Amuse-bouche: Small bites of French Silent Film Comedy and Media Archaeology

OPEN TO THE PUBLIC | Before the First World War, French comic performer and filmmaker Max Linder was considered the world’s most famous screen actor. His comedies for Pathé influenced Charlie Chaplin and the growing motion picture industry as a whole. This lecture will introduce small bites of Linder’s work, discuss the legacy of Alice Guy-Blaché, and will look at both the emergence and lasting influences of French silent film comedy through the lens of Media Archaeology.

Elyse Singer is an early cinema scholar and theatre historian currently completing her Ph.D. in Theatre and Performance, with a Film Studies Certificate, at The Graduate Center, CUNY. A stage director and playwright, she is Artistic Director of the Obie-winning Hourglass Group. Singer teaches Transmedial Cinema at Brooklyn College’s Feirstein Graduate School of Cinema and dramatic writing at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. 

Photo credit: Rohan Preston