowing up mailboxes, window-breaking, and violent interruptions of traffic), American militants were less aggressive in their tactics. American CU leaders such as Paul and Burns picketed and protested outside of the White House and compared President Wilson to the German Kaiser but did not typically employ British tactics such as the violent destruction of federal property. However, both American and British suffragettes led hunger strikes in prison and were then subjected to brutal force-feedings (see chap. 7 for more on suffragette militancy). 26. Cott, Modern Feminism, 49. 27. Stamp, Movie-Struck Girls, 159. 28. THE LADY IN THE BATHS, “From Our Western Correspondent,” Motion Picture News (March 1912): 32. 29. “When in the Lubin photoplays you see a comedy old woman, a shrew or a suffragette, that is Mae Hotely, the star character actress of the Lubin stock company.” Moving Picture World (January 1912): 111. 30. “The Lady Police,” Moving Picture World (January 1912): 392. For more on silent film spectatorship and prisons, see Alison Griffiths, Carceral Fantasies: Cinema and Prison in Early Twentieth-Century America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016). 31. Kraditor, Woman Suffrage Movement, 19. 32. Kraditor, 20. 33. “If They Meant All They Said,” Are Women People? 34. “If They Meant All They Said,” 35. Kraditor, Woman Suffrage Movement, 20. 36. “When Women Win,” New York Clipper (November 27, 1909), 787. 37. “When Women Win,” Variety (November, 1909), 13.

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42. 43. 44.

45. 46. 47. 48.

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Stamp, Movie-Struck Girls, 158. “A Day in the Life of a Suffragette,” Moving Picture World (May 1908): 401. “Fighting Suffragettes,” Moving Picture World (November 1909): 812. “Pardoning the Crime of Rape,” Woman’s Journal (May 25, 1878), 164. On the other hand, emphasis on retribution for the crime of rape repeatedly targeted black males in the South. The African American suffragette Ida Wells-Barnett wrote prolifically about the racialization of sexual justice in the Memphis Free Speech. In 1892, when three black men successfully running a grocery store were lynched near Memphis for allegedly raping a white woman, Wells “point[ed] out that the punishment for the rape of a white woman was a cover-up for the lynchers’ economic motive: the victims had been prospering and were becoming threats to the white storekeepers who wanted to take over their trade” (Flexner and Fitzpatrick, 180-181). “The Pickpocket,” Moving Picture World (July 23, 1913): 340. “Great Temptation,” Buffalo Evening News (September 18, 1913). Walter Benjamin draws the distinction between conservative law-preserving violence and transformative law-making violence in order to explore the vicious cycle between means and ends that proliferate unending violence in the name of justice. “The question would remain open whether violence, as a principle, could be a moral means even to just ends. To resolve this question a more exact criterion is needed, which would discriminate within the sphere of means themselves, without regard for the ends they serve” (277). As Benjamin argues, the legal means of violence always overpower and dominate the ends of justice. Only by conjuring a form of “pure means,” which he articulates as a “divine violence,” can this apocalyptic crisis of tautological justification be broken open. Walter Benjamin, “Critique of Violence,” in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings (New York: Schocken, 1986). Cott, Modern Feminism, 57. Cott, 55. Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States: 1492–2001 (New York: Harper Collins, 2003), 344. The leading suffragette organizer from Chicago, Ida Wells-Barnett, was asked not to march with her own Illinois Delegation in the 1913 Washington Parade the day before Wilson’s first inauguration. “She was told that southern women in the line of march would not agree to such interracial participation, and that she must march with a ‘colored delegation’ ” (Flexner and Fitzpatrick, 299). However, Barnett disregarded these instructions, disappearing at the beginning of the parade and then emerging midway through: she “stepped unobtrusively from the sidewalk into the Chicago paraders, flanked on either side by white supporters, and finished the full line of march” (299). “Suffragette Parade in Washington,” Moving Picture World (April 4, 1913). Woman’s Journal and Suffrage News (March 8, 1913), 1. “Bunny for the Cause,” Moving Picture World (September 26, 1913): 155. “The Pickpocket,” Moving Picture World (July 23, 1913): 334.

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53. Stamp raises the question of feminine desire in response to the film’s elliptical title, Eighty Million Women Want—?: “Whereas the book [on which the film is based] unequivocally defines ‘what women want,’ the film poses women’s desire as an enigma. The blank line visible in the revised title suggests as much the impossibility of defining what women want, as it does the obviousness of the answer; the feminine libido is at once enormous and unsignifiable” (187). 54. “For Mayor—Bess Smith,” Moving Picture News (June 1913): 27. 55. Amy Shore, Suffrage and the Silver Screen (New York: Peter Lang, 2014), 1. 56. Stamp, Movie-Struck Girls, 188. 57. Infants Department (May, 1918). 58. Emma Goldman, “The Tragedy of Woman’s Emancipation,” Anarchism and Other Essays (New York: Mother Earth, 1911). Available at https://theanarchistlibrary.org /library/emma-goldman-anarchism-and-other-essays#toc12. 59. “The Suffragette Sheriff,” Moving Picture World (July 2, 1913): 1201. 60. Moving Picture World, 1201. 61. Moving Picture World, 1201. 62. Kay Sloan, “Sexual Warfare in the Silent Cinema: Comedies and Melodramas of Woman Suffragism,” in American Quarterly 33, no. 4 (Autumn 1981): 419. 63. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, “The Matriarchate,” (Washington DC: Women’s Tribune, 1891). 64. Joan Wallach Scott, Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), 136. 65. Scott, 138. 66. Scott, 138. 67. Thomas Hobbes, Elements of Law, Natural and Politics (London: Cass, 1969), 42. 68. Horak, Girls Will Be Boys, 84. 69. “The Indian Suffragettes,” Moving Picture World (November 1914): 1075. 70. Frederick Engels, Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State (New York: International Publishers, 1972), 61. 71. Engles, Origins, 61. 72. Charles Musser, “Conversions and Convergences: Sarah Bernhardt in the Era of Technological Reproducibility, 1910-1913.” Film History 25, nos. 1–2, 2013, 154–175. Bernhardt’s views were still “evolving,” however. She still opposed women assuming important roles in government. See also “20,000 Women in Suffrage March,” New York Tribune, May 4, 1913, 1. 73. Cited in Musser. 74. Goldman, Anarchism. 75. Goldman, Anarchism. 76. Jack Zipes, The Enchanted Screen: The Unknown History of Fairy-Tale Films (New York: Routledge, 2011), 34. 77. As Julie Turnock notes, prior to the establishment of “purpose-built effects divisions” in the late 1920s and 1930s, “cinematographers and camera operators skilled in ‘trick’ photography would complete composites” (images composed of multiple elements)

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to create verisimilar film illusions. Plastic Reality, Special Effects, Technology, and the Emergence of 1970s Blockbuster Aesthetics (New York: Columbia University Press), 277. Harrison Dent, “Tricks and Magic in Pictures,” in Motography 5, no. 4, (April 1911): 32. Cott, Modern Feminism, 49. “Cousin Kate’s Revolution,” Moving Picture World (May 3, 1912): 668. Moving Picture World: 668. “Thoughts at an Anti-Meeting,” in Are Women People?

7. Radical Militancy and Slapstick Political Violence 1. Frederick Pethick Lawrence, Women’s Fight for the Vote (London: Women’s Press, 1910), 109. 2. June Parvis, Emmeline Pankhurst: A Biography (London: Routledge, 2002), 203. 3. Lesley Mason, “A Militant Suffragette,” Motion Picture News (April 1914): 41. 4. Lawrence, Women’s Fight, 125. 5. Lawrence, 104. 6. Ewa Ziarek, Feminist Aesthetics and the Politics of Modernism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 159. 7. Lawrence, Women’s Fight, 121. 8. Notably, Irish Republicans (the IRA) also used hunger strikes as a political tactic to protest British occupation from 1917 through the Irish War of Independence (1919–21). The hunger strike has been employed as a political tactic by protesters including Mahatma Gandhi, Jatin Das (the Indian Revolutionary who fasted to death in 1929), Pedro Luis Boitel (the Cuban poet and political dissident), and many others. 9. “British Notes,” Moving Picture World (May 1913): 684. 10. Women’s large hats, screaming babies, and recreational “sobbing clubs” posed several among many gendered obstacles to immersive film spectatorship through the early 1900s and 1910s. 11. Shelly Stamp, Movie-Struck Girls: Women and Motion Picture Culture After the Nickelodeon, (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2000), 194. 12. Jacqueline Rose, “Introduction II,” Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the école freudienne, ed. Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose (London: Macmillan, 1982), 43. 13. Jeremy Bentham’s eighteenth-century ideal of a model prison, in which prisoners learn self-discipline from the paranoia that they might at any moment be under surveillance by a concealed guard in a central tower, provides a central metaphor for Foucault’s critique of noncoercive governance in Discipline and Punish (New York: Pantheon, 1977). 14. Jennifer Bean, “The Art of Imitation,” in Slapstick Comedy, eds. Rob King and Tom Paulus. (New York: Routledge, 2010), 257. 15. Lawrence, Women’s Fight, 103. 16. Lawrence, 104. 17. Duer Miller, “Our Own Twelve Anti-Suffragette Reasons,” Are Women People? (see chap. 6, n. 3).

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18. Teresa Billington-Greig, “The Woman with a Whip,” in The Non-Violent Militant: Selected Writings of Teresa Billington-Greig (London: Routledge, 1987), 46. 19. Billington-Greig, 46. 20. Sigmund Freud, “Humour” (1927), 161–166, available at https://www.scribd.com /doc/34515345/Sigmund-Freud-Humor-1927. 21. Rose, Feminine Sexuality, 67. 22. Bergson, Laughter, 87. 23. The punishments depicted in Milling the Militants at once exemplify and contradict the technologies of a biopolitical apparatus as Foucault outlines them in Discipline and Punish: “With the police, one is in the indefinite world of a supervision that seeks ideally to reach the most elementary particle, the most passing phenomenon of the social body . . . the infinitely small of political power. And in order to be exercised, this power had to be given the instrument of permanent, exhaustive, omnipresent surveillance, capable of making all visible as long as it could itself remain invisible. It had to be like a faceless gaze that transformed the whole social body into a field of perception.” Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (New York: Pantheon, 1977), 213–214. 24. In early 1900s film comedies, suffragette leaders are almost always depicted as hellraising furies. For example, in Carrie Nation film comedies, including Kansas City Saloon Smasher (Biograph, 1901) and Why Mr. Nation Wants a Divorce (Edison, 1901), Carrie Nation and her hatchet brigade are depicted as axe-wielding maniacs who would wreak violence, anarchy, and domestic turbulence in the name of enfranchisement and prohibition. 25. Aristotle, Rhetoric, Book 2 (New York: Modern Library, 1954). 26. Robert Elliott, The Power of Satire: Magic, Ritual, Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970), 239. 27. Thomas Hobbes, Elements of Law, Natural and Politics (London: Cass, 1969), 60. 28. Giorgia Agamben, State of Exception (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 71. 29. Agamben, 71. 30. Bonnie Honig, Emergency Politics: Paradox, Law, Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), 44. 31. Honig, 62. 32. See Andrea Dworkin, Pornography: Men Possessing Women (New York: Perigee, 1981); Andrea Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon, Pornography and Civil Rights: A New Day for Women’s Equality (Minneapolis: Organizing Against Pornography, 1988). 33. Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York: Routledge, 1997), 1. 34. See Linda Mizejewski, Pretty/Funny: Women Comedians and Body Politics (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2015); Joanne Gilbert, Performing Marginality: Humor, Gender, and Cultural Critique (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2004); Susan Glenn, Female Spectacle: The Theatrical Roots of Modern Feminism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000).

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35. Hanna Arendt argues that the French Revolution, unlike the American Revolution, was a failure because it ultimately shortchanged the idea of liberty, making compassion or happiness rather than freedom the ultimate ideal of modern state politics. See On Revolution (New York: Penguin, 1963). 36. Ziarek, Feminist Aesthetics, 22. 37. “Exciting Derby Race Film,” Moving Picture World (November 10, 1913): 189. 38. Created by Muybridge in 1879, the zoopraxiscope was an early motion-picture projector that created the illusion of movement by spinning discrete images in rapid succession using rotating glass disks. 39. Tom Gunning, “Animating the Instant: The Secret Symmetry Between Animation and Photography,” in Animating Film Theory, ed. Karen Redrobe Beckman (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 46. 40. For more examples of this argument, see Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002); Linda Williams, “Film Body: An Implantation of Perversions,” in Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology, ed. Philip Rosen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 507–534.

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Index

Page numbers in italics indicate figures. Abel, Richard, 130 absurdity, 225 Acéphale (secret society), 40, 284n44 Acker, Ally, 56 Acrobatic Burglars (Vitagraph, 1906), 114 Acrobatic Maid, The (Pathé, 1908), 25, 68, 121, 122, 124, 126–27, 128, 248–49 Addams, Jane, 182, 183 adulterers, 51, 92, 99, 243 Adventures of Dollie (Biograph), 153 aesthetics, 25, 62, 90–91, 111–14, 121–23, 124, 135 African Americans, 48, 74–76, 94, 117, 168, 250–51, 287n29, 301n41 African American women: blackness in transition and, 95; A Bucket of Cream Ale (Biograph, 1904) and, 52; The Colored Stenographer (Edison, 1909) and, 253; A Florida Enchantment (Vitagraph, 1914) and, 117; Laughing Gas (Edison, 1907) and, 34, 74, 81, 95, 248; stereotypes and, 94–95; suffragettes

and, 192–93, 302n48; transitional period (1907–1915) and, 94–95; Wells-Barnett, Ida, 301n41, 302n48; What Happened in the Tunnel (Edison 1903) and, 34, 45, 94 Agamben, Giorgio, 178, 227 Agee, James, 150 Agonies of Agnes, The (1918), 280n41 Ahmed, Sara, 5 Al Christie’s Film Company, 23, 90 Allen, Phyllis, 88 alternative public spheres, 18, 281n50 Althusser, Louis, 120, 293n9 AM&B (American Mutoscope & Biograph Company), 294n16 Amateur Detective, The (Pathé, 1909), 124 American censorship, 25–26, 93. See also censorship American Cinema’s Transitional Era: Audiences, Institutions, Practices (Keil and Stamp), 67, 94 American distribution, 102, 113, 120, 122–23

320 American film industry: artistic legitimacy and the, 24, 90; Betty series (Pathé, 1910–1912) and the, 102; European film industry and the, 102, 291n32; female spectacle and the, 25, 89; filmic story/ narrative and the, 22, 25; instability and the, 86; morality and the, 25, 26, 103; Motion Picture Patents Company (MPPC) (or Edison Trust) and the, 291n32; national exceptionalism and the, 26; race and the, 94–95; reform and uplift campaigns and the, 90, 101; social respectability and the, 22, 24, 25, 90; Turner, Florence and the, 108; women’s bodies and the, 89. See also film industries; individual film companies American nationalism, 25, 121 American reception, 113, 120, 121, 122–23, 124, 128 American suffragettes. See suffragette comedies; United States: suffragettes and the; individual films American Vitagraph. See Vitagraph American Woman’s Home: Principles of Domestic Science, The (Beecher and Stowe), 37–38 amusement parks, 32, 44, 252–53 anarchic comedy: anarchic destruction, 13, 19, 51, 106; anarchic knockabout, 22; anarchic physicality, 14, 93, 108; anarchic slapstick, 94, 112; anarchic violence, 86, 92. See also knockabout violence androgyny, 33 And the Villainess Still Pursued Him (United States, 1909), 81–82, 91–92, 96 Anmer (horse), 229–31 Annual Suffragette Parade, 204. See also suffrage parades Another Job for the Undertaker (United States, 1901), 50–51, 58, 59–60 Anthony, Katherine, 182 Anthony, Susan B., 76

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anthropomorpheses, 135. See also interspecies transfiguration anti-suffrage/suffragettes, 179–80, 185–87, 193–94 anti-suffragette films, 92, 184–85, 225. See also Milling the Militants: A Comical Absurdity (Clarendon, 1913) Anti-Women’s Suffrage Organization, 186 apocalyptic violence, 50–53 Appointment by Telephone (Edison, 1902), 51, 243 Arendt, Hannah, 228, 305n35 Are Women People? A Book of Rhymes for Suffrage Times (Miller), 175, 179–80, 186, 190–91, 209–10, 221, 300n12 Aristotle, 226 Armatage, Kay, 56 Arnold, Roseanne, 13, 280n37 L’Arroseur Arrosé (Lumière, 1895), 20–21 artistic legitimacy, 24, 90, 112–13, 114–15, 128, 144, 298n22 Artist’s Dream, An (Edison, 1900), 53, 58, 241 Arvidson, Linda, 297n11, 298n22 Asquith, H. H., 212 assault comedies, 1–2, 45–46 Aunt Sallie’s Wonderful Bustle (Edison, 1901), 68, 242 automated devices, 132, 133. See also mechanization; new technologies automobile-accident films, 45. See also individual films Babel and Babylon (Hansen), 51–52 Baer, Leon, 295n30 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 4, 11, 12, 13, 15, 42, 178, 226, 279n30, 279n31 Balides, Constance, 8–9, 51–52, 94 Barber’s Revenge, The (Pathé, 1908), 122 Baron Munchausen’s Dream (Star, 1911), 64–65, 81–82, 257 Barr, Roseanne, 13, 280n37 batacchios (prop), 1, 177, 209, 277n1

INDEX

Bataille, Georges: Acéphale (secret society) and, 40, 284n44; Bergson, Henri and, 34, 40; comic sovereignty and, 40, 283n22; decapitation and, 282n21, 284n44; laughter and, 9–10, 34, 40, 76, 282n21, 283n24, 284n44, 288n47; Parvulescu, Anca and, 288n47; self-decapitating laughter and, 49; La Somme Athéologique and, 283n23; The Unfinished System of Nonknowledge and, 40, 283n23, 283n24; un-knowability and, 34, 40, 283n25; “Un-Knowing: Laughter and Tears” and, 40; violence and, 40 battered wives, 14. See also domestic abuse Battlori, Joan, 130, 295n32 Baudelaire, Charles, 9–10, 44–45, 48, 49, 87, 298n31 Bayley, Laura, 31, 63, 240, 281n1 Bayley sisters, 31, 281n1 Bean, Jennifer, 22, 44, 63–64, 69, 220 Bedelia and the Suffragette (1912), 174 Beecher, Catherine, 37–38 Beelzebub’s Daughters (Méliès, 1903), 59, 243 Bell, Shannon, 282n13 Benjamin, Walter, 55, 128, 162, 301n44 Bentham, Jeremy, 304n13 Bergson, Henri: Bataille, Georges and, 34, 40; caricatured comedies and, 48; comedy and, 33, 36; comic automaton and, 21; crinoline conflagrations and, 36; Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic and, 225; laughter as social corrective and, 4, 10, 20, 33, 39–40, 49; laughter definitions and, 20, 45, 87, 145, 147 Berlant, Lauren, 5, 53 Bernhardt, Sarah, 204, 303n72 Bessie’s Dream (Selig, 1912), 93–94, 97, 259 Betty Guards the House (Pathé Comica), 103, 105 Betty is Punished (Pathé, 1910), 102 Betty on Vacation (Pathé Comica), 105

