Enjoy It, Julia, While It Lasts
By MICHAEL J. LEWIS
Published: May 19, 2005
WHAT is the American ideal of beauty today? To judge by People magazine's new "50 most beautiful" issue, which came out earlier this month, it does not tend to delicate and fine features.
If anything, it runs in the opposite direction, toward large and striking features: Angelina Jolie's oversize lips; the emphatic jaw of Mariska Hargitay, a star of "Law & Order: Special Victims Unit"; the startlingly wide mouth of Julia Roberts.
Some 500,000 readers selected these beauties in an online vote, judging this year's most beautiful people in much the same way as they most often see them, as pixilated images on a monitor. After all, today's movie stars are more likely to be experienced at home on a DVD than projected on to a big screen.
The defining feature of the digital image is its smallness. A head shown on a television screen is usually life-size or smaller, a format that favors large features. Just as cartoonists exaggerate the features of their characters so they remain legible in miniature, so oversize features work well on the small screen. The more cartoonish, within limits, the better.
During Hollywood's golden age, the 1930's, the most admired beauties were stars like Greta Garbo, Carole Lombard and Jean Harlow. And their beauty was of a very different sort. For the intense tonal range of black and white photography favored a richly contoured face, with prominent cheekbones that cast lovely form-defining shadows. An "angular face," as Katharine Hepburn termed her own, was particularly good at casting shadows. If her face was insufficiently angular, an actress might make it more so. Marlene Dietrich is supposed to have had her upper molars removed to put shadows under her cheekbones, a story she bitterly denied.
In describing these features, people invariably resorted to the metaphor of sculpture, and compared them to a glistening marble statue lighted dramatically from one side. The director George Cukor observed that "that extraordinary sculptural construction of lines and planes," Joan Crawford's face, "caught the light superbly, so that you could photograph her from any angle."
A generation later, in his essay on Garbo's face, Roland Barthes, the French philosopher, described it as enigmatic "mask of antiquity," that was "sculpted in something smooth and fragile."
But 1950's Technicolor movies did not take kindly to the sculptural face. The legendary Barrymores, with profiles like a map of the English coast, suddenly seemed too craggy.
There arose a new concept of film beauty. Now the distinguishing trait was not so much facial architecture as a glowing complexion. Neither Marilyn Monroe nor Grace Kelly nor Kim Novak had what might be called a strong face, but all presented vast expanses of vitally healthy skin on the big screen.
Eve Arnold, one of Monroe's favorite photographers, saw the actress's principal asset as her "translucent, white, luminous" skin. "Her skin was pneumatic," Ms. Arnold once explained, "one could almost touch it on screen. Cinéasts refer to this phenomenon as 'Flesh Impact.' "
If today's preference for oversize features is due, at least in part, to the smallness and graininess of digital images, this is now likely to change. Wide-screen high-definition television could offset today's fondness for the overemphatic.
It is sobering to think that the stunning beauty of today might have been, with a different technology, the pretty chorus girl in the second row - or vice versa.
But technology cannot account for everything. It certainly can't explain someone like George Clooney, who looks good on the small screen and would have looked equally smashing in the black and white cinema of the 1930's, rivaling Gable in the sculptural sweepstakes, contour for sculptural contour.
Michael J. Lewis, a professor of art history at Williams College, is writing a history of American art that looks at how social and technological changes affected ideas of beauty.
isn't this interesting? i prefer the old look of beauty...although i think grace kelly had small features! i love the blue-blood beauty...blonde hair, high cheekbones, etc....
By MICHAEL J. LEWIS
Published: May 19, 2005
WHAT is the American ideal of beauty today? To judge by People magazine's new "50 most beautiful" issue, which came out earlier this month, it does not tend to delicate and fine features.
If anything, it runs in the opposite direction, toward large and striking features: Angelina Jolie's oversize lips; the emphatic jaw of Mariska Hargitay, a star of "Law & Order: Special Victims Unit"; the startlingly wide mouth of Julia Roberts.
Some 500,000 readers selected these beauties in an online vote, judging this year's most beautiful people in much the same way as they most often see them, as pixilated images on a monitor. After all, today's movie stars are more likely to be experienced at home on a DVD than projected on to a big screen.
The defining feature of the digital image is its smallness. A head shown on a television screen is usually life-size or smaller, a format that favors large features. Just as cartoonists exaggerate the features of their characters so they remain legible in miniature, so oversize features work well on the small screen. The more cartoonish, within limits, the better.
During Hollywood's golden age, the 1930's, the most admired beauties were stars like Greta Garbo, Carole Lombard and Jean Harlow. And their beauty was of a very different sort. For the intense tonal range of black and white photography favored a richly contoured face, with prominent cheekbones that cast lovely form-defining shadows. An "angular face," as Katharine Hepburn termed her own, was particularly good at casting shadows. If her face was insufficiently angular, an actress might make it more so. Marlene Dietrich is supposed to have had her upper molars removed to put shadows under her cheekbones, a story she bitterly denied.
In describing these features, people invariably resorted to the metaphor of sculpture, and compared them to a glistening marble statue lighted dramatically from one side. The director George Cukor observed that "that extraordinary sculptural construction of lines and planes," Joan Crawford's face, "caught the light superbly, so that you could photograph her from any angle."
A generation later, in his essay on Garbo's face, Roland Barthes, the French philosopher, described it as enigmatic "mask of antiquity," that was "sculpted in something smooth and fragile."
But 1950's Technicolor movies did not take kindly to the sculptural face. The legendary Barrymores, with profiles like a map of the English coast, suddenly seemed too craggy.
There arose a new concept of film beauty. Now the distinguishing trait was not so much facial architecture as a glowing complexion. Neither Marilyn Monroe nor Grace Kelly nor Kim Novak had what might be called a strong face, but all presented vast expanses of vitally healthy skin on the big screen.
Eve Arnold, one of Monroe's favorite photographers, saw the actress's principal asset as her "translucent, white, luminous" skin. "Her skin was pneumatic," Ms. Arnold once explained, "one could almost touch it on screen. Cinéasts refer to this phenomenon as 'Flesh Impact.' "
If today's preference for oversize features is due, at least in part, to the smallness and graininess of digital images, this is now likely to change. Wide-screen high-definition television could offset today's fondness for the overemphatic.
It is sobering to think that the stunning beauty of today might have been, with a different technology, the pretty chorus girl in the second row - or vice versa.
But technology cannot account for everything. It certainly can't explain someone like George Clooney, who looks good on the small screen and would have looked equally smashing in the black and white cinema of the 1930's, rivaling Gable in the sculptural sweepstakes, contour for sculptural contour.
Michael J. Lewis, a professor of art history at Williams College, is writing a history of American art that looks at how social and technological changes affected ideas of beauty.
isn't this interesting? i prefer the old look of beauty...although i think grace kelly had small features! i love the blue-blood beauty...blonde hair, high cheekbones, etc....
for some reason I was pleasantly surprised to learn that...for some reason I always thought you were caucasian (i tend to associate people's actual face with their avatars if it contains a person - i thought Meg was the girl in her avatar who turned out to be Sofia Coppola)
