RESEARCH General Art

MOVIE POSTERS
Exhibition catalogs changing role of women in films, in life

Melissa Mitchell, News Editor
(217) 333-5491; melissa@uiuc.edu

4/1/03

One of the more than 60 items featured in the "Larger Than Life: Mythic Women in American Cinema" exhibition at the Krannert Art Museum from April 18 through May 25.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — High-brow art it’s not, but the brightly colored, often lurid, poster images of yesteryear’s movie queens are sure to raise an eyebrow or two among viewers of an exhibition opening this month at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

"Larger Than Life: Mythic Women in American Cinema" is the title of the new show, on view April 18 through May 25 at the university’s Krannert Art Museum. "Goddesses, monsters, mothers, lovers, dames, femmes fatales – depictions of women in American films have created numerous and often contradictory images," said exhibition curator Christine Catanzarite. And they’re all there, hanging shoulder pad to shoulder pad in the new show, which features more than 60 full-color posters, lobby cards, glass slides and movie-theater ephemera on loan from Illinois alumnus Stephen W. Blakely.

Catanzarite, associate director of the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities, said the exhibition was organized to coincide with the fifth annual Roger Ebert’s Overlooked Film Festival. The festival, hosted by the popular Chicago Sun-Times film critic and the university’s College of Communications, takes place April 23-27 in Champaign.

The posters on view at the museum represent a mere subset of the hundreds of items Blakely, a St. Louis businessman, has collected over the past six years. When Catanzarite, a film scholar, first visited Blakely’s home to view the entire collection, the women just popped out at her. "The collection does revolve around women," she said. "It’s diverse, it represents different genres, and is spread out across the decades. What was striking was how women were depicted." For example, Jayne Mansfield in "The Girl Can’t Help It" appears holding two milk jugs in front of her, at chest level. "You could get no more symbolic than that," Catanzarite said.

Movies represented in the exhibition run the gamut from silent film classics and 1940s film noir to 1950s Hitchcock thrillers and 1960s beach-blanket flicks. More contemporary selections include "Goldfinger" and "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?" with the provocative image of "toon" star Jessica Rabbit, front and center. Some of the films, such as "Double Indemnity" feature star-studded casts, while others – "Blondes at Work" and "The Bamboo Blonde" – for example, are strictly "B" fare.

The collection includes plenty of damsels in distress and more than a few calculating, cold-hearted blondes. Yet, Catanzarite said, the entire range of images of women "was so much more vivid and striking than the ones we see today. It’s all there – from ‘Little Women’ to ‘Rosie the Riveter’ to ‘Blonde Ice.’ Women had multifaceted roles that changed from decade to decade."

That evidence of an evolving history is what appeals most to Blakely. "I like collecting (these images) because I find them culturally and historically interesting," he said. "I believe movies as popular culture have a huge impact on our lives. They fuel dreams. Your parents saw these things, my parents saw them. They represent the mythology of our lives."