H

321

Betty Pulls the Strings (Pathé Comica, 1910), 24, 102, 104–7, 110, 269 Betty Rolls Along (Pathé Comica), 103 Betty’s Apprenticeship (Pathé Comica), 103 Betty’s Boat (Pathé 1911), 102, 103, 268–69, 270 Betty series (Pathé Comica 1910–1912), 101–7, 268–70, 292n43 Betty’s Fireworks (Pathé, 1910), 122 Betty’s Tricks (Pathé, 1911), 103–4, 105, 269 Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Malabou), 65 Biddy on Her Mettle (Komic, 1913), 263, 290n16 Big Swallow, The (UK, 1901), 79, 80 Billington-Greig, Teresa, 221 Billy the Suffragette (1913), 202, 212 Biograph: European comedienne series and, 25; Griffith, D. W. and, 26, 72, 114, 139, 144–46, 147–48, 150, 151, 153–54; literature/theater adaptations and, 139; melodramas and, 170; Motion Picture Patents Company (MPPC) (or Edison Trust) and, 291n32, 294n17; Normand, Mabel and, 23, 145, 170; Pathé and, 121; Sennett, Mack and, 145, 168, 281n56; slapstick comedies and, 144 Biograph Bulletin, 151 blackness in transition, 95. See also African Americans; African American women Blackton, J. Stuart, 138, 139, 140, 141, 296n37 Blavatsky, Helena Petrovna (Madame), 76, 288n55 bodily elasticity, 25, 119–20, 125, 127, 242. See also elasticity (reversibility) bodily exhibitionism, 147–48 bodily exposure, 51–52 bodily fluidity, 28, 55, 129. See also female bodily fluidity bodily invincibility, 4, 14, 16, 88, 158, 232. See also physical indestructibility bodily transformation. See female metamorphosis; interspecies transfiguration

322 bodily violation, 14 body genres, 10, 147, 279n28 Boîte à Cigares, La. See Cigar Box, The (Pathé, 1907) Boitel, Pedro Luis, 303n8 Booth, Walter, 131 Bow, Clara, 24, 94 Bowser, Eileen, 50 Boy, the Bust, and the Bath, The (Vitagraph, 1907), 115–16, 247 Braidotti, Rosi, 56 Braude, Ann, 76, 77 Brewster, Ron, 293n9 Bridget and the Egg (Lubin, 1911), 41, 257 Bridget McKeen (character), 35, 41–43, 48, 59–60, 69–70. See also individual films Brighton Conferences, 63, 287n22 Britain: Davison, Emily Wilding and, 229– 32; force-feedings and, 213, 225; How They Got the Vote (Edison, 1913) and, 181; Irish Republicans (the IRA) and, 303n8; Mary Jane’s Mishap (G.A. Smith, 1903) and, 68; slapstick comediennes and, 101; suffragettes and, 27, 173–75, 183, 199, 204, 211–15, 218–26, 229–32, 300n25; suffragette spectatorship and, 215; Tillie (Hepworth, 1910–1915) and, 25; Turner, Florence and, 292n53; World War I and, 101. See also Milling the Militants: A Comical Absurdity (Clarendon, 1913); Pankhurst, Christabel and Emmeline British Film Institute, 295n33 British Women’s Freedom League, 221 British Women’s Social and Political Union, 211 Brown, Kelly, 151, 153 Brown, Wendy, 6–7 Browning, Tod, 290n16 Bruce, Kate, 163 Bruno, Giuliana, 55, 56 Bucket of Cream Ale, A (Biograph, 1904), 20–21, 52, 245

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INDEX

Buhle, Mary Jo, 55 Bunny, Johnny, 92–93, 113, 193–94, 290n17 Bunny for the Cause (1913), 193–95 Burch, Noel, 106, 292n54 Burns, Lucy, 183, 191, 192, 213, 300n25 Bush, W. Stephen, 89 Busy Day, A (1914), 199, 202 Butler, Judith, 7, 228 Cabbage Fairy, The (Guy-Blaché, 1896), 78 Cahill, James Leo, 45, 287n35 cannibalism, 2, 91, 93, 96, 97, 259 Canova, Judy, 88 carnality, 128 carnival, 178, 226 carnivalesque, the, 4, 14, 16, 42–43, 178–80, 226, 227 carnivalesque bodies, 13, 14–15, 279n30 carnivalesque feminism, 11–13 carnivalesque-grotesque bodies, 14–16, 62, 75, 178–79, 228, 279n30, 279n31. See also female grotesques carnivalesque laughter, 4, 11–13, 227 Carrie Nation film comedies, 304n24 “Cat and Mouse Act” (Britain), 225, 287n33 catastrophes, 66. See also female catastrophes Catt, Carrie Chapman, 183 Caught by the Coupon Craze (Edison, 1909), 93, 99–100, 252 censorship, 7, 93, 97, 124, 228, 294n27. See also American censorship Century Comedies, 299n41 Change of Heart, A (1909), 153 Chaplin, Charlie, 10, 21, 63, 156, 162, 168– 69, 199–200, 220 chase films, 22, 73–74, 87, 88 chase scenes, 106–7, 114, 168–69 Cheese Special, The (Universal, 1913), 22–23, 262, 297n5 Chomón, Segundo de, 122, 129–35, 141, 294n27, 295n32, 295n33 Christie, Al, 23, 90, 290n16

INDEX

Cigar Box, The (Pathé, 1907), 16, 67, 68, 81–82, 123, 247 cinema, 196. See also early cinema (1894–1906); film historiographies; pre-classical cinema (1894–1917); silent film classical period (1916–1927); transitional period (1907–1915) Cinema and Its Shadow (Maurice), 74 cinema of attractions, 86 Cinematernity (Fischer), 79 Cinemetrics database, 291n31 Cines, 91, 93, 295n32 Cissy’s Innocent Wink (Vitagraph, 1915), 281n58 citizenship, 217–18 civic empowerment, 188 civic housekeeping, 182, 211 Cixous, Hélène, 12, 13 class, 24, 38–39, 41, 89, 116, 128, 204, 206, 208, 209 classical period (1916–1927). See silent film classical period (1916–1927) Close Combat (Romeo Bosetti, 1911), 92, 258 close-ups, 76, 108, 109–10, 148, 159–60 Clover, Carol, 146 Cohen at Coney Island (Vitagraph, 1909), 93, 252–53 Colored Stenographer, The (Edison, 1909), 91, 253 comedians, 113. See also individuals Comedian’s Downfall, The (1913), 202 comedies, 10–11, 41–43, 119, 170, 173, 228. See also slapstick comedies; suffragette comedies comedies of manners, 22, 24, 90, 92–93, 95, 113, 290n17 comedy, 6, 7, 33, 36, 62–63, 90, 128, 173 Comedy Is A Man In Trouble (Dale), 169 comedy scholarship, 4, 22. See also feminist comedy scholarship comedy theories, 9–10, 17. See also individuals comical gestures, 86. See also facial gestures

H

323

comic automatons, 21 comic sovereignty, 40, 283n22 comic spectatorship theories, 43–45 comic violence, 4, 169–70. See also violence commedia dell’arte, 1, 277n1 commodity capitalism, 137–38, 196–97, 203, 206, 211, 213 commodity fetishism, 24, 99–100, 138, 164, 203 commodity standardization, 70, 71 Coney Island Comedies, 139–40 Congressional Union (CU), 183, 191, 213, 300n25 Conklin, Chester, 88 Conquest of the Pole, The (Méliès, 1912), 205–6, 207 continuity-editing, 71, 234–35 convict-themed comedies, 114, 132 convulsive laughter, 128–29 copyright, 293n5 coquettes, 92 corporeality, 56. See also female corporeality corrective slapstick, 104 “Correct View of the New Machine for Winding Up Ladies, A (1820),” 37 corsets, 32–33, 37, 44, 241, 283n31 Costello, Maurice, 92–93 Cott, Nancy, 183, 191, 208 Cottingley Fairy scandal, 296n48 Courting Across the Court (1911), 173, 183–84 Cousin Kate’s Revolution (Éclair, 1912), 27, 173, 208–10, 260 Crandon, Mina, 76–77 Crash: Cinema and the Politics of Speed and Stasis (Redrobe), 45, 51 Criminal Hypnotist, The (Biograph), 153 crinoline conflagrations, 1, 19, 32, 35–41 crinoline fashion, 35–36, 38, 39, 282n13 “Crinoline Terror, The” (article), 37 cross-dressers, 81–82, 91, 100, 199–204, 293n6 Cult of True Womanhood, 76

324 Cumpson, John, 151 Cunégonde (Lux, 1911–1913), 25, 93, 101–2, 271–72 Cunégonde Reçoit sa Famille [Cunégonde Has Visitors] (Lux, 1912), 14, 21, 69, 102, 127, 271 Cure for Pokeritis, A (Vitagraph, 1912), 92–93, 260 Cure for Suffragettes, A (Biograph, 1913), 27, 92, 173, 174, 182, 212, 262, 300n20 Curious Dream A (Vitagraph, 1907), 116 Daisy Doodad’s Dial (Turner, 1914), 67, 90, 93–94, 107–10, 116, 265 Dale, Alan, 169 Dancing Legs, The (Vitagraph, 1908), 67, 70, 115–16, 249 Dandy, Raymond, 272 Daniels, Bebe, 24 Das, Jatin, 303n8 “Daughters of Freedom” (song), 196 Davenport, Alice, 24 Davies, Marion, 24, 94 Davis, Mildred, 23 Davis, Natalie Zemon, 11, 178 Davison, Emily Wilding, 229–32, 233–34 Day in the Life the Life of a Suffragette, A (1908), 188 “Death of the Author, The” (Barthes), 56 decapitation, 59, 282n21, 284n44. See also female decapitation Deceived Slumming Party (Biograph, 1908), 26, 72, 73, 81–82, 144, 150, 249 defensive pranks, 19. See also pranksters/ tomboys de Lauretis, Teresa, 5, 146 democracy, 27, 175–76, 178, 180–81, 182, 183, 192, 299n6 denegation, 168 Dent, Harrison, 207 Derby, The (Pathé, 1913), 230 derisive laughter, 13, 218, 221, 224, 227–28 Derrida, Jacques, 63

H

INDEX

destructive plasticity, 57, 64, 65 Deutsche Kinemathek, 295n33 Diabolical Pickpocket (Pathé, 1908), 132 digital media, 56, 63 Discipline and Punish (Foucault), 304n23 “Discipline Through Diegesis” (Elsaesser), 104 Discontented Woman, A (1910), 179 Disintegrated Convict, The (Vitagraph, 1907), 114, 132 dismemberment, 51, 132, 134, 241. See also female dismemberment Disney animation, 71 Diving Lucy (Mitchell & Kenyon, 1904), 57–58, 245 Doane, Mary Ann, 5, 7–8, 9, 66, 146–47 Doisneau, Robert, 7–8 Doll’s Revenge, The (Hepworth, 1907), 93–94, 97, 247 domestic abuse, 177, 179, 212–13, 255, 300n13 domestic accidents, 19, 35–41. See also crinoline conflagrations domestic assault, 1–2, 45. See also sexual assault domestic comedies/farces, 24, 25, 113 domesticity, 32, 37–38, 101–2, 203, 208, 219. See also housework domestic labor, 134–35, 182, 184. See also housemaids; Kitchen Maid’s Dream, The (Vitagraph, 1907); labor division; Scullion’s Dream (Pathé, 1908) domestic violence, 32, 223 double exposures, 140, 141 Down with Men (1912), 173, 183–84 Dramatist’s Dream, The (Vitagraph, 1909), 116 dreamers, 93–94 dream films, 93, 116–17, 132, 134, 242, 252. See also individual films Dream of Wealth, A (Vitagraph, 1908), 116 Dressler, Marie: Bean, Jennifer and, 44; gender and, 280n41; Marie Dressler productions, 280n41; My Own Story

INDEX

(Dressler), 298n36; Normand, Mabel and, 298n36; physical indestructibility and, 85; slapstick ridicule and, 88; Sturtevant, Victoria and, 13, 280n41; Tillie’s Punctured Romance (Keystone, 1914) and, 22–23, 88, 280n41; Tillie’s Tomato Surprise (Lubin, 1914) and, 22–23, 280n41; Tillie Wakes Up (Peerless, 1917) and, 22–23, 280n41; transitional period (1907–1915) and, 22–24; as unruly woman, 13 Drew, Mr. and Mrs. Sidney, 24, 92–93, 113, 117 Drunken Mattress, The (Gaumont, 1906), 87, 246 dualities, 6, 135, 158, 169, 197, 298n36. See also spirituelle/voluptuary dichotomy Duhamel, Sarah, 25, 85, 101–2, 273 Dunlop, Marion Wallace, 214 Durand, Jean, 122 Duras, Marguerite, 80 Durfee, Minta, 88 Dworkin, Andrea, 228 Dye, Nancy, 55 dying-regenerating bodies, 15. See also elasticity (reversibility); physical indestructibility early cinema (1894–1906): bodily exhibitionism and, 148; female corporeality and, 19; female selfdefense and, 90; female sexuality and, 22, 94; feminist scholarship and, 22, 69, 94; film historiographies and, 69; non-centered quality and, 106; as selfreflexive screen, 72, 288n43; sexual assault and, 90; silent film classical period (1916–1927) and, 148; slapstick comedies and, 19 Earnshaw, George, 197 Easter Eggs, The (Pathé), 135, 296n37 East Lynne; or, Led Astray (Vitagraph, 1908), 139

H

325

Eastman Kodak, 120 economics, 119–23. See also markets Edgar Allen Poe (Biograph), 153 Edison, 121, 291n32, 294n16. See also Motion Picture Patents Company (MPPC) (or Edison Trust); individual films Edith’s Avoirdupois (Lubin, 1910), 24, 91–92, 96, 256 Effects of a Trolley Car Collision, The (Lubin, 1903), 47, 243 Eighty Million Women Want—? (1913), 195, 302n53 Eisenstein, Sergei, 71, 288n42 elasticity (reversibility), 57, 65, 72–76, 80, 287n26. See also bodily elasticity Elastic Transformation (Pathé, 1909), 25, 121, 122 Electric Hotel, The (Pathé, 1908), 130, 132, 133 Elements of Law, Natural and Politic (Hobbes) (1640), 201, 226 Ellis, Havelock, 182 Ellison, Ralph, 48–49 Eloping with Aunty (Biograph), 153 Elsaesser, Thomas, 104 Elusive Miss Pinkhurst, The (Warwick, 1912), 27, 67, 173, 260, 287n33 emblematic shots, 109, 292n54 Emergency Politics (Honig), 227 Enchanted Pond (Pathé), 296n37 “Encouraging Education Pictures” (article), 114 Engels, Frederick, 203 Epsom Derby, 229. See also Davison, Emily Wilding equal rights for women, 25, 173. See also Nineteenth amendment; right to vote; suffragettes equine photography, 229–30, 231 Eradicating Auntie (D.W. Griffith, 1909), 91–92, 253 erotic gags, 7–9

326 Espionage Act, 213 Essanay, 112, 291n32, 294n17. See also individual films “Essence of Laughter, The” (Baudelaire), 48 Eternal Feminine, The (1915), 193 Eternal Mother, The (1912), 148–50, 163, 297n11, 297n13 Ethel Gets Consent (Komic, 1915), 266–67, 290n16 ethnicities, 72–76, 202–4, 208 etiquette manuals, 18 Eugénie, Straighten Up! (France, 1911), 93, 257 European comediennes, 25–26, 91, 292n40 European film industry, 86, 93, 101–2, 119, 125, 291n32 Eva Is Tired of Life (Pathé, 1911), 16–17, 68, 85–87, 110, 127, 258, 289n1 Excitable Speech (Butler), 228 Exciting Derby Race Film (Gaumont), 229, 232 exhibition. See film exhibition Expiation, The (1909), 153 explosion, 57. See also female explosion Explosion of a Motor Car, The (Hepworth, 1900), 45, 51, 106, 241 “Extravagance of Laughter” (Ellison), 48, 49 Face or the Voice, The (Vitagraph, 1912), 108, 260 facial gestures, 23, 107–10, 116, 265 factory laborers, 14, 32 “Failure of the Premium Gag, The” (Bush), 89 Fairooz, Desiree, 278n9 Fallen Idol, The (Edison, 1909), 91, 253 Fan, A (Pathé, 1909), 125, 128 fantastic (magic films). See magic films Fantastic Umbrella, The (Pathé, 1907), 128, 130 Farley, Dot, 24, 88 Fatal Mallet, The (Keystone, 1914), 88, 156, 265

H

INDEX

Fatal Sneeze, The (1907), 50 fat ladies, 91, 96, 272 Fazenda, Louise, 10, 22–24, 88, 94, 147, 235, 297n5 female absence, 57–62 female accidents, 32–33 female aurality, 161, 163 female bodies, 26, 87, 95, 108, 112–13. See also female corporeality female bodily damage/destruction/ fragmentation, 57, 95, 154. See also bodily invincibility female bodily fluidity, 1, 25, 56–57, 59, 97, 114, 121, 122, 142, 237 female bodily mutilations, 2 female bodily transformation, 21–22 female burning, 25. See also crinoline conflagrations; female combustion female calamity films, 46–47 female catastrophes, 31–53; class and, 41; crinoline conflagrations and, 35–41; domesticity and, 32; female accidents and, 32–33; female combustion and, 33, 35–41; female dismemberment and, 33; female self-defense and, 52–53; female survival and, 52–53; femininity and, 33; feminist scholarship and, 54–55; film historiographies and, 66; filmic story/ narrative and, 54; history and, 32–33, 55; immigrant/Irish maids and, 34, 41–43; laughter and, 52; modernity and, 32–33; non-knowledge and, 34; plasticity (permanent change) and, 73; public spheres and, 32–33; Redrobe, Karen and, 66; suffragette comedies and, 174; trick devices and, 66; trick films and, 66, 80; violence and, 52, 66 female combustion, 19–22, 31–41, 54–82; everyday mishaps and, 35–41; female bodily fluidity and, 59; female catastrophes and, 33, 35–41; female corporeality and, 19; female metamorphosis and, 3; film

INDEX

historiographies and, 62–63; filmic story/narrative and, 54, 58, 60–62; film metamorphosis and, 72; gendered histories and, 56; gender politics and, 40–41; gender violence and, 62; Gilman, Charlotte Perkins and, 77; housemaids and, 19, 21, 35, 39, 41, 50, 57, 58–59, 81; housework and, 31–32; immigrant maids and, 41; laughter and, 32, 39, 48, 49; machine technologies and, 53; Mary Jane’s Mishap (G.A. Smith, 1903) and, 31–32, 50, 57–58, 60–62, 67, 244; modernity and, 19; nineteenth century and, 37–39, 41; sexual predation and, 2, 19; short films (1894 to 1907) and, 2–3; sight gags and, 57; slapstick and, 16; slapstick comediennes and, 2; transitional period (1907–1915) and, 86; trick films and, 80; violence and, 62, 66; women’s domestic accidents and, 19. See also crinoline conflagrations; individual films female comedy, 22, 24. See also slapstick comediennes Female Complaint, The (Berlant), 53 female corporeality, 143–70; all-male homosocial spaces and, 18; artistic legitimacy and, 113; cannibalism and, 97; carnality and, 128; carnival and, 178; carnivalesque-grotesque bodies and, 279n31; censorship and, 97; Chomón, Segundo de and, 129, 131; cinema potentials and, 3–4; cinematic technologies and, 70; Cousin Kate’s Revolution (Éclair, 1912) and, 209; early cinema (1894–1906) and, 19; elasticity (reversibility) and, 65; Elastic Transformation (Pathé, 1909) and, 122; facial gestures and, 109–10; female bodily fluidity and, 97; female-limb fragmentation and, 152–53; female metamorphosis and, 128; female slapstick and, 235; femininity and,

