seems to have been eliminated from Hollywood. But fortuitously a surreal fur coat in a

standard screwball comedy suggests that there may be an associative link between the

studio system and the avant-garde art. In order to trace this connection, like the

Benjaminian ragpicker, I fashion a history out of articles that were once quite fashionable

and have now become outmoded, in order to trace what la mode reveals about le mode,

what fashion designing unexpectedly reveals about the method of studio filmmaking

itself. Along the way, fur coats and chiffon dresses form a strange network of connections

between the studio system and Surrealism. What emerges from this network is less a

theory about Classic Hollywood than a way of addressing a crucial issue for thirties

Hollywood filmmaking: the negotiation between detail and plot, image and script,

moment and narrative.

 Chapter 3, "Loose Ends: The Stuff That Movies Are Made of," imagines a

fldneur's gaze at the enigmatic objects of film noir. At the heart of studio filmmaking is

this central paradox: temporal continuity conveyed through a rapid succession of still

images. Film noir is usually associated with a fast-paced plot that parallels the linear trail

of the railroad; conforming to studio cinema in the forties, it looks like a system driven

by forward motion, avoiding pauses, disallowing digression. Yet, as F. Scott Fitzgerald's

The Love of the Last Tycoon shows, at any moment, this linear trail can be derailed by

distracting objects-by the stuff that movies are made of. Here, I use flanerie as a way of

examining that stuff which pulsates with uncommon intensity. Instead of interrogating

them for what they mean, gazing at things in incidental fashion leads to an unorthodox

approach to noir objects-a way of writing i i//h the stuff of cinema and not just about

them. Thus, on a walking tour of John Huston's The Maltese Falcon, I pause to look at