In the days of silent film – the period from the late 1890s until the late twenties – women had prominent and important creative roles. Not just as actors, but as directors, writers, and producers. Many of the films that these pioneering film makers created explored provocative feminist themes that might seem surprising today. Peter Solomon speaks with Maggie Hennefeld, Professor of Cultural Studies and Comparitive Literature at the University of Minnesota. Hennefeld curated a 4-DVD collection of female film pioneers called “Cinema’s First Nasty Women.” Hennefeld also curated the program “Accordo with Silent Film: Women in Early Cinema” that is taking place at the Ordway on Tuesday, May 13th. That event will feature original scores by six different composers.
TRANSCRIPT:
PETER SOLOMON: Next Tuesday at the Ordway, there’s a show called “Women in Early Cinema,” a program of century-old silent film with live music by Accordo. Accordo is an ensemble of principal players from the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra and the Minnesota Orchestra. They’ll be playing brand new scores for the occasion. The films feature women in roles that might seem surprising given the period when they were created, 1899 – 1926. All of them were written, directed or star women actors and the content can seem almost subversive. You’ll see what I mean in a few minutes. To learn more, I visited with the curator of the show, Maggie Hennefeld.
MAGGIE HENNEFELD: I am a professor of cultural studies and comparative literature at the University of Minnesota, and I’m a silent film programmer, so I curate a lot of silent film screenings around the Twin Cities, and Steve Prutsman, who directs the Accordo program that happens every spring at Ordway, actually reached out to me because he’d seen this DVD/Blu Ray set. I co-curated. (It’s) a feminist collection called Cinema’s First Nasty Women. So, the program coming up in May features six of the films from our set, and he invited me to collaborate and pick, you know, some of my favorite films from the DVD set, along with a couple of others that Steve selected. So that’s how I got involved. The set actually has 99 feminist silent films made between 1898 and 1926, so I had to limit myself to only six of the 99 but there are plenty more, if audiences are interested.
SOLOMON: Okay, before I get into the program, I am really curious to know how you ended up with an interest in silent film. And then you know, in the particular way that you study it, like as it corresponds to feminism and studies of women’s history.
HENNEFELD: So, I’ve been a lifelong comedy fan and basically also a lifelong cinephile. I grew up watching Saturday Night Live and renting Marx Brothers movies with my dad from the local video store. I actually grew up in Brooklyn, New York, and I think it wasn’t until later, maybe college or grad school, when I started to become aware of silent cinema as something we might want to talk about. Obviously, the Ordway program is themed on women in early silent cinema, right? Women participated so much more extensively in the behind the scenes of film production, really, even than they do now by comparison, like women worked as directors, producers, screenwriters, editors and so on and so forth. But they were also comedy stars, and I feel like they were written out of the early screen history of slapstick comedy.
When you think of silent slapstick comedy. Who comes to mind?
SOLOMON: Buster Keaton. Fatty Arbuckle…
HENNEFELD: Charlie Chaplin, maybe. Harold Lloyd, but women were among the most popular performers, not just in comedy like romantic comedy, but in really rough and tumble, almost surreal, slapstick, knockabout cinema. And I just felt like women, the way they carried their bodies, the way they performed comedically. In the early years, they were so free and just kind of Unchained, you know, they would dominate public space. And you really see a lot of those feminist themes in some of the films I’ve selected for the Ordway program, like women take over men’s roles and, you know, organize political protests and make their husbands nurse their infants and do all the housework and that kind of thing. So actually, I think women comedians were more free and wild and raucous in the early 20th century than they are today, maybe, where women participate a lot in standup comedy and variety shows sketch comedy, but less in the really kind of rough and tumble slapstick knock about and that’s my favorite genre of comedy. So, it was almost a no-brainer to go back to the early silent era.
SOLOMON: Since you’ve talked a little bit about comedy, I’m going to ask you first about Florence Turner, because one of the films is called Daisy -. Is it “Daisy Doodad’s Dial? Can you tell me a little bit about the film and a little bit more broadly about who she was in her career?
