A Florida Enchantment

A Florida Enchantment (1914) is a silent film directed by Sidney Drew and released by the Vitagraph studio. The feature-length comedy/fantasy was shot in and around St. Augustine, Florida, where its story is set. It is notable for its cross-dressing lead characters, much later discussed as bisexual, lesbian, gay, and transgender.[1][2][3]

A Florida Enchantment
Edith Storey as Lillian Travers/Lawrence Talbot (right) and Ethel Lloyd as Jane, "Miss Travers' mulatto maid" (left)
Directed bySidney Drew
Written byMarguerite Bertsch
Eugene Mullin
StarringEdith Storey
Sidney Drew
Ethel Lloyd
CinematographyRobert A. Stuart
Production
companies
Vitagraph Company of America
Broadway Star Features
Distributed byGeneral Film Co.
Release date
  • 1914 (1914)
Running time
5 reels, approx. 63 minutes
CountryUnited States
LanguagesSilent film
English intertitles

Plot

In the film, Lillian Travers, a wealthy Northern woman about to be married, visits her aunt in Florida. While there, she stops in a curiosity shop and buys a small casket which contains a note and a vial of seeds. At her aunt's house she reads the note which explains that the seeds change men into women and vice versa. Angry with her fiancé, Fred, Lillian decides to test the effects of the seeds. The next morning, Lillian discovers that she has transformed into a man. Lillian's transformation into Lawrence Talbot has also sometimes been read as a transformation into a butch lesbian. This reading is bolstered by the later transformation of Lillian's fiancé into what could be an effeminate gay man. However, as Lillian and her fiancé are shown attracted both to each other and to the same sex (albeit at different times), the film has also been considered to have the first documented appearance of bisexual characters in an American motion picture.[4][5][6]

Cast
  • Edith Storey[7][8] - Lillian Travers/Lawrence Talbot
  • Sidney Drew[7] - Dr. Frederick Cassadene
  • Ethel Lloyd - Jane
  • Grace Stevens - Constancia Oglethorpe
  • Charles Kent - Major Horton
  • Jane Morrow (screen name for Lucille McVey, aka Mrs. Sidney Drew) - Bessie Horton
  • Ada Gifford - Stella Lovejoy
  • Lillian Burns - Malvina
  • Allan Campbell - Stockton Remington
  • Cortland van Deusen - Charley Wilkes
  • Frank O'Neil - Gustavus Duncan

Production background

The film is based on the 1891 novel and 1896 play (now lost) of the same name written by Fergus Redmond and Archibald Clavering Gunter.[9][10] The film, produced by Vitagraph Films, was shot in 1914 on location in three Florida locations: Jacksonville,.[11][12] St. Augustine,[13][14] and St. Petersburg.[15]

The film includes white actors in blackface,[7] an aspect carefully dissected in Siobhan B. Somerville's book Queering the Color Line Race and the Invention of Homosexuality in American Culture.[16] Since its inclusion in Vito Russo's 1981 book The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies[17] and its 1995 documentary film adaptation, A Florida Enchantment has been seen as one of the earliest screen representations of homosexuality and cross-dressing in American culture.[18][19][20] Alison McMahan, a screenwriter and filmmaker, argued that the film was approached the approach to cross-dressing, "transbodiment, and role reversal" in Solax Studios films.[21]

Reception and analysis

At the time of its release, Variety stated that film should have "never been put out", and the New York Clipper criticized the film and said the female and male impersonations at the story's center were "a most disagreeable theme".[7][22] When the stage version of the original novel was on Broadway, in 1896,[23] the New York Times described it as "vile stuff" and "nauseating".[7] Variety was also critical of the stage version for similar reasons.[24]

In a masters thesis for University of Florida, Joel Christian Adams analyzed the film, arguing it is transformed from the original novel, noting the connection to consumer capitalism at the time, argued it has become an "ur-text within the emergent history of lesbian and gay visibility", and said the transformations of the film's characters come within a "seemingly fixed system of gender and racial assignment."[25] Scholar Janet Staiger said the film is an "extensive treatment" of cross-dressing and gender-switching, arguing it is interesting because it does not only make cross-dressing a performance, but it creates a narrative around gender transformation and creates "narrative tension".[26] Film historian David Kalat added that the film might be the first "feature comedy", criticized the film's racial stereotypes, but noted it is about the "slipperiness of identity".[27]

Historian Julio Capó Jr. also argued that the film introduced viewers to "gender and sexual transgression" which were possible in the cities and resort towns of Florida, including dances reminiscent of those in Chicago and New York City, and stated that "cultural understandings of race" influenced the message communicated by the film. He also distinguished between the vaudeville show of the same name, premiering three years earlier, and the film.[28] Susan Potter, a films studies scholar, stated the film has an affinity for a "novel stylistic transformation" in which a character engages in action to "guarantee legibility", along with creation of new personification and sexual legibility.[29] Others were more critical. Maggie Hennneield, a scholar of early cinema, argued that the film was "bread-and-butter" for the film industry, which she said "often exploited nonnormative bodies" to resolve tensions between commercial appeals of film and its "aspirational artistic ambitions". She also stated the film missed the mark of "codified deviance or sexual subversion" present in previous adaptations of the original novel.[30]

The film is a central element of the 2020 novel Antkind by Charlie Kaufman.[31]

