Car Wreckers and Home Lovers: The Automobile in Silent Slapstick
A lecture by Karen Beckman
Wednesday, December 9, 2009 at 7:30pm
Light Industry
Tickets - $7, available at door.
This talk explores the function of the automobile gag through a close analysis of Harold Lloyd's Hot Water and Laurel and Hardy's Two Tars. As Beckman traces critical responses to these three very different comedians, she focuses in particular on Lloyd's (a.k.a. "Speedy"'s) association with the tempo of modernity in contrast to Laurel and Hardy's association with regression, slowness and retardation, qualities which in turn become associated by critics with misogyny and the specter of homosexuality. Revisiting these films and their reception, she explores the normative impulse of early film scholarship, and examines the queer potential of slow, stalled, crashing, and exploding cars.
http://lightindustry.org/wreckers
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