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Jeannette completed her PhD (Media Studies, La Trobe University) in January 2003. Her thesis, 'Louise Lovely: The Construction of a Star,' studied an Australian silent film actress (real name Louise Carbasse) famous in early Hollywood (1915-1922). The construction of Lovely's star persona was explored, including her name, makeup, blonde hair, costumes, and body type. Jeanette's most recent publication, 'Eyes Wide Shut: Tom, Nicole, Stardom and Visual Memory,' explores how magazines create interpretive contexts for images-contexts that can change, exposing the instability of the images' meanings (Transformations, issue 3, http://www.ahs.cqu.edu.au/transformations).
"Elizabeth" (Shekhar Kapur; 1998) is the quintessential costume drama: the premise of the film is that Elizabeth the sexual woman is transformed into Elizabeth the Virgin Queen by a makeover of costume, hair and cosmetics. This cinematic device can be seen to turn the story into the melodrama of a woman who-disappointed in love-becomes a career woman. This recasting of Elizabeth's story into a women's magazine-type makeover can be said to trivialize and over-simplify its complex politics and history. The film's costumes are deliberately non-realistic and theatrical, says designer Alexandra Byrne, allowing her to heighten their cinematic impact to better serve their cinematic ends. Yet because the costumes are clearly based on Elizabethan dress, they also draw on the visual language of the time. Elizabeth's gowns were richly symbollic, their smallest details speaking to her audiences about power, dynasty, religion, classical mythology, empire, consumerism, and much more.
The dramatic use of costumes in the film, therefore, deploys two separate meaning systems: modern cinematic, and Elizabethan symbolic. This paper proposes to investigate how these intersect, clash, and even sometimes reinforce each other. It will also consider modern audience response to the cultural specifics of period costume.
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