Slapstick

Examples taken from the short silent films of Charles Chaplin, specifically the two-reelers he made for Mutual Films in 1916 and 1917, will suggest that slapstick can be usefully understood as a quasi-ritualized and socially-sanctioned expression of proscribed behavior. In addition to arguing that basic elements of slapstick symbolically transgress ideal behavior, the essay will also suggest how the experience of movie-watching in modern western societies approximates the experience of a village-wide audience watching ritual clowning in traditional non-western societies. Viewing Chaplin”s silent slapstick clowning performances with an audience in a movie theater has the potential to create the sense of communitas that Victor Turner argues is part of ritual. Finally, as is the case in the ritual clowning of traditional non-western societies, slapstick clowning potentially subverts as well as conserves the norms of western societies.

Desde el nacimiento entre bastidores y los violentos años del vodevil hasta el encuentro con Arbuckle y el nacimiento de una estrella.

Recorrido por su años en los escenarios, el estrellato infantil, los problemas con la Gerry Society, el tour por el Reino Unido y el descenso del Big Time al Small Time.

Chaplin nació en el seno de una familia de artistas profundamente ligados a las tradiciones del vodevil y el music hall el 16 de Abril 1889. Su trayecto por los escenarios a los dieciséis años, Chaplin se convertía en actor del West End londinense.

La Fred Karno´s Speechless Comedians sería su nuevo destino

Karno era el más famoso de los empresarios de los sketchs para el music hall, poseía diez compañías de sketchs que estaban en gira de forma permanente.Tal y como señala David Robinson (1996, 22): “Karno era un hombre rudo, ineducado y con frecuencia desagradable, pero era un genio en la creación de situaciones cómicas. Poseía un talento extraordinario para la invención de gags así como para el “timing”; al margen de esto había descubierto que la comedia podía ser, con frecuencia, mucho más efectiva cuando surgía con un toque de sentimiento o pathos: ésta fue una lección que iba a resultar de una importancia suprema para el más famoso de sus alumnos, Charles Chaplin.

En el otoño de 1910, fue elegido para realizar un tour de 21 meses por los Estados Unidos con la compañía de Fred Karno. Fue allí donde Mack Sennett vio actuar al joven Chaplin y le realizó una oferta para unirse a la Keystone Film Company, iniciando la carrera más meteórica de la Historia del Cine.

This article rethinks the emergence of narrative film syntax through the comedy genre, focusing on slapstick films that depict female unruliness. I discuss films featuring Mabel Normand, Florence Turner, Marie Dressler, Sarah Duhamel, and other forgotten silent comediennes, arguing that these women's performances played crucial roles in orchestrating transitions in industrial film form. Focusing on a comparison between the French Pathé and American Vitagraph companies, I examine the variety of techniques deployed to try to rationalize or contain the unruly bodily gestures of slapstick comedienne performers — most of whom have now dropped out of historical visibility entirely. I frame this comparative analysis through close readings of two key texts: a Vitagraph trick film, Princess Nicotine; or, The Smoke Fairy (dir. J. Stuart Blackton, 1909), which depicts the surrealistic plight of a male cigar smoker who gets pestered by two micrographic nicotine fairies; and a Pathé slapstick comedy, Betty Pulls the Strings (dir. Roméo Bosetti, 1910), about a madcap female trickster whose pranks wreak mass anarchy. Whereas films like Princess Nicotine micromanage their comediennes' unruly bodily performances in order to execute their trick techniques, films like Betty let their comediennes run wild in front of the camera, instead making sense of their irrational behavior through postproduction editing. Comedy has always haunted the emergence of cinema both as a narrative storytelling medium and as an international industry. Here, I analyze how unruly women and uncomfortable experiences of laughter provided coconspirators for legitimizing the motion picture's nascent storytelling vocabulary.

