Specters of Slapstick and Silent Film Comediennes Hennefeld, Margaret D creator 2014 viii, 306 p. born digital Thesis (Ph.D. -- Brown University (2014) Rosen, Philip Director Rooney, Ellen Reader Doane, Mary Ann Reader Brown University. Modern Culture and Media sponsor theses Laughter has a material history. In my dissertation, "Specters of Slapstick and Silent Film Comediennes," I argue that comedy has haunted the emergence of cinema both as a narrative storytelling medium and as a cultural industry. I draw on extensive archival research about forgotten slapstick comedienne films (from around 1894-1920) in order to rewrite early film historiography through images of female bodily mutation. These figures include vanishing ladies, female dancers who metamorphose into spiders, miniaturized “nicotine fairies,” and spontaneously combusting and self-dismembering housemaids. Defining comedy as the attempt to preserve pleasure and mystification against the rupture and finitude characteristic of industrial modernity, I propose a theory of historical change that emerges from the experiences of contingency and reversal intrinsic to laughter and to early trick film aesthetics. I thereby not only develop the historical visibility of comedic film archives, but I make a larger intervention into philosophies of comedy. Whereas most film scholars define the comic in terms of its objects of ridicule (a man slipping on a banana peel), my project focuses on how female film bodies engage with the unstable social landscapes that they inhabit. Metamorphosis represents a key device for imagining the effects of comic eruption on the one who laughs, instead of on the one who is laughed at. From these images of metamorphosis, I develop a theory of the laughing film spectator, which is critical to rethinking theories of comedy, cinema, and gender. This project was developed through extensive archival research at MoMA, The Library of Congress, Cinémathèque Française, Amsterdam Filmmuseum, and the British Film Institute. Film Gender and Sexuality Modernity Theory Politics Media Civilization, ModernPolitical scienceFeminism RPB 20141006 engEnglish10.7301/Z0FX77S8In CopyrightCollection is open for research.dissertations