IMAGINARIUM: AN ALTERNATE HISTORY OF ART, a podcast available on spotify or apple podcast. I write articles on art history, cinema or whatever strikes my fancy. SERIES THREE CURRENTLY ONGOING
In this article, we are going to discuss the way in which art, comics and illustrations in the early years of the 20th century helped shape and cement the archetype of the new modern woman, not only in the western world but globally. After all, modernity happened everywhere. I don’t like to put countries and rank them as one set of countries as being the end goal that everyone else is trying to catch up to, because this is very much a tenet of imperialism and i am decidedly not here for it. However, there is no going around how this is part of a very prevalent narrative. That you can quantify progress and quote unquote civilization and modernity. I think of the prevalent idea about of how progress moves and how it’s a view that is generally associated with the current capitalistic understand of our world that values constant progress and growth, and that history works in that manner. However progress is never truly linear, and the way history evolves is full of ebbs and flows, of progress in certain areas, and regression in others, and there is always a judgement of value that is being made when thinking about the march of progress . The 1920s and the 1930s were an era of constant change on all fronts, and the world as a whole was marching straight into the modern world as the repercussions of the first world war were still being felt.
In those years, the printed medium was at its peak, illustrated strips, which were what we would consider to be the ancestor of the comic were gracing the pages of newspapers , and in an age with no internet, where the medium of radio or movies were just getting their start, newspapers were the main way people got all of their informations on the current events, the latest plays and the latest books and all of the knowledge about the right places to be if you were anyone. From the classified ads to the marriage announcements, the newspaper and the printed medium in general was solidly embedded in the culture.
The 1920s and the 1930s were the beginning of the movement of art deco, a new modern style that was clean and streamlined visually, with very neat and geometrical lines, and it is very much a reflection of the current trends in fashion, architecture and design. It is very much in the spirit of the times and i think it was very much in keeping with the times where there was much more of a monoculture in general, you could easily pinpoint what were the big lines of the trends of the eras as they all played off each other and reflected the world that existed around them — through the visual arts, art and culture. There was a generalized aesthetic, if one can say it like that, in a way that I don't think we have anymore. I mean i have been trying to pinpoint what are the trends for the 2020s and when I tell you I absolutely cannot. I have to admit that trends are cycling at such a fast rate nowadays that they do not really have the time to truly permeate the general mainstream culture. On one hand, I do think it’s good that no one can feel the pressure to ascribe to a specific mainstream set of trends if they don’t like to, I think it’s way better to really be able to pick and choose what kind of style truly reflects the person you are and your interests, however I think this does imply a minimum of effort to truly try and discover those interests and curate a personal style and not follow the extremely fast trends that we have now. While before, those trends shifted on a cycle of roughly 10 years, and no matter how stark the transition from the 1910s and the Edwardian era to the shapeless and shorter dresses of the 1920s and then to the more feminine and elegant silhouette of the 1930s, the truth is that the change is very gradual, the shape relaxed and shortened season after season, and it’s only with distance that you can perceive how strong the change was. I think so much of it is in hindsight. Maybe in 10 or 20 years I will be able to pinpoint the changes and broad line of the 2020s tendencies, because history aways seems clearer when you are removed from it.
Through art, images, fashion and advertisement, the world saw a changing and mutating definition and significance off what it meant to be a woman. First of all, I think I really have to stress that i’m talking in binary terms here because this is how the illustrations and advertising as well the shifting of the gender politics were at their base core. I totally acknowledge how it is so much more complicated than that, and the definitions of womanhood and femininity are as diverse and complex and Complicated as there are women in the world, and that our relationship to gender and gender expression is an ever evolving one and that understanding will always be within a certain societal context and you cannot divorce that understanding from the global realities. All of it is arbitrary in a certain way, but it is constructed with social interaction, customs, and visual images contribute greatly to this understanding that we have of it. I will be taking about a very mainstream view of gender, and womanhood here through advertisements and images, which is how that identity was constructed during the period we’re talking about, and especially during the interwar period which was one of great change and shaking up the old ways of how things were being done and how people reacted to it, as well as how it translated to the world of visual culture specifically in the area of the illustrations and comics that were in the printed press and the advertisements of the era.
During the 1920s, we can see that change very quickly and assist to a boom in consumerism, with the roaring twenties, the end of the first world war and the end of a very specific idea of traditionalism, there is this new and unbridled world of possibilities in the general culture and consciousness. The youth goes out to try and have fun, the magazines and stores are trying to sell anything and everything to a new modern young woman. The 1920s is the moment where we can see that shift, it’s that clinching moment where things become overwhelmingly mass produced and the predominance of the ready made. Not that this shift was not happening beforehand, the industrial revolution happened in the 1830s or so and it steadily continued during the 19th century, building over what was existing, and changing the cultural mores and the habits around consumption, but i think that break in the 1920s is absolutely obvious. It is the beginning of modernity as one calls it.
With the advent of modernity came new possibilities and understandings. Of course, this phenomenon doesn’t decline itself the same way everywhere in the world, the context in India will be very different from the society in Japan or in the United Kingdom or in France, however, it is possible to see a significant shift in the understanding of the concept in itself of womanhood, and this happened throughout the whole world. In a matter of a couple of decades, the way a woman existed had shifted to something new, exciting, and even a bit scary to those from an older generation holding on to their own definition of what a woman should be. It was the age of the flapper, a word that came to designate this very specific archetype of independent young women of the 1920s.
The early 20th century was an era that was moving extremely fast in terms of the illustrated press. From articles and illustrated strips to publicity, the image was more present than ever before. During the last season of the podcast, I talked about the Golden Age of Illustrations which was from the 1870s to the 1920s, and the reason for this truly that it was the last years before the use of photography and video truly took over the use of illustration in the mainstream for entertainment and advertisement.
These were also the years where cinema was making its way, the silent era, the beginning of the way we think about celebrity. It truly changed the game in a way no one could have predicted. It was an age of glamour and excess. The early years of the film industry were absolutely insane, and please tell me on twitter or instagram if you would like a more in-depth foray into that subject and more precisely into the visuals, the art directing and the way the movies of that time looked, but suffice it to say that it was absolutely bonkers, Hollywood was so unhinged. There was glamour, beauty, but also murder and scandals and sin, and all of it being filmed in a soft focus of satin and sin. Even back then, as Hollywood’s myth and legend was being constructed, it was a place where you could gain it all, or you could lose it all, it had the appearance of perfection, and yet, everyone talked about how it was a den of sin and vices. And I will say that the current Hollywood does not compare at all to those golden years, and especially not when you think of it in terms of the dream that Hollywood sells. All of the current players in the Hollywood scene bore me to tears, I am not enchanted by people trying their best to be hashtag relatable in their gigantic mansions and white tees and cargo shirts. I genuinely think that if you are rich, you should at least look the part somewhat, otherwise what is the point of it ? Where are the beautiful glamorous people at ? No one is even doing a scandal the way they used to anymore, it truly is tragic.
Ralph Barton, a popular illustrator of the 1910s and 1920s created his illustrations for the book Gentlemen Prefer Blondes written by Anita Loos in 1925. His art was a beautiful complement to the story and underlined perfectly the fun and comedic story of the way the young women were trying to climb the social ladder. That book was adapted brilliantly later in the 1950s and starred an absolutely brilliant Marilyn Monroe in the titular role of Lorelei Lee, and while the 1950s movie truly captured the heart of the story and made it their own, which just goes to show that an adaptation does not have to be completely faithful to the text to be faithful to the core of the story. But the original book was about the flapper and the gold digger and the new kind of woman that was started to rise in that era She was a social climber, desperate, and yet still fun and irreverent. The illustrations Barton created for this book were fun, fresh and very representative of the energy of that era, where there was a lot of social mobility, and people were making fortunes, looking to make fortunes, or simply losing these fortunes. It was simply an era of social upheaval in a lot of ways. It was in the air du temps.
This era was chock-full of illustrators and talented artists as visual arts was still extremely highly valued in the mainstream, a lot of female illustrators getting their names in the papers and becoming well known for their comic strips and illustration work. The visual of the modern girl or the new woman, both terms being used almost interchangeably and describing the same concept of this new type of women at the dawn of the jazz age was developed by these very artists. She had boldness, charm and a sort of sexual awareness and a fearlessness, with a desire to seize life and all its possibilities. A Sort of nihilism in line with the general sense of dread and celebration that often follows consequential world events, even a bit of a hedonism especially in western countries. After the first world war, a break from the past and toward modernity.
The short bobbed hair, the vamp makeup, the receding hemlines, even though the length of their dresses were still fairly modest by today’s standards, after all, their knees were still covered, it was such a scandalous break from the earlier traditional mode of dress, may it be the western Edwardian dress, or the places where dress was still majorly traditional and cultural outfits. After all, it is because of capitalism, fast fashion and cultural imperialism and globalization that nowadays we are all wearing very similar fashion and dress whether you live in Italy, Nigeria or Peru. Of course, cultural mores will make it be slightly different from place to place, but hoodies, trousers trainers are worn all over he world. However. A bit more than a hundred years ago, people were still wearing their caracos and djellabas in Algiers, and now those outfits are being left for special events. In Korea, Hanboks were worn on a daily basis. In less than a hundred years, most of, if not all, traditional and cultural outfits have been relegated to relics of the past. And yet, the 1920s is that moment where modern western dress started to really become the norm as the world shifted into modernity, and this new scary idea of the modern woman started to take hold.
Beauty and the advertisement of beauty, makeup and fashions were a cornerstone of the way that identity was constructed, because for the first time since the 18th century at least in the western world, the use of visible makeup was no longer frowned upon. I say visible, because even though makeup was thought to be the purview of actresses and ladies of ill-repute in the 19th century and the Edwardian eras, women were still using cosmetic aids to beautify themselves. Of course, it's the ever-present no makeup makeup look that is infinitely more complicated to master than any colorful and ostentatious look could ever wish to be. So at the turn of the 1920s, women were wearing dark lips, in plums and dark reds, and surprisingly bright eyeshadows and rouge, and none of it was made to be discrete and hint to the notion of a natural face. The Modern Woman was painted and made-up, unbalancing the social norms that were established until then. It was a very visible shift from the obsolete and the traditional to the very made-up New Woman, and there is a list of beauty and makeup items and objects that are all absolutely gorgeous I have to say, that are associated with this. It’s the new accessibility of consumerism where it was before limited to the elites, now everyone could purchase eyeshadows and a compact of powder and rouge and those minuscule multipurpose makeup compacts with a tiny lipstick and a bit of rouge and powder and some mascara, so that you could touch up on the go and carry it in the tiny bags that were in fashion. Those items were luxurious and opulent, and fairly affordable comparatively to what they had been previously, especially with the rise of the ready-made.
Is consumerism a visual symbol of modernity ? After all, the almost omnipresence of publicity in our visual world, which was definitely the case in the global world in the 1920s, is one of the ways in which that modernity, along with the dominion of capitalism that demands constant consumption from the people. As John Berger says in his foundational art history book Ways of Seeing published in 1972, which btw I totally recommend to get if you want to dive a bit deeper into art history theory, or you can just watch his 4 parts show of the same title which btw and i haven't said anything COULD potentially be on youtube but i haven't said anything at all. Anyway as he says quote : publicity images […| belong to the moment in the sense that they must be continually renewed and made up-to-date. Yet they never speak of the present. Often they refer to the past and always they speak of the future unquote. This was extremely relevant in the world of the interwar, where the construction in itself of the identity of the modern woman was made through those publicity images.
There is also something to be said about how the concept of modernity and of the modern girl truly blurs the lines of a social hierarchy., and that was a good thing, I do think those lines should be blurred to the point of non-existence. Now everyone could look like the popular starlets of the movies and buy their own makeup and clothes that could make them look as glamorous as the women on the silver screen, the easy availability of cosmetics, and of a climate of consumerism made it so that everyone could attain that status, the lines between the social boundaries and between the quote unquote elites and the working class are becoming more fluid than ever. Where the way you dressed immediately signaled your social rank and your place within the hierarchal structure, which, in turn, told other people how to treat you, this was no longer necessarily the case. However as those lines are shifting and moving, the way you could signal your status have also shifted.
