Books by Maggie Hennefeld
Columbia University Press, 2024
Imagine being so wild and free that your laughter literally killed you. The funniest comedian’s w... more Imagine being so wild and free that your laughter literally killed you. The funniest comedian’s worst nightmare betrays humor’s ultimate utopian wager: to die laughing—to take flight from the world in the throes of unbearable pleasure and outrageous ecstasy. “Though extremely rare, even laughter can be a killer,” warns Trusted Choice.2 Death-by-laughter insurance dates back to the early 1900s (in their telling), when “a group of giggly (yet timid) cinemagoers” hired the firm Lloyd’s of London “to issue a policy that would cover them in the event they actually died laughing. Now that’s pretty funny.”3 What film could provoke such dangerous mirth? Was it Tickled to Death (1909) in which a woman brings her dead husband back to life by tickling his feet with a hat feather? Or perhaps That Fatal Sneeze (1907), an unorthodox comedy about nasal catastrophe? Although preposterous, death-by-laughter insurance would have been a perfectly sensible precaution at the time.
From 1870 to 1920, hundreds of women reportedly died from laughing too hard. Bertha Pruett was “Killed By A Joke” in 1893 when a young man (and “noted wit”) made a risible remark at a dinner party that “threw Miss Pruett into a violent fit of laughter” that “suddenly changed to a cry of pain and she fell to the floor . . . Dead.”4 The unnamed jokester was not a professional comedian, unlike the thespians whose riotous performance on opening night at the theater caused Mrs. Charles S. Stuber (age thirty-three) to die of acute indigestion incited by excessive laughter.5 Mrs. Polly Ann Jackson “had not laughed so hard in months as at the story told her which caused her death” in Kentucky in 1906.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Kino Lorber, 2022
Cinema’s First Nasty Women is a 4-disc DVD/Blu-ray set featuring rarely-seen silent films about f... more Cinema’s First Nasty Women is a 4-disc DVD/Blu-ray set featuring rarely-seen silent films about feminist protest, anarchic slapstick destruction, and suggestive gender play. The collection includes 99 European and American silent films, produced from 1898 to 1926, sourced from 13 international film archives and libraries, and spotlighting slapstick comediennes and cross-dressing women of the silent screen.
This 114-page edited booklet includes essays, interviews, photos, and detailed film notes.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Columbia University Press, 2018
https://cup.columbia.edu/book/specters-of-slapstick-and-silent-film-comediennes/9780231179478
... more https://cup.columbia.edu/book/specters-of-slapstick-and-silent-film-comediennes/9780231179478
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.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Unwatchable, 2019
We all have images that we find unwatchable, whether for ethical, political, or sensory and affec... more We all have images that we find unwatchable, whether for ethical, political, or sensory and affective reasons. From news coverage of terror attacks to viral videos of police brutality, and from graphic horror films to transgressive artworks, many of the images in our media culture might strike us as unsuitable for viewing. Yet what does it mean to proclaim something “unwatchable”: disturbing, revolting, poor, tedious, or literally inaccessible?
With over 50 original essays by leading scholars, artists, critics, and curators, this is the first book to trace the “unwatchable” across our contemporary media environment, in which viewers encounter difficult content on various screens and platforms. Appealing to a broad academic and general readership, the volume offers multidisciplinary approaches to the vast array of troubling images that circulate in global visual culture.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Abjection Incorporated: Mediating the Politics of Pleasure and Violence, 2020
From the films of Larry Clark to the feminist comedy of Amy Schumer to the fall of Louis C. K., c... more From the films of Larry Clark to the feminist comedy of Amy Schumer to the fall of Louis C. K., comedic, graphic, and violent moments of abjection have permeated twentieth- and twenty-first-century social and political discourse. The contributors to Abjection Incorporated move beyond simple critiques of abjection as a punitive form of social death, illustrating how it has become a contested mode of political and cultural capital—empowering for some but oppressive for others. Escaping abjection's usual confines of psychoanalysis and aesthetic modernism, core to theories of abjection by thinkers such as Kristeva and Bataille, the contributors examine a range of media, including literature, photography, film, television, talking dolls, comics, and manga.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
by Valentine Robert, Doron Galili, Marina Dahlquist, Maggie Hennefeld, Ian Christie, Daniel Sánchez-Salas, Luis Alonso Garcia, Benjamín Schultz-Figueroa, Joanna Hearne, Denise McKenna, Ivo Blom, and Martin Barnier ENG:
Corporeality in Early Cinema inspires a heightened awareness of the ways in which early fil... more ENG:
Corporeality in Early Cinema inspires a heightened awareness of the ways in which early film culture, and screen praxes overall are inherently embodied. Contributors argue that on- and offscreen (and in affiliated media and technological constellations), the body consists of flesh and nerves and is not just an abstract spectator or statistical audience entity.
