Whether women worked as motion picture camera operators during the silent era seems never to have been seriously considered. The very few who did this work tried not to draw attention to themselves, and as a result many people in the commercial industry may have believed there was no such thing as a woman camera operator. Even one of the best-connected women in the industry could not think of one. Asked in 1925 for her views on women’s contributions, the powerful head producer and screenwriter June Mathis said she could think of cases in which women had worked as cutters or title writers, but that she had not yet come across a woman “turning the crank of a camera” (664). Nevertheless, despite the skepticism and even hostility they very likely faced on set, there were a few women who operated the heavy 35mm motion picture camera and mastered the new technology in defiance of cultural expectations.
While women who actually worked as camera operators were rare, “women with cameras” were a publicity trend. If, in 1916, silent film actress Marie Doro shot footage of Blanche Sweet with a motion picture camera given to her by Charlie Chaplin, the New York Dramatic Mirror would report it as news (22). Even so, it was not women using “small” 16 mm cameras but women working with large 35 mm cameras on a motion picture set who made bigger news. Yet not all the women photographed with cameras were professional camera operators. Some of them were actor-directors or women producers, and on this point the composition of the photograph tells us a great deal. Women actor-directors or producers pose beside motion picture cameras when photographed with men or alone with the cameras. Women camera operators, by contrast, are photographed behind the motion picture camera, and in this sense they are entirely original. In the woman’s strange and novel relationship to this technological apparatus, this feminine anomaly becomes a metaphor for the startling strangeness of motion picture photography itself.
The most in-depth of these stories, “The Only Camera Woman,” begins: “How many of you have ever heard of a woman camera man?” (59). The Picture Play Magazine writer’s angle on the story is to correct the mistaken assumptions about women’s technological skills that the piece attributes to its 1916 readers. Although the byline, A.J. Dixon, gives no indication of gender, contemporary readers might assume the writer was a man, given the remarks about the shy “Miss Davison” as an interview subject and the writer’s familiarity with the men on the Astor Company set, such as director Al Ray and veteran cameraman Harry Fischbeck. Part of the writer’s approach is to make fun of the expectation that women would be incompetent and, better still, to turn the situation to the writer’s own advantage with the readers. The writer had imagined footage that was out of focus and made up of over- or underexposed negatives. Before arriving on the set, the writer wants to learn about the camerawoman’s technical skill from the two men there, moving between questions in a way that offers a chance to display the writer’s own technical knowledge. “And does Miss Davison know all the tricks of photography?” the writer asks (61). The writer is assured that she does double exposures and even triple exposures (61). Davison then explains to the writer that she started out with a Graflex still camera, because it was easier to master than a motion picture camera since “there is no crank to turn” (62). However, it is not Davison but the professional cameraman Fischbeck who explains the single-crank animation technique, produced with the crank on the side of the camera, which is turned and stopped while the pose is changed, then turned and stopped again for the next pose. Continuing to vouch for Grace Davison’s competence, cameraman Fischbeck hands the fan magazine writer a strip of Eastman Kodak film negative, shot with the “single-crank movement” technique he has just described, which turns out to be Davison’s own experimental footage. In the “tiny pictures that look like ping-pong balls,” the fascinated writer sees that Davison has filmed her own image against a black velvet background using a mirror and a reflector (64). The “new and astonishing” camerawoman thus brings with her a metaphor for a “new and astonishing” phenomenon of the motion pictures (65).
The camerawoman’s appearance is “astonishing,” too. In October 1916, Photoplay published a full-page photograph of camerawoman Margery Ordway wearing a checked cap, a striped blouse and checked trousers. The caption, “New Fall Styles for Camera‘Men’,” makes subtle fun of the gender switch in question (103). The unusual unconventionality of her outfit also confirms how rarely women were found in this line of work. A.J. Dixon, the writer of uncertain gender, described Grace Davison’s clothing in much the same way. What Davison called her “camera costume” was a checked suit with a matching checked cap (61). The costume is also in keeping with the oddity conveyed by the terms “grinding” and “cranking,” which the article uses both to describe the cameraman’s work and to slyly hint at the double meaning of “crank,” slang for a cantankerous, eccentric person, without quite saying that a woman behind the camera must be ill-tempered.
In a 1914 Photoplay article based on an interview with “camera operator” Francelia Billington, the film actress herself comments on the double fascination with this strange machine and with a woman operating this mechanical marvel: “I suppose it still seems odd to see a girl more concerned with a mechanical problem than with makeup” (59). Although she notes that her interest in photography did not mean she was also interested in popular films, Billington, like Davison, says she started out at a young age with a still camera and later moved on to the motion picture camera. Katherine Synon conducted the interview while Francelia Billington was “assisting” director W. C. Cabanne on the Los Angeles set of the Reliance-Majestic Studio. Billington is efficiently doing the work of a “cameraman,” or what would later be known as a “cinematographer,” described as “turning a crank while closely watching a scene played out by a group of actors.” (no page number). In 1914, however, Billington’s work is not taken very seriously, and the reference to her “dual role as both actress and camera operator” implies that she was a lucky stand-in cameraman who helped operate the camera when she was not acting. (no page number)
Considering how work was organized on set, one can see from a photograph taken at the Edison Studio in the same period that the hierarchy of labor was determined by gender, and one can imagine how difficult it must have been for Billington to move back and forth across the invisible line between the dramatic scene and the all-male camera department. Like Davison, Billington says that she started in film as an actress but preferred camera work. However, the year of the interview was probably her last chance to work as a cameraman. Reliance-Majestic Studio was a new studio on the West Coast under head director D.W. Griffith, whose big plans did not include a woman camera operator.
Francelia Billington’s career trajectory, outlined by William M. Drew in “More Than Just a Pretty Face,” got off to a slow start with her involvement in a 1915 project written by Nell Shipman and later abandoned, but it picked up speed soon afterward. Around 1916-17 she was a prolific actress working with the American Film Co. and Universal Pictures, and although she no longer worked with cameras, Movieland Notes showed her working on a vehicle like a mechanic.
The high point of her career was the lead role she shared in director Erich von Stroheim’s Blind Husbands (1919). After the 1920s, however, things gradually took a turn for the worse for Billington, who played small parts in westerns and adventure films and appeared in one sound film before her death in 1934. Grace Davison’s career likewise picked up after she returned to acting after 1916, but, like others, she took advantage of the 1917-1918 window of opportunity for independent production and set up “her own” production company. See Women’s Production and Pre-Production Companies. A note in the American Film Institute Catalog states that the actress Davison founded the company to make Wives of Men (1918), written and directed by John M. Stahl. While Harry Fischbeck (credited as Fishbeck) is named as cinematographer on the film, Davison’s name appears in publicity and reviews not as producer but as part of the cast (Hanson, 1050). After producing Wives of Men, she took on one or two acting roles a year in independent productions until 1922.
In the first decade of the 1900s, women camera operators were a rare phenomenon, which explains why Mathis had neither seen nor heard of one by 1925. Women camera operators did not catch our attention until the 1970s, when Anthony Slide began to uncover the women directors of the silent era. In his first book, he cites Grace Davison and Margery Ordway, whom he found in the fan magazines cited here, and briefly mentions Dorothy Dunn, who he says was part of the “army of cameramen” working for Universal Animated Weekly (Slide 1974, 168). While Dunn fits the pattern of women who started out as actresses before taking up the camera, unlike Davison and Billington, who gave up camera work for acting, Dunn gave up acting and became, according to Moving Picture World (1609), “the only woman photographer on the staff.” In a later book, Slide mentions Dunn, Davison and Ordway, and adds to these women Louise Lowell, who worked for Fox News in 1920 (1996, 5-6). Yet the label of “first” or “only” continues to tempt us, and more recently Suzy Groves discovered Katherine R. Bleecker as “the earliest professional motion picture camerawoman” (quoted in Krasilovsky 1997, xxi). Although the New York Times reported on Bleecker in 1915 and Photoplay discovered Billington in 1914, the difference between the kinds of work the two took on matters more than the year that separates them. While Billington had the chance to shoot some fictional short films, Bleecker wrote, directed and shot scenarios set in New York prisons, casting the inmates as themselves, and she should therefore be recognized as a pioneer of what we know today as docufiction.
Jane Gaines, Michelle Koerner
Translation: Nahit Evre Uçarcı
To read the original article, please click here. .
There was no funnier sight gag in early cinema than the catastrophe of epidemic contagion. In The Yawner (1907), a man’s involuntary yawning transmits irresistibly to his housekeeper, a squadron of soldiers, day drinkers at a café, a police officer, and an inanimate portrait of a woman, who is roused from her stasis by the impulse to yawn. Habitual tics such as yawning, laughing, sneezing, hiccupping, itching, coughing, barking, sobbing, and blinking spread like wildfire when too many nervous bodies find themselves together in close quarters. In Laughing Gas (1907), after her dentist gives her nitrous oxide (laughing gas) during a tooth extraction, a black woman’s joyful hysterics spread to the white workers, black gospel singers, and several police officers around her. In The Epidemic (1914), the craze for tango dancing possesses bodies eager for fun, while That Fatal Sneeze (1907) takes the perils of involuntary outbursts to their mortal conclusion (a man dies from sneezing!). From a sneeze to a belly laugh and the penchant for tango dancing, any such bodily symptom was easy fodder for an epidemic film.