The year was 1925 and Nell Brinkley, a young reporter and famous illustrator, was sending the first strips of The Adventures of Miss Prudence Prim out for publication to William Randolph Hearst’s Sunday American Weekly. Her stories of romance, love and carefree amusement were capturing the zeitgeist of this period that was the interwar: these years full of change and when modernity was at the forefront of culture. Born in the small town of Edgewater in Colorado in 1886, Nell Brinkley always had dreams of making art her career. At only 19 years old, after convincing her father that she could earn her life with a short contract as an illustrator at the Denver Post, she finally moved to the city where she would accomplish those dreams : New York. She came of age during the pinnacle of Edwardian sensibilities and was influenced by the ornate curves of Art Nouveau, but also by the new visual ideas of Art Deco. She created a style that was very unique for her time and was a woman who was constantly looking forward to the future. She was a perfect example of the New Woman of the 20th century. A woman that was bold, vibrant and who was not afraid to speak her mind. Her art was a vignette of a time that's now long gone by, and yet her art still feels as charming as it used to be. Those were delightful images of youthful fun and desire, ideas of romance, and, most surprisingly perhaps, issues of women’s rights and the working class.
Brinkley got her start and her renown as an illustrator and journalist in 1907, while covering the gruesome and shocking case of Harry K. Thaw, a highly publicized trial involving the beautiful and popular showgirl Evelyn Nesbit. This case was sordid, involving a murder, a jealous husband, and a previous lover of Nesbit, and was a huge news story during that year. Brinkley’s interviews and various portraits of Nesbit put her in the limelight as a talented illustrator and reporter.
Commentator and columnist as well as an artist, the career of Nell Brinkley was prosperous and she was a constructing a new vision of womanhood. She was writing and drawing for women, and they were her direct audience. She wrote about cultural events, reviewed plays, gossiped about the latest fashions and movies. Her columns and her art were a guide to living fully and encouraging women to realize their full potential. Brinkley’s work had a definite feminist slant to it, in favor of working women and pushing for the rights of women. Her cartoons and illustrations had a decidedly political element to them that was part of the spirit of the times, about the endless possibilities that they carried within them. Without necessarily being an activist, she was always pushing for progress and women’s rights and trying to unshackle the constrictions of gender norms that were remnants of a previous generation. She was a writer as well as an illustrator, and this is how she communicated a vision of womanhood that was new and fresh, and she represented the way a lot of young women felt during these years. The New Woman, as she became known, was the face of a modern generation of women.
The archetypes of her illustrations were so strong that they were known as the "Brinkley Girls, » with their head full of short curls, their sleepy eyes and their darkened lips which brought a new vision of femininity. The Brinkley Girl was a break from traditional archetypes of beauty. She was no longer the demure and aloof women drawn by Charles D. Gibson that were in vogue. The Gibson Girl of the Edwardian era, with her long hair, her cold and distant beauty was now a thing of the past. The Brinkley Girls were far from being shy, and were not hesitant to take life as it came, and live fully and wholeheartedly. There was a certain desire of enjoying one’s life that was at the core of the illustrations of Brinkley. Emotion, passion and romance, as well as a sort of carefree independence were the new motto of a new generation of women who wanted to desperately have fun. It was an idealized idea of life and romance that provided a definite appeal to its audience.
The Brinkley Girl archetype was so widespread that it was used for advertising during the 1910s and the 1920s for diverse products that the modern woman would be using in her daily life. She was thus set as a symbol of the eminently modern woman. From hair curlers that « will not break your hair » to henna dye and face powder, the curly haired young women of Nell Brinkley were a good example of how illustration was used as part of advertisement in the early 20th century, blurring the lines between art and capitalism. The Brinkley Girl was known in the cultural sphere as being a symbol of a new generation of young women who were fearless, representing a vision of womanhood that was progressive and a celebration of independence as well as pleasure.
In the 1920s, her art involved sequential images and interesting stories, all starring young women as the main protagonists and centering their point of view. Starting with her serials in the 1910s and steadily creating comics during the rest of her career, she was an incredibly prolific author. From 1918 and onwards, most of her comics were full page and full color, a privilege reserved for very few artists during those years.
The Adventures of Prudence Prim, written by Carolyn Wells and illustrated by Brinkley, follows the life of a young lady who lives with her two sensible Edwardian aunts, and who has dreams of romance and adventures. Prudence takes the opportunity of her aunts taking a nap to go out and experiencing life for herself, after all « now if I just sit still and do exactly as I ought - I’ll never get a thrill ! » And so the adventures of Miss Pruddy Prim begin ! They are told each Sunday as she lives through new experiences and goes out and wears glamorous and fantastical ensembles. The pages are peppered with the different characters that Prudence Prim meets during her adventures, from society ladies with beautiful clothes and bobbed hair to dashing suitors who sweep her off her feet. Brinkley truly takes the time to dress all of her characters in fanciful outfits to match the universe she creates. The story is told by small, witty verses with a lot of good humor. Those narratives capture a certain desire for escape and the new daring sensibilities of young women, of their hunger for love and life. It is complete with the details of the latest fashion and decorated with illustrations of roses which will eventually influence the style of shoujo manga in the 1970s, with its abundance of roses, the drama, and extravagance of feelings.
The art of Brinkley creates a very indulgent feminine universe, where the men are dashing and noble, but still drawn in a very feminine way. It is in line with the slight gender fluidity of the time, where men were more delicate and women were cutting their hair short. Nonetheless, her worlds were utterly feminine and yet were trying to change what this world meant for the young woman of the interwar period — to leave the past behind and move toward the future and document the rapid changing social norms for women. Her style is especially striking in its transitional quality between art — the heavily ornamented and rounded lines of the Art Nouveau years in which she came of age and the streamlined and fashionable lines of Art Déco. It is a style that found a lot of admirers, but also a lot of detractors. She truly made her signature style one that captured the new woman of the era. She captured a very specific moment in time and the way women might have understood themselves. This understanding was not universal, however it captured the way American women wanted to visualize themselves. The way they wanted to represent and depict their future. It was an ideation that was becoming reality. In a way, Brinkley was creating the future through her art. Of course, she was not the only one. She was simply part of a moment in time, but I do have to say that Brinkley, with her frothy pictures and her fanciful curves was successful in a way a lot of artists were not.
To me, she represents a very feminine idea, and to me, this type of art often receives criticism simply for daring to be feminine, maybe a bit shallow, maybe a bit superficial, but after all very cute and very fun. The rococo genre of the 18th century received similar criticisms in my opinion for being sugary and cute and overtly feminine. And this is simply always an unfair criticism to me, because judging something being aligned with femininity negatively comparatively to something more masculine is just plain old sexism. It’s not that the genre of rococo is devoid of criticism, there can be much to criticize, but people mostly bring up the fact that its frilly and pink and for some reason, that means it is not a sign of serious art. After all, this is what the neoclassical movement that followed was about. Something more visually sober, and more serious in its subject. And once again, the pendulum of taste swings.
Nell Brinkley was interesting as an artist that had this idea of the new woman being at the center of all the work she was doing. She was active during an era of profound change in the way women were perceived and perceived themselves, and whose art was something that was created solely for the modern woman. Brinkley was a daring and brave woman, with a taste for excitement and joy. She did not back down from any challenge; she flew a biplane in 1914, illustrated it, and commented on it for her audience's pleasure:« Nell Brinkley Tastes Joys of Real Freedom Soaring in Clouds ». She had adventures of her own and lived a full and brazen life. She got married to Bruce McRae II in 1920, and then she divorced him. I have to mention that he was several years younger than she was, so she was breaking boundaries in all sorts of ways,
She was a mother but also a career woman, and always followed her heart and ambitions no matter where they took her. Despite knowing a widespread cultural and financial success during her time, Nell Brinkley went the same road as many successful women artists often do, and was subsequently rapidly forgotten by history apart from the niche academics and amateurs of early 20th century comics. What she accomplished was no small feat. She managed to create this pictorial universe that understood the preoccupations of a modern woman, from her leisure to work to romance, from her activism to her frivolities, and how to balance all of it. She was a modern woman through and through.
This archetype of the modern girl is an intrinsic part of national identity and how those identities shaped the way she was understood and the way she was perceived by the general public, not only domestically but also internationally. She was also used for pushing political agendas either as to how the youth, and especially young women, were out of control, and trying to reassert the previous order of things, were women were not going out partying at all hours of days, and were expected to stay home. Or, on the flipside, using those young women living their lives as a political statement about how much more modern and civilized she was compared to the quote unquote retrograde societies and traditions. And this happened not only in the western world, but in Russia, India, China, Japan and elsewhere. From the illustrations and caricatures of Guo Jianying who satirized this new type of modern woman in China, with jokes and piques about the way things were changing, and changing fast, to the ads in various news papers across the world that promised their customers beauty and pleasure.
During the interwar, the illustrated advertisements for the brand Shiseido, a brand that started in 1872 and still is a sizable part of the beauty landscape today, and that revolutionized the market for the modern woman in Japan, were at the intersection of art, design and advertisement. These images were ones that were communicating an idea of modernity and newness, and yet advertised products that helped the consumer access this new ideal and be able to adhere to the beauty standards of the era, that were particular to Japan.
Shiseido’s graphic design communicated an idea of chic elegance that was becoming an aspirational quality during the interwar. The poster design by Sawa Reika in 1927 shows a young blonde woman wearing a fashionable evening dress holding a camelia flower, the brand’s logo, which was designed by Yabe Sue in 1924, all with the streamlined aesthetic conventions of art deco, and a limited palette of colors The result is minimalist and beautiful, and conveys so efficiently this new type of lifestyle and modernity that was being created, all through the use of graphic designs and cosmetics advertisements.
Even though the concept itself the of womanhood during the interwar was a mix of effervescence in the way it developed and grew and changed, and how, it stayed the same in a lot of ways. The illustrations of journals and magazine covers such the covers of the german graphic design journal « die reklame » in 1929 by Albert Rabenbauer were just another way the image of the modern woman got used in the art and the advertisements, not only helping to construct the idea of a modern woman, but the way that cosmopolitanism and the life in the urbane centers, full of the busy bustle of cities is just another way young women could enjoy a certain anonymity and freedom.
The idea of a chic and cosmopolitan world of material goods, of parties, of champagne and music, of a worldly but extremely fun woman at the center of it was one that was dominating the imagination. Ethel hays had small comic illustrations in the papers that satirized and caricatured that specific archetype of the flapper. Her character « Flapper Fanny » was the woman who was fashionable, a bit silly and yet, still very witty. Hays’ illustrations are extremely adorable, and manage to land a joke or a line with only a small drawing. The modern woman, the flapper, the gamine, this idea of the intrepid fashionable new woman was constructing itself in reality and also through the art, the illustrations and the visual representations of her in the advertisements and those, in turn, helped shape the way that the modern woman saw herself. Despite what she represented about this new era, being used to express concepts of modernity, a fear of change when women are going out and gaining those newfound freedom, being bolder and more in touch with their sexualities and their expanding idea of femininity, these women were still people and not only concepts about which people could discourse and debate, and I think this is something that is quite often forgotten.
In this article, we are going to discuss the way in which art, comics and illustrations in the early years of the 20th century helped shape and cement the archetype of the new modern woman, not only in the western world but globally. After all, modernity happened everywhere. I don’t like to put countries and rank them as one set of countries as being the end goal that everyone else is trying to catch up to, because this is very much a tenet of imperialism and i am decidedly not here for it. However, there is no going around how this is part of a very prevalent narrative. That you can quantify progress and quote unquote civilization and modernity. I think of the prevalent idea about of how progress moves and how it’s a view that is generally associated with the current capitalistic understand of our world that values constant progress and growth, and that history works in that manner. However progress is never truly linear, and the way history evolves is full of ebbs and flows, of progress in certain areas, and regression in others, and there is always a judgement of value that is being made when thinking about the march of progress . The 1920s and the 1930s were an era of constant change on all fronts, and the world as a whole was marching straight into the modern world as the repercussions of the first world war were still being felt.
In those years, the printed medium was at its peak, illustrated strips, which were what we would consider to be the ancestor of the comic were gracing the pages of newspapers , and in an age with no internet, where the medium of radio or movies were just getting their start, newspapers were the main way people got all of their informations on the current events, the latest plays and the latest books and all of the knowledge about the right places to be if you were anyone. From the classified ads to the marriage announcements, the newspaper and the printed medium in general was solidly embedded in the culture.
