There is nothing worse than when your wife is a bad cook. Well, there is: when she blows up the entire kitchen, when eating her cooking has lethal consequences, and when her inedible food can become a weapon with the potential to start a civil war. This program is dedicated to the violent and destructive culinary mishaps of early film comediennes, who not only demolished their domestic spaces with gleeful abandon, but inflicted their crises of indigestion on the public sphere at large. Revolutionizing the gendered relations of production is apparently fun!
We begin with the notorious Irish domestic Bridget McKeen, a character who appeared in 28 films from 1895 to 1909 (several times portrayed by the famous female impersonator, Gilbert Saroni). Bridget is the epitome of a “nasty woman.” In How Bridget Served the Salad Undressed, she amusingly misinterprets her employer’s instructions to “serve the salad undressed.” How Bridget Made the Fire also climaxes with an obscenely corporeal punch line, substituting spontaneous bodily combustion for accidental pornography. The Finish of Bridget McKeen prolongs the maid’s explosion by depicting her subsequent eruption out of the ceiling, bodily dismemberment (her head, hands, and feet rain down from the sky), and pithy epitaph: “Here Lie the Remains of Bridget McKeen, Who Started a Fire with Kerosene.” G.A. Smith and Laura Bayley had great fun adapting Bridget in the 1903 British film Mary Jane’s Mishap (not in this programme, but shown at the Giornate in 2002 and 2008), which featured the equally ingenious epitaph: “Here Lies Mary Jane, Who Lighted the Fire with Paraffin. Rest in Pieces.”
While Bridget and Mary Jane explode out of the chimney, the domestic sphere sprawls into the community via a runaway pet in La Course à la saucisse (1907), when a dog steals several links of meat from a butcher shop and then sets an army of kitchen maids on a ridiculous chase to reclaim their rightful dinner. From Bridget’s limbs to sausage links, dismemberment is indeed a prominent theme of slapstick comedienne kitchen comedies. In Segundo de Chomón’s surrealist French trick film Le Rêve des marmitons (Scullion’s Dream, 1908), uncannily disembodied hands prepare the food during a vividly productive hallucination of an overworked servant. The title character of Victoire à ses nerfs, while very much awake, is similarly driven by the spastic extremes of her unconscious.
Such gleeful violence reigns in D.W. Griffith’s Her First Biscuits (1909), in which Mrs. Jones (Florence Lawrence) whips up a batch of inedible biscuits that make everyone at her husband’s workplace violently ill – along with the iceman, a house burglar, and police officer – nearly landing Mrs. Jones in court for manslaughter. In contrast, in Griffith’s Lucky Jim (also 1909), death is the only possible escape from the terrors of culinary abomination. Two men, Jack and Jim, are rivals for Gertrude (Marion Leonard), who initially chooses Jim, but then ends up marrying Jack (Mack Sennett) after Jim dies suddenly of acute indigestion. Not only is Gertrude’s cooking both inedible and actively lethal, but her temper erupts in violent fits of rage at the slightest hint of Jack’s gastronomical displeasure. “Lucky Jim,” to have taken flight through food poisoning, thinks Jack, while Gertrude throws all the tableware at his head and then savagely beats him with the flatware.
In contrast, Cunégonde lacks any apparent motivation for her domestic volatility, save the sheer glee of accidentally breaking things. The eponym of a popular French series by Lux (1911-1913, 25 episodes), Cunégonde’s name is a pun on the French and Latin words for female genitalia (and a nod to the incest theme in Voltaire’s Candide). In this unidentified episode, Cunégonde (played by an unknown actress) is a newly hired housemaid, whose remarkable talent for shattering breakable dishes is rivaled only by her tendency to trample on perishable food items.
Like “Cunégonde,” “Pétronille” was a widely beloved comic series from France (produced by Éclair), featuring the ample and eminently prolific comedienne Sarah Duhamel (who also played “Rosalie”). In Le Singe de Pétronille, Duhamel enlists a simian companion to carry out her domestic rampage. Meanwhile, in an unidentified French film with the Dutch release title Een Dierenvriend, an unruly domestic turns her employers’ elegant home into a barnyard after inferring that they are “animal lovers” by watching them coddle their small dog and spoon-feed it delicacies at the dinner table. In a stroke of genius, she invites a pack of dogs, a monkey, a mule, a drove of pigs, a herd of cattle, a flock of chickens, a rabbit, and a goat to join the anthropomorphic feast – much to her master’s anger and her mistress’s hysterical anguish. If Noah’s Ark saved all the world’s animals, this film empowered modernity’s kitchen maids.
On a “lighter” note, Louise Fazenda aerates the dinner by inflating hot biscuits into bouncy rubber balloons in Are Waitresses Safe? (The answer is YES, but no one else is.) Although disciplined by the comedy genre conventions of romantic coupling, Are Waitresses Safe? still revels in the utter nastiness of gendered household labor, and the panoply of destructive and hysterical symptoms that erupt when women revolt against their normal domestic roles. Bon appétit!