Should we find it disturbing that these movies were all comedies? What is so funny about the sensitivities and vulnerabilities of individuals succumbing to the spastic will of the roiling masses? Zombie movies and other grossly corporeal films evoke anxious dread and clammy discomfort, and a little haphazard excess can tip the balance between horror and comedy. So where is the line between anxiety and enjoyment when it comes to hysterical bodily contagion?
Laughter is often described in suspiciously hysterical terms. The euphemism first took hold in the late 19th century, when the notion of hysterical laughter shifted in meaning from nervous breakdown to convulsive enjoyment. Prior to that time, “hysterical laughter” was the last thing you ever wanted to experience with your body. It rang out, from the anguished pleas of psychiatric asylums to incidents of mass psychogenic illness, as in the 1787 Cotton Mill Outbreak and 1962 Tanganyika Laughter Epidemic. Neither entirely real nor purely illusion, hysteria lingers in the gray zone between anxiety and transmission. This, no doubt, is what makes it ripe terrain for comedy.
Mimicry is the cornerstone of comic pantomime, just as it is essential to the symptomology of hysteria. Hysteria comes from the Greek word for uterus, or womb (hystera), and physicians believed that a woman’s womb could start wandering around her body in cases of dormancy or disuse. This perilous affliction of spinsters and widows was thought to make mischief in the body by imitating the organic processes of the zones it traversed. For example, if the womb got into the throat, it might create a sensation of choking (“globus hystericus”). If it made its way down into the foot, it could trigger paralysis or dancing mania, spreading contagiously as in the 1518 Dancing Plague or the 1374 Dancing Mania that shadowed the Black Death. Incidentally, tango and polka dancing were the most frequent hazards of slapstick contagion comedies (see Kristina Köhler’s extensive research on this topic). Whether comic or tragic, the notion of hysteria has long conveyed a severe confusion between mimicry and organic affliction. Is the patient truly suffering, or merely a malingerer? Amid mass outbreaks of epidemic disease, hysteria’s hallmark, and indeed its prime suspect, is imitation.
Affective Contagion in Early Film Comedy
In the early 20th century, the mass migration of people and the rapid swarming of laboring bodies into fast-paced capitalist cities laid the groundwork for a visual explosion of epidemic-themed comedies. There is something uniquely therapeutic about the absurd spectacle of bodily contagion when it is enjoyed from a distance. Cayenne Pepper in a Street Cab(1903) lampoons the nervous sneezing fit that breaks out when a lady with her arms full of grocery packages accidentally drops her package of cayenne pepper on an overcrowded streetcar. The result, as the Selig Polyscope Company put it, is an “epidemic of sneezing among the passengers, which is more easily imagined than described.”
But affective suggestion also served as a breeding ground for conspiracy theories and xenophobic attitudes. Gustave Le Bon, in his 1895 study of crowd psychology, compared the contagion of ideas, sentiments, and emotions to “microbes.” Gut feelings gain momentum in the crucible of modern crowds, where unschooled passions are given free rein over elitist expertise. Early films depict the hazards of mob psychology in purely somatic terms. A Contagious Nervousness (1908) burlesques an explosion of anger that germinates from a husband and wife’s squabble and quickly spreads, first to workers and eventually to barnyard animals. Other epidemic-themed comedies hilariously mistake the contagion for the cause. An All-Wool Garment (1908) plays on underwear and its effects: as a man is tormented by his itchy new garments, his co-workers, streetcar passengers, and even fellow movie spectators cannot resist the urge to scratch. The confusion between itch and contagion reaches its peak, and the crisis is resolved when the man buys new cotton underwear. Never mind the masses of prickling bodies who had never donned itchy garments in the first place. Their compulsion to relieve themselves is collateral damage from the desire to imagine dangerous affective contagion in amusingly epidemic terms.
Neurasthenia and hysteria were often treated as catchalls for any unexplainable ailment; in other words, if you couldn’t make an accurate diagnosis, you simply called it hysteria. Potential symptoms ranged from somnambulism, loss of sensation, and hallucinations to political excitement, novel reading, and “masturbation and tobacco.” Mysterious in origin, overdetermined in meaning (from deviant desire to overt defiance), and unpredictable in transmission, the amorphous morphology of hysteria rendered the disease both fascinating and horrifying. Endemic ambivalence about epidemic hysteria was not lost on early filmmakers of slapstick comedy, who kept film’s popularity going despite rampant anxieties about its toxic immorality.
How to prove that nervous contagion is innocuous? Look at the funny side! Theater owners advised turning up the houselights, noting that viewers could then see their neighbors’ writhing, spasmodic bodies and would “no longer keep laughs exclusively to themselves.” Similarly, according to The Film Index , a man’s nervous disorder afflicts “all within sight” in Contagious Nervous Twitching (1908). His involuntary tic has roughly the same effect as a woman’s fetching physique in A Very Fine Lady (1908), where her presence provokes men’s libidinous ogling and brings their work to a halt. The nervous twitcher, by contrast, wreaks havoc through bodily contagion. A janitor’s knee starts to twirl and he tumbles down the stairs; a construction worker atop a ladder is seized by spastic convulsions and plasters a supervising architect in mortar; a wedding party turns into a hysterical orgy; and so forth. In The Yawner, affective suggestion animates even the inanimate, turning a concrete statue into a neurasthenic tableau vivant. Do germs reside in our living bodies or in the spaces we inhabit? Whether corporeal or environmental, the man’s nervous tic sends everyone around him to his neurologist’s office by the end of the film.
Archiving “Epidemics”: Fatal Germ or Financial Gimmick?
There was no greater selling point for a slapstick film comedy than comparing its laughing effects to those of an epidemic. Viewers flocked to watch amusing contagion gags that promised to incite uncontrollable audience laughter. For example, according to The Nickelodeon, A Flirty Affliction (1910), a gender-reversed remake of Contagious Nervous Twitching, in which a young woman’s facial spasms are mistaken for sexual flirting, was guaranteed to set off a convulsive epidemic in the audience. The Moving Picture World promised that the Vitagraph comedy Grin and Win (1909), about a “sour-faced family” who buys a Billiken that turns them into a family radiating happiness, would make audiences laugh heartily. “The spirit of the thing is contagious and before the audience knows it everyone is laughing.” Likewise, in Matrimonial Epidemic (1911), a slapstick comedy about an epidemic of matrimony, “the love germ finds lodgment and develops to laughable proportions.” Last but not least, The San Francisco Dramatic Review described Seven Days (1910) as a “raging epidemic of fun, laughter, merriment, and all other jolly complications.” Affective contagion offered a lucrative gimmick for voracious film advertisers, and pandemic-themed sight gags were their ace in the hole.
Though clearly the ploy of an expanding capitalist industry, these hyperbolic metaphors collided headlong with tangible outbreaks of deadly disease. Even before the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic, recurring waves of illness threatened the livelihood of filmmakers and movie theaters. Polio bedeviled the industry from 1912 until long after the 1918 flu outbreak. Children under 16 were banned from going to the movies. Variety wrote in 1912 that “the infantile epidemic has done a great injury to show business,” as the police had issued an order preventing children under 15 from attending local theaters. Partial closures, age-based prohibitions, and other safety precautions were implemented across the United States. In 1917, The Moving Picture Weekly described polio as “one of the most serious menaces which has ever faced the moving picture exhibitors,” lamenting the steep decline in daily box-office receipts caused by the loss of young audiences. In summer 1918, it was again polio, not influenza, that forced movie theaters across the country, from New York to Iowa to California, to close for more than a month.
Perhaps it was the partial quarantines prompted by polio’s slow spread that led exhibitors to remain somewhat cavalier in the face of influenza. In December 1918, The Springfield News-Record published a scandalous editorial titled “Common Sense and the ‘Flu’,” declaring that “patience has ceased to be a virtue” and describing mandatory closures as “ridiculous.” Portentous symptoms were debated not for their contagion but for their unpredictable timing. “How is a theatre manager to know whether a patron has a cough by looking him in the eye?” lamented one nervous employee, adding, “How can he tell whether or not the ticket holder will sneeze while he is in the place?” As we remember from Cayenne Pepper in a Street Cab, the urge to sneeze can be set off by anything from nervous suggestion to edible spices.
In the early 20th century, diseases such as typhus, yellow fever, cholera, influenza, polio, measles, and rubella loomed large as mortal threats to public health and to individuals, who might contract them in any communal space, from the streetcar to the marketplace to the movie theater. The rise in 1905 of seedy, storefront “nickelodeon” theaters, where spectators were packed like sardines into unventilated rooms, raised public health concerns about sanitation. Scarlet fever closed a swath of movie theaters in Chicago in 1906, in New York in 1907, in Ohio in 1910, and in Omaha in 1917, though an alliance of theater owners won an appeal against regional commissioners to keep the theaters open. Then as now, economic incentives butted heads with public health precautions.
