Costume on film: How the femme fatale’s wardrobe scripted the pictorial style of 1940s film noir

2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-84 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lisa Colpaert
Keyword(s):  
Meaning Making ◽  
Film Noir ◽  
The Body ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Femme Fatale ◽  
Star Image ◽  
Close Textual Analysis ◽  
Visual Style ◽  
Double Indemnity ◽  
Mode Of Production

The character of the femme fatale and the visual style of film noir are vital elements in our understanding of that genre. Film costumes worn by the femme fatale are crucial, and are defining elements in genre recognition precisely because of their explicit cinematic visualization, rather than functioning as unequivocal signs. This article proposes a methodology for film costume researchers to conduct a pictorial analysis, without necessarily analysing film costume in terms of a meaning-making repertoire adhering to our understanding of film as a ‘language’. In the proposition of a framework for the close textual analysis of film costumes, the methodology is based on the triangulation of a shot-by-shot description, a wardrobe breakdown and an examination of production stills. This triangulation is crucial to understand the complexity of film costumes, which are defined by a wide-ranging set of factors such as: the film industry’s mode of production, the film costume’s relation to the fashion of its time, the body and star image of the actor, the work of the costume designer and his/her department, and the film-specificity. The ways in which a film costume functions in a specific shot will prove to be an important tool to analyse the pictorial characteristics of film noir and the femme fatale. To exemplify to methodology, this article proposes a close reading of an iconic film costume designed for one of the best-known performances of such a character, i.e. the white jumpsuit designed by Edith Head for Barbara Stanwyck in the closing scene of Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944).

The Woman on Pier 13

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Miklitsch
Keyword(s):  
Film Noir ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
Femme Fatale ◽  
Mise En Scene ◽  
Close Textual Analysis ◽  
Production History ◽  
History Of ◽  
Gangster Film

Part one of this chapter examines the production history of The Woman on Pier 13 to highlight the ideological mutability of the film’s ostensible, “right-wing” agenda, one endorsed by RKO’s head of production at the time, Howard Hughes. Part two aims to counter the claim that the anticommunist noir is without aesthetic interest by proffering a close textual analysis of a number of noir sequences in The Woman on Pier 13. Part three argues that--as the film’s original title, I Married a Communist, indexes--the political discourse of anticommunism cannot be divorced from questions about genre (melodrama, film noir, gangster film) and from contemporary socio-cultural notions about marriage, notions which receive their most charged expression in the picture’s figuration of gender and sexuality, in particular femininity (the femme fatale), masculinity (the “bad boy”), and homosexuality (the queer “Commie”). Part four revisits the issue of form—here, mise-en-scène--by exploring issues of labor and union subversion via the role of the cargo-hook and Diego Rivera’s painting, The Flower Carrier (1935), in the film.

Contesting Aristotle: Science, Theology and the Resurrection of the Body in Methodius of Olympus’ De Resurrectione and the Dialogue of Adamantius

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-23
Author(s):  
Dawn LaValle Norman
Keyword(s):  
Scientific Knowledge ◽  
Scientific Reasoning ◽  
The Body ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Scientific Authority ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
Parallel Text ◽  
Entire Text

Abstract The contest over the resurrection of the body used the scientific authority of Aristotle as ammunition on both sides. Past scholars have read Methodius of Olympus as displaying an anti-Aristotelian bias. In contrast, through close reading of the entire text with attention to characterization and development of argument, I prove that Methodius of Olympus’ dialogue the De Resurrectione utilizes Aristotelian biology as a morally neutral tool. To put this into higher relief, I compare Methodius’ dialogue with the anonymous Dialogue of Adamantius, a text directly dependent upon the Methodius’ De Resurrectione, but which rejects arguments based on scientific reasoning. Reading Methodius’ De Resurrectione with greater attention to the whole and putting it in the context of its nearest parallel text retells the traditional story of early Christian resistance to Aristotle. Methodius of Olympus’ characters, although they view scientific knowledge as subordinate to philosophy, see it as neutral in and of itself.

The Justified Body: Hauerwas, Luther and the Christian Life

2017 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-78
Author(s):  
Justin Nickel
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Sacramental Theology ◽  
Christian Life ◽  
Stanley Hauerwas ◽  
The One ◽  
God's Grace ◽  
Ethical Significance ◽  
The Way

Stanley Hauerwas and others argue that Luther’s understanding of justification denies the theological and ethical significance of the body. Indeed, the inner, spiritual person is the one who experiences God’s grace in the gospel, while the outer, physical (read: bodily) person continues to live under law and therefore coercion and condemnation. While not denying that Luther can be so read, I argue that there is another side of Luther, one that recognizes the body’s importance for Christian life. I make this argument through a close reading of Luther’s reflections on Adam and Eve’s Fall in his Lectures on Genesis (1545) and the sacramental theology in ‘Against the Heavenly Prophets’. For this Luther, disconnection from our bodies is not a sign of justification but rather the sin from which justification saves us. Accordingly, justification results in a return to embodied creatureliness as the way we receive and live our justification.

scholarly journals “Celebration of the Body”: Marshall McLuhan and the Sensory Conceptualism of N.E. Thing Co. Ltd.