In its history, production, plots and gestures, slapstick comedy was tied to the rise of modern labor in terms of both Taylorist theory and Fordist practice. Comic heroes ranging from live action comedians Chaplin or Keaton to animated animals Felix or Mickey worked against work through the playful excesses of their obediences and transgressions within an increasingly rationalized, industrial world. The digital animation studio Pixar summoned slapstick and its specifically Fordist resonances in its 2008 feature, WALL-E, yet offered a twist in humanizing a figure of perfected Fordism itself with its title character, a robot repetitively working in a post-apocalyptic earth devoid of human life. Explicitly modeled after Chaplin, Keaton and Lloyd, WALL-E contrasts with the film’s humans, who are entirely liberated from labor through automation in a satirical reflection of both post-Fordist accounts of the ‘end of work’ as well as broader critiques of a distracting digital culture. This article focuses on the film’s revitalization of slapstick traditions within the context of recent debates about post-Fordism, the future of automated labor and the transformation of working human bodies. Just as slapstick’s relationship to modern labor touched on the playful mode of its cinematic production as well as their form as indexical montage so too does Pixar’s corporate reputation as ‘Creativity, Inc’ suggest a complex relationship between its slapstick hero and the digital labor animating his movement. The same will be argued of Pixar’s vaunted techniques with both digital image-making and commodity generation, both of which suggest a nostalgic animation of slapstick’s antinomies as much as a disavowal of the post-Fordist production of which Pixar is vanguard.

This thesis examines the distinct relationship between Buster Keaton’s characters and their modern, twentieth-century environment. In accounting for the operations of this environment, this thesis positions Keaton’s films within a theoretical framework known as the Modernity Thesis. These debates focus on characterising early twentieth-century modernity in an urban environment as being fuelled by industrialisation, and as creating a faster-paced, over-stimulated world. This was a world in which the individual was subjected to a new barrage of stimuli obtained through a plethora of new technologies and amusements. These included, among others, cinema and faster forms of transport. This new, modern landscape provided the individual with a transformed physical and psychological experience of modernity.

This thesis investigates this new experience of modernity as it manifests itself in Keaton’s films. Keaton positions his on-screen characters in a state of victimisation by their own environment, often overpowered by the chaos of the modern city. This position calls on Keaton to undertake a process of adaption to his environment in order to achieve his particular goal, or simply to keep up with the pace of those around him. I argue that it is through a close examination of these moments of adaption and the logic that governs them that we can see how the ideas expressed in the Modernity Thesis can be seen to take on cinematic form through slapstick comedy. Importantly, this thesis characterises Keaton’s stunts, in these moments of adaption, as actively involving the participation of director, performer, environment and, by extension, the audience.

Radical comedy liberates spectators from their compulsive attachments to volatile objects. In that spirit, modernist film theorists placed their hopes in the raucous, world-shattering laughter elicited by violent slapstick comedies to explode the crises of the present and their foothold in habituated perception. But what remains of laughter’s revolutionary modernist project in the twenty-first century? In this article, I rethink the concept of cine-genre to pursue tropes of uncanny, uncontrollable laughter that have proliferated across all genres of contemporary cinema. Conventional genre provides an aesthetic contract of solid expectations (brokered between audiences, media-makers, and producers) to sustain the hope for what’s possible through the repetition of what’s imaginable. But in times of escalating crisis, genre itself falls apart, spawning perverse hybrid mutations. Cinema, I argue, in its renewed capacity for dialectical ‘hybridity’ can give rise to radical forms of embodied perception and affective experience that slam the brakes on the nightmare of postmodern carnival and reveal new ways forward toward a less dystopian future.

