At the heart of this programme is cinema’s preoccupation with moments where reality meets fiction. For this, fashion’s acts of posing, dressing up, staging and masking offer ideal material. In a number of languages the word pose connotes not only a position or posture of the body but also artificiality and falsity in one’s conduct, in other words, pretence. By imitating cultural norms, models who pose become oddly reassuring fabrications. The collective observer moulds them as if they were inanimate objects. Similarly in this programme, the rich source of fascination is the confusion between the artificial body of a shop dummy and the real one of a poser who is shown in the moving image as momentarily immobilised and thus conspicuously exposed.
Screening will be followed by Fashion photographer Jean-François Carly and fashion designer Shelley Fox in conversation with Penny Martin, Editor-in-Chief of SHOWstudio.
>Read Christel Tsilibaris’ essay Assuming a Pose
>Read David Bate’s essay Patricia & Marie-France Martin’s C’est comme être
>Read Sam Serafy’s essay Four Beautiful Pairs of Legs
>Read Penny Martin’s essay Shelly Fox 14 and I Feel
