Book Review: Death by Laughter: Female Hysteria and Early Cinema, by Maggie Hennefeld

If the women laugh… I don’t care what the men do. I go ahead and prepare for a long run… (if) they don’t like the show - turn off the pipe organ, Tessie; there’s nobody behind you but the ushers and they’re all asleep. 

Broadway star Taylor Holmes, Motion Picture Magazine, May 1918

 

This book achieves the rare feat of being both enlightening and thoroughly entertaining; Maggie Hennefeld’ s work here is so rich in content but it is also packed with the light touch of someone truly on top of their subject who is also able to define and then extemporise on the humour under study. Maggie’s historical analysis is compelling and revelatory, with the fluidity of her style making light work of the detail of whilst gleefully leading us on to the most interesting of conclusions.

 

Here is a book that explains the influence of societal changes on cinema, a liberation of feminine laughter that fuelled the popularity and monetization of the new media of the 1900s, as well as the opportunities the industry provided to enable the further acceleration of these changed sensibilities. The studios may have been laughing all the way to the bank but women were laughing all the way to greater liberation, self-expression and representation. None of this happened in isolation – other factors were at play – but The Killing Joke was definitely on the archaic attitudes of the late Nineteenth Century medical-political consensus. In capitalist society, nothing speaks louder than a new market found and served. Trust me, I’m a marketer.

 

I’m also a historian though – I’ve got the paperwork to prove it (just about) - and the first two sections of the book provide a thorough and fascinating feminist, “hysterical-historiographical” description of the view and status of women on the edge of nervous breakdowns as defined by the male mentalities of the Nineteenth Century and beyond. The appeal of silent film is always its view of the culture of the time, it’s a primary source showing not just the evolution of technique but also social mores, Death by Laughter adds so much context and breaks new ground for me and I would expect many others.

 

Léontine s'envole (1911)

“… women’s laughs were ruthlessly suppressed, muffled, corseted, defanged, gaslit and hystericized throughout the nineteenth century.”

 

Part One: Death by Laughter

 

Hennefeld splits the book into three sections, the first looking at the way laughter – something we would now count as a freedom – was once considered not just improper but also dangerous. From 1879 to 1920 hundreds of women supposedly laughed themselves to death, including one Bertha Pruett, killed by a joke in 1893 – allegedly.  It’s easy to laugh now but far more serious to lose control then, especially as a woman, prone as they were to nervous complications brought in by merry excess and wild laughter. Whilst there have been cases of people laughing just too hard, the poor man who couldn’t stop himself watching The Goodies episode about the ancient Yorkshire martial art of Ecky Thump, the dangers were used for marketing purposes very early on in the cinema.

 

Yet there was also deep-rooted disapproval of allowing one’s funny bone the full tickle. According to Charles Baudelaire writing “On the Essence of Laughter” in 1855, all merry laughter was “satanic”, “grotesque” or a symptom of lunacy. As bad as this is, he never used the term hysterical which was a gendered signifier reserved in a non-humorous way for the “weaker” sex for whom excess excitement was considered inappropriate by many. Indeed, as Hennefeld observes, women’s joyful laughter was actively censored and suppressed in the Nineteenth Century, they simply required more control.

 

The evolution of mid-to-late Nineteenth Century perceptions of laughter is analysed through sentimental novels, those reported health impacts and the works of Darwin (evolutionary purpose) and Marx (revolutionary purpose) until we get to 1898 and The New Laugh offered by the New York Herald; a “ripple of merriment” for a generation of girls making far too much noise. Buckle up Herald, the next century’s going to be a bumpy ride, and making more noise shall be the whole of the law.

 

I like the way Hennefeld draws contemporary analogies, especially the reference to the Monty Python sketch about the most dangerous joke in the world; one that is so funny it kills in seconds and which is used to win the Second World War. It’s un-survivable and un-sayable. Even lethal in German.

 

No Monty without Mabel?

Part Two: Female Hysteria

 

“I therefore claim all symptoms of female hysteria as unrealized eruptions of exuberant laughter… I see women’s hysterical symptoms as laughs cut off at the knees…”

 

This long-debunked aspect of early psychological analysis has been the subject of much examination by feminist historians. Hysterical was not a word associated with rollicking laughter until the end of the Nineteenth Century and was a signifier of female strangeness for much of the time before that and even beyond during the work of Sigmund Freud who here stands accused of “gaslighting the libido” of his subject Dora who simply refused to surrender to his interpretation of her symptoms. Dora’s will to resist is surely under-pinned by increasing education and the broader movement towards self-expression among better educated women. In Britain the reforms of Liverpudlian William Gladstone’s Liberal governments would have a long-term impact on the thinking and expression of the middle and even lower classes… soon more and more would want to vote and the disenfranchised were not laughing anymore.

