Cinema's First Nasty Women | Maggie Hennefeld, Laura Horak

thank you again for joining us and thank you for putting together such a fantastic project for us to share with our audiences i want to set the stage just by asking you both as scholars and researchers what is it that you find most compelling or interesting about working in the silent film era is there a particular thing that drew you to this area of research i can start if you want um thanks everyone for coming and for staying for this conversation the thing i find so exciting with the silent era is that you know films had just been invented so it was not clear yet what the rules were going to be and every five years they kind of try something else different and they try something else and so each time they make a film they're like oh what if what if films could be like this or what if they could be like that or what if we tried adding this thing and so it was also a time of great political gender social sexual change so everything about how the world would organize seemed kind of up in the air and film as this you know new exciting medium that a lot of people could get into that didn't have a lot of hierarchies already set up um it participated in all of those kind of conversations and contestations and arguments about you know how should the world change just at the same time as how should the medium change yeah and just to build off of that and you know that's i i feel exactly the same way i mean in the industry before it was formed before it was big business it was so open to women so women participated extensively as filmmakers producers you know faye tincher had her own production company um shortly before rowdy ann was made and then the early you know the very early years i mean obviously i'm obsessed with leontyne and rough and tumble slapstick comediennes but um the industry was just so open to women um who had power and creative agency um over their own performance oftentimes there was a great sense of fluidity between the director the gag writer and the performer so i think um it's the films themselves i think the um the the bodily language the um exhibitionism the like constant zening zany gags they're irresistible but also i think it's been the silent era has been really inspiring for feminist historians because women um helped build the medium and innovate how it would be used and then were just written out of the history of cinema so i i think this this kind of feminist culture and drive to recuperate that um forgotten labor and influence has been really exciting for us as film historians and scholars and i'll add one more thing that i thought of as meghan was answering the thing i also like about the silent period is both those feelings sometimes when you're like wow that seems to resonate directly with me like this was a hundred 120 years ago and i feel that but at the same time you say oh but here this feels very different this is like different you know a different country almost it seems like a different land where you know things have changed so much between then and now and so it kind of oscillates between both of those feelings that it i think it gets at something about what you know the change is possible but also that there's these connections we have with the past that we are not always aware of so i love that aspect of of watching and studying silent film i mean just speaking about the forum in the silent film forum one of the things that came out to me seeing the whole program again tonight was i think one of the standard or not standard one of the features of the silent era as you were saying like the rules were still coming together classical form hadn't sort of taken over one of the hallmarks of that was direct address and these kind of extra narrative shots like at the end of the great train robbery where the bank robber shoots at directly at the camera up until this program i would think if you ask me like for examples of that every example i would think would be men it's remarkable how often women get the they get the direct address they regret they're given or they claim this extra narrative moment and it's something i mean there's always something subversive about breaking down that fourth wall but it seems particularly subversive when we see these performers do it are there any other tropes that from that era that you can see like being have a different inflection when you see these performers and these women you know taking them on well i'll just say quickly about those direct address close-ups at the beginning and the end of the film the film historian neil burch refers to them as the emblematic shot that's sort of separate from the narrative world of the film or the diogenesis but also in a sense summarizes it or or you know sets up our expectations as viewers and yet in the earl so the emblematic shot is sort of spawned from a very early incredibly popular genre known as the facial and if you think of one of the earliest films um from 1894 which is simply called the sneeze starring fred ott it's about 10 seconds long and a man just sneezes into into the camera and that's the film but you know he makes kind of a funny face while he's sneezing and those were really popular and then they kind of fell off the map in the late 1890s early 1900s but we see the facial or the funny face making film kind of return at the beginning and end of the sort of like quasi narrative split reel or short film like with birth or augustus right she has a toothache at the beginning and then she's laughing hysterically contagiously at the end so by 1906 the emblematic shots were dominated by women and some film historians have associated that with like fetishism you know just sort of like objectifying women as a spectacle separate from the narrative but it's obviously much more subversive right they're really like they get the last laugh in all of these films anyway i'll add also one of my favorite um emblematic shots