After Yves, you'll still have time to catch the front row with Yohji and the ethereal minimalism of his clothes. The second "Elle Fashion Film Festival" is entering its final two days, and while several screenings in the past week have been popular at SF Emporium — particularly Yves Saint Laurent and The Grand Budapest Hotel — there's one film that I personally enjoy and yet it's flying below the radar of Bangkok chic (meaning sparse audiences).
The Look Of Love.
Notebook On Cities And Clothes, a documentary film about Yohji Yamamoto by German filmmaker Wim Wenders, is a rare fashion film that's not about fashion but about clothes — and about the philosophy of clothes-making rather than trendsetting. It's showing for the last time tonight at 7pm.
Made in 1989 (the only "old" film in the Elle Festival), Notebook On Cities And Clothes was commissioned to Wenders by Centre Georges Pompidou prior to Yamamoto's show in Paris. And through its 80 minutes, the film is a gentle probing into the intellectual juncture between fashion, filmmaking and avant-gardism, between the idea of authorship and the industrialisation of art. This sounds (and is) a bitter pill for casual viewers of "fashion films", which often means "fashionable films" — but to those who believe that fashion is a manifestation of modern art and Yamamoto's deep thinking about his craft is something to treasure, this is a 25-year-old doc that's still startlingly relevant.
With modernist instinct, Wenders expands the assignment — to make a movie about a clothing designer — into a visual essay about art-making: Notebook On Cities And Clothes is largely driven by the director's own monologue as he lets us hear his thoughts and as he poses questions to himself, to us and to Yamamoto — questions about the meaning of identity, originality, and textural essence of fashion and of film. His philosophising — very Germanic in its heady balance between detachment and involvement — manages to keep Yamamoto at the creative centrifuge and still allows Wenders to delve into his own obsession with "electronic images"; the director was filming Yamamoto both with an old-school 35mm camera as well as a video camera, and he plunges into an analysis of transience and permanence, of the stability and ephemerality of his own art in parallel with Yamamoto's approach in design.
Notebook On Cities And Clothes.
Wenders made a prophecy in the film: "In its own language, the video camera was capturing [Tokyo] in an appropriate way. I was shocked: a language of images was not the privilege of cinema? Wasn't it necessary then to re-evaluate everything?" That was his comment in 1989, and today, the language of video has become integral with the language of film. Meanwhile, that "re-evaluation of everything" has taken place and will still be going on for a long while. Fashion doesn't last, but a film like this does.
Still, if you're looking for something lighter, other offerings at the Elle Fashion Film Festival today and tomorrow include the British film The Look Of Love, starring Steve Coogan as a strip tease tycoon in 1960 (showing tonight at 8.40pm), Populaire, a sweetly-coloured French romantic comedy about a secretary in a typewriting competition (tomorrow at 5pm), and Cloclo, another French drama about a co-writer of the song My Way (tomorrow at 7.30pm).