 

Hennefeld shows how the “hysteria chronicles… map onto long-standing debates about the subversive potentials of disruptive feminist comedy” – can women’s laughing defiance tangibly impact the social order or are they just blowing off steam. This debate continues to this day across a whole range of the arts and even sports: how much “protest” does it take and is this also a manifestation of wider processes of change and challenge? She delves into the historiography of hysteria and the views of contemporary feminists balanced against those of the time to provide a whole spectrum of interpretation – from Freud to Foucault, who, whilst he is not gender specific, the facts show that hysterical women incarcerated in asylums were in greater numbers than men with similar conditions.

 

Next it is posited that pathological, noncomedic laughter is “the forgotten symptom” of female hysteria despite its frequent use as a cinematic signifier of unhinged evil/madness – think Bette Davis serving up a rat salad in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962). “As a symptom – unlike hallucinations or somnambulism – laughter was never allowed to speak…” it was an uncoded message of madness, an end in itself in terms of cinematic creativity as well as contemporary psychotherapy.

Ultimately, the greater concern was possibly the transmissibility of hysterical laughter and the potential destabilisation of the social order. Living in the new age of mass hysteria – when the appearance or otherwise of a photoshopped princess can absorb the attention of millions – it is all too easy to relate to these turn of the last century concerns, “… emotional contagion and ideational suggestion are not so easily separatable…” as Hennefeld says.

Chrissy White and Alma Taylor. Dangerous women. 

Part Three: Early Cinema

 

“… female enjoyment was mined as a source of affective capital, conjuring transgressive fun as an exploitable compulsion.”

 

Did early cinema not only legitimise women’s freedom of hysteria but actively encourage it in the making and marketing of film? With the rise of this new media, women were able to become members of a “society of spectators”, participating in “…mass culture and a new urban crowd…” (Vanessa R Schwartz). A new context, new comedy and auditoriums enabling infectious mass merrymaking en masse.

 

Sadly, early cinema is, as Hennefeld says, “…a treasure trove for retroactive hope”; not all the news was good and she quotes Lauren Berlant and Sianne Ngai’s description of a nightmarish “permanent carnival” with its diminishing returns of compulsory enjoyment. This sits alongside Neil Postman’s concepts in Amusing Ourselves to Death, which, incidentally, had my son in ironic stitches as he read it for the first time recently and thought of Donald Trump: 40-year-old book, 80-year-old liar and 130-year-old lost opportunities.

 

Female and laughter from the marginalised was quickly commoditized in every conceivable way with phonographs featuring such as the “Hee-Haw Girl” Ida May Chadwick and “Laughing Girl” Sallie Strembler. Comedy films proliferated such as the 425 ft of laughter contained in Edison’s Sandy McPherson’s Quiet Fishing Trip (1908) and Essanay’s He Who Laughs Last, Laughs Best (1908) containing even more laughs per foot…

Frank Tinney &“Hee-Haw Girl” Ida May Chadwick, Philadelphia Inquirer, November 9, 1919

Hennefeld prefers the period of “early” cinema, from 1896 to 1907 “at which point films became increasingly concerned with storytelling and character development”. This formative decade of white-hot innovation and “…hasty exhilarating temporality- the sheer enthrallment with unforeseen play of wild, shape-shifting figures. This is surely an energy we can all connect with, youthful, risk-averse, putting the show on here and with a pre-jazz ideology that there are no mistakes. It sounds like hysterical unruly production, one with fewer rules and more room for everyone outside of the settled hierarchies of theatre.

 

As the medium developed so too did a “moral panic” about the impact on audiences with films such as The Soul Kiss (1908) advertised as “…free from the slightest trace of suggestiveness… “even as the main make character goes on a kissing spree, something a female protagonist would not be allowed. The worry began that films with “too much meaning” might make their audience anxious, hysterical even – that old hack phrase making a comeback. There were even advisory notices attached to certain films such as Vitograph’s Jerry’s Uncle’s Namesake (1914) which was, “one of those wild comedies that are dangerous for hysterical persons to watch”.                                                                                                                                                                 

By 1915, movies were established (and, no, not because of Griffiths’ lengthy advert for the bed linen industry) as were its clientele with Hennefeld introducing a Madame Medusa as an exemplar of the every-woman crowding most cinemas. She quotes Mauritz Stiller’s The Mannequin (1913) in which Lili Ziedner jumps upon screen to knock out a boxer (Andre Deed) before re-joining the audience in ways that clearly foreshadow Keaton’s Sherlock but also reveal how women wanted more control on and off screen. Dangerous thinking at the time and a challenge to a society in which the needs of the many cannot possibly be met in reality.

 

Cinema was a hysterical medium that “let our minds fall asleep and create with our eyes whatever the soul desires…” (a sadly unknown German writer in 1910) and “hysteria-historiography” means understanding cinema as a somatic language – the body not the mind – and “… proxy reality for a spectator on the cusp of having a powerful voice.” In this case it was to be a reality increasingly controlled by male-dominated studios but they were addicted to their audience; this push and pull continues.

