Pioneers: Alice Guy Blaché Program
88 minutes, Digital
USA
Director: Alice Guy Blaché
Distributor: Kino Lorber
Filmmaker and JHU Film and Media Studies Lecturer Karen Yasinsky will host a discussion after the 11/27 screening.
Karen Yasinsky is an artist and filmmaker working with experimental film, animation and drawing. She teaches courses dealing with the aesthetics of film language, animation, surrealism and experimental video. She is a Guggenheim fellow and a fellow of the American Academy in Berlin and the American Academy in Rome. Her video installations and drawings have been shown in many venues internationally including the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, P.S. 1 Contemporary Art, NY, UCLA Hammer Museum, LA, the Wexner Center, Columbus, Kunst Werke, Berlin and Museum Folkwang, Essen. Her films and videos have been screened worldwide at various venues and film festivals including Museum of Modern Art, the New York Film Festivals Views from the Avant Garde, the International Film Festival Rotterdam, Images Festival, San Francisco International, Crossroads and the Ann Arbor Film Festival (Best Sound 2013). She is also the recipient of the Baker Award.
Short Film:
A Fool and His Money
1912 • USA • 12 MIN • Silent
The oldest known film to feature an all-black cast, this comic short is a vital historical record of the African‑American image on celluloid.
Short Film:
Algie the Miner
1912 • USA • 10 MIN • Silent
This fascinating slice of early queer cinema concerns a foppish dandy who goes West, where he kisses cowboys while proving he’s as tough as any of them.
Short Film:
The Little Rangers
1912 • USA • 12 MIN • Silent
Two heroic women nab a villain in this rousing, proto‑feminist western.
Short Film:
Matrimony’s Speed Limit
1915 • USA • 14 MIN • Silent
A young man has 12 minutes to marry if he hopes to inherit a fortune in this antic farce, which “comically meditates upon the gendered, class, and racial fantasies and anxieties of early 20th century American culture” (author Margaret Hennefeld).
Short Film: (Pictured)
The Ocean Waif
1916 • USA • 40 MIN • Silent
A touching, beautifully crafted melodrama about a young woman (a striking performance from silent star Doris Kenyon) who falls in love with a writer while attempting to escape her abusive stepfather.
Series sponsored by the Stavros Niarchos Foundation.