is in a film we're not showing called the boy detective from 1908 and in this film there's an unknown we don't know her name female performer who plays a male role so she's cast as a boy who's a kind of amateur detective in the film the boy has to disguise himself as a woman in order to catch these thieves and uses um something that looks like a gun it's actually a lighter so it's like a toy and then in the final scene you see this boy detective who looks to our eyes like a butch lesbian basically um sort of pretend to shoot at the camera and then open it up oh no it's not lighter it has a cigarette it's a cigarette case and then show that like this is actually a cigarette case and then like laugh and then also smoke a cigarette and so it's just like full of these kind of winks and in jokes and gags and like levels of like can you see this like what can you what are you seeing here um so it's just another example of how these shots can be so rich another example of um film form kind of meaning something different in these films is uh you can see examples of this in rowdy anne and in my research i was thinking you know what makes some of these films um and i i work on cross-dressing films and lesbian and queer representation maggie works more on um the comediennes and all kinds of comedy um but what makes some of these cross-dressing films so um exciting and popular with audiences who could you know have a wide range of entertainments that they could partake in and this combination of the american landscape of this classic kind of western landscape with you know horses and these long shots of mountains and goalies with these athletic female performers who are doing these stunts themselves you know riding horses um doing all and there's lots of other films including with um some indigenous women performers who do all kinds of stunts but like the combination on stage or in a um you can see stunts and at a wild west show you can see sun speed don't get the landscape you know and you can see landscape and photography but you can't see the action fill of stunts so like these kinds of performances bring all those things that film can give you that no other medium can give you and i think that really contributed to this wild popularity of cross-dressed women including in a lot of uh western films so um i mean at the beginning of the introduction we mentioned you know chaplin keaton and harold lloyd with this we can also talk about edna perviance or you know mabel normand or marie dressler big stars at the time but one of the things that's so fantastic and amazing about this project is you really went deep to find like the the you know you know all of these amazing performers that we've never heard of before have or haven't been highlighted in this way before what is the if you could talk each about like what is the process or what's you know what is the work or the labor that goes into finding it and covering these films and then and you know bringing them to light so um laura if you could start talking about how how you approach their research and then we'll go to maggie so although we started working on this dvd set in 2016 the actual research of these films goes back years so um i first found out about the incredible abundance and richness of cross-dressing women in early american cinema when i was an undergrad at yale in one of that 2002 i was working on an undergraduate paper thesis um and first off i found this amazing amateur website by a trans woman film fan about cross-dressing in film through the ages and i there were hundreds of films before the 1950s and going all the way back to the beginning of cinema this blew my mind as you know a 19 year old like how could history have these things i had no idea about and um and my advisor was charlie messer a big um film historian and he's like why don't you spend your um spring break at the library of congress and watch some of these films and so i did being a super film nerd already and it blew my mind there there was so queer there was so much same sex kissing so much androgyny so you know things that i didn't think existed were certainly not in my american film history classes or textbooks you know so um i realized that that this period had so much to offer that no one seemed to know or the people who knew didn't seem to care so um so i started back then and then like how to find more films was i went through um film reviews at that time they hadn't digitized anything there was no ocr of texts but they had made indexes of film reviews in the new york times and variety so i would just these big books i would just read all the film reviews and look for examples of cross-dressing and plots and then i would look them up in this database it was on a cd-rom and then contact archives like oh it says you have this film or you have these films and then by start there was lots of films that were not in the database either so once i knew about a couple films then i'd talk to archivists and then they would be like oh have you seen this have you seen that or you should talk to so and so and even um i met some collectors who would show me stuff in their collection so you know the base was going through the reviews and of course once things were digitized i did a lot of searching but um but a lot of it was just archivists sharing their incredible knowledge with me and um and and helping me see stuff and also even though i work on american films the films were not just in the united states but american films were of course distributed all over the world so a lot of times the only films that still exist were in archives in europe and all over the place i mean we we went to the ends of the earth to find some of these films and there are a lot of nasty women who would seem to be obvious candidates for this collection like you mentioned mabel normand and marie dressler who he didn't include because there are they've already been released in other dvd sets people