The unresolved tensions between ticket sales and infected audiences also shaped the rhetoric of the film press, which launched a fervent propaganda campaign to trivialize deadly epidemics in order to ward off the financial threats facing the film industry. The movie industry actively weaponized the terminology of epidemics, using the term contagion specifically as an incitement to fun, laughter, happiness, and amusement. During the 1911 typhoid epidemic, for example, which kept customers away from movie theaters, a leading film distribution company widely ran the following ad: “CREATES AN EPIDEMIC OF ENTHUSIASM WHEREVER SHOWN.”
In 1918, amid quarantines and nationwide closures, Variety wrote: “Happiness is the most contagious thing in the world, a thousand times more so than the flu.” Variety was, without a doubt, an extreme case. Contagious happiness battled dangerous diseases in a zero-sum game that pitted affective capitalism against killjoy health regulations. Photoplay gave pride of place to these words from a reader’s letter: “I hope the health authorities, in their efforts to protect public health in movie theaters, won’t forbid us to laugh at Charlie Chaplin on the grounds that fun is contagious.” As Max Horkheimer and T. W. Adorno so aptly remind us, “Fun is a medicinal bath. The pleasure industry never fails to prescribe it.” But a Frankfurt School Marxist would frown on this specious comparison between contagious flu and salutary laughter.
Off the screen, Seven Days , a 1910 stage comedy, was praised as “a quarantine comedy through and through. Quarantines come with epidemics, and Seven Days is a raging epidemic of fun, laughter, merriment, and all other jolly complications.” Similarly, in 1917 Harold Lloyd’s Lonesome Luke character set off “an epidemic of laughter,” and Motion Picture News wrote that The Kaiser: The Beast of Berlin (1918) produced “a contagious state of mind.” “‘A whole German army couldn’t have handled that crowd,” said one observer. To invoke Le Bon (a French social psychologist) in the context of patriotism and xenophobia, the germs of a suggestible psychic complex were the entertainment industry’s swift response to threats of disruption, from world war to public health disasters.
Women’s laughs and smiles were especially marketable; Helen Duval’s “hearty, contagious and irresistible” laugh, for example, propped up an otherwise lame vaudeville routine that Variety would later compare to “chop suey.” From the female throat to convulsing bodies: Motion Picture News called Vivian Martin’s smiles in Mirandy Smiles (1918) “as contagious as the flu.” Vivian’s “emotional qualities,” which blended sentiment with comedy, contributed greatly to a film that promised a cheerful escape from “gloomy war pictures.”
In this collage of quotations, which I have gathered from the years 1903-1919, film industry discourse described the following phenomena as “epidemics”:
Censorship, white slave films, moving stage productions, labor unionization, reformist boycotts, midnight revues, rowdyism, freak legislative provisions, Charlie Chaplin comedies, depictions of gun violence, Theda Bara-ism (after the silent film actress), groundbreaking technology patents, movie stars buying expensive cars, films dramatizing fatal heart disease, the proliferation of “star-owned companies,” bad photoplays, rising admission prices, the rise of feature-length films, troublesome state film rights, unwholesome films, and, of course, film itself (that is, the passion for cinema).
Although deadly epidemics, from typhoid to scarlet fever and from polio to influenza, were everywhere among moviegoers in these years, the happiness virus always got the better of the epidemic virus. Or, as a pseudonymous Shadowland writer put it in 1919: “Since everything is contagious, laughter, good nature and cheer as much as diseases, permit me, dear audience, to remain your obedient servant. O.B. Joyful.”
Epidemic Affect and Bodily Contagion in the Time of COVID-19
“Laugh, and the world laughs with you; weep, and you weep alone”—except during quarantine. At a time when our sociality is so thoroughly mediated by screens, what do we expect from our images? Depending on recurring outbreaks and regional authorities, Zoom meetings, virtual cinema, and online happy hours will hold sway for the foreseeable future. If COVID-19 were transmitted through the screen, as in a Medusa-style horror film like The Ring or Bird Box or Videodrome , where the copy itself becomes a source of the virus, perhaps it could rescue us from apocalyptic Zoom misery. On the other hand, nothing is lonelier than watching live comedy shows in which canned audience merriment is added to pre-packaged monologues pulled out of the freezer in an empty studio, as in programs like Last Week Tonight and Saturday Night Live (for now renamed Saturday Night Live at Home). With apologies to the famous Marxist critique, when we are too alienated or too exhausted to laugh by ourselves, not even the laugh track will laugh for us anymore.
As laughter takes on a traumatic affective urgency as a way to shake off the morbidly anxious zeitgeist, this laughing fit is only a drop in the bucket in the age of COVID-19. “Audiences are affected—and infected—by the laughter of others,” we read in Julian Hanich, The Audience Effect. Yet laughter’s key feature, its collective contagiousness through physical proximity, disappears during social distancing. For audiences now quarantined at home, it is perhaps horror or the thriller, rather than comedy, that takes on real therapeutic value. Steven Soderbergh’s brilliant Contagion (2011), for example, jumped from 270th to second place on the list of the most popular films in the Warner Bros. catalog in March 2020. Along with the Ebola film Outbreak (1995), the South Korean sci-fi drama Flu (2013), and the bird-flu TV series Pandemic (2007), Contagion offers anxious viewers both a release of dramatic tension and the speculative comfort that, if we can imagine it, at least it will not happen on a catastrophic scale (by the end of Contagion, some 70 million people have died).
Still, the film’s spectacle of bodily contagion powerfully soothes viewers’ frayed and isolated nerves. As Sarah Keller’s Anxious Cinephilia puts it, “The variable nature of cinema naturally gives rise to variable relationships with cinema.” Films are most therapeutic when their ambivalent conflicts viscerally coincide with our own. Call it contagion or perhaps anxious identification, it is certainly not an epidemic. “Social feeling […] is shared feeling,” writes Sara Ahmed, and therefore contagious. That is precisely what makes affect so dangerous. There was no shortage of “shared feeling” among the “LIBERATE” protesters who defied the quarantine and gathered with Confederate flags and rifles to demand that the state reopen businesses. By contrast, in Lachen in der U-Bahn (2011), a woman’s amused antics in a packed car on a German subway spread merrily among the other passengers like an epidemic.
So where is the line between anxiety and pleasure when it comes to the spectacle of hysterical bodily contagion? Personally, I adore the sight gag of tumbling, stomping bodies in excessive proximity, of convulsive yawners, sneezers, twitchers, tango dancers, and old-time laughers. Whether these unruly masses will go down in the record as anxious dread or as cathartic comedy is a question for the collective political stage, one that goes beyond the analytics of social affect. Revolutionary affect should not be contagious like a germ, but creative and provocative like a carnivalesque general strike.
This piece was written in March-April 2020, before the global political uprisings against white supremacy, police brutality, and structural racism that erupted in the wake of the murder of George Floyd. I see the recent protests, which have radiated political anger and resilient spontaneity, as a “carnivalesque general strike” that parlays affective contagion into collective solidarity.
Maggie Hennefeld
Translation: Murat Müftüoğlu
To read the original article, please click here.
There was no funnier sight gag in early cinema than the catastrophe of epidemic contagion. In The Yawner (1907), a man’s involuntary yawning transmits irresistibly to his housekeeper, a squadron of military soldiers, day drinkers at a café, a police officer, and an inanimate portrait of a woman, who’s roused from her stasis by the impulsion to yawn. Habitual tics such as yawning, laughing, sneezing, hiccupping, itching, coughing, barking, sobbing, and blinking spread like wildfire when too many nervous bodies found themselves together in close quarters. In Laughing Gas (1907), a black woman’s joyful hysterics steamroll the public sphere — convulsing white workers, black gospel revelers, and several police officers — after her dentist gives her nitrous oxide (a.k.a. laughing gas) during a tooth extraction. The craze for tango dancing, of all things, possesses hot-to-trot bodies in The Epidemic (1914), while That Fatal Sneeze (1907) takes the perils of involuntary outbursts to their mortal conclusion. (A man dies from sneezing!) The point is that any such bodily symptom was fair game for epidemic exposure — from a sneeze or a yawn to a belly laugh and the penchant for tango dancing.
Should we find it disturbing that these movies were all comedies? What’s so funny about the vulnerability of isolated bodies succumbing to the spastic will of the roiling masses? Just as zombie movies and other grossly corporeal films evoke anxious dread and clammy discomfort, a little haphazard excess can go a long way toward tipping the balance from horror to slapstick. But what is the line between anxiety and enjoyment when it comes to the spectacle of hysterical bodily contagion?
Laughter is often described in suspiciously hysterical terms. The euphemism first took hold in the late 19th century when the notion of laughter as “hysterical” shifted in meaning from nervous breakdown to convulsive enjoyment. Prior to that time, “hysterical laughter” was the last thing you ever wanted to experience with your body. It rang out in anguished peals from psychiatric asylums to incidents of mass psychogenic illness, such as the 1787 Cotton Mill Outbreak and 1962 Tanganyika Laughter Epidemic. Neither entirely real nor purely illusion, hysteria lingers in that gray zone between anxiety and transmission. This is no doubt what also makes it ripe terrain for comedy.
