Maggie Hennefeld
Biographic Data
| ID | 323181 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Maggie Hennefeld |
| GIVEN NAMES | Maggie |
| FAMILY NAME | Hennefeld |
| SIGNATURE | HENNEFELD M |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Minnesota |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 18 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 2 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 15 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 3 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2014 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Smashing the Patriarchy in Bologna
Cinema Ritrovato is a nine-day festival at the Cineteca di Bologna that celebrates new restorations of widely unseen archival cinema. Maggie Hennefeld recounts her experience as a spectator and participant in the June 2025 edition, where she filled her festival docket with unruly visions of feminist and women-made cinema. Her viewings included French comedies by Coline Serreau, anti-colonial films by Jocelyne Saab (Lebanon) and Sumitra Peries (Sr…
Cinema and Pleasure
There has been no concept as foundational as pleasure in the history of film studies and film theory in particular. During the 1970s, film scholars debated pleasure as a deeply ambivalent promise, some finding it an outright synonym for the self-delusion and alienation driven by the market forces that shape commercial cinema’s narrative language and ideological apparatus. Today, scholars and cinephiles alike are still haunted by an unresolved, la…
On the Pleasures of Cinema and Daydreaming
In this essay, I finally come out of the celluloid closet as an involuntary daydreamer. I have no greater pleasure as a cinephile than to let my mind wander—enfolded in otherworldly voices and transported by fluid cinematography to enter another realm. What is cinema if not a radical experiment in simultaneously existing elsewhere? Unfortunately, understanding movies is also my job, so I have to be ruthlessly accountable for the swirling orbit of…
Mourning Without End: A Start
The End of Mourning or: Death by Laughter
Can you really die from laughing too hard? This article embraces the wager of fatal jouissance as an alternative to pervasive melancholia. Inspired by a lethal dentistry joke that allegedly made a woman laugh for eight hours in 1907, this article pursues the highest laugh (of all the laughs!) through her carnivalesque praxis, which involves cachinnation obituaries, interspecies bird jokes, and Medusan meta-cinema. When the old world is dying and …
Feminist World-Making with Cinema’s First Nasty Women
Cinema’s First Nasty Women is a ninety-nine-film DVD/Blu-ray set that highlights silent-era comediennes and cross-dressed women. Cocurators Maggie Hennefeld and Laura Horak organized two live Zoom roundtables with members of the team who had created, taught, or contributed to the project, moderated by FMH editor Jennifer Bean. One included cocurator and film historian Laura Horak, Kino producer Bret Wood, cocurator and silent film archivist Elif …
“The Most Revolutionary Affect of the Masses”: Collective Laughter
.
The problem of film comedy in the twenty-first century
Radical comedy liberates spectators from their compulsive attachments to volatile objects. In that spirit, modernist film theorists placed their hopes in the raucous, world-shattering laughter elicited by violent slapstick comedies to explode the crises of the present and their foothold in habituated perception. But what remains of laughter’s revolutionary modernist project in the twenty-first century? In this article, I rethink the concept of ci…
Affect Theory in the Throat of Laughter
Is Laughter an affect? And what would it mean for feminist theory to conceive of it as such? This article pursues laughter as an affect that bridges the gap between feminist comedy studies and feminist affect theory. Laughter has widely missed the mark of feminist theory’s sourcing of collective activist potential and intellectual invigoration in the exploration of affect. Likewise, affect has not been a central concern for humor scholars. But wh…
On Second Thought
Editors:I found Sam Chesters's “metamodern” framework for satire in “Don't Go All Earnest on Us” useful and encouraging, especially in an era in which, despite George Saunders's own increasing popularity, satire is viewed with skepticism by much of the reading public and the publishing industry.1I was a student of Saunders's two decades ago, and even then he was warning me against my tendency toward what Steven Weisenburger refers to as “degenera…
Gender and the Nasty Women of history
For the past two years, Maggie Hennefeld, Laura Horak, and Elif Rongen-Kaynakçi have been curating Cinema’s First Nasty Women: a 4-disc DVD/Blu-ray set that features 99 archival silent films and will be released by Kino Lorber in August 2022 (see https://wfpp.columbia.edu/cinemas-first-nasty-women/). In this co-written archive piece, they put theory into action and share tantalizing snippets from the collection. Women combust out of the chimney, …
