ABSTRACT
Movies began in the early 1890s with the introduction of primitive, hand-cranked machines that ran short filmstrips. The first cinematic narrative appeared in 1903, when Edwin Porter made a short film entitled The Life of an American Fireman. The mini-drama showed a fire alarm sounding, firemen leaping from their beds and sliding down the brass pole in the firehouse, and the triumphant rescue of a woman and her child from a burning house. For Bernhardt’s Elizabeth, Poiret adopted the romantic Italian Renaissance styles rather than the more accurate farthingales and severely fitted bodices of the English Tudor period. In the 1920s, women’s faces also changed to suit the new, mysterious look. Replacing the valentine smile of vacuous innocence worn like a mask by women of polite society during the early 1900s, women now affected a drawn paleness and a near-cynical stare of contempt and boredom.