HENNEFELD: Yeah, great question. So, this is one of my favorite films, not just in the program, but really in the history of cinema. So, Florence Turner was an American actress and filmmaker. She was one of the first movie stars in the history of cinema. Like, movie stars weren’t or film performers weren’t credited for, like, the first decade of cinema, so she worked for a film company based in Brooklyn, New York, called Vitagraph, and she was just known as the Vitagraph girl, but she and some of her creative collaborators relocated to the UK in the 1910s where she started her own film company, Florence Turner Productions, which produced “Daisy Doodad’s Dial,” right? And she co-wrote it, co-directed it, costarred in it. It’s such a remarkable film. I mean, just the premise alone, she plays a bored housewife who trains day and night to compete in an amateur face making competition. And she was also a stage performer who was widely beloved for her impersonations and facial caricatures. So, she’s doing something called gurning, which means, like, face making. Basically, there’s still annual competitions in gurning in the UK, to this day. People try to make grotesque, funny faces, and she’s actually arrested for public indecency, for disturbing the peace. She’s hauled away by the police, and at the end of the film, she’s locked up in her room like a hysterical woman, sort of confined to the rest cure. She misses the competition she’s been training for, and she has these surreal nightmares where disembodied visions of her head float over her body consecutively, making these like horrific, comical, grotesque, funny faces. And then the last shot of the film is a close-up of Florence Turner continuing to gurn and mug at the spectator. But the reason it’s called “Daisy Doodad’s Dial”. Well, first she plays a character named Daisy Doodad. That’s her name, but dial was actually a British slang term for face, right? Like kind of mug. So, it’s her name Daisy Doodad, and the film is about her dial.
SOLOMON: The first film that’s listed in the program is called “Suspense,” and I just looked at the Wikipedia entry for Lois Weber. I mean, first of all, the film is striking technically, because there’s some interesting effects. There’s like a Triple Split Screen. There’s a remarkable chase scene and I was reading that Lois Weber not only acted and directed in this film, but that she was compared to D.W. Griffith as the first American auteur. So, I mean, can you talk about her importance in cinema as it might compare to D.W. Griffith? And I know a lot of people might know “Birth of a Nation” and not realize that he invented the modern language of cinema.
HENNEFELD: I’m kind of hesitant to like credit D.W. Griffith with innovating a lot of techniques that had kind of been around for a long time that other filmmakers were experimenting with. But Lois Weber was a tour de force. She was an actress, a director, and a producer. She started her own film company after working for years for Universal Pictures, and she was basically the most important director in early Hollywood in the 19 teens and 1920s until women were sort of pushed out of the industry, especially with the rise of the talkie, there were very, very few women directors working in Hollywood after the transition to sound. But Lois Weber made feminist films about really controversial political issues. So, she made a film about abortion, called, “Where Are My Children?” She made films about birth control, contraceptives, sex work, capital punishment, poverty. Her films are extremely interesting, of course, to feminist scholars, but just anyone who is interested in the history of filmmaking, and they’re really compelling. And she worked mostly in drama. So, I actually didn’t pick this one, though, suspense is a film that I teach and that I love, and I’ve watched many times. So, it was made in 1913 sort of the, I’d say, earlier phase of Weber’s career, before she started her own company. And it is a variation on a theme, the sort of home invasion race to the rescue melodrama. So, part of the reason this film in particular is compared to D.W. Griffith’s work is that he made a film with a very similar premise called “The Lonely Villa” in 1909, so this one comes a few years later. But as you sort of mentioned, she really just goes to town. In terms of the visual effects, we have the triptych triangular split screen showing three different spaces at once, right? Because this woman, she and her child, are alone at their house in the countryside, and a tramp sort of wanders in and threatens them, and she calls her husband for help, and then the you know, tramp cuts the telephone cord, and we sort of follow the progress of his race to the rescue. But he steals a car, and then the police are chasing after the husband who’s chasing, you know, who’s rushing to get to the house in time to save his wife? But just there are keyhole shots characters walk into their own close ups. There’s a really interesting kind of sense of experimentation with different kinds of visual angles and camera placements. So I think just visually, even though she was retelling a story that had been depicted on film maybe dozens of times by 1913 it’s an incredibly innovative film, and I think audiences will find it to be a wild ride, and that will sort of set the tone for the program. That’s the only kind of melodrama, and the rest is slapstick comedy.
SOLOMON: One of the really interesting pieces for me was “Laughing Gas.” Can you talk a little bit about that film, and how the protagonist is presented? Because it, it didn’t fit with my conception of how a black performer would have been depicted in cinema in that day.
