“At last the day has came.” So says Frau Leuchtag to her fellow refugee Carl, headwaiter at Rick’s Café Américain in the film classic Casablanca (1942). The day they celebrate is a departure to America. Today’s celebration is the long-anticipated Kino Lorber release of the four-disc box set Cinema’s First Nasty Women — or at least the New York Times publication of “Rewriting Women Back Into Film History” by film critic Manohla Dargis. Her assessment? “A mind-expanding endeavor, the set features 99 mostly comic rarities produced from 1898 to 1926, gleaned from archives and libraries across the globe. It is a triumph of scholarship.” Full stop.
Much more will continue to be written about the project, its ongoing impact on both film scholarship and curatorship. Five years ago Maggie Hennefeld and Laura Horak explained the origin of the term in their catalog note for the first of three biennial curated programs for the Giornate del Cinema Muto.
The term “Nasty Woman” has been a feminist rallying cry since October 2016, when Donald Trump interrupted Hillary Clinton by hissing into his microphone, “such a nasty woman,” during a televised Presidential Debate just before the 2016 American election. . . “Nasty Woman” instantly became a viral Twitter hashtag (#IAmANastyWomanBecause…), a feminist fundraising symbol (printed on T-shirts, mugs, and tote bags), and an inspiration for the memorable “pussy hats” at the 2017 global Women’s March. 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. (“Nasty Women,” GCM 2017)
Joined by Elif Rongen-Kaynakçi, silent film curator at Eye Filmmuseum, the team has produced a series of essays, book chapters, festival programs, blog entries, conference sessions, keynote talks, original videos, commentary tracks, restoration initiatives, and, let’s add, Tweets, that have productively impacted how we think about cinema itself. Nasty Women is a brand (in the best sense) that brings energy, critique, rediscovery, and joy.
This video documents Horak & Hennefeld’s contribution to this year’s Orphan Film Symposium and samples three selections.
The closing screening included this 79-minute block.
Laura Horak (Carleton U) & Maggie Hennefeld (U of Minnesota)
Screening Cinema’s First Nasty Women:
• Pranks (1909). Library of Congress. Music by Gerson Lazo-Quiroga.
• Laughing Gas (1907, with Bertha Regustus). Library of Congress. Music by Matt Hayes and Gerson Lazo-Quiroga.
• La Pile électrique de Léontine / Betty’s Electric Battery (1910). Gaumont-Pathé Archives. Music by Gonca Feride Varol.
• Fatty and Minnie He-Haw (1914, with Minnie Deveraux). Library of Congress. Music by Eliot Britton. Introduced by Kickapoo artist Arigon Starr.
• The Red Girl and the Child (1910, with Red Wing/Lilian St. Cyr). Museum of Modern Art. Music by Don Ross. Introduced by Cherokee scholar Liza Black.
Kino Lorber also allowed us to live-stream the June 18th screening — and contributed a box set as a door prize. We cannot replay the program here, but the 7 pieces are among the 99 [!] now available on Blu-Ray and DVD.
The hefty film-to-video project with its impressive booklet is a companion of sorts to Kino Lorber’s box sets Pioneers of African-American Cinema (Kino Lorber, 2016) and Pioneers: First Women Filmmakers (2018). All three were produced by the estimable Bret Wood. He also writes books and directs his own films, including Hell’s Highway: The True Story of Highway Safety Films (2002), where he intersected with foundational figures in the orphan film movement, Rick Prelinger and Skip Elsheimer.
Maggie Hennefeld (Associate Professor of Cultural Studies & Comparative Literature, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities) is the author of Specters of Slapstick and Silent Film Comediennes (Columbia University Press, 2018), and co-editor of Cultural Critique and of two volumes, Unwatchable (Rutgers, 2019) and Abjection Incorporated: Mediating the Politics of Pleasure and Violence (Duke, 2020).
Laura Horak (Associate Professor of Film Studies, Carleton University, Ottawa) is director of the Transgender Media Lab and Transgender Media Portal. She is author of Girls Will Be Boys: Cross-Dressing Women, Lesbians, and American Cinema, 1908-1934 (Rutgers UP, 2016) and co-editor of Silent Cinema and the Politics of Space (Indiana UP, 2014) and Unwatchable (Rutgers UP, 2019).
Abstract
We propose a 63-minute screening sourced from the archives of Cinema’s First Nasty Women. Funded by a grant from Canada’s Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, this project is a partnership between academic researchers, film archivists, festival curators, and a film distribution company. Collaboratively, we are producing a 4-disc DVD/Blu-ray set that features rarely-seen silent films about feminist protest, anarchic slapstick destruction, and suggestive gender play.
Given the theme of counter-archives, we’ve selected 5 films from our collection that spotlight the queer, feminist, and BIPOC people and content that is too often excluded from silent film preservation and curating. We are mobilizing the archive to connect these neglected works to a new generation of silent film viewers and communities. Most of these films have long been commercially unavailable; some have been accessible on YouTube in low-resolution format. All selections will be accompanied by original music by women and BIPOC performers. Fatty and Minnie He-Haw will be prefaced by pre-recorded introduction from Arigon Starr (Kickapoo) and The Red Girl and the Child will be prefaced by an introduction from Liza Black (Cherokee). Many of the performers in these films are largely unknown and sometimes still unnamed. They exemplify the alliance between orphaned films and feminist counter-archives.
This project is a major one, but only one of many that make up the collective Women Film Pioneers Project.