seeing love from both sides now
by Douglas Messerli
Alice Guy Blaché (screenwriter and director) Les résultats du féminisme
(The Consequences of Feminism) / 1906
It’s fascinating to realize that a year before
Georges Méliès was shooting the still rather crude, cartoon-like The
Courtship of the Sun & Moon, Alice Guy released a sophisticated and
clever satire in which she skewered male paternalistic notions of empowerment
by imagining a reversal of male/female stereotypical roles as representing The
Consequences of Feminism (1906). Playing on the male terror emanating from
the growing female empowerment, Guy showed her opponents what life might look
like in the future if women treated their companions as males had throughout
the centuries, suggesting that gender roles were not in-born but were a result
of acculturation and basic received attitudes about sexuality.
The result is a stunning early statement that might have forced any
thoughtful viewer to question his or her assumptions about gender and some of
the attending mannerisms we assume are products of sexual orientation.
A
woman enters the millinery shop, apparently in search of a new hat. The shop
manager goes in search of an appropriate hatbox, while she checks out the
workers, pinching one of their cheeks.
When she finally selects a hat, the manager choses one of the young men
to deliver it, he first stopping to smear a bit of cream on his face before
mincing out into the world.
At home we see a man busy on the sewing machine while his male maid is
ironing. The two work blissfully together, the maid finally finishing up her
chores while his wife seems to be not so patiently waiting for him on a nearby
lounging chair, drinking and smoking. She stands, goes to get something, and
knocks over the small table before returning to her seat. The maid quickly
picks it up, and puts it in its proper place before putting away the folded
items. He kisses his boss goodbye gently on the forehead, the sewer fondly
throwing him back a kiss with an extended hand and limp wrist.
The sewing man, now alone, takes up a photograph and kisses it,
impatient evidently for his companion or lover to return home. The woman we
have seen flirting in the previous scene soon enters and kisses him, leading
him to the couch for more kisses as she gets on her knees in seeming adoration
of her housebound lover. Apparently, she is asking him to leave his home to
join her for sex in a nearby hotel, for he pauses in some regret for leaving his
domestic world behind, she convincing him to wrote a note, which he does before
throwing several goodbye kisses at the room before exiting.
In the very next scene, he sits on a bed, she before him attempting to
make love to him. He literally swoons in the process, she proceeding to undress
him as he faints in reaction to her lust. As the camera’s shutter closes she
rushes to bring her lover some smelling salts.
Now in a bar, several women are occupied reading newspapers, while
others gather in conversations at nearby tables. A pioneer-like woman, toting a
gun enters to be greeted heartily by the others, a woman pouring her out a
drink and pounding her back with a sense of camaraderie.
A man enters with a laundry basket filled with freshly washed linen,
some of the women reaching it to pull out items and tossing them about the
room, making fun of his confusion and distress. He rushes out horror-stricken
by the chaos.
We observe other men, also holding children passing by, fearful of intruding upon the all- female domain. The bartender closes the bar door to prevent further male entry into their sacred space.
The camera switches to a spot outside the bar where our busy female masher is sitting at a café table enjoying a drink. Bit by bit a parade of perambulators and attending older children steered by males wander the streets. One man with children at his side recognizes the drinker and pleads with her to return home with him, an offer she rejects while seemingly put to shame by the others of his kind who surround and support his entreaties, scolding the woman for her treatment of her husband and her children.
At that very moment, the insurrection seems to grow as back at the bar
we see a man enter and scold the women, demanding that they all should return
to their homes and families. Again, they quickly rout him out. But the next
moment a league of males enter the bar, pulling the woman out, many of them
up-righting and pushing their wives in the direction of home, while the
ringleaders grab up some bottles and hail their new triumph.
The victory, of course, is precisely what women were attempting to
achieve in 1906 living under the same conditions that Guy’s fictitious men were
being forced to endure.*
If there was any one director who attempted early on to understand the
“other” it was Guy, who as I write elsewhere in these pages, explored notions
of the double and the “other” in several of her films. In The Consequences
of Femininity, she was positing a “feminist” society that behaved just as
the paternalistic male society had for centuries, a force that ruled over and
controlled the “other,” in this case the opposite sex, in order to make a
specific point. You can be certain that while this work is most definitely a
satire demonstrating the evils of generations of male rule, she is
simultaneously arguing against a feminism that behaves in the very same manner.
If time and again in Guy’s work women prove themselves just as powerful
as men, they are clever enough to share their prowess without denigrating their
husbands or lovers. Guy encourages both, through the symbolic act of cross
dressing, to feel what it was like to temporarily live as the other, or, as in
this film, to explore what he feels like to live under such patriarchal—or
matriarchal—domination. Guy seemed always to be seeking empathy on both sides
of whatever divide people perceived, whether it be sexual, political, or
cultural.
The
clever housewife of her short film A Comedy of Errors manages to punish
her presumptuous neighbor for believing her window kisses thrown out to her
departing husband were meant for him by gradually stripping him of most of his
clothing accessories: his hat, umbrella, and coat, awarding them as gifts to
her husband as surprise birthday gifts; but when her husband begins to behave
equally badly, suspecting her of having a secret affair, she just as suddenly
allows the neighbor to reclaim his possessions, leaving her husband with the
tattered hat, a broken umbrella, and a weather-worn cloak with which he began
the morning.
