At the movies – Page 2 – Stories from A Closet of Errors

Movie Inspiration of the Week – One from the Heart (1982)

Costume designer Ruth Morley

Considered by many Coppola’s worst movie and one of the biggest flops in film history, eventually leading to the director’s, and his company Zoetrope’s, bankruptcy, One from the Heart is a flamboyant and artificial musical following Frannie ( Teri Garr) and Hank (Frederic Forrest) 5th anniversary celebrations in their hometown Las Vegas during a 4th of July weekend.

I can clearly see nothing is clear
I keep falling apart every year
Lets take a hammer to it
There’s no glamour in it
Is there any way out of this dream

Frannie works at Paradise Travel Agency and dreams of flying off to Bora Bora while lending her vivid imagination to the thematic window displays she sets up while Hank is the owner of a junkyard called Reality.

I’m as blue as I can possibly be
Is there someone else out there for me
Summer is dragging its feet
I feel so incomplete
Is there any way out of this dream

Having met 5 years before over the 4^th of July, reality has settled in and Frannie and Hank now struggle with the increasing boredom and disillusionment over each other. After an argument, Frannie decides to leave, taking refuge with her best friend Maggie (Lainie Kazan) while Hank finds solace near his best friend Moe (Harry Dean Stanton) and both decide to reinvent themselves through perms and haircuts, tailored funky suits and enticing red dresses and present new and alluring self-images to new prospective partners.

Because I know I’ve been swindled
I never bargained for this
What’s more you never cared about me
Why don’t you get your own place
So you can live like you do
And I’m sick and tired of picking up after you

Take all your relatives and all of your shoes
Believe me I’ll really swing when you’re gone
I’ll be living on chicken and wine after we’re through
With someone I pick up after you

I got upset
I lost my head
I didn’t mean the things I said
You are the landscape of my dreams
Darling I beg your pardon

While Frannie finds the excitement and adventure she’d been craving for with Ray (Raúl Juliá) the dark and handsome lounge pianist/waiter, Hank finds his new idealized partner in the otherworldly beautiful Leila (Nastassja Kinski) who decides to abandon her circus troupe.

So little boy blue
Come blow your top
And cut it
Right down to the quick
Don’t sit home and cry
On the fourth of July
Around now you’re
Hitting the bricks

You can’t unring a bell Junior
It’ll cost you to get out of this one Junior
She’s got big plans that don’t include you
Take it like a man

Everything is over the top and cartoonish and obviously fake. And it’s even maybe a little soppy and oversentimental and corny but it’s a tale of ordinary lives taking place in an extraordinary setting and narrated by a wonderful Tom Waits soundtrack.

I can’t tell
Is that a siren or a saxophone
But the roads get so slippery when it rains
I love you more than all these words can ever say
Oh baby
This one’s from the heart

While it might not be Coppola’s best, for me, in all its artificiality and melodramatic extravaganza, One from the Heart, is the musical that we, sometimes, can’t resist playing in our heads. We might not be able to sing but once in a while, we just can’t resist the daydreaming fantasy of having our little ordinary life soundtracked and choreographed.

I’m so sorry
That I broke your heart
Please don’t leave my side
Take me home
You silly boy
Cause I’m still in love with you

In the end, Frannie does not board the flight taking her first to Los Angeles and then to Bora Bora with Ray. She goes back to Hank. True love always wins, or that’s probably the way a musical should end or, again, we like to believe the artifices we see on screen are real.

Photos via thredlist.com

Lyrics https://genius.com/albums/Tom-waits/One-from-the-heart-soundtrack

Movie Inspiration of the week

Marguerite (2015)

Costume Designer: Pierre-Jean Larroque. César Best Costume Design (Meilleurs costumes)

I did not see this movie when it came out, I’ve watched it on TV on Christmas Eve. As with Florence Foster Jenkins (2016) , Marguerite is also inspired by the life of the “world’s worst opera singer“. While Stephen Frears‘ film (that I did not see) is set in 1940s New York, director Xavier Gianolli, tells Marguerite’s story in Paris during the Golden Twenties. Since the 20s are my “in the wrong place at the wrong time” period in history, this little detail makes all the difference. Not only because Pierre-Jean Larroque’s period costumes are exquisite but also because the story benefits from the social, cultural and artistic context of European avant-gardism.