Comic pantomime has a foothold in mimicry, which is likewise essential to the symptomology of hysteria. From the Greek word for uterus (hystera), physicians believed a woman’s womb could start wandering around her body in cases of dormancy or disuse. A pestilence among spinsters and widows, it further made mischief by imitating organic processes of the zones it traversed; for example, if the womb got into the throat, it might create a sensation of choking (i.e., “globus hystericus”). If it got into the foot, it could trigger either paralysis or dancing mania, spreading contagiously like in the 1518 Dancing Plague or 1374 Dancing Mania that shadowed the Black Death. Incidentally, tango and polka dancing were among the foremost hazards of slapstick contagion comedies (see Kristina Köhler’s extensive research on this topic). Whether comic or tragic, the notion of hysteria has long conveyed a severe disorientation between suggestible mimesis and organic affliction. Is the patient truly suffering, or merely a malingerer? Hysteria’s hallmark is imitation, further implicating it as a prime suspect — and inevitable whiplash — amid mass outbreaks of epidemic disease.
Affective Contagion in Early Film Comedy
In the very early 20th century, the mass migration of people and rapid swarming of laboring bodies into fast-paced, capitalist cities provided a groundwork for the visual catharsis of epidemic-themed comedies. There’s something uniquely therapeutic about the absurd spectacle of bodily contagion when enjoyed from a distance. Cayenne Pepper in a Street Cab (1903) lampoons the nervous attractions of sneezing when a lady with armful of groceries accidentally drops her package of cayenne pepper on an overly full street car. The result is an “epidemic of sneezing among the passengers, which is more easily imagined than described,” boasted the Selig Polyscope Company.
But affective suggestion also served as a breeding ground for conspiracy theories and xenophobic attitudes. Gustave Le Bon compared the contagion of ideas, sentiments, and emotions to “microbes” in his 1895 study of crowd psychology. Gut feelings gain momentum in the petri dish of modern crowds, where unschooled passions are given free rein over elitist expertise. Early films depict these teeming hazards of mob psychology in purely somatic terms. A Contagious Nervousness (1908) burlesques the explosion of anger that germinates from a husband and wife’s domestic squabble, but quickly spreads to essential workers and eventually barnyard animals. Other epidemic-themed comedies hilariously mistake the contagion for the cause. An All-Wool Garment (1908) pulls a bait-and-switch between affect and underwear, when a gentleman is so tormented by his itchy new garments that his office co-workers, streetcar passengers, and even fellow movie spectators cannot resist that urge to scratch. Confusion between device and transmission comes full circle, the crisis resolved by the man’s purchase of new cotton skivvies. Never mind the unruly masses of prickling bodies who’d never donned itchy garments in the first place. Their compulsion to relieve themselves is collateral damage from the desire to imagine dangerous affective contagion in ludicrously epidemic terms.
Neurasthenia and hysteria were often viewed as wastebaskets for any unexplainable ailment, meaning that if you couldn’t accurately diagnose, then hystericize it. Potential symptoms ranged from somnambulism, paralysis, and hallucinations to political excitement, novel reading, and “masturbation & tobacco.” Mysterious in origin, overdetermined in meaning (from displaced desire to overt defiance), and unpredictable in transmission, the amorphous morphology of hysteria rendered the disease dually fascinating and horrifying. Endemic ambivalence about epidemic hysteria was not lost on early filmmakers of slapstick comedy, who harnessed film’s spreading popularity despite the rampant anxieties about its toxic immorality.
How to prove that nervous contagion is innocuous? Make it fun! Theater exhibitors even advised turning up the houselights so viewers could espy their neighbor’s writhing, spasmodic body and then “no longer keep laughs exclusively to themselves.” Similarly, a man’s neurotic disorder afflicts “all within sight” in Contagious Nervous Twitching (1908), according to The Film Index. His involuntary tic has roughly the same effect as a woman’s fetching physique in A Very Fine Lady (1908), where her public presence provokes men’s libidinous ogling and causes a disastrous disruption of work. In contrast, the nervous twitcher wreaks havoc through mimetic bodily contagion. A janitor catches his knee twirl and topples down the stairs; a hod-carrier mounted atop a ladder contracts his spastic convulsions and then plasters a surveying architect in mortar; a wedding party turns into an epileptic orgy; and so forth. Affective suggestion animates even the inorganic, as in The Yawner, convulsing a concrete statue into a neurasthenic tableau-vivant. Do germs reside in our living bodies or in the spaces we inhabit? Whether corporeal or environmental, the man’s nervous twitching lands the whole public sphere in his neurologist’s office by the end of the film.
Archiving “Epidemics”: Fatal Germ or Financial Gimmick?
There was no greater selling point for a slapstick film comedy than comparing its laughing effects to those of an epidemic. Viewers flocked to watch ludicrous contagion gags that promised to incite uncontrollable audience laughter. For example, A Flirty Affliction (1910) — which is basically a gender-reverse remake of Contagious Nervous Twitching, in which a young woman’s facial spasms are mistaken for sexual flirting — was guaranteed to “send a convulsive epidemic around the audience,” according to The Nickelodeon. The Vitagraph comedy Grin and Win (1909), about a “sour-faced family” who buys a Billiken that enthuses them to radiate happiness, will “cause a hearty laugh,” promised The Moving Picture World. “The spirit of the thing is contagious and before the audience knows it everyone is laughing.” Likewise, in Matrimonial Epidemic (1911) — a slapstick comedy about epidemic matrimony — “the love germ finds lodgment and develops to laughable proportions.” Last but not least, Seven Days (1910) was described by The San Francisco Dramatic Review as a “raging epidemic of fun, laughter, merriment, and all other jolly complications.” Affective contagion offered a lucrative gimmick for voracious film advertisers, and pandemic-themed sight gags were their ace in the hole.
Though clearly the ploy of an expanding capitalist industry, hyperbolic metaphors collided headlong with tangible outbreaks of deadly disease. Even before the 1918 influenza plague, recurring waves of illness repeatedly threatened the livelihood of filmmakers and exhibitors. Polio bedeviled the industry from 1912 until long after the 1918 flu outbreak. Children under 16 were even banned from going to the movies. “The infantile epidemic has done a great injury to show business,” reported Variety in 1912, “result[ing] in the police issuing an order preventing children under 15 from attending local theatres.” Partial closures, age-based prohibitions, and other safety precautions were implemented on temporary and regional bases across the United States. The Moving Picture Weekly described polio in 1917 as “one of the most serious menaces which has ever faced the moving picture exhibitors,” lamenting the steep decline in “daily receipts” caused by the loss of juvenile attendance. In summer 1918, it was again infantile paralysis — not influenza — that mandated theaters to close for over a month across the country, from New York to Iowa to California.
Perhaps it was polio’s slow-burn incitement to partial quarantine that provoked exhibitors to remain somewhat cavalier in the face of influenza. In December 1918, The Springfield News-Record published a scandalous editorial, “Common Sense and the ‘Flu’,” declaring that “[p]atience has ceased to be a virtue” and describing mandatory closures as “ridiculous.” Portentous symptoms were debated not for their contagion but for their unpredictable timing. “How is a theatre manager to know whether a patron has a cough by looking him in the eye?” lamented one nervous employee, and “How can he tell whether or not the ticket holder will sneeze while he is in the place?” As we remember from Cayenne Pepper in a Street Cab, the impetus for a sneeze can run the gamut from nervous suggestion to digestible condiments.
In the early 20th century, typhus, yellow fever, cholera, influenza, polio, measles, and rubella all loomed large as mortal threats to public health that individuals might contract in any communal space — from the streetcar, to the marketplace, to the cinema. The rise of seedy, store-front “nickelodeon” theaters in 1905, where spectators crowded like sardines into unventilated rooms, raised further public health concerns about insanitation. Scarlet fever closed a swath of movie theaters in Chicago in 1906, in New York City in 1907, in Ohio in 1910, and Omaha in 1917, where an alliance of exhibitors won an appeal against regional commissioners to keep the theaters open. Then as now, economic incentives butted heads with public health precautions.
This piece was written in March–April 2020, before the global political uprisings against white supremacy, police brutality, and structural racism erupted in the wake of the murder of George Floyd. I very much see the recent protests — which have radiated poetic anger and resilient spontaneity — in the vein of a “carnivalesque general strike” that parlays affective contagion into collective solidarity.
Continue reading on LARB’s website.
This year, Jaws celebrates its 45th birthday: the film that forever changed the meaning of summer cinema around the world, shaped the studios’ box-office strategy, and made an entire generation rethink its relationship with swimming in the sea. Seen from today, with both its political subtext and its technical choices, Jaws is in fact a very young film that still captures the spirit of every era. While there is something fitting about watching its final screening, at exactly 45 years old, on the screen set up by the sea in Beykoz, it is impossible not to look back, from where we stand today, at A Summer Night Cinema, which brought this film to us, and at everything it showed us.
