Authors

Discussion

This paper examines the capacity of on-screen costume in fashioning women’s social role, focusing upon the portrayal of the main heroine Anna Dobrokhotova in Vladimir Fetin’s film: Sweet Woman (1976). Based on Irina Velembovskya’s novel, the film swiftly rose to popularity, attracting more than 20 million people. Sweet Woman caught viewers’ attention during Brezhnev’s era, which is widely associated with moderate stability and access to welfare as well as with economic stagnation, shortages of some goods and the blossoming of the “black market”.
The paper investigates the fluidity of the changing texture of the costume and corporeal surrounding of the main heroine, through haptic experience in order to reimagine women’s social position within Soviet society. The corporeal in Sweet Woman is stitched together with the ideology and traditions of the time and offers a textural language in identifying a moral standard; an ideal, a frame for personal enlightening and development.
The discussion is stimulated by the idea of costume on screen’s profuse capacity to communicate sensorial and experiential complexity (Uhlirova 2014). The paper draws upon the interpretation of the costume as a signifier of Soviet women’s social standing, approaches it from the angle of “haptic looking” experience (Bruno 2011, Chong Kwan 2020) and thus explores tactile qualities (faktura) of the material world in the film (Widdis 2012).