This is a story of passion without talent. Not of a simple love of music but of a vital need to express that love. The Baroness Marguerite Dumont loves opera and wants to be loved by her cheating husband through her talent as a venerated soprano, creating a dream world enabled by the butler / photographer Madelbos and her own wealth, pleasant disposition and childlike enthusiasm that prevent everyone around her from telling her how excruciatingly bad she is.

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Marguerite creates a dream world helped by Madelbos, the butler, who protects her from the harsh reviews and mockeries of the outside world but also turns her and the elaborate photo shoots of delusional Diva roles into his own personal artistic project. For that he is willing to let her die and this was, for me, the darkest side of the movie. While this is a thoroughly beautiful and inspirational look at the nature of art and the value of a dream it is also a bitter reflection on the use of others as the object / subject of that art.

While Florence Foster Jenkins might have never known just how terrible she was, Marguerite does get to know and that ends up not making Life possible anymore.

Movie Inspiration of the Week – The Addiction (1995)

I would not want to know a person who isn’t offended by aspects of this film, but I would be equally bored by an individual who would casually dismiss the film itself.

Abel Ferrara

Costume Designer Melinda Eshelman

This is not an obvious choice as far as fashion / style inspiration goes, nor does it fall (apparently) in a film genre I particularly appreciate. Not a conventional (romantic) vampire movie, The Addiction seems to depict “vampires” in an over realistic manner as intellectual drug addicts in a grungy 90s New York City.

An explicit metaphor (if that’s a thing) for heroin addiction and its moral and physical decaying results, this is also a film that uses “the vampire as a metaphor for intellectual hubris in the face of systemic sinfulness in the world”.[*] Having practically been born into academia and having spent all my life in it, this is what strikes me as both inspiring and scary in The Addiction.

Suitably blood-festooned vampire flick (although the word vampire is never mentioned). Secondly, it operates as a philosophical and religious reflection on human evil and redemption and finally as an amusing take on certain aspects of university life, probably best appreciated by those directly involved in that venerable institution.

Clare O’Farrell

Kathleen (Lili Taylor) is a Philosophy doctoral student who transforms into a vampire / undead/ immortal after being bitten by the stylish Casanova ( Annabella Sciorra) because she, the victim, could not stand up to her sleek aggressor who specifically tells her: “Tell me to leave you alone”and begins “a slow transition from theoretical dependency to literal acts of horror and extreme physical addiction.” [*] Succumbing to her addiction, Kathleen neglects her thesis as she falls deeper into ennui until meeting Peina (Christopher Walken), who with the superiority of the recovering addict turns into an impromptu supervisor, sucking all her blood before giving her a reading list. “Read the books, Sartre,Beckett, who do you think they are talking about?”

I have felt the wind on the wing of madness

Baudelaire

Back to her thesis, Kathleen is now a junkie with a rationale.

By making the force of Kathleen’s appetite for blood, and an altering sense of moral perspective a parallel to a developing thesis, St John and Ferrara enable a wry, reflexive commentary on philosophy in action. As well as allowing a PhD student to take a rare leading role in a feature narrative (albeit made more exciting by vampirism), The Addiction is an ambitiously intellectual genre film, and a comic satire on intellectualism itself in its literalization of theory, as Kathleen both consumes her supervisor and eventually the academic community.

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The University, the institution “among the precious things that can be destroyed “, has changed a lot since 1995. I’m not quite sure if the institution transformed into an enabler of transversal skills through, more or less fast tracks, and in the process condemning learners to a life of follow up courses and debt (in some countries) is still the place of never ending theories trying to rationalize the unfathomable. Or maybe it’s just “all theory and philosophy until someone gets bit”

To face what we are in the end, we stand before the light and our true nature is revealed. Self-revelation is annihilation of self.