On the open-air screen, from In the Mood for Love to Call Me by Your Name, from Paris, Texas to Ema, we met films from many countries and genres all summer long. Arriving at just the right place and time, these films seemed to say a great deal about a condition of never quite reaching one another that belongs to our present. In the end, they were all brimming with relationships that suffer from a failure to communicate, from drawn-out separations, and from unexpected partings of ways.
In the program where we also watched Leon: The Professional, the film once again left us alone with the question, “Could you love an assassin?” In a world where loving and being loved has begun to grow rather difficult, at a time when most of us were spending more time with ourselves than ever, perhaps we remembered this thing called love once more as a way of setting out, first of all, from ourselves. Just as In the Mood for Love brings time and space to a standstill, and Call Me by Your Name speeds them up. With Ema’s flooding, overflowing music and colors, and the boundless plains of Paris, Texas, we reached out from the Kundura screen toward the borders of love, which are always bound up with separation.
Now that we have come to the end of a summer night’s dream, while the world still feels as though it is caught in a strange sleep amid all its uncertainty, this selection also opened up room to reflect on how cinema might once again become an escape and a safe space. We don’t know when we will return to movie theaters, but we are so glad that we had such a summer night.
Eray Yıldız
Prantik Narayan Basu is an Indian screenwriter, cinematographer, editor and film director. A graduate in Film Direction from the Film and Television Institute of India, Basu saw his short film Sakhisona screened at BFI London, Mumbai and Rotterdam, where it won the Tiger Award for Best Short Film. His film Rang Mahal (Palace of Colors) was screened at Berlin, IDFA, Signes de Nuit Thailand, Concorto Film Festival, DMZ Docs, Nomadica Bologna, Arthouse Asia and the Bilbao International Documentary and Short Film Festival.
Prantik Narayan Basu sat down with Filmatique for an exclusive conversation as part of Talents 2020.
FILMATIQUE: Thank you for sharing your films. Rang Mahal (Palace of Colors) was quite mesmerizing – dreamlike and seductive. To me, in its fairy-tale, mythic and non-human aspects, Sakhisona in a way created a database, a lexicon, for Rang Mahal. I would like to begin our conversation with the architecture of myth, history and geography in Rang Mahal. How did you build it? What was the process that led you there?
PRANTIK NARAYAN BASU: Thank you. I like the reference to architecture. I often think about it as films unfold themselves in time and space. My film practice is very closely tied to myths and folklore. Myths and folklore work like a time capsule, an entry point into a history of anecdotes, and they give us access to a society’s system of values. I love reading and listening to them, and as a filmmaker I always enjoy sharing the things I love.
These timeless stories are not only structural marvels; they are also far more progressive than today’s forms of storytelling. The creation myths in Rang Mahal, for example, speak of a harmonious coexistence of humans and nature in which humans are not at the center of the narrative. Our popular-culture outlook has placed humans at the center of every narrative. I believe cinema has the capacity to go beyond this and create different narrative possibilities within a different frame of reference.
The Khori Dungri, or chalk-stone hill, that we see in the film was formed over years of erosion and sedimentation. The local people use its pigments to repair and decorate the cracks in the walls of their homes. Like the rocks in their many different hues, the Santhali creation myth exists in thousands of different versions. I asked some of the locals, and they told me that because these myths are passed down orally, they change with every telling and retelling. I was fascinated by the idea of the same story existing in different versions. Using this as the aural layer, I began to build the visual layer with the rocks, the hills, the trees and the village, sometimes connecting directly with the story, and sometimes leaving it open-ended so that viewers could create their own version.
FLMTQ: I like this idea of erosion when I think about the gradually expanding mode of your film. By expanding, I mean the film’s fairy-tale, mythic mode of storytelling, which is not ethnographic or documentary in style. It is very vivid, very contemporary and enveloping. What’s more, the topography of the place becomes part of the whole, and the place tells its own temporal stories.
My question starts from an essay by Ashis Nandy, “A Landscape of Secret and Incommunicable Selves,” on the colonial project of rational enlightenment. According to its own hierarchical norms, this project held that the myths, superstitions and folklore of the colonized were apolitical, ahistorical and irrational.
Your films, however, blend folklore with history. And this is, of course, history, because it tells how people live and how they have lived. It tells what they believe and how they have built their lives. Can you tell us how you arrived at the idea that folklore and oral storytelling are the history of all the people, or the generations of people, living in rural areas? How is history constructed in ways we don’t think about, or that we don’t see as textbook or official history?
PNB: If we take the ritual on its own terms, the Santhals see it as a kind of repair, in both the literal and the figurative sense. They also regard these myths, told again and again during the days of the Sohrai (a late harvest festival), as microcosms. In Rang Mahal, for example, the story of Thakur Jivi tells us that God created the animals first, and that humans entered the picture later. The Santhals are acutely aware of their status as a surplus on the planet, and they live in a harmonious relationship with their environment. For them, a tree is not just a tree, and a pond is not just a simple hole in the ground for storing water: they are bound up with family values.
For far too long, we have convinced ourselves that we know what the concept of “development” means from the Adivasi (Indigenous) point of view. In this context, it is important to mention the Pathalgadi (stone slab) movement, since many Adivasi villages in India have declared themselves “self-governing areas.” The relevant sections of the Indian Constitution that grant them the right to self-government have been inscribed on large stone slabs, usually placed right at the entrance to the village. Ironically, a community that had no written language until recent years was, even as we speak, writing its own history. And let us hope that one day the world will come to realize that there are belief systems different from ours, possibly more rational and more sustainable in the long run.
FLMTQ: This is an urgently needed idea, and I think it has been lost to an incredible degree in this late-capitalist, extractivist world. Many environmental justice movements are trying to find new solutions and are searching for a post-human future. It is a matter of quite literally going to Indigenous communities and asking them how they have lived. Because they live in unity, in a non-exploitative way with non-human elements, and they don’t see themselves as separate from them.
Now the knowledge of Indigenous communities has begun to be taken into account, whereas before it was considered very marginal and insignificant by the mainstream, and even by the independent worlds of art, film and literature. So how do you approach a community without looking at it through the eyes of a sociologist, and without portraying its people as primitive or treating them paternalistically? Because that is so often the reductive view of tribal communities in different parts of the world. In light of all this, what is your approach?
PNB: The first approach is, of course, awareness. I grew up in a suburban setting, and I can’t claim to fully understand these issues. The dynamics of their relationship with nature are very complex. The best I could do was not to behave like a colonizer with my tool, that is, my camera. Because I have been working very closely with the community for some time (first on Sakhisona, and then on another documentary that is now in post-production), a certain sense of friendship has grown between us. My main stance was not to intrude on their privacy or to interrogate them, which, in my view, would have been counterproductive. When we approach a community as a cumulative subject and enter a space with our camera, we adopt an attitude that leaves no room for any fluid interaction. This can be seen in the archival portraits I used as a counterpoint in the film. I used not the people themselves as subjects, but only their voices, which are so rarely heard in mainstream films. I find it problematic to stop people in front of the camera and film their facial features. That is why I chose to film from a certain distance and to present the world I wanted to convey as it is. I think this helped me build a closer intimacy with them than before, and to understand their world as they see it.
FLMTQ: Speaking of entering a way of life from which we could learn so much, I found the soundscape you created and your sound design quite captivating. You used folklore and a narrator’s voice, but there was such emphasis on the sounds of the trees, the birds and the insects, that constant sonic texture, and such continual attention to fine detail. It might sound like mere noise to us, but it is actually a language in its own right. Was this something you consciously set out to capture?
PNB: This is something my sound designer Ananda Gupta and I discussed at length and arrived at after a great deal of trial and error. Having natural sounds play a crucial role alongside the narrator’s voice was part of our plan, but we decided on the extent of their impact during the shoot. The voices of Balika Hembram and Sanjay Tudu carry a certain poetry and the intimacy of telling a story to a friend. This allowed us to drift into dreams and to imagine an almost radio-play-like soundscape for the story being told. Here, however, we used visuals that were sometimes complementary and sometimes contrasting. Put simply, you could say we approached it as if we were playing a game.
FLMTQ: So you are working on a feature-length documentary. Is that your next project?
PNB: Yes. I have just finished the edits, and as soon as the lockdown ends we will complete the sound design and color grading. It will be called Bela, and it is about a group of dancers who appeared in my previous film. It will also be an observational portrait of a small village of the same name, in which we will see the rhythms and rituals of their art and their work, and the ambiguous threshold between the two.
I have finished the screenplay for Dengue, which will be my first fiction feature, and we have received support from the Hubert Bals Fund of the International Film Festival Rotterdam. It is the story of two men who meet by chance during a sudden summer rain, and of their relationship, which turns into a passionate love affair. I developed the project at the PJLF Three Rivers Residency in Italy, and we plan to start shooting next year.
