Dressing and Undressing

This programme consists of three films that address the notion of a woman dressing and undressing in her own private space. This type of mise-en-scène spans the history of film for two reasons: firstly, because it allows the audience into a situation it shouldn’t normally have access to, and secondly because this visual insight is considered (by a fair proportion of men at the very least), to be erotic. It also appears regularly in fashion advertising and editorial imagery for its ability to represent those moments between the private and public self, captured in the daily ritual of donning dress. By stressing the importance of how the social body is “dressed,” it serves to underline the centrality of clothing to identity, which in turn acts as a motor for the consumption of fashion.

Through their exposure of private activity to the scrutiny of public theatre, these kinds of representations in film and fashion turn a daily activity from the ordinary into something less ordinary. I have brought these three films together as each is, in its own way, a homage to witnessing introspection. What unites them is that the purpose of dressing and undressing is never revealed, as the event that prompts each woman to dress either exists beyond the film’s span or fails to take place at all. This disengagement from purpose is the leitmotif of all three films, and what is unusual about it is that it does not serve primarily as a rise to eroticism; rather, it produces an evocation of seemingly empty time, but one brimming with disconnection.

From his first film role as Puck in Max Reinhardt’s adaptation of A Midsummer’s Night Dream (1935) at the tender age of seven, Kenneth Anger’s opus of underground filmmaking, publications and unfinished projects have never been able to resist an engagement with popular American film. Hollywood Babylon, published in 1959 was Anger’s open love letter to the golden era of Hollywood film, unveiling the corrupt underbelly of all that sparkled by intimating a kind of Hollywood action that resisted celluloid. Anger had made earlier attempts to capture the alluring decline of this small civilization in his film script “Puce Women.” The six-minute fragment titled Puce Moment (1949), a eulogy to the kind of woman who became interchangeable with this particular milieu, is all that now remains of the abandoned project.

It is a rich immersion in the lost afternoon of a starlet and in an old index of glamour. The ritual of dressing shown here is a rite of otherness: a rococo of shimmying bugle beads, a wave of jet fringing that flies, an airing of faded names for once fashionable colours. This attention to the details of dress as talismans of social belonging was later explored by Anger in Scorpio Rising (1963) and Kustom Kar Kommandos (1964) but in Puce Moment it reverberates with a mysticism that is not drawn from the 1920s. The film’s soundtrack was initially Overture to Verdi’s opera I Villi, but this was replaced in 1966 by a folk-inspired score by Johnathan Halper with lyrics that muse on the life of a hermit. The hippy-sounding musical overlay evokes the menace that stalked the homes of the Hollywood hills in the late sixties, a menace that was immortalised in the killing of the actress Sharon Tate and others by the Manson clan. Anger’s protégé at that point in time, actor Bobby Beausoleil, was linked to the clan and the director has never shied from profiting from the power of this association.

The Swiss artist Sylvie Fleury is perhaps best known for her stockpiles of shopping bags and purchases of luxury branded goods that she amasses on the floors of international art galleries. Her first solo exhibition in Britain, Life Can Get Heavy, Mascara Shouldn’t in Laure Genillard Gallery, 1998, reflected, in its title at least, the contradiction between work made by a woman conscious of feminism but at the same time confronted with a material world full of hedonistic possibility. Surprisingly, it is in the predominantly masculine medium of film that Fleury excels her arguments as a female consumer. Twinkle (1992) is a very simple film shot in one continuous take from a single fixed viewpoint. It features a woman trying on a series of different shoes and outfits in her bedroom while she listens to a record of high-pitched American hits from the 1950s.

Twinkle instantly conjures the sense of excitation that getting ready for a night out arouses, but this soon passes when we begin to realise that the woman isn’t going anywhere. As the film continues, we see her ever more caught up in an inevitable cycle of indecision bound by the number of shoes she owns. As the tempo of the music and the trying on of outfits begin to slide apart, the scene undoes itself and begins to resemble a strangely solipsistic ceremony, where the outfits are performed as dazzling burdens for the body rather than mere party clothes.