P.S. In its neo noir aesthetic, this is, of course, a film that appeals to me with all the its different layers of black. The invisible, the evil, the academic, the existentialist, the transgressive, the bohemian, the absolute black.

Movie Inspiration of the Week – India Song (1975)

I’ve forgotten the words with which to tell you. I knew them once, but I’ve forgotten them, and now I’m talking to you without them.
Marguerite Duras, Emily L.

A memory piece that calls up the dead, its heroine, Anne-Marie Stretter (Delphine Seyrig), dances with her lover, Michael Richardson (Claude Mann), in the ballroom of the French Embassy in Calcutta, where her memorial—a photograph, a stick of burning incense, some flowers—is already arranged on the piano. Time folds in on itself in India Song, and space is fractured by the huge mirror that nearly covers one wall so that the reflection of the room is a constant; it is always different, however, from the framing of the room by the camera, whether still or moving. The image created by Duras and cinematographer Bruno Nuytten is at once ghostly and eroticized, so delicately colored that it seems hand-tinted, and the closeness of the air, weighted by the insufferable heat, is palpable. India Song puts all the senses on high alert, and yet it is not in any sense realism. No one would be surprised to learn that it was shot on a set constructed in a crumbling mansion near Paris.

Amy Taubin

I’m leaving tomorrow. This is my first trip to India and all the images I have are the ones that never show you India just the dreamlike state of decadence of what has been lost.

Photos and References

http://kebekmac.blogspot.pt/2014/09/duras-1975-india-song.html

The Ghosts of Parties Past: Exorcising India Song

Movie inspiration of the week – Pierrot Le Fou (1965)

Leaving (for now) the Riviera Summer inspiration by means of Godard’s absurdist road movie of feelings versus ideas.

A film is like a battleground: there’s love, hate, action, violence, death. In one word: emotion

A noir movie in technicolor that follows the adventures of Ferdinand Griffon who is trying to fulfill his vast artistic plans, after losing his corporate job and Marianne Renoir the “ingénue fatale”, the epitome of easy French “girly style”.

Not to write about people’s lives anymore, but only about life—life itself. What lies in between people: space, sound, and color. I’d like to accomplish that. Joyce gave it a try, but it should be possible to do better.

A bittersweet representation of the absurd in our lives in full colour and cinemascope, Pierrot le Fou‘s self-destructive romanticism, the artistic self-consciousness, the frenetically unhinged form, the blend of emotional extravagance and cool self-mocking, the vanished boundaries between irony and sincerity and between symbol and reality is Life as loud as it gets. As an “inspiration”, for me, it goes far beyond the stylish Anna Karina whose style still resonates with designers and taste-makers worldwide. My muse in this movie is most definitely Jean-Paul Belmondo and his tragic “Yves Klein Pierrot”. No matter what, “being afraid is [still] the worst sin there is”.

As in Le Mépris and Bonjour Tristesse, the Mediterranean is again the landscape of failed aspirations and human suffering but as far as Pierrot le Fou goes, I would have to agree with Michel Cournot , “I feel no embarrassment declaring that Pierrot le fou is the most beautiful film I’ve seen in my life.”

References and photos

Only the Cinema

Pierrot le fou: Self-Portrait in a Shattered Lens

FilmGrab

paintings in Pierrot le fou

Movie inspiration of the week – Bonjour Tristesse (1958)

Costume Designer: Hubert de Givenchy

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When Jean Seberg is on screen you can’t look at anything else. Her every movement is graceful, each glance is precise. The shape of her head, her silhouette, her walk, everything is perfect; this kind of sex appeal hasn’t been seen on the screen.

François Truffaut

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Contrary to the common practice in this part of the world, I did not go on holiday in August and this is, most obviously, taking its toll on me. I don’t seem to be able to get the French Riviera out of my mind. This week life is back to the black and white tones of reality and Summer has, if not technically, emotionally come to an end.