References
  1. Horak, Laura (2016). Girls Will Be Boys: Cross-Dressed Women, Lesbians, and American Cinema, 1908-1934. Rutgers University Press. p. 107. ISBN 978-0813574837.
  2. Bean, Jennifer M.; Negra, Diane, eds. (2002). A Feminist Reader in Early Cinema. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press. pp. 251–252. ISBN 0822330253.
  3. "A Florida Enchantment". Film at Lincoln Center. Archived from the original on May 6, 2022. Retrieved March 27, 2023.
  4. "Bisexuality in Film". glbtq.com. Archived from the original on October 15, 2012. Retrieved March 27, 2023.
  5. Brasell, R. Bruce (Summer 1997). "A Seed for Change: The Engenderment of "A Florida Enchantment"". Cinema Journal. 36 (4): 3–16. JSTOR 1225610. Retrieved March 27, 2023.
  6. Erish, Andrew A. (2021). "1914-1918". Vitagraph: America's First Great Motion Picture Studio. Lexington, Kentucky: University Press of Kentucky. pp. 117–118. ISBN 978-0822330257.
  7. Ross, Melissa; Donges, Patrick (July 9, 2014). "Controversial Silent Film Shot In Jacksonville, St. Augustine Returns To The Silver Screen". WJCT. Archived from the original on November 28, 2021. Retrieved March 27, 2023.
  8. Espinoza, Victoria (May 13, 2018). "Cinema Arts Centre to pay homage to silent film star Edith Storey". TBR News Media. Archived from the original on June 15, 2021. Retrieved March 27, 2023.
  9. Adams, Joel Christian (2005). Falling into the Queer Archive: A Florida Enchantment and the Uses of the History of U.S. Consumer Capitalism (PDF) (Masters). University of Florida. pp. v–vi, 3. Archived from the original (PDF) on January 22, 2021. Retrieved March 27, 2023.
  10. Taylor, Clare L. (2003). Women, Writing, and Fetishism, 1890-1950: Female Cross-gendering. London: Clarendon Press. p. 42. ISBN 9780199244102.
  11. "Sunday silent film fundraiser benefits Jacksonville's Norman Studios". The Florida Times-Union. July 8, 2014. Archived from the original on March 28, 2023. Retrieved March 27, 2023.
  12. "Norman Studios Launches Silent Sundays with Screening of "A Florida Enchantment"". Norman Studios. July 3, 2014. Archived from the original on March 28, 2023. Retrieved March 27, 2023.
  13. Gardner, Sheldon (November 2, 2015). "Silent films used St. Augustine as backdrop". The St. Augustine Record. Archived from the original on March 28, 2023. Retrieved March 27, 2023.
  14. Allman, T.D. (2013). Finding Florida: The True History of the Sunshine State. New York City: Grove/Atlantic, Inc. pp. 413, 475. ISBN 9780802120762.
  15. O'Dell, Cary (July 9, 2018). "Now Playing at the Packard Campus (July 13-14, 2018)". Library of Congress Blogs. Library of Congress. Archived from the original on March 21, 2021. Retrieved March 27, 2023.
  16. Soverville, Siobhan B. (2000). Queering the Color Line Race and the Invention of Homosexuality in American Culture. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press. pp. 11, 39–64. doi:10.1515/9780822383840-011. ISBN 9780822324430.
  17. Russo, Vito (1981). The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies. New York City: Harper & Row. pp. 12, 13, 250. ISBN 9780060137045.
  18. Adams, "Falling into the Queer Archive", 19-20.
  19. Ullman, Sharon (2014). "Popular Culture: Using Television, Film, and the Media to Explore LGBT History". In Rupp, Leila J.; Freeman, Susan K. (eds.). Understanding and Teaching U.S. Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender History. Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press. p. 345. ISBN 9780299302443.
  20. Grimes, David; Becnel, Tom (2014). Florida Curiosities. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield. pp. 53–54. ISBN 9780762774951.
  21. McMahan, Alison (2014). Alice Guy Blaché: Lost Visionary of the Cinema. Oxford, England: Bloomsbury Publishing. p. 180. ISBN 9781501302688.
  22. "A Florida Enchantment (1914)". AFI Catalog of Feature Films: The First 100 Years: 1893-1993. American Film Institute. Archived from the original on May 30, 2022. Retrieved March 27, 2023.
  23. "A Florida Enchantment". Playbill. Archived from the original on March 28, 2023. Retrieved March 27, 2023.
  24. Watts, Jill (2003). Mae West: An Icon in Black and White. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. p. 29. ISBN 9781501302688.
  25. Adams, "Falling into the Queer Archive", 3-12, 19-34.
  26. Staiger, Janet (1995). "Troublesome Pictures". Bad Women: The Regulation of Female Sexuality in Early American Cinema. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. pp. 73–74. ISBN 9781452902678.
  27. Kalat, David (2019). Too Funny for Words: A Contrarian History of American Screen Comedy from Silent Slapstick to Screwball. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company. pp. 25–28. ISBN 9781476678566.
  28. Capó Jr., Julio (2017). Welcome to Fairyland: Queer Miami before 1940. Chapel Hill, North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press. pp. 152–154. ISBN 9781469635217.
  29. Potter, Susan (2019). Queer Timing: The Emergence of Lesbian Sexuality in Early Cinema. Champaign, Illinois: University of Illinois Press. p. 119. ISBN 9780252051302.
  30. Hensfield, Maggie (2021). "Queer Laughter in the Archives of Silent Film". In Gregg, Ronald; Villarejo, Amy (eds.). The Oxford Handbook of Queer Cinema. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. pp. 99–100. ISBN 9780190878016.
  31. Miller, Laura (July 15, 2020). "Charlie Kaufman's Debut Novel Reveals His Genius Has Its Limits". Slate. Archived from the original on January 28, 2023. Retrieved March 27, 2023. The novel's premise has B traveling to St. Augustine, Florida, to research an obscure silent film about a gender-bending couple. The movie, A Florida Enchantment, is real


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