Among the historical writings that address the concept of ‘Visual Esperanto’, numerous texts have focused on Chaplin’s films and the character he portrayed: the tramp. The tramp has become emblematic of the international language of film. It maybe that this emblem’s ubiquity has lent it a commonsensical armor that has averted critical questions, as no research has focused on this central topic.
Yet the fact that the tramp has come to symbolize universality and the international language of film raises questions: Chaplin’s tramp has been repeatedly inked to migration and foreignness. Siegfried Kracauer, for example, regarded him as the personification of the outcast, the pariah. The image of the other, the stranger, is often used to delineate the social body from the outside, i.e. the group defines itself in contrast to the outcast. Therefore, the question arises as to how the character of the stranger helped define the boundaries of universality, not from without, but precisely from within? Through an examination of writings from the silent era and the years of transition to sound film, this paper will trace the paradox that lies at the heart of the concept of the universality of ‘Visual Esperanto’. An analysis of the tramp’s character traits against the backdrop of the formation of the Hollywood star system will shed new light on the deep connections between the esthetics of abstraction and the historical role of the masses at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Ač vychází ze zasazení proslulé postavy Tuláka do Chaplinovy takříkajíc nedlouhometrážní filmové tvorby, soustřeďuje se tato stať spíše na otázky spojené s jeho pozdějším celovečerním dílem. Věnuje se postupným proměnám pojetí a hlavně promyšleného opouštění konceptu Tuláka ve smyslu Chaplinova (a) hereckého pojetí ústřední postavy i jeho vztahování se k ostatním hercům, (b) zasazování ústřední postavy do celku filmového vyprávění.

https://cup.columbia.edu/book/specters-of-slapstick-and-silent-film-comediennes/9780231179478

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.

Despite its unabated popularity with audiences, slapstick has received rather little scholarly attention, mostly by scholars concentrating on the US theater and cinema traditions. Nonetheless, as a form of physical humor slapstick has a long history across various areas of cultural production. This volume approaches slapstick both as a genre of situational physical comedy and as a mode of communicating an affective situation captured in various cultural products. Contributors to the volume examine cinematic, literary, dramatic, musical, and photographic texts and performances. From medieval chivalric romance and nineteenth-century theater to contemporary photography, the contributors study treatments of slapstick across media, periods and geographic locations. The aim of a study of such wide scope is to demonstrate how slapstick emerged from a variety of complex interactions among different traditions and by extension, to illustrate that slapstick can be highly productive for interdisciplinary research.

This article seeks to identify the underlying historiographical discourses advanced by the programming choices of the Cinémathèque Française’s recent Buster Keaton retrospective. In light of his wide ranging sound era output, the actor-director’s status as a “silent” comic is called into question in order to point toward unexplored approaches to his career and to propose new ways of familiarizing audiences with his work.

First used by the theatre critic Irving Wardle in a 1958 article, the expression comedy of menace has become a catch-all phrase systematically applied to Harold Pinter’s plays. Yet Wardle has offered a specific thematic and aesthetic definition of the genre based on the motif of the malevolent intrusion as well as on the paradoxical combination of comedy and menace. This paper will focus on the aesthetic definition of the genre, more precisely on the simultaneousness of nonsense and menace in The Birthday Party and of farce and menace in The Dumb Waiter. In these two plays, Pinter makes extensive use of nonsense and slapstick yet always endowing these comic devices with a sense of menace. Goldberg, McCann and Ben are indeed both clowns and oppressors and their use of physical comedy and whimsical language is as entertaining as it is unsettling, bringing to mind rather disquieting images of persecution and torture. This simultaneousness will however be qualified in terms of production and audience response since the comic might prevail over the menace and vice versa, leaving it to the reader-spectator to decide what genre the plays belong to.

Silent film comedies were obsessed with images of shape-shifting women: housemaids dismembered their own limbs or stretched these limbs beyond human proportions, magical nicotine fairies miniaturized their entire bodies, and housewives metamorphosed into reptiles or celestial satellites. In this article, I look at female corporeality in transitional silent cinema as itself a trick technique. I argue that filmmakers used female metamorphosis in order to negotiate between trick attractions and integrated narrative effects-- between filmmaking’s spectacular mass appeal and its institutional legitimacy

Despite its unabated popularity with audiences, slapstick has received rather little scholarly attention, mostly by scholars concentrating on the US theater and cinema traditions. Nonetheless, as a form of physical humor slapstick has a long history across various areas of cultural production. This volume approaches slapstick both as a genre of situational physical comedy and as a mode of communicating an affective situation captured in various cultural products. Contributors to the volume examine cinematic, literary, dramatic, musical, and photographic texts and performances. From medieval chivalric romance and nineteenth-century theater to contemporary photography, the contributors study treatments of slapstick across media, periods and geographic locations. The aim of a study of such wide scope is to demonstrate how slapstick emerged from a variety of complex interactions among different traditions and by extension, to illustrate that slapstick can be highly productive for interdisciplinary research.

