Remaking Silent Film History with “Nasty Women,” New Music, and a Reckoning with Racism
Originally published in Cineaste Magazine, Summer 2023 Issue
https://www.cineaste.com/summer2023/home
Cinema’s First Nasty Women presents a rambunctious roster of talented ladies from the silent era challenging gender norms from every direction. They turn households inside out; they invert class and racial hierarchies; they do everything that men do, and they do it all in high spirits. These women actors and characters, who are white, Indigenous, Asian, and African American, are brought together in a groundbreaking Kino Lorber box set of ninetynine films made between 1899 and 1926, constituting more than fourteen hours of running time. Based in equally significant scholarship by Maggie Hennefeld, author of Specters of Slapstick and Silent Film Comediennes (Columbia University Press, 2018) and Laura Horak, author of Girls Will Be Boys: Cross-Dressed Women, Lesbians, and American Cinema, 1908-1934 (Rutgers University Press, 2016), this collection remakes and expands the living history of the silent period. Hennefeld and Horak are the Project Directors, with archivist Elif Rongen-Kaynakcp from Amsterdam’s Eye Film Museum as cocurator.
The proud nastiness of these performers, characters, and writers has become legible in light of Hillary Clinton’s appellation by a former president. The “nasty woman” epithet was quickly appropriated in 2016 by international women’s movements as a term for women who challenge dominant social norms: women who are threatening, clever, and outrageous. The women in these films are not literally nasty, but their unruly behavior needs to be recognized as a real intervention into the patriarchal status quo. As a metaphor, “nasty women” appropriates the insult and turns it into the comic grotesque gesture of a slap in the face. The curatorial project of this box set is a unique collaboration between feminist scholarship and archival media practice.
In addition to digitizing the films, most which have rarely been screened since their birth, the project directors have commissioned new scores that bring the films to life in exciting ways. They also assembled an antiracist panel that helps to contextualize difficult images of racialized people with commentary, introductory talks, a roundtable discussion in the accompanying booklet, and content advisories when needed (which is often). The package is thus a multilayered offering with historical, aesthetic, scholarly, entertainment, social justice, and pedagogical value.
