These early slapstick films depict jolting upheavals in female corporeality as a way of visualizing the broader social opportunities for women to break free of their traditional domestic roles. In Catastrophe in the Kitchen, women burst out of the home in a variety of ways-sometimes even through the chimney. Nearly 50 films-from 30-second-long shorts to feature films-were shown across five programs, and each screening had a different theme to highlight the major tropes of female nastiness circa the early twentieth-century. This October, an exhibit at the annual Pordenone Silent Film Festival (Il Giornate del Cinema Muto) in Northern Italy celebrated silent cinema’s nasty women. In silent films, nasty women defied their domestic constraints by exploding the kitchen, shattering the dinnerware, dismembering their limbs to revolutionize their labor, tormenting their employers with feminist practical jokes and gleefully transgressing sexual and racial taboos-sometimes even metamorphosing into other species.

That is what female nastiness is all about: the power to shape and transform reality by means of vivid imagination and outrageous representation. Meanwhile, silent films playfully represented these gendered changes ad absurdum. Nasty women joined the workforce, resisted sexual predation, ran for government office and attempted to claim their equal rights under the law. When cinema was the exciting new media, these nasty women flaunted their bodily excess on-screen to help viewers navigate the changing world and society in which their films were widely viewed.

Slapstick comedians from France, Italy, England and the United States were some of the era’s most popular and most powerful stars-although today their names are largely forgotten. Women worked as directors, producers, writers, cinematographers, editors, exhibitors. In fact, there were more opportunities for women at every level of the filmmaking process during the silent era than there are even today. Yet, there is a long and robust history of women celebrating their own nastiness to speak truth to patriarchal power.įeminists today have a lot to learn from the nasty women of the early twentieth century, who have been written out of film history. Ever since Donald Trump interrupted Hillary Clinton during a 2016 Presidential Debate, “nasty woman” has become a global feminist rallying cry.

Girls Will Be Boys by Laura Horak