Wednesday, 1 March 2017

Undressing Cinema - Stella Bruzzi


Notes from Text
  • Challenging theories around femmes fatale... 'But why presume that a tempting female image is necessarily conditioned by either the narrative of the films she inhabits or the framework of male fantasy?' - Women are over-identified by their appearance, both on and off screen.
  • 'the vicissitudes of female dress ultimately undermine the woman and render her subservient to (and the victim of) the man who retains his iconographic stability'.
  • 'The justification for this sacrificial offering of the desirable, feminine woman has been sought in her appearance: the conscious eroticisation of her look through seductive clothing and make-up, and the use of this look to manipulate men'.
  • 'Woman (unlike man), is even required by society to make herself an erotic object. The purpose of fashions to which she is enslaved is not to reveal her as an independent individual, but rather to offer her prey to male desires; thus society is not seeking to further her projects but thwart them' - Society represses women when it comes to their ambitions/opportunities.
  • 'Fashion is used, in De Beauvoir's estimation, to absent women and reduce her to an idealised sign'.
  • 'The pursuit of elegance and beauty, therefore, is appressive, trivialising and demeaning'.
  • 'Men's clothes are functional, women's are not'.
  • 'Doane's argument comprehensively disempowers the femme fatale... the construct and embodiment of a dominant male fantasy'.
  • 'Despite her ability to manipulate and seduce the men around her... the femme fatale is somehow impotent and harmless'.

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