Cinema’s First Nasty Women – Snowbird
Cinema’s First Nasty Women is a collection of rarely-seen silent films about feminist protest, anarchic slapstick destruction, and suggestive gender play.
Curated by Maggie Hennefeld, Laura Horak & Elif Rongen-Kaynakçi, the collection includes 99 silent films from the United States, France, England, Italy, Sweden, and Denmark, produced from 1896 to 1926, sourced from 13 international film archives and libraries. The women included are indeed very “nasty”—they organize labor strikes, bake (and weaponize) inedible desserts, explode out of the chimney, electrocute the police force, and assume a rogues’ gallery of playful identities that joyously dismantle gender binaries and sexual norms. Their antics traverse a range of genres spanning slapstick comedy, genteel farce, the trick film, Western drama, and adventure thriller.
The curators of this collection ask:
“Who will be the audience for silent cinema into the twenty-first century? In presenting these 99 films, we aim to reframe their relevance for feminist and anti-racist screen cultures today. We hope that you will also embrace these works playfully, promiscuously, and with an unruly sense of adventure. They bear witness to the speculative history of film feminism that might have been, and perhaps briefly was, and that may even come to pass yet again. Above all, please enjoy!”
In “Snowbird”, theatre star Mabel Taliaferro plays a headstrong society girl who disguises herself as a boy to trick a “woman-hating” French trapper in the frontier.
Runtime: 1 hour 35 minutes