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| Jean Durand: Le Rembrandt de la Rue Lepic (FR 1911). Photo: La Cinémathèque française, Paris. |
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Edwin S. Porter, J. Searle Dawley:
Laughing Gas (US 1907) starring Bertha Regustus (Mandy Brown). Photo: Harvard Film Archive / Kino Lorber.
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Nasty Women – Third Edition
Maggie Hennefeld, Laura Horak (GCM 2021): "Your favorite feminist chimney exploders have survived their endless quarantine and are now nastier than ever! After months of lockdown, who wouldn’t like to break all the dishes and erupt through the rooftop? To refresh your memory, this program burst onto the scene of the Giornate del Cinema Muto in October 2017 with five screenings, including “Catastrophe in the Kitchen,” “Catastrophe Beyond the Kitchen,” and selections from Pathé Comica’s Rosalie and Léontine series, featuring Sarah Duhamel and a still-unidentified comedienne."
"What is a “nasty woman”? Wrested from the hateful utterance of a certain former U.S. president, the term has been reclaimed as a global feminist rallying cry. It celebrates the messiness of gender and sexual difference, bodily excess, social heterogeneity, and the refusal of women to be polite or subservient. At the 2019 Giornate, a new cohort of combustive celluloid miscreants made a comeback as part of the European Slapstick Comedy program curated with Steve Massa and Ulrich Ruedel."
"We are thrilled to raise their unholy specters yet again in 2021 in anticipation of Cinema’s First Nasty Women, a 4-disc DVD/Blu-ray set that we are co-curating with Elif Rongen-Kaynakçi in partnership with the Giornate del Cinema Muto, the Women Film Pioneers Project, Carleton University, and the Festival Internacional de Cine Silente México. The collection will be released by Kino Lorber in May 2022, featuring 99 silent films about feminist protest, anarchic slapstick destruction, queer longings, and suggestive gender play. This year, we present two screenings – in the flesh – on the themes “Contagious Revenge” and “Genders of Farce.” When Nasty Women are on the move, no one is safe!" – Maggie Hennefeld, Laura Horak (GCM 2021)
Prog. 1: Contagious Revenge
THE FINISH OF MR. FRESH (US 1899)
regia/dir: ?. Based on the farce by Thomas H. Davis & Scott Marble (Butler’s Grand Opera House, Washington, D.C., 25.10.1898). photog: Frederick S. Armitage. prod: American Mutoscope & Biograph Company. riprese/filmed: 24.7.1899 (studio). copia/copy: DCP, 1’45” (orig. 157 ft); did./titles: ENG. fonte/source: Eye Filmmuseum, Amsterdam.
THE DAIRY MAID’S REVENGE (US 1899)
regia/dir: ?. photog: Frederick S. Armitage. prod: American Mutoscope & Biograph Company. riprese/filmed: 24.7.1899 (studio). copia/copy: DCP, 1’41” (orig. 157 ft); did./titles: ENG. fonte/source: Eye Filmmuseum, Amsterdam.
A BAD (K)NIGHT (US 1899)
regia/dir: ?. photog: Frederick S. Armitage.
prod: American Mutoscope & Biograph Company. riprese/filmed:
9.6.1899 (studio). copia/copy: DCP, 2′ (orig. 215 ft); did./titles: ENG.
fonte/source: Eye Filmmuseum, Amsterdam.
AA: Both The Finish of Mr. Fresh (1899) and The Dairy Maid's Revenge (1899) were shot at 36 fps and screened at 24 fps, both in a slower and a faster version. The first movie is about churning milk and the second about a horny man approaching a milkmaid whose both hands are tied to the milkcan holder. Both get their comeuppance in a hilarious way. A Bad (K)Night is about a drunken man coming home and getting an unforgettable welcome by the harridan wife aided by a suit of armour.
LA GRÈVE DES NOURRICES (FR 1907)
regia/dir: André Heuzé. prod: Pathé Frères. copia/copy: DCP, 11’59” (orig. 190 m.); did./titles: FRA. fonte/source: Gaumont-Pathé Archives, Saint-Ouen, Paris.
AA: A catastrophe comedy of escalation in which nurses go on strike, fighting the police, and even babies are inspired to strike. André Heuzé displays a great sense of action comedy.
LAUGHING GAS (US 1907)
regia/dir: Edwin S. Porter, J. Searle Dawley. cast: Bertha Regustus (Mandy Brown), Edward Boulden, Mr. Sullivan, Mr. La Montte. prod: Edison Manufacturing Company. riprese/filmed: 13-19.11. 1907. copia/copy: DCP, 6’40” (orig. 575 ft); did./titles: ENG. fonte/source: Harvard Film Archive, Cambridge, MA (controtipo da una copia del MoMA/Duped from MoMA print).
