Saturday, February 23rd, Stony Brook Manhattan, 110 East 28th Street 10:00AM-4:30PM
Dr. Elizabeth Ann Kaplan
E. Ann Kaplan is SUNY Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies at Stony Brook, where she also founded and directs The Humanities Institute. Kaplan has written many books and articles on topics in cultural studies, media and women's studies from diverse theoretical perspectives. Her most recent books are Feminism and Film (2000), Trauma and Cinema: Cross Cultural Explorations (co-edited with Ban Wang) and Trauma Culture: The Politics of Terror and Loss in Media and Literature, (2005). She is working on two book projects, Public Feelings, Memory and Affective Difference in Visual Culture, and Screening Older Women: Desire, Shame and the Body.
Adrienne Munich, Conference Coordinator
Adrienne Munich is the Interim Chair of the Women’s Studies Department at Stony Brook University where she is currently teaching a course on fashion and film. Her interests include fashion theory, material culture, and the rise of consumer culture from Victorian England to the present day. She is the co-author of Queen Victoria’s Secrets (1996) and Andromeda’s Chains: Gender and Interpretation in Victorian Literature and Art (1989). She is writing a book on the cultural history of diamonds and is the author of the article “Heart of the Ocean: Diamonds and Democratic Desire in Titanic,” in Titanic: Anatomy of a Blockbuster, 1999
Mary Ann Caws, What to Wear in a Vampire Movie
This paper looks at a variety of vampire movies and explores what the well-dressed vampire chooses to wear for an elegant blood-letting.
Mary Ann Caws is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature, English, and French at the Graduate School of the City University of New York. One of the primary themes of her work has been the relationship between image and text. She is the author of many books including Glorious Eccentrics: Modernist Women Painting and Writing (2007), Picasso’s Weeping Woman: The Life and Art of Dora Maar (2000) and Surrealism and Women (1991). She is a past president of the Modern Language Association and has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Fulbright Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Getty Center.
Jane Gaines, Wanting to Wear Seeing: Gilbert Adrian at MGM
Gilbert Adrian's spectacular designs for Greta Garbo, Norma Shearer, Joan Crawford and Jean Harlow have never been matched on the screen. During his career at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studio, roughly 1929-1942, he created work that broke the rules, calling attention to itself in ways that threatened to distract spectators from the narrative they were supposed to follow. This disruption allows us to think about the fascinating relation between the spectator who was told in fan magazines that screen costumes were not made to be worn in real social situations and the screen where they are encouraged to want to wear everything they see. Gaines argues that there is a much more complicated situation set up where the spectator wants to "wear it all," that is, to "wear seeing itself."
Jane Gaines is Professor of Literature and English at Duke University where she founded the Film/Video/Digital Program. Currently she is a Visiting Professor in the Film Division of the School of Arts at Columbia University. She is the author of two award-winning books, Contested Culture: The Image, the Voice, and the Law, and Fire and Desire: Mixed Race Movies in the Silent Era. She is currently working on two others: The Documentary Destiny of Cinema and Fictioning Histories: Women Film Pioneers. Her first book was Fabrications: Costume and the Female Body, edited with Charlotte Herzog. (2007).
Diana Diamond, Marie Antoinette, or the third wave of feminism starts on the runway
Sophia Coppola’s film Marie Antoinette centers around the queen as a fashion icon. Traded into marriage by her mother, the young queen was the ultimate object of exchange who dealt with the spectacle of the court where all eyes were on her, by becoming a spectacle of her own construction. Marie Antoinette sought to carve out a power base of her own through her various masquerades which included preposterous pouf hairstyles, stylized silk gowns studded with gems, free-flowing uncorsetted muslin peasant dresses, and masculine riding costumes (the redingote), as well as her final simple white execution robe. In seeking self definition and social empowerment through fashion, in using her masquerades to seduce her public and resist the domination of a hostile and cynical court, Marie Antoinette foreshadowed and epitomized the third wave of feminism. First-wave feminism included the suffragettes who lobbied successfully for women’s equality as citizens. Second-wave feminism grew out of the sexual politics of the new left of the 1960’s and was inspired by consciousness raising around gender issues, sex-role stereotyping in work and family, and economic parity. Third-wave feminism grew out of the spirited individualism and materialism of women in their 20’s and 30’s in the mid 1980’s and 90’s who still advocate for women's rights while embracing a "girlie culture" that celebrates sex, men, gay culture, and clothes--in part as a reaction to the second wave’s rejection of fashion and consumption. The fourth wave of feminism has at its heart a new kind of political activism that is guided and sustained by spirituality and community. Sophia Coppola’s film is a product of feminism’s third wave. It is as much a comment on celebrity youth culture’s submersion of rebellion in the pleasures of obsessive consumption as it is an historical chronicle of the lavish excesses of Marie Antoinette and the ancien régime. As enamored and identified as the filmmaker (herself Hollywood royalty) is with her queen subject, she provides a continual ironic commentary with the languid gauzy close ups of the queen and the endless shots connecting her with the sumptuous surfaces and objects of Versailles, the silks and satins and bonbons and shoes (designed by Manolo Blahnik), by discordant images such as that of a pair of hip-hop hot pink high top sneakers lying amid a spectacular assortment of Blahnik creations and through the ubiquitous presence of the pop rock soundtrack such as The Gang of Four’s Natural’s Not in It. Finally, the paper will address the extent to which the new narrative of Marie Antoinette offered by Coppola’s film and the recent books on which it is based are a post 9/11 phenomenon, a reflection of a society that is challenged by war, terrorism, and the vast inequalities in the distribution of wealth. 9/11 was experienced as a collective trauma which perhaps created a qualitative change in the American consciousness of invulnerability, leading to a “doomsday”–like atmosphere comparable to that of Marie Antoinette during the final days before the French Revolution.
