James Bamforth | Ladies' Skirts Nailed to a Fence / 1899

keeping posted

by Douglas Messerli

 

James Bamforth (director) Ladies’ Skirts Nailed to a Fence / 1899

In Bamforth’s one-minute statement of male chauvinism two cross-dressing males, costumed as proper housewives appear to be gossiping. Evidently the cards accompanying the film suggest that they are engaged in a discussion about women’s suffrage, although we cannot tell whether they stand against or for it. That very much matters since as they talk two men come up behind the fence by which they are standing and nail a hem of each of their dresses to the fence before running off like naughty pranksters.

     If these women are sharing their displeasure with the suffragettes we can say that it serves them right, since they shall surely remain tied to their husbands just as they now stand attached to the fence, only with great difficulty freeing themselves from their predicament, and in the process in this instance revealing their true gender.

     If these women have been arguing for the possibility of women voting, however, the attack on them by the males reveals the ugly patriarchal world in which they live that only reiterates their forced attachment to the male species and the patriarchal punishment for even discussing the possibilities of their escape.

      One might wonder, of course, why males were playing the role of the females. Were they unable to find any females willing to participate in such an attack on their own gender, whether it be seen as prank or punishment? Or were their husbands and the director Bamforth of such a conservative bent that they would not even permit women to be represented in the new medium?

 

      Accordingly, this film seems more to have to do with issues of women studies and feminism than LGBTQ representation, even if we know the issues are highly interconnected. But I don’t think we can chalk this short experiment in filmmaking as evidence of male desire to perform in drag, unless we go back to the belief that women should not ever be allowed on stage or in cinema, forcing men to play out female roles that merely reveal their own inabilities to comprehend the opposite sex or their latent desires to live out their lives as that sex.

       If so, there may be more here than we might first have suspected.

 

Los Angeles, May 21, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (May 2022).