Lame Brains and Lunatics 2

Lame Brains and Lunatics 2 PDF Author: Steve Massa
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book

Book Description
A new batch of unsung practitioners and overlooked aspects of silent film comedy.

Lame Brains and Lunatics 2

Lame Brains and Lunatics 2 PDF Author: Steve Massa
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book

Book Description
A new batch of unsung practitioners and overlooked aspects of silent film comedy.

Lame Brains and Lunatics 2 (hardback)

Lame Brains and Lunatics 2 (hardback) PDF Author: Steve Massa
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book

Book Description
A new batch of unsung practitioners and overlooked aspects of silent film comedy.

Lame Brains and Lunatics

Lame Brains and Lunatics PDF Author: Steve Massa
Publisher: BearManor Media
ISBN: 9781629339412
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book

Book Description
Silent Film Comedy was a fortuitous combination of art and technology, where the physical comedy skills and artistry passed down from the Commedia dell'Arte, English music hall, and American vaudeville were captured for posterity by the newly created motion picture camera. While the Chaplins, Keatons, and Laurel & Hardys are still remembered and celebrated, this book profiles unsung practitioners such as Billie Ritchie, Marcel Perez, Lige Conley, and George Rowe, with special focus on the neglected comediennes Alice Howell, Gale Henry, Fay Tincher, and Josie Sadler. Popular icons on the order of Mack Sennett, Marie Dressler, Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle, and W.C. Fields are re-examined, plus detailed histories of silent comedy teams and kid's comedies are offered. The book also includes selected filmographies and is lavishly illustrated with more than 225 rarely-seen photographs and advertising images.

Lame Brains and Lunatics

Lame Brains and Lunatics PDF Author: Steve Massa
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781593932688
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 492

Get Book

Book Description
Silent Film Comedy was a fortuitous combination of art and technology, where the physical comedy skills and artistry passed down from the Commedia dell'Arte, English music hall, and American vaudeville were captured for posterity by the newly created motion picture camera. While the Chaplins, Keatons, and Laurel & Hardys are still remembered and celebrated, this book profiles unsung practitioners such as Billie Ritchie, Marcel Perez, Lige Conley, and George Rowe, with special focus on the neglected comediennes Alice Howell, Gale Henry, Fay Tincher, and Josie Sadler. Popular icons on the order of Mack Sennett, Marie Dressler, Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle, and W.C. Fields are re-examined, plus detailed histories of silent comedy teams and kid's comedies are offered. The book also includes selected filmographies and is lavishly illustrated with more than 225 rarely-seen photographs and advertising images. Steve Massa is a leading enthusiast of silent comedy, who has devoted 45 years to researching the genre. A librarian in the Billy Rose Theatre Collection at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center, he has organized comedy film programs for the Museum of Modern Art, the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Pordenone Silent Film Festival. In addition to consulting with the Eye Film Institute, Netherlands and other archives, and writing for film journals such as Griffithiana, he is a founding member of Silent Cinema Presentations which produces NYC's Silent Clown Film Series. Steve has also contributed articles and commentary tracks to many comedy DVD collections such as The Forgotten Films of Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle, Becoming Charley Chase, and Kino Video's Buster Keaton: The Short Films Collection.

Specters of Slapstick and Silent Film Comediennes

Specters of Slapstick and Silent Film Comediennes PDF Author: Maggie Hennefeld
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231547064
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 359

Get Book

Book Description
Women explode out of chimneys and melt when sprayed with soda water. Feminist activists play practical jokes to lobby for voting rights, while overworked kitchen maids dismember their limbs to finish their chores on time. In early slapstick films with titles such as Saucy Sue, Mary Jane’s Mishap, Jane on Strike, and The Consequences of Feminism, comediennes exhibit the tensions between joyful laughter and gendered violence. Slapstick comedy often celebrates the exaggeration of make-believe injury. Unlike male clowns, however, these comic actresses use slapstick antics as forms of feminist protest. They spontaneously combust while doing housework, disappear and reappear when sexually assaulted, or transform into men by eating magic seeds—and their absurd metamorphoses evoke the real-life predicaments of female identity in a changing modern world. Specters of Slapstick and Silent Film Comediennes reveals the gender politics of comedy and the comedic potentials of feminism through close consideration of hundreds of silent films. As Maggie Hennefeld argues, comedienne catastrophes provide disturbing but suggestive images for comprehending gendered social upheavals in the early twentieth century. At the same time, slapstick comediennes were crucial to the emergence of film language. Women’s flexible physicality offered filmmakers blank slates for experimenting with the visual and social potentials of cinema. Specters of Slapstick and Silent Film Comediennes poses major challenges to the foundations of our ideas about slapstick comedy and film history, showing how this combustible genre blows open age-old debates about laughter, society, and gender politics.

