I’ve always refused to include in courses and lectures I did about fashion and cinema clips selected from the Sex and the City series or films.
There are quite a few reasons behind my ban and I don’t want to bore you by listing them all, so I will tell you just the main reason why I’ve always avoided it.
My theory is that Sex and the City already happened, only nobody realised it or people simply forgot to make the connection with some old films that displayed some similarities with the infamous series.
This meant that rather than including SATC in my programmes, I usually opted for some early Michelangelo Antonioni films from the 50s that seemed to tackle themes such as fashion and female friendship in a much better way.
In a previous post I wrote a couple of years ago against SATC and in favour of Antonioni's films, I highlighted the director’s connections with style and fashion, analysed his chic existentialism, his exploration of female psychology and looked at themes such as alienation and solitude.
In that previous post I also mentioned Antonioni’s Le Amiche, stating “The connection between the world of fashion and Antonioni continued in Le Amiche (The Girlfriends, 1955), a film that proves that SATC is actually an old concept.”
Yesterday my theory was finally confirmed by an article published in the LA Times entitled “Girl power in '50s Italy”, celebrating the release of a restored print of The Girlfriends that will be screened in different US cities in the next few days.
The piece mainly focuses on finding connections and parallels between characters in SATC and in The Girlfriends and doesn’t mention Antonioni’s fascination with the world of fashion.
Indeed, even before Antonioni worked on Le amiche, he shot in 1949 in a factory in Torviscosa, near Trieste, the documentary Sette canne, un vestito (Seven Reeds, One Suit), about the production of rayon, one of the “autarchic fabric” created during the fascist regime.
Among the documentaries Antonioni would have liked to shoot at the time but never managed to for financial reasons, there was also Modelle, a short film that should have chronicled the lifestyle of Italian models in the Fifties.
In 1950 Antonioni attempted a first exploration of the fashion narrative in Cronaca di un amore, a film that perfectly analysed fashion and female luxury in connection with the perversions of femme fatale Paola (Lucia Bosè)
From a visual point of view Le amiche has a special elegance about it (that SATC obviously lacks...) and that was given to the film by Antonioni and his cinematographer Gianni Di Venanzo’s black and white chiaroscuro contrasts that put under a special almost ethereal light, Clelia and her girlfriends, and gave cynical Momina (Yvonne Furneau) a cold yet elegant aura.
The LA Times piece focuses more on the characters but doesn’t mention the more fashionable aspects of Antonioni's film: there are indeed quite a few references to a woman's attire, fashion and dresses in the script by Suso Cecchi d'Amico, Antonioni and Alba De Cespedes (in the embedded scene in this post - sorry that's in Italian but I didn't find anything else - Rosetta says: "Why should I go on living, to decide which dress I should wear? And when I have decided, what's left for me? Do you pity me?" Clelia replies: "Yes, I do pity you. I'm never sure about what I should say when I hear somebody reducing an entire life to choosing a dress. There are so many important things that make life worth living...").
Besides, the famous Fontana sisters were hired as fashion consultants and costume designers for Antonioni’s film and the fashion show included in the film also tried to look at the nouveaux-riches, the first clients of early Italian fashion houses with a satirical eye.
In fact the fashion show that closes the film is used by the director to create a contrast between the unreal and superficial world of fashion and real-life tragedies. While Clelia is working on the fashion show, she indeed learns about Rosetta’s death. In this way Antonioni implicitly makes a connection between fashion and the exploitation of women’s bodies, the superficiality of catwalk shows and real life.
It makes me very happy to know that finally Michelangelo Antonioni, a director who managed to produce through his films some of the most memorable and fashionable shots in the history of cinema (and that also inspired a few fashion collections that showed interesting connections with his films) is being acknowledged as a sort of forefather of an early and more intelligent version of SATC.
As for Carrie &Co, well girls, maybe your time has finally come, and, who knows, maybe one day there will be many more directors interested in explicitly denouncing fashion as a form of prostitution and an incarnation of consumer capitalism, rather than portraying it like a wonderful game for vapid women with no brains carrying too many shopping bags.
Michelangelo Antonioni's "The Girlfriends" debuts in Los Angeles on 20th and 21st August 2010 at LACMA's Bing Theater.
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And by the same token, we must also trust ourselves to honor this commitment, which means making an effort to change our own behavior and become a better person.
Posted by: ut fire systems | February 08, 2012 at 03:38 PM