Much has been made about cinema’s recent precursors to female superheroes: crusader women who give as good as they get. Long before they were indicted on the big screen, long before feminist academics started calling out inequality in the film industry, and long before talking movies were the norm, women ran wild in movies. They made loud plans, fought, defied convention, raced their way to liberation, and laughed.
This weekend, you can get a glimpse of just how free women in film have been with a short program called ”.queen of destruction: A selection of films from cinema’s first Mean Women. This 11-title program of hers, shown Saturday and Sunday at the Museum of Moving Images in Queens,Cinemas First Nasty WomenThis set contains 99 rare works, mostly comics, produced between 1898 and 1926, collected from archives and libraries around the world. A triumph of learning.
It’s also the latest chapter in a larger, ongoing initiative that seeks to rethink and rewrite the mainstream history of cinema. This has misrepresented the fundamental contributions of women and people of color for too long. . It is a maddening erasure that has shaped both our sense of the past and our understanding of the present. It doesn’t mean there is. They are returning themselves to the history they helped create.
The title of this particular initiative was inspired by Donald Trump’s call to Hillary Clinton an “assassin” during the final debate of the 2016 presidential election, a term that quickly became a meme and feminist. In the box-set booklet, scholars from the collection’s curators Maggie Hennefeld, Laura Horak, and Elihu Rongen Kainakuchi wrote that the label “Nasty Woman” “resonates with the ferocious spirit of the 21st-century feminist movement.” It went viral because it did. And while some of the women in the program get dirty, at least in the usual sense, the ones who are particularly nasty are: not here.
Still, they may have been registered as offensive and obscene at the time, and the cross-dressing and gender-playing of some characters would clearly offend some modern viewers. In contrast, contemporary American reviewers weren’t thrilled with the French comic book character Leontine, a staple of a series of films made between 1910 and 1912. As with many of these short films, the story is basic. A smirking adult woman (the identity of the actress remains unknown) causes her to behave very badly, sometimes violently, and get her into a lot of trouble.
The title is a spoiler. In “Leontin Goes Crazy”, she is carried high in a balloon. In “Leontine’s Boat” a girl floods her house to play with a toy boat. She is left home alone to look after her much younger siblings and dog, so she rushes home again in the more charming and provocative “Léontine Keeps House.” Choreographed chaos ensues, with some playfulness—she washes her plates only to be thrown behind her back—and some isn’t.
Domestic turmoil is a leitmotif running through these films, and one would expect given the impact of the 19th-century women’s suffrage movement and the emergence of new (emancipated, contemporary) female cultural figures. . Time and time again, women test boundaries and subvert stereotypes, including those later reproduced by commercial films. One of the fun things about this collection is how persistently these films deviate from her early 20th-century Hollywood familiar image of a woman. These aren’t the polite weak sisters of the movie – those long skirts have a lot of muscle and mischief!
The complexity of representation is evident in one of the more bizarre themes. It’s a self-destructive maid who lights fire and destroys herself. In the British film The Calamity of Mary Jane, a grinning maid frolicks happily in the kitchen, polishes her face (creating a dirty mustache), burns herself to death by overfueling the fire, and burns herself in the chimney. Blow away the The maids of the wonderful “Rosalie and Her Gramophone” are having much more fun. She dances with her mistress who is the title her character. She dances with her mistress. Her new machine somehow stirs up the contents of the room, creating a glorious mess. It’s a funny, lovely way to subvert gender norms, and it’s no wonder Rosalie laughs as she spins.
Of course, laughter can be destructive, and one of the great satisfactions of these films is watching so many women laugh through one predicament after another. In the revelatory “Laughing Gas”, an African-American woman (Bertha Legastus) visits the dentist for a toothache and receives nitrous oxide. She began to laugh heartily, her cheerfulness became contagious, and everyone she met—the white passenger on the train, her white employer, the black congregation of her church—giggled, too. growl. Her laugh is liberating and joyful.
“Laughing Gas” lacks the vulgar racial caricatures that were common at the time, but not all films here do. Old movies can be tricky, as the never-ending (nothing new!) debate about representation is underscored. Of course, given their historic moment, they can be disappointingly racist, sexist, and difficult to watch. This is the case with “Rowdy Ann”. Her character, a rancher’s daughter with a gun, is funny and untypical, but when she thinks a black train porter is approaching her, she pulls out a gun and chases him. -The film’s comedy and feminist promise is a terrifying vision of white terrorism.
In the booklet, the curator deftly addresses this kind of difficulty head-on, encouraging viewers to do the same. , allowing you to wade through the thicket of expressions and forcefully confront hateful thoughts and images while having fun whenever and wherever you want. The booklet includes conversations with women and scholars of color about the challenges of reclaiming the past. “I believe we have to face (rather than just ‘cancel’) what has gone wrong in the past,” says film scholar Wang Yeeman. don’t repeat. ” yes!
queen of destruction
Film Museum on Saturdays and Sundays.go to movingimage.us for more information.