Sunday 22 November 2009

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.

Wednesday 11 November 2009

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.

Monday 2 November 2009

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?