Audience responses from arousal to disgust, from identification to detachment, offer us a means to understand what spectators have always taken away from their cinematic experience. Through theoretical approaches and case studies, scholars offer a variety of models for stimulating historical research on corporeality and cinema by exploring the matrix of screened bodies, machine-made scaffolding, and their connections to the physical bodies in front of the screen.
FR:
Ce livre consacré aux liens entre le cinéma des premiers temps et le corps révèle combien la culture cinématographique émergente, et toutes les pratiques de l’écran autour de 1900, étaient fondamentalement « incarnées ». Les contributeurs arguent que sur et autour de l’écran (ainsi que dans tous les médias et constellations technologiques associées), les corps ne renvoyaient pas simplement à un spectateur abstrait ou à un public collectif d’ordre statistique : ils étaient bel et bien faits de chair et d’os. Allant de l’excitation au dégoût, de l’identification au détachement, les réactions du premier public de cinéma nous offrent un moyen de comprendre ce que les spectateurs ont toujours retiré de leur expérience filmique.
Cet ouvrage propose de nombreux modèles, tant théoriques qu’analytiques, pour servir la recherche historique sur cette présence du corps au cinéma, en explorant les corps filmés, le seuil de leur mécanisation, et leurs connexions aux corps physiques devant l’écran.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Papers by Maggie Hennefeld
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Feminist Media Histories, 2021
Is Laughter an affect? And what would it mean for feminist theory to conceive of it as such? This... more Is Laughter an affect? And what would it mean for feminist theory to conceive of it as such? This article pursues laughter as an affect that bridges the gap between feminist comedy studies and feminist affect theory. Laughter has widely missed the mark of feminist theory’s sourcing of collective activist potential and intellectual invigoration in the exploration of affect. Likewise, affect has not been a central concern for humor scholars. But what about those feminist laughing affects that do not assume their own affirmative value or knowable effects? They provoke disproportionate, off-cue, and unstable instances of laughter wherein nervous excess consumes the laughing subject and threatens to transform into something else entirely. The feminist killjoy, the laughing hysteric, and the humorless capitalist all choke on their laughs, though each in different ways. Their unrealized laughter, this article argues, opens the floodgates for its transmutation into a new collective body politics.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
New Review of Film and Television Studies , 2022
Radical comedy liberates spectators from their compulsive attachments to volatile objects. In tha... more Radical comedy liberates spectators from their compulsive attachments to volatile objects. In that spirit, modernist film theorists placed their hopes in the raucous, world-shattering laughter elicited by violent slapstick comedies to explode the crises of the present and their foothold in habituated perception. But what remains of laughter’s revolutionary modernist project in the twenty-first century? In this article, I rethink the concept of cine-genre to pursue tropes of uncanny, uncontrollable laughter that have proliferated across all genres of contemporary cinema. Conventional genre provides an aesthetic contract of solid expectations (brokered between audiences, media-makers, and producers) to sustain the hope for what’s possible through the repetition of what’s imaginable. But in times of escalating crisis, genre itself falls apart, spawning perverse hybrid mutations. Cinema, I argue, in its renewed capacity for dialectical ‘hybridity’ can give rise to radical forms of embodied perception and affective experience that slam the brakes on the nightmare of postmodern carnival and reveal new ways forward toward a less dystopian future.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media, 2021
If the canon has too long been dominated by white, male, cishet auteurs and their on-again/off-ag... more If the canon has too long been dominated by white, male, cishet auteurs and their on-again/off-again relationship with big Hollywood industry, the death of film has created space for collective voices, different perspectives, wayward formats, greater accessibility, and activist mobilizations. This is the story of the future of film, which is mischievously unfolding before our very eyes.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Abjection Incorporated: Mediating the Politics of Pleasure and Violence, 2020
This chapter looks at the central importance of comedic abjection in
mobilizing twenty-first cent... more This chapter looks at the central importance of comedic abjection in
mobilizing twenty-first century feminist politics.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
In the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, hundreds of women allegedly died from laughi... more In the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, hundreds of women allegedly died from laughing too hard. Any activity in modern life—going to the circus, playing bridge, or salting pork in the kitchen—could become a gateway to the convulsions of hysterical laughter for women. In this article, I look at death from laughter as a limit case that blows open the long-standing separation between laughter and hysteria in scholarship on these topics. I argue that women’s hysterical laughter failed to register as either laughter or hysteria. Whereas laughter allegedly killed regular women, female hysterics could endure multiday laughing, barking fits without so much as a trace on their bodies. Finally, I think about the striking oppositions between the female laughing hysteric and the hysterically laughing woman through the archives of early cinema. Film spectatorship not only offered women a space to laugh safely but also represented a potential visual cure to nervous hysteria.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Feminist Media Histories, 2017
