Saturday     11:30
The Chopin House
2024, 12 min., English

Director: Noah Teichner

Through examples of films, novelty songs, and comic monologues from the 1929 Wall Street Crash, Slapstick Speculation explores how comedy and the stock market were invested in a shared culture of liveness across media during Hollywood’s transition to sound. This is the first installment of Comedy Objects, a project that brings together archival research with speculative fiction to think about comedy workers in the United States during the Great Depression.

Noah Teichner is a filmmaker, artist, and researcher. His feature-length essay film Navigators (2022) has screened internationally at venues and festivals such as the Centre Pompidou, ICA London, Light Industry, Svenska filminstitutet, and Cinéma du Réel. As a film and media historian, his fields of research include comedy and popular entertainment, film technology, sound studies, and media archaeology. He is Assistant Professor of Film Studies at the American University of Paris.