Florence Turner in Daisy Doodad’s Dial (1914)

 

The book also covers neurodivergent spectatorship in asylums as well as the fascination with mental health which led to such gems as Ham in the Nut Factory (1915) which does exactly as the title suggests. Tales that witness madness include of course, The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1920) a depiction of the rise of the tyrannical psychiatrist, the cure being confused with the symptoms in a word of cognitive uncertainty in which films are also projected onto our doubts and fears.

 

Léonce Perret’s The Rocks of Kador (1912) is also quoted as “perhaps the most remarkable example of a meta film…” founded on the curative properties of cinema especially for female hysteria. Here, after having her sanity pushed to the limit by those wishing to make her miss out on her inheritance, a filmed reconstruction of her breakdown brings clarity back to her. Cinematic kill or cure would drive so much content as we were turned it on, tuned in and were turned on in return.

 

In her spectacular final chapter, Maggie brings forth the spirits of Daisy Doodad (Florence Turner) and her amazing Dial along with the legendary Léontine, a so-far un-named actress who produced a string of comedies in the early 1910s, to advance a Theory of The Laughing Head. Contrary to followers of David Wark G, close-ups were not his invention and indeed, human faces were a staple of cinema from the start. Scotsman James Williamson’s The Big Swallow (1901) gets his performer up close and digestible with his cameraman – which I’ve seen on 70mm at the BFI’s IMAX - then there was George Albert Smith’s series on Humorous Facial Expressions including Grandma Threading Her Needle (1901) and many more.

 

Gradually the performers and their parts are absorbed into more complex narrative spaces - the diegesis – although women’s faces remained as a close-up priority in many films, almost detached from body and this space as an object of wonder and desire. This is highlighted by the “low hanging fruit” (this is a playful book!) of When Cherries are Ripe (1907) which involves a woman chased up a cherry tree by a “masher” who evades him and is shown in triumphant close-up eating cherries, the most erotically coded fruit.

 

Marie Dressler throttles Charlie as Mabel watches Tillie's Punctured Romance (1914)

This “emblematic shot” was seen less as faces were used to connect more complex narratives – Mabel Normand’s brilliant look to camera deployed to this affect in Mabel’s Strange Predicament (1914) as she tries to avoid a drunken tramp. The focus remained on the female face though and you only have to think of the stars of the twenties and beyond to recognise this.

  

What Maggie does in 350 pages of disciplined and tightly referenced writing I can’t hope to summarise in full but what I can tell you is to buy what is certainly one of the books of the year in terms of silent film and the society it fascinated, reflected and helped transform. This is surely a rich new area for historical study and, as Maggie and her contemporaries are proving, there are a lot of connections still to be made.  

 

The book is dedicated to Léontine (whoever you are) and whilst the search for this ground-breaking silent comedian continues we can see for ourselves how potent she and other women were on the Kino Lorber’s Cinema’s First Nasty Women four-disc box set which Maggie helped to compile with others from the Women Film Pioneers Project, Eye Filmmuseum, FIC-Silente, Le Giornate del Cinema Muto, and Carleton University. Read the book then watch/rewatch these films; the past is being brought back to life in front of our very eyes and it means more.

 

Author note: Maggie Hennefeld is associate professor of cultural studies and comparative literature at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. She is also the author of Specters of Slapstick and Silent Film Comediennes (Columbia, 2018) and co-editor of Unwatchable (2019) and Abjection Incorporated: Mediating the Politics of Pleasure and Violence (2020).

 

You can order Death by Laughter from all reputable booksellers and direct from the publisher Columbia University Press.

  

Léontine's box of bellowing balloons begin to blow up the patriarchy!

Gently down the live stream… 12 from 21, Silent Film in the Modern Age

So, here it is... and what another resilient year it’s been for cinema. I saw a lot more films in theatres this year and stand in admiration all those involved in making this possible, so thank you for the projecting, programming, popcorn and perseverance. Thank you for showing me to my seat, introducing and politely requesting that we all wear masks… every little really does help. But this year’s list is dominated once again by digitally streamed films albeit from live events with Bonn, Bologna, Pordenone and others re-emerging and offering the choice to be there in person or the opportunity to watch from home. the way forward as many are still vulnerable whilst the pandemic lasts whilst those who could attend did so with appetite renewed.

So without further ado and in no particular order here's twelve highlights from the year behind us.

 

When Igor met Mary

1. A Kiss from Mary Pickford (1927), with John Sweeney, 10th Hippodrome Silent Film Festival

I’m hoping that 2022 allows me to attend Scotland’s premier silent film festival… OK, one of Europe’s premier festivals! This delicious soviet comedy typifies the focus on programming a mix of well-know and more obscure but historically significant films and is a film I’ve wanted to see for some time.

