The Parade Effect
La grande forme du montage alterné donne aussi une motivation à ces mises en marche avec la perspective d’une convergence finale. On retrouve les croisements de trajectoires des personnages (en marche, en course, en scooter) jusqu’à la rencontre finale, avec ces variations de vitesse du film chères à Wong Kar-wai dans son A Night in Shanghai (Self Saint Laurent). La course permet aussi d’explorer d’autres genres, tel le thriller avec Summer of 21 (Gaspar Noé pour Saint Laurent) s’ouvrant sur la fuite et les cris d’une femme dans une forêt la nuit. L’atmosphère est renforcée par les jeux de lumière animant les arbres autour d’elle, jusqu’à ce qu’elle se réfugie dans une demeure où elle croise plusieurs autres jeunes femmes déambulant dans les salons et escaliers. Chaque changement de plan est marqué par un noir rompant le flux et créant un effet labyrinthique alors qu’elles convergent toutes vers une salle de théâtre où Charlotte Rampling apparaît. Retour à l’icône et à la scène pour boucler la boucle ? n
1 Marketa Uhlirova, « 100 Years of the Fashion Film: Frameworks and Histories », Fashion Theory, vol. 17, issue 2, 2013, p. 153. 2 Thierry Davila, Marcher-Créer, Éditions du Regard, 2002. 3 Siegfried Kracauer, Rues de Berlin et d’ailleurs (1964), trad. fr. J.-F. Boutout, Gallimard, 1995, p. 14. 4 Jakob Wassermann, « Kolportage und Entfabelung », cité dans Marie Fraser (dir.), Replaying Narrative, Mois de la photo à Montréal, 2007, p. 253.
Enseignante-chercheuse à l’Université Sorbonne-nouvelle et à l’ENSAD, Térésa Faucon travaille sur l’esthétique et la théorie du cinéma, l’histoire des formes filmiques en général et le montage en particulier, les interférences entre cinéma et formes sonores, cinéma et art contemporain, cinéma et chorégraphique. Dernières publications : Gestes contemporains du montage (entre médium et performance), Naima Digital Art Publishing (e-pub), 2017 ; Chorégraphier le film.Gestes, caméra, montage, Mimesis, 2019.
Has the fashion film become a new space of experimentation for filmmakers, as staked out by the likes of Luca Guadagnino collaborating with Pierpaolo Piccioli (Valentino), Gus Van Sant with Alessandro Michele (Gucci), Gaspar Noé with Abel Ferrara and Anthony Vaccarello (Saint Laurent’s Self project)? Or is it an exercise in style, where we are meant to recognise the signature touch of filmmakers in images presenting collections (Kenneth Anger for Missoni, JeanPierre Jeunet for Chanel, Sofia Coppola and Matteo Garrone for Dior)? Doesn’t it also offer designers the opportunity to try their hand at cinema by writing and/or co-producing their films, reactivating genres and techniques associated with the history of the seventh art (horror, silent films in black and white, chronicles, film-tracts for John Galliano, Gosha Rubchinskiy, Alessandro Michele, Gaurav Gupta)? But what is left of cinema in the hundreds of films presented on the sites SHOWstudio, Business of Fashion and Nowness, or ithe fashion film festivals, most often signed by directors specialising in the genre, or fashion photographers (Nick Knight,Todd Cole, Nathalie Canguilhem, Gordon von Steiner)?
The diversity of the genre is such that some films can be found in the selections of international festivals—such as Sportin’ Life, a documentary directed by Abel Ferrara and produced by Saint Laurent, in Venice for the 77th edition in 2020; and Staggering Girl by Luca Guadagnino at the Directors’ Fortnight
De haut en bas from top:
Gus Van Sant et and Alessandro Michele.