The 1920s and the 1930s were the beginning of the movement of art deco, a new modern style that was clean and streamlined visually, with very neat and geometrical lines, and it is very much a reflection of the current trends in fashion, architecture and design. It is very much in the spirit of the times and i think it was very much in keeping with the times where there was much more of a monoculture in general, you could easily pinpoint what were the big lines of the trends of the eras as they all played off each other and reflected the world that existed around them — through the visual arts, art and culture. There was a generalized aesthetic, if one can say it like that, in a way that I don't think we have anymore. I mean i have been trying to pinpoint what are the trends for the 2020s and when I tell you I absolutely cannot. I have to admit that trends are cycling at such a fast rate nowadays that they do not really have the time to truly permeate the general mainstream culture. On one hand, I do think it’s good that no one can feel the pressure to ascribe to a specific mainstream set of trends if they don’t like to, I think it’s way better to really be able to pick and choose what kind of style truly reflects the person you are and your interests, however I think this does imply a minimum of effort to truly try and discover those interests and curate a personal style and not follow the extremely fast trends that we have now. While before, those trends shifted on a cycle of roughly 10 years, and no matter how stark the transition from the 1910s and the Edwardian era to the shapeless and shorter dresses of the 1920s and then to the more feminine and elegant silhouette of the 1930s, the truth is that the change is very gradual, the shape relaxed and shortened season after season, and it’s only with distance that you can perceive how strong the change was. I think so much of it is in hindsight. Maybe in 10 or 20 years I will be able to pinpoint the changes and broad line of the 2020s tendencies, because history aways seems clearer when you are removed from it.
Through art, images, fashion and advertisement, the world saw a changing and mutating definition and significance off what it meant to be a woman. First of all, I think I really have to stress that i’m talking in binary terms here because this is how the illustrations and advertising as well the shifting of the gender politics were at their base core. I totally acknowledge how it is so much more complicated than that, and the definitions of womanhood and femininity are as diverse and complex and Complicated as there are women in the world, and that our relationship to gender and gender expression is an ever evolving one and that understanding will always be within a certain societal context and you cannot divorce that understanding from the global realities. All of it is arbitrary in a certain way, but it is constructed with social interaction, customs, and visual images contribute greatly to this understanding that we have of it. I will be taking about a very mainstream view of gender, and womanhood here through advertisements and images, which is how that identity was constructed during the period we’re talking about, and especially during the interwar period which was one of great change and shaking up the old ways of how things were being done and how people reacted to it, as well as how it translated to the world of visual culture specifically in the area of the illustrations and comics that were in the printed press and the advertisements of the era.
During the 1920s, we can see that change very quickly and assist to a boom in consumerism, with the roaring twenties, the end of the first world war and the end of a very specific idea of traditionalism, there is this new and unbridled world of possibilities in the general culture and consciousness. The youth goes out to try and have fun, the magazines and stores are trying to sell anything and everything to a new modern young woman. The 1920s is the moment where we can see that shift, it’s that clinching moment where things become overwhelmingly mass produced and the predominance of the ready made. Not that this shift was not happening beforehand, the industrial revolution happened in the 1830s or so and it steadily continued during the 19th century, building over what was existing, and changing the cultural mores and the habits around consumption, but i think that break in the 1920s is absolutely obvious. It is the beginning of modernity as one calls it.
With the advent of modernity came new possibilities and understandings. Of course, this phenomenon doesn’t decline itself the same way everywhere in the world, the context in India will be very different from the society in Japan or in the United Kingdom or in France, however, it is possible to see a significant shift in the understanding of the concept in itself of womanhood, and this happened throughout the whole world. In a matter of a couple of decades, the way a woman existed had shifted to something new, exciting, and even a bit scary to those from an older generation holding on to their own definition of what a woman should be. It was the age of the flapper, a word that came to designate this very specific archetype of independent young women of the 1920s.
The early 20th century was an era that was moving extremely fast in terms of the illustrated press. From articles and illustrated strips to publicity, the image was more present than ever before. During the last season of the podcast, I talked about the Golden Age of Illustrations which was from the 1870s to the 1920s, and the reason for this truly that it was the last years before the use of photography and video truly took over the use of illustration in the mainstream for entertainment and advertisement.
These were also the years where cinema was making its way, the silent era, the beginning of the way we think about celebrity. It truly changed the game in a way no one could have predicted. It was an age of glamour and excess. The early years of the film industry were absolutely insane, and please tell me on twitter or instagram if you would like a more in-depth foray into that subject and more precisely into the visuals, the art directing and the way the movies of that time looked, but suffice it to say that it was absolutely bonkers, Hollywood was so unhinged. There was glamour, beauty, but also murder and scandals and sin, and all of it being filmed in a soft focus of satin and sin. Even back then, as Hollywood’s myth and legend was being constructed, it was a place where you could gain it all, or you could lose it all, it had the appearance of perfection, and yet, everyone talked about how it was a den of sin and vices. And I will say that the current Hollywood does not compare at all to those golden years, and especially not when you think of it in terms of the dream that Hollywood sells. All of the current players in the Hollywood scene bore me to tears, I am not enchanted by people trying their best to be hashtag relatable in their gigantic mansions and white tees and cargo shirts. I genuinely think that if you are rich, you should at least look the part somewhat, otherwise what is the point of it ? Where are the beautiful glamorous people at ? No one is even doing a scandal the way they used to anymore, it truly is tragic.
Ralph Barton, a popular illustrator of the 1910s and 1920s created his illustrations for the book Gentlemen Prefer Blondes written by Anita Loos in 1925. His art was a beautiful complement to the story and underlined perfectly the fun and comedic story of the way the young women were trying to climb the social ladder. That book was adapted brilliantly later in the 1950s and starred an absolutely brilliant Marilyn Monroe in the titular role of Lorelei Lee, and while the 1950s movie truly captured the heart of the story and made it their own, which just goes to show that an adaptation does not have to be completely faithful to the text to be faithful to the core of the story. But the original book was about the flapper and the gold digger and the new kind of woman that was started to rise in that era She was a social climber, desperate, and yet still fun and irreverent. The illustrations Barton created for this book were fun, fresh and very representative of the energy of that era, where there was a lot of social mobility, and people were making fortunes, looking to make fortunes, or simply losing these fortunes. It was simply an era of social upheaval in a lot of ways. It was in the air du temps.
This era was chock-full of illustrators and talented artists as visual arts was still extremely highly valued in the mainstream, a lot of female illustrators getting their names in the papers and becoming well known for their comic strips and illustration work. The visual of the modern girl or the new woman, both terms being used almost interchangeably and describing the same concept of this new type of women at the dawn of the jazz age was developed by these very artists. She had boldness, charm and a sort of sexual awareness and a fearlessness, with a desire to seize life and all its possibilities. A Sort of nihilism in line with the general sense of dread and celebration that often follows consequential world events, even a bit of a hedonism especially in western countries. After the first world war, a break from the past and toward modernity.
The short bobbed hair, the vamp makeup, the receding hemlines, even though the length of their dresses were still fairly modest by today’s standards, after all, their knees were still covered, it was such a scandalous break from the earlier traditional mode of dress, may it be the western Edwardian dress, or the places where dress was still majorly traditional and cultural outfits. After all, it is because of capitalism, fast fashion and cultural imperialism and globalization that nowadays we are all wearing very similar fashion and dress whether you live in Italy, Nigeria or Peru. Of course, cultural mores will make it be slightly different from place to place, but hoodies, trousers trainers are worn all over he world. However. A bit more than a hundred years ago, people were still wearing their caracos and djellabas in Algiers, and now those outfits are being left for special events. In Korea, Hanboks were worn on a daily basis. In less than a hundred years, most of, if not all, traditional and cultural outfits have been relegated to relics of the past. And yet, the 1920s is that moment where modern western dress started to really become the norm as the world shifted into modernity, and this new scary idea of the modern woman started to take hold.
Beauty and the advertisement of beauty, makeup and fashions were a cornerstone of the way that identity was constructed, because for the first time since the 18th century at least in the western world, the use of visible makeup was no longer frowned upon. I say visible, because even though makeup was thought to be the purview of actresses and ladies of ill-repute in the 19th century and the Edwardian eras, women were still using cosmetic aids to beautify themselves. Of course, it's the ever-present no makeup makeup look that is infinitely more complicated to master than any colorful and ostentatious look could ever wish to be. So at the turn of the 1920s, women were wearing dark lips, in plums and dark reds, and surprisingly bright eyeshadows and rouge, and none of it was made to be discrete and hint to the notion of a natural face. The Modern Woman was painted and made-up, unbalancing the social norms that were established until then. It was a very visible shift from the obsolete and the traditional to the very made-up New Woman, and there is a list of beauty and makeup items and objects that are all absolutely gorgeous I have to say, that are associated with this. It’s the new accessibility of consumerism where it was before limited to the elites, now everyone could purchase eyeshadows and a compact of powder and rouge and those minuscule multipurpose makeup compacts with a tiny lipstick and a bit of rouge and powder and some mascara, so that you could touch up on the go and carry it in the tiny bags that were in fashion. Those items were luxurious and opulent, and fairly affordable comparatively to what they had been previously, especially with the rise of the ready-made.
Is consumerism a visual symbol of modernity ? After all, the almost omnipresence of publicity in our visual world, which was definitely the case in the global world in the 1920s, is one of the ways in which that modernity, along with the dominion of capitalism that demands constant consumption from the people. As John Berger says in his foundational art history book Ways of Seeing published in 1972, which btw I totally recommend to get if you want to dive a bit deeper into art history theory, or you can just watch his 4 parts show of the same title which btw and i haven't said anything COULD potentially be on youtube but i haven't said anything at all. Anyway as he says quote : publicity images […| belong to the moment in the sense that they must be continually renewed and made up-to-date. Yet they never speak of the present. Often they refer to the past and always they speak of the future unquote. This was extremely relevant in the world of the interwar, where the construction in itself of the identity of the modern woman was made through those publicity images.
There is also something to be said about how the concept of modernity and of the modern girl truly blurs the lines of a social hierarchy., and that was a good thing, I do think those lines should be blurred to the point of non-existence. Now everyone could look like the popular starlets of the movies and buy their own makeup and clothes that could make them look as glamorous as the women on the silver screen, the easy availability of cosmetics, and of a climate of consumerism made it so that everyone could attain that status, the lines between the social boundaries and between the quote unquote elites and the working class are becoming more fluid than ever. Where the way you dressed immediately signaled your social rank and your place within the hierarchal structure, which, in turn, told other people how to treat you, this was no longer necessarily the case. However as those lines are shifting and moving, the way you could signal your status have also shifted.
The year was 1925 and Nell Brinkley, a young reporter and famous illustrator, was sending the first strips of The Adventures of Miss Prudence Prim out for publication to William Randolph Hearst’s Sunday American Weekly. Her stories of romance, love and carefree amusement were capturing the zeitgeist of this period that was the interwar: these years full of change and when modernity was at the forefront of culture. Born in the small town of Edgewater in Colorado in 1886, Nell Brinkley always had dreams of making art her career. At only 19 years old, after convincing her father that she could earn her life with a short contract as an illustrator at the Denver Post, she finally moved to the city where she would accomplish those dreams : New York. She came of age during the pinnacle of Edwardian sensibilities and was influenced by the ornate curves of Art Nouveau, but also by the new visual ideas of Art Deco. She created a style that was very unique for her time and was a woman who was constantly looking forward to the future. She was a perfect example of the New Woman of the 20th century. A woman that was bold, vibrant and who was not afraid to speak her mind. Her art was a vignette of a time that's now long gone by, and yet her art still feels as charming as it used to be. Those were delightful images of youthful fun and desire, ideas of romance, and, most surprisingly perhaps, issues of women’s rights and the working class.
Brinkley got her start and her renown as an illustrator and journalist in 1907, while covering the gruesome and shocking case of Harry K. Thaw, a highly publicized trial involving the beautiful and popular showgirl Evelyn Nesbit. This case was sordid, involving a murder, a jealous husband, and a previous lover of Nesbit, and was a huge news story during that year. Brinkley’s interviews and various portraits of Nesbit put her in the limelight as a talented illustrator and reporter.
Commentator and columnist as well as an artist, the career of Nell Brinkley was prosperous and she was a constructing a new vision of womanhood. She was writing and drawing for women, and they were her direct audience. She wrote about cultural events, reviewed plays, gossiped about the latest fashions and movies. Her columns and her art were a guide to living fully and encouraging women to realize their full potential. Brinkley’s work had a definite feminist slant to it, in favor of working women and pushing for the rights of women. Her cartoons and illustrations had a decidedly political element to them that was part of the spirit of the times, about the endless possibilities that they carried within them. Without necessarily being an activist, she was always pushing for progress and women’s rights and trying to unshackle the constrictions of gender norms that were remnants of a previous generation. She was a writer as well as an illustrator, and this is how she communicated a vision of womanhood that was new and fresh, and she represented the way a lot of young women felt during these years. The New Woman, as she became known, was the face of a modern generation of women.
