Cinema’s First Nasty Women: Interview with curators Maggie Hennefeld, Laura Horak and Elif Rongen-Kaynakçi
“Women aren’t funny”, some people declare. And again and again those people are proven wrong by numerous examples from today and also from the past. Film history is full of funny women, some forgotten and some very famous. The forgotten ones are now getting a place in the spotlight thanks to people like Steve Massa, who wrote the comprehensive book “Slapstick Divas”. In an interview, we asked Steve to name the “big four slapstick divas” and he came up with the names of Mabel Normand, Gale Henry, Louise Fazenda and Alice Howell. During these divas’ heyday, and even before, there were other great comediennes working. They are now presented in the DVD / Blu-Ray collection “Cinema’s First Nasty Women”.
“Cinema’s First Nasty Women” is about subversive comedy. Sure, there are gag-driven movies — like “Laughing Gas” (1907), in which an African-American comedienne proves that laughing is contagious — but there are also movies that subvert logics — like “The Red Girl and the Child” (1910), in which a Native American saves a baby from evil white men. There is also cross-dressing — A LOT of cross-dressing. This makes sense: being a visual media, early cinema relied on what we see to make sense. Seeing people with clothes that were worn by the opposite sex creates instant laughter without the need of words. There are also the real rebels, who do as they please and wreck havoc wherever they go. Among those we have the characters Lea, played by Italian actress Lea Giunchi, and Léontine, played by an actress whose identity remains unknown.
The four-disc DVD / Blu-Ray has 99 titles ranging from 1898 to 1926 sourced from 13 international film archives and libraries, all with new film scores. The films are about feminist protest and gender-bending slapstick, among others. These two converge, for instance, in “The Nursemaids’ Strike” (1907), in which an ever-growing group of nursemaids go on strike and the kids they used to take care of become, although briefly, the responsibility of male police officers.
“Nasty Woman”, as you may know, was how then presidential candidate Donald Trump referred to the other candidate, Hillary Clinton, during the 2016 campaign. Immediately the term was reclaimed and given a new meaning by feminists. In the debut of the “nasty women” series at the 2017 Giornate del Cinema Muto — Pordenone Silent Film Festival, curators Laura Horak, Maggie Hennefeld and Elif Rongen-Kaynakçi explained why this term applies to women of the silent screen as well, empowering them: “To be a “Nasty Woman” means refusing to be silenced, while embracing the messiness and excess inherent in gender and sexual difference, and engaging as an energetic participant in a new feminist political movement.” Yes, we are nasty women. And the silent comediennes were nasty women as well because they “spoke truth to patriarchal power with their gleefully reckless and wholesale destructive disregard for gendered social norms and feminine corporeal decorum.”, as it was explained in the Giornate catalogue.
Proudly embracing the term themselves, Maggie, Laura and Elif accepted our invitation and answered a few questions about the silent nasty women and the box set that came out on August 30th, 2022:
There is a lot of diversity on screen in the chosen films for the box set. How is the diversity behind the screen in this project, more specifically in the choosing of musicians to create the soundtracks?
Maggie Hennefeld: If by “behind the screen,” you mean among the project collaborators, then that is absolutely true! Of course, we spotlight a diverse range of “nasty women” in the 99 films themselves–from the anonymous French miscreant Léontine to the African-American comedian Bertha Regustus to Indigenous performers such as Minnie Devereaux (Cheyenne/Arapaho) and Lillian St. Cyr (Ho-Chunk).
It was important to us to be radically inclusive in our project’s labor collective (you can see our full Project Credits on our website.) We emphasized the soundtrack because women and people of color are massively underrepresented in the world of silent film accompaniment. Of the 45+ composers who created music for this project, 88% identified themselves as women or nonbinary and 20% as BIPOC (as per those who responded to our internal survey). The range of sounds and acoustic themes reflects that diversity, from the haunting jazz score of Terri Lyne Carrington and Edmar Colón for Laughing Gas (1907) to Don Ross’ sonic mischief in his compositions for The Death Mask (1914) and The Red Girl and the Child (1910). We’ve also worked with FIC-Silente, an inspiring Mexican silent film collective that organizes an annual festival in Puebla. They’ve recorded Spanish-language audio commentary for a number of films, and are helping us exhibit these feminist archives across Latin America.