The Theatre. Épisode 4 de of Ouverture at Something that Never Ended. 2020. (Court. Gucci). Todd Cole pour for Rodarte. The Curve of Forgotten Things. 2011. 8 min 19
in the 2019 Cannes festival, then distributed on the cinephile platform Mubi. Other films, which we can call fashion show films, accessible on the networks, replace (during the health crisis) or duplicate collection presentations, sometimes with a concern for writing and directing peppered with cinephile references ( La Piscine and La Bomba for Jacquemus, 2013 and 2019), or self-referencing by updating the style of fashion documentaries in the style of Fashion TV. Thus, for The Lost Tape (a collection inspired by the 1990s by Demna Gvasalia/Balenciaga, winter 2022), Harmony Korine, in a very syncopated montage, follows the usual sequence (time code inscribed in the image): hustle and bustle backstage, arrival of the guests in a flurry of flashes, fashion show, comments.
WALKING BODIES
There are filmmakers whose collaborations testify to the multiple facets of the genre in the context of “the new ubiquity of fashionas-moving-image”. (1) Sofia Coppola, who once trained in certain haute couture houses, has directed both advertisements and a tribute film for Chanel. Her staging of young girls and her types of lighting are also much copied in fashion films (see Todd Cole’s The Curve of Forgotten Things with Elle Fanning for Rodarte in 2011, and Zoe Cassavetes’ Hide and Seek for Vuitton in 2010). Luca Guadagnino is also known for having directed numerous advertising films (for high fashion as well as jewellery), signed a short film around a pair of shoes for Salvatore Ferragamo, and a medium-length film co-written with the fashion designer Pier Paolo Piccioli. The shots in some of the Pomellato advertisements seem like stills from the film Io Sono l’Amore (2009), with the same actress, Tilda Swinton. As for Staggering Girl, Guadagnino “wrote it about the Valentino collection as if it were a literary text”. Conversely, the clothes are also presented as each telling a story, as the designer himself put it. From the fashion shows to the films, one figure recurs: walking bodies staged. On both sides, “the manner of walking can produce an attitude or a form”, (2) whereas on the catwalks or in front of the backdrops of several fashion films, walking is more of an attraction or a looped parade—see Where the Silver Wind Blows (Saint Laurent, winter 2021), shot in an inaccessible black lava field, or Beauté Dérangeante [Disturbing Beauty] (Dior, summer 2022) in Versailles. In cinema, walking intvestigates the interaction between a body, an environment and a temporality, all the more so as the flâneur moves “not only in space but quite often goes beyond its limits to penetrate time”. (3) This “pedestrian rhetoric” (Michel de Certeau) always seems to launch a narrative based on the figures of walkers. It isn’t surprising to find Gerry director Gus Van Sant with, among other everyday gestures, a variation of walking shots for Ouverture of Something That Never Ended (Gucci, 2020). In this series of seven episodes co-written with Alessandro Michele, we follow “24 hours in the life of an ordinary woman”, the Italian performance artist Silvia Calderoni (brushing her teeth, cleaning, watching TV, going to a café, the post office, an audition...). Walking connects the different places and sets the pace, as in episode 3 “At the Post Office”: the rhythm of the queues in front of the counters is regulated like a metronome, recalling filmic cadence, which is also referred to as the pace of the film, or that of the filming behind the scenes of a fashion show. The boundary initially drawn between these forms of walking, on the side of the catwalk and on the side of film, is permeable, te
nuous, especially as “de-fabling affects contemporary narrative forms, focusing instead on the eventual, on a series of states and situations”. (4) These effects of loop and repetition are also present in video installations, such as Roundelay by Ugo Rondinone (2001) and Sleepwalkers by Doug Aitken (2007). In the former, two models (a man and a woman) each wander up and down stairs, across footbridges and through squares of the ghostly Beaugrenelle district of Paris. The viewer follows in their footsteps, embarked on this walking narrative, and invents a fiction, expecting to see their paths cross, to see them meet each other, join up, as if the polyvisual device were unfolding an alternating montage that the viewer associates, through their filmic habits, with a convergence. But the spatio-geographical logic is quickly lost with the effects of return and delay announced by the title. In Sleepwalkers, the montage unfolds on the façades of MoMA at night. Aitken stages five New Yorkers, including an office worker played by Tilda Swinton (a body that flows from advertising spaces to the visual arts), performing the same everyday gestures, pacing the city’s interiors and exteriors, but whose paths never cross.