The archetypes of her illustrations were so strong that they were known as the "Brinkley Girls, » with their head full of short curls, their sleepy eyes and their darkened lips which brought a new vision of femininity. The Brinkley Girl was a break from traditional archetypes of beauty. She was no longer the demure and aloof women drawn by Charles D. Gibson that were in vogue. The Gibson Girl of the Edwardian era, with her long hair, her cold and distant beauty was now a thing of the past. The Brinkley Girls were far from being shy, and were not hesitant to take life as it came, and live fully and wholeheartedly. There was a certain desire of enjoying one’s life that was at the core of the illustrations of Brinkley. Emotion, passion and romance, as well as a sort of carefree independence were the new motto of a new generation of women who wanted to desperately have fun. It was an idealized idea of life and romance that provided a definite appeal to its audience.
The Brinkley Girl archetype was so widespread that it was used for advertising during the 1910s and the 1920s for diverse products that the modern woman would be using in her daily life. She was thus set as a symbol of the eminently modern woman. From hair curlers that « will not break your hair » to henna dye and face powder, the curly haired young women of Nell Brinkley were a good example of how illustration was used as part of advertisement in the early 20th century, blurring the lines between art and capitalism. The Brinkley Girl was known in the cultural sphere as being a symbol of a new generation of young women who were fearless, representing a vision of womanhood that was progressive and a celebration of independence as well as pleasure.
In the 1920s, her art involved sequential images and interesting stories, all starring young women as the main protagonists and centering their point of view. Starting with her serials in the 1910s and steadily creating comics during the rest of her career, she was an incredibly prolific author. From 1918 and onwards, most of her comics were full page and full color, a privilege reserved for very few artists during those years.
The Adventures of Prudence Prim, written by Carolyn Wells and illustrated by Brinkley, follows the life of a young lady who lives with her two sensible Edwardian aunts, and who has dreams of romance and adventures. Prudence takes the opportunity of her aunts taking a nap to go out and experiencing life for herself, after all « now if I just sit still and do exactly as I ought - I’ll never get a thrill ! » And so the adventures of Miss Pruddy Prim begin ! They are told each Sunday as she lives through new experiences and goes out and wears glamorous and fantastical ensembles. The pages are peppered with the different characters that Prudence Prim meets during her adventures, from society ladies with beautiful clothes and bobbed hair to dashing suitors who sweep her off her feet. Brinkley truly takes the time to dress all of her characters in fanciful outfits to match the universe she creates. The story is told by small, witty verses with a lot of good humor. Those narratives capture a certain desire for escape and the new daring sensibilities of young women, of their hunger for love and life. It is complete with the details of the latest fashion and decorated with illustrations of roses which will eventually influence the style of shoujo manga in the 1970s, with its abundance of roses, the drama, and extravagance of feelings.
The art of Brinkley creates a very indulgent feminine universe, where the men are dashing and noble, but still drawn in a very feminine way. It is in line with the slight gender fluidity of the time, where men were more delicate and women were cutting their hair short. Nonetheless, her worlds were utterly feminine and yet were trying to change what this world meant for the young woman of the interwar period — to leave the past behind and move toward the future and document the rapid changing social norms for women. Her style is especially striking in its transitional quality between art — the heavily ornamented and rounded lines of the Art Nouveau years in which she came of age and the streamlined and fashionable lines of Art Déco. It is a style that found a lot of admirers, but also a lot of detractors. She truly made her signature style one that captured the new woman of the era. She captured a very specific moment in time and the way women might have understood themselves. This understanding was not universal, however it captured the way American women wanted to visualize themselves. The way they wanted to represent and depict their future. It was an ideation that was becoming reality. In a way, Brinkley was creating the future through her art. Of course, she was not the only one. She was simply part of a moment in time, but I do have to say that Brinkley, with her frothy pictures and her fanciful curves was successful in a way a lot of artists were not.
To me, she represents a very feminine idea, and to me, this type of art often receives criticism simply for daring to be feminine, maybe a bit shallow, maybe a bit superficial, but after all very cute and very fun. The rococo genre of the 18th century received similar criticisms in my opinion for being sugary and cute and overtly feminine. And this is simply always an unfair criticism to me, because judging something being aligned with femininity negatively comparatively to something more masculine is just plain old sexism. It’s not that the genre of rococo is devoid of criticism, there can be much to criticize, but people mostly bring up the fact that its frilly and pink and for some reason, that means it is not a sign of serious art. After all, this is what the neoclassical movement that followed was about. Something more visually sober, and more serious in its subject. And once again, the pendulum of taste swings.
Nell Brinkley was interesting as an artist that had this idea of the new woman being at the center of all the work she was doing. She was active during an era of profound change in the way women were perceived and perceived themselves, and whose art was something that was created solely for the modern woman. Brinkley was a daring and brave woman, with a taste for excitement and joy. She did not back down from any challenge; she flew a biplane in 1914, illustrated it, and commented on it for her audience's pleasure:« Nell Brinkley Tastes Joys of Real Freedom Soaring in Clouds ». She had adventures of her own and lived a full and brazen life. She got married to Bruce McRae II in 1920, and then she divorced him. I have to mention that he was several years younger than she was, so she was breaking boundaries in all sorts of ways,
She was a mother but also a career woman, and always followed her heart and ambitions no matter where they took her. Despite knowing a widespread cultural and financial success during her time, Nell Brinkley went the same road as many successful women artists often do, and was subsequently rapidly forgotten by history apart from the niche academics and amateurs of early 20th century comics. What she accomplished was no small feat. She managed to create this pictorial universe that understood the preoccupations of a modern woman, from her leisure to work to romance, from her activism to her frivolities, and how to balance all of it. She was a modern woman through and through.
This archetype of the modern girl is an intrinsic part of national identity and how those identities shaped the way she was understood and the way she was perceived by the general public, not only domestically but also internationally. She was also used for pushing political agendas either as to how the youth, and especially young women, were out of control, and trying to reassert the previous order of things, were women were not going out partying at all hours of days, and were expected to stay home. Or, on the flipside, using those young women living their lives as a political statement about how much more modern and civilized she was compared to the quote unquote retrograde societies and traditions. And this happened not only in the western world, but in Russia, India, China, Japan and elsewhere. From the illustrations and caricatures of Guo Jianying who satirized this new type of modern woman in China, with jokes and piques about the way things were changing, and changing fast, to the ads in various news papers across the world that promised their customers beauty and pleasure.
During the interwar, the illustrated advertisements for the brand Shiseido, a brand that started in 1872 and still is a sizable part of the beauty landscape today, and that revolutionized the market for the modern woman in Japan, were at the intersection of art, design and advertisement. These images were ones that were communicating an idea of modernity and newness, and yet advertised products that helped the consumer access this new ideal and be able to adhere to the beauty standards of the era, that were particular to Japan.
Shiseido’s graphic design communicated an idea of chic elegance that was becoming an aspirational quality during the interwar. The poster design by Sawa Reika in 1927 shows a young blonde woman wearing a fashionable evening dress holding a camelia flower, the brand’s logo, which was designed by Yabe Sue in 1924, all with the streamlined aesthetic conventions of art deco, and a limited palette of colors The result is minimalist and beautiful, and conveys so efficiently this new type of lifestyle and modernity that was being created, all through the use of graphic designs and cosmetics advertisements.
Even though the concept itself the of womanhood during the interwar was a mix of effervescence in the way it developed and grew and changed, and how, it stayed the same in a lot of ways. The illustrations of journals and magazine covers such the covers of the german graphic design journal « die reklame » in 1929 by Albert Rabenbauer were just another way the image of the modern woman got used in the art and the advertisements, not only helping to construct the idea of a modern woman, but the way that cosmopolitanism and the life in the urbane centers, full of the busy bustle of cities is just another way young women could enjoy a certain anonymity and freedom.
The idea of a chic and cosmopolitan world of material goods, of parties, of champagne and music, of a worldly but extremely fun woman at the center of it was one that was dominating the imagination. Ethel hays had small comic illustrations in the papers that satirized and caricatured that specific archetype of the flapper. Her character « Flapper Fanny » was the woman who was fashionable, a bit silly and yet, still very witty. Hays’ illustrations are extremely adorable, and manage to land a joke or a line with only a small drawing. The modern woman, the flapper, the gamine, this idea of the intrepid fashionable new woman was constructing itself in reality and also through the art, the illustrations and the visual representations of her in the advertisements and those, in turn, helped shape the way that the modern woman saw herself. Despite what she represented about this new era, being used to express concepts of modernity, a fear of change when women are going out and gaining those newfound freedom, being bolder and more in touch with their sexualities and their expanding idea of femininity, these women were still people and not only concepts about which people could discourse and debate, and I think this is something that is quite often forgotten.
GREEN KNIGHT (2021) by David Lowery is a movie that is beautiful, luscious and grandiose, in a way that rarely is in the cinematic landscape of the 21st century. In a world where magic and tales of courageous knights coexist. This is a tale that takes place years after the rise of King Arthur and the sword in the stone. A movie that doesn’t hold your hand and does not carry you through the finish line. It is the kind of films that need several viewings to correctly absorb and interpret. And even there, there are so many ways to interpret this movie, to understand its meaning. A story that has been around for centuries and was part of a larger folkloric narrative. Based on a poem from the 14th century and the chivalric romances of the king Arthur, the story of Gawain and the Green Knight is one worth reading, if you have the chance to. The legends of Camelot I have already made a podcast episode on the role of arthurian imagery in art, but after watching this movie, I really wanted to dive deeper in the visual aesthetic and production design of this movie. Because whenever a movie puts so much effort and thoughts behind the visual aspect of it, as well as the way those visual symbols tie up with the narrative thread of the story, it always fascinates me to no end and this movie is no exception
Of course, as we explore how the visual aspect of this movie ties in with the narrative, and we analyze the visual and the significance that they can have, please know that I will spoil this movie, and so, if you have not watched it yet ? What are you waiting for ? Please watch it and come back to this article as soon as it is done !
GREEN KNIGHT is a beautifully intricate story of a very (pretty) irresponsible and spoiled man facing the consequences of his actions. He is selfish, and has an enormous ego, he wants heroism and the prestige of being a knight without having to make any effort, nor put himself in the line of danger. He is a coward, and keeps failing at each of the various tests given to him across the course of the movie. But in the end, by accepting to face the green knight, to take off the belt and surrender, it is growth that we see. I don't think this movie would have ever worked with any other actor than Dev Patel, simply for the charm and regality that Patel has in this role. He is a very beautiful man, but he imbues this very unlikable and complex character with a charm that is inescapable. No matter how terrible he keeps being as a person, you still want him to succeed, you want him to have a change of heart, you want him to do the right thing and ultimately, succeed and survive. I do not think this could have been accomplished with any other actor than Dev Patel. He brought the nuance needed for this character to work, to be likable, to be sympathetic even though he was so utterly despicable. This story is not one that will hold your hand, there are a lot of interpretations and understandings of the entire plot, and of course of the open ending. I think it is amazing how many conversations the entirety of this movie, and especially that ending spawned so many conversations between me and my friends. The main question was that one, so did he die ? But we are getting ahead of ourselves, after all, shouldn’t we start by the beginning.
Before we even really begin, I think it is unavoidable to talk about the fact that Patel is not a white man. And the significance that this has with him playing the role of Gawain and the huge step forward that this represents, not only in the grand scheme of things, as a sign of progress in the film industry, but also within the world of the movie. First of all, before someone plays the historically accurate card, this movie is based on a fictional poem from the 14th century, and does not claim to represent History. It is a fantastical movie, a gothic and fantasy tale that has no basis in history, after all there is a green knight who does not die after his head is chopped off…So if anyone is playing the card of realism, I do not think this is the right movie to do so.
Folktales and stories are made to be constantly reinvented, and there are part of the zeitgest that people of color living in the west grew up with. These stories belong to us as much as they belong to white people, and we deserve to have a place within that reimagining as well. It is in the nature itself of folk tales, of legends and myths and fairytales, to be constantly moving and ever changing, to constantly change and evolve with the society. After all these stories were part of the oral tradition, and part of the general culture. So why should these tale conform only to a white supremacist visions of history ? These are the stories that belong to all of use, and everyone should be welcome to partake in them. And so seeing Gawain, an extremely layered and complex character, being played by Dev Patel, was something that was more important to me than words can express, and I do hope this will continue to happen in cinema, and that actors of color will get the chance to take part in these amazingly fantastical movies. Even if we accept the argument of historical accuracy as a valid one, and it is not, Green Knight is a fantasy movie, not a historical one, these movies are still being created in 2021, and there’s no excuse for this kind of exclusion. There are absolutely no reason to make whole stories entirely white, because the world has always been global and multicultural, yes even in the Middle-Ages. This world of ours has always been a varied one, and the choice to use Dev Patel as the lead actor of Green Knight was a well chosen one, as he has been the darling of the public for good reason. He is an incredibly handsome and pretty man, and my favorite description of him describes how he « has grown into a leading man with romance-novel hair, empathetic eyes and a well-kept beard » and he definitely sustains that charisma throughout the entire movie. Patel had a lot on his shoulders with this movie, and he carried that weight gracefully and flawlessly. The acting was phenomenal on every single level, and I will not be surprised when he wins several awards for this role. (as he well deserves !)