H

327

15–16, 34; film editing and, 26; film historiographies and, 3; filmic story/ narrative and, 26, 28, 62, 107–8, 120, 129, 143–70; film industries and, 142; filmmaking history and, 26; film technique and, 129; gender/politics and, 3, 26, 32, 41; gentrification and, 97; Griffith, D. W. and, 26, 144–50, 154, 163; horrific depictions and, 97; Howell, Alice and, 169; industrial mechanization/modernity and, 15–16, 18–19; laughter and, 3, 6, 18–19, 26, 128; machine technologies and, 51, 53; male aggression/predation and, 19, 20–21; markets and, 128, 142; Mary Jane’s Mishap (G.A. Smith, 1903) and, 62; melodramas and, 170; Mickey (Normand, 1918) and, 28; new technologies and, 50, 53; Pathé and, 112–13, 120, 121; plasticity (permanent change) and, 65; Princess Nicotine; or the Smoke Fairies (Vitagraph, 1909) and, 137; sight gags and, 146; slapstick and, 16, 146, 235, 236–37; slapstick comediennes and, 150, 235; slapstick explosion and, 51; slapstick political violence and, 28; social uplift and, 113; stardom and, 113; suffragette comedies and, 190, 227; Synthetic Sin (First National, 1929) and, 235–37; transitional period (1907–1915) and, 95; An Unseen Enemy (1912) and, 157, 158; violence and, 53, 228; Vitagraph and, 112–13, 114–15, 119–20, 121, 142; wild corporeality, 85–86. See also female combustion; female dismemberment; female explosion; female rupture; slapstick corporeality female decapitation, 16, 18, 32, 40, 66 female destructive metamorphosis, 66–72, 81. See also female metamorphosis female disappearances/reappearances, 2, 21–22, 58, 64, 65

328

H

female dismemberment: dream films and, 116; female catastrophes and, 33; female metamorphosis and, 67, 82, 93; female slapstick fluidity and, 21; housemaids and, 22; housework and, 50; The Kitchen Maid’s Dream (Vitagraph, 1907) and, 50, 67, 69, 70–71, 93–94, 115–16, 132, 248; Mary Jane’s Mishap (G.A. Smith, 1903) and, 21, 31, 60, 244; Mickey (Normand, 1918) and, 235; An Odd Pair of Limbs (Vitagraph, 1908) and, 70, 115–16; public spheres and, 115; Scullion’s Dream (Pathé, 1908) and, 134; slapstick and, 16, 18; slapstick comediennes and, 1; transitional period (1907–1915) and, 22, 93; An Unseen Enemy (1912) and, 160; The Vanishing Lady (R. W. Paul, 1897) and, 240; violence and, 66; Vitagraph and, 112, 115–16, 142. See also femalelimb fragmentation female dissection, 16, 25, 32 female duplication, 25 female durability, 88. See also elasticity (reversibility); physical indestructibility female elasticity. See bodily elasticity female electrocution, 91, 95 female empowerment, 27, 92, 188–92, 204, 263 female explosion: Bridget McKeen (character), 69–70; Cousin Kate’s Revolution (Éclair, 1912) and, 209–10; crinoline conflagrations and, 19; female corporeality and, 53; film metamorphosis and, 72; gender and, 19, 21–22; housework and, 59; How Bridget Made the Fire (Biograph, 1900) and, 54; humor and, 21–22; jump cuts and, 54; magic-themed films and, 59; Mary Jane’s Mishap (G.A. Smith, 1903) and, 60; new technologies and, 53; The Old Maid Having Her Picture Taken (Edison, 1901) and, 53; slapstick and, 18; slapstick comediennes and, 1; slapstick

INDEX

comedies and, 59; suffragettes and, 186–87; Synthetic Sin (First National, 1929) and, 237 female facial gestures, 23, 107–10, 116, 265. See also Daisy Doodad’s Dial (Turner, 1914) female fashion, 33, 35–38, 39, 283n31. See also crinoline conflagrations female grotesques, 11–13, 178. See also carnivalesque-grotesque bodies female incineration, 16. See also female combustion female laborers, 85. See also Eva Is Tired of Life (Pathé, 1911); housemaids; immigrant maids; labor division female laughter, 18, 20, 44, 46–48, 89. See also feminist laughter female-limb fragmentation, 70, 152–53, 160. See also female dismemberment; Odd Pair of Limbs, An (Vitagraph, 1908) female melting, 1, 2–3, 16, 25, 137 female mesmerization, 77, 91–92, 97, 250 female metamorphosis, 66–72; The Acrobatic Maid (Pathé, 1908) and, 122; aesthetics and, 25, 124; artistic legitimacy and, 128; Chomón, Segundo de and, 135; The Cigar Box (Pathé, 1907) and, 16, 67, 68, 123; dream films and, 93, 116–17; elasticity (reversibility) and, 72, 80; ethnicities and, 72; European film industry and, 125; female destructive metamorphosis, 66–72, 81; female dismemberment and, 67, 82, 93; female slapstick fluidity and, 21–22; feminism and, 64–65; film editing and, 92; film historiographies and, 63, 69; filmic story/narrative and, 22, 62, 69–70, 111; gender and, 20; gradual metamorphosis and, 67, 68; international film markets and, 25; interspecies transfiguration and, 16, 93; laughter and, 237; The Lover (Duras) and, 80; magic films and, 93; markets and, 111; Mary Jane’s Mishap

INDEX

(G.A. Smith, 1903) and, 60, 65, 66, 67, 68, 81; Méliès, Georges and, 59, 64–65; modernity and, 55; national contexts and, 111; neurasthenia and, 78; The Ontology of the Accident (Malabou) and, 80; Pathé and, 119–23; plasticity (permanent change) and, 72, 80; Princess Nicotine; or the Smoke Fairies (Vitagraph, 1909) and, 16, 69, 93–94; quick-change metamorphosis and, 67, 68; The Red Spectre (Pathé, 1907) and, 16, 93–94; slapstick and, 16; slapstick comediennes and, 2, 66, 123; slapstick corporeality and, 68; tableau-vivant and, 67; temporality and, 69–70; Titfor-Tat (Pathé, 1906) and, 16, 73, 123; transitional period (1907–1915) and, 22, 67, 69, 86, 111; trick films and, 16, 22, 80, 123, 128; tropes of, 22, 25, 56, 67–68, 93–94; uncanny metamorphoses, 93–94; undercranking and, 67, 69; violence and, 60, 66; Vitagraph and, 142; A Workingman’s Dream (Vitagraph, 1908) and, 117. See also female combustion; female corporeality; female miniaturization female miniaturization: Chomón, Segundo de and, 135; Cottingley Fairy scandal and, 296n48; dream films and, 116; female comedy (1907 to 1914) and, 24; female metamorphosis and, 16, 67, 68, 69, 93; filmic story/narrative and, 2–3; Microscopic Dancer (Pathé, 1908), 130, 135; modernity and, 19; Pathé and, 123, 135; Princess Nicotine; or the Smoke Fairies (Vitagraph, 1909) and, 67, 69, 93–94; slapstick comediennes and, 2; spectators and, 135, 140–41; transitional period (1907–1915) and, 22, 93; trick films and, 135; Vitagraph and, 112, 135; Wonderful Mirrors (Pathé, 1907) and, 129, 131, 135 female modernity, 51. See also modernity

H

329 female paranoia, 161 female pranksters. See pranksters/tomboys female publics, 216 female retribution, 51, 52–53 female rupture: Davison, Emily Wilding and, 232; femininity and, 18; feminism and, 191; gender and, 21–22; humor and, 21–22; Malabou, Catherine and, 80; suffragette comedies and, 190, 232; suffragettes and, 191, 192; Synthetic Sin (First National, 1929) and, 237; trick films and, 18; womb tilt and, 78. See also female decapitation; female dismemberment; female explosion females, 18, 68, 88, 99–100, 185 female self-defense, 19, 52–53, 90, 92 female sexual exposure, 22, 92 female sexuality, 22, 41, 43, 50–53, 94 female slapstick, 6, 25, 98, 146, 235. See also slapstick comediennes female slapstick fluidity, 21–22. See also female bodily fluidity; female combustion female spectacle, 13, 25, 89 female specters. See ghosts; specters female survival, 50, 52–53 female-to-male crossdressers, 201. See also cross-dressers female transfiguration, 1, 2–3, 54, 112, 116–17, 126. See also individual types of transfiguration female transformation, 19, 54 female types, 163 feminine humor, 47–48 femininity: Betty Pulls the Strings (Pathé Comica, 1910) and, 107; comic violence and, 169–70; cross-dressers and, 199–200; Cult of True Womanhood and, 76; democracy and, 182; female catastrophes and, 33; female corporeality and, 15–16, 34; female rupture and, 18; feminism and, 200– 201; Gilman, Charlotte Perkins and, 182;

330 femininity (continued ) Griffith, D. W. and, 144, 148; The Indian Suffragettes (1914) and, 203; Intolerance (1916) and, 149; Lea (Società, 1910–1916) and, 272; melodramas and, 170; A Militant Suffragette (Die Suffragette) (1914) and, 212; modernity and, 50, 57; Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State (Engels) on, 203; Pelletier, Madeleine and, 201; pranksters/ tomboys and, 91; psychosexual subjectivity and, 218; right to vote and, 200–201; Sennett, Mack and, 88; slapstick bodies and, 15; spiritualism and, 76, 77; suffragette comedies and, 182, 188–89, 195; suffragettes and, 182, 186, 194, 195, 196, 199–200, 212; the unruly woman and, 5. See also traditional femininity feminism, 4–13, 54–82; Anthony, Katherine and, 182; anti-laughter ethos and, 5; carnivalesque and, 4, 16; carnivalesque feminism/laughter and, 11–13; censorship and, 7, 228; cinema and, 196; class and, 208; comedies and, 228; comedy and, 6, 7; Congressional Union (CU) and, 191; Cott, Nancy and, 183; Cousin Kate’s Revolution (Éclair, 1912) and, 208; Davison, Emily Wilding and, 231; democracy and, 175–76; disciplinary interpretations and, 4; ethnicities and, 208; female metamorphosis and, 64–65; female rupture and, 191; female sexuality and, 94; femininity and, 200–201; feminist politics and, 15; film historiographies and, 17, 21–22, 62–66, 94; film periodization and, 69; gender and, 175–76, 180; gender politics and, 13; Gilman, Charlotte Perkins and, 182; humor and, 5, 7; killjoy and, 5–6; labor politics and, 206–7; laughter and, 4–5, 6, 8–11, 173, 194–95, 228; the law

H

INDEX

and, 180; marginalization and, 175–76; misogynism and, 4–5, 7; Musser, Charles on, 204; Native Americans and, 202; paradoxes of, 181–84; political power and, 180; politics of formlessness and, 208–10; pranksters/tomboys and, 100; psychosexual subjectivity and, 218; race and, 208; right to vote and, 180, 191, 208; semiotic theories and, 6–7; slapstick comediennes and, 237; slapstick/comedies and, 2, 4–13, 14, 17, 26–28; slapstick political violence and, 28; socialist-feminists, 201; social media and, 7; structural transformation and, 191; suffragette comedies and, 3, 179, 183, 208; suffragette feminism, 26–27, 179–80; suffragettes and, 173, 176, 178; The Suffragette Sheriff (Kalem, 1912) and, 198; Too Much Suffragette (1912) and, 179; the unruly woman and, 5–6, 12, 178; wounded attachments and, 6–7 feminist comedy scholarship, 4, 14, 22, 27, 179. See also comedy scholarship; feminist scholarship feminist film theory, 146–50, 279n29. See also individuals feminist histories/historiographies, 55–57, 94, 285n2 feminist laughter, 4–5, 6–9, 278n9. See also female laughter Feminist Media Histories (journal), 56 feminist politics, 15, 26–28, 174, 190, 196, 198–99, 204, 206, 209–10, 270 Feminist Reader in Early Cinema (Bean), 63–64 feminists, 92, 183, 201, 272. See also suffragettes feminist scholarship: early cinema (1894–1906) and, 22, 69, 94; female catastrophes and, 54–55; female sexuality and, 22; feminist film theory, 146–50, 279n29; film spectatorship and, 10–11; Mary Jane’s Mishap (G.A. Smith,

INDEX

1903) and, 62; melodramas and, 147; Normand, Mabel and, 23, 94; Redrobe, Karen and, 179; slapstick comedies and, 179; slapstick violence and, 51; stardom and, 94; transitional period (1907–1915) and, 22; violence and, 51, 179. See also feminist comedy scholarship; individuals feminist theories, 2, 17, 27, 57 Femme Collante, La. See Sticky Woman, A (Gaumont, 1906) fetishism, 51–52, 138, 153, 206–8, 296n39. See also commodity fetishism Ficelles de Léontine, Les. See Betty Pulls the Strings (Pathé Comica, 1910) Field, Allyson, 287n29 Fighting Suffragettes (1909), 188–89, 253 “Film, System, Narrative” (Heath), 168 film aesthetics, 25, 62, 90–91, 111–14, 121–23, 124, 135 film classicism, 63 Film d’Art, 119 film editing, 26, 57, 60–61, 71, 72 film exhibition, 67, 71, 72, 102, 119, 175, 291n32, 294n17 film historiographies, 54–82, 95–110; comedy and, 62–63; comedy theories and, 17; early cinema (1894–1906) and, 69; female absence and, 57–62; female catastrophes and, 66; female combustion and, 62–63; female corporeality and, 3; female metamorphosis and, 63, 69; female transfiguration and, 112; feminism and, 17, 21–22, 62–66, 94; A Florida Enchantment (Vitagraph, 1914) and, 119; gender and, 56, 62–63, 64; Griffith, D. W. and, 144, 146, 147–48, 150; historiographic (in-)visibility and, 22; Keystone/Film Company and, 22, 112; Mary Jane’s Mishap (G.A. Smith, 1903) and, 62; metahistoriographies, 81–82; production companies and, 112; rubes

H

331

and, 104; slapstick comediennes and, 94; spectrality and, 63; transitional period (1907–1915) and, 22, 112; violence and, 66; Vitagraph and, 112, 113; women and, 66, 69 filmic story/narrative, 143–70; American film industry and, 22, 25; Betty Pulls the Strings (Pathé Comica, 1910) and, 106; bodily elasticity and, 125; closeups and, 108; comical gestures and, 86; commodity standardization, 70; efficient productivity, 70; female bodily fluidity and, 56–57; female catastrophes and, 54; female combustion and, 54, 58, 60–62; female corporeality and, 26, 28, 62, 107–8, 120, 129, 143–70; female melting and, 2–3; female metamorphosis and, 2–3, 22, 26, 62, 69–70, 111, 124; female miniaturization and, 2–3; female paranoia and, 161; female transfiguration and, 2–3; film industries and, 87, 124–25, 142; film metamorphosis and, 71–72; forking path and, 107; gender violence and, 62; Griffith, D. W. and, 144, 146–48, 150, 153–54, 159, 161; invisible narration, 70; Mary Jane’s Mishap (G.A. Smith, 1903) and, 60–62; melodramas and, 159; The Mender of Nets (Griffith, 1912) and, 165, 166–67; middle-class legitimacy and, 70; moral strictures/ uplift and, 70, 87; motion picture trade press and, 124; multi-reel duration and, 70; narrative cinema, 86; Pathé and, 112–13, 119; Princess Nicotine; or the Smoke Fairies (Vitagraph, 1909) and, 137; Scullion’s Dream (Pathé, 1908) and, 134; transitional period (1907–1915) and, 86, 113; trick devices and, 140, 207; An Unseen Enemy (1912) and, 157, 159, 163; violence and, 25; Vitagraph and, 112–13; “Weaving a Narrative” (Gunning) and, 148

332

H

film industries, 25–26, 85–86, 87, 89, 124– 25, 128–29, 142. See also American film industry; European film industry film magazines, 43–44. See also trade journals film metamorphosis, 71–72, 78 film morality, 70, 103, 291n32. See also morality; social uplift film negatives, 120 Filmoteca de Catalunya, 295n33 film periodization, 69. See also individual periods film registration, 293n5 film scholarship, 62, 69, 94, 111–12, 113, 130, 153. See also feminist comedy scholarship; feminist scholarship films de luxe, 140 film spectatorship: Betty Pulls the Strings (Pathé Comica, 1910) and, 104, 107; Cahill, James Leo and, 45; combustion trope and, 51; comic spectatorship theories, 43–45; feminist scholarship and, 10–11; gender and, 303n10; laughter and, 45, 104, 113, 217; mimetic spectatorship, 44; nationalism and, 113; Slide, Anthony and, 148; sob clubs and, 303n10; Uncle Josh at the Moving Picture Show (Edison, 1903) and, 104; women’s hats and, 303n10 Finch, Flora, 24, 92–93, 112, 143, 194 Finish of Bridget McKeen, The (Edison, 1901), 32, 58, 59–60, 68, 242 Finish of Michael Casey, The (United States, 1901), 58 Fired (Marie Dressler production), 280n41 Fire! Fire! Fire! (1911), 183–84 First Woman Jury in America, The (Vitagraph, 1914), 189 Fischer, Lucy, 79 Fitzgerald, Cissy, 23, 281n58 flappers, 23–24 Fletcher, Alicia, 294n27 Flirtation Collar (Phoenix, 1909), 92, 99, 253

INDEX

Florence Turner Productions (1913–1916), 108 Florida Enchantment, A (Vitagraph, 1914), 93–94, 116, 117–19, 265, 293n6 Flynn, Peter, 41–42 Focault, Michel, 17–18, 220, 304n13, 304n23 force-feedings: Britain and, 213, 225; “Cat and Mouse Act” and, 225, 287n33; Davison, Emily Wilding and, 229; The Lady Police (Lubin, 1912) and, 185; Milling the Militants: A Comical Absurdity (Clarendon, 1913) and, 222, 224–26; suffragette comedies and, 212; suffragettes and, 1, 27, 211–12, 213, 225, 300n25 forking path, 107 For Mayor—Bess Smith (1913), 173, 195–96 Foster, Gwendolyn Audrey, 56 Four Heads Are Better Than One (Méliès, 1898), 59 France, 25, 101, 120, 187, 213–14, 305n35. See also Lumières brothers; Méliès, Georges; Pathé Francesca di Rimini; or, The Two Brothers (Vitagraph, 1907), 139 Frascaroli, Valentina, 101 Freezing Auntie (Edison, 1912), 24, 91–92, 95–96, 260 French Cinémathèque, 295n33 French Republicanism/French Revolution, 213–14, 305n35 Freud, Sigmund: Althusser, Louis and, 293n9; Bean, Jennifer and, 220; Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Malabou) and, 65; elasticity (reversibility) and, 287n26; fetishism and, 138, 296n39; gallows humor and, 222; ideational mimesis and, 220; jokes and, 10, 40, 146–47, 244, 278n20, 282n20; laughter and, 10, 40, 46, 120, 282n20; overdetermination and, 293n11; plasticity (permanent change) and, 65, 287n26; smutty humor theory and, 7–8, 278n20; teeth and, 75

