Specters of Slapstick and Silent Film Comediennes by Maggie Hennefeld (review)

Specters of Slapstick and Silent Film Comediennes is the first comprehensive history of slapstick comediennes in early cinema (1894–1918). Author Maggie Hennefeld discusses hundreds of international silent-film comedies featuring performers such as Laura Bayley, Florence Turner, Mabel Normand, Lea Giunchi, Sarah Duhamel, and Flora Finch. Hennefeld argues that 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. She consults numerous international film archives, drawing on their 35mm prints, paper print fragments, and trade press materials. In particular, she focuses on early trick films in which women spontaneously combust while doing housework, 1910s European comic series that depict apocalyptic destruction, the roles of slapstick actresses in D. W. Griffith's Biograph films, and the feminist politics of laughter in slapstick comedies about the suffragette movement. She emphasizes the line between joyful laughter and punitive violence, rethinking the gender politics of physical destruction in the slapstick genre.

Mary Jane pours too much paraffin wax on the fire and blows up the chimney in Mary Jane's Mishap (1903).