The movie opens with Gawain, sitting on a throne, a scepter and a sovereign’s orb in his hands, and the halo-like metal crown on his head. Draped in beautiful golden fabric, a single ray of light falls on him, and as the camera pans closer to him, his head combusts on fire, an omen of the threat of beheading that will be on the forefront of Gawain’s mind during the entire movie. The items Gawain carries in this scene are symbols of the english monarchy, both items of power and status. The sovereign’s orb was specifically created for the coronation of Charles II of England in 1661, the first king of the Restoration. It is interesting to consider that the previous king was Charles I who was beheaded following a civil was and the dissolution of the monarchy. Considering the anachronistic stylistic and deliberate choices in this movie, it is easy to think that this was very much on purpose and to read into the decision of giving him a Sovereign’s orb an allusion to the beheading to come.
Already, this sets the tone of the movie, as well as the atmosphere in Camelot, which is optimistic, and yet, there’s the feeling of something heavier yet to , something brewing right under the surface. The inspiration for the castle of Camelot came from the french abbey L’abbaye du Thoronet. This means a roman style for Camelot, because it has a simplicity over the ornate complicatedness of the gothic cathedrals and castles, which falls in line with the more pared down visual aesthetics of the movie, costumes and the sets, which are grand and majestic, compelling and striking, but ultimately very simple and straightforward which adds to the effectively creepy and intense atmosphere. The round table, which we immediately see during the christmas dinner is more of a horse shoe shape instead of the usual round table. The crew had to work within a very small budget and set, which This is a way to reinvent this idea that we are all familiar with, this round table of legends, where all the men around it were equal. The composition of the people behind the table, notably the king and queen, as well as Arthur’s closest advisers is a stark visual reminder of the Davinci painting of The Last Supper (1490s), an allegorical reference to the importance of Arthur in the kingdom and the value he gives his closest ones. It is a movie that visually embraces the aesthetics of catholicism and paganism, in an era where both were still intimately intertwined. When catholicism was first introduced in England, it took a long time for it to genuinely dominate the spiritual landscape. For years and years, paganism and catholicism were cohabitating in the same world, and this dichotomy can definitely be seen in the way the movie looks, in the different symbols and visual references that are peppered throughout the film. This movie is very vibrant and lush, like an old story book of sorts. This film is separated with title cards, that are reminiscent of both early 20th century noirs and horror movies, as well as the beginning of a new chapter in a storybook. This gives the film a very retro feel to it, but also shapes the storytelling of the movie, not in a straightforward way, but in a very segmented way, the way one would tell a story in the oral tradition, not necessarily bound by the constraints of narration.
The scenes decline themselves in colors that can be found in the pages of 14th century manuscript pages. Natural colors of course, but also sumptuous golds, vibrant greens, blues and reds. This use of a restricted color palette for the look of this movie really helps to set the story visually as well as narratively. I feel like people often forget that movies are a story yes, but it is primarily told through a visual medium, and the use of the visual, of what we see, to support and manipulate the narrative is extremely important. The green was a very strong color that was deeply important and connected to the green knight, and thus Lowery and his director of photography, Andrew Droz Palermo, decided to use the color carefully. And this is why the greens that were used were more often than not: ochre greens or blue-tinted greens and deep turquoises, instead of a straight up green.
The golden cloak that Gawain wears for the duration of the story is a direct reference to the golden mantle of Gawain in the original poem. It starts out in a vibrant and a brilliant golden yellow, and the colors muddy and fade as the movie goes on. This color is the same as the Gorse, an irish plant, which once again shows an intrinsic link with nature, which is a theme that resonates through GREEN KNIGHT, but also it was the one vibrant splash of color in the movie, a color that was uniquely tied to Gawain. This cloak was quilted with the shape of a thumbprint to really separates Gawain as an individual, as a person who is inherently selfish and self-centered. This is just one of the few of the many costumes that the costume designer Malgosia Turzanska manufactured for the movie when it came to the various ensembles that dressed the actors in GREEN KNIGHT. She mentions the fact that the costumes were not constructed with a desire of historical accuracy, which would not quite work for this movie that toes the line between fantasy and reality, dreams and nightmares. Instead, she went for a very fantastical and fantasy vibe, reminiscent of how these stories were put together and fabricated over time, gleaning influences from different historical periods and places, as an amalgam of various influences. The Arthurian legends too, while usually historically placed during the 500s, do not happen in one single period of the Middle-Ages, an era that lasted a thousand years if we remember. The earlier legends lean more toward an amazing warrior king of the pagan era, while the later iteration of the Arthurian legends depict Arthur as a gentle and good catholic king, who searches for the Holy Grail. And this intricacy is something that is reflected in how the story moves forward. Even the costumes of Green Knight are extremely simple in their cuts and materials, something that contrasts with the ostentatious nature that we often picture with stories of kings and queens of yore.
There is also a clash between the perception that we have of these times and the grim and bleak reality. In this tale, the King Arthur seems like an older and peaceful king, but we are in a field of bodies, killed in a battle. It was the ages of battles and war, something that Lowery wanted to convey in the background of the movie, without referencing it directly, with the allusion to the historical battle in which King Arthur allegedly singlehandedly killed 960 men, and this is just a reminder that life in the middle ages was bloody, and to have been a king of his stature, even just on a fictional level, means that there has to be a lot of bloodshed and violence to assert and maintain his power, which is not something that we often think about when thinking about the arthurian legends, because the version that we often reference were written in the later years of the Middle-Ages, from the 12th century onwards, where being a knight was associated with courtly manners and chivalry, but if King Arthur really did exist, he would have existed in the 500s, an era where carnage and violence were common, and where that kind of bloodshed was ordinary. And it is something that Lowery delicately bring to the fabric of this universe.
When it comes to the costumes that Turzanska crafted for the movie, she used only natural materials, from pineapple leather to bark cloth and linens. The reason that she cites for that choice is that David Lowery is vegan, but even then, I think it makes sense thematically, because that movie has such a strong tie to nature, with the Green Knight and the pagan religions, that the use of natural materials that simply makes sense to the centering of the natural world in this movie, a continuity of that atmosphere that is being established, where the characters have one foot in the real world, but also one foot in the world of the woods, where they can easily get lost and never come back, where they can meet ghosts, thieves and green knights who have issued them a challenge on christmas night. The main visual inspirations for those costumes were definitely early medieval paintings, but once again, this movie was not meant to be historically accurate, it was meant to tell a story, a story that belongs to a land of myth and a time of magic. I think this movie really captured really well the ambiance and atmosphere of arthurian legends, that evasiveness of place and time way better than if it tried to root it in reality.
Even though this is very much a fantasy movie, with a fantasy-inspired wardrobe, Turzanska definitely looked a lot at historical references, especially armors and pieces of jewelry, themes that come back especially once again in the outfits of the king and the queen, some of the few characters whose outfits are ornate and adorned in decoration. The queen’s dress in which we meet her in the beginning of the movie was decorated in milagros, which are small metal votive offerings that are small metal charms with a folkloric and religious meaning that was meant to give thanks, and are usually found in shrines or altars. This mix of the folklore and of the religious once again underlines the way the pagan and catholicism were united. It is also possible to note, that during the movie, the king and the queen are often posed as if they were paintings or statues. Their status as legends part of a myth is heightened, This is doubly true given their crowns, halo-like contraptions resembling the religious halos of the medieval arts, giving them an allure of saintly, thus setting them apart from the rest of the characters.
Despite it there being no body of armor in this movie apart from the Green Knight’s, metal was still hugely incorporated to the costumes, which is a historical inspiration from 5th and 6th century clothing. They were often woven in wool or cotton, as well as metal, « but the clothes itself just decompose and the only thing that stayed was metal." This can be definitely constructed as a metaphor of how nature will always have its way in the end. A concept that can be visually represented through that scene in which Gawain is tied up, and the camera spins around, and then back to Gawain who is now a skeleton. All those careful details give it a very distinct visual identity that is precise and knows what it wants to communicate. It is a very thoughtful use of the historical details when it comes to creating the look of the movie.
While Arthur and Guinevere represent the christian side of the duality this movie seems to embody, Morgan Le Fay definitely embodies the arts of sorcery and magic. Even though nothing is really explicitly said, it is understood that she is the one who summoned the Green Knight and orchestrated this whole thing as a way to give Gawain, her son, the opportunity to prove himself and legitimize his name within the kingdom. Gawain wants to prove himself, to his mother, to his uncle, as well as to himself. He feels like he hasn’t done anything yet worth talking about, that would give him a place next to the heroes of legends he is surrounded with. He wants to leave his mark on history, but is not very driven to actually do so. He is lazy and pathetic, and likes to spend his days drinking and fucking, and there seems to be a sense of fatality about him. Gawain is extremely human, in the way he feels this pressure to live up to the grand destiny of his uncle. Meanwhile, the other characters, especially the king and queen, seem to live on an another plane of reality, as paintings that are unmarked by the banality of human emotions, symbols instead of people.
The ambiance of this movie is very eerie, one could definitely say almost gothic. I am saying it. It is definitely gothic, there’s an oppressive quality to the atmosphere,. The movie starts at Christmas, a time of year that does not inherently feels gothic, but definitely is in the context of the movie. The sun sets early, the snow is falling, the air is heavy, and despite the fact that people are rejoicing and celebrating, there is an undercurrent of unease and disquietness that runs through the whole evening. The ambiance is moody and downcast, Camelot is shrouded in darkness, a single light shining through the hole in the roof. Visually, this movie takes a lot of cues from the gothic, with its claustrophobic feeling, despite most of the story being set in the woods. There is a feeling of Gawain being trapped in his own destiny. The scene where the green knight leaves with his head in hand and gallops away after having issued his challenge, seems to be a visual reference to Sleepy Hollow (1999) directed by Tim Burton, which is a very gothic film that also deals with, you guessed it, a beheaded character. Whether it is intentional or not, and I have the feeling it is, with how carefully crafted this movie has been, there are layers upon layers of artistic, historical as well as visual references to beheadings sprinkled throughout the run of this film. Lowery does not let you forget that Gawain is walking inexorably toward his own beheading.
The gothic movement of the 19th century owes a lot to a certain form of medievalism, to the significant interest to the romances the middle-ages that the writers of the 19th century had, from the Romantics to the Pre-raphaelites, there was this vested passion for everything relating to the medieval era, but of course, to a romanticized and fantasized medieval era, with adventures, magic, romance and a very sanitized version of history that conformed to their ideals of beauty and art. The early gothic stories, with authors such as Ann Radcliffe and Horace Walpole, were set in the medieval era, and thus the Gothic and the Middle-Ages are so closely linked that they will be forever entwined. Especially when it comes to the medieval era in the United Kingdom, where there is so much we don’t yet know. This period is elusive and mysterious, fleeting and ghostly. Everything seems to be shrouded in mist and fog and if that era of history. When you think abt the middle ages in Europe, specifically Britain. While the rest of the world was honestly kind of thriving, I mean if you look at the Muslim Empire, the Chinese empire, the ottomans and etc etc, those societies were thriving and prospering, and there are a lot of primary sources from them, as well as a lot of artefacts, but European medieval history is different. It is blended with history and myth, a weird entanglement of fact and fiction. The way historians worked in the middle ages, and this is not exclusive to European history, is not the same way we conceive of a historian today. There is a fusion of fantasy, reality and propaganda. They wrote a history that was both an exercise in story telling and facts. So whenever you read primary sources from the medieval period, you really have to take it with a grain of salt, because the goal was not to preserve what happened, but to create a story to assert power and status. And because of that, it is even harder to distinguish what is fact and what is simply made-up. European history in the Middle-Ages, especially when it comes to arthurian legends and history is a combination between paganism and catholicism, in an era of magic, legends and ghosts.
