An-Other Place for Female Subjectivity: the Comic Pratfall in the Films of Frances Marion and Mary Pickford

Abstract

Mary Pickford hired Frances Marion in 1915 to write the screenplays for her films, box-office hits that consolidated her stardom in the 1910s. In an agitated social context, marked by the First World War and the changes that women underwent in the transition from nineteenth-century society to modern society, Mary Pickford's characters were a model of optimism for audiences. The star represented a traditional figuration, but through comedy it offered new feminine behaviours. The article will study the comicality of the star's characters in order to show that in her comic gestures an autonomous female subjectivity is looming.  From the analysis of the pratfall gag found in all the films of Frances Marion and Mary Pickford it will be demonstrated that the screenwriter and star developed an alternative discourse to the phallocentric view of the subject. Through Star Studies and the Feminist philosophical theories of Teresa De Lauretis and Rosi Braidotti it will be shown that in the “pratfall gags” Mary Pickford revealed an "eccentric" subjectivity, capable of creating an "other place" of resistance to the nineteenth-century and patriarchal logos.