In 1926 Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks came to Moscow as part of a grand European tour and seeing how rapturously they were greeted, how fetishized they were as something beyond ordinary humanity, Sergei Komarov devised a means of using this to both shine a comic light on the nature of this ultra-fame. He had no special access to the stars, just a collection of newsreels and one crucial sequence in which Mary agreed to perform a short skit with Igor Ilyinsky at the end of which she kisses him on the cheek; the moment which makes this film transcend its sources, from meta to better.

John Sweeney provided accompaniment and delighted in every comedic twist and turn in this joyful film that is as much a celebration of the Muscovite sense of humour as its cinema. As John said in his introduction, this is exactly the kind of film you fall for… one that is largely unseen but one that is further evidence of the strength of Russian comedy and cinematic ideas during the Twenties.

 

2. Siren of the Tropics (1927), Günter A. Buchwald and Frank Bockius, Slapstick Festival 2021

My first missed Slapstick Festival for a few years but the programme was as strong as you’d expect especially this opportunity to see the great Josephine Baker in her first feature. At the time, Hollywood was certainly not ready to go as far as French directors Mario Nalpas and Henri Étiévant do by placing Baker as the main focus in La sirène des tropiques and by giving her a story largely free of the cliqued tramlines of other multi-ethnic stories. Baker is perhaps treated as more overtly sexual than most white actors at this time – she’s topless twice -  is portrayed as both innocent and with a childlike wildness; she attracts (white) male lust as well as love and protectiveness, revels in powerfully expressive jazz dancing – seriously, that core and the way she co-ordinates massive extensions without any apparent strain -  and yet her character remains in awe of western spirituality. So many questions… but it’s still a shock to see someone as naturalistic as her placed, largely, at the centre of a story from this period and one in which race is not really mentioned.

Live musical accompaniment was provided by Guenter A. Buchwald on piano and Frank Bockius on percussion, who, in addition to deploying an almost telepathic musical synchronicity, smartly avoided the cliches of cultural referencing. This being one of the great jazz babies, they gave us a rip-roaring, hi-tempo jazzed score that not only kept pace but lifted the film to the vibrational level of its all-powered star. When Baker eventually struts her considerable stuff towards the end of the film you felt that this is the moment the players had been pacing themselves for.

 

Marthe Fabris... L’Arlésienne

3. L’Arlésienne (1922), Il Cinema Ritrovato, Günter Buchwald and L’Octuor de France

 

A film with a fantastic sense of place, shot on location in the gorgeous city of Arles and the surrounding countryside of the Camargue, it’s almost entirely shot outdoors, featuring the images of locale and rural practice you’d expect from André Antoine, the director of L'hirondelle et la mésange (1920) and La Terre (1921).

 

This 4k restoration is a thing of beauty completed in 2020 by Fondation Jérôme Seydoux-Pathé and La Cinémathèque française from two unique diacetate prints preserved at the latter and it benefited mightily from musical accompaniment based on orchestral arrangements by Gabriel Diot from the score edited by Pathé in 1922. Günter Buchwald rearranged the score, which features compositions from Bizet (who incidentally wrote an opera based on this story), Gillet, Rachmaninov and others. He also added his own Impressions d’ Arles and conducted L’Octuor de France to create a perfectly synchronised emotional narrative that not only pull at present day heartstrings but also recreates the sound of the contemporary silent experience.

 

Lyda Borelli 

4. Fior di male (1915), Bonn Silent Film Festival with Cellophon

 

I’m not having a best of list without a new-to-me classic Diva film and here was a prime cut of imperial Borelli in all her operatic pomp and with a collection of magisterial emotional displays only matched by her gorgeous and frequently changing wardrobe. Only in Italy miei amici and it took a German film festival to highlight that point.

Accompanying were the Cellophon duo, aka Paul Rittel and Tobias Stutz who both play cello in ways that are emotionally resonant and respectful of the source visuals. They used admirable flavour and restraint with both recognising the need to underplay when confronted by the operatic fireworks on screen using this most mournfully flexible of instruments in musical tribute to perhaps the greatest Italian silent film diva…

Another excellent presentation from this year’s Bonn festival and I have completely run out of reasons not to go there in 2022.

 

Magda Holm

5. The Girl in Tails (1926), Stephen Horne and Elizabeth Jane-Baldry, Bonn Silent Film Festival

I’m to be disgraced simply because I’m a girl. A meek and mild, simple and unassuming girl…

Karin Swanström’s uplifting film, a delicate mixture of comedy and drama that fully lives up to its promise as A Light Summer Film Story especially with truly delicious accompaniment from Horne and Baldry, without whom no remote access Bonn would be complete. It is notable for addressing so many issues that might be considered more modern concerns and it tackles proto feminism in ways which are never black and white, flowing naturally with the story. It’s sophisticated about its subject and uses cross-dressing as a means of creating conflict as well as comedy and makes points about fairness that doesn’t bang the drum so much as rolls it around the ballroom between social conservatism and the heroine’s “fight against injustice”.

