The Clothed Body

The Clothed Body
relation of a text to public opinion, and its relation to other texts, but also
the internal functioning of the story it recounts (Aumont et al. 1994).
Verisimilitude thus doesn’t concern just realistic cinema (the degree of
adhesion to the historical, spatial and social reality represented), but a
more complex resonance between cultural texts, including current public
opinion that cinema itself helps to construct and certainly to cement. What
we call ‘received meaning’ falls into this category of opinion. 2
The image of the cowboy, for instance, in its appearance style (see Kaiser
1992) in the classic Western: the dusters around the legs, the ten-gallon hat,
the fringed jacket and trousers, the holster with pistol, an essential prosthesis
in the representation of this type. Just how much realism do these images
contain? Is there any similarity between John Wayne and an ‘authentic’ nineteenth
century photo portrait of a gunman in the Wild West? The answer is
that what counts is not so much the adhesion of the clothed body in the film
to a model established by the ‘real’ (which is itself only a construction of the
photographer’s studio), but the degree of verisimilitude that the signs on the
body manage to define and the ‘veridiction contract’ (see Greimas 1983)
drawn up between the film and its viewers. This ‘veridiction contract’ is a
sort of implicit accord between the two parties, or agents, in the communication
process, sender and receiver, which are not necessarily two physical
people, but rather two positions, or figures, in a discourse. A character’s
clothes, accessories or hairstyle in a costume drama may appear verisimilar
to the viewer if the latter’s encyclopaedia contains prior knowledge of the
apparel in vogue during the historical period in which the film is set 3 and,
moreover, if the images manage to make that costume credible at a textual
and intertextual level, if they manage to stimulate the viewers’ imagination
(as a semiotic activity productive of other worlds). 4
Thus in the contract tacitly drawn up between the polyphonic complexity
(director, cast, film industry, etc.) of the film discourse and the multilayered
social subject, only reductively called ‘the public’ or ‘viewers’,
verisimilitude is transformed into veridiction. The terms of the contract
concern the fact that not only is the clothed body on the screen credible, it
is also socially ‘true’ and that one can recreate from its image other like
bodies, not only in film, but in reality, whether past or present.
Costume drama is film in historical costume, but what about cinema
that represents the present or the future, fleeting forms of time that the
twentieth century (the century of cinema) has invented to recount and
imagine itself. Here cinema encounters that other great modelling system
of communication, fashion. Cinema manages to act beyond the limits of
image and representation, penetrating the ways in which clothed bodies
think and reproduce themselves through fashion as a great syntax, or
92