The still focus of the film presents us with a detailed view of women’s fashion from the early nineties in a perfectly modelled array: from Vivienne Westwood’s “Voyage to Cythera” collection, John Fluevog’s platform heels popularised at the time by Lady Miss Kier, to Azzedine Alaïa’s reworking of the Parisian clothing store Tati’s red and white plaid insignia, all sorts of directions are covered.

The soundtrack may have been chosen for its bubblegum approach to femininity, but it also echoes the kind of hit records featured in Anger’s Scorpio Rising, the first film to utilise solely contemporary music for its soundtrack. With this parallel in mind, we can appreciate Fleury’s scene as being as much a closed system of belief as Anger’s evocation of American bikers dressing in their leathers. The gendered difference between these mythologies is that while one is codified as rebellion, the other is codified as repression.

Il Lavoro (also known as The Job) is one of Luchino Visconti’s least discussed films, released as an episode in Boccaccio ’70 (1962), a film intended to challenge the prevailing climate of film censorship of the time and including episodes by other notable Italian directors: Federico Fellini, Vittorio De Sica and Mario Monicelli. Although it is loosely based on the structure of The Decameron (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1971), with each episode exploring a different sexual theme, what resoundingly pervades the ensemble is the sexual economy of modern life. Visconti’s film is set in a grand palazzo apartment and deals with a rich young bourgeois woman who resolves her aristocratic husband’s admission that he has visited prostitutes by stipulating that he now must also pay her for sex. The story references de Maupassant’s short story Au Bord du Lit, but also foregrounds a Milanese call-girl scandal that broke in the early 1960s.

The episode revels in the trappings of a moneyed existence informed by Visconti’s own fastidious taste: the director supplied many of his own artworks as props and persuaded producer Carlo Ponti to have fuchsias from his Roman garden delivered to the set daily as well as two hundred tulips and two hundred roses flown specially from Holland. The biographer Gaia Servadio describes Visconti’s set design as a “background of bottles of Guerlain scent, bibelots, opalines, statues by Donatello and Sarah Bernhardt.” (1) But the visual weight of these objets in the film is not mere set design, as they structure the relationships that define the tragic comedy – relationships between a man and a woman and between sexuality and possessions. This is typified by the clothes, supplied by Chanel, that Pupe (played by Romy Schneider) dresses in.

Visconti first met Coco Chanel in the mid-1930s. She introduced him to Jean Renoir with whom he went on to work briefly as assistant on Une partie de campagne (1936). Visconti agreed to make Il Lavoro solely because he thought it a good vehicle for the newly emerging Schneider and he flew over Chanel, who had recently re-launched her label, to dress the actress and instruct her on issues of deportment. As Pupe undresses and then dresses in her outfits we are given a very precise demonstration of how they should be worn and in what order. The film’s highlighting of the gilt chain in securing the skirt and accessorising the outfit is a lesson in how effortlessly functional the Chanel bouclé wool two-piece suit really is.

While the outfit satisfies Pupe as just one of the many expensive things that she surrounds herself with, it is only when she reflects on the new economic arrangement she has made with her husband that she realises that her own value is measured in equally economic terms. (This idea would later be reworked by Louis Bunuel, Yves Saint Laurent and Catherine Deneuve in Belle de Jour, 1967.) By the early 1960s the Chanel suit was better known as the smart uniform for the office woman rather than the preferred choice for women of leisure. With this in mind it is easy to appreciate that Pupe’s outfit has, in its outmoded modernity, an underlying absurdity when worn by a young woman too rich to know how to work to get paid. It is unlikely that this escaped Visconti’s attention, or, for that matter, the shoe designer Manolo Blahnik, who claims the figure of Pupe as the ideal wearer of his creations.

(1) Gaia Servadio, Luchino Visconti: A Biography (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1981), p.172.

© Alistair O’Niell 2006