Après-coup 1

As a Germaine Greer feminist since my early teens, I understood problems of the patriarchal construction of societal norms. Post-feminism via the Spice Girls interrupted my teens and I claimed my body by wearing the shortest of mini skirts and the smallest of triangle tops only marginally more modest than the smallest string bikini and danced all night in clubs, catching the first bus home in the morning. It came as a total shock that my nights of fun could be misinterpreted as a display for men, when someone put their hand up my skirt. Some kind of bubble burst. I had been sold some dodgy rhetoric.

Secrets of The Boudoir Burlesque: An Audience Dresses

Winkle pickers, black shirt white waistcoat. Silver ballet flats, hookeresque platforms, red patent t-bar, 2 flapper head bands, 3 feather hair clips, fishnets, patterned tights, lots of black, feather boa, 1 scruffy couple, top hat, red stilettos, puff ball skirt, patterned dress with leggings with pixie / cowboy boots, stiletto platform oxfords, jarvis cocker with longer straggly hair, plaid shirt, jeans and doccers, purple chiffon wrap dress with boach, mini top hat, blonde dreadlocks (girl) with duffel coat, black trousers, Eastpak and trainers.  Fishnet stockings with visible suspenders, sparkly puff sleeves, man with dreadlocks, red and black corset with puff ball skirt, gatenet tights with patent black shoes, black dress with silver sparkles, red lippy with hair band, pin strip suit with waistcoat, shiny suit, grey suit, black shirt, purple tie and bald head, red tennis shoes, slacks and stripped shirt. Green strapless dress matching shoes and black jacket, 15 denier black tights. Sloochy top, mini skirt, leggings, big biker boots, addidas trainers, brown leather jacket and jeans, tartan skirt and black corset. High necked slinky dress with red and white corset, pink beanie hat, black layered frilled skirt, gothic flouncy coat, curler-ed hair. Flat shoes, vest top, satchel, curly mop over one side with stripe shirt, black waistcoat, converse with suit, glitter beanie, white thin cardie over dress, red corset with black lace, pencil skirt exposing hip bones.

A Page I Inserted into A Library Book At SHU (with thanks to Kim Noble)

Kim Noble gave me a homework assessment - to find a library book, rip out a page and insert my own page, looking exactly like the original.  I found a book I love 'Popcorn Venus, Women, Movies and the American Dream' by Majorie Rosen, a kind of love letter to the stars of Hollywood, with historical contextualisation that takes in the social status of women at the time the films were made.  I couldn't bring myself to rip the page out, it felt too important in its analysis of Rita Hayworth in Gilda.  I did slip in this new page though.  


212           THE FORTIES - NECESSITY AS MOTHER OF EMANCIPATION

I am interested in asking whether it is possible to claim Rita Hayworth as a feminist icon.  She is my heroine.  I love her.  And, so does Majorie Rosen.  She says some great things on the previous page about her sexuality.  In one line she states that through her performance of 'Put the Blame on Mame' in Gilda she is saying 'This is my body.  It's lovely and gives me pleasure.  I rejoice in it just as you do.'  That’s a great idea.  I think that exemplifies why I like that performance so much.  I want to do a performance where that’s what my performance says.  That's about as subversive as you can get with the male gaze.   A disregard for it because you are so pleased with yourself.  Is that ever possible, do you think? 

However, this page makes me sad.  This book is written in 1973 and the writer does not know that Rita Hayworth was the victim of early onset Alzheimer's Disease.  In fact, the disease was far less understood then than it is today.  When Rita had difficulty remembering her lines on set people thought she was an alcoholic.  She started to drink because that was what everyone said about her.  She was unemployable and became a joke in Hollywood.  Her daughter by Aly Khan, Yasmin Khan, nursed her at the end of her life.

She infamously said that men fall in love with Gilda and wake up with Rita.  And here we have the problem of Rita Hayworth.  Her image as a sex symbol is so wonderfully joyous, so celebratory.  She IS an incredible dancer.  But, her life story and the biographies of her life paint her as so deeply tragic a person.  She was repeatedly raped by her father and entered marriage after marriage with men who exploited her.  But she said, looking back on her life, that she did not want people to be sad when they thought of her, she wanted to be remembered as giving joy. 

