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Fashion in Film Festival's Birds of Paradise programme will be touring to Bristol and Glasgow in March 2012. Find out more here.
- - - Fashion in Film's Kinoscopes to depart on tour. Find out more about their London-wide installation.
- - - Limited edition catalogue
- - - Texts now published online - - -
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| Model and the World of Fashion | ||
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Who are You, Polly Maggoo? (Qui ętes-vous, Polly Maggoo?)
France 1966. Dir William Klein. 102 min.
Ceiling (Strop)
Chytilová’s Ceiling and Klein’s Who are You, Polly Magoo? make two powerful comments on 1960s fashion and cinematography. Both are prime examples of cinema d’auteur but each has a strikingly different vision and sensibility: one is an introspective essay, the other an uncompromising parody. Filmed in Prague and Paris respectively, they are loaded with sharp insights into the fashion world that complement those of Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow Up (1966) set in London. Like Antonioni, Chytilová and Klein approach the fashion and the surrounding media world critically, treating it as a sign of the vacancy and self-indulgence of contemporary society and human relationships within. Both Chytilová (a mannequin in the early 1950s) and Klein (an on-and-off fashion photographer) were fashion industry insiders, and thus ideally equipped to thoroughly investigate their subject; in this case a fashion model as a character type. Yet for both directors the model remains something of a mysterious, otherworldly creature. As Ginette Spanier, directrice for Pierre Balmain, put it, “They [mannequins] have very little to do with life as usually lived on this planet…” Who are You, Polly Maggoo?, the 1967 winner of the French Prix Jean Vigo, remains a quintessential film by one of the wittiest and most versatile veteran artists and fashion image-makers. A team of TV reporters chronicles the life of the dolly-faced fashion mannequin Polly (Dorothy McGowan) at a climax of her career. In an obsessive quest for Polly’s elusive identity, the filmmakers try to get “under her make-up.” Following Polly’s own musings on who she is, they end up in a frustrated debate about fashion, surface and existence. Particularly inspired are Klein’s outlandish fashion scenes and his understated commentaries on film and filmmaking, best exemplified in a sequence showing media’s manipulation of “raw material” through cunning editing. Highly stylised, sarcastic, hilarious and heart-achingly sharp, Klein’s first full-length feature film offers no moral maxims. In a method truly worthy of fashion, it merely lays the surface out for the viewers to figure out. Watch William Klein’s Q&A at Ciné lumičre on the SHOWstudio website
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