This journal issue is dedicated to the vibrant feminist media histories of comedy that we have se... more This journal issue is dedicated to the vibrant feminist media histories of comedy that we have seen, time and again, vanish right before our eyes. The ability to laugh in the face of crisis and in the wake of ruins is, after all, the premise of why we commit to archival research: to make visible the forgotten histories of feminist social struggle and of women's cultural authorship, not just in their own right, but against the recurrence of their political obstruction and historical annihilation. This comedy issue follows from that momentous project. Our goal is not to supplement the archive that we already know to be important, but to challenge the ways in which—as feminist historians with our eyes toward the basis of all future progress in the unrealized potentials of the past—we come to know anything at all. These are and have always been the epistemological stakes of feminist archival labor, which we hereby unleash onto the feminist and comedic crises of the present historical moment.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Camera Obscura, Sep 23, 2014
This article rethinks the emergence of narrative film syntax through the comedy genre, focusing o... more This article rethinks the emergence of narrative film syntax through the comedy genre, focusing on slapstick films that depict female unruliness. I discuss films featuring Mabel Normand, Florence Turner, Marie Dressler, Sarah Duhamel, and other forgotten silent comediennes, arguing that these women's performances played crucial roles in orchestrating transitions in industrial film form. Focusing on a comparison between the French Pathé and American Vitagraph companies, I examine the variety of techniques deployed to try to rationalize or contain the unruly bodily gestures of slapstick comedienne performers — most of whom have now dropped out of historical visibility entirely. I frame this comparative analysis through close readings of two key texts: a Vitagraph trick film, Princess Nicotine; or, The Smoke Fairy (dir. J. Stuart Blackton, 1909), which depicts the surrealistic plight of a male cigar smoker who gets pestered by two micrographic nicotine fairies; and a Pathé slapstick comedy, Betty Pulls the Strings (dir. Roméo Bosetti, 1910), about a madcap female trickster whose pranks wreak mass anarchy. Whereas films like Princess Nicotine micromanage their comediennes' unruly bodily performances in order to execute their trick techniques, films like Betty let their comediennes run wild in front of the camera, instead making sense of their irrational behavior through postproduction editing. Comedy has always haunted the emergence of cinema both as a narrative storytelling medium and as an international industry. Here, I analyze how unruly women and uncomfortable experiences of laughter provided coconspirators for legitimizing the motion picture's nascent storytelling vocabulary.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Perhaps no other visual or physical obstruction posed a greater annoyance to 1910s motion-picture... more Perhaps no other visual or physical obstruction posed a greater annoyance to 1910s motion-picture spectators than the woman’s hat. Adorned with everything from exotic bird plumes, to entire fruit baskets, to miniature barnyard animals, women’s early twentieth-century hat fashions butted heads with the sheer logistics of film screen visibility. As the mayor of Macon, Georgia, put it in 1912, in his futile efforts to pass an ordinance banning ladies’ hats from film screenings, “many a man goes to the moving picture show, pays his dime and for it sees a beautiful hat but no picture.” More than just a physical obstacle to the visibility of the screen, the woman’s hat represented a whole constellation of social and aesthetic problems that afflicted the motion-picture industry. These triangulations between spectator bodies, women’s hats, and moving-picture images had an enormous impact on the emergence and uneven codification of industry film culture from roughly 1907 to 1916, a period characterized by the simultaneous standardization and constant transformation of the meaning and experience of filmgoing.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Early Popular Visual Culture, May 15, 2015
Silent film comedies were obsessed with images of shape-shifting women: housemaids dismembered th... more Silent film comedies were obsessed with images of shape-shifting women: housemaids dismembered their own limbs or stretched these limbs beyond human proportions, magical nicotine fairies miniaturized their entire bodies, and housewives metamorphosed into reptiles or celestial satellites. In this article, I look at female corporeality in transitional silent cinema as itself a trick technique. I argue that filmmakers used female metamorphosis in order to negotiate between trick attractions and integrated narrative effects-- between filmmaking’s spectacular mass appeal and its institutional legitimacy
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
mediafieldsjournal.squarespace. …
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Shorter Contributions by Maggie Hennefeld
Giornate del Cinema Muto Catalog, 2024
Catalog notes for 3 screenings of "Feminist Fragments" at Le Giornate del Cinema Muto in Pordenon... more Catalog notes for 3 screenings of "Feminist Fragments" at Le Giornate del Cinema Muto in Pordenone, Italy (Oct 2024).