INDEX

Frog, The (1908), 129, 296n37 From Death to Life (1913), 72–73, 81 “From Fig Leaf to Crinoline” (article), 37 Frothingham, Octavius B., 185, 189 frozen females, 91, 95–96, 97, 260 gags: Betty Pulls the Strings (Pathé Comica, 1910) and, 105–6; Betty’s Fireworks (Pathé, 1910) and, 122; Cousin Kate’s Revolution (Éclair, 1912) and, 209; crossdressers and, 199, 201; Daisy Doodad’s Dial (Turner, 1914) and, 109–10; erotic gags, 7–9; gender and, 95; Gunning, Tom on, 57; Princess Nicotine; or the Smoke Fairies (Vitagraph, 1909) and, 137; slapstick and, 106; The Suffragette Sheriff (Kalem, 1912) and, 198; violence and, 92; World War I and, 101. See also sight gags Gaines, Jane, 55–56, 69 gallows humor, 198, 222 Gandhi, Mahatma, 303n8 Gartenberg, Jon, 114 Gaudio, Tony, 141 Gaudreault, André, 69 Gaumont, 68. See also individual films Gaumont Graphic (newsreel), 229–30 Gay Shoe Clerk, The (Edison, 1903), 51, 215, 243 gender: civic empowerment and, 188; comedies and, 10–11; commodity fetishism and, 99–100; Cousin Kate’s Revolution (Éclair, 1912) and, 209; cross-dressers and, 202; Dressler, Marie and, 280n41; dualities and, 6; elasticity (reversibility) and, 73–74; Eva Is Tired of Life (Pathé, 1911) and, 16–17, 87; female corporeality and, 26; female explosion and, 19, 21–22; female metamorphosis and, 20; female rupture and, 21–22; feminism and, 175–76, 180; film historiographies and, 56, 62–63, 64; film spectatorship and, 303n10; A Florida

H

333

Enchantment (Vitagraph, 1914) and, 118–19; gags and, 95; gendered mimicry, 220; humor and, 21–22; The Indian Suffragettes (1914) and, 203; The Lady Police (Lubin, 1912) and, 185; laughter and, 4, 20, 32, 46, 96; Lea (Società, 1910–1916) and, 272; Mary Jane’s Mishap (G.A. Smith, 1903) and, 62; melodramas and, 168–70; metamorphosis and, 68; miniaturization and, 140; The Missionary and the Maid (Edison, 1909) and, 96; modernity and, 203; Pathé and, 111; Pelletier, Madeleine and, 201; “The Perils of Crinoline” (New York Times) and, 35–36; Princess Nicotine; or the Smoke Fairies (Vitagraph, 1909) and, 141; public spheres and, 108; representative democracy and, 27; sexual violence and, 32; sight gags and, 95; slapstick and, 2, 237; slapstick comediennes and, 1, 2, 237; slapstick comedies and, 168–70; slapstick ridicule and, 87–88; slapstick violence and, 6; Stewart, Jacqueline Najuma and, 95; suffragette feminism and, 26; The Suffragette’s Dream (Pathé, 1909) and, 176–77, 188; transitional period (1907– 1915) and, 144–45; trick films and, 114, 120; tropes and, 86; An Unseen Enemy (1912) and, 156, 157; violence and, 213; When Women Win (Lubin, 1909) and, 174, 188; wild bodies and, 51. See also labor division; role reversals gendered mimicry, 220 gender equality, 92, 177 gender iconography, 111, 120, 179 gender identity, 176. See also cross-dressers; role reversals gender politics, 43–50; Cahill, James Leo and, 45; female combustion and, 40–41; female corporeality and, 3, 32, 41; female dissection and, 32; female transformation and, 54; feminism

334

H

gender politics (continued ) and, 13; film metamorphosis and, 71; Keystone comedies and, 290n8; knockabout violence and, 1–2; laughter and, 4, 54; Mary Jane’s Mishap (G.A. Smith, 1903) and, 62; mechanization and, 33; metamorphosis and, 81; sight gags and, 94; slapstick and, 2; slapstick comediennes and, 4, 237; slapstick comedies and, 13; slapstick corporeality and, 44; suffragette comedies and, 179; the unruly woman and, 5 gender scholarship, 22 gender trick films, 58, 87. See also trick films gender violence, 87–89; artistic legitimacy and, 113; cannibalism and, 97; comedies of manners and, 95; female combustion and, 62; filmic story/narrative and, 62; Mary Jane’s Mishap (G.A. Smith, 1903) and, 62; mothers-in-laws and, 95; old maids and, 95; slapstick comedies and, 17; social uplift and, 113; spinsters and, 95; stardom and, 113; transitional period (1907–1915) and, 86, 87–89; wild bodies and, 50 Genette, Gerard, 159 “Genius of Segundo de Chomón, The” (DVD), 129 genres, 144–45, 147, 153 Germany, 101 ghosts, 19, 59–60, 76–81, 132, 253. See also specters ghoulish transfigurations, 22 Gibson Goddess, The (1909), 153, 160, 254 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, 36, 77, 182 Girl and Her Trust, A (1912), 155 Girl and the Mayor, The (1913), 173, 195 Girls Will Be Boys: Cross-Dressed Women, Lesbians, and American Cinema (Horak), 100, 201 Gish, Dorothy, 154–55, 159–61, 162, 298n26 Gish, Lillian, 143, 149, 154–55, 158–60, 161, 162, 298n26

INDEX

Giunchi, Lea, 25, 272 Gledhill, Christine, 169 global influence, 128–29. See also international film markets Goldman, Emma, 197, 206–7 Goodness Gracious (Vitagraph, 1914), 113 Gordon, Ann, 55 Gordon, Rae Beth, 78 Gorris, Marleen, 12 gradual metamorphosis, 67, 68. See also female metamorphosis Graham, Cooper, 150–51 Grandma’s Reading Glass (G.A. Smith, 1900), 108, 241 Grandma Threading Her Needle (G.A. Smith, 1900), 241, 281n1 Great Big Girl Like Me, A (Sturtevant), 13, 280n41 Great Train Robbery, The (Edwin S. Porter, 1903), 76, 292n54 Greenwood, Charlotte, 88 Griffith, D. W., 143–70; African Americans and, 168; Biograph and, 26, 72, 114, 139, 144–46, 147–48, 150, 151, 153–54; denegation and, 168; ethnicities and, 72; female corporeality and, 26, 144–50, 154, 163; femininity and, 144, 148; film editing and, 26; film historiographies and, 144, 146, 147–48, 150; filmic story/ narrative and, 144, 146–48, 150, 153–54, 159, 161; film language/syntax and, 144, 154; Finch, Flora and, 143; genres and, 153; Gish, Lillian and, 158; knockabout slapstick and, 144; literature/theater adaptations and, 139, 153; melodramas and, 26, 88–89, 144, 145, 146, 147, 153, 163, 170; motherhood and, 148–50; Mr. and Mrs. Jones series (Biograph, 1908– 1909) and, 93; on nervousness, 162; Normand, Mabel and, 23, 26, 143, 148, 158, 163, 169; parallel storytelling and, 114; pathos and, 144; Photoplay and, 143, 158, 162; Pickford, Mary and, 148; race

INDEX

and, 168; rescue films and, 88–89, 155; slapstick comediennes and, 144, 146, 150; slapstick comedies and, 26, 144–45, 146, 150–54; Slide, Anthony and, 150; spirituelle/voluptuary dichotomy and, 143–44, 146, 148–50, 162–63, 168; spirituelle women and, 143–44, 148, 150, 158, 161; West, Dorothy and, 297n11. See also individual films Griffith Project (Higgins), 151, 153 Guinchi, Lea, 101 Gunning, Tom, 57, 69, 107, 148, 159, 231, 290n10 Guy-Blaché, Alice, 34, 69, 78–79 Hall, G. Stanley, 100 hallucination, 130–32, 133, 134, 136, 255 Hansen, Miriam, 9, 41, 51–52, 56, 94, 104, 149, 151, 281n50, 288n43 Harris, Neil, 58 Harron, Bobby, 163 Haskell, Molly, 146 Hastie, Amelie, 56, 69 hats. See women’s hats Haunted Hotel (Vitagraph, 1907), 130, 132, 133, 295n35, 296n36 Haunted Kitchen (Pathé, 1907), 130 Heath, Stephen, 104, 168, 298n34 Henderson, Grace, 154–55 Henry, Gale, 23, 235, 281n57 Hepworth, Cecil, 91, 270 Her Awakening (Griffith, 1911), 26, 163–65 Her Crowning Glory (Vitagraph, 1911), 92–93, 258 Her First Cake (1906), 50, 246 Her First Cigarette (1899), 241 Higashi, Sumiko, 56 Higgins, Steven, 151, 153 Hilarious Posters, The (1906), 95–96 His Lost Love (1909), 153 historical change/transitions, 26, 33 historiographic (in-)visibility, 22, 24 history, 32–33, 55

H

335

Hobbes, Thomas, 87, 201, 226 Holloway Prison, 211–12, 214, 225, 229 Holy Hermit, The (British Gaumont, 1908), 92, 249 Honig, Bonnie, 227 Hoodoo Hat, The (Kalem, 1912), 93–94, 261 hoop skirts, 33, 35, 38. See also crinoline conflagrations Horak, Laura, 100, 201, 202 horses, 229–32. See also Mickey (Normand, 1918) Hotely, Mae, 184, 301n29 housemaids: African American women and, 94–95; crinoline conflagrations and, 1; Cunégonde (Lux, 1911–1913) and, 271; European comedienne series and, 25; female bodily fluidity and, 59; female combustion and, 19, 21, 35, 39, 41, 50, 57, 58–59, 81; female comedy (1907 to 1914) and, 24; female dismemberment and, 22; Jane on Strike (Pathé, 1911) and, 273; A Lady and Her Maid (Vitagraph, 1913), 90, 263; national contexts and, 111; Nellie, the Beautiful Housemaid (Vitagraph, 1908), 91; The New Maid (Lubin, 1908), 251–52; The New Maid Is Too Much of a Flirt (Ambrosio, 1912), 261; Nora’s 4th of July (Biograph, 1901), 242; One Can’t Always Tell (Vitagraph, 1913) and, 90, 264; out-of-control bodies and, 93; The Servant’s Revenge (Lubin, 1909) and, 100; slapstick and, 14; A Sticky Woman (Gaumont, 1906) and, 45, 52; transitional period (1907–1915) and, 90; Unseen Enemy, An (1912) and, 154–63, 298n32; Vitagraph and, 114. See also Acrobatic Maid, The (Pathé, 1908); Bridget McKeen (character); immigrant maids; Irish housemaids; Kitchen Maid’s Dream, The (Vitagraph, 1907); Mary Jane’s Mishap (G.A. Smith, 1903)

336 housework, 1, 16, 31–32, 50, 59, 115, 181, 209, 255. See also domesticity; labor division Howard, Gertrude, 94–95, 236–37 How Bridget Made the Fire (Biograph, 1900), 32, 41, 54, 67, 81, 242 How Bridget Served the Salad Undressed (United States, 1898), 42, 240 How Cissy Made Good (Vitagraph, 1915), 281n58 Howell, Alice, 22–23, 169–70, 299n41 How It Feels to Be Run Over (Hepworth, 1900), 45 How They Got the Vote (Edison, 1913), 92, 173, 174, 181, 193, 263 How Women Win (Powers, 1911), 92, 258 Hulette, Gladys, 136, 140 human absurdity, 20 human combustion, 58–60. See also female combustion humor: female explosion/rupture and, 21–22; feminine humor, 47–48; feminism and, 5, 7; gallows humor, 222; gender and, 21–22; males and, 4–5; Milling the Militants: A Comical Absurdity (Clarendon, 1913) and, 222; misogynism and, 5; patriarchal laughter and, 4–5; as profane, 6; revolutions and, 227; scholarship and, 145; sexual objectification and, 6; smutty humor theory, 7–8, 278n20; violence and, 6, 16; Zupančič, Alenka and, 169. See also laughter Hunger Strike, The (1913), 175, 263 hunger strikes: Boitel, Pedro Luis and, 303n8; “Cat and Mouse Act” and, 225; Das, Jatin and, 303n8; Gandhi, Mahatma and, 303n8; Irish Republicans (the IRA) and, 303n8; Lytton, Constance and, 214; A Militant Suffragette (Die Suffragette) (1914) and, 212; Milling the Militants: A Comical Absurdity (Clarendon, 1913) and, 222, 224–26, 227; suffragette comedies and,

H

INDEX

212; suffragettes and, 27, 211–12, 213, 214, 227, 231, 300n25 Hyde-Lees, Georgie, 76, 288n55 hypnotism, 241 Hypnotizing the Hypnotist (Vitagraph, 1911), 91, 108, 258 hysteria, 81, 289n62, 289n67 hysterical maternity, 76–81 ideational mimesis, 220 If Women Were Policemen (Clarendon, UK, 1908), 27, 173 Illustrated Film Monthly, 194 immigrant labor, 41, 43, 50–51 immigrant maids, 34, 41–43. See also Bridget McKeen (character); Irish housemaids; individual films immigrants, 281n50 IMP Company, 22–23 incarceration, 185, 213, 225, 229. See also Holloway Prison Indian Suffragettes, The (1914), 202–3, 204, 265–66 India Rubber Head (Méliès, 1901), 59, 108 industrial mechanization. See mechanization industrial modernity, 11, 13, 18–19, 26, 81, 137. See also modernity Infants Department (magazine), 197 ingénues, 6, 23–24 insanitation, 42, 43, 182–83. See also Typhoid Mary International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF), 287n22 international film industry, 119, 120, 122. See also European film industry international film markets, 25, 119–21, 122, 291n32 international suffragette movements, 204, 207–8. See also suffragette movements interspecies transfiguration: Baron Munchausen’s Dream (Star, 1911) and, 64–65, 257; female comedy (1907 to

INDEX

1914) and, 24; female metamorphosis and, 16, 93; modernity and, 19; Pathé and, 123; slapstick comediennes and, 2; Tit-for-Tat (Pathé, 1906) and, 125–26; transitional period (1907–1915) and, 93; Vitagraph and, 112 Intolerance (1916), 149, 151, 158 invisible narration, 70 Invisible Thief, The (Pathé, 1909), 132 involuntary laughter, 6–9 Irate Model, The (United States, 1903), 52, 243 Ireland, 226 Irish housemaids, 32, 34, 41–43, 242. See also Bridget McKeen (character); immigrant maids Irish immigrants, 41–42, 58 Irish Republicans (the IRA), 303n8 It (Lasky, 1927), 24, 268 Italy, 1, 25, 101, 189 iustitium (stand still), 227 Jacobs, Lea, 157 jails. See incarceration Jameson, Frederic, 284n47 Jane, the Justice (Pathé, 1914), 189, 193 Jane and Her Faithful Furniture (Pathé, 1911), 273, 274 Jane and Her Phonograph (Pathé, 1911), 67, 274 Jane Is Unwilling to Work (Pathé, 1909), 124 Jane Moves In (Pathé, 1911), 102, 273, 274 Jane on Strike (Pathé, 1911), 24, 91, 273 Jane series (1911–1912), 101–2, 273–75 Japanese Butterflies (Pathé, 1908), 125–26 Jealous Old Maid; or, No One to Love Her, The (Vitagraph, 1908), 91–92, 249 Jim Crow, 48, 117 Joker series, 23 jokes, 4, 5, 7–8, 10, 40, 146–47, 244, 278n20, 279n22, 282n20 Jones, The (Biograph) (series), 144, 254 Joubert, Laurent, 147

H

337

jump cuts, 34, 54, 56, 57–58, 60, 67, 205 Just a Bad Kid (Thanhouser, 1912), 91, 261 Juvenile Chicken Thieves (Vitagraph, 1906), 114 Kalem, 291n32, 294n17 Kansas City Saloon Smasher (Biograph, 1901), 304n24 Kant, Immanuel, 53 Karnick, Kristine, 22 Keaton, Buster, 10, 21 Keil, Charlie, 67, 94, 153 Kessler, Agnes, 294n13 Key, Ellen, 182 Keystone comediennes, 26, 297n5. See also individuals Keystone/comedies, 22–23, 88, 94, 112, 151, 168, 233, 290n8, 299n41 Keystone Film Company, 90, 94, 112, 281n56. See also individual films Kibler, Alison, 12, 13 killjoy, 5–6 King, Rob, 22, 58 King Lear (Vitagraph, 1909), 111 Kingsley, Charles, 165 Kirby, Lynne, 9, 45, 78 Kiss in the Dark, A (Biograph, 1904), 94, 245 Kiss in the Tunnel (G.A. Smith, 1899), 241, 281n1 Kiss Me! (Biograph, 1904), 8, 34, 51, 67, 95–96, 245 Kitchen Maid’s Dream, The (Vitagraph, 1907): dream films and, 116; female dismemberment and, 50, 67, 69, 70–71, 93–94, 115–16, 132, 248; A Florida Enchantment (Vitagraph, 1914) and, 118; revenge-seekers and, 91; Scullion’s Dream (Pathé, 1908) and, 134 knockabout slapstick, 112, 144, 299n41 knockabout violence, 1–2, 16, 88, 132 Komic Pictures, 90, 290n16 Kramer, Peter, 114

338 Kri Kri series, 272 Kuhn, Annette, 5 labor, 208 labor division, 181, 183, 184, 203, 209, 219–20 labor politics, 116–17, 206–7 Lacan, Jacques, 218 laceration, 66 Ladies Home Journal, 196 Lady and Her Maid, A (Vitagraph, 1913), 90, 263 Lady Barbers, The (Selig, 1910), 92, 256 Lady Cyclists (1899), 57, 241 Lady Lunatic’s Hat, The (Paul, 1908), 93, 249–50 Lady Plumpton’s Motor Car (Hepworth, 1904), 50, 245 Lady Police, The (Lubin, 1912), 184, 185, 261 Lafargue, Laura, 201 Laidlaw, Harriet Burton, 181 Landay, Lori, 22 language, 6–7, 44, 228, 235 L’Arroseur, Arrosé (Lumière, 1895), 53, 57, 198 laughing barrels, 48 Laughing Gas (Edison, 1907), 34, 47, 74–76, 81, 93, 95, 248 “Laugh of the Medusa, The” (Cixous), 12 laughter: absurdity and, 225; androgyny and, 33; Aristotle on, 226; Bataille, Georges and, 9–10, 34, 40, 76, 282n21, 283n24, 284n44, 288n47; Baudelaire, Charles and, 9–10, 44–45, 48, 49, 87; Benjamin, Walter on, 128; Bergson, Henri and, 33, 39–40, 145; Betty Pulls the Strings (Pathé Comica, 1910) and, 107; carnivalesque laughter, 4, 11–13, 227; Chomón, Segundo de and, 130–32, 135; civilizing consequences and, 98; comedy/drama line and, 145; convulsive laughter, 128–29; corsets and, 44; Cousin Kate’s Revolution