Interview by: Ritika Biswas Guest Curator, Filmatique
Translation: Murat Müftüoğlu
In the first decades of the twentieth century, five African-American women filmmakers helped to establish the US cinema industry and to better the representation of African-Americans on film. Hailing from different regions of the country, from Kansas City, Missouri, to Montclair, New Jersey, to Washington DC, they were geographically separated but united by a belief that the motion picture was socially transformative. Some tried to make a living for a short time from their film work while others seemed to have made one motion picture and disappeared from the field altogether. These women wanted to present a vision of the life of African Americans that was authentic, and in attempting this they were often entrepreneurial, arranging theatrical exhibition and distribution or taking film prints directly to audiences themselves in order to reach more communities. Apart from their risk-taking and trailblazing, their efforts to shift the prevailing view of African Americans is what binds them, marking their achievements as emblematic of a movement to establish the validity of the lives of African Americans. While the recent wave of interest in African-American director-producer Oscar Micheaux and the “race movie” makers of his time has helped to confirm and affirm the existence of black independent filmmakers in the silent era, the resulting research largely uncovered only the men involved.
Taking a second look, however, we discover not just African-American giants but women involved with their husbands in creative teamwork—best exemplified by Micheaux’s second wife, Alice B. Russell, and Eslanda Robeson, the wife of singer, stage and screen actor, and activist Paul Robeson.
However, with the exception of Eloyce King Patrick Gist, who has received some critical attention for her work making 16mm educational religious shorts and Zora Neale Hurston, known primarily because of her work as a writer and ethnographer, African-American women filmmakers have not come to the attention of historians. Yet in their own time the achievement and consequently the attribute “first woman filmmaker” was important to the African-American press. The press claimed on separate occasions a year apart that both Tressie Souders and Maria P. Williams, also both from Kansas City, Missouri, should be acknowledged as the “first.”
It could also be argued that the first female filmmaker of African-American descent was Madame E. Touissant Welcome, born Jennie Louis Van Der Zee, sister of famed photographer James Van Der Zee. She directed a film of black soldiers from World War I, part of a twelve-part documentary produced in partnership with her husband, E. Touissant Welcome, for the Touissant Motion Picture Exchange (Dixon 20). Thus, in retrospect we see not just individuals but a group of women, all breaking barriers of different kinds.
That the black community pinned their hopes on such women is suggested by the title of a 1921 article in The Competitor: “Our Growing Importance in the Amusement World.” Here, author Birdie Gilmore is mentioned as having had her Jungle God produced by the Delsarte Film Company and reference is made to another story accepted by the Metro Company (38). In 1915, the Chicago Defender mentions the “three-reel drama” Shadowed by the Devil in their section “Among the Movies” (5). The feature-length Shadowed by the Devil was the only product of Chicago’s Unique Film Company, which may have been founded by husband and wife producers. Mrs. M. Webb is the source of the original story for the film directed by her husband, Miles M. Webb (Sampson, 183). Considered together, Tressie Souders, Maria P. Williams, Eloyce King Patrick Gist, Alice B. Russell, Eslanda Robeson, Mrs. M. Webb, Birdie Gilmore, Madame E. Touissant Welcome, and Zora Neale Hurston all deserve recognition and a firm place in the history of silent cinema.
Drusilla Dunjee Houston, who wrote a screenplay she titled “Spirit of the South: The Maddened Mob,” should also be added to this group as an African-American woman who wanted to make a difference in the era of the silent film. Houston’s screenplay, most likely the earliest African-American response to Thomas Dixon and D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915), but never produced as a motion picture, represents one woman’s almost decade-long documentation of the destructive race-based social ideas espoused by Thomas Dixon in his novels, staged plays, and later The Birth of a Nation. These ideas represented a violent social stratification taking root in the American West and throughout the country.
The recent repatriation to the US of 35mm prints of Oscar Micheaux’s silent-era Within Our Gates (1920) and Symbol of the Unconquered (1920), from archives in Spain and Belgium respectively, has helped to revive historical interest in early African-American independent filmmaking, as documented in the Oscar Micheaux and His Circle touring catalogue (xxiii). These fortunate discoveries have also inspired new hope that more motion pictures, if only in fragments, may be found. We continue to search for clues to the existence of other “lost” titles as well as evidence that helps us to fill in the sketchy figures of these women who took up producing, acting, directing, and writing in an earlier age of institutionalized racism.
This article is taken from WFPP official website.
In 1958, Tony Curtis was at a Hollywood party when Billy Wilder took him aside. Wilder was planning to make a film about two musicians who dress as women so they can join an all-female band, and he asked Curtis to play one of the musicians. Curtis was delighted to receive the offer but wasn’t sure why such a celebrated writer-director wanted to use him. “You’re the prettiest boy in town,” Wilder replied. “Who else am I going to use?”
Faced with the question of why Some Like It Hot came first in BBC Culture’s poll of the greatest comedies in cinema, it is very tempting to answer in much the same way. Wilder’s sparkling masterpiece uses not only the prettiest boy in town, but also the dazzling sex symbol Marilyn Monroe and Jack Lemmon, one of the most gifted comedians of his day. The film has beautiful women, sinful gangsters, the glittering seaside setting of the ’20s, and a magnificent collection of songs.
It is so meticulously structured that it glides from moment to moment with the grace of an Olympic figure skater, and Wilder and IAL Diamond’s screwball dialogue is so superb that every line not only carries a joke or a second meaning, but also echoes a line from another moment in the film. To quote one of its characters, it is a feast of “thrills, laughs and fun.” To quote another, it deserves to be “the best thing that’s happened to us since the Graf Zeppelin.” So why was it chosen as the greatest comedy ever made? The answer is simple. Which other film would we have chosen?
There is more to Some Like It Hot than its glittering surface. Among its main themes, alongside romantic comedy, friendship and crime, the film celebrates tolerance, acceptance and the possibility of transformation. That is something we need now more than ever.
Wilder took the film’s basic premise from a French farce, Fanfare d’Amour (1935), and from Fanfaren der Liebe (1951), which he described as a third-rate German film. Its heroes, saxophonist Joe (Curtis) and bass player Jerry (Lemmon), are struggling to scrape a living in the cold climate and harsh conditions of Chicago when they witness the 1929 St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, or a version of that legendary event.
To escape the city’s most ruthless gangster, Spats Colombo (George Raft), they hide out for three weeks at a hotel in Florida with an all-female jazz band, Sweet Sue’s Society Syncopators, disguising themselves as Josephine and Daphne (“I never did like the name Geraldine,” says Jerry). On the sleeper train heading south, both of them fall for the band’s sexy ukulele player, Sugar Kane (Monroe). When Sugar Kane tells Joe/Josephine that she hopes to seduce a millionaire in Florida, Joe, once they arrive at the Seminole-Ritz Hotel, steals the band manager’s clothes and, with an accent borrowed from Cary Grant, passes himself off as Junior, heir to the Shell Oil fortune.
One of the film’s many turning points comes when Sugar Kane meets Junior on the beach and he doesn’t pursue her too eagerly. He plays hard to get and keeps her at arm’s length. When Sugar tells him that her band specializes in “hot jazz,” Joe smirks: “I guess some like it hot. But I personally prefer classical music.” Sugar doesn’t miss a beat and comes out with the lie that she “spent three years at the Sheboygan Conservatory of Music,” a claim Joe/Josephine overheard the night before. “Good school,” murmurs Joe/Junior. Sugar is every bit as skilled a liar as he is. Meanwhile, Jerry/Daphne has been asked out by Osgood (Joe E. Brown), an elderly and probably short-sighted businessman, and their enchanted night leads to yet another thrilling development. In the morning, Jerry announces to Joe that he is engaged to Osgood. But Joe objects, saying there are “laws, conventions” that must be observed. When Jerry finally confesses to his fiancé that he is a man, Osgood responds with the film’s exemplary closing line: “Nobody’s perfect.”
“Sweet or hot”
In short, Some Like It Hot is the story of people who lie and cheat in order to bed or swindle others. Wilder is famous for dark, cynical films (see Sunset Boulevard and Double Indemnity), and Some Like It Hot could be filed alongside them. Yet it warms the audience’s hearts so much that it lifts them skyward as if in a hot-air balloon. Rather than condemning its unscrupulous antiheroes, it treats them with respect and sympathy, daring to look radical in 1959, as it still does today.
Think about how the film’s script would be handled in a Hollywood comedy today. Joe and Jerry would be punished for their schemes. Sugar would catch Joe out and make him apologize, and the audience would have to watch the misery the two inflict on each other before she forgave him. Then he and Jerry would use their talents to wring a confession out of Spats Colombo. And, no doubt, the heterosexuality of Jerry and Osgood would be firmly reaffirmed. Think of Judd Apatow’s comedies, for example. They all conclude that breaking the “laws, conventions” for a while is fun, as long as they are firmly put back in place just before the closing credits roll.
For all its meticulousness, Some Like It Hot is too carefree to force anyone to face the facts. When Sugar learns that Joe has deceived her, she runs straight into his arms. When Osgood learns that Jerry has deceived him, he doesn’t react at all. The message here is that there is nothing wrong with faking it until you make it. Experimenting with a new identity can lead you to become a better, happier person. It can help you survive. And if you are lucky, you might even find someone who accepts you as whoever you want to be, perfect or not.
