Specters of Slapstick and Silent Film Comediennes by Maggie Hennefeld, and: Comic Venus: Women and Comedy in American Silent Film by Kristen Anderson Wagner (review)

Specters of Slapstick and Silent Film Comediennes by Maggie Hennefeld. Columbia University Press. 2018. $90.00 hardcover; $30.00 paper; also available in e-book. 384 pages.

Comic Venus: Women and Comedy in American Silent Film by Kristen Anderson Wagner. Wayne State University Press. 2018. $84.99 hardcover; $29.99 paper; also available in e-book. 314 pages.

In one of feminist film theory's earliest studies on women and silent cinema, from 1979, Lucy Fischer wrote about the "vanishing lady" trick films of Georges Méliès, Thomas Edison, and others, including films of women who were dismembered, shot out of a cannon, and cleaved in half. Fischer argued that the logics and strategies of magic in these films express an impulse that continues in film history, with the male "magician" director producing illusionary, fetishizing, and sadistic images of women.¹ Nearly forty years later, two groundbreaking studies demonstrate feminist film theory's continuing fascination with silent cinema's female bodies. We see in these books—Maggie Hennefeld's Specters of Slapstick and Silent Film Comediennes and Kristen Anderson Wagner's Comic Venus: Women and Comedy in American Silent Film—the ongoing feminist project of restoring the "vanished" women performers of the silent film era to our histories.

These books also measure the distance between early feminist film theory's psychoanalytically informed qualms about comedy and the current lively engagement with the topic. Although some of the films Fischer describes are trick films that overlap with those discussed in Hennefeld's book, their funniness was beside the point. In fact, laughter would have been a questionable response in the context of that era's feminist critique. For the first fifteen years of feminist film theory, comedy was a low priority, and women's physical comedy was particularly suspect. Hennefeld points out that within that paradigm and its concern for gendered spectatorship, female slapstick was a prime example of the female body objectified and distanced from the spectator.² As a result, with just a few exceptions, funny female bodies nearly vanished from feminist film studies. In 1991, when Fischer published an essay critiquing a pattern of matricide in men's comic films, she was the sole feminist scholar in a prestigious anthology on film theory and comedy that didn't even include the obligatory essay on Mae West.³ It was not until Kathleen Rowe's 1995 The Unruly Woman: Gender and the Genres of Laughter that comedy became a respectable topic for feminist film theory, revealing the possibilities of cultural rather than psychoanalytical theories and enabling incisive work by Pamela Robertson, Lori Landay, Bambi Haggins, Victoria Sturtevant, and Kristine Brunovska Karnick, among others, on topics ranging from camp comedy and the female trickster to individual stars and African American comedy.⁴

Comic Venus and Specters of Slapstick emerge from this history and from decades of rigorous scholarship on women in silent cinema by Miriam Hansen, Shelley Stamp, Jennifer Bean, Lauren Rabinovitz, and others.⁵ Like these scholars, Anderson Wagner and Hennefeld aim not simply to restore and remember the vanished women of silent cinema but also to analyze the cultural and industrial roots and effects of their performances. Their books are also part of the recent surge of scholarly interest in women's comedy in response to the growing presence of women comedians in popular culture, from comedy clubs and YouTube to television and box-office hits, as seen in two recent anthologies, a special issue of Feminist Media Histories, Rebecca Krefting's book on "charged" comedy, and my own work on comedy's body politics and the pretty-versus-funny paradigm.⁶ Broad City...