Maggie Hennefeld

HOW BRIDGET SERVED THE SALAD UNDRESSED (No Salad Dressing Wanted) (US 1898)
regia/dir: ?. prod, dist: American Mutoscope & Biograph Co. uscita/rel: 05.1898. copia/copy: DCP, 30″; senza didascalie/no intertitles. fonte/source: Library of Congress Packard Center for Audio-Visual Conservation, Culpeper, VA.

HOW BRIDGET MADE THE FIRE (US 1900)
regia/dir: ?. photog: Arthur Marvin. cast: Gilbert Saroni, prod, dist: American Mutoscope & Biograph Co. uscita/rel: 06.1900. copia/copy: DCP, 30″; senza didascalie/no intertitles. fonte/source: Library of Congress Packard Center for Audio-Visual Conservation, Culpeper, VA.

THE FINISH OF BRIDGET MCKEEN (US 1901)
regia/dir: Edwin S. Porter. cast: Gilbert Saroni. prod, dist: Edison Mfg. Co. uscita/rel: 02.03.1901. copia/copy: DCP, 1’15”; senza didascalie/no intertitles. fonte/source: Library of Congress Packard Center for Audio-Visual Conservation, Culpeper, VA.

LA COURSE À LA SAUCISSE (FR 1907)
regia/dir: Alice Guy?, Louis Feuillade?. prod, dist: Gaumont. uscita/rel: 02.1907. copia/copy: DCP (da/from 35mm), 4’28”; senza didascalie/no intertitles. fonte/source: Gaumont Pathé Archives, Saint-Ouen, Paris.

VICTOIRE À SES NERFS (A Nervous Kitchen Maid) (FR 1907)
regia/dir: ?. prod, dist: Pathé Frères. uscita/rel: 29.06.1907. copia/copy: 35mm, 131 ft. (= 40 m.; orig. 70 m.), 2′ (16 fps); senza didascalie/no intertitles. fonte/source: BFI National Archive, London.

LE RÊVE DES MARMITONS (Scullion’s Dream) (FR 1908)
regia/dir: Segundo de Chomón. prod, dist: Pathé Frères. uscita/rel: 22.02.1908. copia/copy: DCP, 7′; senza didascalie/no intertitles. fonte/source: Lobster Films, Paris.

HER FIRST BISCUITS (US 1909)
regia/dir: D.W. Griffith. cast: Florence Lawrence (Mrs. Jones), John R. Cumpson (Mr. Jones), Anita Hendrie, Arthur Johnson, Mack Sennett, Marion Leonard, Owen Moore, David Miles, Mary Pickford, Violet Mersereau, Charles Avery, [Linda Arvidson?, Flora Finch?] (vittime dei biscotti/biscuit victims), George O. Nicholls (poliziotto/policeman), ? (ladro/thief), Anthony O’Sullivan (operaio/workman), Jeanie MacPherson (segretaria/secretary). prod, dist: Biograph. uscita/rel: 17.06.1909. copia/copy: 35mm, 370 ft. (orig. 514 ft.), 6′ (16 fps); did./titles: ENG. fonte/source: Library of Congress Packard Center for Audio-Visual Conservation, Culpeper, VA.

