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What Happened on Twenty-third Street, New York City
What Happened on Twenty-third Street, New York City
	A screenshot from the film
Directed by	George S. Fleming; Edwin S. Porter
Starring	A. C. Abadie; Florence Georgie
Cinematography	Edwin S. Porter
Release date	August 1901;
Running time	77 seconds
Country	United States

What Happened on Twenty-third Street

What Happened on Twenty-third Street, New York City is a 1901 American short film starring A. C. Abadie and Florence Georgie in which a woman's undergarments are accidentally exposed. A similar 1901 film, Soubrette's Troubles on a Fifth Avenue Stage, also starred Abadie and Georgie.^[1]

Plot

The 77-second film depicts a woman, escorted by a man, walking over a grate. The hot air lifts her skirt, she laughs and they walk on.

Comparisons

In 2001, Rosemary Hanes and Brian Taves compared the sequence to the iconic image of Marilyn Monroe in a white dress in the 1955 film The Seven Year Itch, writing "With The Seven Year Itch (1955), the image of Marilyn Monroe's thighs exposed under her billowing skirt entered American popular culture. The Library's motion picture and broadcasting collections provide the opportunity to document not only how women's roles and their depictions have changed throughout the past hundred years, but also how much has remained the same."^[2]

Tom Gunning contrasts the two events as narrative devices, writing, "The act of display [in What Happened...] is both climax and resolution here and does not lead to a series of incidents or the creation of characters with discernible traits. While the similar lifting of Marilyn Monroe's skirt in The Seven Year Itch also provides a moment of spectacle, it simultaneously creates character traits that explain later narrative actions."^[3]^[4]

References

^ Musser, Charles (1991). Before the Nickelodeon: Edwin S. Porter and the Edison Manufacturing Company. University of California Press. p. 179. Retrieved 1 February 2024.
^ Rosemary Hanes with Brian Taves. "Moving Image Section--Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division" The Library of Congress. Retrieved 5 January 2011. From a chapter in American Women: A Library of Congress Guide for the Study of Women's History and Culture in the United States, Library of Congress, 2001.
^ Lee Grieveson, Peter Krämer. The silent cinema reader (2004) ISBN 0-415-25283-0, ISBN 0-415-25284-9, Tom Gunning "The Cinema of Attractions" p.46. Retrieved 5 January 2011.
^ Richard Abel. Silent film (1996) ISBN 0-485-30076-1, Tom Gunning '"Now You See It, Now You Don't": The Temporality of the Cinema of Attractions' p.78. Retrieved 5 January 2011.