2015 ◽  
Vol 40 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Adam Lauder
Keyword(s):  
Conceptual Art ◽  
The Body ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Marshall Mcluhan ◽  
Friedrich Kittler ◽  
Artist's Book ◽  
Livre D'artiste

Through a close reading of the 1976 artist’s book and exhibition catalogue “Celebration of the Body,” the N.E. Thing Co. Ltd.’s pioneering representations of the body’s “informationalization” are situated within the conceptual company’s creative reworking of Marshall McLuhan’s sensory media theories. In turn, McLuhan’s thought is located within a genealogy of physiological aesthetics that troubles conventional narratives of Conceptual art as a movement defined by its engagement with theories of cognition, language, and systems. Friedrich Kittler’s analysis of modernism as reflecting the decomposition of the body under a regime of psychophysical experimentation provides the framework for this article’s re-evaluation of the Toronto School theorist and his influence on the foundational Vancouver-based “critical company.”En utilisant une lecture attentive du livre d’artiste et catalogue d’exposition « Celebration of the Body », 1979, les représentations du corps numérisé de N.E. Thing Co. sont encadrées dans le remaniement créatif des théories médiatique de Marshall McLuhan entreprit par la compagnie.  À leurs tours, les pensées de McLuhan sont placées dans une généalogie d’esthétique physiologique qui dérange les récits conventionnels de l’art conceptuel comme étant un mouvement défini par son engagement avec les théories de la cognition et du langage. L’analyse de Friedrich Kittler de modernisme comme réflexion de la décomposition du corps effectuée par des expériences psychophysique fournit le cadre pour cette réévaluation du théoricien de l’École de Toronto et son impact sur la « compagnie critique » fondatrice de Vancouver.

‘Till the whisper…You know…When you can't hear the words’: Narrated Memory and the ‘Fragmented’ Body in Samuel Beckett's Late Drama

2021 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 139-155
Author(s):  
Michelle Charalambous
Keyword(s):  
Present Article ◽  
The Body ◽  
Narrative Form ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Late Works

Samuel Beckett's interest in the experience of memory and the central role the body plays in the re-experience of the past has been most evident since the time he composed Krapp's Last Tape (1958), one of his most famous memory plays where the body can actually ‘touch’ its voice of memory. In this context, the present article provides a close reading of two of Beckett's late works for the theatre, namely That Time (1976) and Ohio Impromptu (1981), where the author once again addresses the relationship between the body and memory. Unlike his earlier drama, however, in That Time and Ohio Impromptu Beckett creates a ‘distance’, as it were, between memory and the body on stage by presenting the former as a narrative and by reducing the latter to an isolated part or by restricting it to limited movements. Looking closely at this ‘distance’ in these late plays, the article underlines that the body does not lose its authority or remains passive in its re-experience of the past. Rather – the article argues – the body essentially plays a determining role in these stripped-down forms as is shown in its ability to ‘interrupt’ and somatically punctuate the fixity of the narrative form memory takes in these works.

Quiltmakers’ meaning-making in Aotearoa New Zealand: Social interactions, embodied experiences and material mediation

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-78
Author(s):  
Linda Claire Warner ◽  
Pirita Seitamaa-Hakkarainen ◽  
Kai Hakkarainen
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
Informal Learning ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Qualitative Content Analysis ◽  
Community Context ◽  
The Body ◽  
Learning And Teaching ◽  
Craft Knowledge ◽  
Aotearoa New Zealand ◽  
Embodied Experiences

The research study focuses on the phenomenon of informal learning and teaching, as it materializes through the quiltmakers’ engagement in idiosyncratic community practices. The present study considers the construction of craft knowledge from a sociocultural perspective, focusing on social and material mediation, and embodiment as a form of meaning-making for quiltmakers. The ethnographic data were collected from two quilting communities in Aotearoa New Zealand and in total 66 quilters volunteered to participate. The fieldwork extended over an eight-month period with data consisting of interviews, observations, fieldnotes and reflective diaries including the visualization of interactive happenings in situ. Chronological content logs were created, and data were analysed by qualitative content analysis. The primary interest was on the verbal (i.e. social), non-verbal (i.e. embodied) and material (inter)actions that were central to the quilters’ meaning-making processes. This praxis and process of informal learning usually make it invisible because it is a ubiquitous element embedded in the quilting community context. Identifying different aspects of multimodal making foregrounds how the quilters’ learning is socially interactive, with ‘hands on’ and ‘minds on’ processes tied to their bodily experiences and material world. This study demonstrates the significance of the ongoing communicative (inter)actions for meaning-making, highlighting the role of the body, mind and environment in shaping quilting practices and appropriating craft knowledge.

Femme fatale

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Felicity Chaplin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Film Noir ◽  
Cultural Tradition ◽  
American Film ◽  
Femme Fatale ◽  
French Version ◽  
Female Protagonists ◽  
French Film ◽  
French Culture ◽  
The City

The association of woman with Paris and death was a popular trope in nineteenth-century French culture and finds expression in cinematic representations of the Parisienne as femme fatale. This chapter considers la Parisienne as femme fatale in Jules Dassin’s Du rififi chez les hommes (1955), Marcel Carné’s Le jour se lève(1939) and Le quai des brumes(1938), and Jean-Luc Godard’s A bout de souffle (1960). These films can be considered examples of French film noir and their female protagonists read as femme fatales. However, the femme fatale of French film noir is different from the femme fatale of American film noir; she comes from a different cultural tradition and is informed by a different cultural figure. This chapter argues that the development of the femme fatale as a cinematicarchetype passed through a cultural tradition not usually associated with the noir genre: nineteenth-century French culture and the tradition of the filles d’Eve embodied in the type la Parisienne. The French version of this archetype grew out of the popular nineteenth-century trope of the association of woman with the city and death. Indeed, there is an aesthetic and narrative overdetermination of the femme fatale by the figure of la Parisienne, particularly through iconographical motifs associated with the type, like fashion, ambiguity, sexuality and danger

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