AA: See photo above. Mandy Brown (Bertha Regustus) gets such an overdose of laughing gas visiting a "painless dentist" that the whole world cannot ignore it. Even the Moon cannot help laughing, in Méliès style.
LITTLE MORITZ ENLÈVE ROSALIE (FR 1911)
regia/dir: Henry Gambart. cast: Sarah Duhamel (Rosalie), Maurice Schwartz (Little Moritz). prod: Pathé Frères. uscita/rel: 22-28.11.1911 (Théâtre Omnia, Rouen). copia/copy: DCP, 7’55” (orig. 180 m); senza didascalie/no titles. fonte/source: Gaumont-Pathé Archives, Saint-Ouen, Paris.
AA: A catastrophe comedy about Little Moritz and the warhorse Rosalie on a car chase in the mountains. They escape to a rooftop, and lifted by the hot air from the smokestack, Rosalie rises to the sky, carrying also Moritz and the hound dog to the clouds.
LES FEMMES COCHERS (FR 1907)
regia/dir: ?. scen: André Heuzé. prod: Pathé Frères. copia/copy: DCP, 10’08” (orig. 185 m); senza didascalie/no titles. fonte/source: Gaumont-Pathé Archives, Saint-Ouen, Paris.
AA: Women as coachmen, whipping men, fighting each other and creating havoc at the bistro.
GISÈLE A MANQUÉ LE TRAIN (FR 1912)
regia/dir: ?. cast: Little Chrysia (Gisèle’s chaperone). prod: Lux. copia/copy: DCP, 9’06” (orig. 185 m); did./titles: FRA. fonte/source: Eye Filmmuseum, Amsterdam.
AA: Gisèle misses the train and finds shelter in a Gypsy camp. They for their part find shelter in a castle, where all their table manners leave a lot to be desired.
LE REMBRANDT DE LA RUE LEPIC (FR 1911)
regia/dir: Jean Durand. cast: Gaston Modot, Berthe Dagmar, Ernest Bourbon. prod: Gaumont. uscita/rel: 17.3.1911. copia/copy: DCP, 5’36” (orig. 114 m); did./titles: ??. fonte/source: Gaumont-Pathé Archives, Saint-Ouen, Paris.
AA: A fake Rembrandt causes confusion in a bistro at the Montmartre. When a nasty lady sits on it, a mirror image emerges in her underwear since the paint is still wet. Another catastrophe comedy where the world turns upside down. Jean Durand at his best in several incredible multiple action setpieces. They sometimes turn so complex that they border on the abstract. The world exists only in order to be destroyed. Jean Durand was a genius of the catastrophe comedy of the kind that was an inspiration to Dadaism and Surrealism. Regarding Gaston Modot, I may be mistaken, but I believe he appears here also as a man, with a moustache and a pointed beard.
CUNÉGONDE AIME SON MAÎTRE (FR 1912)
regia/dir: ?. cast: Little Chrysia (Cunégonde). prod: Lux. copia/copy: DCP, 6’48” (orig. 136 m); did./titles: NLD. fonte/source: Eye Filmmuseum, Amsterdam.
AA: When the housemaid is young and pretty she inevitably attracts the attention of Monsieur, and is promptly fired by Madame. The challenge is to find the most unattractive possible maid, and here Cunegonde comes to help. But unfortunately it is now she who falls in love with Monsieur.
FATTY AND MINNIE-HE-HAW (US 1914)
(titolo di lavorazione/working title: The Squaw’s Man)
regia/dir: Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle. cast: Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle (Fatty), Princess Minnie [Minnie Devereaux] (Minnie-He-Haw), Minta Durfee [the woman on horseback], Joseph Swickard, Harry McCoy (the barroom drunk), Frank Hayes, Slim Summerville (the railroad bull), Bill Hauber, Billy Gilbert, Joe Bordeaux. prod: Mack Sennette, per/for Keystone Film Company. dist: Mutual Film Corporation. uscita/rel: 21.12.1914. copia/copy: DCP, 21’08” (orig. 35 mm, 2 rl, 2000 ft); did./titles: ENG. fonte/source: Academy Film Archive, Beverly Hills, CA (Blackhawk Films/Film Preservation Associates Collection).
AA: This year is a Centenary memorial of Affaire Fatty Arbuckle, the great comedian who was falsely accused and whose career was destroyed, although he was twice declared innocent by courts and given an official apology. Another comedy of unrequited love, now between Fatty and Minnie the Indian Princess. Not one of Fatty's best, it is from his early, crude Keystone period, before his upgrading to Paramount and later to Comique and collaboration with Keaton.