Vitagraph

Vitagraph PDF Author: Andrew A. Erish
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 0813181216
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 305

Get Book

Book Description
Winner of the 2022 Peter C. Rollins Book Award and the 2022 Browne Best Edited Reference/Primary Source Work in Popular and American Culture Award In Vitagraph: America's First Great Motion Picture Studio, Andrew A. Erish provides a comprehensive examination and reassessment of the company most responsible for defining and popularizing the American movie. This history challenges long-accepted Hollywood mythology that Paramount and Fox invented the feature film, that Universal created the star system, and that these companies, along with MGM and Warner Bros., developed motion pictures into a multimillion-dollar business. In fact, the truth about Vitagraph is far more interesting than the myths that later moguls propagated about themselves. Established in 1897 by J. Stuart Blackton and Albert E. Smith, Vitagraph was the leading producer of motion pictures for much of the silent era. Vitagraph established America's studio system, a division of labor utilizing specialized craftspeople and artists and developed fundamental aspects of American movies, from framing, lighting, and performance style to emphasizing character-driven comedy and drama in stories that respected and sometimes poked fun at every demographic of Vitagraph's vast audience. For most of its existence America's most influential studio was headquartered in Brooklyn, New York, before relocating to Hollywood. A historically rigorous and thorough account of the most influential producer of American motion pictures during the silent era, Erish draws on valuable primary material long overlooked by other historians to introduce readers to the fascinating, forgotten pioneers of Vitagraph.

Hysterical!

Hysterical! PDF Author: Linda Mizejewski
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 1477314547
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 568

Get Book

Book Description
Susan Koppelman Award Winner: “A juicy read for those who love the many ways female comics use their art to question the patriarchy.” —Bust Amy Schumer, Samantha Bee, Mindy Kaling, Melissa McCarthy, Tig Notaro, Leslie Jones, and a host of hilarious peers are killing it nightly on American stages and screens, smashing the tired stereotype that women aren’t funny. But today’s funny women didn’t come out of nowhere. Fay Tincher’s daredevil stunts, Mae West’s linebacker walk, Lucille Ball’s manic slapstick, Carol Burnett’s athletic pratfalls, Ellen DeGeneres’s tomboy pranks, Whoopi Goldberg’s sly twinkle, and Tina Fey’s acerbic wit all paved the way for contemporary unruly women, whose comedy upends the norms and ideals of women’s bodies and behaviors. Hysterical! Women in American Comedy delivers a lively survey of women comics from the stars of the silent cinema up through the multimedia presences of Tina Fey and Lena Dunham. This anthology of original essays includes contributions by the field’s leading authorities, introducing a new framework for women’s comedy that analyzes the implications of hysterical laughter and hysterically funny performances. Expanding on previous studies of comedians such as Mae West, Moms Mabley, and Margaret Cho, and offering the first scholarly work on comedy pioneers Mabel Normand, Fay Tincher, and Carol Burnett, the contributors explore such topics as racial/ethnic/sexual identity, celebrity, stardom, censorship, auteurism, cuteness, and postfeminism across multiple media. Situated within the main currents of gender and queer studies, as well as American studies and feminist media scholarship, Hysterical! masterfully demonstrates that hysteria—women acting out and acting up—is a provocative, empowering model for women’s comedy. “An invaluable collection and a great read.” ?Journal of Popular Culture Winner of a Susan Koppelman Award for Best Anthology, Multi-Authored, or Edited Book in Feminist Studies, Popular and American Culture Associations (PACA), 2017

SLAPSTICK DIVAS

SLAPSTICK DIVAS PDF Author: Steve Massa
Publisher: BearManor Media
ISBN: 9781629331331
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 644

Get Book

Book Description
Illustrated with 440 rare movie scene shots, formal portraits, candid behind the scenes photos, film frame enlargements, trade magazine advertisements, lobby cards, stage photographs, artist's renderings and caricatures, and casting guide entries.

She Could Be Chaplin!

She Could Be Chaplin! PDF Author: Anthony Slide
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1496808444
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 135

Get Book

Book Description
Alice Howell (1886-1961) is slowly gaining recognition and regard as arguably the most important slapstick comedienne of the silent era. This new study, the first book-length appreciation, identifies her place in the comedy hierarchy alongside the best-known of silent comediennes, Mabel Normand. Like Normand, Howell learned her craft with Mack Sennett and Charlie Chaplin. Beginning her screen career in 1914, Howell quickly developed a distinctive style and eccentric attire and mannerisms, successfully hiding her good looks, and was soon identified as the "Female Charlie Chaplin." Howell became a star of comedy shorts in 1915 and continued her career through 1928 and the advent of sound in film. While she is today recognized as a pioneering female filmmaker, during her career she never expressed much interest in her work, seeing it only as a means to an end, with her income carefully invested in real estate. It has taken many years for her to gain her rightful place in film history, not only as a comedienne, but also as matriarch of a prominent American family that includes son-in-law and director George Stevens and grandson George Stevens Jr., founder of the American Film Institute and the Kennedy Center Honors, who provides a foreword.

The Andy Clyde Columbia Comedies

The Andy Clyde Columbia Comedies PDF Author: James L. Neibaur
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 1476630976
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 212

Get Book

Book Description
Andy Clyde starred in the second-longest series of shorts at Columbia Pictures (after the Three Stooges), with nearly 80 productions from 1934 to 1956. This film-by-film analysis of Clyde's Columbia short comedies features introductory chapters on his early life, stage work, silent films and early talkies, as well as concluding chapters on his appearances in feature films--including several Hopalong Cassidy westerns--and his television roles on such shows as Lassie and The Real McCoys. Rare photos and graphics are included.