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
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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