Interestingly, Guy’s tale is retold, within a slightly different
context, in Richard Wallace’s 1926 film What’s the World Coming To?, in
which husbands and wives also reverse their traditional roles, the men again
being depicted as sissified dandies.
*The usually reliable commentator on silent
films, particularly those featuring and directed by women, who goes under the
moniker of “popegrutch,” wonders how the director found so many male actors
capable of representing what reads today as an openly “gay society”:
“The...thing that stands out about this movie
is all of the signals the men put out regarding sexuality, which a modern
audience reads as their being “flaming” or openly gay. Gay men existed at this
time, of course, but they were far less open, even in liberal France, and again
it’s hard to know how much we are “reading backward” when we interpret their
behavior in this manner. Obviously, Guy was making them as feminine as possible
to show her future dystopia in which men and women have traded places. Did she
hire female impersonators as actors? That would make the longer hair and
obvious facility with feminine roles more logical. Certainly, there were
cabarets by 1906 in which this sort of thing went on, but I don’t know whether
Guy would have had access. It’s possible that she used wigs and directed
“straight” male actors until she got what she wanted.”
Frankly, I’ve grown a little tired of the continued attempts to correct
for our misconceptions of gay history, presuming that such so-called
“effeminate” or affected behavior and the recognition of their signifying
homosexuality was simply not possible in the early part of the century. Perhaps it’s time to remind ourselves that as
early as the 1910s figures such as Magnus Hirschfeld had already written
extensively on his observations of gay individuals and in 1914 produced an
important study Die Homosexualität des Mannes und des Weibes (“The
Homosexuality of Men & Women”). He would fight, with other scientists such
as Franz Joseph von Bülow, Eduard Oberg, and Max Spohr against paragraph 175 of
the German Penal Code, which defined homosexual activity as a criminal act,
believing that homosexuality was one of many natural and normal sexual
behaviors. Hirschfeld would go on to found in 1919 the famous Berlin Institut
für Sexualwissenschaft (Institute of Sexual Research). By that time Berlin had
already established itself as a hotbed for male and female homosexual bars and
other gathering places, as well as providing numerous private home-gatherings
for sexually adventurous males and females.
Even earlier, Oscar Wilde had felt comfortable enough in France to move
there after his British imprisonment.
In 1927 Henry Gauthier-Villars, known better by his pseudonym Willy and
for his marriage to the writer Colette, had written a rather scandalous and
disapproving work, The Third Sex, outlining the history of gay life in
major European cities from the turn of the century forward.
And there are numerous other examples of documentation of an extensive
gay culture in Europe and elsewhere from the 1890s on, despite its social and
legal restrictions.
Even the word “gay”—which we are constantly reminded by some blinkered
historians did not generally come to mean a man who had sex with other men
until the 1950s—had long before taken on those connotations. When Cary Grant,
dressed in a woman’s feathery nightgown in the 1938 comedy Bringing Up Baby
was asked why he was dressed like that, in ad-libbing the line “I’ve just gone
gay!” the actor most definitely did not mean that he’d suddenly grown very
happy. Indeed, the word in various polari or polare languages (used by actors,
day-laborers, gypsies, etc) had long before shifted that word from its 19th
century references to a female prostitute, a man who slept with numerous women,
or even its slightly later verbal signification (“gay it”) to have sex, to mean
a man who was not only sexually active but who had sex with other men as well.
By the 1920s a “gey cat” meant a homosexual boy, and “gay boy” soon after
signified a homosexual male. In many European countries the word “blue” was
another signifier for a gay man, again quite the opposite of being very happy.
Working with actors and theater folk, certainly Alice Guy would have
well known where to find the kind of actors she was looking for to portray what
we can describe as “gay”-like beings, robbed of their pejorative masculinity.
We
might note that the strict bifurcation between homosexuality and
heterosexuality was almost meaningless for many centuries. Sexuality was simply
not conceived as an “either/or” activity.
Finally, My Queer Cinema had its impetus in disproving the notion
that homosexuality was seldom expressed or difficult to express in positive
terms until after the 1960s. Once the first filmmaker determined that
heterosexual desire was something of interest to depict on the screen, so did
it become immediately necessary to represent the “other,” which cinema did
mostly negatively but in a multitude of cases engagingly and interestingly,
even if coded, despite the attempt of the normative society to censor, ban, and
destroy all images and narrative representations of the experiences of what we
now describe as the LGBTQ community. It has long been my contention that
homosexuality in filmmaking became enormously powerful and interesting because
it needed to express itself in new, different, and queer ways that stood out
from the increasingly tired and bland expressions of love and sex depicted in
normative filmmaking. Gay sex was best when it was conceived of as being wrong
or “dirty.” You almost always knew that if something went sexually awry in
commercial films it was because it had found itself quite nicely through the
experience a different kind of sexual desire.
Los Angeles, May 21, 2021
Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog and
World Cinema Review (May 2021).
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