The meeting with Winifred is a section of the movie that was not in the original poem, but falls wonderfully seamlessly with the rest of the story, it is yet another test for Gawain to get through before he can reach the green knight. Yet another opportunity for him to show that he is virtuous and merciful, that he acts with honor and has the makings of a true knight. This whole scene has a very victorian impression to it, it definitely looks like the typical gothic romance, whether one from the 19th century or a later gothic romance of the mid-century pulps. Winifred is dressed in a nightgown, and the prominence of the house in the background. These visuals look like a gothic romance book cover of the 20th century came to life. The tale of Winifred is a gothic romance that ended badly. She was a welsh martyr of the 8th century who had her head cut off by her fiancé when she told him she wanted to become a nun, and is now haunting the house she died in until her head is brought back to her. It is another task for Gawain to accomplish, another challenged issued probably by the Green Knight himself, and another allusion yet again to a beheading just to keep Gawain on his toes about what is going to befall him.
The compositions of this movie often look like they are straight up taken form a Caravaggio painting. Caravaggio was an Italian baroque painter who lived from roughly 1571 to 1610, and had a terribly eventful life which included murder, being a violent fugitive and a tragic figure. He is definitely not what one would call a good person by any means, but his art was magnificent and transcendent. His art style was profoundly realistic and especially toward his life was very bloody and violent. One of the techniques he used was chiaroscuro, which is directly translated to light/dark and describes the way artists use very dark and the very light to create their compositions in three dimensions, and it is something that Lowery and his director of photography when it comes to the use of dark shadows and lights in the movie. The banquet scenes right before the green knight enters, where they are all drinking and feasting, look like it could have been directly transposed from a Caravaggio painting. Also a lot of Caravaggio’s paintings such as Judith Beheading Holofernes (1599), The Decapitation of Saint John the Baptist (1607), David with the Head of Goliath (1607), and Medusa (1597), and a fair few more paintings that it would take m me a while to list them, all deal with the subject of beheading, which leads me to believe that Caravaggio’s art definitely was a central inspiration in the construction of the visual identity of Green Knight.
That visual identity was carefully crafted, when you look at the way the movie presents itself, every single shot feels like it is stylized as a painting, with a very careful and very theatrical compositions. The characters often seem to hold their position, as if momentarily part of a painting or a photograph, a theme that comes back a few times during the run of the movie, striking a pose for a single moment for the audience. It feels like breaking the fourth wall without expressly doing so, it is simply a way of including the audience from within the story. Despite being a movie, this film often feels a lot like theatre, if only by these very intricately and meticulously designed shots. The work of art A Philosopher in a Moonlit Churchyard (1790) by Philippe-Jacques de Loutherbourg is a good visual reference to the early Gothic from which a lot of visual and atmospherical inspiration comes from. The cloudy night with the moon shining as the only source of light is reminiscent to not only that first Christmas night in which the Green Knight first issued his Christmas game, but also of the journey Gawain takes on. When Gawain leaves Camelot on his way to the Green Chapel, it is possible to notice ruins in the background as he is making his way on his horse. A sign of the future that waits for Camelot one day, because nature will win again in the end, whenever that will be.
This conflict between Nature and Humanity is a central theme for Lowery in Green Knight, as he explores the climate anxiety that haunts him and troubles him. He says «As soon as you pick those two against one another — which should never have happened in the first place — but as soon as nature and mankind are pitted against one another, I just see the fallibility and the fallacy of man» In this way, the Green Knight is the central figure of the natural world, and he is thus in conflict with human world. When he comes to Camelot, moss grows where he walks and puts his axe, a single ray of green light shining on him, he is not only the personification of the nature world, he is nature in itself.
A lot of the movie was shot on locale in Ireland, which gives this very haunting and realistic quality to the movie that couldn’t have been achieved with the use of CGI. The use of on-site sets, from the outside locations to the interiors, made it so that they could really work with the the turn of seasons and the passage of time. Something that was visually communicated through the movie with the medieval theatre and a wheel that kept turning and showing the changing of the seasons, from winter to spring, summer, autumn, and finally, winter again. One year hence. It is now time for Gawain to face his fate.
When Gawain is at the house of the Lord, it is an amazing and lovely anachronistic moment, with the production design, the costumes and the set. The house is set in such a way that it feels disconnected from the rest of the film, isolated from time, both visually and narratively, as if one has jumped a few hundred years into the future. Notably by the presence of the camera obscura room, something that would only be created during the Renaissance era. This consolidates this air of fantasy and magic, of not quite being in a historical place and time. The house of the Lord feels as if it is separated of the rest of the world, which adds credence, in my opinion, to the theory that the Lord is simply the Green Knight. Once again, this movie does not give you any real answers, it is up to the viewer to read between the lines, and to take what is given and see what you understand from it. On the walls, there is a medieval hunting tapestry, an item that was very expensive and prized during the Middle-Ages and is still an artefact that’s witness of an art that once was. The creation of a large tapestry could take months to finish with five weavers working on it. It was a highly expensive object that took a lot of labor and skill to complete. And this tapestry that was created in the movie shows a hunt, but also, it shows the fox that was accompanying Gawain throughout his quest. The tapestry is lush, inviting, worrying, layered and complex, and it reflects both the story so far, as well as Gawain’s interior narrative.
In the vision he has before deciding to take off his girdle and face his fate, whatever shape it might take, it is possible to notice that the queen he marries hugely resembles Elizabeth I, with the vibrant red hair and the heart shaped hair style and the very pale face. It immediately frames her as the legitimate queen versus Essel who was simply a commoner and a whore. The movie establishes the legitimacy of rank by a very immediate visual reference to a well known queen that is associated with power and royalty in the visual culture.This movie takes a lot of cues from popular culture, from the film inspirations from movies such as Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1991) directed by Francis Ford Coppola and outfitted by the late Eiko Ishioka, for the boldness of style and vibrant visual aesthetic, or the 1928 The Passion of Joan of Arc, a movie with a lot of close ups and striking composition and cinematography. 1980s fantasy movies such as Willow (1988) were also a huge inspiration especially for the filmmaking techniques and sporadic use of CGI, as a way to give a grounded feeling to the movie.
«Lowery further engaged with his love for ’80s fantasy and adventure by deploying the occasional matte painting and as many old-school practical effects and in-camera tricks as he could, in order to give The Green Knight its throwback feel. “The aesthetics of those ’80s and ’90s films,” Lowery says, “they didn’t have the tricks up their sleeves that someone like Peter Jackson or even we had. There’s a tactile quality that helped stick them in my head. I love Willow because I was seven years old when I saw it, but also [because of] its craftsmanship.”
The Green Knight’s throwback vibe was also strategic. “We couldn’t afford to do an actual, literal period piece set in the 14th century with enough period-accurate costumes,” he says. “So [we were] finding this weird middle ground where it doesn’t have to be true to history and yet also feels grounded. Films like Willow and Ladyhawke did that really well.”»
The shot of him entering the green chapel, is vaguely reminiscent of the scene in Alice in wonderland, where she wanders off to Wonderland, of finally entering another world, a world of magic and enchantment, fully separated of reality. He finally enters the realm of nature and he is fully to the mercy of the Green Knight. He takes off his girdle, and is ready to face his fate. And so it ends.
Green Knight is a magnificent movie visually, the narrative is complex and winding, the lore behind the story is layered and never ending, and the first time I watched it, I was simply blown away. This is definitely a movie that uses style as substance, by which I mean the visual aspect of this movie is used as a way of conveying the story. It is a heavily atmospheric and dreamy film that manages to capture the volatile essence of the Arthurian legends perfectly. It is a feat of cinema, and I am so incredibly excited to watch whatever will come next from Lowery and his team, as well as Dev Patel, whom I have no doubt will continue to shine.
Eiko Ishioka is a Japanese designer who is mostly known for her work as an art director, artist, graphic designer as well as a costume designer. She is known for her over-the-top work when it comes to design and staging, and her ability to go out of the usual mold that we tend to expect when it comes to design. You can trace her artistic influences in both the classical European paintings, as well as traditional Japanese arts. The blending of the two from a Japanese perspective thus creates a visual identity that is truly unique to her. Until her death in 2012, she worked through multiple art fields and kept bringing her unique work experience from one field to another. Her experience in graphic arts influencing her work in movie costuming and vice-versa. She is definitely someone who constantly tackled new projects and new mediums without fear and hesitation.
Before being known for her costume design in her western movies, Eiko Ishioka was a prolific graphic designer as well as an art director. Her ads and graphic design work is truly out of this world and her use of color is truly what distinguishes her from other artists. She also was the first female graphic design in Japan and succeeded in a field that majoritarily dominated by men. Despite that, Ishioka never truly rallied for feminism causes, she felt that gender wasn’t important to her, yes, she was a woman. But, she was an artist first and foremost.
As an artist and a graphic designer, she worked a lot within the marketing field and making covers for magazines and ads for products. She knows how to grab the attention of the viewer and how to keep it. Much of her earlier works will be her honing her aesthetic, with bold colors and shapes, being shameless about existing and being successful in a way people didn’t expect her to be. Her work was often thought of as shocking and even erotic by the general public, even though it wasn’t her intent. Ishioka often uses nude bodies in her work, but she says it’s more of a general appreciation for the human body rather than a desire of sexualizing it. In fact, she is rather appalled and angry at the way male designers and advertisers were displaying the female body in their works and thought it degrading.
In a lot of ways, the guiding line for her commercial and advertising work could be simply summarized in wanting to create a “strong, simple and clear” mood to the advertisement. A strong contrast is also very efficient at communicating what you want to say to your audience. Which is why the contrast of East vs West is very predominant in her work as it’s a powerful visual tool which she can play with. It can be seen in this image of an advertisement for the brand PARCO, a brand Ishioka worked for several times in the early years of her career.
This image shows the western actress Faye Dunaway wearing a traditional japanese outfit and transformed into a goddess of mercy. The two children in the piece are Ishioka’s own nieces. She wanted to truly experiment with a western movie star to truly play with this contrast of East and West and to also bring up questions of the japanese identity, as well as the current and future situation of Japan in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Despite the use of a western model, Ishioka went for a very japanese way of designing that page, which makes for a very fresh and yet traditional way of thinking.
Ishioka had a career that was both rich and varied both in the artistic sense as well as the professional sense. Despite having a very strong visual identity, her work never feels stale and boring. She worked as an exhibition director, working within the confined space of an art gallery. She also did smaller graphic design work for musical artists for their album covers as well as posters for movies, concerts, and events. Packaging design was also part of her career in the 1970s and early 1980s.
In the realm of design and visual creations that were rooted in the practical and concrete, managing to retain her strong artistic identity in her work for clients and for corporation truly shows the strength and uniqueness of what she does. Also, it has to be said that the variety of her work experience will then go on to really shine when she will move on to costume and production design. This will bring her a professional perspective that will be richer and deeper in the understanding of how to communicate with the costumes and how to blend the costumes with the set, the actors and all the elements that make a film.
The way she approaches her design work is by being confident in her style and to approach each challenge as it own. Each project, she says, has its approach and it would be foolish to approach every projects the same way. It’s hard to categorize a woman who made her career trying everything from graphic design, product design, costume design and more. As an art director and as an artist, it’s difficult to label the work she does, but it’s definitely striking to the eye of whoever sees it.
Nonetheless, even though she had a strong career in advertising and graphic design, Ishioka felt that this wasn’t the right path for her and after taking a break from 1980 to 1982, she wanted to move on to new challenges. I just want to say that she was 42 years old in 1980, which truly shows that it never is too late to do anything, and to just take your time and go at your own pace. She was 42 years old and yet, this was far from being the end of her career at all.
It’s only from the 1980s and onwards that Ishioka took her career toward the costume design in cinema, where she frankly brought a unique color to the work she does with clothing. I just want to stop here and talk about this for a moment if you’ll let me. In a world where we are told to hurry constantly and that if we aren’t successful by the age of 30, Ishioka is a beacon of hope and inspiration. Here is a woman that just did whatever she wanted to do, and by the age of 40 years old, just went “oh this isn’t fulfilling anymore to me" and just ? switched career ? This is truly mind boggling to me how her costume design career, only started once she was fairly ahead in her career. This sort of courage to just start again, and to keep searching for what is the most inspiring and fulfilling things to do for oneself is something i wish i can channel in my own life.