Not only young funny girls are showcased, but also older women, like Minnie Deveraux from “Fatty and Minnie He-Haw” (1914), in which a Native American woman romances a younger white men, played by the popular actor Roscoe ‘Fatty’ Arbuckle. How was ageism felt in the silent movie era?
Elif Rongen-Kaynakçi: I think ageism had not yet settled in during the first decades of cinema. It was fairly common to have well established stage actresses like Sarah Bernhardt or Alla Nazimova appearing on screen, taking on roles much younger than themselves. I should also say that in a lot of cases we are unable to tell the real age of the actresses, simply because we don’t know them, or we don’t know their date of birth. But for example Sarah Duhamel, born in 1873, is already 40 years old at the height of her comedy career at Pathe Nizza around 1913, while doing some crazy stunts.
Laura Horak: One amazing example is the 1912 Vitagraph adaptation Shakespeare’s As You Like It. 61-year-old stage actress Rose Coghlan plays the cross-dressing Rosalind and her love interest, Orlando, is played by 35-year-old actor Maurice Costello. You don’t see that kind of thing anymore!
MH: It’s a sexist cliché that women in comedy had to be either pretty OR funny, but god forbid if they try to be both at once! In that way, it is a bit transgressive to see younger comedians like Léontine, Lea Giunchi, and Alma Taylor partake in rough-and-tumble slapstick. But there are plenty of older QUEENS of destruction on display here, like Sarah Duhamel, Little Chrysia, Ellen Lowe, and, as you say Minnie Devereaux. In the gender-bending films, you can see so many different forms of romantic attraction–involving age, gender, race, sexuality, and power–that would be straightjacketed by the film industry in the talkie era.
The limits between functions — acting, writing, directing — were blurred in the early silent era. Did these women, besides starring in the movies, shape the story of the films or even direct the scenes? Could you give some examples present in the box set?
MH: There is so much uncredited creative labor behind the production of these 99 silent films. Performers would often contribute to writing and directing the film–devising the gags, setting up and destroying the set, and concocting the basic scenario. Was Léontine a filmmaker? Probably. We don’t have the hard evidence to credit her as such. But there was a spirit of creative fluidity between different roles on the film set, and everyone pitched in. We know Florence Turner produced, co-directed, wrote, and starred in Daisy Doodad’s Dial (1914) and Lillian St. Cyr probably had a hand in The Red Girl and the Child, which is credited to her husband James Young Deer. There are fewer female authorial credits in this collection because Shelley Stamp already covered so much ground in her essential, 6-disc DVD/Blu-ray set, “Pioneers: First Women Filmmakers,” which includes films by Alice Guy-Blaché, Mabel Normand, Lois Weber, Zora Neale Hurston, Alla Nazimova, and so many others!
LH: Gene Gauntier is another great example of someone who wrote, produced, and starred in films ostensibly directed by her husband–while she wasn’t credited as director at the time, she certainly had a lot of creative control over the productions. We’re excited to release three of her popular “girl spy” films for the first time since the 1910s!
ERK: I am sure that this was the case, but it is a point very hard to prove. I am convinced that the cinema before the WWI was a collective effort, particularly the short films that were churned out by the production companies were very similar to each other. I think there were lots of copycats. If we speculate about these performers’ mindset; they were coming from vaudeville or the circus, where they would sometimes be doing very similar acts, and repeating and improving them day by day. Let’s not forget that Chaplin started like this at Karno, where he was impersonating existing types like the drunk, and he was certainly not the only one. I think this also applies to the women. They all play the clumsy kitchen maid, or a jealous wife or a nosy matron, but they each add something of their own to the role. And I’m sure they also improvise on the set and maybe add something that is particular to the scenery (like using the cranes at the Nice sea port). I think the story is not written down; they all work on a loose premise, and then someone suggests to shoot a scene differently and they probably try that out. If it doesn’t work well, in the next film they do it differently, but if it does work well it might become one of the signature gags.
Do you believe the Hays Code ended or at least discouraged the use of cross-dressing as a comic device or was it the arrival of sound that demanded more elaborated gags?
MH: This is really Laura’s field of expertise. The Pre-Code era is fascinating and often highlights gender masquerade and cross-dressing as specific acts of transgression in violation of the Code.