Dr. Diana Diamond is a professor in the Department of Psychology at the City University of New York. One of her specialties is the projection of psychoanalytic concepts onto the film screen. She has coauthored two books on the subject: Psychoanalytic Visions of Cinema/Cinematic Vision of Psychoanalysis (2007) and Projections of Psychic Reality: A Centennial of Film and Psychoanalysis (1998). Her articles in this area include “Passion for Survival in Polanski’s The Pianist” (2007), “Attachment Disorganization and Creativity in Fanny and Alexander by Ingmar Bergman” (2007) and “Loss, Mourning and Desire in Midlife: François Ozon’s Under the Sand and Swimming Pool” (2007).
Drake Stutesman If “Costumes Are Not Clothes,” Then What is Fashion in Film?
This talk examines important Hollywood costume designers, their influence on and separation from pop and couture fashion and the effect of fashion in film on American identity
Drake Stutesman is writing a biography of the milliner/ couturier Mr. John, who created two major fashion empires and designed hats for the films of Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, Marilyn Monroe and others from the 1930’s to the 1970’s. Stutesman’s work has appeared in the British Film Institute and MoMA publications, Schirmer’s Encyclopedia of Film, The Women’s Film Pioneer Source Book, Film Quarterly, Film Festival Reporter and AMIA. She edits Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media, is a novelist and nonfiction writer, and holds a Ph.D. in literature/film. Her cultural history of snakes, Snake (Reaktion Books), was published in 2005. Co-chair of The Women’s Film Preservation Fund, which preserves American films in which women have had a significant creative input, she co-programs their films for MoMA’s annual Save and Project series, and at Lincoln Center and the Tribeca Film Festival. She has interviewed many directors, costume designers, cinematographers, video artists, writers, hair stylists, and make-up artists.
Jacqueline Reich, Slave to Fashion: Maciste, Suits, and Early Italian Cinema
Beginning in 1915, the beloved character of Maciste changes clothes and racial affiliation in his transformation from African slave in the epic Cabiria (1914) into the epitome of white, Italian masculinity. In a number of eponymous films, he accomplishes his metamorphosis by exchanging the toga for a variety of elegant and fashionable suits and cinematic roles. This paper examines the implications of this character alteration for both cinema and men's fashion in pre-WWI Italy.
Jacqueline Reich is Associate Professor of Italian and Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies. She is the author of Beyond the Latin Lover: Marcello Mastroianni, Masculinity and Italian Cinema (Indiana UP, 2004) and co-editor of Re-viewing Fascism: Italian Cinema, 1922-1943 (Indiana UP, 2002).
Maura Spiegel, Ornament and Sexual Restraing: Reading the Victorian Costume
Being fashionable was hardly a Victorian virtue –or not for heroines of novels where plainness in dress was linked to moral superiority and intelligence, while attention to appearance was a mark of mere conventionality –or worse. This paper explores the evolving meanings that attach to the ornate (or fashionable) and the plain woman in Victorian costume films.
Maura Spiegel teaches literature and film at Columbia University and Barnard College. She is the co-author of The Grim Reader: Writings on Death, Dying and Living On (Anchor/Doubleday) and The Breast Book: An Intimate and Curious History (Workman), which was a Book-of-the-Month Club-Quality Paperbacks selection. She has written for The New York Times, and has published essays on such varied topics as the history of the emotions, Charles Dickens, diamonds in the movies, and more. She is writing a book on the films of Sidney Lumet.