She is someone who was entirely dedicated to her craft and her art in all the facets of her life and i feel that sometimes we really need this sort of role model in our lives. Someone to tell us it’s never too late to do what you wish to do. That it’s never too late to search for new challenges and for new heights to aspire to. Like not to be all anti-capitalist leftist on you, but in this very fast and productivity driven world, i find it so important to know that you don’t have to comply with society’s measures of success and you can just follow the challenges where they lead you. Another thing that I am definitely keeping is both her work ethics an also the versatility of the work she did. All those different working and artistic experiences
Her first steps in the movie costume designing world happened with the movie MISHIMA : A LIFE IN FOUR CHAPTERS (1985) directed by Paul Schrader. Albeit saying that she lacked the technical capabilities for the job, she was able to develop a strong and unique concept for whatever she was working on. Schrader asked Ishioka personally to work on this project, as he was aware of the strength of her artistic vision. This is why, even though she had no previous experience specifically within the realm of costume design, the versatility of her work experience made her the right person for this project in his eyes. The design on MISHIMA was built on a strong visual symmetry as well as elements inspired by Kabuki and Chinese Opera. The work she did on MISHIMA surely displays the work ethic that she always displayed on each of her projects previously, she made more than a hundred design sketches and built 20 sets for the movie. Her way of working, very precise and detail-oriented, contrast with her lush and grand outfits which makes it even more impressive.
Ishioka, though, is mostly known internationally for her costume designs in movies such as DRACULA (1992), THE FALL (2006) and MIRROR MIRROR (2012), just to name a few of them and not for this first try at costume and production design. Over the years she has developed a very recognizable aesthetic with costume design, as she did with her visual art, which uses very rich colors like bold reds and yellows, as well as a variety of textures, textiles and prints. Her use of embroidery is also very noticeable as being an intricate part of the outfits she creates. You can see a very strong traditional japanese influence in the way she thinks her outfits, but is still very imbued with her strong sense of personality
Her work with the costume design is a mastery of couture, colors and texture as well as a brilliant knowledge of fashion history and design. I can safely say that the costume design of all those movies is frankly one of the main things that makes those movies as impressive as they are visually. They bring a visual coherency and richness that only adds to the depth of the story that’s being told on screen. I won’t get into details about costume design and its place in cinema, because that’ not what we’re talking about rn, but costume design is a key component of the visual identity of the movie, no matter how much someone wants to argue it’s “just clothes”
The 1992 movie of DRACULA can attest to that and she even received an Academy Award for her work on this movie as a costume designer (an award very well deserved in my opinion). The costumes for this movie were perfect for the story that this movie was telling, for the way it was telling this story, all in dramatics and lighting and shadows. A story about vampires always should be dramatic, and the costumes and clothing should reflect that.
The story is set in the late 1890s and the meticulous research that Ishioka made can attest to the accuracy of the dress silhouettes. But Ishioka transcends the simple historical accuracy while designing the costumes for the actors. She goes beyond simply dressing them and complements the atmosphere of the film. Before working on DRACULA, Coppola asked of Ishioka to watch the films IVAN THE TERRIBLE (1944) as well as UGETSU (1953) to give herself a place to start when it came to the atmosphere he wanted for the movies and what was important for the costume designing. She truly knows how to take the vision and ideas a client has and make them come to reality with even more richness than it originally had.
Ishioka says that the story Dracula and the fact that the story spans time from the 15th century to the 19th century and starting in Istanbul inspired her greatly. This overlap of all these influences was something she tried to convey visually with the costumes on screen. This is a story that’s bigger than the era it’s set in, and she manages to communicate this effectively with the costumes, especially with the costumes of the supernatural beings.
For example, the use of silks and embroideries, as well as the silhouettes of the clothes the women are wearing here are very loose, very simple and very reminescent of ancient greece clothes, especially with the draperies. So you can see just how broad the inspiration and influences that Ishioka integrates in her costume design, which ends up being something that will be visually totally unique. There is an overlap in times and silhouettes. Even tho the story is set in the late 1890s, close to the turn of the centuries, the fantastical characters have rich outfits that will have historical influences from various fashion eras preceding the current era.
Even in the designing of the menswear for this movie, you can see that Ishoka goes one step further in her design of these costumes. Menswear in the late 1890s is very stiff and formal, but through the use of various textiles and textures, it is possible to create an outfit that is visually very interesting and that are different one from another.
Mina, one of the main characters, spend the first half of the movies wearing various dresses in delicate shades of greens, and i personally think each of those dresses she wears are gorgeous. Nonetheless, they serve a bigger purpose than just looking pretty (even though they really so pretty !!!), those dresses, and by extension all of the costumes the various characters wear throughout the movie, serve to establish Mina as a character in the movie. The shade of green she wears is a very delicate mint green, that blends seemlessly in the sets where Mina is at her home. She looks like she belongs in that setting, in the middle of those plants and flowers and delicate space. Meanwhile, when she is out, we can see that she really looks out of place in those urban and grey streets. Almost as if she doesn’t belong in the modern times.
Before moving on from this movie, i just want to mention Lucy’s costumes throughout the movies and especially her final costume and the one she was buried in. Once again, the costume design will follow the evolution of the character throughout the movie.
This final costume of Lucy is so intricate and unique, and the complexity of each of the elements of this dress should feel overwhelmingly complicated and yet it doesn’t feel like its “Too Much”. The dress makes us really pay attention to the face of the person wearing it, especially with the contrast of Lucy’s red hair and red lips. This visual contrast of white vs red, as well as the complexity of the dress’ structure vs the unicity of the white makes this dress a favorite of mine.
THE FALL (2006) : ARTISTRY ON SCREEN
This movie is one of my all time favorite movies and one of the reasons for this is the beauty and artistry behind the costume design in this movie. I feel like the costumes Ishioka made for this movie really represents the culmination of a career. I know most people will cite either DRACULA (1992) or MIRROR MIRROR (2012) as those works are the most commercially successful and known to the general public, but to me THE FALL is a very special movie.
The fantastical setting of the story (a story within a story, as told from a bedridden stuntman to a wide eyed imaginative child) left for a lot of freedom to Ishioka when it came to the costumes. Unlike the other movies she worked on, where there was a general setting to the story, she could go wild for these costumes, and go wild she did.
I dont want to spoil this movie, because it truly is one of my favorites of all times (go watch it if you can please !) but to me, this movie was where ishioka had the most freedom to truly do what she wanted and the costume design she conceived for this movie really shone. The costumes truly blended themselves seamlessly with the sets of the movies giving this film one of the most impressive cinematography i have seen in a long time. I feel like this movie is one that needs to be seen to truly understand how organically the costumes flow into the cinematography and the story, and it’s sheer talent how
MIRROR MIRROR (2012)
It’s been a while since i have watched this movie, i got to admit, and while i only remember the actual storyline in a very splotchy way at best, what i do remember the most though, are the very luxurious and scrumptious costume. In this movie, Ishioka really goes wild especially with the costumes of the Queen. The costumes are vaguely inspired by the 18th century, and the 18th century, fashion wise, was a time of excess particularly for the monarchy. The outfits were extravagant for both men and women and they were very ornamented.
This movie’s costumes , while definitely inspired by this era, still aren’t historical costumes. Which means that Ishioka had the space to really explore those silhouettes, but with techniques and fabrics that suited the movie’s intent regarding the story and the characters. Because MIRROR MIRROR is a fairytale inspired movie, and a fantastical movie, it was Ishoka’s opportunity to create truly magical outfits and she really seized the chance.
The dress down below as well as the accompanying cape are my fave garments of this movie, I am not going to lie, those soft colors as well as the very structured dress with those floral fabrics…. i am In Love. I wish i could wear something similar to this...
I feel like i should write something witty to conclude this article, but frankly i am just blown away all over again by the sheer talent of Eiko Ishioka and the strenght of her artistic vision in all of the art she created, whether it was her graphic design work or her costumes. Costume design is such an important part of the movie process that very often gets forgotten, but a really talented costume designer will create something that will enhance both the storytelling and the characters and I am once again humbled by how much i adore fashion, film fashion and history. It’s a very niche interest of mine but i really wish reading this article was interesting for you and thank you again !
The art canon, BIPOC artists : Artistic references and the reconstructed identity.
When it comes to the canon of art history, it’s a concept that might seem slightly nebulous, and yet, people immediately do have an idea of what one is talking about. The canon of art history is something that has been constructed over time, we’re talking the Mona Lisa by Leonardo DaVinci, the David of Michelangelo or the paintings of Monet. These paintings are very much the ones that even the person who doesn’t know much about art or art history thinks about when it comes to art. These works of art, as well as those Grand Masters of art, are being chosen as an objective indicative of the global art history, of their privileged places in the broader vision of history, and specifically, in how they shaped and influenced the world of art, and this is why it is the canon. Notice, though, how I said that generally the canon is considered to be an objective overview of what is important, and in this way that it is used, generally, as a tool for teaching what one should know about art history.
While art history is usually the study of art itself, sometimes it is also good to turn a critical eye to the field in itself of art history. Art historiography, or the history of art history, is also an important field to keep in mind while we think about the concepts, theories and notions that we use to talk about art and its history now, as well as the understanding of how these concepts came to be and how they shape the current study of art history. Because art history, and the way it is shaped and how it constructed itself through time, deeply informs the way we now understand art as well as the language that is used to talk about it.
The canon basically is a corpus of the works of art that conventionally represent the ideals of art, beauty and aesthetic, and it is the framework through which a lot of art will be understood and compared to. The thing with the construction of that art canon, is that it is ostensibly constructed with a very specific perspective in mind, and also, with a very specific goal, as well. The elements that are chosen to be part of the art canon are considered to be crucial and exemplary of the culture, in this case, of art. It tries to write in stone permanently the works of art that are the ones that are the real fundamentals and critical artworks that construct the most important pieces of art history.
One of the things that is important to talk about when it comes to the canon is the value of neutrality. Which is one of the things that it boasts itself as, the understanding is that the art canon simply IS, that the works of art that are part of it are because they are objectively the best work of arts that art history has to offer, but we know it is not the case and we all know that the neutral is everything but neutral. The same way the straight white able bodied man is not the neutral, it stands to reason that it is impossible to create a canon of work that is universal to everyone and therefore Neutral. The simple act of choosing what is part of the canon is a biased action, as well as taking the decision of excluding certain works of arts from it. The creation of the art history canon, even if not explicitly, is a tool of white supremacy.
You can even see how the art canon has often been used as a power tool by white supremacists and fascists throughout history, for example with the nazis and their term of « degenerate art », a very degrading term for whatever was not in their very narrow and bigoted definition of art. The heralding of a certain canon of art as the superior one, as a way of asserting the Right Kind of Art History, a very white, western, cis and heteronormative vision of classical art history, is only complementing their understanding of life as they try to systematically eliminate anything or anyone that doesn’t fit. The nazis had a very rigid and bigoted idea of what art should be, comprehensibly as they were the scum of earth, and they systematically got rid of any art that didn’t fall in those categories. This is a very concrete shaping of the art canon on a practical level, because they confiscated and either sold or destroyed all the artworks that were considered to be an attack on the nazi regime and their values.
With some of these confiscated and stolen art, the nazis created an exhibit of « Degenerate Art » to showcase the art they thought was the example of degeneracy as they called it, and consisted of mostly modern art and more contemporary and avant-garde art, from jewish, non-white or queer artists, or anyone who didn’t conform to the white supremacist ideals of the nazi regime. Their use of the word « degeneracy » is one that connected the art to the racial element of the nazi ideology, that said that « racially healthy people » would create objectively « good art ». God I’m disgusted just by writing this…. Anyway, this exhibit of degenerate art was contrasted to classical art and used as a way to assert what kind of art and cultural assets was the right one, and which one was the wrong one.
With these informations in mind, it’s really important to not fall into the trap of that specific discourse that theorizes that «art was so much better before and now everything is not real art» as it is a very slippery slope to some very bigoted ways of communicating and thinking, that are the way the alt-right, as well as fascist ideologies frame art and art history. I think there’s nothing wrong with having aesthetic preferences. I for one am very much a sucker for 19th c. style book illustrations as well as very cutesy illustrations in general. But there is a line that can be easily crossed over, and alt-right groups and fascists use this term in a very purposeful way that is very exclusionary and in a way to assert Traditional values as they consider it, associating only a certain type of classical, traditional « clean » art, made by also a certain type of artist, as objectively superior to other types of art, and this is why the art canon is a tool of white supremacy.
