Cargando…
Specters of slapstick & silent film comediennes /
Women explode out of chimneys and melt when sprayed with soda water. Feminist activists play practical jokes to lobby for voting rights, while overworked kitchen maids dismember their limbs to finish their chores on time. In early slapstick films with titles such as Saucy Sue, Mary Jane's Misha...
| Clasificación: | Libro Electrónico |
|---|---|
| Autor principal: | |
| Formato: | Electrónico eBook |
| Idioma: | Inglés |
| Publicado: |
New York :
Columbia University Press,
[2018]
|
| Colección: | Film and culture.
|
| Temas: | |
| Acceso en línea: | Texto completo |
| Sumario: | Women explode out of chimneys and melt when sprayed with soda water. Feminist activists play practical jokes to lobby for voting rights, while overworked kitchen maids dismember their limbs to finish their chores on time. In early slapstick films with titles such as Saucy Sue, Mary Jane's Mishap, Jane on Strike, and The Consequences of Feminism, comediennes exhibit the tensions between joyful laughter and gendered violence. Slapstick comedy often celebrates the exaggeration of make-believe injury. Unlike male clowns, however, these comic actresses use slapstick antics as forms of feminist protest. They spontaneously combust while doing housework, disappear and reappear when sexually assaulted, or transform into men by eating magic seeds--and their absurd metamorphoses evoke the real-life predicaments of female identity in a changing modern world. Specters of Slapstick and Silent Film Comediennes reveals the gender politics of comedy and the comedic potentials of feminism through close consideration of hundreds of silent films. As Maggie Hennefeld argues, comedienne catastrophes provide disturbing but suggestive images for comprehending gendered social upheavals in the early twentieth century. At the same time, slapstick comediennes were crucial to the emergence of film language. Women's flexible physicality offered filmmakers blank slates for experimenting with the visual and social potentials of cinema. Specters of Slapstick and Silent Film Comediennes poses major challenges to the foundations of our ideas about slapstick comedy and film history, showing how this combustible genre blows open age-old debates about laughter, society, and gender politics. "In Specters of Slapstick, Hennefeld focuses on silent film comediennes and the function of the female body in early slapstick. Laughter is a kind of grating against the absurdity of society, argues Hennefeld. But while male bodies in slapstick tried to violently fight or "escape" their surroundings--slipping on a banana peel and falling, for example--female bodies exhibited a fluidity that reflected an attempt to morph into their changing surroundings. In one slapstick film, a maid humorously cuts off her limbs in order to finish all her household chores in time. In others, women transform into fairies or spiders; all underscore an attempt to assimilate their bodies to the demands of changing environments. This eradicates the traditional opposition between performer and audience, making the "laughing spectator" a more active part of the film experience. As Hennefeld analyzes early slapstick film historiography in light of this theory, she examines larger themes like the evolution of gender, the body, and their place in cinematic comedy"-- |
|---|---|
| Descripción Física: | 1 online resource (xvii, 358 pages) : illustrations |
| Bibliografía: | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
| ISBN: | 9780231547062 0231547064 |