H

INDEX

(Éclair, 1912) and, 209; crinoline conflagrations and, 39–40; crinoline fashion and, 36; culture and, 87; derisive laughter, 13, 218, 221, 224, 227–28; disciplinary interpretations and, 4; domestic abuse/assault/ violence and, 32, 45, 177; Elements of Law, Natural and Politics (Hobbes) on, 201; Ellison, Ralph and, 48–49; “The Essence of Laughter” (Baudelaire), 48; female bodily mutilations and, 2; female catastrophes and, 52; female combustion and, 32, 39, 48, 49; female corporeality and, 3, 6, 18–19, 26, 128; female decapitation and, 40; female laughter, 18, 20, 44, 46–48, 89; female metamorphosis and, 237; female transformation and, 19; feminism and, 4–5, 6, 8–11, 173, 194–95, 228; feminist laughter, 4–5, 6–9, 278n9; feminist politics and, 210; feminist theories of social justice and, 27; filmic story/ narrative and, 69; film industries and, 89; film spectatorship and, 45, 104, 113, 217; Freud, Sigmund and, 10, 40, 46, 120, 282n20; gender and, 4, 20, 32, 46, 96; gender politics and, 4, 43–50, 54; historical change and, 33; involuntary laughter, 6–9; Kant, Immanuel and, 53; knowledge and, 9–10; The Lady Police (Lubin, 1912) and, 185; language and, 44; the law and, 222; Lewis, Wyndham and, 9–10, 20, 81; mechanization and, 33; Medusan laughter, 12, 13; Meredith, George on, 89; methodology and, 17; misogynism and, 4, 8; modernity and, 20, 21, 33; morality and, 89; motion picture trade press and, 43, 89; nature and, 226; the new laugh and, 89; pain of, 147; Parvulescu, Anca on, 73; patriarchal laughter, 4–5; Philosophy of Laughter and Smiling (Vasey), 96–97; political

INDEX

violence and, 226; power and, 226; Princess Nicotine; or the Smoke Fairies (Vitagraph, 1909) and, 141; public spheres and, 18; public transportation and, 46–47; A Question of Silence (Netherlands, 1982) and, 12–13; race and, 48; repressive hypothesis and, 17–18; revolutions and, 227–28; role reversals and, 220; sadistic laughter, 4–5, 97; sexual assault/predation/ violence and, 32, 45; shapeshifters and, 6; slapstick and, 14, 147, 237; slapstick bodies and, 15; slapstick comediennes and, 124; social change and, 4, 27; social conformity and, 4; social effects/ improvement and, 87, 89; social power and, 48; social transformation and, 6, 10, 11, 237; suffragette comedies and, 173, 179, 185, 188, 197, 218, 220, 221, 222, 223; The Suffragette Sheriff (Kalem, 1912) and, 198–99; Sully, James and, 87, 89; theories and, 9–11, 20; thoughtful laughter, 89, 113, 124; un-knowability and, 40; “Un Regard Oblique” (Doisneau) (photograph) and, 8; the unruly woman and, 5, 12; Vasey, George and, 96–97; Victorians and, 18; violence and, 4, 6, 14, 19, 39, 40, 128, 179; vulgarity and, 89; Williams, Linda and, 10; women and, 5 Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic (Bergson), 225 laughter as social corrective: Bergson, Henri and, 4, 10, 20, 33, 39–40, 49; Bunny for the Cause (1913) and, 194–95; feminism and, 194–95; film spectatorship and, 104; laughter debates and, 87; Milling the Militants: A Comical Absurdity (Clarendon, 1913) and, 221; transitional period (1907–1915) and, 110; Vasey, George and, 97 laughter debates, 87–89 laughter definitions, 20, 45, 87, 147

H

339 Laughter: Notes on a Passion (Parvulescu), 282n21, 288n47 laughter theories, 43–50, 54 law, the: carnivalesque and, 178, 227; Elements of Law, Natural and Politic (Hobbes) (1640), 226; feminism and, 180; iustitium (stand still) and, 227; laughter and, 222; Milling the Militants: A Comical Absurdity (Clarendon, 1913) and, 223, 225; slapstick corporeality and, 215; spectators and, 215; state sovereignty and, 226–27; suffragettes and, 180–81, 182, 183, 189, 192, 211, 213–14, 223, 227, 228, 231; suffragette spectatorship and, 217–18; violence and, 228 Lawrence, Florence, 24, 143, 151, 193 Lawrence, F.W.P., 211, 213–14 Lea (Società, 1910–1916), 25, 91, 93, 272–73 Lea, the Suffragette (Lea Femminista) (Cines, 1910), 183–84, 189, 272, 273 Lea and the Ball of Wool (Lea e il Gimitolo) (Cines, 1913), 67, 69, 86, 91, 127, 272 Leap Year Proposals of an Old Maid (Vitagraph, 1908), 91–92, 97–98, 250 Lea Wants the Vote (Lea Modernista) (1912), 272, 273 Lehrman, Henry, 90, 290n16, 299n41 Lehrman-Knockout Picture (L-KO), 23, 90, 290n16, 299n41 Leonard, Marion, 153 Léontine (Pathé, 1910–1912), 25, 91, 101–2, 268–70 Lesson in Jealousy, A (Vitagraph, 1913), 92–93, 263 Let Me Dream Again (G. A. Smith, 1900), 242, 281n1 Lewis, Wyndham, 9–10, 19, 20, 49–50, 51, 81, 135, 169, 284n47 libidinal desire, 17, 147. See also sexual arousal libidinal subordination, 51–52 Library of Congress, 293n5, 295n33

340 Life of Moses, The (Vitagraph, 1909), 139–40, 141 limb detachment. See dismemberment; female dismemberment; female-limb fragmentation literature/theater adaptations, 111, 113, 139, 153. See also individual films Little Willie’s Last Celebration (United States, 1902), 58, 60 Litvak, Anatole, 161 Living Silhouette (Pathé, 1907), 130 Lloyd, Ethel, 117 Lloyd, Harold, 21 Lonedale Operator (1911), 155 Lonely Villa, The (1909), 88–89, 155 Long Distance Wireless Photography (Star Film, 1908), 59, 250 Love, Speed, and Thrills (Keystone, 1915), 88, 267 Love and a Lemon (1912), 195 Love and the Law (1913), 173 Lover, The (Duras), 80 Lubin, 112, 121, 291n32, 294n17, 301n29 Lumières brothers, 69, 198 Lux, 93 Luxembourg, Rosa, 201 Lytton, Constance, 214 Mabel at the Wheel (1914), 168–70 Mabel’s Married Life (1914), 156, 162 Mabel’s Strange Predicament (1914), 156, 266 Macbeth (Vitagraph, 1908), 139 machine technologies, 50, 51, 53, 57, 72, 106. See also automated devices; modernity; new technologies MacKinnon, Catherine, 228 Madame’s Cravings (Gaumont, 1906), 34, 67, 78–81, 246 Madam Flirt and Her Adopted Uncle (Lubin, 1908), 92, 250 “Madam How Would You Like to Sit Behind the Hat You Are Wearing” (print), 217

H

INDEX

Magic Album, The (Pathé), 296n37 magic films, 59, 93, 122, 125, 129, 130, 294n27. See also individual films magicians, 59, 65, 129, 207, 247, 248, 296n37 Magic Mirror, The (France, 1907), 67, 93–94, 248 Magnetic Eye, The (Lubin, 1908), 92, 98–99, 251 Magnetic Vapor (Lubin, 1908), 91–92, 250 Maiden’s Paradise, A (Méliès, 1903), 59, 244 Ma-in-Law Mesmerized (Gaumont, 1908), 91–92, 250 mainstream cinema, 5, 193 Malabou, Catherine, 57, 64–65, 80 male aggression, 19, 45, 51, 52–53 male combustion, 58–59 male comic clowns, 2, 6, 21. See also individuals male dismemberment, 68, 114 male magicians, 59 male peeping toms, 51, 52, 58. See also voyeurism male power, 108 male predation, 20–21, 34, 98–99. See also sexual predation males: Comedy Is A Man In Trouble (Dale) and, 169; commodity fetishism and, 99–100; Daisy Doodad’s Dial (Turner, 1914) and, 109; female laughter and, 20, 47–48; humor and, 4–5; patriarchal laughter, 4–5; patriarchal power, 17, 176, 179, 222, 225; patriarchal voyeurism, 7–8; sex crimes and, 301n41; slapstick comediennes and, 88; suffragette comedies and, 184; The Suffragette’s Dream (Pathé, 1909) and, 176–77; undercranking and, 68; An Unseen Enemy (1912) and, 155–56, 160–61 male-to-female crossdressers, 201. See also cross-dressers Mallon, Mary (Typhoid Mary), 42, 283n27 Mandy’s Social Whirl (Lubin, 1911), 91, 258

INDEX

Man Suffragette for Abolition of Work for Women (1910), 188 marginalization, 56, 175–76 Marie Dressler productions, 280n41 Marion, Kitty, 225 markets: bodily elasticity and, 120; female corporeality and, 128, 142; female metamorphosis and, 111; film industries and, 128–29, 142; Haunted Hotel (Vitagraph, 1907) and, 295n35; international film markets, 25, 119–20, 291n32; Motion Picture Patents Company (MPPC) (or Edison Trust) and, 294n17; Pathé and, 119–23, 128–29; Vitagraph and, 112, 295n35, 296n36 Marsh, Mae, 143 martyrdom, 211, 227, 229, 230–31 Martyred Presidents (United States, 1901), 67 Marvin, R. Frederic, 77–78 Marx, Karl, 201, 209 Mary Jane (character), 35, 38, 60, 70 Mary Jane’s Mishap (G.A. Smith, 1903): Britain and, 68; carnivalesquegrotesque bodies and, 62; crinoline conflagrations and, 35, 38; female absence and, 57–58; female combustion and, 31–32, 50, 57–58, 60–62, 67, 244; female corporeality and, 62; female dismemberment and, 21, 31, 60, 244; female explosion and, 60; female metamorphosis and, 60, 65, 66, 67, 68, 81; feminist scholarship and, 62; film editing and, 60–61; film historiographies and, 62; filmic story/ narrative and, 60–62; gas and, 74; gender/violence and, 62; jump cuts and, 57–58, 60; public spheres and, 33–34; spectators and, 61–62; specters and, 21, 31, 60–62, 65, 66, 67, 96, 244; suffragettes and, 187; trick films and, 61–62; violence and, 60, 62, 65; visual effects and, 62

H

341

Mashing the Masher (Vitagraph, 1908), 92, 250 Mason, Lesley, 212 “Masquerade Reconsidered” (Doane), 7–8 Massa, Steve, 22, 299n41 mass/popular culture, 3, 196, 204, 206 Mathieu, Julienne, 129, 131, 133, 141, 296n37 matrimony, 24, 90, 92, 290n17 Matrimony’s Speed Limit (Solax, 1913), 67, 94–95, 263 Maurice, Alice, 74 Mayne, Judith, 9, 51–52, 94 McClellan, George, 123–24 McCoy, Harry, 168–69 McCulloch, Catherine Waugh, 180 McMahan, Alison, 56 McVey, Lucille, 113 “Meaning of the Wild Body, The” (Lewis), 19, 49, 169 Mechanical Mary Anne, The (Hepworth, 1910), 93, 257 mechanization, 15–16, 33, 209 media, 12, 196, 213, 214, 229. See also motion picture trade press; individual publications medieval banquets, 42 medieval carnivals, 11, 14–19. See also carnivalesque, the mediomania, 77–78 mediumship, 76–81, 288n55, 289n58 Medusan laughter, 12, 13 Meet Me at the Fountain (1904), 57, 245 Méliès, Georges, 59, 64–65, 205–6, 207, 296n37. See also Star Film; individual films Mellencamp, Patricia, 12 melodramas: Biograph and, 170; female brutality and, 10; female corporeality and, 170; femininity and, 170; feminist scholarship and, 147; filmic story/ narrative and, 159; future-perfect predicament and, 159; gender and, 168– 70; Griffith, D. W. and, 26, 88–89, 144,

342 melodramas (continued ) 145, 146, 147, 153, 163, 170; Normand, Mabel and, 23, 169, 170; pathos and, 170; slapstick comedies and, 26; slapstick-inflected melodramas, 23, 145; spectators and, 156; spirituelle/ voluptuary dichotomy and, 146, 170; suffering and, 168, 170; violence and, 156–57; Weber, Lois and, 88–89. See also individual films Memphis Free Speech, 301n41 Mender of Nets, The (Griffith, 1912), 26, 163, 165–68 Meredith, George, 89, 113 Merry Widow Waltz Craze, The (Edison, 1908), 93, 251 meta-historiographies, 81–82 Metamorphoses (1912), 129 Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming (Braidotti), 56 metamorphosis, 68, 81–82, 86, 93–94. See also female metamorphosis Mickey (Normand, 1918), 28, 233–35, 267–68 micrographia, 139, 140 Microscopic Dancer (Pathé, 1908), 130, 135, 296n37 middle-class legitimacy/respectability, 24, 25, 70, 112, 216 Midsummer Night’s Dream, A (Vitagraph, 1909), 111, 116, 118, 140, 141 Miles, David, 151 Milholland, Inez, 193 Militant Suffragette, A (Die Suffragette) (1914), 212 militant tactics, 174–75, 191–92, 211–12, 213–14, 221, 226, 227, 228, 231 militant violence, 27–28, 211, 212, 215–16, 221, 227, 300n25, 304n24 milkmaids. See Trouble with the Milkmaid (Lubin, 1903) Miller, Alice Duer, 179–80, 181, 186, 209–10, 221, 300n12. See also Are Women

H

INDEX

People? A Book of Rhymes for Suffrage Times (Miller) Milling the Militants: A Comical Absurdity (Clarendon, 1913), 92, 173, 212, 218–26, 227, 264, 304n23 mimetic spectatorship, 44 miniaturization, 139–41, 142. See also female miniaturization Misérables, Les (Vitagraph, 1909), 139 misogynism: Eva Is Tired of Life (Pathé, 1911) and, 16–17; feminism and, 4–5, 7; humor and, 5; laughter and, 4, 8; Lewis, Wyndham and, 284n47; Milling the Militants: A Comical Absurdity (Clarendon, 1913) and, 223; A Question of Silence (Netherlands, 1982) and, 12–13; Slide, Anthony and, 150; suffragette comedies and, 27; Too Much Suffragette (1912) and, 179; transitional period (1907–1915) and, 100 Missionary and the Maid, The (Edison, 1909), 91–92, 96, 97, 254 Miss Mischief (Thanhouser, 1913), 91, 100, 101, 132, 264 Mistake in Spelling, A (Vitagraph, 1912), 113 Mistinguett (comedienne), 101 Mixed Babies (Biograph, 1908), 91, 95, 250–51 Mizejewski, Linda, 12 modernity: Cousin Kate’s Revolution (Éclair, 1912) and, 209; female catastrophes and, 32; female combustion and, 19; female metamorphosis and, 55; female miniaturization and, 19; female modernity, 51; gender and, 203; The Indian Suffragettes (1914) and, 203; interspecies transfiguration and, 19; laughter and, 20, 21, 33; neurasthenia and, 78; public spheres and, 19; slapstick comediennes and, 19; spiritualism and, 78; A Sticky Woman (Gaumont, 1906) and, 57; suffragette comedies and,

INDEX

188; suffragettes and, 204; traditional/ femininity and, 50, 57; utromania and, 81. See also industrial modernity Modern Magic (Pathé, 1908), 122, 123 Modern Sculptures (Pathé), 296n37 Modleski, Tania, 8, 279n22 Moirai, the (female weavers), 165 Moore, Colleen, 24, 94–95, 235–36 moral censorship/strictures, 70, 87 morality: American film industry and, 25, 26, 103; commodity fetishism and, 99; film morality, 70, 103, 291n32; laughter and, 89; Motion Picture Patents Company (MPPC) (or Edison Trust) and, 99, 294n17; nickelodeons and, 123– 24; Pathé and, 121, 122–23; Vitagraph and, 114; voluptuary women and, 170. See also middle-class legitimacy/ respectability moral uplift, 70. See also social uplift Moran, Polly, 22–23, 88, 280n41 Mosquini, Marie, 23 motherhood, 148–50, 163–65. See also individual films mothers-in-laws, 24, 91, 95–98, 99, 189 motion picture culture, 87, 121, 123, 126 Motion Picture Magazine, 294n13 Motion Picture News, 212 Motion Picture Patents Company (MPPC) (or Edison Trust), 99, 121–22, 291n32, 293n12, 294n17 motion picture trade press, 25–26, 43, 89, 102–3, 121, 122, 123, 124, 134, 205–6. See also individual publications Motion Picture World (journal), 121 Motography (journal), 207 Mott, Lucretia, 76 Movie-Struck Girls (Stamp), 178, 196, 216 Moving Picture World, The (MPW) (journal): on The Acrobatic Maid (Pathé, 1908), 124; on The Amateur Detective (Pathé, 1909), 124; on Betty’s Apprenticeship (Pathé Comica), 103;

H

343 on Betty series (Pathé, 1910–1912), 269; on Betty’s Fireworks (Pathé, 1910), 122; Bush, W. Stephen and, 89; on A Fan (Pathé, 1909), 125; on The Lady Police (Lubin, 1912), 184; on The Magnetic Eye (Lubin, 1908), 98; on The Missionary and the Maid (Edison, 1909), 97; on The Pickpocket (1913), 194; suffrage parades and, 193; on The Suffragette’s Dream (Pathé, 1909), 177; on suffragette spectatorship, 215–16; on An Unseen Enemy (1912), 159; On the Wrong Scent (Essanay, 1909) and, 99 Mr. and Mrs. Jones series (Biograph, 1908– 1909), 92–93 Mr. Jones at the Ball (1909), 254 multiple exposures, 139, 205, 303n77 multi-reels, 62, 70, 149 Mulvey, Laura, 5, 146 Musidora (comedienne), 101 Musser, Charles, 58, 59–60, 204 Muybridge, Eadweard, 229–30, 231, 305n38 My Own Story (Dressler), 298n36 Mysterious Boudoir (Pathé, 1907), 123 narrative. See filmic story/narrative narrative cinema, 86 Nation, Carrie, 304n24 National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), 183, 191, 213 nationalism, 25, 113, 119, 121, 123 National Women’s Party, 183, 213 Native Americans, 26, 202–3, 204, 265–66 nature, 226 Negra, Diane, 69 Neighbor’s Kids, The (Essanay, 1909), 91, 254 Nellie, the Beautiful Housemaid (Vitagraph, 1908), 91, 95, 251 Nell’s Eugenic Wedding (Komic, 1914), 266, 290n16 neoliberalism, 5 nervousness, 128, 162, 186–87, 298n31 Nestor Company, 290n16

