Hélène Bellenger collects and diverts magazines, posters and reels from the collection of the Toulouse Cinémathèque. By studying female iconography in the cinema, she aims to deconstruct the objectification of beauty for the screen in the 1920s and 1950s. These key years of the American Star System were a real turning point in the « archetypalization » of representations of the female body. Between divinization and standardization, female iconography curved and shaped itself according to the technological constraints of the early 20th century, creating promiscuity between body and technique, beauty and photogenics. Hélène Bellenger reproduces in post-production the make-up adapted to the cinema and television of the 1920s-1950s. The image technology had a monochrome colour spectrum with few nuances. To emphasise the contrasts and expressiveness of faces, make-up was accentuated to the point of grotesqueness. Max Factor is famous for inventing a facial make-up 

that was adapted to the technology of the time and was able to bring out the features on screens. By collecting articles on television and film make-up from the Cinémonde magazines of the 1920s and 1940s, she has brought to the surface the invisible make-up on the screens of the time. The portraits we observe thus seem clownish and disturbing, and question the forces behind the construction of beauty imagery