'Che credeva, che fossi Cenerentola!': Changes of Clothes, Guest Appearances, and Other Diva Performances in 1950s Cinema. (August 2015)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Noto, Paolo
• Is Part Of: Italian studies. Volume 70:Number 3(2015:Nov.)
• Page Start: 377
• Page End: 388
• Publication Date: 2015-08
• Subjects: Italian literature -- History and criticism -- Periodicals; Italy -- Intellectual life -- Periodicals; Italy -- Study and teaching -- Periodicals; 945
• DOI: 10.1179/0075163415Z.000000000108
• Languages: German
• ISSNs: 0075-1634

Abstract

<abstract> <title> <x content-type="archive" xml:space="preserve">Abstract</x> </title> <p>Italian female stars of the 1950s are often subject to the gaze of male characters as they dress or undress. In this article, I analyse this cliché and others, such as dances, partial stripteases, and guest appearances, as textual <italic>topoi</italic>, in order to define how visual attractions attained a narrative function consistent with the fragmentary character of that cinema. The frequent visual linking of feminine beauty and consumer goods also helps to re-frame, historiographically, the issue of stardom in the early 1950s, and to identify that period as a complex one in which the female body was no longer visualized as an element able to link the cinematic representation to a supposed state of nature, but not yet displayed as a completely commodified object.</p> </abstract>