Maggie Hennefeld, Laura Horak (GCM 2021): "There’s nothing funny about bodily contagion – unless it’s a vehicle for collective uprising and furious social rebellion. In this program, domestic workers go on strike, heterosexual romance falls apart, and the whole world explodes. Two American Mutoscope & Biograph films, The Finish of Mr. Fresh (1899) and The Dairy Maid’s Revenge (1899) celebrate women’s sweet comeuppance against the male mashers who harass them (presented at various speeds to convey each original frame). Milk is further weaponized in La Grève des nourrices (Pathé, 1907), a gender-defiling burlesque on female reproductive labor: childcare, housework, cooking, cleaning, and breastfeeding. Nursemaids go on strike and terrorize the police force. Dairy cows are enlisted as scabs to replace lactating nursemaids. The film was meant to lampoon the excesses of working-class feminism but survives today as an empowering document of women’s systematically exploited and invisible labor. Then as now, women continue to do a disproportionate share of housework and deserve fair compensation."
"The cops are also no match for Mandy (Bertha Regustus), an African-American woman whose contagious cachinnation helps desegregate the public sphere in Laughing Gas (Edison, 1907). Mandy is given nitrous oxide (i.e., laughing gas) by her dentist during a tooth extraction and transmits the euphoric effects to everyone in her path. The title of A Bad (K)night (AM&B, 1899) is a pun too calamitous to describe, as you will see. Sarah Duhamel, one of our favorite nasty comediennes, returns as Rosalie to consecrate her disastrous elopement with Little Moritz (Maurice Schwartz) in this memorable cross-over episode (one of several), Little Moritz enlève Rosalie (Pathé, 1911). Rosalie shoots up through the chimney, aerated by her ridiculous hoop skirt, and cruises through outer space, until gravity gets the better of her fantastic journey and she crashes through a rooftop. Back to the scene of apocalyptic labor, the angry wives of drunken coach drivers cause a series of traffic accidents in Les Femmes cochers (Pathé, 1907), and then unwind by smoking pipes together after an eventful workday."
"Little Chrysia, nasty woman extraordinaire, moonlights as Gisèle’s chaperone in Gisèle a manqué le train (Lux, 1912), which takes a holiday from the exhausting schedule of locomotive modernity by allowing white upper-class people to play-act as Roma travelers. Should we read this as a gesture of social alliance or ploy of colonialist tourism? The film tries to defuse its ambiguity (we might say, to have its cake and “eat the other” too) with a raucous carnivalesque dance scene finale. Speaking of the Seven Arts, painting is at least as deceptive as gender in Le Rembrandt de la rue Lepic (Gaumont, 1911), a cross-dressing comedy featuring Gaston Modot in drag. S/he wreaks total mayhem when a supposed Rembrandt original accidentally affixes itself to her/his rear. Cunégonde (Little Chrysia) falls in love with her employer’s portrait in Cunégonde aime son maître (Lux, 1912), and an equally ill-fated romance ensues in Fatty and Minnie-He-Haw (Keystone, 1914). The title characters are played by Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle and Minnie Devereaux (Cheyenne), an Indigenous comedienne who raised a ruckus in more than 15 films, including with Mabel Normand in Mickey (Mabel Normand Feature Film Company, 1918) and Suzanna (Mack Sennett Comedies, 1923). Though Fatty and Minnie bristles with offensive stereotypes, Devereaux’s role is “rare in the history of cinematic representations of Native American women,” according to Michelle H. Raheja (Seneca) in Reservation Reelism, because “she possesses a clear sense of sexual agency that is not predicated on the looking relations that dominate most gendered and raced viewing practices.” Her burning desire for uproarious revenge against white male colonizers is not only nasty: it is contagious." – Maggie Hennefeld, Laura Horak (GCM 2021)
AA: There are mighty surprises in this wild and crazy compilation programme, and also some films that are familiar to me.
Comedy has always been full of gender benders, and in our age of Me Too and non-binary revelations also comedies from the early cinema period can be revisited and new dimensions discovered.
This show is certainly bouleversant and deserves to be widely disseminated.
There is no specific film I would want to eliminate, but I believe that this kind of show would be at its most effective at a duration of circa one hour. There are so many short films, and so much mayhem in many of them, that a little bit less would be more.
These films are very funny, but there is surprisingly little laughter. This is a general phenomenon in contemporary silent comedy screenings. I remember days of thunderstorms of laughter in silent comedies. I think cures can be found. It is good for the health to laugh. "Laughter prolongs life" is a Finnish proverb (again, one whose wit is lost in translation).
On the other hand, although these films are comedies, they are magnificent outlets of repressed female aggression.
The digital visual quality sometimes had a video look.
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