This production, with its inclusive and daring message, was also close to the hearts of the film’s creators. After all, just like the characters, they too had reinvented themselves: emigrating from Germany (Wilder) and Romania (Diamond), getting away from California foster homes (Monroe) and the streets of the Bronx (Curtis), they had left their pasts behind. For a madcap farce about two cross-dressers, Some Like It Hot is a strikingly personal, even semi-autobiographical film.
Let’s look again at Joe and Sugar’s beach scene. It was written by two men once called Samuel Wilder and Itec Domnici, and performed by a man and a woman once called Bernie Schwartz and Norma Jeane Mortenson. Schwartz, who renamed himself Tony Curtis, plays Joe pretending to be Junior, using the accent of Cary Grant, who was once called Archibald Leach. Mortenson, who renamed herself Marilyn Monroe, plays Sugar Kowalczyk, who renamed herself Sugar Kane and uses the very words Joe used while pretending to be Josephine. Not even Twelfth Night or The Importance of Being Earnest had this much fun with their characters’ identities.
Names, genders, social status… everything can change in Some Like It Hot. That is the American way.
In his memoir about the making of the film, Curtis confirms that Wilder and Diamond deliberately built this theme into the title. People, he argues, can be as changeable as the pop songs of the 1920s, which came in different styles, “sweet” or “hot,” with the choice left up to the audience. “The concept was very important to our film,” he writes. “A person could be more than one thing, depending on the time, the place, and whatever. Sweet or hot.”
Nicholas Barber
Translation: Nil Ege Özden
This article originally appeared on the BBC Culture website.
Perhaps the first job women could find in the earliest days of the film industry was coloring, in other words, hand-coloring film prints by painting them frame by frame. At least initially, because they could be exploited by being paid less than men to carry out repetitive and detailed tasks, women colorists were widely employed in the lantern slide and postcard industries in the nineteenth century. By the mid-1890s, the film industry had adopted similar labor strategies for coloring prints. Aesthetic assumptions also underpinned this practice: a persistent motif of Western color theory is the gendering of color, and in this sense women have long been assumed to be more sensitive to color. Besides being generally cheaper to employ, women were thought to be naturally better suited to the detailed work of coloring thanks to their presumed sensitivity and nimble fingers.
Sources indicate that in the mid-1890s the Edison Company employed Edmund Kuhn’s wife to hand-color prints such as the popular serpentine dance films (Yumibe, 45). According to Charles Edward Hastings, writing for Moving Picture World in 1927, there were other well-known women colorists in the US film industry at the turn of the century: “the early colorists were Mrs. Martini of West Orange, N.J., Mrs. Sarah Levy of New York City, and Mrs. Tompkins of Brooklyn, N.Y. These famous hand-coloring artists raised their art to a degree of perfection and showed admirable patience in bringing out the results of their labors” (346). However, little documentation of these women’s work has been found.
Madame Thuillier’s Company and Méliès
Fortunately, the recorded history of women colorists in France is somewhat better. Georges Méliès, for example, had his hand-coloring done from 1897 to 1912 by a firm in Vincennes run first by Élisabeth Thuillier and later by her daughter, Marie-Berthe Thuillier, who managed a workforce of more than 200 women colorists (Mazeline 74n1; Fossati 122-123; Malthête, 6-9; Yumibe 48). An earlier version of this essay credited this achievement solely to Élisabeth Thuillier; however, thanks to a wonderful discovery by Stéphanie Salmon and Jacques Malthête in the Women Film Pioneers Project, which you can find here, it has come to light that it was Berthe Thuillier who oversaw much of the film coloring previously attributed to her mother, who died in either 1904 or 1907 (Salmon and Malthête). Originally a lantern slide laboratory, the Thuillier firm began coloring films in the late 1890s and working with other companies and filmmakers such as Pathé and Raoul Grimoin-Sanson. In a 1929 interview, Berthe Thuillier described that period as follows: “I did all the coloring of Méliès’s films, and this work was done entirely by hand. I employed two hundred and twenty workers in my workshop. I spent my nights selecting and sampling the colors, and during the day the workers applied the colors according to my instructions. Each specialized worker applied only one color, and we often used more than twenty colors in a single film” (Mazeline 74n1, author’s translation). From Thuillier’s account, one can imagine how complex the firm’s coloring work was. The Thuillier firm organized its workforce along assembly-line lines and divided it by color tone to increase efficiency. Judging by the prints and print fragments surviving from the turn of the century, the colored results are magnificent.
Méliès continued to use hand-coloring in the early 1900s; the Pathé company, by contrast, began in 1903 to shift its coloring work from hand-coloring to stenciling as part of a broader project to industrialize its production methods. Although it was still a labor-intensive process, stenciling made it easier to apply dyes to positive prints. Each color in a print had its own stencil, cut by hand frame by frame according to the length of the colored sequence. Once made, the stencils could be used on multiple prints, saving time and labor on long print runs. As with hand-coloring, Pathé employed women to prepare the stencils. In 1906, the rapidly growing company tried to reach an agreement with the Thuillier firm to do this work exclusively for Pathé at its factory in Vincennes. Élisabeth and/or (more likely) Berthe Thuillier initially agreed to work with Pathé, but canceled the agreement a few weeks later upon realizing that she would have to share her authority with Madame Florimond, one of Pathé’s head colorists. Despite this setback, Pathé continued to expand its coloring workforce in 1906, more than doubling the number of its women colorists from 80 to over 200 (Yumibe 78-90).
Women Colorists as “Pathé’s Hens”
One of the more striking stories about Pathé’s colorists is Jorge Dana’s 1984 interview with Germaine Berger, published in Positif in 1992. Berger began cutting stencils for Pathé in 1911, at the age of 15, together with her sister Lucie. She had been raised strictly and, before Pathé, had worked for several years for her father (a furniture designer). Oddly enough, although she worked in the film industry, Berger was not allowed to go to the movies. As a young woman, her only experience of films was cutting stencils. Mirroring her home life, the workday at Pathé was also highly regimented. The Pathé colorists, who worked side by side, were not allowed to chat or socialize during the day. Even so, Berger loved her work, and as she and the other colorists became considerably more skilled at stenciling over time, she earned a good wage from Pathé, making 21 francs a week rather than the 15 francs a week that less-skilled male factory workers earned on average. In this way, the belief that women were naturally more sensitive to color gave Pathé’s skilled colorists an economic advantage. Yet the job also came with its own belittling epithets: because of the nest eggs they built up from their hard-earned wages, Berger and the other colorists became known around Vincennes as “poules de chez Pathé [Pathé’s hens].”
Joshua Yumibe
Translation: Nahit Evre Uçarcı
In 1958, Tony Curtis was at a Hollywood party when Billy Wilder took him aside. Wilder was planning a film about two musicians who dress up as women to join an all-girl band, and he asked Curtis to play one of the musicians. Curtis was overjoyed, but he wasn’t sure why such an illustrious writer-director would want to use him. “You’re the handsomest kid in this town,” said Wilder. “Who else am I going to use?”
Faced with the question of why Some Like It Hot has topped BBC Culture’s poll of the best ever big-screen comedies, it’s tempting to say something similar. Wilder’s glittering masterpiece doesn’t just use the handsomest kid in town (and a terrific actor, to boot), but its most radiant sex symbol, Marilyn Monroe, and one of its most dexterous comedians, Jack Lemmon. It also has a bevy of bathing beauties, a crowd of sinister mafiosi, a glamorous seaside setting in the roaring ‘20s, and a sizzling selection of songs.
It is structured so meticulously that it glides from moment to moment with the elegance of an Olympic figure skater, and the consummate screwball dialogue, by Wilder and IAL Diamond, is so polished that every line includes either a joke, a double meaning, or an allusion to a line elsewhere in the film. To quote one character, it’s a riot of “spills, thrills, laughs and games”. To quote another, it deserves to be “the biggest thing since the Graf Zeppelin”. So why was it chosen as the best comedy ever made? Simple. What else were we going to choose?
There’s more to Some Like It Hot than its sparkling surface, though. As well as being a romantic comedy, a buddy movie, a crime caper, and a musical, the film is an anthem in praise of tolerance, acceptance, and the possibility of transformation. It’s an anthem that we need to hear now more than ever.
Wilder borrowed the basic set-up from a French farce, Fanfare d’amour (1935), and a remake, Fanfaren der Liebe (1951), which he dismissed as “a very low-budget, very third-class German picture”. Its heroes are Joe (Curtis) and Jerry (Lemmon), a saxophonist and a bassist who are scraping a living in freezing Chicago when they witness 1929’s St Valentine’s Day Massacre – or a version of that legendary event at least.
Desperate to elude the city’s most ruthless gangster, Spats Colombo (George Raft), they disguise themselves as Josephine and Daphne (“I’ve never liked the name Geraldine,” explains Jerry), so that they can hide in a Florida hotel for three weeks with a female jazz orchestra, Sweet Sue’s Society Syncopators. On the southbound sleeper train, they are both smitten by the band’s voluptuous ukulele player, Sugar Kane (Monroe). She tells Joe/Josephine that she is hoping to seduce a millionaire in Florida, so when the band arrives at the Seminole-Ritz Hotel (actually the Hotel del Coronado in San Diego), he switches to another disguise. Stealing some clothes from the band’s manager, and stealing his accent from Cary Grant, he styles himself as Junior, heir to the Shell Oil fortune.
