PDF: SCREEN STYLE: FASHION AND FEMININITY IN 1930S
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PDF: SCREEN STYLE: FASHION AND FEMININITY IN 1930S
dans le geste présent, ce qui a pour effet de suspendre l’action en imposant au récit les éclatements de la sensation physique. Ici encore, on retrouve l’autonomie du corps; le resserrement du cadre isole le geste, le corps existe autrement. Amiel voit cette constante chez Cassavetes: “Pour exister en soi, pour lui-même, le corps se doit d’être espace, soit trop large pour l’écran, soit trop près, soit fragmenté.” Quand Amiel compare Allen à Cassavetes, il dit le faire par l’absurde. Il constate l’omniprésence thématique du corps chez Allen, mais aussi son effacement physique. “L’idée du corps est là; mais la présence ne se concrétise pas.” On assiste, même dans l’acte sexuel, à un effacement du corps qui laisse toute la place au discours. Tout au long du livre, Amiel propose des analyses détaillées pour soutenir et illustrer son propos. Et s’il emprunte assez peu à d’autres auteurs, certains sont parfois conviés afin de renforcer la démonstration, dont Maine de Biran (Essai sur les fondements de la psychologie et sur ses rapports avec l’étude de la nature), Michel Henry (Philosophie et phénoménologie du corps), Michel Guérin (Philosophie du geste), et Gilles Deleuze (L’Image-Temps). Amiel fait aussi régulièrement référence à des peintres, des sculpteurs, afin de mieux illustrer son propos. Par exemple, dans sa discussion sur Keaton, il écrit: “Comme dans un rêve, encore une fois, ou comme dans ces représentations oniriques de Chirico ou de Magritte, c’est ‘de l’extérieur’ que nous ressentons la vérité émotionnelle de ce corps.” Même si l’ouvrage d’Amiel ne convaincra pas tout le monde de la non-valeur du cinéma classique et de ses représentations “intellectualisées,” il n’en demeure pas moins que Le corps au cinéma offre une perspective critique radicale, précisément par ce rejet en bloc des représentations traditionnelles du corps au cinéma, et originale, de par sa démonstration, à l’aide des exemples du cinéma de Keaton, Bresson et Cassavetes, de la façon dont il est possible pour le spectateur de vivre une “expérience esthétique rare,” non intellectualisée, ne devant donc rien aux mots ou aux idées, mais tout au corps de l’acteur qui happe le spectateur dans son émotion. Avec ce bouquin, Amiel nous offre une véritable réflexion sur le cinéma. Concordia University SCREEN STYLE: FASHION AND FEMININITY IN 1930S HOLLYWOOD Sarah Berry Commerce and Mass Culture, vol. 2, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000, 235pp. Reviewed by Kay Armatage This book begins with a telling little story about a 1939 promotional short called Hollywood—Style Center of the World. The film intercuts scenes of CJ FS • RCEC 117 Joan Crawford in a swanky ensemble with scenes of a farm girl buying the identical outfit at her local “Cinema Shop.” Thus Hollywood bridges the gulf between urban and rural, representing mass-market fashion as a democratic leveling of social distinctions. As a book about Hollywood fashion and style, Screen Style examines the relation between fashion marketing and consumerism, identifying links between fan magazines, star endorsements, studio merchandising of clothes, cosmetics and accessories, and the newly discovered buying power of employed women who had their own money to spend. As a contemporary scholarly text, Screen Style touches all the bases of race, class, sexuality and spectacle across an eclectic grid of methodologies. Although the notes make the obligatory references to Bahktin, Butler, Habermas, Foucault, Shohat and Stam, this book belongs to the new generation of scholarship that doesn’t operate primarily from within theory. There is nary a whiff of Mulvey, de Lauretis or Silverman, let alone Jameson or Lacan. Berry’s research includes industrygenerated publications, ephemera such as press kits, advertisements and articles from contemporary newspapers and magazines such as Fortune, Vogue and Photoplay. However, her text relies predominantly upon the 118 Volume 10 No. 1 work on fashion and style in movies that flooded scholarly publishing in the nineties. One of the most interesting directions in recent research, fashion scholarship has become a new academic industry. Beginning with Jane Gaines and Charlotte Herzog’s Fabrications: Costumeand theFemale Body (1990), fashion has developed a stylish new silhouette for feminist research, which seemed to be almost in tatters in the late eighties as “postfeminism” dominated the field with studies in masculinity, popular culture and the subaltern. Senior scholars who built some of the foundations of seventies theory have produced new texts on fashion; I’m thinking of Gaines, Christine Gledhill and especially Pam Cook, whose Fashioning the Nation: Costume and Identity in British Cinema (1996) rapidly established itself as a watershed text. Fashion scholarship combines the methodologies developed around representation in the seventies with eighties work on the body and sexuality, and nineties theories of performativity and popular culture. As a result of such rich combinations of methodologies, fashion has been a particularly fecund field. Not only that, but it has made feminist work fun again; everyone loves fashion, everyone can relate, and the language of press kits isn’t nearly as daunting as Butler or Lacan. There is always lots of sensual description of fabrics, trim, silhouettes and colour— and the more photographs the better. We just never seem to get tired of glamour photos of those fabulous stars (Garbo, Dietrich, Hepburn and Crawford) in those fabulous outfits, no matter how often we see them. Here we must invoke the first complaint about this book. It includes photos throughout the text, which should be a good thing: how annoying it is to have to flip to the glossy sections of many other books to find images referred to in the text. But in Screen Style the photos are laser printed on the uncoated paper of the text, rendering them considerably less than satisfying as illustrations. It’s an understandable compromise, given the economics of academic publishing, but still disappointing. While relying heavily upon previous work, Screen Style brings marketing, commerce, consumerism and class to the fashion scene. Scholarship on the film industry implicitly devolves to an economic base, but Berry deals with commerce explicitly. She argues that the popular fashion system offered women an opportunity to challenge and shape their social roles. In contrast to male identity and status, which have historically been defined in