The Dressmaker Film Analysis
Drawing on insights gleaned from scholarship that investigates how costume constitutes a discourse, this essay will analyse how costume operates within the recent film The Dressmaker (2015, Moorhouse) with specific reference to gender, race, and sexuality. Directed by Australian national Jocelyn Moorhouse and presented by Screen Australia the film operates within an Australian context which, I will argue, both reflects on, and engages with, films encompassed within the canon of Australian National Cinema. Discussions surrounding gender, race, and sexuality will entail exploring how the film’s use of costume reveals and reproduces ideologies associated with a white patriarchal sexual economy as it has manifested itself in Australian cinema.