Looking for Mabel Normand
Madcap Mabel Normand
Marilyn Slater
“Looking-for-Mabel”
I would like to recommend a book;
THE FUN FACTORY by Rob King
(the little fringe around the book’s edges are my post-it notes)
Rob King is an Assistant Professor of Cinema Studies and History currently at the
The title of the book is “The Fun Factory;” it covers the period from 1912 when the Keystone Studio was established to around 1917 when the “Fun Factory” morphed into the Mack Sennett Studios. It is a cultural and social history rather than the more common film histories, which tend to be “Great Man” histories, the kind that tell the story of a particular era through the life of a dominate personality. Research is the strength of this book since almost a 3rd of “The Fun Factory” are the end-notes and, frankly, the notes alone are worth far more than the price of the book, which is extremely reasonable.
If you want to know about the products made at the Keystone Studio (The Fun Factory), this is the book for you: “The history of the changing social patterns that produced laughter.”
What you will find is a thoughtful and detailed discussion of “The Keystone Film Company and the Emergence of Mass Culture” and the importance of slapstick films on the large American viewing public. He argues that the history of comedy reflects the general culture, which was portrayed on film (and the stage during this period) and the comedy expressed the values of the society.
If you are looking for a new discussion of “who threw the first pie,” “why Mack Sennett and Mabel Normand didn’t marry,” “who killed William Desmond Taylor,” “the love life of Charlie Chaplin,” “if Gloria Swanson was a bathing beauty,” or pictures of the early players or a filmography of Keystone films this is not a book where you will find that kind of stuff.
There are some illustrations but small, and for the most part, ones, which you are probably familiar, if you have done any research into Keystone; they are mostly from the Margaret Herrick Library Collection. The filmography in the back of the book only covers the films discussed within the text and is very abridged.
There are some thoughtful and well-researched monographs on class and popular culture inasmuch as they are reflective of the mass entertainments of the era. There is another composition on the ethnic-comedies with some wonderful insights into the on-screen character played by Ford Sterling. He wrote a terrific treatise on “Tillie’s Punctured Romance.” It is presented in a classic compare-and-contrast composition format It deals with the feature film and the stage play, Tillie’s Nightmare, The Triangle dream of Harry Aitken and his brother, Roy, is explored in a very understandable chapter.
Rob King takes-apart a number of the split-reels screen-by-screen (much like the work done by the French film scholar, Thierry Georges Mathieu, with his monumental work on “La Naissance de Charlot,” the journals of each of the Chaplin films from 1914 at Keystone
I agree with the author in that the timing of the shorts are reflective of the rhythms of the industrial factories with which the working-class audiences would have been familiar with but the whole use of the various “machines” in the Keystone production was something I had not thought of before but it is so much apart of the Fun Factory product! There is also a nice essay on the use of the Bathing Beauties as a part of the emerging new consumer culture.
What is of particular interest to me is the material on the “New Women” in a section called “A Slap From A Perfumed Hand: The Screen Comedy of Mabel Normand,” in which Rob King wrote “For the New Woman had defined herself, in large part, by reclaiming the right to her own embodiment against the morally and spiritually defined – hence quintessentially disembodied – ideal of true womanhood. Hence the growth of women’s sporting pursuits, hence the flamboyance and flirtations encouraged in the new world of commercial recreation…” I had not considered the development of the amusement parks as a place where women were allowed to participate without the restrictions of the social rules that where still very much a part of the Victorian primary social paradigm, and, of course, my interest is in the influence of Mabel Normand on the Keystone audiences and beyond.
All in all this is a scholarly little treasure but accessible to the general, educated public.
The amazon link is below:
http://www.amazon.com/Fun-Factory-Keystone-Company-Emergence/dp/0520255380/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1229399451&sr=8-1