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I should probably be writing on Otto Preminger’s talents and “virtuosity with CinemaScope framing and three-strip Technicolor” and their use in establishing a clear difference in tone and mood between the wintering, sophisticated Paris present and the sun drenched, carefree past of Mediterranean summers.

BOM DIA TRISTEZA Bonjour tristesse 1958 ~ Jean Seberg ~ 025

Better yet, I should be writing about how Givenchy’s costumes are essential to understand the characters and the changes they go through, specially in the case of Cecile (Jean Seberg). As Barbara Tfank noted, “Givenchy is the customer designer, which is so extraordinary. When you see Jean in the film’s opening, it’s the most perfect example of fashion and film”.

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But, as with Le Mépris, this a film I feel a strong emotional connection to. This is the film responsible for almost 10 years of wearing a pixie cut. Cecile inspired my visit to Monaco and my self styled movie fantasies while strolling inside the Monte Carlo Casino almost by myself. Said self styling was, fortunately, enough to convince the Maitre d’ that I was not a regular tourist.

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In its bittersweetness, it keeps reminding me that Summer inevitably comes to an end.

References and photos

Fashion and Film at the TCM Film Festival: Getting Audrey Hepburn, Kim Novak & Jean Seberg in Character

Well, Hello Bonjour Tristesse

Sunday Matinee, Bonjour Tristesse

Ferdy on Films

Films I Love #3: Bonjour Tristesse

Seduced by Bonjour Tristesse

Movie Inspiration of the Week – Le Mépris (1963)

The cinema substitutes for our gaze a world more in harmony with our desire. This is the story of that world

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Costume Designer Tanine Autré

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Aristotelian tragedies might not need elaborate costumes. After all, sometimes what you do not wear speaks as loud as what you do.

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This week, inspiration seems to be simple, the always present, always perfect always modern Breton shirt. This week, more than ever, craving Summer by the harsh and timeless landscapes of Mediterranean sea.

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This was the first film that made me feel I could (I needed to) live inside it.

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You aspire to a world like Homer’s, but, unfortunately, that doesn’t exist

References

Contempt: A Visual Reading and Other Loose Ends

The unexamined life

In the Mood for Love, 2000 – Wong Kar-Wai

Photo via kinoimages.com

Movie inspiration of the week – La Dolce Vita (1960)

the smarter the clothes, the more dangerous the man, and the more damaged the clothes, the more vulnerable the man

Costume Designer Piero Gherardi, Academy Award for Best Costume Design (BW) 1961 and 1963 for 8½

Piero Gherardi, self-taught in art and architecture, created the overall look of La Dolce Vita. He was costume and set designer, as well as art director. This is a stylish film as a whole, as Gherardi placed equal emphasis on the costumes for both female and male leads. Every scene in La Dolce Vita strikes you as a beautifully styled photograph and the film still guides sartorial aspirations around the globe.

And aspire you do. To be ” the first woman on the first day of creation. [The] mother, sister, lover, friend, angel, devil, earth, home”. Of course much helped by the natural statuesque sensuality of Sylvia, costumes do play a decisive part on the construction this first Woman, the unattainable male fantasy.

Much in the same way as they immortalized the sophisticated, frivolous elegance of the thrill seeking Maddalena. Has ennui ever looked more glamorous on-screen?

We need to live in a state of suspended animation like a work of art, in a state of enchantment. We have to succeed in loving so greatly that we live outside of time, detached.

In La Dolce Vita‘s mid-century Rome, Sylvia, Emma and Maddalena are each either proponents or victims of the media-hyped sweet life, with Sylvia as the celebrity symbol of fantasy, Maddalena as a habitual consumer of the trivial, and Emma as an outsider suffering the undesirability of being so.