already know about them or people who are familiar to a certain extent with silent film history know about like josephine baker is another example could totally be in cinema's first nasty women but we really wanted to spotlight uh rare films that were hard to access and amazing performers who'd no one had ever heard of so like um you know laura's contributions to this the project mine spawned from my dissertation which turned into a first book on slapstick comediennes and silent cinema and i remember i think i first saw mary jane's mishap the one that we enjoyed where the maid can bust through the chimney i saw it on youtube and i don't even remember how i was in grad school and the algorithm fed it to me now you you know the algorithm turns you into a white supremacist but somehow it gave me a house made exploding out of the chimney so that was a revelation because i was in grad school and i had no idea what i wanted to work on but i love comedy you know i grew up watching saturday night live and um you know dabbled in comedic performance myself but that didn't work out for one reason or another so i i feel like all of the like little fragments of my interest all the pieces of the universe aligned when i stumbled upon this archive and i did a lot of um i mean over 80 percent of silent films are potentially lost so i remember just reading through trade journals and film production catalogs and reading about lost films um this one film called the kitchen maids dream that's still lost if there's one lost film that i would like to resuscitate from the archive it would be this one where a kitchen maid who's overworked alienated exhausted dreams that she can dismember her hands to do her housework for her well the rest of her i don't know like limbless torso reclines on the sofas but and and i found paper print fragments that were registered with the library of congress in their uh paper print collection that was you know transferred to um 16 millimeter celluloid and watched them in grad school at the library of congress and i think i recorded the fragments on my iphone but things like that and like laura was saying you know getting a hot tip from an archivist who knows you as that like forlorn grad student who's just like marathoning all the vitagraph films from 1909 or something like that and going to archival film festivals in bologna and portenone um we definitely had some moments of like some cinephilic miracles were happening in this kind of very niche um uh archive world but it should be it should be popular because look at that and i'll also just mention there's 99 films on the dvd set that we're releasing but if we had all the time and money in the world there would be many hundreds more so this is even those 99 films is the tip of the iceberg there is many many more with crossdressing hilarious comedy so um yeah tell your anonymous donor uh i have a couple more questions and we'll turn it over the audience so if you want to think of your questions um we'll have microphones come down to you when we're ready to ask so how did um uh you two and then e-lift come together as a group to put this project together how did it all come together oh my god can i tell the story yeah sure i um so there's this amazing conference called women in the silent screen right which is exactly what you would think from hearing the title about the contributions of women to the silent film industry at every level of production performance writing directing cutting um and it was in bologna where this major archival film festival that paul and i just came from earlier in the summer was taking place and i was a grad student so i had this insane flight itinerary where i was gonna fly to london via reykjavik and then take an hour bus to switch airports and go to bologna but while i was flying from new york one of the engines on my plane blew and we had to make an emergency landing in boston where i had a 24-hour layover at a marriott in worcester massachusetts so anyway i finally got to the conference but i had messed up my hotel reservation and laura's roommate was sick and stuck in berlin and someone like matched us up at the conference so that's how i met laura this is how film history is often made sure maggie was also like so i think i want to do something about film history can you tell me about that i was like yes of course yeah like let me tell you everything yeah exactly so that's how we first met and um so while we were doing our dissertations we were in lots of contact um and i guess it was a few years ago then that we started um both of us trying to program films that we had found in our research for public audiences and we got together to program something that we coined at the time nasty women for the puerto none silent film festival and then that was so fun and great and the reaction was so great that we were like oh we got to do a dvd set and we were really inspired by the the first women filmmakers and the african-american film pioneers sets that kino did previously and we were like we want to do something like that so um we talked to shelley stamp who had curated the first women and she connected us to uh brettwood at keno lorber and so we got on a zoom with no it was before zoom a skype with uh with brett and we were like we have this amazing project you know and he's like wow that sounds great but like that's gonna cost a lot of money and and we were like what it's like maybe one desk maybe half a disk yeah we were like we need like at least six to eight discs and he's like yeah no um but um i don't know how much of the story of the david when does elif come into the picture how did you yes oh yes well we both knew her for i mean she was incredibly generous when we were grad students i mean we met her at portnoy i think and she's the head silent film archivist at the ifill museum in amsterdam where we got over 40 of the films from the collection and she had been really generous just digitizing films