Shoe Reels

The History and Philosophy of Footwear in Film

Elizabeth Ezra, Catherine Wheatley

• Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
• Year: 2020
• Edition: 0
• eBook ISBN:
  9781474451420
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Fashion Design

In his famous interpretation of Vincent Van Gogh's painting A Pair of Peasant's Shoes (1886), Heidegger argues that shoes tell us all we need to know about the world of the person who walks in them. In the case of Van Gogh's painting, we learn this not through a description of the pair of shoes, nor by a report on how to make shoes, but by looking at the shoes. Heidegger thus gestures towards the power of the visual arts to show us human truths through images of footwear and the feet they conceal or reveal, a power that finds its fullest expression in the cinema. From Chaplin's meal of boots (The Gold Rush, 1925), through Powell and Pressburger's Red Shoes (1948) and Dorothy's ruby slippers (The Wizard of Oz, 1939), to Julia Roberts' pvc thigh-highs (Pretty Woman, 1990), Marty McFly's power-lacing Nikes (Back to the Future, 1985) and the slim, spike-heeled stiletto that graces the poster for The Devil Wears Prada (2006), shoes are not only some of the cinema's most enduring icons; they also serve as characterisations, plot devices, soundtracks, metaphors and philosophical touchpoints. This book anaylses their significnace through a range of approaches drawn from the fields of Film Studies, Philosophy, Cultural History, Fashion, Cultural Studies and Politics.

Table of contents

• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on contributors
• Foreword
• Introduction: foot notes
• 1 Max’s stylish shoes
• 2 A girl and a shoe: Marcel Fabre’s Amor pedestre
• 3 ‘An intensive study of – feet!’ in two films by Lois Weber: Shoes and Th e Blot
• 4 Magic shoes: Dorothy, Cinderella, Carrie
• 5 The ruby slippers at the V&A: an odyssey
• 6 Blood-red shoes?
• 7 The two textures of invisibility: shoes as liminal questionings
• 8 How to see through a shoe: the fashion show sequence in How to Marry a Millionaire
• 9 Frenetic footwear and lively lace-ups: the spectacle of shoes in Golden Age Hollywood animation
• 10 Ferragamo’s shoes: from silent cinema to the present
• 11 Feet of strength: the sword-and-sandals film
• 12 Men in boots: on spectacular masculinity and its desublimation
• 13 ‘The brunette with the legs’: the signifi cance of footwear in Marnie
• 14 The sole of Africa: shoes in three African films
• 15 Slippers and heels: In the Mood for Love and sartorial investigation
• 16 Sex, corruption and killer heels: footwear in the Korean corporate crime drama
• 17 It’s gott a be the shoes: Nike in the Spike-o-sphere
• 18 ‘Nice shoes’: Will Smith, mid-2000s (post) racial discourse and the symbolic signifi cance of shoes in I, Robot and The Pursuit of Happyness
• 19 ‘Whoa! Look at all her Louboutins!’ Girlhood and shoes in the films of Sofi a Coppola
• 20 Isabelle’s espadrilles, or les chaussures d’Huppert
• Index