Finally Back on the Silver Screen

Finally Back on the Silver Screen

Comic Actresses of the 1910s

»NEXT TIME; YOU’D BE BETTER OFF READING.«
THE MOTHER IN. LEA AND THE BALL OF WOOL

One of the most important and surprising film history discoveries of recent years has been the number of comediennes with their own successful series, a trend that clearly began in 1910. The Cinema Ritrovato Festival in Bologna and the »Hundred Years Ago« programme uncover more unknown films each year, films in which things always look different from what historiographic tradition and our own prejudice had led us to expect. Reflecting a multiplicity of social milieu and diverse, changing images of gender roles, films from around 1910 clearly disprove the conventional wisdom, that women before the First World War were unliberated Victorians and that the great era for the emancipation of women was the 1920s. In the cinema, at least, that is not the case. Not until the twenties do women appear as simply actresses, as the passive material of creative directors and powerful producers. Before then power relationships were not as clearcut, and the cinema was open, freely accessible to women, a place for entertainment, of course, but also for relatively autonomous creative work. The actresses were largely responsible for creating their own roles, wrote scripts; others became producers.
Following its beginnings in 1909 with Cretinetti at Itala, from 1910 the comedian-based series became a tremendously productive genre, especially in Italy and France. Yet the French series heroines, Rosalie (Jane), Léontine (Betty) and Cunégonde, belong, as do many of their male counterparts, in the great folk traditions of the clown: they can be ugly, aggressive and destructive. The obstreperous young girl type – bobby-soxer or tomboy – relates to the cheeky child characters of the early cinema: a real handful when encountered in pairs, like the British sisters Tilly and Sally.
Objectivity is not, of course, the stock in the trade of comedy films, yet with the help of absurdity and exaggeration the social reality of power relations between ages, classes, genders and between the haves and have-nots is revealed. Hurts, grudges and frustrations are aired, scores are settled. Underpinned by the wild energy of popular culture, comic heroines – often housemaids or cooks – take revenge on behalf of women who would rather read than do housework, employees subjected to sexual harassment and maids. In German-speaking countries ›housemaid cinema‹ was a pejorative term for the supposedly lowbrow cinema of the 1910s; but the destructive frenzy demonstrated by girls and women doing housework in these comedy series offers an interesting new interpretation of the phrase. It is even more remarkable that many of these films still, a hundred years later, remain relevant and bring us pleasure. In her book on early German film, Heide Schlüpmann speaks of the secret complicity between the cinema and women‘s emancipation. This solidarity is omnipresent in film comedy before the First World War, expressed in the wide variety of female characters, the diversity of their relationships and their unexpected solutions and exit strategies. Thus even the following happy end is possible: in A Lady and Her Maid, housemaid and mistress join forces to begin a new life, refusing the dubious amorous propositions of men.

_Mariann Lewinsky Stäuli