Ludic Love

This chapter discusses the single movie made at Lenfilm by one of the USSR’s most important avant-garde directors, Kira Muratova. As she worked on the script, Muratova transformed a mild and sweet story about a pretty young factory worker, Lyuba, who was in love with two men at once, into a philosophical meditation on love. Yet any aspirations to deep thinking were constantly called into question by the playful nature of the representation. Music-hall effects, comedy repetition, and parodic echoes of Stalin-era official films jostle film noir and citations from new wave. Reactions at Lenfilm were wary, and the collaboration with Muratova ended at one film. But Getting to Know the Wide World remained Muratova’s favorite film even at the end of her life; though she resented the criticism that she got at Lenfilm, the frustration that it generated turned out to be creative.

“Handy Man”/“I Tickled ’Em”

This chapter discusses New Arkansas Travelers, “Handy Man”, “I Tickled ’Em”, and music hall song

Hilarious Homicides: Satirizing Sensational Murders in Late Nineteenth-Century London

Whereas many studies consider the nineteenth-century fascination with murder as synonymous with the contemporary cultural tendency towards sensation and melodrama, this article offers a fresh perspective on the subject. Here, I deal with a corpus of humorous murder representations, which have rarely been addressed before. I examine how murder was comically represented and look at the contemporary discourse on murder, through the investigation of sources including music hall songs, cartoons, and theatrical travesties, with an emphasis on visual representations. In the context of the democratization of culture, the article examines the importance of murder in the elite claim to cultural authority versus its perception of plebian taste. It demonstrates how late nineteenth-century notions of modernity, which were crystallized through the discussion of murder, were classed and gendered. Thus, a hidden discourse is exposed, in which murder serves as a central tool in a mechanism similar to Bourdieu’s theory of distinction, where cultural and artistic ‘taste’ has a social dimension.

Reclaiming the Biguine

This chapter examines how the Caribbean dance known as the biguine gained enormous popularity in Paris in the late 1920s and early 1930s. After an Antillean band playing it was a hit feature at the Colonial Exposition, it (briefly) superseded the Charleston and the tango. This popularity was intensified by Josephine Baker’s performance of the biguine in the wildly successful music-hall show Paris qui remue. The chapter focuses on how the biguine was reclaimed both in practice and in print (in large part by three of the Nardal sisters). It shows how music was utilized to build anti-colonial solidarity by pan-African and communist movements and how the police then responded to musical events as a political threat.