A Celluloid Tale: Blondes vs. Brunettes

[weber_dubois22]

PARIS — On a wall-mounted screen, Marilyn Monroe sings a chorus from "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes" next to a blown-up picture of Kristin Scott Thomas pulling off a peroxide wig to reveal the dark hair beneath.

"Brunette/Blonde?", which opened this month at the Paris cinematheque, uses film and television archives, photography and art to retrace how generations of movie makers have used women's hair to seduce and shape their times.

Until the 1930s, the blonde was the demure housewife, and the brunette was cast as a temptress. Then the tables turned -- the blonde taking over as femme fatale, an enduring myth that culminated in the figure of Marilyn Monroe. "At each period, the viewer knows how to tell the good girl from the bad, even if the codes have changed," said Bergala.

Later, the show moves the viewer away from the stereotype of the eternal rivals on to the 1990s and the cinema of David Lynch and his "idea that there is a blonde and a brunette inside every woman," said Bergala. In Lynch's "Lost Highway", Patricia Arquette plays both sides of a female figure -- dark and blonde. In "Mulholland Drive" the twin heroines, blonde and dark, are caught in a complex play on identity.

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