Tag Archives: Nasty Women

Your silent cinema Valentine

If you truly love something, let he, she, they or it know. Now, in this instance, I am talking about silent film, and it is the season for wearing your heart on your sleeve, so here’s an opportunity to do just that. Coincidentally, if you are the sort of person who has considered giving up talkies for Lent this is also very much right up your avenue.

Cinema’s First Nasty Women: A Demographic Survey is a research, curation, and outreach project led by Laura Horak (Carleton University), Maggie Hennefeld (University of Minnesota), and Russell Zych (UCLA Film & Television Archive). And this Valentine season, the Nasty Women want you to let them know how you really feel about silent movies. If you fill in this survey, you will be helping them to gain a deeper understanding of silent film audiences today – who’s watching, how frequently, in what spaces and formats, and toward what ends? What are people’s (mis)impressions of silent-era cinema?

The Nasty Women plan to use the data collected in this survey to develop a better understanding of present-day audiences for silent film programming and physical media releases. Insights from this study will help silent film organisations build their audiences and raise audience engagement. In other words, it is in your interests to let them know how you truly feel.

How deep is your love? Let the Nasty Women know by filling in this survey. And remember, just as with a Valentine, all responses to the survey are totally anonymous – plus, completing the form is voluntary and doesn’t commit you to anything.

Take the survey here.

The Silent London Poll of 2023: vote for your winners now

Season’s greetings Silent Londoners. It’s that time of year when we like to look back at the year, and especially at all the great silent movies we watched.

2023 was a busy year. We had in-person and online film festivals, seasons, screenings and conferences, some fabulous new restorations, discs and some big anniversaries. We had new books and DVDs to enjoy. I was a little distracted, but the silent film scene was booming.

Continue reading The Silent London Poll of 2023: vote for your winners now

Ossi, Marion and Julie: Gender Rebels in Bristol

A quick note about an event I am taking part in, in Bristol this month. The Slapstick Festival is hosting a day devoted to “Gender Rebels”, with a triple-bill of films on the theme of early-20th-century cross-dressing, starring Ossi Oswalda, Marion Davies and Julie Andrews:

I Don’t Want to be A Man (Ernst Lubitsch, 1918)

Beverly of Graustark (Sidney Franklin, 1926)

Victor/Victoria (Blake Edwards, 1982)

Continue reading Ossi, Marion and Julie: Gender Rebels in Bristol

The Greatest Silent Film Poll of 2022: vote for your winners now

Season’s greetings Silent Londoners. It’s that time of year when we like to look back at the year, and especially at all the great silent movies we watched.

Who knows what normal is any more? But this year we had in-person film festivals, seasons, screenings and conferences a-plenty. We had new books and DVDs to enjoy. New websites too! And honestly, silent cinema seems to be more popular than ever.

Continue reading The Greatest Silent Film Poll of 2022: vote for your winners now

Take Cinema’s First Nasty Women home this summer

Yes, I have been hiding it very well, but I am actually a big fan of the Cinema’s First Nasty Women project. Who knew?

Co-curated by Laura Horak, Maggie Hennefeld and Elif Rongen-Kaynakçi, the Nasty Women project has trawled the archives for trailblazing examples of female energy, anger, transgression, rebellions and explosive hilarity in early cinema. The films have been shown at festivals around the globe and this summer you can take them home with you, courtesy of Kino Lorber, in the form of an “irreverent” four-disc box set, available in both DVD and Blu-ray flavours. Here’s the official spiel:

Continue reading Take Cinema’s First Nasty Women home this summer

Nasty Women at Hippfest: The Night Rider and Rowdy Ann

This blogpost is a version of the introduction I was honoured to give at the Hippodrome Silent Film Festival on Friday for the Nasty Women: Gender Rebels double-bill. The films were brilliantly accompanied by Meg Morley, and the festival continues all weekend.

Welcome to the world of Nasty Women. Cinema’s First Nasty Women is a curatorial project from two American academics, Maggie Hennefeld and Laura Horak. The name is taken from Donald Trump’s notorious remark about Hillary Clinton, and for the past five years, Hennefeld and Horak have been screening films that reveal women being transgressive, riotous and unbiddable on the silent screen at festivals around the world.

This May you will be able to take the nasty women home with you on a four-disc DVD and Blu-ray box set, containing 99 films, dating back to the very beginnings of cinema, sourced from a dozen international archives. It will be crammed with “feminist protest, anarchic, destructive slapstick, and suggestive gender play”.

Continue reading Nasty Women at Hippfest: The Night Rider and Rowdy Ann

Hippfest is back in Bo’Ness for 2022

Hippfest returns! You don’t know how happy it makes me to think about watching silent films with live music at the stunning Hippodrome in Bo’Ness.

The festival is held from Wednesday 16 to Sunday 20 March and the full toothsome lineup just dropped, as they say. Here are a few highlights, some of which have been postponed from the sadly cancelled 2020 edition. I am so ready.