LH: In my book, Girls Will Be Boys: Cross-Dressed Women, Lesbians, and American Cinema, I argue that in the 1900s and 1910s, American censors actually celebrated cross-dressing women on screen as part of the wholesome uplift of American cinema because they drew on established theatrical, literary, and other entertainment traditions. Only in the late 1920s and early 1930s did American filmmakers purposefully associate cross-dressing with lesbianism to capitalize on a vogue for European and urban cosmopolitanism. Only then did censors begin to object to cross-dressed women. Cross-dressing and effeminate men, on the other hand, were long associated with sexual deviance–they were very popular in film comedies, but censors tried to minimize or cut their screen time. Even though the Hays code prohibited “any inference of sex perversion,” cross-dressing men and women continued to be popular on-screen, but it was largely confined to strict musical comedy genre conventions wherein the films always ended with the reinstatement of gender norms and a heterosexual marriage–unlike in the silent period!
I’d like to highlight what was my favorite discovery of “Cinema’s First Nasty Women”: Ora Carew, a girl, playing a boy who disguises as a girl in the Keystone short “Dollars and Sense” (1916). I had never heard of her and she is very funny in this particular movie. Could you highlight another performer or performers who were “discovered” by you while curating the box set?
LH: I’m glad you love Ora Carew–I was really struck with her layered performance in that film and I’m so glad we can share it with the world! I’ve loved Edna “Billy” Foster since I was first introduced to them by Russell Merrit in my first year of graduate school. Imagine, a performer assigned female who played almost exclusively boy roles to critical acclaim–we don’t think these things happened 100 years ago but they did! I am also in love with Minnie Devereaux, whom you mentioned. I had seen her great performance opposite Mabel Normand in Mickey (1918), but didn’t realize that she actually stars in her own film until we started researching this set. I would love to find more films where she plays a major role.
ERK: I am thinking of a few women I had not really paid attention to before working on this set: one of them is the protagonist of Madame fait du sport. Actually others before us, like the late Roland-François Lack had already done some research on her and argued the possibility that she might be Lucien Nonguet’s wife. I would also love to know who is playing Madame Plumette in La fureur de Mme Plumette and if there are other films starring her. Similarly the woman playing Mrs Dranem in Le Menage Dranem is still unknown, but she is great! While working on these films I also started recognizing Ellen Lowe in side-roles and would love to learn more about her. We could go on like this, and I think there are a number of other actresses on this set waiting to be discovered by larger audiences, such as the Italian comedienne Lea Giunchi.
MH: I was already well aware of my favorite performer Léontine when we embarked on this project. (You can enjoy a couple of her films in Mariann Lewinsky’s wonderful cento anni fa DVD set, “Comic Actresses and Suffragettes: 1910–1914.”) I think the biggest revelation for me was Evelyn Greeley, who plays a cross-dressing, Sapphic-dancing Greek professor who has a feature-length flirtation with a woman-hating, male Greek professor in Phil for Short (1919), which we screened at the Giornate del Cinema Muto in Pordenone last fall.
Who would you call “the nastiest woman” in the DVD pack and what can we learn from her?
ERK: I guess given my obsession with Little Chrysia, I should respond to this by mentioning her. And indeed one of my favorite films is Cunégonde femme crampon, which we translated as Cunégonde, the Nasty Woman! On the other hand, I also think that Mme Plumette might be one of the nastiest women; since she is the only one who acts out her premenstrual syndrome on literally everything and everyone appearing on the screen!
LH: She’s only in one film in the set, Mannekängen (1913)–and sadly only fragments survive! — but I have to say Swedish actress Lili Zeidner. In these fragments, she not only wreaks havoc on a tram, but climbs over a bunch of spectators at a movie and jumps into the screen, where she punches out the film’s main character! And this is in 1913, eleven years before Buster Keaton famously jumps into the screen in Sherlock Jr. (1924). It’s just delightful. In some sense, a woman jumping onto the screen and spectacularly taking up space is exactly what this whole set is about!
MH: And no one embodies that destructive spirit better than Léontine!! She is an anarchic force of nature who always goes after what she desires. Even if it’s as ordinary as sailing a toy boat in her house or flying away with all the helium balloons in the park. Her films celebrate that utopian impulse of violent comedy to demolish the old world that no longer offers us a satisfying place (not that it ever did!) to try to make way for something less oppressive and more hopeful.
You can order your copy of the “Cinema’s First Nasty Women” on the Kino Lorber website.