and so i'm like typing in the dutch translations to because all of the i films have dutch enter titles and i don't speak dutch so anyway um so we we knew her because she helped us a lot with our research and then once the project was already underway we invited her to be a third curator and that was the best decision we've ever made yeah and so she had you know helped us find films suggested films for our own dissertations books um but then she also had independently been researching kunagand one of the performers you saw um for years and also tracking down who was she and how many films did she make and you know and so we thought that was a great fit and um and she was really great like both suggesting films and also connecting us to different arc archives and archivists who she'd worked with over the years so many of these films including rowdy ann i'm not sure we could have included without a leaf kind of making those connections for us i mean i think you both made very strong and i think eloquent cases for why these films and these performers can be so inspiring now today put a little more anarchy in the activism you know to make change what do we know about how these films were received or some of these performers were received at the time by critics and audiences a lot of them were really popular but leontyne was censored in the u.s she was known as betty in the u.s and uk and all of the 24 films in her series um were distributed in britain and there you know rave review or a lot of the industry is always tooting its own horn this is the best funniest film you've ever seen the audience exploded with laughter um but in the us that there was this pate did this whole publicity campaign betty is coming who is betty is she a pug is she someone's mother-in-law like there was all this mystery and fanfare surrounding the arrival of betty and then um you know there's a lot of excitement and i think her films were really popular but then as the industry is trying to establish itself as a you know respectable middle class pastime um um betty was was pretty much panned and only the first 10 of her films had distribution in the us so unfortunately american audiences never saw uh leontyne keeps house the last film that was the last film in the series so the cross-dressing films were by and large really popular and popular with all different kinds of people different audiences and one thing that was so interesting that i really spent a lot of my dissertation book trying to figure out is why were there censors were very worried about the movies generally they were very worried about teaching people criminality um illicit sexuality you know affairs adultery all of that stuff there was lots of concern um by like middle class club women and police and um and different kinds of local censorship boards um but there was no concern at all about these cross-dressing films even ones you know that ends with these like women getting into a pillow fight and rejecting marriage like that was great they were seen as wholesome bring the family bring your kids you know and i was like what is how could that be how could that be and so what i found was that um later on in the late 20s when they're bringing over a lot of european stars like garbo and dietrich and european writers and and directors they started trying to kind of sell european sophistication and with that lesbianism to the public as one of the kind of cool exotic things you could see at the movies um and and then sensors did get concerned and there were lots of regulations put in place but before that there was all of these um traditions of cross-dressed women women disguising themselves as men to fight as soldiers to work to travel um all kinds of all kinds of androgynous and cross-dressing performances that were just part of the tradition even little lord font leroy would you know and peter pan they'd be played by women on stage so there was all of these other ways to read these like wide variety of female masculinities that didn't involve kind of immorality and sexuality and so they were actually seen as great alternatives to the slapstick that was also very much a concern so it's just an example of how different things can be and how differently things can be read and of course different people in the audiences may have been reading very different things into these films but as far as the mainstream kind of middle class censorship apparatus there was no concern at all and they were seen as you know family-friendly popular films and a lot of the cross-dressing titles that are in this program the gender adventures program that we're doing next week and i think so that's right come back keep coming back there's lots of stuff to discover so let's turn it over to the audience you have any questions okay we'll bring a mic to you right there just wait for the mic to come to you i wanted to say thank you so much for the this program i mean i was yeah this is fascinating i could see like carol lombard or jean arthur you know that uh i know that you that you mentioned that you you didn't include mabel normand and uh uh marie dressler because they were better known but i was wondering does the series or include people like gail henry or luis fazenda or or minta durfy for that matter because i know that gail henry particularly had a career as a very manish kind of woman and a lot of her her films were and she also owned her own production company so does the series include any any of their films or at all or like uh no no i mean this was why it was we needed like eight this at least now we didn't include most of the american um women comedians um because you know they had gotten a little bit more recognition not you know widespread popular recognition there's a gail henry dvd okay oh there is yeah oh there it is yeah great um so yeah so some of their films are available um but and we we also started out on our list with some maple norman some glorious swanson's