  • The Dodge Brothers accompany FW Murnau’s City Girl on Saturday night – this is the Scottish premiere of their brilliant score for this incredible, jaw-dropping Hollywood silent.
Continue reading Hippfest is back in Bo’Ness for 2022

Le Giornate del Cinema Muto 2021: Pordenone Post No 6

Pordenone 6

Unprecedented scenes in the Teatro Verdi tonight, as the audience of customarily meek silent film enthusiasts stamped their feet, booed and exclaimed “outrageous!” “Close the curtains!” and “Down with this sort of thing!” But more reports on the incident the papers are calling the 2021 Giornate riot later.

Continue reading Le Giornate del Cinema Muto 2021: Pordenone Post No 6

Le Giornate del Cinema Muto 2021: Pordenone Post No 2

Here in Pordenone, life is an endless round of parties, each more glamorous than the last. Sorry, that’s not my lifestyle but that of Ellen Richter and co in  Leben Um Leben (Richard Eichberg, 1916). This film is a sequel so abandon all hope of following the plot all ye who enter in. What I can tell you is that Weimar star Ellen Richter, subject of a retrospective here at the Giornate, plays a scheming Princess in this glitzy romp. There was a costume ball, a “jolly hunt”, some stolen pearls, a run on the “Volksbank” and non-stop shenanigans and all of it was entertaining but it didn’t quite add up to a whole film. Still there was a marvellous multi-tinted dance sequence, as if the star of the floor show was grooving under coloured electric lights, which was far more than set-dressing – it was an attraction all of its own, a very modern throwback.

Continue reading Le Giornate del Cinema Muto 2021: Pordenone Post No 2

Le Giornate del Cinema Muto 2019: Pordenone Post No 6

Norma Desmond reckoned the silents didn’t need dialogue. But she never came to the Giornate. This may be a silent film festival but it’s good to talk. And listen. So I spent about as much time listening to people chat today as I did watching them mouth words. And yes, today did mark the return of benshi artist Ichiko Kataora to Pordenone with the Japanese silent Chushingura (1910-1917). So there is a method to this festival madness, I promise you. Continue reading Le Giornate del Cinema Muto 2019: Pordenone Post No 6

Le Giornate del Cinema Muto 2019: Pordenone Post No 4

Still mooning about the goat-herder? Another Giornate blogpost will take your mind off it, Marion.

One of the beauties of Pordenone is the fact that the programme is so omnivorous, ranging far and wide over the first four decades of film history, and the audience are equally diverse. No doubt the main attraction of today, the headline act as it were, was the Hollywood comedy double-bill that played this evening. While I enjoy Marion Davies and Laurel and Hardy as much as the next silent cinema blogger, like everyone here I have my own particular passions that draw me back to the Verdi every year.

So it was that I woke up this morning most excited to see an eleven-minute film playing in the middle of the morning: Gerolamo Lo Savio’s 1909 Otello. Yes, I am a silent Shakespeare fan and this was my treat for the day. Stencil-colour, Venetian location shooting, a passionate but hardly Moorish Othello (I think it was the divine Michelle Facey sho said that meant he was surely “lessish”) and a nicely malevolent Iago made this a Shakespeare to savour, even if inevitably one had to devour it in one small mouthful. The colour was especially memorable here – notably a brief bloom of scarlet at Othello’s throat as he dies. An attractive and unexpected gory entry in the silent Shakespeare canon. Continue reading Le Giornate del Cinema Muto 2019: Pordenone Post No 4

Le Giornate del Cinema Muto 2019: Pordenone Post No 3

Not to brag*, but I recently returned from the San Sebastián International Film Festival. There I saw people falling over themselves to catch a glimpse of Penélope Cruz or Kristen Stewart. That’s cool, but I do like it here at Pordenone where the mere sight of Léontine’s name on a title cart can cause someone in the Verdi stalls to whoop so loud that I was wondering who it was from the second balcony.

This bit certainly isn’t a brag, but my day job followed me to Pordenone this week, and I was tapping away at my laptop in my hotel room, writing about H****y W*******n when I suddenly realised I only had a minute to spare to get to the Verdi for the next session, the session I really didn’t want to miss: the return of Nasty Women, curated by Maggie Hennefeld and Laura Horak. Readers, I dashed to the Verdi and what I saw there was enough to wipe such horrid thoughts from my mind. Joyously anarchic, gleefully disruptive, messy, wild and endlessly hilarious antics, perpetrated by women on an unsuspecting world. Alice Guy-Blaché’s pregnant Madame with her escalating cravings, Léontine vandalising the petit bourgeoisie of a whole town, the housemaids on strike and marching through the streets, Cunégonde trying to keep tabs on her man … I loved all these gigglesome, radical short comedies. Up to and including the wonderful La Peur des Ombres with its shadowplay, sophisticated splitscreen and good-natured gurning – it rips a classic DW Griffith actioner into shred and sprinkles it around like confetti. Would love to think Weber saw it before making Suspense. This sort of thing should be available on the NHS: National Hilarity Service. Continue reading Le Giornate del Cinema Muto 2019: Pordenone Post No 3