Rewriting Women Back Into Film History

Much has been made of cinema’s recent vanguard of female superheroes, the crusading women who give as good as they take. But long before Wonder Woman and her Amazonian sisters charged the big screen, long before feminist scholars began calling out the film industry’s inequities and long before talking movies became the norm, women ran wild in movies. And I mean, really wild. They riotously schemed, fought and defied convention, racing and laughing their way to liberation — or something like it.

This weekend, you can get a peek at just how free women in cinema were in a program of shorts called “Queens of Destruction: A Selection of Films From Cinema’s First Nasty Women.” Screening Saturday and Sunday at the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens, this program of 11 titles is a tasty sampler of “Cinema’s First Nasty Women,” a four-disc Kino Lorber box set that will be available Sept. 27. A mind-expanding endeavor, the set features 99 mostly comic rarities produced from 1898 to 1926, gleaned from archives and libraries across the globe. It is a triumph of scholarship.

It’s also the latest chapter in a larger, continuing initiative to rethink and rewrite the mainstream history of cinema, one that for too long mispresented the foundational contributions of women and people of color. This history hasn’t simply marginalized those contributions, but has persistently ignored and even expunged them. It is an infuriating erasure, one that has shaped both our sense of the past and our understanding of the present. The women and people of color engaged in this endeavor aren’t concocting a wishful counterhistory; they’re putting themselves back into a history they helped create.

The title of this specific initiative was inspired by Donald Trump’s calling Hillary Clinton a “nasty woman” in the final 2016 presidential debate, an epithet that rapidly became a meme and a feminist rallying cry. In a booklet for the box set, the collection’s curators — the scholars Maggie Hennefeld, Laura Horak and Elif Rongen-Kaynakçi — write that the “Nasty Women” label went viral because it resonated “with the furious ethos of 21st-century feminist movements.” That’s fair, even if yoking this project to an intended slur feels limiting. And while some women in the program get dirty, none seem especially nasty, at least in the usual sense.

Still, they may have registered as offensive and indecent back in the day, and some of the characters’ cross-dressing and gender play would clearly offend some modern-day viewers. Certainly contemporary American reviewers weren’t thrilled with the French comic character Léontine, the titular attraction in a series of films produced between 1910 and 1912. As in many of these shorts, the stories are elemental: Léontine, who’s dressed as a child but played by a grinning adult woman (the actress’s identity remains unknown), behaves very badly, sometimes violently, and gets into heaps of trouble.