relation to work, women’s social status has been associated with “physical capital”; their beauty and style operate as factors in their exchange value for men. Without claiming that consumer fashion in itself has a liberatory effect on women, Berry follows Elizabeth Wilson’s argument that on an “abstract level” post-Victorian fashion invoked both modernity and the democracy of urban society, and thus contributed to subjective feelings of emancipation for women. Hollywood films in the thirties are marked by a fascination with female power. High budget films that dealt with working women of all stripes, from gold diggers to social climbers, were vehicles for powerful women stars. Conceding the promotion of specific gender, racial and class stereotypes, Berry argues that Hollywood cinema was from its inception deeply concerned with issues of social mobility, acculturation and fantasies of self-transformation. The films could be seen as contributing to the erosion of traditional social categories for women specifically through the promotion of consumer fashion. In addition to advertising clothes, cosmetics and accessories, women stars appeared in costumes that could be purchased in department stores through studio tie-in lines such as “Cinema Fashion,” “Studio Styles” and “Hollywood Fashions.” Rather than a mass dictatorship of style to the public, the cross-promotional relationship between film and fashion industries CJ FS • RCEC 119 marks a point of diversification. Unlike European couture, which is predicated on exclusivity, consumer fashion is about popularity, dissemination and accessibility. Eventually, the proliferation of consumer subcultures made it increasingly difficult for taste to be determined by an hereditary elite. This is a pretty interesting thesis, and Berry offers substantial research to support it. The first couple of chapters are rather awkwardly written, but once she settles in, the later chapters are appropriately accessible for her popular subject. I had a few nagging questions about the book, however. Berry takes the subjects of fashion and fan cultures, usually considered trivial, as salient in women’s access to a greater range of social worlds. By foregrounding the performative aspect of social status and promoting fashion as a means to upward mobility, the films’ use of stars as fashion types demystified social class. As costume becomes cinematic spectacle, connections between performance, gender and discourses of consumer fashion are underscored. The popularization of cosmetics not only brought the democratization of beauty, but also went hand in hand with the construction of new types of exotic glamour (the “Latinization” of the demure blonde Joan Bennett into a Hedy Lamarr type) and a commodified multiculturalism that challenged nativist beauty norms. Finally, Berry looks at the role of Hollywood stars such as Garbo and Hepburn in popularizing menswear and thereby promoting gender androgyny. Women’s adoption of pants in the 1930s foregrounded their presence in traditionally male workplaces, and raised issues of women’s social mobility and sexuality. While efficient and manageable, the exclusive focus on the thirties begs a few historical questions. First, Berry offers as a marketing illustration a magazine article that notes the new form of costuming in cinema as distinct from the style of “character” dressing previously dominant. Berry suggests that the new style was deliberately glamourous and spectacular, but she does not address either the components of the “character” costuming codes or their historical sources. 120 Volume 10 No. 1 Second, department stores were a creation of the 1890s, making women’s finery accessible to the new class of women “white blouse” workers. The connections between women’s employment, codes of dress and trends in ready-to-wear were well established early in the century. The rupture between the Victorian and the modern was made substantially in the teens and twenties. Why then did it take the film industry so long to catch on to this lucrative potential market? Or did it? The focus on the third decade leaves such questions dangling. Third, I also have a general question about film history and film scholarship. The film examples are selected to support the thesis with no attempt to indicate whether those films were in fact the most popular moneymakers, or indeed if they were widely advertised or extensively covered in fashion or fan literature. We know who the big stars were, but were Steffi Duna and Tala Birell major influences on popular consumer culture? Were the Dorothy Lamour vehicles (J ungle Princess, 1936; The Hurricane, 1937; Her Jungle Love, 1938; and Tropic Holiday, 1938) important draws on the “A” circuit? Do ads in Photoplay and a mention in Vogue constitute substantive evidence of significant trends that would have had the effect of democratizing social distinctions and empowering women? Finally, I’m a little uneasy about a widespread tendency in feminist research, of which Screen Style is just one example. With the welcome rejection of the exploited victim model for feminist analysis has come a propensity to read virtually every representational strategy as ultimately empowering for women. This approach has a long history, beginning with the seventies Women in FilmNoir argument that even if the femmes fatales are murdered, punished or just turned into wives at the end, we remember them as powerful figures to be celebrated. This makes for more cheerful reading and better feelings about ourselves, but then why–after a century of powerful women, androgyny and social leveling–is the wage gap still at nearly 40%? Just asking. University of Toronto THE DANISH DIRECTORS: DIALOGUES ON A CONTEMPORARY NATIONAL CINEMA Edited by Mette Hjort and Ib Bondebjerg Bristol, UK: Intellect Press, 2001, 224 pp. Reviewed by E.J. Bell Attempts to define a national cinema can often be criticised for being as reductive and elusive as attempts to define a national identity. This book is an exception. In compiling interviews they conducted with twenty of Denmark’s principle directors, Mette Hjort and Ib Bondebjerg have been able to address the inherent contradictions within definitions of national identity and culture. The resulting dialogue between artistic, theoretical, and institutional concerns constitutes a distinct and valuable approach to national film literature. The Danish Directors reflects the growing interest in Danish film and its place in the vanguard of contemporary European cinema. Due to its timely appearance, the book bridges a gap in Scandinavian film literature and draws CJ FS • RCEC 121