344 neurasthenia, 78, 128, 289n62, 295n30 New Air Fan, The (Pathé), 105 new laugh, 89 New Maid, The (Lubin, 1908), 92, 251–52 New Maid Is Too Much of a Flirt, The (Ambrosio, 1912), 92, 261 Newsreel Company, 193 New Stenographer, The (Edison, 1908), 90, 252 New Stenographer, The (Vitagraph, 1911), 92–93 new technologies, 50, 53, 209. See also automated devices; mechanization; modernity New Use for a Bike, A (Lux, 1912), 174, 182, 212, 260 New York City, 192–93, 204 New York Clipper, 188 New York Dramatic Mirror, The, 114, 121, 153, 298n22 New York Herald, 89 New York Times, 35–36, 39 New York Tribune, The, 300n12 Ngai, Sianne, 75 Nickelodeon, The (journal), 102 nickelodeons, 119, 121, 123–24 Nielsen, Asta, 212 Night of Terror, 213 Nineteenth amendment, 175, 207, 213, 300n13 nineteenth century, 37–39, 41, 42 nonconsensual enjoyment, 6–9 Nora’s 4th of July (Biograph, 1901), 32, 67, 242 Normand, Mabel, 163–70; Biograph and, 23, 145, 170; Dressler, Marie and, 298n36; dualities and, 158, 169, 298n36; The Eternal Mother (1912) and, 148–50, 163; The Fatal Mallet (Keystone, 1914) and, 88; feminist scholarship and, 23, 94; flappers and, 23–24; Griffith, D. W. and, 23, 26, 143, 148, 158, 163, 169; Her Awakening (Griffith, 1911) and, 163–65;

H

INDEX

Keystone and, 23, 26, 88, 233; laughter and, 10; Mabel at the Wheel (1914) and, 168–69; Mabel’s Married Life (1914) and, 156, 162; Mabel’s Strange Predicament (1914) and, 156; melodramas and, 23, 169, 170; The Mender of Nets (Griffith, 1912) and, 165, 166; physical indestructibility and, 85; spirituelle/ voluptuary dichotomy and, 164–65; The Troublesome Secretaries (Vitagraph, 1911) and, 290n17; Vitagraph and, 23, 112; as voluptuary woman, 165–66. See also Mickey (Normand, 1918) Notari, Elvira, 55 Novice at X-Rays, A (Méliès, 1898), 59 Nursemaid’s Dream, The (Hepworth, 1908), 93–94, 252 Occoquan Workhouse, 213 Odd One In, The (Zupančič), 128 Odd Pair of Limbs, An (Vitagraph, 1908), 67, 70, 115–16, 251 office pranks, 90, 92 Oh! You Suffragette (1911), 182 Old Maid, The (Edmund Goulding, 1939), 297n5 Old Maid Having Her Picture Taken, The (Edison, 1901), 50, 53, 242, 285n54 old maids, 24, 91–92, 95, 97–98, 189, 249, 250. See also spinsters Old Maid’s Temperance Club (Edison, 1908), 91–92, 251 Old Maid’s Valentine, The (G.A. Smith, 1900), 242, 281n1 Oliver Twist (Vitagraph, 1909), 111, 139 One Can’t Always Tell (Vitagraph, 1913), 90, 264 Onésime, Clockmaker (France, 1912), 68 On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, The Gigantic, The Souvenir, The Collection (Stewart), 139 On the Wrong Scent (Essanay, 1909), 92, 99, 254

INDEX

Ontology of the Accident, The (Malabou), 80 operational aesthetic, 58 Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State (Engels), 203 Orlando (Woolf), 38 Orphans of the Storm (1921), 298n26 Ostriche, Muriel, 101, 292n39 out-of-control bodies, 93. See also wild bodies out-of-control objects, 87. See also machine technologies overdetermination, 120, 293n11 pain, 147. See also pathos Pandora’s Box (Vitagraph, 1912), 92–93, 261 Panicky Picnic (Pathé, 1909), 131–32, 253 Pankhurst, Christabel and Emmeline, 183, 196, 211–12, 213, 287n33. See also Elusive Miss Pinkhurst, The (Warwick, 1912) Pankhurst, Sylvia, 211 paraffin wax, 32, 60, 282n3 parallel storytelling, 114 Parallel Tracks: The Railroad and Silent Cinema (Kirby), 45 Paris Commune, 187, 226 Parvulescu, Anca, 73, 282n21, 288n47 patents, 121, 294n16. See also Motion Picture Patents Company (MPPC) (or Edison Trust) Pates, Gwendolyn, 195 Pathé: American distribution and reception and, 113, 120, 121, 122–23, 124, 128; artistic legitimacy and, 113; Biograph and, 121; bodily elasticity and, 119–20; censorship and, 124; Chomón, Segundo de and, 122, 129–35, 295n32; economics and, 119–23; European film industry and, 119; female bodily fluidity and, 25, 122; female corporeality and, 112–13, 120, 121; female metamorphosis and, 119–23; female miniaturization and, 123, 135; film aesthetics and, 121–23; Film d’Art and, 119; film exhibition and,

H

345 119; filmic story/narrative and, 112–13, 119; film negatives and, 120; gender and, 111; global influence and, 128–29; international film industry and, 119, 120–21, 122; interspecies transfiguration and, 123; magic films and, 122, 125, 129, 130; markets and, 119–23, 128–29; morality and, 121, 122–23; Motion Picture Patents Company (MPPC) (or Edison Trust) and, 121–22, 291n32, 294n17; motion picture trade press and, 121, 122, 123, 134; nickelodeons and, 119, 121; Pathédye colors and, 122, 125, 126, 294n19; red rooster scare and, 120; SCAGL (Société cinématographique des auteurs et gens de lettres) and, 119; slapstick comediennes and, 121; trick devices and, 132–33; trick films and, 68, 111, 113, 121–23, 133, 142, 295n32; United States and, 120, 121; Vitagraph and, 121, 132–39; Yumibe, Joshua on, 130. See also Betty series (Pathé Comica 1910–1912); stencil-coloring Pathé Comica, 91, 93, 112 Pathédye colors, 122, 125, 126, 294n19 Pathé-Frères. See Pathé Pathé News, 233 pathos, 10, 26, 144, 147, 155, 170. See also Unseen Enemy, An (1912) patriarchal laughter, 4–5 patriarchal power, 17, 176, 179, 222, 225 patriarchal voyeurism, 7–8 Patsy, The (MGM, 1928), 24, 268 Paul, Alice, 183, 191, 192, 213, 300n25 Pearson, Roberta, 111 Pelletier, Madeleine, 199–202 “Perils of Crinoline, The” (New York Times), 35–36 Pétroleuse (Paris Commune), 187 Pétronille (Pathé, 1912–1916), 25, 93, 101–2, 264, 266 Pétronille suffragette (1914), 266 phallic desire, 17, 147. See also sexual arousal

346 Philosophy of Laughter and Smiling (Vasey), 96–97 photograph (film) registration, 293n5 Photoplay, 143, 158, 162, 236 physical clown comedy, 147 physical comedy, 89 physical indestructibility, 4, 6, 85–87, 88. See also bodily invincibility; elasticity (reversibility) Pickford, Mary, 143, 148, 165, 169 Pickpocket, The (1913), 189, 194 Piker’s Dream, The (Vitagraph, 1907), 116 plasmatic theory, 71, 288n42 plasticity (permanent change), 57, 65, 72–76, 80, 287n26. See also destructive plasticity police, 1, 27, 33–34, 173, 184–85, 213, 219–21, 261, 262, 304n23 Policeman’s Dream, A (Vitagraph, 1908), 116 political power, 173, 180, 304n23 political violence, 226 Politician’s Love Story, A (1909), 151 politics, 26. See also suffragettes Politics (film), 280n41 politics of formlessness, 208–10 popular/mass culture, 3, 204 pornographic exposure, 58. See also voyeurism Porten, Rosa, 101 Porter, Edwin S., 76 Positive Images: A Guide to Non-Sexist Films for Young People (Waldman), 280n45 positive images debate, 17 Poster Girls and the Hypnotist, The (Biograph, 1899), 67, 241 power, 5, 17–18, 40, 178, 180, 197, 206, 226, 304n23. See also female empowerment; patriarchal power pranks, 19, 90, 92 pranksters/tomboys, 24, 25, 91, 100–101, 102, 254, 255, 272. See also Tilly series (Britain)

H

INDEX

pre-classical cinema (1894–1917), 63, 81 pregnant women, 19, 34, 81. See also Madame’s Cravings (Gaumont, 1906) Pretty Milliner, The (Pathé, 1909), 92, 99, 255 Price, Kate, 24, 112 Princess Nicotine; or the Smoke Fairies (Vitagraph, 1909), 16, 25, 67, 69, 93–94, 114, 136–39, 141, 198, 254–55 prisons, 213, 304n13. See also Holloway Prison; incarceration “Problem of Women’s History, The” (Gordon, Buhle, Dye) (essay), 55 profanity, 14 Professor’s Secret, The (Gaumont, 1908), 93–94, 97, 252 profilmic realism, 71 Prohibition, 300n13, 304n24 Prosperity (film), 280n41 psychosexual subjectivity, 217–18 public health and safety standards, 182–83. See also insanitation; Typhoid Mary public spheres: alternative public spheres, 18, 281n50; Cousin Kate’s Revolution (Éclair, 1912) and, 209; crinoline fashion and, 39; Daisy Doodad’s Dial (Turner, 1914) and, 108, 109; facial gestures and, 109; female bodily fluidity and, 1; female catastrophes and, 32–33; female dismemberment and, 115; female publics and, 216; gender and, 108; laughter and, 18; Mary Jane’s Mishap (G.A. Smith, 1903) and, 33–34; mediumship and, 76–77; modernity and, 19; sexual predation and, 101; suffragette comedies and, 3, 174, 186; suffragettes and, 26, 181, 185–86; technologies and, 43. See also alternative public spheres public transportation, 19, 32, 46–47 Pygmy World, The (Gaumont, 1910), 97–98, 255

INDEX

Queen of the Burlesque, A (Edison, 1910), 91–92, 257 Queer Folks (Vitagraph, 1911), 91–92, 258–59 ‘?’ Motorist, The (Animatograph, 1906), 45, 87, 247 Question of Silence, A (Netherlands, 1982), 12–13 quick-change metamorphosis, 67, 68 Rabinovitz, Lauren, 9, 44, 140 race: American film industry and, 94–95; elasticity (reversibility) and, 73–74; feminism and, 208; A Florida Enchantment (Vitagraph, 1914) and, 117–19; Griffith, D. W. and, 168; Japanese Butterflies (Pathé, 1908) and, 125; Laughing Gas (Edison, 1907) and, 74–76; laughter and, 48; The Missionary and the Maid (Edison, 1909) and, 96; Mixed Babies (Biograph, 1908) and, 250–51; Ngai, Sianne and, 75; plasticity (permanent change) and, 72–76; right to vote and, 206; The Servant’s Revenge (Lubin, 1909) and, 100; sex crimes and, 301n41; sexual justice and, 301n41; sight gags and, 100; Stewart, Jacqueline Najuma and, 94–95; suffragettes and, 192–93, 202–4, 302n48; Tomkins, Kyla Wazana and, 79; transitional period (1907–1915) and, 94–95; trick films and, 73; the unruly woman and, 74; “What Happened in the Transition? Reading Race, Gender, and Labor Between the Shots” (Stewart) (essay), 94; What Happened in the Tunnel (Edison, 1903) and, 34, 45 racehorses, 229–32. See also Mickey (Normand, 1918) Racial Indigestion (Tomkins), 75, 79 racial miscegenation, 94 Radical Spirits (Braude), 77 Rapf, Joanna, 22

H

347 Raye, Martha, 88 Rebellious Betty (1910), 100, 102 Rebellious Walking Stick (Pathé, 1906), 130 Red Cross Nurse, The (Marie Dressler production), 280n41 Red Man and the Child, The (Biograph), 153 Redrobe, Karen, 45, 51, 65, 66, 179 red rooster scare, 120 Red Spectre, The (Pathé, 1907), 16, 67, 93–94, 129, 130, 131, 135, 248 Reducing (film), 280n41 reform and uplift campaigns, 89, 90, 101. See also morality reformist tactics, 191–92 Regustus, Bertha, 34, 74 Reliance-Mutual Komics, 23 Repplier, Agnes, 89 representative democracy. See democracy repressive hypothesis, 17–18 rescue films, 88–89, 155. See also Unseen Enemy, An (1912); individual films revenge films, 42, 247, 253 revenge-seekers, 91, 92 Revolt of Mr. Wiggs, The (1915), 182, 203–4 revolutions, 213–14, 221, 227–28, 305n35. See also Paris Commune Rich, B. Ruby, 56 Richard III (Vitagraph, 1908), 139 right to vote: Bernhardt, Sarah on, 204; Davison, Emily Wilding and, 231; disenfranchisement and, 206; femininity and, 200–201; feminism and, 180, 191, 208; international suffragette movements and, 207–8; race and, 206; revolutions and, 228; silent films and, 173; suffragettes and, 26, 176, 196–97. See also Nineteenth amendment Riley, Denise, 176 Roe, Grace, 225 role reversals, 32, 188, 220, 223, 224, 255. See also cross-dressers romance, 190, 195 Romance of a Lady Cabby (Pathé, 1909), 122

348 Romeo and Juliet (Vitagraph, 1908), 139 Rosalie (Pathé, 1911–1912), 25, 101–2, 273–75 Rosalie et Léontine (France, 1910–1912), 93 Rosalie et Léontine vont au Théatre [Jane and Betty Go to the Theater] (Bosetti, 1911), 3 Rose, Jacqueline, 218, 224, 299n6 Rowe, Kathleen, 11–13, 178, 280n37 rube comedies, 13, 22–23 rubes, 58–60, 98, 104, 130, 132, 242–43, 295n35 Russo, Mary, 11, 13, 178, 279n31 “sack of potatoes” man, 49–50 sadism, 16–17 sadistic laughter, 4–5, 97 sadistic pranksters, 24 Sadler, Josie, 23, 112 Salt, Barry, 62 Saroni, Gilbert, 32, 68, 285n54 Satan at Play (Pathé, 1907), 123, 130, 296n37 satanic rituals, 19 Saturnalia feasts, 227 Saucy Sue (Lubin, 1909), 24, 91, 100–101, 255 SCAGL (Société cinématographique des auteurs et gens de lettres), 119 Scandal Over the Teacups (G.A. Smith, 1900), 281n1 “Scenarios of Exposure” (Balides), 51–52 Scene in a Laundry (United States, 1903), 52, 244 Schlüpmann, Heide, 56 Schreiner, Olive, 182 science-fiction, 205 Scott, Joan Wallach, 201 Scullion’s Dream (Pathé, 1908), 132, 134 Sculptor’s Dream, The (Vitagraph, 1909), 116 Selby, Gertrude, 23 Selig, 112, 121, 291n32, 294n17 semiotic theories, 6–7, 54–55, 57, 120 Sennett, Mack: Biograph and, 145, 168, 281n56; The Fatal Mallet (Keystone,

H

INDEX

1914) and, 156; Howell, Alice and, 169; Keystone/Film Company and, 22, 90, 112, 151, 281n56; A Politician’s Love Story (1909), 151; slapstick comediennes and, 22, 88, 169; The Wooden Leg (Griffith, 1909) and, 151 Servant’s Revenge, The (Lubin, 1909), 24, 42, 91, 100, 255 Servant’s Revenge, The (Urban, 1907), 91, 248 sex crimes, 189, 301n41 sexism, 8, 16, 207, 228. See also misogynism sexual arousal, 53, 58, 98–99, 241 sexual assault, 45–46, 52–53, 88–89, 90, 236–37. See also domestic assault sexual assault comedies, 34, 45–46, 51 sexual desire, 99 sexual difference, 16, 41, 74, 174–75, 176, 179, 180–81 sexual harassment, 14, 92, 99, 250 sexuality, 17–18, 22, 24, 25, 43, 62, 117–19 sexual justice, 189, 301n41 sexual objectification, 6, 17 sexual politics, 33, 183. See also gender politics sexual predation, 2, 19, 32, 34, 45, 52–53, 101. See also male predation sexual reassignments, 117–18, 142. See also cross-dressers; role reversals sexual violence, 32, 88. See also sex crimes; sexual assault Shakespeare’s Tragedy, King Lear (Vitagraph, 1909), 139 “Shall Women Vote?” (song), 196 shapeshifters, 6, 24. See also female bodily fluidity; female metamorphosis Shaw, Anna Howard, 183 Shocking Incident, A (Biograph, 1903), 32, 42, 43, 48, 244 shopgirls, 14, 24 Shore, Amy, 196 shot lengths, 98, 291n31 Sidis, Boris, 87

INDEX

sight gags: African American women and, 94–95; assault as, 1–2; carnivalesque laughter and, 12; cross-dressers and, 199, 201; Davison, Emily Wilding and, 229; explosion and, 57; female combustion and, 57; female corporeality and, 146; female sexual exposure and, 22; gender/politics and, 94, 95; Gunning, Tom on, 57; machine technologies and, 57; Madame’s Cravings (Gaumont, 1906) and, 34; The Magnetic Eye (Lubin, 1908) and, 98; male predation and, 34; Milling the Militants: A Comical Absurdity (Clarendon, 1913) and, 223; race and, 100; Rosalie (Pathé, 1911–1912) and, 273; social value and, 95; suffragette comedies and, 26–27, 176; traditional femininity and, 33; transitional period (1907–1915) and, 86, 94, 98; women and, 91. See also gags silent film classical period (1916–1927), 69, 148, 168, 298n34 silent film history. See film historiographies silent film production (women), 55, 64, 66, 69, 277n2, 287n24, 287n30, 287n34 Silverman, Kaja, 5, 146 Simple Home Dinner (Edison, 1909), 93, 255 slapstick: amusement parks and, 44; anarchic destruction and, 19; battered wives and, 14; bodily invincibility and, 16; definitions of, 1, 3; factory laborers and, 14; female bystanders and, 14; female combustion and, 16; female corporeality and, 16, 146, 235, 236–37; female decapitation/dismemberment and, 16, 18; female explosion and, 18; female identity and, 3; female metamorphosis and, 16; feminism and, 2, 14; gags and, 106; gender and, 2, 237; housemaids and, 14; laughter and, 14, 147, 237; medieval carnivals to, 14–19; shopgirls and, 14; slapstick-inflected