Tra il 1974 e il 1977 Gianni Celati, in collaborazione con il fotografo Carlo Gajani e il mimo Lino Gabellone, pubblica due volumi illustrati, Il chiodo in testa e La bottega dei mimi. Si tratta di veri e propri fototesti, in cui parola scritta e immagine fotografica si sostengono a vicenda, secondo una ricerca sul rapporto tra testo e performance che Celati conduce negli anni Settanta. Alla base di tutto c’è la necessità di « sfuggire » alla fissità della pagina scritta: la stessa necessità che porterà Celati dapprima alla collaborazione con Luigi Ghirri e, anni dopo, al cinema vero e proprio.

Irony's Antics marks a major intervention into the underexplored role of the comic and its relationship to irony in German letters. Combining theoretical breadth with close textual analysis, Erica Weitzman shows how irony, a key term for the German romantics, reemerged in the early twentieth century from a postromantic relegation to the nonsensical and the nihilistic in a way that both rethought romantic irony and dramatically extended its reach. Through readings of works by Robert Walser, Franz Kafka, and Joseph Roth against the rich history of comic theory (particularly Hegel and Freud), Weitzman traces the development of a specifically comic irony in modern German-language literature and philosophy, a play with the irony that is itself the condition for all play. She thus provides a crucial reevaluation of German literary history and offers new insights into the significance of irony and the comic from the Enlightenment to the present.

La discussion sur le langage et la discussion sur les images peuvent s'éclairer réciproquement – si nous sommes d'accord que la connaissance, c'est savoir rapprocher et différencier à la fois. Si connaître, ce n'est pas "fétichiser", absolutiser et rendre unique. Trop souvent, les uns (linguistes, logiciens, philosophes) "fétichisent" la langue ; les autres ("visualistes", spécialistes des arts, du cinéma) "fétichisent" l'image...
Cet article s'attaque au cas d'école typique : la critique des "fétichistes" de la langue contre l'image : seule la langue saurait nier, l'image ne serait qu'affirmative... Il s'agit ici de montrer combien il est intéressant et utile d'abandonner cette thèse : et pour la compréhension et explication des images, et pour la compréhension et explication des langages.

An account of two sources of the "minimal global ethic," one interpretive and the other creative. Humour, more specifically slapstick, is the interpretive source, while "revelation" as present in both Rabbinic Judaism and Modernism is the creative source. The question of the ethic and conflict is then briefly discussed. This version, posted 25 June 2022, is a revised form of the chapter from the book published in 2009.

