Featured facts about Cinema's First Nasty Women

“To be a #NastyWoman means refusing to be silenced while embracing the messiness of gender and engaging as an energetic participant in feminist political life,” according to Associate Professor of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Minnesota, Maggie Hennefeld, Laura Horak, and Elif Rongen-Kaynakçi. The trio co-curated the four-disc DVD/Blu ray set titled Cinema’s First Nasty Women from which this selection of films is drawn. 
 

The names of many of the actresses in this collection are unknown to this day, including the real name of French spitfire Léontine, who starred in more than 20 episodes of her own comic film series from 1910-1912. 
 

Viewers may be surprised to witness the female rebellion and hilarity of Cinema’s First Nasty Women, considering these films debuted between 1898 and 1920. As The New York Times  points out in Rewriting Women Back Into Film History, “Laughter can be subversive, of course, and one of the great satisfactions of these films is watching so many women laugh—often guffawing, not tittering—through one predicament after another.”

Most Westerns are generally masculine-dominated. Flipping expectations, entertainer and entrepreneur Texas Guinan starred in silent Westerns, even holding her bridegroom at gunpoint in the film The Night Rider! In addition to her film career, she became legendary during Prohibition as “The Queen of the Nightclubs,” and for her catchphrase, “Hello, sucker!” (Silent London).

The founders of Dreamland Faces, Karen Majewicz and Andy McCormick, perform and write music together, having composed “dozens of scores for silent films” (Star Tribune). To add sass to these silent cinema shorts, the duo enlisted Ryan Billig, providing percussion “clanks, creaks, thuds and dings,” Elaine Evans with varied wind, string, and electronic improvisation, Philip Potyondy supplying lyric cornet and other brass, Christa Rübsam Schneider on cello and violin, and Molly Raben’s dynamic colorings on Northop’s own Aeolian-Skinner Opus 892 pipe organ.