Ziegfeld Girl: Image and Icon in Culture and Cinema
by Linda Mizejewski, Linda Mizejewski
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Book Summary Information
Author: Linda MizejewskiEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 1999-12
ISBN: 0822323230
Number of pages: 241
Publisher: Duke University Press
Book Reviews of Ziegfeld Girl: Image and Icon in Culture and Cinema
Book Review: Ziegfeld through the HERstory lens
Summary: 1 Stars
This incredibly boring and technical book deliberately skips any possible entertainment value (No kidding - she sneers at other Ziegfeld books and movies in her preface) to focus exclusively on feminist revisionism. Instead of telling us anything personal about the showgirls, headliners or Ziegfeld himself, the whole book is viewed through a psychoanalysizing lens that echoes that familiar boogeyman story, "How The Big Bad White Man Hates You". Every musical act is sexually sinister, every costume a deliberate put-down, and only SHE can decode what they all REALLY meant. For example: There is a picture of Anna Held donning a costume where a black mannequin is affixed to her waist, making it appear that her servant is carrying Anna around in a basket on her back. You've probably seen variations of this costume every Halloween but I'll bet you never saw any sexual meaning behind it, did you? Well, the author does. She writes extensively about the significance of the mannequin being attatched to Anna's waist, giving it an imaginary sexual significance that granted Anna the alleged animal-like sexual appetite of the *lower* class black person while keeping her face attractive, clean and white for the paying audience. Oh yeah, OBVIOUSLY. Sort of puts those Gorilla-holding-a-man-in-a-cage costumes you've seen in a different light now, doesn't it? But REALLY now, could she have had the mannequin sprouting from her neck? Or her back? As Freud reportedly once said, "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar." A lot of the book is like this. A LOT OF IT.
The author reads WAY too much into this stuff, and while I'm sure some of it has a basis in fact, the rest is opinion and revisionism on a grand scale. It's the polar opposite of equally annoying books that breathlessly claim Ziegfeld's follies to be the apex of beauty and humanity, and that we've all gone to hell in a handbasket since. The real story lies somewhere in the middle. Remember that if you read this book.
Summary of Ziegfeld Girl: Image and Icon in Culture and Cinema
In the first decades of the twentieth century, Broadway teemed with showgirls, but only the Ziegfeld Girl has survived in American popular culture-as a figure of legend, nostalgia, and camp. Featured in Florenz Ziegfeld Jr.'s renowned revues, which ran on Broadway from 1907 to 1931, the Ziegfeld Girl has appeared in her trademark feather headdresses, parading and posing, occasionally singing and dancing, in numerous musicals and musical films paying direct or indirect homage to the intrepid producer and his glorious Girl. Linda Mizejewski analyzes the Ziegfeld Girl as a cultural icon and argues that during a time when American national identity was in flux, Ziegfeld Girls were both products and representations of a white, upscale, heterosexual national ideal.Mizejewski traces the Ziegfeld Girl's connections to turn-of-the-century celebrity culture, black Broadway, the fashion industry, and the changing sexual and gender identities evident in mainstream entertainment during the Ziegfeld years. In addition, she emphasizes how crises of immigration and integration made the identity and whiteness of the American Girl an urgent issue on Broadway's revue stages during that era. Although her focus is on the showgirl as a "type," the analysis is intermingled with discussions of figures like Anna Held, Fanny Brice, and Bessie McCoy, the Yama Yama girl, as well as Ziegfeld himself. Finally, Mizejewski discusses the classic American films that have most vividly kept this showgirl alive in both popular and camp culture, including The Great Ziegfeld, Ziegfeld Girl, and the Busby Berkeley musicals that cloned Ziegfeld's showgirls for decades.
Ziegfeld Girl will appeal to scholars and students in American studies, popular culture, theater and performance studies, film history, gender studies, gay and lesbian studies, and social history.
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