But this is unmistakably a movie about a man, a magnificently attractive one. La Dolce Vita confirmed Mastroiani, even if he rejected the title himself, as the ultimate Latin Lover. This Latin Lover appears as a cultural symbol of the Italian as “other”, the “imagined embodiment of the primitive, whose unrestrained and exotic passion directly affronts the more civilized and restrained Northern European or American Society”. This cultural symbol is also a cultural commodity, a “poster boy” for Rome as the hot spot of the rich, the famous and the beautiful, but also for the “European Don Giovanni and the Italian style based on the emergence of Italian fashion and design”.

Fellini and Gherardi present fashion and clothing as a “subtle critique of Italian masculinity”. Jacqueline Reich claims that Marcello, the journalist, is an anti-hero (inetto), ” a man in conflict with an unsettled and at times unsettling political and sexual environment” but always immaculately dressed, the embodiment of the cultural heritage of the bella figura, “reflecting a taste for public display of self-worth though appearance”.

Malossi (quoted by Reich) observes that “the Italian male literally puts on a show for the admiring public. Like the dandy, the bella figura parades his sense of style, his masculinity, and his sensuality, regardless of his social and economic status. Both individual and national identity are written on the body through clothing and grooming and paraded for the community”. I have only been to Italy for work a couple of time, and in Rome stayed only a few hours, enough to walk to the Fontana di Trevi and drive past the Coliseum but, the parading of well dressed men did really make a strong impression on me. Never before I had seen in practice this notion that “dressing well [is] both a privilege and a responsibility” and the conscious use of public space as stage and tailoring and suits as costumes.

In La Dolce Vita, Fellini, presents us with the “discontinuity between surface and substance. Marcello Rubini is dressed in the latest fashions but the costuming fails to mask his moral, spiritual and sexual failings”. Still, at the end, vulnerable and damaged in his white suit, Rubini is still showing us that, as claimed by Bruzzi, “masculinity is directly measured by narcissism”.

References

Jacqueline Reich, UNDRESSING THE LATIN LOVER Marcello Mastroiani, fashion and La Dolce Vita in Bruzzi and Gibson (2013) Fashion Cultures Revisited: Theories, Explorations and Analysis

classiq.me/style-in-film-la-dolce-vita

http://www.whatladylikes.com/2015/02/that-sweet-life.html

https://thefashioneaste.com/tag/la-dolce-vita/

Movie Inspiration of the Month – The Adventures of Priscilla Queen of the Desert (1994)

Costume Designers: Tim Chappel and Lizzy Gardiner (Oscar Best Costume Design, 1995; BAFTA Best Costume Design, 1995; Australian Film Institute Best Achievement in Costume Design, 1994).

After a somewhat long hiatus caused by jet lagging, I’m back to being movie inspired, this time by one of my absolute favourites.

A story of blood, sweat and tears and a ton of sequins on a tight budget ($20.000) that results in a fabulous road movie extravaganza.

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Costume designer Tim Chappel says that for Priscilla, instead of getting briefed by the director or researching the characters, he and co-designer Lizzy Gardner started with the music. He was allowed to just do free association to the songs, and come up with ideas from that point. It was a truly creative experience.

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Reading those words just made me want to experiment doing the same. How would “normal life” look like like if instead of the weather forecast or your scheduled meetings, or any other practical consideration, each day was inspired by a song?

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Probably an idea worth considering.

I would like to have my words meet the grandeur and glamour of this larger than life adventure. The fact is, they can’t. Again in the the words of Tim Chappel this is a movie that taps into this idea of being yourself and absolute freedom.

Glitter does never age and it does not get more fabulous than this.

Images via http://www.theguardian.com and http://www.nfsa.gov.au

Movie inspiration of the Month – Thelma and Louise (1991)

Costume Designer Elizabeth McBride

I’m in Colorado for the week so it seemed natural to go back to a movie of South West journeys.

While this is not a movie with elaborate costumes, clothes do tell a powerful story on Thelma and Louise, accompanying character development and the change of direction and the so

You said you ‘n’ me was gonna get out of town and for once just really let our hair down. Well darlin’, look out ’cause my hair is comin’ down!

they become more and more natural, but more and more beautiful as it goes on and by the end… just these mythical looking creatures.