The program themes include: 1) "All Play and No Work"; 2) "Queer Eyes, Loose Lips, and Detachable Limbs"; 3) "I'm Ready for my Close-Up!". Co-curated by Maggie Hennefeld and Enri Ceballos.
The fragments were sourced from film archives all over the world, including the National Film Archive of India, Deutsches Filminstitut & Filmmuseum (DFF), Filmoteca de Catalunya, Museo del Cine Pablo Ducrós Hicken, The Museum of Modern Art, the Danish Film Institute, Gaumont-Pathé Archives, Eye Filmmuseum’s Bits & Pieces Collection, and paper print fragments preserved by the Library of Congress.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Minneapolis Star Tribune, 2024
The antidote to MAGA is feminist laughter. “Make America Laugh Again” has become a rallying cry f... more The antidote to MAGA is feminist laughter. “Make America Laugh Again” has become a rallying cry for electing the first Black woman president in US history and an emotional weapon against the furies of Trumpism.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Uploads
Books by Maggie Hennefeld
From 1870 to 1920, hundreds of women reportedly died from laughing too hard. Bertha Pruett was “Killed By A Joke” in 1893 when a young man (and “noted wit”) made a risible remark at a dinner party that “threw Miss Pruett into a violent fit of laughter” that “suddenly changed to a cry of pain and she fell to the floor . . . Dead.”4 The unnamed jokester was not a professional comedian, unlike the thespians whose riotous performance on opening night at the theater caused Mrs. Charles S. Stuber (age thirty-three) to die of acute indigestion incited by excessive laughter.5 Mrs. Polly Ann Jackson “had not laughed so hard in months as at the story told her which caused her death” in Kentucky in 1906.
This 114-page edited booklet includes essays, interviews, photos, and detailed film notes.
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.
With over 50 original essays by leading scholars, artists, critics, and curators, this is the first book to trace the “unwatchable” across our contemporary media environment, in which viewers encounter difficult content on various screens and platforms. Appealing to a broad academic and general readership, the volume offers multidisciplinary approaches to the vast array of troubling images that circulate in global visual culture.
Corporeality in Early Cinema inspires a heightened awareness of the ways in which early film culture, and screen praxes overall are inherently embodied. Contributors argue that on- and offscreen (and in affiliated media and technological constellations), the body consists of flesh and nerves and is not just an abstract spectator or statistical audience entity.
Audience responses from arousal to disgust, from identification to detachment, offer us a means to understand what spectators have always taken away from their cinematic experience. Through theoretical approaches and case studies, scholars offer a variety of models for stimulating historical research on corporeality and cinema by exploring the matrix of screened bodies, machine-made scaffolding, and their connections to the physical bodies in front of the screen.
FR:
Ce livre consacré aux liens entre le cinéma des premiers temps et le corps révèle combien la culture cinématographique émergente, et toutes les pratiques de l’écran autour de 1900, étaient fondamentalement « incarnées ». Les contributeurs arguent que sur et autour de l’écran (ainsi que dans tous les médias et constellations technologiques associées), les corps ne renvoyaient pas simplement à un spectateur abstrait ou à un public collectif d’ordre statistique : ils étaient bel et bien faits de chair et d’os. Allant de l’excitation au dégoût, de l’identification au détachement, les réactions du premier public de cinéma nous offrent un moyen de comprendre ce que les spectateurs ont toujours retiré de leur expérience filmique.