HENNEFELD: Yeah, I do think it is a really unusual film. So often during the silent era, like in D.W. Griffith films, for examples, black characters were played by white actors in blackface. Or even, when black performers would, you know, play African American roles, their depiction was often sort of filtered through these like really racist stereotypes and caricatures. And I don’t really think that’s the case in “Laughing Gas.” It’s a joyful comedy. The main character, Mandy Brown, is played by a comedian, stage performer named Bertha Regustus, about whom we know very little. We know she appeared in at least three silent film comedies, “What Happened in The Tunnel” and “The Servant Girl Problem,” and we know she was a stage actress in black vaudeville. Other than that, like there’s no kind of surviving documentation about her life and career, which is really a tragedy. But in this film, I mean, it’s sort of one simple gag that’s repeated in various ways. She goes to the dentist to have a tooth pulled, and her white dentist gives her nitrous oxide, also known as laughing gas, which kind of sends her into contagious hysterics, and then she spreads her laughter irresistibly to everyone around her, which allows her to traverse all of these sort of white public spaces and effectively to desegregate the white public sphere, so she goes on a street car. She ends up getting arrested, but you know, her laughter is sort of her “Get Out of Jail Free” card. She works as a housemaid and ends up dumping a bowl of hot soup over the head of her employer, but he starts laughing too. So, it doesn’t matter. She doesn’t lose her job, and then the film kind of closes in a Gospel Church service. But she’s like, you feel her physical power, and you see it. Watching the film like, you can tell she was really a comedic presence. And I want to know so much more about other films she made that were probably lost and you know, Screen actors weren’t credited in 1907, so I go through the trade press, right? There are all of these early film reviews that are digitized, and you can now read online. And I speculate, “Hmm, this sort of racial dental comedy did that also star Bertha Regustus?” You know, I wonder, but I have no way of proving it. But I do think laugh there are other films like “Laughing Gas” that star, you know, early comedies made by white filmmakers that star black performers in ways that are, I don’t know, almost utopian to our gaze today. They totally kind of contradict our perception or assumptions about racial representation in silent films made at the time. There are other films like this, but I do think this one is also really special and unique.
SOLOMON: So, one of the premises for the program, as I understand it, is the treatment of gender roles, and that’s illustrated in a really interesting way, according to the write-up of “Mr. Dranem’s Housework.” Can you talk about this film?
HENNEFELD: Yeah, so it’s just total topsy turvy gender anarchy. Dranem was a French music hall performer and stage actor named Menard. So Dranem is Menard spelled backwards. He plays the beleaguered husband. We don’t know who plays his wife, Madame Dranem, who, just like completely dominates him. She makes him do all the housework and kind of care for the infants. And then, just like rides her bike, there’s a beautiful traveling shot of her riding her bike through Southern France. And you know, she goes to a bar, she smokes a pipe, she raises a ruckus. Unfortunately, kind of normative gender order is restored at the end of the film, I feel like I keep spoiling the film, but the sort of, you know, final plot twist is really beside the point of enjoying it. But that basic premise of, you know, the suffragettes take over the government, or like, men give birth to babies, while women sort of take over, like Parliament and like run the show, that was very, very common in silent cinema. So “Mr. Dranem’s Housework,” it’s, really fun that it survives. A lot of these films are lost. Over something like 80 to 90% of all silent films ever made are now just gone irretrievably. But I think that films like “Mr. Dranem’s Housework” reveal first of all how popular silent cinema was among women. Women made up the vast majority of early film spectators, and not just middle-class, women with leisure time to spare, but working women. So, you see a lot of vengeful house maid comedies from the early silent era. In the DVD set I co-curated, “Cinema’s First Nasty Women, there are all of these dish breaking rampages. Like there’s one film in which a kitchen maid just throws dishes against the wall until all of the dishes in the kitchen are broken. And you know, that’s the gag of the film, feminist protest, or suffragettes start a general strike and beat up the police. Like that happens a lot in early silent cinema. So you really see these powerful feminist themes of women refusing to do unpaid or exploited housework, making men do all of their traditional domestic tasks, and just steamrolling the public sphere and taking over everything like that was such a common and wildly popular subject of representation in the early silent era. So, you’ll get a taste of that in the Ordway program. And Dranem’s… is just such a gem. It’s so much fun.
SOLOMON: Can you talk about why you think women’s roles in film changed?
HENNEFELD: Yeah. I mean, I think that the patriarchy really tightened control over the industry once it became big business and Hollywood was getting right after World War One, Hollywood kind of took over the global film industry right displaced a lot of the leading producers of early silent cinema prior to the war were not based in the US, like film companies in France, the UK, Italy, Germany. Hollywood took over everything once it became this kind of like big, prestigious capitalist industry, women were slowly squeezed out, really in the 1920s When Hollywood got significant financial backing from Wall Street and increasingly modeled the production hierarchies on Hollywood sets after the kind of like patriarchal Wall Street bro culture and from the East Coast where they were getting their capital from so women were no longer allowed to run their own companies or assume powerful roles as film directors, and then that really, really becomes the case after the transition to talking pictures in the late 1920s but initially Hollywood was like the Wild West, or before films were even made on the West Coast.
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