Cinema Studies Talk Series

The wager of this event is that the future of Medusan resistance against the rampant dismantling of democratic bulwarks will ignite from the archives of feminist film comedy! Toward that end, this talk and screening will reveal the uproarious history of feminist film comedies that have been long unseen, poorly preserved, and even unrealized. Relevant examples run the gamut from early silent-era trick shorts and slapstick larks to post-war existential absurdism, cannibalistic satire, rabble-rousing mockumentary, and archival fabulation. In particular, I focus on comedic experiments that push laughter against grain—beyond genre conventions, ideological orthodoxy, or even the expectation of humor. When can laughter set us free? Jokes give voice to wild taboos but are easily hemmed in by narrative clichés. This talk will look askance at the canon and will instead mine the archive for hilarious, avant-garde, unruly, and political instances of world-breaking feminist laughter that provoke us to imagine otherwise.

Maggie Hennefeld is Professor of Cultural Studies & Comparative Literature at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. She is author of Death by Laughter: Female Hysteria and Early Cinema (Columbia UP, 2024) and Specters of Slapstick and Silent Film Comediennes (Columbia UP, 2018), an editor of the journal Cultural Critique (UMN Press), and co-curator of Cinema’s First Nasty Women (Kino Lorber, 2022), a DVD/Blu-ray set that spotlights 99 feminist silent films.