Our amazing retrospective programmers, Kelly Robinson and Ingrid Stigsdotter, give us some insight into some of cinemas first celebrities and most alluring vamps.
Greta Garbo
At a time when complaints about our celebrity-obsessed society seem to be everywhere, it is worth reminding ourselves that sensationalism has played an important part in film culture for a very long time. Among the actresses celebrated in this retrospective, Greta Garbo (The Temptress) is perhaps the one name that almost everyone still seems to recognise, but during the silent era, several of the stars in our programme were A-list celebrities.
Theda Bara
Theda Bara (A Fool There Was) was the first actress to establish a vamp persona on film and the first publicity-created star. Although Bara was American she was presented as an exotic French-Italian who had spent her childhood near the Sphinx in Egypt. Read the full story
Last weekend BEV re-ran one of our fabulous Clowning Glories events from this year’s festival at the BFI. The amazing singing trio Juiceperformed their specially commissioned score to Danger Girl - a romping comedy starring early film diva Gloria Swanson. It went down a storm… well done the girls!
So, we went and chatted to some of the comic genii who are appearing at the festival next week, and asked them to explain why it’s a Good Thing to focus on women in comedy film… watch this quick little vid (3 min) to get their take on it…
In many film historians’ accounts of the silent movie era, the answer is an emphatic “No!” Serious slapstick was the province of male performers like Charlie Chaplin, Harry Langdon and Buster Keaton. Women were there to play ingenues, vamps or character parts. The film historian Walter Kerr claimed that: “No comedienne ever became a truly important film clown.”
The stars were supposed to be beautiful and glamorous – the object of the gaze. Clowning Glories and Screwball Women, a season of comedy films screening during the Birds Eye View film festival, a celebration of women in film, seeks to challenge this hoary old chauvinistic thinking.
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