1 Introducing American Silent Film Comedy: Clowns, Conformity, Consumerism
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Notes 1 Introducing American Silent Film Comedy: Clowns, Conformity, Consumerism 1. This speech has often been erroneously quoted (not least by Adam Curtis in his 2002 documentary The Century of the Self ) as ‘You have taken over the job of creating desire and transformed people into constantly moving happi- ness machines’ – a tremendously resonant phrase, but not one which actually appears in the text of Hoover’s speech. Spencer Howard of the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library attributes the corrupted version to a mis-transcription several decades later. 2. The title of his 1947 essay. His key writings in the 1920s were Crystallizing Public Opinion (1923) and Propaganda (1928). 3. Of course, not all responded sympathetically to the film’s vicious racist message. The NAACP mounted a particularly effective campaign against the film, which was banned in several states and sparked mass protests in others. For the full story see Melvyn Stoke, D.W. Griffith’s ‘The Birth a Nation’, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. 4. CPI titles made in 1917/18 include America’s Answer, Under Four Flags and Pershing’s Crusaders – distributors who wanted the new Fairbanks or Pickford picture would be forced to take a CPI release as well. 2 A Convention of Crazy Bugs: Mack Sennett and the US’s Immigrant Unconscious 1. The temptation, here, is to regard Sennett’s name and the Keystone brand as being broadly synonymous, but one should remember that Sennett started off, first, as an actor and then, as a director at Biograph in 1909; the Key- stone Company was set up by Adam Kessel and Charles Baumann in 1912 (Sennett was never the owner). Keystone then became part of the short- lived Triangle group in 1917, before Sennett jumped ship, just six months later, to Paramount. From this point on, productions were distributed under the title of ‘Mack Sennett Comedies’ rather than the Keystone imprint, which remained with Triangle until its collapse in 1919. Hence, the terms Keystone and Sennett aren’t simply interchangeable: there are Keystones without Sennett, and plenty of Sennett films without Keystone, even though the terms are frequently conflated. Pathé distributed Sennett’s later shorts from 1923. 2. When talking about Sennett as a director, it is important to note that, while Sennett directed virtually all the Keystone shorts made between 1912 and 1913, after 1914 his role was mostly that of supervisor (plan- ning pictures, assembling the cast, conducting rehearsals) and by the time 223 224 Notes of the Triangle deal in 1917, his essential function was that of executive producer. 3. Louvish regards the experience as ‘much like been clapped over the head with a monkey wrench for hours at a time’: see Simon Louvish, Keystone: The Life and Clowns of Mack Sennett, London: Faber, 2003, p. xv. 4. See Walter Kerr, The Silent Clowns, New York, NY: Da Capo Press, 1980, pp. 64–8, and Rae Beth Gordon, Why the French Love Jerry Lewis, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, esp. pp. 14–8. 5. Most of the stories about Kops getting crushed by speeding autos in real- ity are merely Hollywood fables, although it’s true that vaudeville stars Joe Weber and Lew Fields quit after their taxi was hit by another car in one infa- mous shoot in 1915, and that during the making of Skidding Hearts (1917), ace driver Lewis Jackson as well as cameraman L.B. Jenkins and two specta- tors were killed in a crash; astonishingly, part of the footage made its way into the finished film. 6. One might also link Slapstick to Bakhtin’s theory of the bodily grotesque, a concern with ‘that which protrudes, bulges, sprouts or branches off [...] when a body transgresses its limits and a new one begins’. See Clayton, 2007, p. 19. 7. See Anne Marie Bean (ed.), Inside the Minstrel Mind: Readings in Nineteenth Century Blackface Minstrelry, Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1996. 8. Chaplin, however, adored Buñuel’s work; indeed he used Un Chien Andalou as a way of punishing his daughter Geraldine as a child (Louvish, 2003, p. 235). 9. A sly reference to the tea-pot dome scandal which rocked President Harding’s administration in 1921. 10. Although one might note that not even Sennett’s work was free of product placement. An ad for The Great Pearl Tangle (1916) stresses the display of ‘gowns of real sartorial importance’ (King, 2009, p. 162). 3 Accelerated Bodies and Jumping Jacks: Automata, Mannequins and Toys in the Films of Charlie Chaplin 1. Charles Musser slyly notes that a title-card identifies the respectable family as the Fords – presumably Henry and his wife? After all, the husband’s very first line is ‘Hurry my breakfast!’ See Musser, ‘Work, Ideology and Chaplin’s Tramp’, Radical History Review, 1988 (41), p. 51. 2. Musser draws attention to the fact that the object Charlie is engaged in dis- assembling is the very instrument that regulates the workplace of modern capitalism. See Musser (1988, p. 50). 3. Chaplin actually stole the sequence from Roscoe ‘Fatty’ Arbuckle’s The Rough House (1918), although, more charitably, this ‘quotation’ could be seen as a tribute to his friend, who at this stage could not appear on screen. 4. It is worth noting here that Mark Winokur considers Bergson’s definition to be culturally conservative in nature: eccentric movement or behaviour deserving of ridicule and punishment leading to correction. See Winokur (1995, p. 100). Jennifer Bean, in her essay on Chaplin, agrees. Bergson’s Notes 225 theory, she writes, ‘identifies the fool, rebukes the automaton, and purges the non person, the thing, from proper society’ (Paulus, 2010, p. 254). 5. For Rob King, this mass cultural appropriation of Chaplin’s duds reflects (and reinforces) the effacement of any immigrant signifiers: the shabby derby of the stage Jew, the eccentric moustache of ‘Dutch’ (i.e. Germanic) comedi- ans, the slap-shoes of Irish vaudeville routines – all these are replaced by a hybridized, Americanized, mass cultural persona. See King (2009, p. 85). 6. Compare Chaplin’s Work with Ritchie’s The Curse of Work (1915), released, a month after Chaplin’s comedy and featuring suspiciously identical routines. 7. In fact, several of Edison’s early Kinetoscope films were taken straight from mechanized waxwork tableaux – the only one to survive is the gruesome The Execution of Mary Queen of Scots (1895). 8. In Buster Keaton’s 1921 The Goat, Buster joins a queue outside a shabby hardware store, unaware that the figures are dummies; later he strikes his match on a cigar-store Indian, only for the Indian to inexplicably grimace and come to life. Similarly, in Safety Last (1923), discussed in Chapter 6, a drunk mistakes a fashion dummy as a lady from ‘The Follies’, while Harold disguises himself as a mannequin in order to arrive at work late, unseen by the disapproving gaze of his supervisor. 9. Here one might think of the Austrian artist Oskar Kokoschka, who commis- sioned a dressmaker to make a life-sized model of Gustav Mahler’s widow, Alma, accompanying his wooden belle to the theatre, restaurants and for private carriage rides. 10. The term ‘robot’ was actually coined by Czech writer Karel Capekˇ in his play R.U.R, (1920), the term deriving from the Czech word for drudgery. Even Capek’s drones suffer from repetitive strain injury, however. As one scientist notes: ‘they come down with something like epilepsy [...]wecallitrobot’s cramp. They’ll suddenly sling down everything they’re holding, stand still, gnash their teeth – and then they’ll have to go to the stamping mill’. Quoted in Peter Wollen, Raiding the Ice Box (1993, p. 42). See also Canty (1997). 11. Perhaps the most disturbing looking dummy in all of silent film is to be found lurking in the obscure Harry Watson vehicle, Keep Moving (1915), it’s hairy square head all too obviously sitting on a real body. In sound films, the most terrifying of all movie mannequins is unquestionably the faceless model of a serial killer which is slowly assembled and then comes to haunt the police station in Richard Fleischer’s utterly bizarre film noir, Follow Me Quietly (1949). 12. In this, Picabia’s art is very different from Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelor’s Even, whose central themes are frustration, impotency and a cold, lonely onanism. 13. See Michael Chion, Les Lumieres de la Ville, Paris: Nathan, 1989. 14. Likewise, see the 1917 Ben Turpin comedy, A Clever Dummy,inwhich Turpin’s janitor is forced to impersonate his robot double. See King (2009, p. 201). 15. Winokur argues that Chaplin aestheticizes poverty and thereby redeems it, making the immigrant experience acceptable for a working-class audience; whether this is an inescapable by-product of film is open to debate, though I would agree with Rob King that different classes tend to interpret the Tramp in different ways. A stress on his clumsiness, laziness and general fecklessness 226 Notes would seem to suggest very different connotations to workers or managers, for example. See Winokur (1995, p. 83); King (2009, p. 101). 16. As Charles Musser points out, the second hand of the factory clock is actually a sword – cf. the sword that the statue of liberty wields (in lieu of a torch) in Franz Kafka’s Amerika (1927). 17. In a throwaway line in his own autobiography (My Life and Work), Ford recalls one worker assigned a particularly monotonous task, a single motion of his hand, who cried and broke down when, after a few months, the fore- man attempted to move him to another post: Ford graciously condescended to allow him to remain where he was.