Stephen’s multi-instrumentation and Elizabeth-Jane’s harp work so well together as they leave each other so much space and support, sharing the leading lines with the harp being used as percussion and bass as well as the heavenly flourishes you’d expect. There were some exceptionally lovely themes and the improvised was hard to separate from the pre-arranged which says it all. The ideal accompaniment for this delightful film!

 

Leslie Howard and some of my old neighbours

6. Breaking the silence… The Wit and Wisdom of A.A. Milne, BFI, with Bryony Dixon and Neil Brand

This was not my first cinema of the pandemic but it was the first silent screening with live accompaniment since March 2020… and, what a way to break the silence with BFI Curator Bryony Dixon providing expert introduction and Neil Brand accompanying with all the contextual flourish and narrative instinct you would expect.

There were two films written by Alan Alexander Milne for Minerva Films, founded in 1920 by the actor Leslie Howard with his friend and story editor Adrian Brunel. The company’s board of directors included C. Aubrey Smith, Nigel Playfair and A. A. Milne. First up was The Bump (1920) featuring Smith as the famous explorer with a “bump” that enables him to find even the darkest parts of Africa but in London he gets hopelessly lost. Smith was 57 and the film makes great play of his cragginess with a sequence notating the origins of the scars on his face, a shark bite here and a lions’ claw there; he’s explored the world and has the autographs left by every predator he’s met.

The second film featured Leslie Howard in Bookworms (1920) another witty tale of love and adventure this time transporting a knight and fair maiden to Edwardian semi-detached suburbs in what is now West Wimbledon. Turns out the location was just around the corner from where I used to live too.

 

Henry Edwards

7. The parade returns… The Joker (1928), with Stephen Horne, Le Giornate 40th Edition Streaming, Day One

The 40th Edition of Le Giornate del Cinema Muto mixed physical media and digital content with the cinemuto-philes returning to Pordenone for the full programme including live screenings, accompaniment and lashings of Aperol Spritz late into the night… and a lighter schedule available online and worldwide. It was the best of both worlds and the best we can hope for as the cautious C-19 recovery continues.

 

The streaming got off to a rip-roaring start with a big party in Nice, featuring the annual carnival, covered extensively, including one or two hangovers and a reunion of Mander and Horne; not a long-lost music hall pairing but the star of The First Born, accompanied once again by the man who produced one of the most memorable scores for modern restorations at the London Film Festival in 2011. Directed by Danish Georg Jacoby this “Euro pudding” had a charming cast to match its location and story of playboy jewel thievery with The Joker played by the British actor and director, Henry Edwards, in prototypical Bond fashion admittedly more Niven than Craig.

 

Ellen Richter

8. Moral (1928), with Donald Sosin, Le Giornate 40th Edition Streaming, Day Seven

 

The rediscovery of Ellen Richter was one of the big themes of this year’s Giornate live in Pordenone and she did not disappoint digitally either. She’s one of those performers who naturally draws the eye and apart from having charisma to burn she has a richly centred persona with a smile that radiates glee as powerfully as sardonic rage. You don’t mess with Ellen but, if you do, she’ll have you back and relish a cool revenge that aims not to destroy but to educate; it’s not just piano she teaches, it’s self-respect.

Here she plays stage performer Ninon d’Hauteville who causes a stir when her troop come to play in the provincial town of Emilsburg and whilst battling the self-appointed Moral Society, gets the chance to teach the Prince Emile XXVII’s “milksop” of a son piano and much more besides. There’s much comedy and cabaret and the fashions are spectacular but so is Ellen and knowing that enables even the truly improbable garb to hang naturally and unselfconsciously. Donal Sosin accompanied with the appropriate sense of occasion and humour.

 

9. Maciste All’ Inferno (1926), with Teho Teardo and Zerorchestra, Le Giornate 40th Edition Streaming Day Eight

This was Bartolomeo Pagano’s 26th performance as the likeable lunk who combines power and morality as the Italian superuomo first introduced in Cabiria (1913). It was something like a cross-over event in the Dante Extended Universe, a follow-up to L’Inferno (1911) with a soul-devouring Lucifer drawn directly from Bertolini, Padovan and De Liguoro’s masterpiece, a feature film diligently drawn from Dante Alighieri’s The Divine Comedy.

 

It’s a wild ride with amazing special effects from the legendary Segundo de Chomón along with direction to die for – literally – from Guido Brignone, along with set and costume direction from Giulio Lombardozzi. Maciste must fight in Hell and it’s ugly, fierce and outrageously sexy. Hellzappopin’ alright and wonder it left such an impression on Federico Fellini who remembered it as the first film he ever saw – aged five or six? – even down to the details the capture of Maciste by Proserpina (Elena Sangro).

