Theatre of Poses: Framing the Fashionable Body in the Early Studio Film

In this paper I examined a group of the very first films that foregrounded costume or fashion as their key attraction. In particular I focused on films produced at two leading French companies, Gaumont and Pathé Frères, during the early years of the twentieth century. Examining the profilmic and cinematic spaces of these films, their framing conventions, rudimentary mise-en-scènes, and techniques of choreographing and animating bodies, I argued that rather than merely anticipating the fashion film’s economy of visual spectacle, they prefigured them more directly, paving the way for how the fashion film would conceptualise space and body choreography within it.