Interestingly, one of her closest friends and confidants throughout her life was Hermes Pan, a choreographer she met on one of the films she did with Fred Astaire.  It's as though her really understood her because he understood her as a dancer and that’s where she lived.  She was a dancer first and foremost.  I maintain she was the best partner that Astaire ever had.  Way better than Ginger.

Lower down on this page there is a sentence underlined.  I think it deserves to be read as a stand alone sentence, without reading on:  "1946 emerged as a landmark for the female breast".

I like this book because the author reads the text and image of film, something I do as an art viewer.  It's a slightly instinctive.  It is interesting because she uses a personal subjective approach that was outmoded with the semiotic and psychoanalytic methods of the film-feminists later in the Seventies and Eighties.  I get more out of this style though, and I return to this book often.  It's not printed anymore so it's hard buy.  Sometimes it comes up on Amazon, but they are ex-library copies with stamps and marginalia.  I want a clean copy!  A similar book 'From Reverence to Rape' is still in print.  I wonder why that is.

The Day Everything Changed

One afternoon in 2005, I came across a tin full of cigarette cards at a flea market. I leafed through to look more closely at the miniature pin-ups. I noticed the backs of the cards with the clipped-1940s-BBC-announcer biographies of the girls on the cards. I selected all the dancers from the tin (there were models, swimmers and tennis players I rejected, no one I had heard of before) and bought all of them. As I walked home, I decided to recreate all the photographs using myself as the model. My desire to explore another identity merged into a kind of wish, ‘What if I were this person in the photograph?’ The photograph represented such a desirable location that I wanted to be there. The details of the location, although totally unknowable to me, were here presented, as though the top layer of that location were lifted off and frozen. How could I thaw it out and get there?

The Tallulah Moment

I walk out into the floorshow.  The audience surrounds me.  I strike a pose in the spotlight.  I am wearing a strapless, floor length black satin dress slit up the side.  The music starts.  I wait for my cue.  I start to sing…[1]

I propose the scenario I describe above be called the ‘Tallulah Moment’; the moment when the female performer enthrals an audience, projecting her personality, skill and physical presence using the accoutrements of her profession—lighting and costume.  This moment is important to me and by using my personal identification with it as part of my investigation, I shall illuminate how a close read of its use in classic Hollywood films can be re-read as a celebration of women within a feminist discourse.

Why Tallulah?  The name calls to mind the eponymous ‘Bugsy Malone’ (1976) star and the actress, Tallulah Bankhead and through them, it represents excess, opulence, sexuality and joie de vivre—all highly appropriate for my purposes.  The word ‘moment’ relates to the photograph, the symbol, the emblem but not exclusively to the static.  The Tallulah Moment is a moment because I am referring both to the moving image and the frozen symbol.  In the classic Hollywood film, narrative flow is interrupted by such ‘moments’ bringing the unfolding of the story to a temporary halt.  In this interruption, I find potency—it is credit to the Tallulah Moment that it can be extracted from the film story and stand on its own.

Hollywood has used the Tallulah Moment as a device for generating pleasure in its audience. It functions by giving the female character, who, in the course of the conventional narrative is strait-jacketed into stereotypes and simplistic desires, a platform for the display of her power.  Ultimately, the storyline chastises her for that display, but within the Tallulah Moment, the woman is not punished; she is celebrated.  Hollywood developed its celebratory spectacle of the female form through studying the Ziegfeld theatrical tradition of opulence.  Indeed, Ziegfeld’s Follies provided both a ready supply of attractive young women for the Hollywood talent scouts in the 1920s and storyline fuel that was light on story and heavy on opportunities to theatricalise.  Therefore, Hollywood has used the setting of the theatre and the chorus girl, the showgirl, the dancer and the singer frequently since it started to produce films—‘All singing! All dancing!’[2].