Spirited accompaniment was provided by Pordenone-born composer Teho Teardo who’s electronica was accompanied by local favourites the Zerorchestra along with Accademia Musicale Naonis and cellist Riccardo Pes. For this tale of many contexts, the cello represented Dante’s “voice” whilst the booming brass of the Accademia Naonis was that of Maciste. This was the performance that kicked off the pre-Festival event in Teatro Zancanaro, Sacile and I’d have loved to have been there in person to see it. Next year… next year.

 

Franciszka Themerson

10. Europa (1931/2). BFI London Film Festival 2021, Opening Night

Well, I made it to one festival at least… this was the first night of the BFI London Film Festival and the screening of a film not seen since 1933; a World Premier of its restored version no less, followed by a second screening. Europa was the first film made by Stefan and Franciszka Themerson, two radical minded Polish artists who believed in the political importance of art at a time of confusion.

This was an extraordinary session, not just in terms of the content but also the context given by William Fowler, BFI National Archive Curator, along with renowned Polish film historian and programmer, Jasia Reichardt who first met the Themersons as a child. Europa was based on a poem from Anatol Stern publishing in Reflektor magazine in 1925, attacking the relentless violence of propaganda designed to undermine critical thinking and fuel populist sympathy. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? An important film and one believed destroyed by the Nazis, Europa has outlasted them and stands as a message to us all.

 

Their house

11. Back home… The House on Trubnaya (1928), with Cyrus Gabrysch, Kennington Bioscope 

This was my first visit to the Cinema Museum since March 2020 and it was a delight to see the Kennington Bioscope back up and running. The KB carried on through the pandemic with KBTV on YouTube and whilst the path to the old place is all still familiar, what a time we’ve had. The old team was back together in the flesh and as star of stage and small screen, KBTV’s MC Michelle Facey introduced and John Sweeney warmed up for the first films… we partied like it was 2019.

Boris Barnet’s The House on Trubnaya is very clever slapstick mixed with social observation and the required political messaging: if all bosses are as venal and self-serving as in the film – even over a decade on from the Revolution – then workers need to join unions to support themselves and others, not to mention their ducks… It never lectures just wends its peculiar way scoring laughs over political points and that’s exactly why it remains so watchable.

Cyrus Gabrysch accompanied in style and relished this return to the silent film “club” he helped found. This was a fitting welcome home to him and everyone else involved in this wonderful collective.

 

Léontine takes flight

12. Anarchy in the UK… Nasty Women: A Comic Tribute, BFI with Meg Morley 

There was a guy, I’m not sure if you remember him, who once referred to his presidential rival as a “nasty woman” long ago in The Time Before. In response film historians Maggie Hennefeld and Laura Horak ran a programme of comedy shorts at the 2017 Le Giornate del Cinema Muto featuring women behaving nastily for comic effect. As there is plenty more where that came from the BFI decided on a re-run with a new-old favourites thrown in.

Thus, we had Florence Turner’s incredibly flexible fizzog in Daisy Doodad’s Dial (1914), Alma Taylor and Chrissie White giving plenty of cheek in Tilly’s Party (1912) and Texas Guinan our riding and out gunning the men in The Night Rider (1920). There was also the enigmatic gallic anarchy of the legendary Léontine, also known as “Titine” in France and Betty” in the United States, about whom almost nothing is known. Three films Léontine s’envole (1911), Léontine enfant terrible (1911) and Léontine garde la maison (1912) showed her daredevil comic flair and it is to be hoped that her story emerges in more detail. What a talent she was.

Meg Morley accompanied with thematic variety and satisfying melodic invention. No two scores were the same and she kept pace with the on-screen anarchy with the acuity of a seasoned jazz player, one used to working as part of an improvisational team, this time with her bandmates on screen.

A splendid afternoon on the Southbank and we drank a toast to the nasty but nice trailblazers who are being remembered anew.

 

So much more to discover in 2022… I hope to see you all then!

 

Anarchy in the UK… Nasty Women: A Comic Tribute, BFI with Meg Morley

There was a guy, I’m not sure if you remember him, who once referred to his presidential rival as a “nasty woman” long ago in The Time Before. In response film historians Maggie Hennefeld and Laura Horak ran a programme of comedy shorts at the 2017 Le Giornate del Cinema Muto in Pordenone featuring women behaving nastily for comic effect. As that festival is about to run live for the first time on two years and because female silent comedy is as funny as it is often unrecognised, the BFI decided on a re-run with a few old favourites thrown in.

In the ten years or so I’ve been stricken with this silent film bug, there has been much restoration and re-evaluation of women’s role in early film direction with Alice Guy-Blaché, Lois Webber, Nell Shipman, Germaine Dulac, Dorothy Davenport Reid and, of course, Mabel Normand amongst those now getting their due. But many of the key players in global comedy still require elevation in modern discourse, these women having faced the double bind of having to battle for recognition at the time and then being overwritten by a history that has favoured the men… we know their names and yet perhaps the greatest of all was directed in his first film by Mabel.

