Congratulations Dr. Drew Todd!
Drew Todd with his research assistant, Max Todd.
Dr. Todd’s article “Marked Woman (1937) and the Dialectics of Art Deco in the Classical Gangster Genre” has been published in the peer-reviewed, online journal Film, Fashion & Consumption (1.3, December 2012).
Drew explains, “The subject is one I’ve been interested in for a while, that of the relationship between Art Deco movie design (from the 1920s and 1930s, especially) and ideologies of gender, economics, and consumerism. The article allowed me to combine this specialization with another area of interest, one I’ve taught in RTVF, that of crime films and, more specifically, the gangster genre.”
Here’s the abstract of the article:
In this article, I analyse the function of Art Deco designs in the 1930s gangster genre and, in particular, Warner Brothers’ Marked Woman (Bacon, 1937). Like many gangster films of the period, it associates high-style Art Deco with excess and the criminal underworld. My findings, however, reveal a tension between the film’s moralist stance and its visual excess. Compelling visual signifiers of leisure, style and social mobility, the modern designs are free to circumvent the film’s critical message and reinforce American capitalist ideologies. My analyses underscore Art Deco as an emblematic style of commercial modernity. Marked Woman and other gangster films not only reflect the latest trends in design, but also negotiate a constellation of values, ideologies and desires at a time of social and economic volatility.
Unfrotunately, the article is not free. The library will eventually link and make available the article through ScholarWoks, we will provide a link to that when the time comes. Here is the link to the site, in any case: http://www.intellectbooks.co.uk/journals/view-Article,id=14922/