Ridley Scott

Movie Inspiration of the week – Il Gattopardo (1963)

Without Sicily, Italy creates no image in the soul: here is the key to everything.

Goethe

Costume Designer Piero Tosi. His work can be admired in luminous films by such directors as Luchino Visconti, Vittorio De Sica and Franco Zeffirelli. Tosi earned five Academy Award nominations during his career and an Academy Honory Award in 2013. His designs brought elegance, artistry, passion and, dare I say, a mastery of fantasmagoria and nostalgia, and even humour to neo-realist dramas, historical romances and farsical comedies, including Senso, Death in Venice (BAFTA Award for Best Costume Design), The Damned, La Traviata (BAFTA Award for Best Costume Design) and La Cage Aux Folles.

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Martin Scorsese, who restored this 1963 classic to its former glory and brought it back to Cannes in 2010, has often referred to “The Leopard” as one of the five best films ever made, having live [d] with this movie every day of [his] life. One of director Luchino Visconti’s handful of masterpieces, the film features subtle, visual storytelling in a world of decaying opulence, with its “deeply measured tone … its use of vast spaces and also the richness of every detail.” .

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As far as costume design goes, this is a true masterpiece. Tosi was born in Florence amid art, and studied at Florence’s Accademia di Belle Arti. Both his appreciation for art and his knowledge of art’s history as a living and breathing heritage is evident in the design of his costumes (Christian Esquevin)

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The extraordinary, verging on obsessive, collaboration between Piero Tosi and Umberto Tirelli , the tailor whose fate led him to create not for men but their representations, created a magnificent work of art through costume. Something like 2,000 costumes were made for this film. Visconti was one of the most meticulous Italian directors, he loved historical accuracy and had a great attention to details. Tirelli often remembered him working together with the costume designers, picking the colours for the costumes, studying the silhouettes and the shapes, sampling the fabrics and checking upon the work made by the tailoring houses (Anna Battista).

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The ball scene, where new and old Italy come face to face with each other, takes about one-third of the total length of the movie and took a whole month to film, involving around 200 people in 14 interconnected rooms. 400 costumes were made for this scene alone, the most celebrate of which is, of course, the magnificent organza ball gown worn by Claudia Cardinale /Angelica Sedara.

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Il Gattopardo, an epic adaptation of Giuseppe de Lampedusa’s novel about an aristocratic Sicilian family’s adjustment to a changing way of life during the Risorgimento (1815-1871, the novel itself opens in 1860) is a tale of melancholy and change, a testimony of social avalanche, Art embodying History.

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Those were the best days in the life of Tancredi and Angelica, lives later to be so variegated, so erring, against the inevitable background of sorrow. But that they did not know then; and they were pursuing a future which they deemed more concrete than it turned out to be, made of nothing but smoke and wind.

Giuseppe Di Lampedusa, The Leopard: A Novel

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All Sicilian sensuality is a hankering for oblivion … that is the cause of the well-known time lag of a century in our artistic and intellectual life; novelties attract us only when they are dead.

Giuseppe Di Lampedusa, The Leopard: A Novel

burt_lancaster — Fabrizio and Jean Baptiste Greuze’s The Punished Son (1778)

Do you really think, Chevalley, that you are the first who has hoped to canalise Sicily into the flow of universal history? I wonder how many Moslem Imams, how many of King Roger’s knights, how many Swabian scribes, how many Angevin barons, how many jurists of the Most Catholic King have conceived the same fine folly; and how many Spanish viceroys too, how many of Charles III’s reforming functionaries! And who knows now what happened to them all! Sicily wanted to sleep in spite of their invocations; for why should she listen to them if she herself is rich, if she’s wise, if she’s civilized, if she’s honest, if she’s admired and envied by all, if, in a word, she is perfect?

