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The thrill of the ‘chase film’: women, fairies, and narrativization in Jack the Kisser

There is a great deal at stake in discussing the 1907 Edison film, Jack the Kisser. As well as marking a significant stage in the evolution and establishment of narrative film, Jack the Kisser’s combination of a cinematically and socially resonant narrative with a dynamic and entertainingly spectacular visual style points to socio‐cultural motivations for the institution of narrative as a practice of representation. This particular film also serves to foreground the importance of intertextuality to the development of more ‘classical’ mainstream film narrative, thus emphasizing ways in which such narrativization can function to control and contain women, female impersonators, ‘fairies’, and related perceived threats to the dominant ideology of patriarchy. Certainly I argue that the chase film was crucially important to establishing marriage as both a ‘safe’ place (in which to escape from threatening femininity) and as a central element of narrative closure. Moreover, an analysis of Jack the Kisser – especially in relation to later genres such as horror and romantic comedy – illustrates that on some level, at least, the chase‐film could be said to have initiated the genre system in its working through of gendered cinematic space and in its establishment of diegetic narrative as the ‘norm’ for mainstream story‐films in the United States.