Sunday, October 12, 2008

impressions of Audrey Hepburn

I've only watched two Hepburn films, "Sabrina" and "Breakfast at Tiffany's," so perhaps others better versed in her work would like to comment on their impressions of the star. For me, her screen persona, especially in "Breakfast," typifies a notion of the masquerade of femininity as *unconscious* and embedded, and as such toothless as a political tool. Although "Sabrina" is a makeover film and "Breakfast" alludes to the My Fair Lady-like grooming and transformation of Hepburn's character at the hands of a male Hollywood agent, the idea of femininity as socially constructed is "re-naturalized" by Hepburn's characters' effortless appropriation of the props of feminity--as though, literally, she were just "made for them." Her performances seem to lack the "distanciation" that Sarah Berry notes is there in the performances of Dietrich, Katharine Hepburn, and Garbo, in gestures that these actresses make that grate against the grain of their characters' diegetic positioning in an ideology of conventional femininity.

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