cross-dressing films you know um but by the end we kind of kept shaving it down to be only the most um the most inaccessible ninja durfee has a cameo in fatty and mini which is already right but it's not that interesting of a role yeah yeah yeah thank you what can we make of the this phenomenon that the nasty women is international there's like just i mean is there a particular country where there seems to be more nasty with others or but i i was really struck by the international you know nature of the whole program and how sort of amazingly crazy like all of these various different you know national cinemas were back then i mean i mean and silent film especially early film was such an international medium so just because it was made in one country doesn't mean that's the only place in which it would be seen or enjoyed i think the french films are the nastiest i mean the slapstick is the most violent um and women's comedy in particular yeah but it's yeah i'll say in the whole set we also have films from sweden denmark italy um is that it and then lots of french and american yeah a lot of german and russian films we would have liked to include i mean we were already working with 13 archives and and that was logistically and especially there's a lot of two realer comedies you know that are 15 or 20 minutes and we really had to limit those so that we could include everything we wanted so there's a lot i remember a lot of two wheeler german films that we would have liked to include yeah it's about the wanda trimens yeah a question over here oh we're gonna bring up we're gonna bring the mic down to you hang on one second hi thanks this has been wonderful i'm just curious if it's great that it's on a tangible disc but would it be more budget friendly could you release more if it was streaming i don't know i don't know how that works it will also be streaming on kino now's platform possibly canopy and we're looking into other streaming options but once it's you know if it goes to netflix who knows how long it will be up before they inexplicably take it down so um that yeah there are so many other components than just you know producing it as a dvd or blu-ray versus streaming online the kind of working with the archives digitizing scanning films commissioning original musical scores so i don't know how much i mean i'll say all 99 films are on the disc they're all licensed for that but a handful of um archives weren't willing to give streaming rights so the number of films will be screening is a little bit smaller and also about half of the archives would only give us 10-year licenses so um that would be the maximum amount of time they could stream but you know the disc will last a long time if you keep it in good condition um but yeah we are definitely interested in all the streaming we can get though i mean that's part of our strategy okay awesome thank you keep your blu-rays under archival conditions we can rent you some vaults right yeah ask ucla to keep hold of them well that's an interesting question um what was it like donning producers hats to put this whole thing together i'm curious if you what you might have learned about the nature of film history by putting together a package like so many contracts oh my god we had no idea what we were getting into we never would have done this yeah no uh i think we had no idea of the details of all the legal agreements then and the you know the multiple pages i mean luckily brett wood aquino has a tremendous amount of experience at carleton university we worked with asla iran who's the contracts officer although the university is not used to making lots of contracts for arts types things they're used to like engineering inventions so they're like what is this you know we so there's a lot of learning um so and i and lots of spreadsheets too many many laura is the best organized person i've ever met like we have an excel spreadsheet for everything i am terrible at excel they're all google sheets actually they're not even excel but um i mean one thing we did learn is there's a there's lots of reasons why you don't have a lot of archival uh films on dvds or streaming today because it is very expensive and time-consuming um and a lot of people fund it through kickstarter campaigns we had a two hundred thousand dollar grant from the canadian federal government to fund this project if laura didn't work in canada i don't know what we would have done because that money just doesn't exist in the u.s yeah yeah from the neh exactly so funding for this kind of thing um is so hard to come by so that's why i mean all the work that you know archivists are doing to keep these things even under often very difficult financial conditions is really important and also we're especially grateful to archives like the i museum and library of congress who are very generous with their films and it's interesting because i think laura you were saying one of the first films in your early research you hope you at moma and you were looking at films that nobody had seen since the 70s and so but archives have to save everything for that that that scholar that comes in and pulls it out so that's sort of the the burden of responsibility i think of the archives do you have any other questions from the audience right here bring your oh i'm sorry if we go over on this side then we'll come back uh we got a mic over on the side i i just wanted to say that in addition to the pleasure of of watching the films uh the the the music went so well with all of them and i congratulate you on finding these composers um meg morally in particular i thought i think is a virtuosic job on on the films that she scored how did you go about finding your composers we had a music supervisor named dana reason who coordinated relayed our feedback and she's in the music world and she knew of a lot of these performers because not all of the musicians and the composers who contributed to the set um have experience playing