Habiller les personnages, revêtir la chair

The main objective of this contribution is the presentation of a series of methodological instruments for carrying out costume analysis in cinema. The first proposal concerns an exploration of the heuristic potential of semiotics of body figures, developed by Jacques Fontanille, to explore the meaning of clothing. Then, we aim to clarify the contradictory position of cinema in relation to fashion; on the one hand, it takes advantage of clothing taxonomies and conventions to facilitate the understanding of the distribution of roles between the characters in the film; on the other hand, it deconstructs the stereotypes of clothing through iconic re-elaborations (aesthetic reading) or indexical appraisals (symptomatological reading) of costumes, which finally become very important discursive operators in the economy of a cinematographic work. In particular, we seek to illustrate the marking function of the costume, which offers the spectator a privileged key to understanding the narrative transformations of a character. Furthermore, the costume can assume a figurative role and enter in a series of rhetorical operations that inevitably solicit an intertext. This invites us to distinguish different perspectives on the integration of costumes into film discursive formations in order to also grasp their thematization in discourse or in the practices that accompany the enjoyment and distribution of the film. Finally, the article leads to a more general reflection on the contribution of cinema to the understanding of the cultural roles of clothing.

Abstract licence: CC BY

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