H

349 melodramas, 145; suffragettes and, 14, 228; utopian regeneration and, 19; Victorians and, 18; violence and, 7, 14, 24–25, 104, 218, 235, 237; vulgarity and, 91 slapstick bodies, 14–15, 170. See also carnivalesque-grotesque bodies; female corporeality slapstick comediennes, 143–70, 233–37; Britain and, 101; double standards and, 169; dualities and, 169; European film industry and, 101; female bodily fluidity and, 237; female combustion and, 2; female corporeality and, 150, 235; female destructive metamorphosis and, 66; female disappearances/reappearances and, 2; female dismemberment and, 1; female explosion and, 1; female metamorphosis and, 2, 66, 123; female miniaturization and, 2; female transformation and, 19; feminism and, 237; film historiographies and, 94; filmmaking transitions and, 142; gender and, 1, 2, 237; gender politics and, 4, 237; Griffith, D. W. and, 144, 146, 150; interspecies transfiguration and, 2; Keystone and, 22–23; laughter and, 124; males and, 88; modernity and, 19; Pathé and, 121; physical indestructibility and, 85; political activism and, 1; Sennett, Mack and, 22, 88, 169; transitional period (1907–1915)/tropes and, 90–95; violence and, 2, 24–25; Vitagraph and, 112, 121; World War I and, 101 slapstick comedies: anarchic destruction and, 51; apocalyptic violence and, 50, 51; Biograph and, 144; early cinema (1894–1906) and, 19; Fazenda, Louise and, 297n5; female bodily fluidity and, 59; female explosion and, 59; feminism and, 4–13, 17, 26–28; feminist scholarship and, 179; gender and, 168– 70; gender politics/violence and, 13, 17;

350 slapstick comedies (continued ) Griffith, D. W. and, 26, 144–45, 146, 150–54; melodramas and, 26; militant violence and, 27–28, 215–16; Redrobe, Karen and, 179; sexual objectification and, 17; spectators and, 156; suffering and, 168; suffragettes and, 27–28, 212–13, 218; violence and, 4, 66, 177–78, 179; Williams, Linda and, 10; women’s bodies and, 1–2 slapstick corporeality, 44, 68, 215. See also female corporeality slapstick explosion, 50–51. See also female explosion slapstick-inflected melodramas, 23, 145 slapstick political violence, 28 slapstick ridicule, 87–88 slapstick violence, 51, 86, 88, 177–78. See also violence Sleeping Beauty (Pathé), 296n37 Slide, Anthony, 139, 148, 150 Sloan, Kay, 199 Smith, Albert E., 139–40 Smith, G. A., 281n1 Smoking Lamp, The (United States, 1902), 58 smutty humor theory, 7–8, 278n20 sob clubs, 216, 303n10 social change/improvement, 4, 27, 89, 184. See also social uplift social conformity, 4 social contract theory, 226 social defiance, 12. See also suffragettes socialist-feminists, 201 social masculinists, 200. See also Pelletier, Madeleine social media, 7 social messages, 174, 179 social politics, 4, 25 social power, 48 social prohibitions, 18, 44. See also Victorians social reform, 226

H

INDEX

social respectability, 22, 24, 25, 90. See also middle-class legitimacy/respectability social transformation, 6, 10, 11, 237 social uplift, 89, 103, 113–19, 140, 142, 144. See also reform and uplift campaigns social value, 95, 98 Soldier’s Dream, The (Vitagraph, 1907), 116 Solomon, Matthew, 58, 130 Somme Athéologique, La (Bataille), 283n23 Song of the Shirt, The (Biograph), 153 Sorry, Wrong Number (Litvak, 1948), 161 Spadoni, Robert, 111 Spanish Marriage (Pathé, 1909), 124 special effects, 122, 125–26, 139. See also Pathédye colors; stencil-coloring; trick devices “Spectator, The” (Wood), 298n22 spectators: female miniaturization and, 135, 140–41; film industries and, 142; the law and, 215; Mary Jane’s Mishap (G.A. Smith, 1903) and, 61–62; melodramas and, 156; neurasthenic film spectators, 128, 295n30; Princess Nicotine; or the Smoke Fairies (Vitagraph, 1909) and, 141; slapstick comedies and, 156; spirituelle women and, 161; suffragette comedies and, 179, 185, 222; trick devices and, 132–33; An Unseen Enemy (1912) and, 159; violence and, 66. See also film spectatorship spectatorship, 43–45, 112, 215–18, 222. See also film spectatorship specters: Daisy Doodad’s Dial (Turner, 1914) and, 108, 109; Derrida, Jacques on, 63; Freezing Auntie (Edison, 1912) and, 96; Mary Jane’s Mishap (G.A. Smith, 1903) and, 21, 31, 60–62, 65, 66, 67, 96, 244; spinsters and, 96 “Spectre of Crinoline: Thrilling News for People Who Must Live in Crowds, The” (article), 37 Spectre Rouge, Le. See Red Spectre, The (Pathé, 1907)

INDEX

spinsters, 24, 91, 95–98, 114, 189, 197–98, 208, 271. See also old maids spiritualism, 76–81, 288n55, 289n58 spirituelle/voluptuary dichotomy, 143–44, 146, 148–50, 158, 162–63, 164–65, 168, 170 spirituelle women, 143–44, 148, 150, 158, 161, 165 spousal abuse, 177, 179. See also domestic abuse spousal discord, 98–100 spousal infidelity, 51, 92, 99, 243 squalor, 209 Squaw’s Love, The (Griffith), 26 SS-1, 168, 298n34 Stamp, Shelley: American Cinema’s Transitional Era: Audiences, Institutions, Practices, 67, 94; Eighty Million Women Want—? (1913) and, 302n53; feminist historiographies and, 56, 285n2; MovieStruck Girls (Stamp), 178, 196, 216; slapstick violence and, 51; suffragette comedies and, 183; Weber, Lois and, 287n34 Stanford, Leland, 229–30 Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, 76, 199–200 Stanwyck, Barbara, 161 stardom, 22, 24, 94, 113, 169, 204. See also individuals Star Film, 205–6, 291n32, 294n17 States of Injury (Brown), 6–7 state sovereignty, 178, 223, 226–27 state violence, 27, 212–14, 225, 226 Stella Dallas (1947), 164 stencil-coloring, 73, 122, 125–26, 128, 129, 130, 294n19, 294n27 stenographers, 95. See also individual films Stenographer Troubles (Vitagraph, 1913), 90, 264 Stewart, Jacqueline Najuma, 56, 74, 94–95 Stewart, Susan, 139 Sticky Woman, A (Gaumont, 1906), 34, 45–46, 52, 57, 246

H

351

still photography, 80, 289n58 Stolen Pig, The (United States, 1907), 74, 288n49 Stone, Lucy, 76, 189 stop-motion cinematography, 71, 82, 133, 136, 138, 296n36 Storey, Edith, 117 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 37–38 Sturtevant, Victoria, 12, 13, 22, 280n41 Subpoena Server, The (Biograph, 1906), 73–74, 247 suffering, 168, 170. See also pain; pathos Suffrage and the Silver Screen (Shore), 196 suffrage parades, 192–93, 195, 204, 302n48 Suffragette, Die (A Militant Suffragette) (1914), 212 Suffragette, The (1913), 204 suffragette comedies, 173–210; antisuffragette films, 184–85; apocalyptic destruction and, 231; as carnivalesque, 178–80; dualities and, 197; excess and, 195–97; female catastrophes and, 174; female corporeality and, 190, 227; female empowerment and, 27, 188–92; female rupture and, 190, 232; females and, 185; femininity and, 182, 188–89, 195; feminism and, 3, 179, 183, 208; feminist comedy scholarship and, 27, 179; feminist politics and, 174, 190; force-feedings and, 212; gender and, 188; gender politics and, 179; hunger strikes and, 212; labor division and, 183, 184, 203; laughter and, 173, 179, 185, 188, 197, 218, 220, 221, 222, 223; the law and, 189; males and, 184; mass/popular culture and, 3; misogynism and, 27; modernity and, 188; patriarchal power and, 176, 179; politics of formlessness and, 208; public spheres and, 3, 174, 186; romance and, 190, 195; sexual difference and, 176; sexual politics and, 183; sight gags and, 26–27, 176; social change and, 27, 184; social messages and, 174, 179;

352

H

suffragette comedies (continued ) spectators and, 179, 185, 222; Stamp, Shelley and, 183; suffragette politics and, 174, 175; violence and, 175, 177–78, 179, 185, 190, 220, 221; workplace and, 183–84. See also individual films suffragette feminism, 26–27, 179–80 suffragette humorists, 186. See also Are Women People? A Book of Rhymes for Suffrage Times (Miller) Suffragette in Spite of Himself, A (Edison, 1912), 92, 261–62 suffragette movements, 27, 174–75, 204, 206–8, 226 suffragette politics, 174, 175 suffragettes, 173–210, 218–26; African American women and, 192–93, 302n48; anti-suffragettes, 179–80, 185–87; Anti-Women’s Suffrage Organization, 186; Bernhardt, Sarah and, 204, 303n72; Britain and, 27, 173–75, 183, 199, 204, 211–15, 218–26, 229–32, 300n25; caricatures and, 182, 186, 196, 202, 204, 207, 212; carnival and, 178; carnivalesque-grotesque bodies and, 228; Carrie Nation film comedies, 304n24; citizenship and, 217–18; civic empowerment and, 188; class and, 204, 206; comedies and, 173; commodity capitalism and, 196–97, 203, 206, 211, 213; Congressional Union (CU) and, 183, 191, 213; The Conquest of the Pole (Méliès, 1912) and, 205–6; cross-dressers and, 199–204; Davison, Emily Wilding, 229–32, 233–34; democracy and, 180–81, 183, 192; domestic abuse and, 300n13; domestic labor and, 182, 184; Eighty Million Women Want—? (1913) and, 195; The Elusive Miss Pinkhurst (Warwick, 1912) and, 287n33; Espionage Act and, 213; ethnicities and, 202–4; female explosion and, 186–87; female rupture and, 191, 192; femininity and, 182, 186,

INDEX

194, 195, 196, 199–200, 212; feminism and, 173, 176, 178; fetishism and, 206–8; force-feedings and, 1, 27, 211–12, 213, 225, 300n25; Goldman, Emma on, 206–7; Hotely, Mae as, 301n29; hunger strikes and, 27, 211–12, 213, 214, 227, 231, 300n25; The Indian Suffragettes (1914) and, 202–3, 265–66; international suffragette movements, 204, 207–8; Ladies Home Journal and, 196; The Lady Police (Lubin, 1912) and, 185; language and, 228; the law and, 180–81, 182, 183, 189, 192, 211, 213–14, 223, 227, 228, 231; Lea, the Suffragette (Lea Femminista) (Cines, 1910) and, 272, 273; Lea Wants the Vote (Lea Modernista) (1912) and, 272, 273; legislation and, 183; mainstream cinema and, 193; martyrdom and, 211, 227, 229, 230–31; Mary Jane’s Mishap (G.A. Smith, 1903) and, 187; mass/popular culture and, 196, 204, 206; media and, 196, 213, 214, 229; Méliès, Georges and, 205–6, 207; militant tactics and, 174–75, 191–92, 211–12, 213–14, 215–16, 221, 226, 227, 228, 231; militant violence and, 27–28, 211, 212, 221, 227, 300n25; Milling the Militants: A Comical Absurdity (Clarendon, 1913) and, 264; modernity and, 204; Musser, Charles on, 204; National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), 183, 191, 213; Native Americans and, 202–3, 204, 265–66; nervousness and, 186–87; A New Use for a Bike (Lux, 1912) and, 260; Night of Terror and, 213; out-ofcontrol bodies and, 93; paradoxes and, 181–84, 191; Pétronille suffragette (1914), 266; police and, 1, 183–85, 213, 219, 220, 221; power and, 180, 197, 206; prisons and, 213; Prohibition and, 300n13; psychosexual subjectivity and, 217–18; public spheres and, 26, 181, 185–86; race and, 192–93, 202–4, 302n48; reformist

INDEX

tactics and, 191–92; revolutions and, 228; right to vote and, 26, 176, 196–97; romance and, 195; self-hurt and, 213–14; sexual difference and, 180–81; silent films and, 173; slapstick and, 14, 228; slapstick comedies and, 27–28, 212–13, 218; social reform and, 226; stardom and, 204; state violence and, 212–14, 225, 226; suffrage parades, 192–93, 195, 204, 302n48; suffragette humorists, 186; suffragette spectatorship, 215–18; transitional period (1907–1915) and, 92; trick devices and, 207; trick films and, 205–10; United States and, 174–75, 183, 185, 191, 192–93, 196, 206, 207, 211, 212–14, 300n25; the unruly woman and, 187; violence and, 199, 211, 212–13, 218, 219–20, 227; Woman’s Journal and Suffrage News and, 193. See also Are Women People? A Book of Rhymes for Suffrage Times (Miller); force-feedings; hunger strikes; individuals; Nineteenth amendment; suffragette comedies; individual films Suffragettes Again (1913) (newsreel), 199 Suffragettes and the Law (1913), 173 Suffragettes’ Downfall; or, Who Said Rats, The? (1911), 182, 186 Suffragette’s Dream, The (Pathé, 1909), 176–78, 179, 188, 212–13, 223, 255 Suffragette Sheriff, The (Kalem, 1912), 27, 92, 173, 178, 183–84, 197–99, 204, 262 suffragette spectatorship, 215–18 Sully, James, 87, 89 Suspense (1913), 88–89 Swain, Mack, 88 Swanson, Gloria, 22–23, 88 sweatshops, 14, 32 Sweet, Blanche, 148, 150 Sweet Caporal brand cigars and cigarettes, 137–38, 141 Sweet Deception, A (Vitagraph, 1913), 92–93, 265

H

353

Synthetic Sin (First National, 1929), 24, 94–95, 235–37, 268 tableau-vivant, 67, 95–96, 129 Talbot, Frederick, 136, 140 Talmadge, Constance, 23 Tapley, Rose, 193–94 Taylor, Alma, 25, 101, 270 technical advances, 114 technologies, 43, 132, 133. See also mechanization; new technologies Teddy at the Throttle (Keystone, 1917), 88, 267 telephones, 88–89, 159–61, 163, 290n10 television, 66 temporality, 63, 69–70, 156, 160, 181 Thanhouser Company, 292n39 The Jail Bird and How He Flew! (Vitagraph, 1906), 114 “These Too, Too Solid Ghosts” (Gilman), 77 The Win(k)some Widow (Vitagraph, 1914), 281n58 Thieving Hand, The (Vitagraph, 1908), 68, 114, 115, 132 Thomas, Olive, 23, 235 Thompson, Kristin, 111, 151 Those Awful Hats (Biograph, 1909), 26, 144, 145, 215, 256 thoughtful laughter, 89, 113, 124 Thou Shalt Not Rubber (IMP, 1913), 22–23, 265 “Three Fishers, The” (Kingsley), 165 Tillie (Hepworth, 1910–1915), 25, 91 Tillie’s Punctured Romance (Keystone, 1914), 13, 22–23, 88, 266, 280n41 Tillie’s Tomato Surprise (Lubin, 1914), 22–23, 267, 280n41 Tillie Wakes Up (Peerless, 1917), 22–23, 267, 280n41 Tilly series (Britain), 101, 270–71 Tincher, Fay, 23, 290n16 Tin-Type Romance, A (Vitagraph, 1910), 92–93, 257

354 Tit-for-Tat (Pathé, 1906), 16, 67, 73, 123, 125–26, 247 Tobacco Mania (1909), 93–94 Tobacco Road (play), 48, 284n42 tomboys. See pranksters/tomboys Tomkins, Kyla Wazana, 75, 79 Too Much Dog Biscuit (Essanay, 1909), 91, 101, 256 Too Much Suffragette (1912), 179 trade journals, 123, 292n43. See also motion picture trade press; individual journals traditional femininity, 15–16, 26, 33, 41, 57. See also femininity Trahair, Lisa, 283n22 transitional period (1907–1915), 85–110, 111–42; aesthetics and the, 90–91; African American women and the, 94–95; American Cinema’s Transitional Era: Audiences, Institutions, Practices (Keil and Stamp), 67, 94; anarchic knockabout/physicality/violence and the, 22, 86, 93; artistic legitimacy and the, 113, 144; chase films and the, 22; Chomón, Segundo de and the, 129; class and the, 128; comedies of manners and the, 22, 90, 92–93; comedy/feminist/gender scholarship and the, 22; cross-dressers and the, 201; Dressler, Marie and the, 22–24; fat ladies and the, 91; female combustion and the, 86; female comedy and the, 22; female corporeality and the, 95; female dismemberment and the, 22, 93; female metamorphosis and the, 22, 67, 69, 86, 111; female miniaturization and the, 22, 93; female paranoia and the, 161; female self-defense and the, 90; film historiographies and the, 22, 112; filmic story/narrative and the, 86, 113; film scholarship and the, 113; gender and the, 144–45; gender violence and the, 86, 87–89; genre conventions and the, 144–45; ghoulish transfigurations

H

INDEX

and the, 22; historiographic (in-) visibility and the, 24; housemaids and the, 90; interspecies transfiguration and, 93; laughter as social corrective and the, 110; laughter debates and the, 87; metamorphosis and the, 81, 86; misogynism and the, 100; old maids and the, 91; race and the, 94–95; reform and uplift campaigns and the, 90; rube comedies and the, 22; sexual arousal and the, 98–99; sexual assault and the, 90; sight gags and the, 86, 94, 98; slapstick comediennes and the, 90–95; slapstick mayhem and the, 22; social uplift and the, 113, 144; telephones and the, 290n10; trick films and the, 86; Vitagraph and the, 111–12 Trapeze Disrobing Act (Edison, 1901), 52, 242–43 Treumann, Wanda, 101 Triangle, 23 trick devices, 66, 79–80, 125, 131, 132–34, 139–40, 141, 207, 303n77 trick films: The Acrobatic Maid (Pathé, 1908) as, 126; the Big Swallow (UK, 1901) as, 80; The Cigar Box (Pathé, 1907) as, 68; close-ups and, 108; The Conquest of the Pole (Méliès, 1912), 205–6; Cousin Kate’s Revolution (Éclair, 1912), 208; From Death to Life (1913), 72–73; The Elusive Miss Pinkhurst (Warwick, 1912) as, 287n33; Eva Is Tired of Life (Pathé, 1911) as, 87; female catastrophes and, 66, 80; female combustion and, 80; female disappearances/reappearances and, 65; female metamorphosis and, 16, 22, 80, 123, 128; female miniaturization and, 135; female rupture and, 18; Gaumont and, 68; gender and, 114, 120; Haunted Hotel (Vitagraph, 1907) as, 295n35; How They Got the Vote (Edison, 1913), 181; Madame’s Cravings (Gaumont,