Abjection Incorporated: Mediating the Politics of Pleasure and Violence
Abjection Incorporated: Mediating the Politics of Pleasure and Violence
Film History
Feminist film history involves the ongoing rewriting of the past through the lens of gender/sexual difference and from the perspective of women, whose work is too often erased or sidelined in dominant narratives of the history of cinema. Feminist film history is often seen as having emerged as an academic subfield in the mid- to late 1970s, alongside a general “historical turn” by which film scholars came to emphasize archival research and histor…
Feminist Filmmaking and the Future of Global Film Politics
Death from Laughter, Female Hysteria, and Early Cinema
In the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, hundreds of women allegedly died from laughing too hard. Any activity in modern life-going to the circus, playing bridge, or salting pork in the kitchen-could become a gateway to the convulsions of hysterical laughter for women. In this article, I look at death from laughter as a limit case that blows open the long-standing separation between laughter and hysteria in scholarship on these topics…
Miniature women, acrobatic maids , and self-amputating domestics: Comediennes of the trick film
Silent film comedies were obsessed with images of shape-shifting women: housemaids dismembered their own limbs or stretched these limbs beyond human proportions, magical nicotine fairies miniaturized their entire bodies, and housewives metamorphosed into reptiles or celestial satellites. In this article, I look at female corporeality in transitional silent cinema as itself a trick technique. I argue that filmmakers used female metamorphosis in or…
Slapstick Comediennes in Transitional Cinema: Between Body and Medium
This article rethinks the emergence of narrative film syntax through the comedy genre, focusing on slapstick films that depict female unruliness. I discuss films featuring Mabel Normand, Florence Turner, Marie Dressler, Sarah Duhamel, and other forgotten silent comediennes, arguing that these women's performances played crucial roles in orchestrating transitions in industrial film form. Focusing on a comparison between the French Pathé and Americ…
Slapstick Comediennes in Transitional Cinema: Between Body and Medium
This article rethinks the emergence of narrative film syntax through the comedy genre, focusing on slapstick films that depict female unruliness. I discuss films featuring Mabel Normand, Florence Turner, Marie Dressler, Sarah Duhamel, and other forgotten silent comediennes, arguing that these women's performances played crucial roles in orchestrating transitions in industrial film form. Focusing on a comparison between the French Pathé and Americ…
Slapstick Comediennes in Transitional Cinema: Between Body and Medium
This article rethinks the emergence of narrative film syntax through the comedy genre, focusing on slapstick films that depict female unruliness. I discuss films featuring Mabel Normand, Florence Turner, Marie Dressler, Sarah Duhamel, and other forgotten silent comediennes, arguing that these women's performances played crucial roles in orchestrating transitions in industrial film form. Focusing on a comparison between the French Pathé and Americ…
Miniature women, acrobatic maids , and self-amputating domestics: Comediennes of the trick film
Silent film comedies were obsessed with images of shape-shifting women: housemaids dismembered their own limbs or stretched these limbs beyond human proportions, magical nicotine fairies miniaturized their entire bodies, and housewives metamorphosed into reptiles or celestial satellites. In this article, I look at female corporeality in transitional silent cinema as itself a trick technique. I argue that filmmakers used female metamorphosis in or…
Death from Laughter, Female Hysteria, and Early Cinema
In the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, hundreds of women allegedly died from laughing too hard. Any activity in modern life-going to the circus, playing bridge, or salting pork in the kitchen-could become a gateway to the convulsions of hysterical laughter for women. In this article, I look at death from laughter as a limit case that blows open the long-standing separation between laughter and hysteria in scholarship on these topics…
Film History
Feminist film history involves the ongoing rewriting of the past through the lens of gender/sexual difference and from the perspective of women, whose work is too often erased or sidelined in dominant narratives of the history of cinema. Feminist film history is often seen as having emerged as an academic subfield in the mid- to late 1970s, alongside a general “historical turn” by which film scholars came to emphasize archival research and histor…
