March 2009: Karen Beckman

Karen Beckman, University of Pennsylvania

"Car Wreckers and Home Lovers: The Automobile in Silent Slapstick"

Respondent: Paula Marantz Cohen, Drexel University

Monday, March 2

5 PM

University of Pennsylvania, 113 Jaffe Building | directions

Karen Beckman explores the function of the automobile gag through close analysis of Harold Lloyd's Hot Water and Laurel and Hardy's Two Tars. As she 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, a contrast to Laurel and Hardy's association with regression, slowness and retardation, qualities which in turn become associated by critics with misogyny and the opposition to domesticity. As Beckman revisits these films and the reception of them, she explores the normative impulse of early film scholarship, and examines the queer potential of slow, stalled, crashing, and exploding cars.

Karen Beckman is the Elliot and Roslyn Jaffe Associate Professor of Film Studies in the department of the History of Art, and she is also the director of the program in Cinema Studies. She completed her BA in English at Cambridge University and her Ph.D in English at Princeton University. Her book, Vanishing Women: Magic, Film and Feminism (Duke UP, 2003), examines the relationship between the elusive female body and the medium of film. She is currently completing a book about car crashes and film that includes chapters on early cinema, slapstick comedy, educational safety films, Warhol, and contemporary disaster films (forthcoming, Duke UP). She is co-editor of two volumes: Still Moving: Between Cinema and Photography with Jean Ma (Duke UP, September 2008) and Picture This! Photography and Literature with Liliane Weissberg. She has published articles on a range of subjects, including feminism and terrorism, death penalty photography, pop art and literature, and the relationship between cinema and contemporary art.

 

Paula Marantz Cohen, Distinguished Professor of English, received her BA in English and French from Yale University and her Ph.D. in English from Columbia University. She is the author of six books and numerous essays on literature, film, and culture. Her scholarly books are The Daughter as Reader, The Daughter's Dilemma, Alfred Hitchcock: the Legacy of Victorianism, Silent Film and the Triumph of the American Myth; her novels are Jane Austen in Boca; Much Ado About Jessie Kaplan; and Jane Austen in Scarsdale or Love, Death, and the SATs. Her most recent academic book, Silent Film and the Triumph of the American Myth (Oxford UP), was selected as a Choice Outstanding Book for 2003. Her first novel, Jane Austen in Boca (St. Martin's Press), was a Literary Guild/Book of the Month Club Featured Alternate and a Page-Turner of the Week in People Magazine. She has articles and stories in many journals, including Yale Review, Boulevard, Iowa Review, Raritan, The American Scholar, and The Hudson Review. She is the Co-Editor of the Journal of Modern Literature and a regular reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement. She is the recipient of the Lindback Teaching Award.