Today we gathered just to watch women being funny in the manner they were appreciated at the time: gender-neutral daftness all perfectly illuminated by Meg Morley’s improvisational excellence and introduced by long-time champion of the comically under-rated nasty women, Bryony Dixon.

The first two films got us warmed up…

The Finish of Bridget McKeen (1901) USA

Here Lies the Remains of Bridget McKeen Who Started a Fire with Kerosine

 

This brief comedy outlined the perils of using inflammatory material to start a fire with the titular hero meeting her end after causing an explosion.

 

Mary Jane’s Mishap; Or Don’t Fool with the Paraffin (1903) UK

A couple of years later and this rather more sophisticated British effort told the same tale. Directed by George Albert Smith this film has Bridget/Mary Jane played by his wife Laura Bayley, a former variety performer, who hams it up splendidly with many pleading looks right to camera, busting the fourth wall and still connecting with the disruptive soul onlooking natives.

She rests in pieces...

Léontine s’envole (1911) France

Our lessons in fire safety completed it was off to France for the enigmatic gallic anarchy of the legendary Léontine, also known as “Titine” in France and Betty” in the United States, about whom almost nothing is known. Maggie Hennefeld’s essay on the LA Review of Books¹, shows what is known about this energetic screen presence but all this is entirely based on her surviving celluloid with her life off screen a closed book. She made some 22 episodes of her comic film series for Pathé-Frères from 1910 to 1912 after which she disappears apart from being spotted as an extra in a 1916 comedy.

Here she burns bright as a brat who keeps on begging her parents for one more balloon until, inevitably, she takes off and is carried across the sandy streets of what looks like the south of France pursued by all and sundry attempting to pull her to earth. This includes three acrobats who stand on each other’s shoulders to try and catch her. Everyone falls down and the camerawork is startling, following our brave star as she gamely hangs from balloons dangling from a crane metres above the ground.

Léontine after the balloons go up

Léontine enfant terrible (1911)

I’m not surprised Léontine is so awful in this film as her parents look like creatures from a gothic fairy tale, mother complete with prosthetic nose. Their daughter strikes back and smashes all of their plates and most of the house before spreading her destruction to the outside world. She ties two workmen together so they drop their boxes, sets fireworks off and smashes a man’s head into a pumpkin. There may be a deeper meaning to all this but surely there’s nothing more purely amusing than watching someone break completely with social convention and just let rip. A fanfare for the common woman.

Léontine garde la maison (1912)

Now, there’s one thing you really don’t want to do and that’s leave this woman in charge of the house and the baby… and the dog. Léontine feels put upon and responds in the only way she can, dishes are washed and smashed, kitchens are set alight and bathrooms flooded, then she goes to play with her pal and the dog and child disappear. Advertising for her lost items she gets dozens of children and dogs in return before being told off by mother. At the end she cries only until she’s left alone to fight again.

What is she rebelling against? What have you got?

Butter wouldn't melt: Chrissie White and Alma Taylor

 

Tilly’s Party (1912)

In the Tilly series, Alma Taylor and Chrissie White play merry havoc with social norms by cheeking their way through anarchic adventures which must have made the women in the audience feel just that bit more amused than the men. Here the girls disrupt a gathering at their parent’s house, lead the angry guests on a merry chase sat on the handlebars as their boyfriends cycle away. They manage to get to their “music lesson” just in time to get away with it all.

At the height of the suffrage debate, the women’s movement was so ingrained in society and so many women went to the pictures… perhaps cinema was more subtly supportive than the government may have thought?

Daisy Doodad’s Dial (1914)

Not only does American actress Florence Turner prove that if the face fits anything is possible, she also demonstrates the comedic special relationship between her home country and the old country. DDD concerns the efforts of Ms Turner and her hubby to win a face-pulling competition. They’re both very adept but Florence's facial flights of fancy end up getting her arrested before she finally wins out with her extraordinarily flexible fizzog².

Flo’, this is great content for Tic-toc, bring back pro-face-pulling, there’s gold in gurning!

The Night Rider (1920) Texas Guinan

Not for nothing was Texas Guinan described as “the female William S Hart” who, as the Kennington Bioscope’s Michelle Facey ³   has said, was very much the real thing, a ranch gal from Waco, who could ride and shoot as good as any man on her father’s farm. Guinan toured as an itinerant rodeo performer before the stage (not the Deadwood one…) called. She featured in vaudeville were her pep and knack for self-promotion stood her in good stead: she once claimed to have accidentally shot herself in the side, but the show still went on, it being just a flesh wound an’ all. She was still a chorus girl in 1917 and as she rode a horse down the runway in the theatre, she was talent spotted by a movie man… probably.

Texas is as charming as she is tough and here she has to choose between two men, one of whom may be rustlin’ her cattle… as is usual, she doesn’t stand on politeness and if any man has wronged her… there ain’t no mercy! Not nasty, just assertive!