Gaspar Noé pour for Saint Laurent. Summer of ’21. 2020. 7 min 52
LOOPING THE LOOP
Alessandro Michele (for Gucci, winter 2020) seems to have played with this proximity between cinema and fashion via the walk, between the catwalk and the scroll, by transforming the public presentation stage into a large rotating stage like a reel on an editing table, lined with a series of windows (evoking the vignettes on the film), forming regular frames, behind which each model is made visible. Ravel’s Bolero accompanied this repetitiveness of passages while giving it its amplifying movement, until the end, when the stage opened and the models escaped one after the other, like a reel of film, the movement of which had been freed. The catwalk effect still seems to open up Name Is Love directed by Indra Joshi for Gaurav Gupta (summer 2021), but very quickly the editing interrupts the flow, and sequences the portraits on the models who represent for the designer, “all genders, all body shapes, all ethnicities and all sexualities”. While their first name and gender or sexuality are inscribed in the image, they seem to be addressing us, but it is the unique voice of the poet Navkirat Sodhi that speaks for everyone, regularly chanting: “my name is love” and “we have no boundaries”. In this setting, the principle of the model approaching the photographers before leaving takes on a completely different sense of selfassertion. This brings to mind other influences, such as the device of Tejal Shah’s video installation What Are You? (2006), a series of portraits of the Indian hijra community. They also come forward to the camera to say “I” or “hello” and then read the Constitution that granted this third gender neutrality recognition even though they still live on the margins of society. Against a black background, they also appear dressed in saris, posing for the camera. “Where are we going?” is often the recurring question in these filmed walks. Several fashion films play on this rhetoric, as the very title of Luca Guadagnino’s Walking Stories for Ferragamo announces, where the female character in this romantic comedy takes us on a world tour, from Florence to California to Shanghai, to tell the story of how she lost her shoes and met the man of her life. The great form of the alternating montage also gives motivation to these journeys, with the prospect of a final convergence. We encounter the meeting of the characters’ trajectories (walking, running, riding a scooter) until the final meeting, with those variations in film speed dear to Wong Kar-wai in his A Night in Shanghai (Self Saint Laurent). The race also allows for the exploration of other genres, such as the thriller with Summer of 21 (Gaspar Noé for Saint Laurent) opening with woman fleeing, screaming in a forest at night. The atmosphere is heightened by the play of light animating the trees around her, until she takes refuge in a mansion, where she comes across several other young women wandering through the living rooms and staircases. Each change of shot is marked by blackness breaking the flow, and creating a labyrinthine effect as they all converge on a theatre where Charlotte Rampling appears. Back to the icon and the stage to complete the circle?
Translation: Chloé Baker
1 Marketa Uhlirova, “100 Years of the Fashion Film: Frameworks and Histories”, Fashion Theory, vol. 17, issue 2, 2013, p. 153. 2 Thierry Davila, Marcher-Créer, Paris: Éditions du Regard, 2002. 3 Siegfried Kracauer, Straßen in Berlin und anderswo, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1964. 4 Jakob Wassermann, “Kolportage und Entfabelung”, quoted in Marie Fraser (ed.), Replaying Narrative, Montréal: Le Mois de la Photo à Montréal, 2007, p. 253.
Térésa Faucon is an Associate Professor at the Université Sorbonne-Nouvelle and at the ENSAD. She works on the aesthetics and theory of cinema, the history of filmic forms in general, editing in particular, and the interplay between cinema and sound forms, cinema and contemporary art, cinema and choreography. Latest publications: Gestes Contemporains du Montage (Entre Médium et Performance), e-pub, Naima Digital Art Publishing, 2017 and Chorégraphier le Film. Gestes, Caméra, Montage, Sesto San Giovanni: Mimésis, 2019.