One of the film’s many twists is that when Sugar meets Junior on the beach, he doesn’t throw himself at her. He plays hard to get. Sugar tells him that her band specialises in hot jazz, but he sniffs, “Well, I guess some like it hot. But personally, I prefer classical music.” Sugar doesn’t miss a beat. She claims to have “spent three years at the Sheboygan Conservatory of Music” – a claim she overheard Joe/Josephine making the previous night. “Good school,” murmurs Joe/Junior. Sugar, he realises, is just as adept at lying as he is.
Meanwhile, Jerry/Daphne has been inveigled into going out with an elderly – and presumably short-sighted – tycoon, Osgood (Joe E Brown), and their enchanted evening ends with another twist: in the morning, an elated Jerry tells Joe that he and Osgood are engaged. Joe protests that there are “laws, conventions” that have to be observed. But when Jerry finally admits to his fiancé that he is a man, Osgood responds with the film’s exemplary last line, “Well, nobody’s perfect.”
‘Sweet’ or ‘hot’
In summary, Some Like It Hot is the story of people who lie and cheat in order to con other people into bed or out of their cash. Wilder has a reputation for dark, cynical films (see also Sunset Boulevard and Double Indemnity), and Some Like It Hot could be categorised as one of them. But it has so much warmth that it carries the viewer upwards like a hot-air balloon. Rather than condemning its unscrupulous anti-heroes, it respects them and sympathises with them in a way which must have seemed radical in 1959, and which seems more radical nearly six decades later.
Just imagine how the film’s scenario would be treated in a Hollywood comedy today. Joe and Jerry would be punished for their deceit. Sugar would have to catch Joe out, and he would have to apologise, and the viewer would have to sit through a montage of their shared misery before she forgave him. He and Jerry would then use their talent for duplicity to extract a confession from Spats Colombo. And, of course, Jerry and Osgood’s heterosexuality would be vigorously reaffirmed. Think of Judd Apatow’s comedies, for example. They all conclude that it’s amusing for “laws, conventions” to be flouted for a while, just as long as they’re put firmly back in place before the end credits roll.
Some Like It Hot is too buoyant to be brought down to earth by such prissiness. When Sugar learns that Joe has been tricking her, she runs straight into his arms. When Osgood learns that Jerry has been tricking him, he doesn’t bat an eyelid. The message is that there is nothing wrong with faking it until you make it. Experimenting with a new identity can help you become a better, happier person. It can help you survive. And, if you’re lucky, you’ll find someone who accepts you for whomever you want to be – perfect or otherwise.
It’s a boldly inclusive message, but it’s one that must have been close to the film-makers’ hearts. After all, several of them had reinvented themselves, just as the characters do: emigrating from Germany (in Wilder’s case) and Romania (in Diamond’s), distancing themselves from their hardscrabble pasts in Californian foster homes (in Monroe’s case) and on the streets of the Bronx (in Curtis’s). For a frantic farce about two cross-dressers on the run from prohibition-era mobsters, Some Like It Hot is a strikingly personal, even semi-autobiographical film.
Look again at the beach scene with Joe and Sugar. It was written by two men who were once called Samuel Wilder and Itec Domnici, and acted by a man and a woman who were once called Bernie Schwartz and Norma Jeane Mortenson. Schwartz, who renamed himself Tony Curtis, is playing Joe, who is pretending to be Junior, using the mid-Atlantic vowels of Cary Grant, who was once called Archibald Leach. Mortenson, who renamed herself Marilyn Monroe, is playing Sugar Kowalczyk, who renamed herself Sugar Kane, and who is using lines which Joe used when he was pretending to be Josephine. Not even Twelfth Night or The Importance of Being Earnest had such elaborate fun with its characters’ identities. Names, genders, social standings … they can all change in Some Like It Hot. It’s the American way.
In Curtis’s memoir about the making of the film, he confirms that Wilder and Diamond embedded this theme in its title. People, he argues, can be as fluid as the pop songs of the 1920s, which were performed in different styles – either “sweet” or “hot” – according to the audience’s preference. “The concept was important to our movie,” writes Curtis. “A person can be more than one thing, depending on the time, the place, whatever. Sweet or hot.”
This article is taken from BBC Culture website.
In the first quarter of the twentieth century, five African American women filmmakers helped build the US film industry and helped secure better representation of African Americans on screen. Although they were geographically separated, living in different parts of the country, from Kansas City, Missouri, to Montclair, New Jersey, and Washington, DC, they were united by a shared belief that the motion picture was socially transformative. Some tried for a short time to make a living in the film business, while others left the field after making a single motion picture and disappeared altogether. These women wanted to present an authentic vision of African American life, and to that end they often became entrepreneurs, arranging screening venues and distributing film prints, or taking them directly to audiences in order to reach more communities. Beyond their risk-taking and pioneering spirit, their efforts to change the prevailing view of African Americans bound them to one another and made their achievements emblematic of a movement to affirm the validity of African American lives. Although the current wave of interest in African American director-producer Oscar Micheaux and the “race film” producers of his day has confirmed and validated the existence of independent Black filmmakers in the silent era, the research prompted by this interest has largely uncovered only the men involved.
Taking a second look, however, we discover not only the African American giants of cinema but also the women who took part in creative teamwork alongside their husbands. The best examples are Micheaux’s second wife, Alice B. Russell, and Eslanda Robeson, the wife of singer, stage and screen actor, and activist Paul Robeson.
Who Was the “First” African American Woman Filmmaker?
Even so, with the exceptions of Eloyce King Patrick Gist, whose 16 mm educational religious short films drew the attention of some critics, and Zora Neale Hurston, known primarily for her work as a writer and ethnographer, African American women filmmakers have not attracted the attention of historians. In their own time, however, the achievement of being the “first woman filmmaker,” and the title of “first woman filmmaker” that came with it, mattered to the African American press. Citing separate events a year apart, the press argued that Tressie Souders and Maria P. Williams, both of Kansas City, Missouri, should be considered the “first.”
It could also be argued that the first woman filmmaker of African American descent was Madame E. Touissant Welcome, born Jennie Louis Van Der Zee, the sister of the famous photographer James Van Der Zee. She directed a film about Black soldiers in World War I as part of a twelve-part documentary that she produced with her husband, E. Touissant Welcome, for the Touissant Motion Picture Exchange (Dixon 20). Looking back in this way, we can see that those who broke down barriers of different kinds were not only individuals but a whole group of women.
The hopes that the Black community placed in these women are evident in the title of a 1921 article published in The Competitor, “Our Growing Importance in the Amusement World.” The article mentions that writer Birdie Gilmore had her work Jungle God produced by the Delsarte Film Company, and refers to another of her stories that had been accepted by the Metro Company (38). In 1915, the Chicago Defender mentioned a “three-reel drama” titled Shadowed by the Devil in its “Among the Films” section (5). The feature-length Shadowed by the Devil was the only production of Chicago’s Unique Film Company, which may have been founded by a husband-and-wife team of filmmakers. Mrs. M. Webb was the source of the original story for the film, which was directed by her husband, Miles M. Webb (Sampson, 183). Taken together, Tressie Souders, Maria P. Williams, Eloyce King Patrick Gist, Alice B. Russell, Eslanda Robeson, Mrs. M. Webb, Birdie Gilmore, Madame E. Touissant Welcome, and Zora Neale Hurston all deserve recognition and a secure place in the history of silent cinema.
Drusilla Dunjee Houston’s 1902 Answer to Dixon and Griffith
Drusilla Dunjee Houston, who wrote a screenplay she titled “Spirit of the South: The Maddened Mob,” should also be added to this group as an African American woman who sought to make a difference in the silent film era. Although Houston’s screenplay, probably the first African American response to Thomas Dixon and D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915), was never made into a motion picture, it represents a woman’s documentation, over nearly a decade, of the destructive race-based social ideas promoted by Thomas Dixon in his novels, in his stage plays, and later in The Birth of a Nation. These ideas advocated a violent social stratification that took root in the American West and spread across the country.
The 35 mm silent-era prints of Oscar Micheaux’s Within Our Gates (1920) and Symbol of the Unconquered (1920), recently returned to the US from archives in Spain and Belgium respectively, have helped revive historians’ interest in the early days of African American independent filmmaking, as documented in the touring catalog Oscar Micheaux and His Circle (xxiii). These fortunate discoveries, fragmentary though they may be, have kindled new hope that more motion pictures may yet be found. We continue to search for clues to the existence of other “lost” works, as well as for evidence that will help us fill the gaps in the sketchy portraits drawn of these women, who worked as producers, actors, directors, and writers in an earlier era of institutionalized racism.
Kyna Morgan, Aimee Dixon
Translation: Nahit Evre Uçarcı