Giuseppe Di Lampedusa, The Leopard: A Novel

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If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change

Giuseppe Di Lampedusa, The Leopard: A Novel

dolce_gabbana_alta_moda — Dolce and Gabbana Alta Moda 2015

Everyone is either a fairy or princess.

Stefano Gabbana

dolce-and-gabbana — Dolce and Gabbana Alta Moda 2015

Look at all this beauty, truth and emotion, created from nothing but words. Just words. How can you possibly spend your life not trying to do the same?

Giuseppe Di Lampedusa, The Leopard: A Novel

Tosi and Tirelli magnificently bring to life the glamorous, sensual and desperate characters in Lampedusa’s novel. This is also, a portrait of the “lost South” or as Jonathan Jones so eloquently put it Lampedusa’s Sicily is a place where the optimistic, progressive, rational forces of history as viewed in the 19th century – the march of liberal democracy and of socialism alike – get lost in baroque back streets at midnight. As a myth, as a fiction of history, The Leopard will continue to ensnare minds, and not only in Italy. Lampedusa’s despair is not so different from that of today’s world, with its shrunken political expectations. We are all Sicilians now.

References

Goethe, Martin Scorsese, Giuseppe Di Lampedusa,

Photos via http://www.virtual-history.com and http://www.vogue.com

Movie Inspiration of the week – Orlando (1992)

Vain trifles as they seem, clothes have, they say, more important offices than to merely keep us warm. They change our view of the world and the world’s view of us.
― Virginia Woolf, Orlando

Costume Designer Sandy Powell who has won three Oscars for Best Costume Design (Shakespeare in Love, 1998; The Aviator, 2014 and The Young Victoria, 2009) and is responsible for sartorially composing characters in some of my favourite movies.

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For it was this mixture in her of man and woman, one being uppermost and then the other, that often gave her conduct an unexpected turn. The curious of her own sex would argue, for example, if Orlando was a woman, how did she never take more than ten minutes to dress? And were not her clothes chosen rather at random, and sometimes worn rather shabby? And then they would say, still, she has none of the formality of a man, or a man’s love of power.

― Virginia Woolf, Orlando

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Yet again, though bold and active as a man, it was remarked that the sight of another in danger brought on the most womanly palpitations. She would burst into tears on slight provocation. She was unversed in geography, found mathematics intolerable, and held some caprices which are more common among women than men, as for instance that to travel south is to travel downhill.

― Virginia Woolf, Orlando

Whether, then, Orlando was most man or woman, it is difficult to say and cannot now be decided. .

― Virginia Woolf, Orlando

The film’s social commentary is never far from the surface, however, and “the sheer crippling unmanageability of Orlando’s bourgeois female attire… brilliantly conveys feminine physical and social constraint” (Pidduck, 106).

To be born a woman has been to be born, within an allotted and confined space, into the keeping of men. The social presence of women has developed as a result of their ingenuity in living under such tutelage within such a limited space. But this has been at the cost of a woman’s self being split in two. A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself.

John Berger, Ways of Seeing

‘we are one with a human face’.

…not a blend of masculine and feminine characteristics, but an absence of them, and where androgynes are perceived to rely on neither masculine nor feminine behaviors.

Larin McLaughlin

Photos via Costume Captures

Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (1964)

Costume Designer Jacqueline Moreau, César Award for Best Costume Design for La passion Béatrice in 1988 and La vie et rien d’autre in 1990.
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French director Jacques Demy didn’t just make movies—he created an entire cinematic world. Demy launched his glorious feature filmmaking career in the sixties, a decade of astonishing invention in his national cinema. He stood out from the crowd of his fellow New Wavers, however, by filtering his self-conscious formalism through deeply emotional storytelling.

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Palme d’Or, Technical Grand Prize and OCIC Award 1964 Cannes Film Festival

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It’s been raining for over three months here. Every week. This is Southern Europe and it’s getting to be depressing. It doesn’t get much uplifting than this brilliant, bright and bold technicolor world of exuberant details where clothes even match wallpaper.