LUCKY JIM (US 1909)
regia/dir: D.W. Griffith. cast: Marion Leonard (Gertrude), Mack Sennett (Jack), Herbert Yost (Jim, il primo marito/the first husband), Anita Hendrie (la madre/Mother), David Miles (il padre/Father), Harry Solter (l’amico di Jim/Jim’s friend), Herbert Prior (il ministro/minister). prod, dist: Biograph. uscita/rel: 26.04.1909. copia/copy: 35mm, 311 ft. (orig. 502 ft.), 5′ (16 fps); did./titles: ENG. fonte/source: Library of Congress Packard Center for Audio-Visual Conservation, Culpeper, VA.

[HET ONWILLIGE DIENSTMEISJE] [La domestica riluttante/The Reluctant Housemaid] (FR 1912)
Unidentified Cunégonde film listed here with its assigned Dutch cataloguing title.
regia/dir: ?. cast: ? (Cunégonde). prod: Lux. copia/copy: 35mm, 107 m., 5’13” (18 fps); senza didascalie/no intertitles. fonte/source: EYE Filmmuseum, Amsterdam. Preservazione del 2000 da un duplicato negativo del 1993/Preserved in 2000 at Haghefilm, from a duplicate negative made in 1993.

LE SINGE DE PÉTRONILLE [De aap van petronella] (FR 1913)
regia/dir: Roméo Bosetti, Georges Rémond. cast: Sarah Duhamel (Pétronille). prod: Éclair. copia/copy: 35mm, 137 m., 7’23” (16 fps); did./titles: NDL. fonte/source: EYE Filmmuseum, Amsterdam (Desmet Collection). Preservazione in b&n effettuata nel 1991/Preserved in b&w in 1991 at Haghefilm through a duplicate negative.

[EEN DIERENVRIEND] [L’amica degli animali/Animal Lover] (FR, 1912?)
regia/dir: ?. prod: Pathé-Comica. copia/copy: 35mm, 138 m., 6’42” (18 fps); senza didascalie/no intertitles; titoli di testa e di coda/main title & closing: NDL. fonte/source: EYE Filmmuseum, Amsterdam. Preservazione in b&n effettuata nel 1991/Preserved in b&w in 1990 at Haghefilm through a duplicate negative.

ARE WAITRESSES SAFE? (US 1917)
regia/dir: Victor Heerman, con/with Hampton Del Ruth. photog: Fred W. Jackman. mont/ed., asst. prod. mgr: Hampton Del Ruth. cast: Louise Fazenda (lavoratrice/Working Girl), Ben Turpin, (Ralph, il suo innamorato/her lover), George “Slim” Summerville (capo banda rivale/gang leader rival), Glen Cavender (comune amico/mutual friend, the chef), Wayland Trask (cliente/customer), Tony O’Sullivan (travestito/“drag” woman friend), Frank B. “Jack” Cooper, Al McKinnon, Erle C. Kenton, Cliff Bowes, Tom Kennedy, Gene Rogers, Phyllis Haver, Vera Steadman, Grover Ligon, Marvel Rea, Elinor Field, Gonda Durand, Roxana McGowan, Hal Haig Preiste, Ted Edwards, Laura La Varnie, Wallace Beery, Bobby Dunn, Teddy the dog, Pepper the cat. prod: Mack Sennett, Mack Sennett Comedies. dist: Paramount. uscita/rel: 18.11.1917; riedizione/reissue 1923. copia/copy: 35mm, 1566 ft. [1858 ft. (2 rl.) – orig. length??], 17′ (24 fps); did./titles: ENG. fonte/source: Library of Congress Packard Center for Audio-Visual Conservation, Culpeper, VA.