Shoe Reels examines the special relationship between shoes and cinema. The book considers the narrative and aesthetic functions of shoes, asking why they are so memorable, and what their wider cultural resonance might be. Written by experts from a range of disciplines, including film and television studies, philosophy, history, and fashion, this collection covers cinema from its origins to the present day, and spans a global range of films from the United States, Europe, Africa and Asia. Besides protecting the feet, shoes contribute to the performance of gender; they indicate aspects of personality, sexuality, race, ethnicity and social class; and they serve as tools of seduction. As objects designed for the body, shoes also affirm the materiality of individual bodies and the endurance of the human body itself when physical presence has been progressively de-emphasised, first with the advent of technical reproducibility (printing, photography, cinema, radio and the like), and now with the rise of digital technology in the virtual era. The very materiality of shoes—the fact that they are things—is what makes them ripe for analysis. Shoes humanise, setting people apart from non-human animals, but they can also serve to dehumanise. Objects par excellence of hyper-consumption, shoes are situated at the crossroads of sexual fetishism and commodity fetishism. Shoes are clearly more than just good to wear, then: to paraphrase Claude Lévi-Strauss, they are also good to think.
