Designing Women: Cinema, Art Deco, and the Female Form

The image of woman is ubiquitous in Art Deco design - in sculptures, pottery, glassware, jewelry and lamps. Lucy Fischer argues that Art Deco style became a kind of "trademark" for the modern woman of the era. Moreover, the Art Deco woman, as screen protagonist, was at her most radical in the mid- to late-1920s, as embodied by actresses such as Greta Garbo or, notably, Brigitte Helm, who played both the authentic and the replicant (robot) Maria in Fritz Lang's 1926 German silent film classic "Metropolis", which Fischer calls a "Deco extravaganza". But throughout the 1930s, the female figure became progressively more muted and tamed in both the musical and the exotic adventure epic, while in the fantasy film, it became associated with perversity. Meanwhile, just as in the wider culture, a growing conservatism questioned the feminist advances of an earlier generation.;Fischer situates the Art Deco movement within the dynamics of American consumerism, revealing how its appeal to women was used to sell cosmetics, clothing, home furnishings, jewellery and objets d'art. She also investigates its implications for the star system. The book examines a large body of film work, from a variety of genres, in terms of set and costume design as well as narrative structure, and extends its conception of the cinematic "text" beyond the screen to the realm of movie theatre design.