All for Beauty

Makeup and Hairdressing in Hollywood’s Studio Era

ADR I ENNE L. MCLEAN

Ever wonder why so many stars and featured players, male or female, in movies of Hollywood’s “Golden Age” look like they just stepped out of a beauty parlor even if the story places them in a jungle, a hospital bed, or the ancient past? All for Beauty, organized as a chronological industrial history, examines how and why makeup and hairdressing evolved as crafts designed partly to maintain the white awlessness of men and women as a value in the studio era. Through what came to be known as beauty makeup in lm after lm, decade after decade, the crafts and their extensive artistry were used to cue spectators to admire certain characters and to ignore or dismiss others largely based on appearance. All for Beauty pays particular attention to the labor force, exploring the power and in uence of cosmetics inventor and manufacturer Max Factor and the Westmore dynasty of makeup artists but also the contributions of others, many of them women, whose names are far less known. At the end of the complex, exciting, and at times dismaying chronicle, it is likely that readers will never again watch Hollywood lms without thinking about the roles of makeup and hairdressing in creating not just ctional characters but stars as emblems of an idealized and undeniably mesmerizing visual perfection.

ADRIENNE L. MCLEAN is a professor of lm studies at the University of Texas at Dallas and the author or editor of multiple books including Dying Swans and Madmen: Ballet, the Body, and Narrative Cinema and Costume, Makeup, and Hair (both Rutgers University Press).

Techniques of the Moving Image

Uncanny Histories in Film and Media

ED I TED BY PATR I CE PETRO

Uncanny Histories in Film and Media brings together a stellar lineup of established and emergent scholars who explore the uncanny twists and turns that are often occluded in larger accounts of lm and media. Prompted by fresh archival research and new conceptual approaches, the works included here probe the uncanny as a mode of historical analysis that reveals surprising connections and unsettling continuities. The uncanny stands for what often eludes us, for what remains unfamiliar or mysterious or strange. Whether writing about lm movements, individual works, or the legacies of major or forgotten critics and theorists, the contributors remind us that at the heart of the uncanny, and indeed the writing of history, is a troubling of de nitions, a challenge to our inherited narratives, and a disturbance of what was once familiar in the uncanny histories of our eld.

UNCANNY HISTORIES in FILM and MEDIA

218 pp 14 b/w images 6.125 x 9.25

978-1-9788-2994-7 paper $32.95S

978-1-9788-2995-4 cloth $120.00SU

June 2022

Media Studies • Cultural Studies

PATRICE PETRO is a professor of lm and media studies, Dick Wolf Director of the Carsey-Wolf Center, and Presidential Chair in Media Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is the author, editor, and co-editor of thirteen books, including The Routledge Companion to Cinema and Gender Media Matters