In the late 1920s, a number of Hollywood filmmakers took their cameras to the amusement park. Given the robust, intertwined threads that tie the amusement park to the cinema, this act of filming the ferris wheel constitutes a kind of self-reflexive gesture, one that harkens back to the birth of cinema. These aforementioned threads are far too numerous to fully account here, but, most obviously, cinema and the amusement park were born within one or two years of each other--1894 to 1896--and early films were often exhibited at the fairground. Movies, according to Lauren Rabinovitz, figured prominently in over 75 percent of the nation's amusement parks by the turn of the twentieth century. (1) Tom Gunning's notion of the "cinema of attractions" reminds us that early cinema was--like the thrill ride--an attraction in and of itself, with the lure being to "see machines demonstrated (the newest technological wonder) ... rather than to view films." (2) Gunning also links early cinema aesthetics to those of the fairground through what he calls "shock aesthetics" and "aesthetics of astonishment." Through aesthetics of outward or inward motion and display, this cinema worked to create "the particularly modern entertainment form of the thrill, embodied elsewhere in recently appearing attractions of the amusement parks (such as the roller coaster), which combined sensations of acceleration and falling with a security guaranteed by modern industrial technology." (3) This desire to thrill and astonish led to an intimate interplay--one which still exists--between cinema and the amusement park. In the early 1900s, for instance, Hale's Tours and Scenes of the World utilized a "phantom ride" perspective--achieved by placing the camera at the front of a moving vehicle--to mimic the experience of being aboard a moving train. Audiences or "passengers" viewed these moving images on moving platforms that were furnished as railway cars. In her book Electric Dreamland: Amusement Parks, Movies and American Modernity, Rabinovitz makes another set of interesting connections between the two entertainment forms: More than other types of available contemporary commercial leisure, amusement parks and movies represented new kinds of energized relaxation that also functioned to calm fears about new technologies and living conditions of an industrialized society ... They [both] represented uniquely modern mechanized responses to turn-of-the-century American culture. (4) Here, Rabinovitz's emphasis is twofold. First, both early cinema and the amusement park constituted a controlled shock, one that ultimately soothed anxieties amidst a rapid technological modernity. Second, they both provided new perceptions of movement through electric, mechanical means. This combination of rapid movement--either of the image or of the body--and mechanization inspired many early filmmakers to treat the amusement park as their subject. Rabinovitz observes that films such as Rube and Mandy at Coney Island (1903), Shooting the Chutes (1903), and Bamboo Slide (1904) are simple studies of motion and the human body--movement as attraction. Lucy Fischer also notes the high number of early films that present electricity as an attraction (Panoramic View of Electric Tower From a Balloon (1901), Electrocuting an Elephant (1903), The Electric Hotel (1905), among others). Electricity, she writes, was the "crucial tie to both the birth of the modern city and to the cinematic medium"--and, of course, to the possibilities of the amusement park as well. (5) Cinema and the amusement park, then, were able to present new perceptual experiences of movement and light, features which have placed them in larger conversations about urban and technological modernity. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] While these connections between early cinema and the fairground are indeed crucial to our understanding of American history, culture and modernity, I'd like to call attention to a number of amusement park sequences in late-silent films--It (1927), Sunrise (1927), The Crowd (1928), Lonesome (1928), and Speedy (1928)--because I feel they have an equally important voice in these conversations. …

In his famous study on “Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious," Freud argues that jokes, and the laughter they elicit, allow a kind of access to the unconscious. They permit, among other things, the fulfillment of repressed desires, the channeling of aggression into an acceptable social form, and polysemic satisfaction. As the structure of a joke operates similarly to the structure of a dream (by condensation and displacement, metaphor and metonymy), it also enables the revelation of contemporary ideology and its ambiguities. Further, for Lacan, with the child’s “jubilant assumption of his [sic] specular image” in the mirror, laughter coincides with the ego's coming-into-being. Laughter is also connected to the phallus—and therefore castration—which easily produces laughter, for instance in the constant failure of male courting and adultery in the French Vaudeville, or in the laughter by which we cope with the failure of the sexual relation.

Laughter is both imaginary and symbolic, and for Lacan it is also linked to jouissance and thus the Real. The outburst of excessive laughter without reason, the repeated failure of pronouncing a word correctly or the constant incapability of controlling one’s own body—for instance in slapstick—move beyond the socially accepted and hence produce an ambivalent laughter. They reveal the presence of the Real in everyday life alongside the stubborn ambiguity of signifiers and the limits of meaning. Furthermore, both satire and black comedy allow us to subversively approach difficult political and moral questions. Laughter and comedy therefore permeate, reveal, and subvert our identities and social existences.

This seminar seeks papers that deal with the relationship between psychoanalysis and laughter. Questions for consideration could include:

What are the connections between laughter, psychoanalysis, ideology, and politics today? Is a joke still a joke if it loses the capability of playing around freely, even (or especially) with “master signifiers”? Is laughter nowadays "free" or censored, and what does laughter at (or proscription of) the vulgar, distasteful, or “offensive” reveal about our unconscious? Our jouissance? (Why) is sex funny? Does satire work? Is contemporary mass media just a naïve (or even sadistic) pastime as Adorno and Horkheimer claim or is, to the contrary, comedy a preferred medium of acting out (hidden) social criticism in post-postmodernist times?