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From Audrey Hepburn in Givenchy, to sharp-suited gangsters in Tarantino movies, clothing is central to film. In Undressing Cinema, Stella Bruzzi explores how far from being mere accessories, clothes are key elements in the construction of cinematic identities, and she proposes new and dynamic links between cinema, fashion and costume history, gender, queer theory and psychoanalysis.
Bruzzi uses case studies drawn from contemporary popular cinema to reassess established ideas about costume and fashion in cinema, and to challenge conventional interpretations of how masculinity and femininity are constructed through clothing. Her wide-ranging study encompasses:
* haute couture in film and the rise of the movie fashion designer, from Givenchy to Gaultier
* the eroticism of period costume in films such as The Piano and The Age of Innocence
* clothing the modern femme fatale in Single White Female, Disclosure and The Last Seduction
* generic male chic in Goodfellas, Reservoir Dogs, and Leon
* pride, costume and masculinity in `Blaxploitation' films, Boyz `N The Hood and New Jack City
* drag and gender confusion in cinema, from the unerotic cross-dressing of Mrs Doubtfire to the eroticised ambiguity of Orlando.
List of contents
Part 1 Dressing Up; Chapter 1 Cinema and Haute Couture; Chapter 2 Desire and the Costume Film; Part 2 Gender; Chapter 3 The Instabilities of the Franco-American Gangster; Chapter 4 The Screen’s Fashioning of Blackness; Chapter 5 Clothes, Power and the Modern Femme Fatale; Part 3 Beyond Gender; Chapter 6 The Comedy of Cross-Dressing; Chapter 7 The Erotic Strategies of Androgyny;
About the author
Stella Bruzzi is a lecturer in Film at Royal Holloway, University of London. She has published widely in the areas of cinema and cultural studies and is a regular contributor to Sight and Sound
Summary
Clothing is a key element in the construction of cinematic identities. This book is an innovative examination of the importance of clothes in film and makes new links between cinema, fashion, gender, queer theory and psychoanalysis.