Cet ouvrage propose de nombreux modèles, tant théoriques qu’analytiques, pour servir la recherche historique sur cette présence du corps au cinéma, en explorant les corps filmés, le seuil de leur mécanisation, et leurs connexions aux corps physiques devant l’écran.
Papers by Maggie Hennefeld
mobilizing twenty-first century feminist politics.
Shorter Contributions by Maggie Hennefeld
The program themes include: 1) "All Play and No Work"; 2) "Queer Eyes, Loose Lips, and Detachable Limbs"; 3) "I'm Ready for my Close-Up!". Co-curated by Maggie Hennefeld and Enri Ceballos.
The fragments were sourced from film archives all over the world, including the National Film Archive of India, Deutsches Filminstitut & Filmmuseum (DFF), Filmoteca de Catalunya, Museo del Cine Pablo Ducrós Hicken, The Museum of Modern Art, the Danish Film Institute, Gaumont-Pathé Archives, Eye Filmmuseum’s Bits & Pieces Collection, and paper print fragments preserved by the Library of Congress.
From 1870 to 1920, hundreds of women reportedly died from laughing too hard. Bertha Pruett was “Killed By A Joke” in 1893 when a young man (and “noted wit”) made a risible remark at a dinner party that “threw Miss Pruett into a violent fit of laughter” that “suddenly changed to a cry of pain and she fell to the floor . . . Dead.”4 The unnamed jokester was not a professional comedian, unlike the thespians whose riotous performance on opening night at the theater caused Mrs. Charles S. Stuber (age thirty-three) to die of acute indigestion incited by excessive laughter.5 Mrs. Polly Ann Jackson “had not laughed so hard in months as at the story told her which caused her death” in Kentucky in 1906.
This 114-page edited booklet includes essays, interviews, photos, and detailed film notes.
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.
With over 50 original essays by leading scholars, artists, critics, and curators, this is the first book to trace the “unwatchable” across our contemporary media environment, in which viewers encounter difficult content on various screens and platforms. Appealing to a broad academic and general readership, the volume offers multidisciplinary approaches to the vast array of troubling images that circulate in global visual culture.
Corporeality in Early Cinema inspires a heightened awareness of the ways in which early film culture, and screen praxes overall are inherently embodied. Contributors argue that on- and offscreen (and in affiliated media and technological constellations), the body consists of flesh and nerves and is not just an abstract spectator or statistical audience entity.
Audience responses from arousal to disgust, from identification to detachment, offer us a means to understand what spectators have always taken away from their cinematic experience. Through theoretical approaches and case studies, scholars offer a variety of models for stimulating historical research on corporeality and cinema by exploring the matrix of screened bodies, machine-made scaffolding, and their connections to the physical bodies in front of the screen.
FR:
Ce livre consacré aux liens entre le cinéma des premiers temps et le corps révèle combien la culture cinématographique émergente, et toutes les pratiques de l’écran autour de 1900, étaient fondamentalement « incarnées ». Les contributeurs arguent que sur et autour de l’écran (ainsi que dans tous les médias et constellations technologiques associées), les corps ne renvoyaient pas simplement à un spectateur abstrait ou à un public collectif d’ordre statistique : ils étaient bel et bien faits de chair et d’os. Allant de l’excitation au dégoût, de l’identification au détachement, les réactions du premier public de cinéma nous offrent un moyen de comprendre ce que les spectateurs ont toujours retiré de leur expérience filmique.
Cet ouvrage propose de nombreux modèles, tant théoriques qu’analytiques, pour servir la recherche historique sur cette présence du corps au cinéma, en explorant les corps filmés, le seuil de leur mécanisation, et leurs connexions aux corps physiques devant l’écran.
mobilizing twenty-first century feminist politics.
The program themes include: 1) "All Play and No Work"; 2) "Queer Eyes, Loose Lips, and Detachable Limbs"; 3) "I'm Ready for my Close-Up!". Co-curated by Maggie Hennefeld and Enri Ceballos.