Feminist Filmmaking and the Future of Global Film Politics
Abjection Incorporated: Mediating the Politics of Pleasure and Violence
Abjection Incorporated: Mediating the Politics of Pleasure and Violence
Affect Theory in the Throat of Laughter
Is Laughter an affect? And what would it mean for feminist theory to conceive of it as such? This article pursues laughter as an affect that bridges the gap between feminist comedy studies and feminist affect theory. Laughter has widely missed the mark of feminist theory’s sourcing of collective activist potential and intellectual invigoration in the exploration of affect. Likewise, affect has not been a central concern for humor scholars. But wh…
On Second Thought
Editors:I found Sam Chesters's “metamodern” framework for satire in “Don't Go All Earnest on Us” useful and encouraging, especially in an era in which, despite George Saunders's own increasing popularity, satire is viewed with skepticism by much of the reading public and the publishing industry.1I was a student of Saunders's two decades ago, and even then he was warning me against my tendency toward what Steven Weisenburger refers to as “degenera…
Gender and the Nasty Women of history
For the past two years, Maggie Hennefeld, Laura Horak, and Elif Rongen-Kaynakçi have been curating Cinema’s First Nasty Women: a 4-disc DVD/Blu-ray set that features 99 archival silent films and will be released by Kino Lorber in August 2022 (see https://wfpp.columbia.edu/cinemas-first-nasty-women/). In this co-written archive piece, they put theory into action and share tantalizing snippets from the collection. Women combust out of the chimney, …
The problem of film comedy in the twenty-first century
Radical comedy liberates spectators from their compulsive attachments to volatile objects. In that spirit, modernist film theorists placed their hopes in the raucous, world-shattering laughter elicited by violent slapstick comedies to explode the crises of the present and their foothold in habituated perception. But what remains of laughter’s revolutionary modernist project in the twenty-first century? In this article, I rethink the concept of ci…
Feminist World-Making with Cinema’s First Nasty Women
Cinema’s First Nasty Women is a ninety-nine-film DVD/Blu-ray set that highlights silent-era comediennes and cross-dressed women. Cocurators Maggie Hennefeld and Laura Horak organized two live Zoom roundtables with members of the team who had created, taught, or contributed to the project, moderated by FMH editor Jennifer Bean. One included cocurator and film historian Laura Horak, Kino producer Bret Wood, cocurator and silent film archivist Elif …
“The Most Revolutionary Affect of the Masses”: Collective Laughter
.
Smashing the Patriarchy in Bologna
Cinema Ritrovato is a nine-day festival at the Cineteca di Bologna that celebrates new restorations of widely unseen archival cinema. Maggie Hennefeld recounts her experience as a spectator and participant in the June 2025 edition, where she filled her festival docket with unruly visions of feminist and women-made cinema. Her viewings included French comedies by Coline Serreau, anti-colonial films by Jocelyne Saab (Lebanon) and Sumitra Peries (Sr…
Cinema and Pleasure
There has been no concept as foundational as pleasure in the history of film studies and film theory in particular. During the 1970s, film scholars debated pleasure as a deeply ambivalent promise, some finding it an outright synonym for the self-delusion and alienation driven by the market forces that shape commercial cinema’s narrative language and ideological apparatus. Today, scholars and cinephiles alike are still haunted by an unresolved, la…
On the Pleasures of Cinema and Daydreaming
In this essay, I finally come out of the celluloid closet as an involuntary daydreamer. I have no greater pleasure as a cinephile than to let my mind wander—enfolded in otherworldly voices and transported by fluid cinematography to enter another realm. What is cinema if not a radical experiment in simultaneously existing elsewhere? Unfortunately, understanding movies is also my job, so I have to be ruthlessly accountable for the swirling orbit of…
Mourning Without End: A Start
The End of Mourning or: Death by Laughter
Can you really die from laughing too hard? This article embraces the wager of fatal jouissance as an alternative to pervasive melancholia. Inspired by a lethal dentistry joke that allegedly made a woman laugh for eight hours in 1907, this article pursues the highest laugh (of all the laughs!) through her carnivalesque praxis, which involves cachinnation obituaries, interspecies bird jokes, and Medusan meta-cinema. When the old world is dying and …
Cinema and Media Studies (10 works) · Movie theater (10 works) · Art (9 works) · Sociology (8 works) · Aesthetics (6 works) · Literature (6 works) · Gender Studies (5 works) · Psychology (5 works) · Art history (4 works) · Laughter (4 works)