for silent cinema some do but a lot had never really composed music for silent film before and it's a really specific skill set knowing how that music really guides the viewers gauge gaze and engages them in the film so we couldn't have done it without dana reason and she who it was brett who put us in touch with her because brett wood had worked with her on other projects at keno larbour yeah and i'll just say maggie did mention this in the intro but the field of silent film composing like the field of film composing more generally is by and large dominated by white men and so we really wanted to do it differently and to have women non-binary people of color black indigenous composers and so um so we too and the leaf and brett and dana really kind of reached out to our networks to find composers both who could do it and also could do it on our you know pretty limited time scale and somewhat limited budget especially compared to like a contemporary feature film we had a lot less money to offer composers and so we were really a lot i would say basically everyone who composed for this did it because they were so excited about the project because it was really meaningful to them and so i think you can see that in the scores and we were also interested in having a wide range of styles from you know piano scores that were maybe more closer to what people from the teens and early 1900s would have listened to to all kinds of contemporary musical styles to you know jazz electronic um all kinds of things and so um i think one of the most exciting things about the project for us was working with all this like wide range of diverse composers and seeing what you know collaboratively they could come up with a number of the films have multiple uh musical tracks we commissioned two scores one in a more traditional vein and the other more avant-garde experimental it really makes a huge difference to how you receive the film what the sound is doing we have time for one more question if we want to come back over here bring the mic down thanks hi my name is john i'm a ragtime pianist and composer so i'm very interested in like the african-american diaspora of the edwardian period the world scott joplin lived in you know so what really brought me here tonight is my friend priy here sent me the website and i saw uh laughing gas the still and i was like oh my god i've never seen this film because you know i kind of dig up a lot of films from the era with black uh actors in it you know like the one with bert williams and stuff like that so when i saw that i was like oh i got to come see that but my question is on the dvd were you able to uncover more of black acting from the era uh yeah that's a question yeah so in the dvd set um i i mean the actress who plays mandy brown in laughing gas is named bertha augustus and we know that she's in two other films that survive one called what happened in the tunnel which is widely accessible you can watch it on youtube another is called the servant girl problem and charlene register the black film historian who wrote a book called the struggle for visibility in the edited booklet the 116 page booklet which will be included in the set but it will also be open source online uh charlene register has written an amazing essay on black women in silent film comedy and she's written extensively about the performer madame saltuan whose films we weren't able to include in the set the ones that survived didn't really make sense um for the um you know the the themes of the project but definitely check that out and laughing gas has a video introduction by um the the black feminist historian kilo wasana tompkins um but yeah other films i don't know why that there are only a few films that really central that really center black um actresses and they're just so poorly preserved um and other films that might have been thematically appropriate i think we were just too uncomfortable with we couldn't make the justification for including them even with a content warning so that's yeah and a lot of the the films that um charlene register writes about will have like a black woman performer just in a bit role you know in a 90-minute film so i mean definitely worth watching but like more of a slog to kind of get to those performances one thing i do want to mention really quickly there's one film in the set called mixed babies it's written by dw griffith i mean it is like a very racially problematic comedy about like babies getting mixed up and you can kind of imagine where it goes um a black female mother in the film is played by a white actress in blackface and then in the emblematic shot at the end right the medium close-up it's about 20 seconds long all of a sudden the black mother is played by an actual black woman and we have no idea why she is who she was but why you know how strange and i don't think that was particularly common to have a black actress who's excluded from the film only appear in the close-up at the end which was often used for promotional purposes so that kind of thing's really interesting yeah and you probably already know but for other folks in the audience jackie stewart has written real a really great book about um black both black performers and black audiences during this period and i think i mean what the project shows there is more to find you know i think we could only find so much and we can only fit so much but i think there is more research to be done so it's exciting to hear about the research you're already doing another i'll just say very quickly there's jackie was co-curator of a previous kino set um pioneers african-american filmmakers so there are some things that were already included in that set that we might have been interested in for nasty women but we didn't want to reduplicate a recent keno project well i want to thank everybody for coming laura and maggie want to thank you for an amazing programmer for coming out tonight so thank you so much [Applause]