Janice Breen Burns talks to ACMI film programmer James Nolen ahead of the launch of Fashion on Film 2016, a pillar event of the Virgin Australia Melbourne Fashion Festival’s Cultural Programme.
Fom Signe Chanel
One of the first films ACMI programmer James Nolen screened for Melbourne’s fashion culture tragics (a cast of thousands he believes is unique in the world) appeared to promise a simple study of an haute couture collection’s progress from sketch to sale. In 2008, Signe Chanel (The House of Chanel) by cerebral film maker Loic Prigent, proved more an absorbing, surprising, fly-on-the-wall trip to fashion’s pinnacle Parisian realm of pinnacle realms. Haute Heaven. The tragics still talk about it.
Prigent shadowed Karl Lagerfeld and his petite mains craftsmen and women intimately, intricately through the knock-down-drag-out creation of their winter 2004/05 haute couture collection, teasing out as he went, that mesmerising fashion dichotomy of ordinary mortals doing extraordinary, dreamlike things. “I love that eternal surprise when you think you know a designer and their work, than someone comes along and reinterprets everything,” James says. “You suddenly see it in a whole new light; you fall off your chair…”
From Le Jour d’avant
In every ACMI Fashion on Film series, James aims for precisely that kind of joyful revelation that Signe Chanel so memorably delivered. The film not only elegantly clipped Karl Lagerfeld’s demi-god celebrity down to a more interesting reality (“It really talked to Karl Lagerfeld as a human being,” says James) but, among its many surprises, it revealed some of fashion’s unexpected, and invariably intriguing, back-stage characters.
One Madame Pouzieux, for example. The French farmer, 75 at the time of filming, was a contemporary of Coco Chanel in her heyday and had invented a complex loom to weave the braid unique to the legend’s signature jackets. Mme Pouzieux, and only Mme Pouzieux, created the precious trim and she did so between farm chores. “No-one could quite comprehend how she did it,” James laughs. “She was extraordinary to watch; her fingers all gnarled and arthritic, but, she could produce this braid that no one else in the world could…”
Hubert de Givenchy with muse, Audrey Hepburn
Since 2007 and the first Fashion on Film series, James has scrounged and pleaded with filmmakers, marketers and archivists all over the world, for permission to screen works with the resonance of Signe Chanel, or Le Jour d’avant (The Day Before) which plumbed Jean Paul Gaultier‘s creative process up and down the seven hive-like levels of his Parisian atelier or La Ligne Balmain (The Balmain Style) which traced an absorbing timeline between creative director Olivier Rousteing and the eponymous Pierre.
For the 2016 series opening this week, he got his hands on an “otherworldly” study of Alexander McQueen (which he expects will have impact equal to Signe Chanel) produced in the years before he died, and an expose of Hubert de Givenchy, still alive, still insightful, and increasingly celebrated for his inventions including the classic, ubiquitous Little Black Dress he originally designed for his muse, Audrey Hepburn.
Alexander McQueen, above, and main photo, top.
James has found films that dissect iconic fashion houses and flesh out contemporary perspectives: models, photographers, Significant Others in the fashion industry’s fast evolving global mechanics. “I keep my antennae up all the time.” Some films, he quickly discovers, were created for specialist, cult or, otherwise likely to be limited audiences. All the more desirable, but, therein lies a rub for the makers: screen in a comparatively small-fry venue like ACMI or, hang out for interest from a global distributor? You do the math. “Sometimes, it’s hard to explain what we are, who we are, and why they should let us (screen their film),” James says. He often has to explain; why Melbourne? “It’s hard, because there’s nothing similar (to the Fashion on Film series) anywhere else in the world,” he says. “And, I don’t really know if it would work in any other city. Melbourne just has this enduring love of fashion and culture and (the films) just hit that right combination, the right spot. They just love fashion.”
And, they take it with depth, thanks, and texture.
Olivier Rousteing at Balmain
Melbourne’s Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) has run its Fashion on Film series as a pillar event of the Melbourne Fashion Festival Cultural Programme since 2007. Tonight the 10th series opens with Borsolino City, filmmaker Enrica Viola’s ode to the iconic Italian hat brand. Rare film portraits of Alexander McQueen, Hubert de Givenchy and Jeremy Scott will also screen until March 10.. For tickets and info about tonight’s opening party, Borsolino and Bubbles, click here. For the complete Virgin Australia Melbourne Fashion Festival Cultural and show schedule, click here.
