LÉONTINE S’ENVOLE (FR 1911)
regia/dir: ?. cast: ? (Léontine). prod: Pathé-Comica. copia/copy: DCP, [orig. 115 m.], ??’; did./titles: FRA. fonte/source: Gaumont Pathé Archives, Saint-Ouen, Paris.

BAIN FORCÉ (Een gedwongen bad) (FR 1906)
regia/dir: ?. cast: ?. prod: Pathé. copia/copy: 35mm, 51 m. [orig. 55 m.], 3′ (18 fps); did./titles: NLD. fonte/source: EYE Filmmuseum, Amsterdam.

MANNEKÄNGEN [The Mannequin] (SE 1913) [fragments]
regia/dir, scen: Mauritz Stiller. photog: Julius Jaenzon. cast: Lili Ziedner (Lili), Viktor Arfvidson (tranviere/tram conductor), Stina Berg, Dagmar Ebbesen, Karl Gerhard, Mary Johnson, Sven Peterson (tram passengers). prod: AB Svenska Biografteatern. copia/copy: 35mm, 65 m., 3’09” (18 fps); did./titles: SWE. fonte/source: Svenska Filminstitutet, Stockholm.
[Film probably never completed or released. Fragments excerpted from two Swedish documentaries.]

LÉONTINE EN APPRENTISSAGE (FR 1910)
regia/dir: ?. cast: ? (Léontine). prod: Pathé. fonte/source: Gaumont Pathé Archives, Saint-Ouen, Paris.

LEA SALVA LA POSIZIONE (IT 1911)
regia/dir: ?. cast: Lea Giunchi (Lea), Ferdinand Guillaume (Tontolini), Lorenzo Soderini, Giuseppe Gambardella (le guardie/the guards). prod: Cines. fonte/source: Fondazione CSC – Cineteca Nazionale, Roma.

LA FEMME COLLANTE [A Sticky Woman] (FR 1906)
regia/dir: Alice Guy. cast: ?. prod: Gaumont. copia/copy: 35mm, 52 m., 2’26” (18 fps); senza did./no titles. fonte/source: CNC – Centre national du cinéma et de l’image animée, Bois d’Arcy.

CUNÉGONDE FEMME DU MONDE (Cunegonde als modedame) (FR 1912)
regia/dir: ?. cast: Little Chrysia (Cunégonde). prod: Lux. copia/copy: 35mm, 136 m. [orig. 140 m.], 7′ (18 fps); did./titles: NLD. fonte/source: EYE Filmmuseum, Amsterdam (Desmet Collection).

MILLING THE MILITANTS (GB 1913)
regia/dir: Percy Stow. cast: ? (Mrs. Brown), ? (Mr. Brown). prod: Clarendon Film Co. copia/copy: 35mm, 495 ft. [orig. 500 ft.], 7′ (18 fps); did./titles: ENG. fonte/source: BFI National Archive, London.

KRI KRI E LEA MILITARI (Patachon als soldaat) (IT 1913)
regia/dir: ?. cast: Raymond Frau (Kri Kri), Lea Giunchi (Lea). prod: Cines. v.c./censor date: 01.12.1913 (n. 316).  copia/copy: 35mm, 87 m. [orig. 144 m.], 4′ (18 fps); did./titles: NLD. fonte/source: EYE Filmmuseum, Amsterdam (Desmet Collection).

LA PILE ÉLECTRIQUE DE LÉONTINE (FR 1910)
regia/dir: ?. cast: ? (Léontine). prod: Pathé. copia/copy: did./titles: FRA. fonte/source: Gaumont Pathé Archives, Saint-Ouen, Paris.

LE CHARME DE MAUD (De bekoring van Maud) (FR 1913)
regia/dir: René Hervil. cast: Miss Campton [Aimée Campton/Emily Straham Cager] (Maud), Gabriel de Gravone. prod: Éclipse. uscita/rel: 28.11.1913. copia/copy: 35mm, 302 m. [orig. 320 m.], 16′ (18 fps); did./titles: NLD. fonte/source: EYE Filmmuseum, Amsterdam (Desmet Collection).

The Nasty Women are at it again in this program! “Discipline and Anarchy” explores the tensions between control and freedom that haunt every cultural representation of radical social change. We start high in the sky in Léontine s’envole (1911), in which Léontine’s gotten her hands on fifty air balloons that send her flying over the village skyline (like our favorite Nasty Women exploding out of the chimney in The Finish of Bridget McKeen and Mary Jane’s Mishap). Eventually, she’s grounded by a steeple and further disciplined by her parents’ justifiable anger. Like fish out of water, the women in Bain forcé (1906) just want to go for a dip without being harassed. A diminutive soldier with a sword (who’s a dead ringer for Napoleon Bonaparte) chastises them for public indecency. They respond by pushing him into the water and then biking away in their swimsuits, provoking a memorable chase scene. Mauritz Stiller’s Mannekängen (1913) features another rebellious protagonist, Lili (Lili Ziedner), who makes a ruckus on a tram and in a movie theater (even inserting herself into a pretend André Deed film!). Lili’s character riffs on the jolly anarchism of Deed’s Cretinetti. We are screening the only surviving fragments from this Swedish comedy, which may never have been completed or released.
Young women are let loose on the workforce in the next three films: Léontine en apprentissage 1910), Lea salva la posizione (1911), and La Femme collante (1906). Léontine fails miserably to apprentice for a milliner, a baker, and a shoemaker. First, she allows an expensive hat to be crushed by a steamroller when she shirks her delivery route to play a game of leapfrog, then starts a food fight in the bakery, and further offends an important customer in the shoe store. When she gets her hands on a bucket of paint, she’s finally disciplined via a blackface minstrelsy sight gag. In contrast, Lea resorts to inventive means to salvage her livelihood, proving that Nasty Women can also adapt and work within the constraints of the system. Meanwhile, Alice Guy’s “sticky woman” mixes postage glue with saliva in this comedy about sexual assault.
Things don’t turn out so well for Cunégonde (they really never do), who tries to pose as a “femme du monde” in her mistress’s clothes but ends up in jail. Milling the Militants (1913) raises the stakes of the dialectic between discipline and anarchy. A henpecked husband, whose wife is a militant suffragette, fantasizes that he’s been elected Prime Minister. He assumes autocratic powers, wielding them to humiliate and punish any woman who dares to defy her subordinate social role as wife and mother – yet, all dreams must come to an end.
Kri Kri e Lea militari (1913) takes the struggle from Parliament to the battlefield. Lea and Kri Kri are happily engaged, but their courtship is interrupted by Kri Kri’s mandatory military service. Lea cross-dresses as a soldier to try to help her awkward husband survive boot camp, where she doesn’t fare much better herself. Both are disciplined, but together at last! No army in the world, however, could survive the ravages of Léontine, who’s on the march with her new electric battery in La Pile électrique de Léontine (1910). She sadistically electrocutes everyone in her path, inciting them to dance a crazy, hyper-frenetic jitterbug. Her victims include two nice old ladies, some drunken revelers at a café, laborers on a construction site, a horse buggy driver, and finally everyone inside the police station where she is arrested. Sometimes discipline is brutal and repressive, other times it’s self-fulfilling and ideological. Le Charme de Maud (1913) no doubt falls into the latter category, featuring a lead character who explores cross-class disguises and at one point slaps an older male assaulter in the face – the highlight of this nasty comedy of manners.

Maggie Hennefeld, Laura Horak