VII. Shoes, Eroticism
and Fetish
Women’s shoes trigger amorous behaviour and sexual fixations which, in their extreme, can cause a breakdown in social etiquette. Co-curator Christel Tsilibaris will introduce a programme which explores various routines of wearing and showing off shoes for the film camera, focusing on the notions of exhibiting, revealing, voyeurism and morality. Composed of two adverts, a single-situation comic routine, an experimental short and a feature film, this selection of films shows a variety of links between the female shoes and attraction. Starting with displays of shoes as enchanting fashion accessories, the programme goes on to show shoes as ‘characters’ that stimulate and communicate erotic feelings, and finally culminates in a case where shoes substitute for their wearer as an object of sexual desire.
→ Read Christel Tsilibaris’ essay ‘Shoes, Eroticism and Fetish’ here.
→ Read Christel Tsilibaris’ essay ‘Marcel Fabre’s Amor Pedestre’ here.
→ Read Charles Musser’s essay ‘On Shoes and Kisses’ here.
Diary of a Chambermaid
Wednesday 17 May, 19:30 | Ciné LumièreBuñuel’s story finds its origin in the novel of Octave Mirbeau. The plot follows the young Celestine who goes to work as a chambermaid in rural France of the late 1920s. Her employers are a dysfunctional bourgeois family of three, all of whom carry out clandestine activities behind closed doors. Rabour, the master of the household, owns an album of dirty postcards and a collection of ladies footwear. He obliges his maids to wear black leather boots while they read to him.
The Gay Shoe Clerk
Wednesday 17 May, 19:30 | Ciné LumièreThe Gay Shoe Clerk is a story about a shoe clerk who gets attracted to a young lady while assisting her shopping for shoes, and consequently punished by her chaperone’s umbrella. Filmed at the beginning of the century, at a time when amorous behaviour was timid and revealing legs was for the most part reserved for music hall entertainment, Edwin S. Porter’s film is a daring staging of a more boisterous reality.
Paris: Women’s Shoes in Lafayette Galleries
Wednesday 17 May, 19:30 | Ciné LumièreFrance, 1912. Dir Pathé Gaumont.
Amor Pedestre (Love on Foot)
Wednesday 17 May, 19:30 | Ciné LumièreAmor Pedestre (1914) was part of a series of comic films directed by and starring Marcel Fabre as the protagonist, Robinet. While the plot of Fabre’s silent film is a typical bourgeois story of an illicit love affair and subsequent revenge, what makes it unique is the angle in which the film was shot. The director’s decision to capture on celluloid the legs and feet of his actors, rather than their entire bodies (and faces) is a coup-de-génie.
Shoes Talk Too (Anche le scarpe parlano)
Wednesday 17 May, 19:30 | Ciné LumièreItaly, 1949.
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