INDEX

H

355

1906), 78–80; Mary Jane’s Mishap (G.A. Smith, 1903) as, 61–62; Méliès, Georges and, 205–6; mystical trick films, 123; Pathé and, 68, 111, 113, 121–23, 133, 142, 295n32; Princess Nicotine; or the Smoke Fairies (Vitagraph, 1909) as, 136–37; race and, 73; Solomon, Matthew on, 58; suffragettes and, 205–10; Tit-for-Tat (Pathé, 1906) as, 73; transitional period (1907–1915) and, 86; Vitagraph and, 68, 112, 113–14, 115; A Workingman’s Dream (Vitagraph, 1908) as, 116–17. See also Chomón, Segundo de; magic films Trimble, Laurence (Larry), 108, 292n53 “Trip to Vitagraphville” (Kessler), 294n13 tropes, 22, 25, 56, 67–68, 86, 90–95 Troublesome Secretaries, The (Vitagraph, 1911), 90, 113, 259, 290n17 Trouble with the Milkmaid (Lubin, 1903), 20–21, 52, 244 Trouble with the Washerwoman (Lubin, 1903), 20–21, 52, 244 Tsivian, Yuri, 165 Tulipes, Les (The Tulips) (1907), 128, 294n27 Turner, Florence: American film industry and, 108; Britain and the, 292n53; comedies of manners and, 24, 92–93; facial gestures and, 108; Florence Turner Productions (1913–1916), 108; stardom and, 24; Trimble, Laurence (Larry) and, 108, 292n53; Vitagraph and, 108, 112, 113, 292n53. See also Daisy Doodad’s Dial (Turner, 1914) Turner Films, 292n53 Turnock, Julie, 303n77 2 A.M. in the Subway (1905), 47, 246 Two Reels and a Crank (Smith), 139–40 Typhoid Mary, 42, 283n27

Unchanging Sea, The (1910), 165 Uncle Josh at the Moving Picture Show (Edison, 1903), 104, 130 unconscious (dream films), 93. See also dream films undercranking, 67, 68, 69, 82 Under the Old Apple Tree (Biograph, 1907), 92, 95, 248 Unfinished System of Nonknowledge, The (Bataille), 40, 283n23, 283n24 United States: American censorship, 25–26, 93; Irish immigrants and the, 41; Lea, the Suffragette (Lea Femminista) (Cines, 1910) and the, 189; A Militant Suffragette (Die Suffragette) (1914) and the, 212; nickelodeons and the, 119; Pathé and the, 120, 121; suffragettes and the, 174–75, 183, 185, 191, 192–93, 196, 206, 207, 211, 212–14, 300n25. See also American film industry United States Congress, 207 Universal, 23, 290n16 Universal Weekly, 73 un-knowability, 9–10, 34, 40, 44, 283n25 “Un-Knowing: Laughter and Tears” (Bataille), 40 “Un Regard Oblique” (Doisneau, 1948) (photograph), 7–8, 278n18 Unruly Woman (Rowe), 12 unruly woman, the, 5–6, 12, 13, 14, 42, 43, 74, 178, 187 Unseen Enemy, An (1912), 154–63, 298n26, 298n32 unwanted female bodies, 95, 97 upward class mobility, 24, 89 Uricchio, William, 111 US Patent Wars, 121, 294n16 utromania, 77–78, 80–81

umbrellas, 123, 128, 130, 215, 216 Unappreciated Joke, The (United States, 1903), 51, 244 uncanny metamorphoses, 93–94

Vacuum Cleaner Nightmare, The (Urban, 1906), 131, 247 “Value of Laughter, The” (Woolf), 20 vamps, 6

356 Vanishing Lady, The (R. W. Paul, 1897), 64, 67, 240 vanishing-lady films, 79, 81–82 Vanishing Women (Redrobe), 65 Variety, 188 Vasey, George, 87, 96–97 vaudeville, 71, 108, 150–51, 153 Velle, Gaston, 295n32 vernacular modernism, 62, 288n43 vertical wipes, 62 Very Fine Lady, A (Louis Feuillade, 1908), 92, 249 “Victimless Leather” (Bell), 282n13 Victorians, 17–18, 88, 282n13 violence: aftermath minimization and, 32; apocalyptic violence, 50–53; Bataille, Georges and, 40; Benjamin, Walter on, 301n44; Betty series (Pathé, 1910–1912) and, 102–7; carnivalesque/feminism and, 13, 14; comedies and, 228; comedy scholarship and, 4; comic violence, 4, 169–70; commodity fetishism and, 100; Cousin Kate’s Revolution (Éclair, 1912) and, 209; cross-dressers and, 199; democracy and, 299n6; Dworkin, Andrea and, 228; European film industry and the, 101; facial gestures and, 109; female catastrophes and, 52, 66; female combustion and, 62, 66; female corporeality and, 53, 228; female decapitation/dismemberment and, 66; female disappearances/reappearances and, 65; female metamorphosis and, 60, 66; female slapstick and, 235; female transfiguration and, 54; feminist scholarship and, 51, 179; feminist semiotic theories and, 57; film historiographies and, 66; filmic story/narrative and, 25; A Florida Enchantment (Vitagraph, 1914) and, 118; gags and, 92; gender and, 213; humor and, 6, 16; laceration and, 66; laughter and, 4, 6, 14, 19, 39, 40, 128, 179; the

H

INDEX

law and, 228; machine technologies and, 53; MacKinnon, Catherine and, 228; Mary Jane’s Mishap (G.A. Smith, 1903) and, 60, 62, 65; melodramas and, 156–57; militant tactics and, 221; Milling the Militants: A Comical Absurdity (Clarendon, 1913) and, 219–20; out-of-control bodies and, 93; physical indestructibility and, 88; pranksters/tomboys and, 100; The Servant’s Revenge (Lubin, 1909) and, 100; slapstick and, 7, 14, 24–25, 104, 218, 235, 237; slapstick comediennes and, 2; slapstick comedies and, 4, 24–25, 66, 177–78, 179; spectators and, 66; suffragette comedies and, 175, 177–78, 179, 185, 190, 220, 221; suffragettes and, 199, 211, 212–13, 218, 219–20, 227; The Suffragette’s Dream (Pathé, 1909) and, 176–78; temporality and, 32; Tit-forTat (Pathé, 1906) and, 125–26; Women in Dark Times (Rose) and, 299n6; A Workingman’s Dream (Vitagraph, 1908) and, 117. See also state violence visual desire, 146–47 visual effects, 62. See also film editing; jump cuts; special effects; trick devices; trick films Vitagraph, 111–19; artistic legitimacy and, 112–13, 114–15; Blackton, J. Stuart and, 139; Brooklyn studio and, 114, 121, 294n13; Bunny for the Cause (1913) and, 193; chase scenes and, 114; comedians and, 113; comedies of manners and, 113; convict-themed comedies and, 114, 132; domestic comedies and, 113; dream films and, 116–17; Drew, Mr. and Mrs. Sidney and, 92–93; Edison and, 294n16; Essanay and, 112; European comedienne series and, 25; female corporeality and, 112–13, 114–15, 119–20, 121, 142; female dismemberment and, 112, 115–16, 142; female metamorphosis and, 142; female

INDEX

miniaturization and, 112, 135; female transfiguration and, 112; film aesthetics and, 113–14, 121; filmic story/narrative and, 112–13; film scholarship and, 111–12; films de luxe and, 140; Finch, Flora and, 112; Fitzgerald, Cissy and, 281n58; gender and, 111; housemaids and, 114; interspecies transfiguration and, 112; Keystone comedies and, 112; knockabout slapstick and, 112; Library of Congress and, 293n5; literature/ theater adaptations and, 111, 113, 139; Lubin and, 112; markets and, 112, 295n35, 296n36; mass taste and, 112–13; McVey, Lucille and, 113; middle-class legitimacy/ respectability and, 112; miniaturization and, 139–40, 142; morality and, 114; Motion Picture Patents Company (MPPC) (or Edison Trust) and, 291n32, 294n17; Normand, Mabel and, 23, 112; parallel storytelling and, 114; Pathé and, 121, 132–39; Pathé Comica and, 112; The Pickpocket (1913) and, 194; Price, Kate and, 112; Sadler, Josie and, 112; Selig and, 112; sexual reassignment and, 142; slapstick comediennes and, 112, 121; Smith, Albert E. and, 139; social uplift and, 113–19, 140, 142; spectatorship and, 112; spinsters and, 114; style and, 111; technical advances and, 114; transitional period (1907–1915) and, 111–12; trick devices and, 132–33; trick films and, 68, 112, 113–14, 115; Turner, Florence and, 108, 112, 113, 292n53; Walker, Lillian and, 112; Young, Clara Kimball and, 113. See also individual films Vitagraph Bulletin, 140 Vitagraph Girl, The. See Turner, Florence Vitagraphville, 114, 121, 294n13 Vixen, The (Powers, 1910), 92, 257 vixens, 24, 92, 93, 98–100 voluptuary women, 23, 143–44, 146, 148–50, 165–66, 170

H

357

votes. See right to vote Votes for Women (1912), 193 votes-for-women movement, 199, 204 voyeurism, 7–8, 9, 52, 58, 153, 159, 164, 215, 247 vulgarity, 89, 91, 122 Wagenknecht, Edward, 150 Wagner, Kristen Anderson, 22, 51 Waldman, Diane, 280n45 Walker, Lillian, 24, 112 Walsh, Reverend, 186 Ward Mahar, Karen, 56 Was He a Suffragette? (1912), 179, 188 Washington, D.C., 192–93, 213, 302n48 “Weaving a Narrative” (Gunning), 148 Weber, Lois, 69, 72–73, 88–89, 287n34 Weird Fantasies (Pathé, 1907), 130 Wells-Barnett, Ida, 301n41, 302n48 West, Charles, 166 West, Dorothy, 297n11 “What Happened in the Transition? Reading Race, Gender, and Labor Between the Shots” (Stewart) (essay), 94 What Happened in the Tunnel (Edison, 1903), 34, 45, 47, 94, 245 What Happened on Twenty-Third Street, New York City (Edison, 1901), 58, 243 What the Cards Foretold (Edison, 1909), 91–92, 256 When Helen Was Elected (1912), 183–84 When Persistency and Obstinacy Meet (Vitagraph, 1912), 92–93, 108, 262 When Their Wives Joined the Military, 183–84 When the Men Left Town (1914), 183–84, 188 When Two Hearts Are Won (Kalem, 1911), 92–93, 259 When Women Rule (Selig, 1912), 27, 92, 173, 178, 262 When Women Vote (Lubin,1907), 27, 173, 178

358 When Women Win (Lubin, 1909), 27, 92, 173, 174, 178, 188, 195, 256 White, Chrissie, 25, 101 White, Patricia, 56 Why Bridget Stopped Drinking (1901), 42, 243 Why Mr. Nation Wants a Divorce (Edison, 1901), 304n24 Wifie’s New Hat (Lubin, 1911), 91, 259 Wig Chase, The (Pathé, 1906), 87, 246 wild bodies, 9, 49–50, 51, 135 wild corporeality, 85–86. See also female corporeality Williams, Linda, 10–11, 94, 147, 279n28 Williams, Tami, 56 Wilson, Woodrow, 192, 213, 300n25 Windy Day on the Roof, A (Biograph, 1904), 9, 52, 245–46 Woman at the Keyhole, The (Mayne), 51–52 woman on top, 11–13, 178 Woman’s Curiosity, A (Lubin, 1911), 93, 101, 259 Woman’s Journal and Suffrage News, 193 Woman Who Dared, The (1913), 233 “Woman with the Whip, The” (BillingtonGreig) (essay), 221 womb iconographies, 79 womb tilt, 77–78, 80–81 women: female publics, 216; film historiographies and, 66, 69; history and, 55; laughter and, 5, 89; mainstream cinema and, 5; mediomania and, 77–78; new laugh and, 89; physical comedy and, 89; pranksters/tomboys and, 91; sight gags and, 91; silent film production and, 55, 64, 66, 69, 277n2, 287n24, 287n30, 287n34; utromania and, 77–78, 80–81. See also females women aren’t funny debates, 18, 281n48 Women Film Pioneers Project (WFPP), 66, 287n30 Women in Dark Times (Rose), 299n6

H

INDEX

women’s bodies, 1–2, 89. See also female corporeality women’s hats, 33, 99, 123, 201, 215, 216, 217, 249–50, 303n10. See also individual films women’s laughter. See female laughter Women’s Movement, 76 women’s skirts comedies, 9, 52, 58 Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), 229 Wonderful Eggs (Pathé, 1908), 93–94, 252 Wonderful Mirrors (Pathé, 1907), 123, 129, 130, 131, 135, 296n37 Wonderful Rose Designs (Pathé, 1909), 122 Wood, Frank E., 298n22 Wooden Leg, The (Griffith, 1909), 26, 144, 151–53, 256 Woolf, Virginia, 20, 38, 47–48, 284n47 Workingman’s Dream, A (Vitagraph, 1908), 116–17, 118 workplace, 183–84 workplace harassment, 43 World War I, 101–2, 213, 287n26 wounded attachments, 6–7 Wringing Good Joke, A (Edison, 1900), 106 Writer of Modern Life, The (Benjamin), 298n31 wronged spouses, 92. See also adulterers Wrong Patient, The (Vitagraph, 1911), 108 X-Ray Fiend, The (G.A. Smith, 1897), 58, 240, 281n1 Young, Clara Kimball, 113 Yumibe, Joshua, 130, 294n27 Zetkin, Clara, 201 Zhang, Zhen, 56, 78 Ziarek, Ewa, 214, 228 zoopraxiscope projector, 230, 231, 305n38 Zulu’s Heart, The (Biograph), 153 Zupančič, Alenka, 128, 169

F ILM A ND CULT UR E A S E R IE S O F CO LUM B IA UN IV ER S I T Y P R ES S EDI T ED BY J O HN B E LTON

What Made Pistachio Nuts? Early Sound Comedy and the Vaudeville Aesthetic Henry Jenkins Showstoppers: Busby Berkeley and the Tradition of Spectacle Martin Rubin Projections of War: Hollywood, American Culture, and World War II Thomas Doherty Laughing Screaming: Modern Hollywood Horror and Comedy William Paul Laughing Hysterically: American Screen Comedy of the 1950s Ed Sikov Primitive Passions: Visuality, Sexuality, Ethnography, and Contemporary Chinese Cinema Rey Chow The Cinema of Max Ophuls: Magisterial Vision and the Figure of Woman Susan M. White Black Women as Cultural Readers Jacqueline Bobo Picturing Japaneseness: Monumental Style, National Identity, Japanese Film Darrell William Davis Attack of the Leading Ladies: Gender, Sexuality, and Spectatorship in Classic Horror Cinema Rhona J. Berenstein This Mad Masquerade: Stardom and Masculinity in the Jazz Age Gaylyn Studlar Sexual Politics and Narrative Film: Hollywood and Beyond Robin Wood The Sounds of Commerce: Marketing Popular Film Music Jeff Smith Orson Welles, Shakespeare, and Popular Culture Michael Anderegg Pre-Code Hollywood: Sex, Immorality, and Insurrection in American Cinema, 1930–1934 Thomas Doherty Sound Technology and the American Cinema: Perception, Representation, Modernity James Lastra Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema and Its Contexts Ben Singer Wondrous Difference: Cinema, Anthropology, and Turn-of-the-Century Visual Culture Alison Griffiths Hearst Over Hollywood: Power, Passion, and Propaganda in the Movies Louis Pizzitola Masculine Interests: Homoerotics in Hollywood Film Robert Lang

Special Effects: Still in Search of Wonder Michele Pierson Designing Women: Cinema, Art Deco, and the Female Form Lucy Fischer Cold War, Cool Medium: Television, McCarthyism, and American Culture Thomas Doherty Katharine Hepburn: Star as Feminist Andrew Britton Silent Film Sound Rick Altman Home in Hollywood: The Imaginary Geography of Cinema Elisabeth Bronfen Hollywood and the Culture Elite: How the Movies Became American Peter Decherney Taiwan Film Directors: A Treasure Island Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh and Darrell William Davis Shocking Representation: Historical Trauma, National Cinema, and the Modern Horror Film Adam Lowenstein China on Screen: Cinema and Nation Chris Berry and Mary Farquhar The New European Cinema: Redrawing the Map Rosalind Galt George Gallup in Hollywood Susan Ohmer Electric Sounds: Technological Change and the Rise of Corporate Mass Media Steve J. Wurtzler The Impossible David Lynch Todd McGowan Sentimental Fabulations, Contemporary Chinese Films: Attachment in the Age of Global Visibility Rey Chow Hitchcock’s Romantic Irony Richard Allen Intelligence Work: The Politics of American Documentary Jonathan Kahana Eye of the Century: Film, Experience, Modernity Francesco Casetti Shivers Down Your Spine: Cinema, Museums, and the Immersive View Alison Griffiths Weimar Cinema: An Essential Guide to Classic Films of the Era Edited by Noah Isenberg African Film and Literature: Adapting Violence to the Screen Lindiwe Dovey Film, A Sound Art Michel Chion

Film Studies: An Introduction Ed Sikov Hollywood Lighting from the Silent Era to Film Noir Patrick Keating Levinas and the Cinema of Redemption: Time, Ethics, and the Feminine Sam B. Girgus Counter-Archive: Film, the Everyday, and Albert Kahn’s Archives de la Planète Paula Amad Indie: An American Film Culture Michael Z. Newman Pretty: Film and the Decorative Image Rosalind Galt Film and Stereotype: A Challenge for Cinema and Theory Jörg Schweinitz Chinese Women’s Cinema: Transnational Contexts Edited by Lingzhen Wang Hideous Progeny: Disability, Eugenics, and Classic Horror Cinema Angela M. Smith Hollywood’s Copyright Wars: From Edison to the Internet Peter Decherney Electric Dreamland: Amusement Parks, Movies, and American Modernity Lauren Rabinovitz Where Film Meets Philosophy: Godard, Resnais, and Experiments in Cinematic Thinking Hunter Vaughan The Utopia of Film: Cinema and Its Futures in Godard, Kluge, and Tahimik Christopher Pavsek Hollywood and Hitler, 1933–1939 Thomas Doherty Cinematic Appeals: The Experience of New Movie Technologies Ariel Rogers Continental Strangers: German Exile Cinema, 1933–1951 Gerd Gemünden Deathwatch: American Film, Technology, and the End of Life C. Scott Combs After the Silents: Hollywood Film Music in the Early Sound Era, 1926–1934 Michael Slowik “It’s the Pictures That Got Small”: Charles Brackett on Billy Wilder and Hollywood’s Golden Age Edited by Anthony Slide Plastic Reality: Special Effects, Technology, and the Emergence of 1970s Blockbuster Aesthetics Julie A. Turnock Maya Deren: Incomplete Control Sarah Keller Dreaming of Cinema: Spectatorship, Surrealism, and the Age of Digital Media Adam Lowenstein

Motion(less) Pictures: The Cinema of Stasis Justin Remes The Lumière Galaxy: Seven Key Words for the Cinema to Come Francesco Casetti The End of Cinema? A Medium in Crisis in the Digital Age André Gaudreault and Philippe Marion Studios Before the System: Architecture, Technology, and the Emergence of Cinematic Space Brian R. Jacobson Impersonal Enunciation, or the Place of Film Christian Metz When Movies Were Theater: Architecture, Exhibition, and the Evolution of American Film William Paul Carceral Fantasies: Cinema and Prison in Early Twentieth-Century America Alison Griffiths Unspeakable Histories: Film and the Experience of Catastrophe William Guynn Reform Cinema in Iran: Film and Political Change in the Islamic Republic Blake Atwood Exception Taken: How France Has Defied Hollywood’s New World Order Jonathan Buchsbaum After Uniqueness: A History of Film and Video Art in Circulation Erika Balsom Words on Screen Michel Chion Essays on the Essay Film Edited by Nora M. Alter and Timothy Corrigan The Essay Film After Fact and Fiction Nora Alter