Fainting at Work: Anarchiving Gendered Stereotypes in Silent Cinema at EYE Film Museum

This anarchival research at EYE Film Museum in Amsterdam focuses on silent films produced between 1911 and 1928 that create biased representations of female exhaustion in wage labour-related contexts. It isolates gestures enacted by Caucasian actresses performing as frail working-class women, while highlighting similarities in this mode of filmic representation across geographies. The four case studies analyzed depict women as unable to work jobs outside of the family home. These positions consist of menial tasks or are morally questionable, such as those in showbiz. The films, selected out of circa 30 of the same era archived at EYE, portray women as wretched and quickly burning out while at work, performing dramatic gestures expressing exhaustion, frequently crying and fainting at the limit of functionality, throwing their hands in the air or desperately bringing them to the forehead before collapsing. Methodologically, the present chapter proposes that analyzing silent films’ heavily gendered depictions of exhaustion and burnout should depart from a purely film and media studies approach to include artistic methods of research that demystify haunting stereotypical gendered subjectification. The current research is thus two-fold, including both a theoretical component and an artistic practice. The first collects and analyses film fragments through women, media and performance studies, while the second experiments with these as art material employing expanded cinema techniques. This dual research trajectory supports the unveiling of biased visual strategies that permeate normalized contemporary aesthetics and underscore dispossessive structures of gender-based subjectification.