The fragments were sourced from film archives all over the world, including the National Film Archive of India, Deutsches Filminstitut & Filmmuseum (DFF), Filmoteca de Catalunya, Museo del Cine Pablo Ducrós Hicken, The Museum of Modern Art, the Danish Film Institute, Gaumont-Pathé Archives, Eye Filmmuseum’s Bits & Pieces Collection, and paper print fragments preserved by the Library of Congress.
http://www.flowjournal.org/2016/12/laughter-in-the-age-of-trump/
On January 10 2017, Desiree Fairooz, a 61-year-old Code Pink protester, was forcibly removed and arrested for laughing at Jeff Sessions during his Attorney General confirmation hearings. However, it was not the fact of Fairooz’s laughter that caused her arrest, so much as what it signified: to “impede and disrupt then Senator Sessions’ confirmation hearing by drawing attention away from the hearing itself and directing it instead toward the Defendants’ perception of the nominee’s racist views, policies, and voting record” (from a government motion filed against her). Laughter, and the power to dictate its meaning and address, has always been at stake in the law.
Published in Slant Magazine on June 19, 2016.
Following a screening of rare silent shorts, this panel discussion brought together feminist film historians for an introduction to the politics of laughter, race, class, gender, and sexuality in silent cinema. The panelists examined under what circumstances women are allowed to be funny in media culture, how gendered provocations for laughter have shifted throughout the history of cinema, and how gender and race are inextricably linked in silent cinema.
Panelists included Laura Horak, Assistant Professor of Film Studies at Carleton University; Denise McKenna, part-time lecturer at University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts; and Alice Maurice, Associate Professor of English at University of Toronto Scarborough. This panel was moderated by Maggie Hennefeld, a Post-doctoral Fellow at the Jackman Humanities Institute at the University of Toronto.
In partnership with the Jackman Humanities Institute and the Cinema Studies Institute at the University of Toronto, this Higher Learning event was held on October 17, 2014 at TIFF Bell Lightbox.
The Feminist & Women’s Media Festival (March 14-16, 2014):
The Feminist & Women's Media Festival featured 3 days of film, television, video, and webisode screenings, photography installations, and symposia panels with media theorists, programmers, critics and practitioners. The festival included a broad range of works by women filmmakers and artists including Nandita Das, Cauleen Smith, Lupita Nyong’o, Ida Lupino, Alla Nazimova, Cheryl Dunye, Mehreen Jabbar, Issa Rae, Sonali Gulati, Amber Hank Swanson, Eloyce Gist, Nikki Lee, Lena Waithe, Akosua Adoma Owusu, and many others.
In displaying such a broad range of works and modes from different regions and time periods, the goal of the festival was to stimulate critical conversations about the fraught relationships among the categories of “women’s media,” racial politics, and feminist art practices. Our programming draws connections between women’s aesthetic representations onscreen and the various sexual and racial labor economies underpinning broader media production opportunities. How do expanding global and media distribution networks—from international women’s film festivals to intermedial adaptations from photography, to film, to TV, to video, to digital web series—push us to think differently about questions of the archive, women’s work, feminist and racial identity politics, affect and embodiment, or even what we mean by “woman?” And how do these notions get defined discursively through different forms of media representation?
In addition to the 50+ films, videos, and TV episodes/webisodes that we presented over the course of the festival, we were also excited and honored to welcome a distinguished group of artists and scholars to discuss the topics of the festival and the issues raised by the programming. Nandita Das, Cauleen Smith, Nilita Vachani, Portia Cobb, and Hong-An Truong were all present for discussions and questions after screenings of their work. In addition to an extended Q&A with Nandita Das on the 14th, we curated two panel discussions on different themes throughout the weekend. The first of these panels, themed on “Archives,” included commentary, discussion, and Q&A among Cauleen Smith, Rhea Combs, and Portia Cobb; The second panel themed on “Borders” featured Hong-An Truong, Nilita Vachani, and Mimi Thi Nguyen. We were also very pleased and excited to exhibit an ongoing installation of Nikki Lee’s photography at the Granoff Arts Center.
***Generously co-sponsored by the Malcolm S. Forbes Center for Culture and Media Studies; the Creative Arts Council; the Brown-India Initiative; the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America; the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women; and the Departments of Africana Studies, American Studies, Comparative Literature, History, History of Art and Architecture, Modern Culture and Media, Music, and RISD Photography.***
https://necsus-ejms.org/all-the-rumors-are-true/
https://necsus-ejms.org/rumors-a-roundtable-discussion-with-mladen-dolar-richard-dyer-alexandra-juhasz-tavia-nyongo-marc-siegel-and-patricia-turner/
https://necsus-ejms.org/portfolio/spring-2022_rumors/