Curated by Maggie Hennefeld (UMN, Cultural Studies & Comparative Literature)
Presented by Northrop and Archives on Screen, Twin Cities

Hands give us metaphors for the urgency of collective labor, but they also appeared as surreal and uncanny images across the silent film archive. In this playful program, laboring limbs fall in love, catch fire, metamorphose into toy animals, chop wood, cut films, smoke pipes (while pregnant!), hypnotize circus dancers, and build zoomorphic shelters from the storm—all accompanied by Dreamland Faces’ live original score that includes Northrop’s historic pipe organ.

The seven films in this program include Stella Simon's rhythmic choreography of disembodied hands, Zora Neale Hurston's fieldwork footage shot in the 1920s, Alice Guy-Blaché's voracious comedy of maternity cravings, Ladislaw Starewicz's stop-motion fable starring dead bugs, Segundo de Chomón's phantasmagoric animation, a grotesque German puppet film, and a social satire about gendered labor and the disastrous results of editing film newsreels on a too-tight deadline!

Immediately following the event, a panel discussion moderated by University of Minnesota Associate Professor and author Maggie Hennefeld will explore themes and images raised by the screening, from the history of gender, race, labor and technology to the political aesthetics of popular moving images. She will be joined by labor and civil rights historian Professor William Jones (History, UMN) and film studies scholar Professor Mary Hennessy (University of Wisconsin, Madison) to place these films in their historical contexts and discuss their resonances for today.

William P. Jones is Professor of History at the University of Minnesota, where he teaches about race and class in the modern United States. He is author of two award-winning books, The Tribe of Black Ulysses: African American Lumber Workers in the Jim Crow South, and The March on Washington: Jobs, Freedom, and the Forgotten History of Civil Rights, and has written for The New York Times, Washington Post, The Nation, and other publications.

Mary Hennessy is assistant professor of German at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. She previously taught at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research examines women’s multiple (often hidden) roles in the production of media to retheorize relationships between gender, labor, and technology in modern Germany. Her current book project focuses on women typists, telephone operators, and film editors in the Weimar Republic.