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Bestseller
BestsellerE-book
Author Hennefeld, Maggie, 1984- author.

Title Specters of slapstick & silent film comediennes / Maggie Hennefeld.

Publication Info. New York : Columbia University Press, [2018]
©2018

Item Status

Description 1 online resource (xvii, 358 pages) : illustrations.
Physical Medium polychrome
Description text file
Series Film and culture
Film and culture.
Summary Women explode out of chimneys and melt when sprayed with soda water. Feminist activists play practical jokes to lobby for voting rights, while overworked kitchen maids dismember their limbs to finish their chores on time. In early slapstick films with titles such as Saucy Sue, Mary Jane's Mishap, Jane on Strike, and The Consequences of Feminism, comediennes exhibit the tensions between joyful laughter and gendered violence. Slapstick comedy often celebrates the exaggeration of make-believe injury. Unlike male clowns, however, these comic actresses use slapstick antics as forms of feminist protest. They spontaneously combust while doing housework, disappear and reappear when sexually assaulted, or transform into men by eating magic seeds--and their absurd metamorphoses evoke the real-life predicaments of female identity in a changing modern world. Specters of Slapstick and Silent Film Comediennes reveals the gender politics of comedy and the comedic potentials of feminism through close consideration of hundreds of silent films. As Maggie Hennefeld argues, comedienne catastrophes provide disturbing but suggestive images for comprehending gendered social upheavals in the early twentieth century. At the same time, slapstick comediennes were crucial to the emergence of film language. Women's flexible physicality offered filmmakers blank slates for experimenting with the visual and social potentials of cinema. Specters of Slapstick and Silent Film Comediennes poses major challenges to the foundations of our ideas about slapstick comedy and film history, showing how this combustible genre blows open age-old debates about laughter, society, and gender politics.
"In Specters of Slapstick, Hennefeld focuses on silent film comediennes and the function of the female body in early slapstick. Laughter is a kind of grating against the absurdity of society, argues Hennefeld. But while male bodies in slapstick tried to violently fight or "escape" their surroundings--slipping on a banana peel and falling, for example--female bodies exhibited a fluidity that reflected an attempt to morph into their changing surroundings. In one slapstick film, a maid humorously cuts off her limbs in order to finish all her household chores in time. In others, women transform into fairies or spiders; all underscore an attempt to assimilate their bodies to the demands of changing environments. This eradicates the traditional opposition between performer and audience, making the "laughing spectator" a more active part of the film experience. As Hennefeld analyzes early slapstick film historiography in light of this theory, she examines larger themes like the evolution of gender, the body, and their place in cinematic comedy"-- Provided by publisher.
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index.
Contents Early cinema and the comedy of the female catastrophe -- Female combustion and feminist film historiography -- Slapstick comediennes in transitional cinema: between body and medium -- The geopolitics of the transition film comedy: American Vitagraph versus French Pathé frères -- D.W. Griffith's slapstick comediennes: female corporeality and narrative film storytelling -- Film comedy aesthetics and suffrategette social politics -- Radical militancy and slapstick and slapstick political violence.
Local Note eBooks on EBSCOhost EBSCO eBook Subscription Academic Collection - North America
Subject Comedy films -- History and criticism.
Comedy films.
Silent films -- History and criticism.
Silent films.
Women comedians.
Women comedians.
Women in motion pictures.
Women in motion pictures.
Human body in motion pictures.
Human body in motion pictures.
Sex role in motion pictures.
Sex role in motion pictures.
Genre/Form Electronic books.
Criticism, interpretation, etc.
Added Title Specters of slapstick and silent film comediennes
Other Form: Print version: 9780231179461 0231179464 (DLC) 2017047038 (OCoLC)1013721339
ISBN 9780231547062 (electronic book)
0231547064 (electronic book)
9780231179461 (hardcover ; alkaline paper)
0231179464 (hardcover ; alkaline paper)
9780231179478 (paperback ; alkaline paper)
0231179472 (paperback ; alkaline paper)