Meg Morley accompanied with thematic variety and satisfying melodic invention. No two “scores” were the same and she kept pace with the on-screen anarchy with the acuity of a seasoned jazz player, one used to working as part of an improvisational team.

A splendid afternoon on the Southbank and we drank a toast to the nasty but nice trailblazers who are being remembered anew.

 

Texas

1. Looking for Léontine: My Obsession with a Forgotten Screen Queen, Maggie Hennefeld, Los Angeles Review of Books September 24, 2019

2. Early 19th century: abbreviation of physiognomy.

3. In her introduction for the Kennington Bioscope’s screening of The Girl of the Rancho (1919), Wednesday 2^nd May 2018!

Brooksie lands... Now We're in the Air (1927) Pordenone parte terza

If the segment of Now We're in the Air didn't exist we'd still fantasise about the rediscovery of a beautiful moment of Louise Brooks that was lost. Now it's found we have just over twenty minutes - less than most rest breaks at Le Giornate del Cinema Muto - to make sense of what look very much like a so-so movie. And yet... restored Brooks shines brightly out in those glimpses we have, a twenty-one-year-old neophyte committing to another part of her build to stardom. Now We're in the Air was never going to be great film but the fate of its star makes it very special indeed.

Which is why I have no hesitation in picking it as my highlight of the day especially as the programmers had inserted the high-class clunker that is The Reckless Age (1924). This is not a good film; the premise is wafer thin and utterly risible... a young woman is willing to, of her own free will, marry a London Lord she has never met who has insured himself against the marriage actually happening... I really can't go on, especially as she meets the man we know will be her eventual partner in the first reel. But, there is method here: The Reckless Age shows what can happen to attractive young female stars in Hollywood, in this case Ruth Dwyer, who was presented with a stepping stone that just wasn't very good.

Just you wait, two more years of this and I'm burning bridges!

I find it hard to believe that ...in the Air could be as bad but it doesn't look promising. Still, it exists, it's history and it has the supernatural presence of the biggest comeback kid in movie history, not in terms of success but in her enduring influence and actual star power. Louise Brooks is the cover star of the festival and all for just this twenty three minutes.

John Sweeney accompanied by royal command and even made Wallace Beery look funny!

History isn't about quality and Now We're in the Air proves that all too well. We are grateful for this sunshine glimpse of Brooks' extraordinary presence and yes, that probably is "code" but, you know what I and Henri Langlois mean...

Now, if you're here for quality then, probably Warning Shadows (Schatten - Eine nächtliche Halluzination) (1923) might be your thing especially with Daan van den Hurk and Frank Bockius accompanying - I saw this at the BFI with John Sweeney and did enjoy it perhaps not the best expressionist film, but fun.

La diva di commedia!

If it's laughter you're after then you can't look beyond Trappola (1922) a bonkers tale of an orphan who makes it as a movie star featuring the cheeky girl stylings of one Leda Gys. The cutting is mad-fast - this is Eisenstein on opiates although some segments are clearly missing but it does reflect the quicksilver charms of diva di commedia Miss Gys. The story makes far more sense than the Reckless Age and the film compensates with committed performances within the framework of its own illogic.

All this said, there's not much Leda Gys does in an hour that Léontine, known in the U.S. as Betty, doesn't manage in minutes. She's ferociously funny and there's literally a gag every other beat as mayhem is created in the shorts Betty Tries to Learn a Business (1910) and Betty Is Still at Her Old Tricks (1910). These were screened as part of the Nasty Women strand but really, she's Naughty more than anything else. the actress is still unknown and deserves to be "found".

We also watched: Italian drama Fiore Selvaggio (1921) directed by Gustavo Serena and featuring the lesser-known diva Anna Fougez in a series of stunning outfits. Costumery far outweighs screenwriting in this plodder about a muse who throws herself away on a promise only to regret all in the lingering denouement.

The other Aasta Nielsen (Swedish, extra "a")

Far better was the Swedish rustic drama Fante-Anne which featured stunning backdrops of valley and field much in the way of yesterday's A Norway Lass (1919). The stars lack the charisma of that film but it's a compelling story well performed especially by Aasta Nielsen (no, not that one).  The payoff was an end title when our heroes head off to America where "a man can be himself and not subject to prejudice..." how times have changed USA?

Günter A. Buchwald and Frank Bockius provided expert accompaniment and were also excellent on the mesmerising Maasai in Maasai Men and Women (1920?) a tribe who seemingly invented the Pogo dance.

Most affecting of all though was a strand of films showing the effects of the Great War. This was moving and quite distressing the decades melting away as you witness the human cost of war, especially children suffering in the thousands. Stephen Horne accompanied with skilled respect.

And that was my Monday. Tomorrow is apparently Tuesday and I'm calling it Jenny Hasselqvist Day! Vem Domer? (1922)... our judgement awaits!

No, it's not.