The 1930s-1950s represent a heyday for both the Musical, and other genres, like Film Noir that employ the Tallulah Moment.  Therefore, it is this time period I want to address.  A musical ‘interruption’ in these films may take on a number of different forms, and a film may include a variety of them.  The Tallulah Moment proper features a single female singing and/or dancing, alone.  A variation on this is a partnered dance where the woman has a male counterpart.  The dance nevertheless allows the woman to shine, supported by the man.  Fred Astaire does not outshine Ginger Rogers when they dance together.

The naughty Ziegfeld flapper/dancer of the Twenties became good-girl virginal figure[3] during the Hayes Code era (from 1930 to 1968), where inference was everything.  The partnered musical number within a Musical film[4] functioned as a metaphor, representing the complexity of sexual relationships.  Through gesture and dance moves, the back and forth of a love affair is embodied.  During the dance sequence it is as though the two dancers go on date, have their first kiss, have an argument, reconcile and have sex.  The dance stands in for the work of the relationship and through it we can understand their affection to one another that is not shown explicitly during the film.  It is through reading the dance as more than a dance that we can understand why the characters become so attached, having seemingly only just met. 

There is a complex craft in constructing the Tallulah Moment.  It is created through a song (usually with lyrics but not necessarily), elaborate set, direction, camera angles and cuts.  For example, in the titular dance of the film ‘Cover Girl’ (1944) the Tallulah Moment is introduced with a montage of magazine covers before Rita Hayworth descends down an elaborate smoke-filled set and removes a long gold coat to present herself in a gold flowing gown. She continues running down to meet a troop of men dressed alike as photographers who dance with her in turn, lift her up and support her swoons.  The scene concludes as Hayworth runs up the path she descended on with the men running after her and glitter falling from the sky.  All of these effects are deployed within the overall construct of the film as well as the studio system’s crafting of the actress as a personality in publicity campaigns and advertising.  However, the story lines of these films repress strong female voices or personalities—something I perceive as I look back on films that reflect a different ideology of femininity.  Indeed I have to suspend my pangs of sadness as I indulge my black and white film habit.  It is so apparent how constrained the women are, which reflects the societal attitudes and limits that women where subject to pre-Second Wave feminism.

But there is release in the Tallulah Moment when the woman explodes with charisma and unapologetically revels in her objectification.  The woman owns her body and the gaze within that moment.  I recognise within this moment something quite absent in my life and I want that moment.  Whilst the Hollywood machinery constructs a moment so pure in its pleasure, overlaying heavy-handed devices to ensure how my gaze is taking in that woman, it is credit to the women who thrive in this moment that they are not a zero point at the centre, but a charismatic being.  Whilst I watch these moments, I imagine the performance in its barest incarnation—a woman, in a dress, in a spotlight.  I imagine my gaze undirected by lingering pans and insinuating cuts.  

During the 1930s-1950s time period the Hayes Code opened up possibilities in representing the female body that have effectively been closed down since then.  I am identifying the Tallulah Moment as one of these possibilities.  What I see happening was actresses with a high standard of technical dance training (and with that a working methodology of how to handle the gaze) were employed to display sexuality.  The freedom and fantasy of their use of their body is being used as a way of being sexually provocative without being overt.  My insider knowledge of dance training enables me to see that work being done and to feel its effect.  It takes skill to project your body as a fantasy space and this is what I am interested in suggesting.  When Rita Hayworth performs ‘Put the Blame on Mame’ in ‘Gilda’ she owns her body as a fantasy space, and credit to her for that.

---

[1] Imagery taken from ‘Gilda’ (1946) Columbia Pictures, directed by Charles Vidor starring Rita Hayworth.

[2] Taken from the promotional advertising posters for the 1929 film ‘Broadway Melody’, the first musical film featuring sound; ‘All talking All singing All dancing’.

[3] See Ruby Keeler in ‘42^nd Street’ (1933), ‘Gold Diggers of 1933’ (1933) and ‘Dames’ (1934).

[4] For example the Fred Astaire films; ‘Swing Time’ (1936), ‘Shall We Dance’ (1937), ‘You’ll Never Get Rich’ (1941), ‘You Were Never Lovelier’ (1942).