When it comes to how the art canon was constructed, there needs to be a brief overview of art historiography, just to make sure I explain a bit what the concept is. Art historiography is the history of art history, which we are going to do here. Even though the concept of talking about art and critiquing art and understanding art is far from being a western concept, the discipline of art history as we now understand it, is definitely a western construct. I think one of the first publications of art history would be from the Italian Giorgio Vasari and his book « The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects» A book that was published for the first time in 1550. And in this book, Vasari who was mostly a biographer, chronicled the lives and work of the artists who he personally thought were skilled, talented and worth talking about. And we can see that it is thus his personal canon of art history that he developed here. And this personal canon, that he constructed subjectively choosing the artists with his own set of criteria, ended up being the basis of a lot of how western art history got constructed especially a he talked about his contemporaries during the renaissance, an era that would end up being considered a pinnacle of art, and the peak of art, with artists such as Michelangelo, Caravaggio, DaVinci and more.
Afterwards, during the 18th century, a period that will also be crucial for the development of art history as a discipline, notably with the writings of Winckelmann, which will end up being foundation texts when it comes to western art history The History of the Art of the Antiquity. His research will have a focus primarily on ancient greek art, specifically sculpture, but also ceramics and pottery, and will heavily bring back the fundamentals of the classics, of the antiquity and of the society and ideals of Ancient Greece. (I’m sorry to be crude here but Winckelmann simply wanted to f*ck a greek statue) This book, as well as his general writings such as Reflections on the Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks are usually credited for being the beginning of art history as an academic discipline as we now know it and understand it. The methodology that he chose to apply to the study of the art of the greek antiquity became the basis for the art historical methodology and the construction of the discipline as a whole.
I have to mention here though, that it was later discovered that the « greek » statues that are the basis of Winckelmann’s studies were later found to be roman copies of greek statues, but that still does not invalidate his research, his methodology, or what he brought to art history as an academic field. He did the research he could with the information he had available at the time, and this is also a stark reminder that everything we consider as part of the current historical knowledge definitely can be invalidated, as new historical and archeological finds are happening. Knowledge is never immuable and it is constantly evolving, and it is something that one needs to always keep in mind, whatever discipline one is specialized in.
But when it come to Winckelmann, though, it is important to see that it is his personal tastes and interests, and him being literally in love with greek statues and ancient Greece which he viewed as the epitome of male masculinity and of aesthetic taste, that really shaped his personal canon of art history, and this canon, which was created with Winckelmann’s own personal subjective vision and tastes, then became the basis, along with Vasari’s ideas of what real art was and which artists were worth studying and remembering, of the objective truth of taste in art.
The canon has been considered, until only very recently, as a sort of an immuable facet of art history. And while, I agree that a lot of these artists and works of art were definitely deeply influential in their own right, and in the field of art history. Once again there needs to be a reflection about why these specific artists and these specific works of art were chosen, because that did not happen by chance. I genuinely want to stress, as a historian of art, and just generally as someone who thinks a lot about history, that while history is composed of facts and events, the way these are presented is a constructed history. A narrative. The perspective in which history is told is almost as important as the events themselves. It is being said that history is written by the victors, and that is incredibly true, whether we’re talking about general history, art history or whatever else. Who has the voice and who has the ability to talk is the one in control of the story being told. Because as much as we want to deny it, there’s a certain form of storytelling when it comes to the creation of History™️ that is inherent to the discipline, and of the way History is understood and framed. What are the events that are focused on, which part of history is made important, while others are devalued.
I was listening to a podcast the other day, that made me think about the concept of the Middle-Ages and of the way it is often called the Dark Ages. Mostly, because there were not a lot of things that have been written during this period, so it is very difficult to unravel what happened, and what is facts and what is legend. But mostly, it is the fact that…. nothing much was happening… in Europe. If you simply turn your focus to the arab world, to Asia, to Africa.. to anywhere else but Europe, the world was thriving. Art and culture was flourishing. It’s that focus and perspective that strictly focuses on Europe and its history that deprives us from that global outlook on history.
There is history and art history done by non-western people, even lesser centered european countries, but because this research is not done in english, it’s almost as if it does not exist within the western / english speaking / centered manner and I think there should be a concerted effort to either a) learn the language or b) translate that research, because most of the time it does exist, and it has been done in a way that will be more mindful of that society’s particular history and culture, and i simply do not want to pretend it doesn’t, i think once again i want to reassert the fact that while western history and art history is being imposed as a sort of cultural hegemony in non-western countries, rarely so the focus is given the other way which is once again a product of colonialism and imperialism.
That period was thus called, because Europe was not where the action was centered, for once. But even in Europe, the medieval period was very fascinating and interesting and there is a lot to learn and to study, but this framing of that historical period as « The Dark Ages » gives the impression of a wasteland of history, when that was far from the case. For me, medieval Europe is a bit of a ghost in history. It haunts us. There is so little that we know, because of the lack of written sources and the mystery and mystical legends that came out of these times, the history of the medieval era in Europe feels shrouded in mystery and obscurity, and I so long to learn what’s hidden behind those shadows. (Especially, when it comes to the historical basis of Arthurian Legends, I would oh so love to finally learn the truth about that).
We always love telling stories about ourselves, and even within non-fiction and more factual-based media, the way you choose to communicate these informations, to present them, is a way to control the narrative. Everyone does it, from books to documentaries, to podcasts (hello my dear friends, listen to my art history podcast IMAGINARIUM: an alternate history of art) to me in this current article. The narrative is continually evolving and moving. We constantly re-contextualize history, as well as our vision of history, to better understand ourselves, to better understand the past and our current present, where we are heading, or where we want to be heading for our futures.
History, and art history is a continual shifting of narratives, a same story can be told in manners that will give it opposite and contradictory meanings, and a single work of art can also be understood and interpreted in so many different ways, and it is naive to pretend otherwise. There is no such thing as pure objectivity, whether in art history, or in fields such as journalism or science, where this concept is being heralded as being paramount to the work being done within those disciplines. And while I think it is very important to try and be as objective as one can, there is a great danger to the myth of objectivity, because I do not think that anyone can be truly objective.
We have seen it in the field of what is considered to be objective sciences such as chemistry, biology, basically anything that has to do with S.T.E.M.. By refusing to accept that, as human beings, we simply cannot attain a state of perfect objectivism, we put ourselves at risk of falling victim to the biases that we hold. Instead, it is a better idea to interrogate the biases and prejudices that one has. So often, we hear about an A.I. that is somehow very racist and sexist, and it is not surprising that these sorts of biases go into the programs that are developed, after all, these A.I. adopt the biases of those who created them, and it is important to consider this aspect. All of this to say that it is that while it is paramount to think about these concepts critically, it is honestly irresponsible in my opinion to pretend that any of us can truly be objective. The myth of objectivity is the same as the myth of neutrality, they’re both dangerous in the way they assume a white, male heteronormative perspective as the norm and the center of all things, which is extremely damaging for everyone. This is why white people get offended when you remind them they are white, because they are simply so used to being the Default, while everyone else constantly has a qualitative term next to them.
There is simply no such thing as a common default for everyone, we all have our differences and unique experiences in life, and I think it’s paramount to simply accept that, and move forward with that reality, instead of trying to create one single unique default and neutral perspective, which will never exist. This is why I’m a huge advocate for diversity in inclusivity in all fields, whether it’s advocating for more people of color behind the scenes in Cinema, more diverse art historians (hello hi 💖 ), or simply more diverse stories being told. I do not believe that the current way representation is the focus of a lot of activism will liberate any of us. Representation is only as good as so far as it is, what is truly needed is a re-structuration of the entire system, of diversity and inclusivity at all levels and areas, and not only as characters of a movie or media, even though it is also very much a good thing.
Needless to say, that we’re truly all bringing our own biases and perspectives, and the construction of the art canon is equally biased. It hasn’t been long since the concept in itself of the canon has been challenged and put as a subject to be criticized, analyzed and understood. For a really long time, the art canon was considered to be this very static and immovable thing, this is how it is, and it’s only recently that I see people from the field truly interrogating how this art canon even came to be in the first place, and what it means for the broader field of art history.
It is due to the influence of the philosopher Immanuel Kant, that the canon is now being considered to be this entity that is set in stone. It is coming from the idea that aesthetic judgement and tastes are somehow separated from the «practical realm», so to say historical circumstances, societal influences and socialization. This way of understanding how someone can appreciate art totally ignores the actual consequences of inequalities, the disparities of access to art and media (Even though this is certainly changing with the democratization of art through the internet), the influence of power dynamics and culture. This approach to the development of taste that is strictly formal and aesthetic adopts the view that there’s an objective beauty and Good taste across the board. Which I have to say that I simply disagree with this statement.
The tastes we develop are intricately linked with the art we have seen, the art we have experienced, the general aesthetic tastes of the society, socio-economical circumstances as well as simply personal preferences. But these personal preferences are not created in a vacuum, and if we live in a world where the work of art that are deemed as the epitome of art and the talent and skills of artists are predominantly created by cis white men, well this creates a situation where it is the art of cis white men that has been historically constantly valued over all the rest. I cannot stress it enough the place of the art canon as a tool of oppression and imperialism. It legitimizes and validates the work of arts of white cis men as the exemplary model of art and it is a way of solidifying the western art in a superior position. The way the art canon is constructed is part of the colonial agenda, and it simply is not accidental that it disseminates the ideas that it does.
The art canon is a tool of power, and it is something that needs to be discussed and then deconstructed. The way art history is currently set up is in a way that constantly uplifts and amplifies white western artists voices, as well as diminishes and silences non-western artists, women and generally ignores the art of non-white people, and this is something that is inherent to the canon in itself. The simple act of deciding which artworks to legitimize, to mythologize even, creates a system that keeps perpetuating and validating the same ideas of what is art. Even if the art styles evolve and change, even if the medium and materials change, the goal of the art canon, as we know it, has always been to consolidate a certain idea of white culture. These canons of art history still are very much anchored in a very white and euro-centric perspective that still dominates the way the subject of art and art history is approached to this day.
The canon has constantly been used to exclude marginalized communities from the main conversation about art, and it is only recently, in the fifty-ish or so past years, I would say, that there seem to have been a cultural shift in terms of what kind of art is being prioritized and who is being listened to. I mean, the art coming from white men is still the one that is very much prioritized, whether we’re talking about fine arts, books, movies, or something else, but it feels like the tide is changing somehow, and people are finally being able to be heard and apply real pressure for systemic change. Once again, while I agree that representation in the field of art is paramount, this needs to be coupled with real change on a systemic level, because if we only focus on representation, it is a very shallow concept to focus on, and that will then only tokenize, alienate and capitalize on marginalized people. A person of a marginalized community achieving mainstream success does not mean anything for that community in itself, unless they in turn make efforts to wrench the doors open for other people. So there needs to be a concerted pushing and pressure for real concrete change, to ask for more than tokenized representation, and a real voice for marginalized artists of all kinds.
During the 1970s, the activists of the second wave of feminism were challenging the art world and its very male focused perspective when it comes to the artists that are exhibited in the institutions of art. The Guerilla Girls infamously created this poster that says « Do women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum » along with some of the statistics concerning the number of female artists exhibited, as well as the statistics of how many of the nudes are representations of women. This is once again a very concrete way to push back against an institution that is constantly exclusionary of women, and of people of all genders that are not cis men, and an interrogation of the canon of art, and what kind of art and artist is legitimized by the institutions of art.
The article written by Linda Nochlin in 1971 : « Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists ? » is a foundational text of the feminist approach to art history, but also of this use of the art canon as an exclusionary tool. There is a single experience that has been repeated time and time again pushed, and it is the one of the western white man, as universal. White men have the freedom of simply being considered as people, meanwhile marginalized people are often being the sole voice for their entire communities, and held to standards that are impossible to uphold. When a white man messes up, it simply reflects on him as a person. If a person from a marginalized community messes up or makes a mistake, this thus becomes a reflection of the whole community. Their mistakes become the mistake of everyone, and it is a very heavy weight to put on marginalized people, especially on artists coming from these communities.
I think it’s a debate that has been happening a lot lately, but people from marginalized groups and their art should not be representative or a voice for their entire communities. Their experiences are theirs and not necessarily relatable to everyone of that community, nor an exact perfect representation of that specific experience. I think it is incredible unfair to demand that, while white men have the opportunity of being considered simply as individual people, and that their experiences are simply theirs, and have the liberty of being complex, layered, and complicated, and create equally complex, layered and complicated art, meanwhile marginalized people are not being afforded that privilege.
So the question that Nochlin explores of «Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists ? » is incredibly crucial to this understanding of the art canon, and the thing to consider is that yes, there have been less great women artists generally in the scope of art history compared to men. But this is a byproduct of misogyny and not of capability, or incapability of women to create and create great art that is compelling and beautiful, and this applies to marginalized artists in general as well. It is also important to consider that even if certain artists from marginalized communities have known mainstream success and material achievements, history will still hardly remember them, and that the success of a few people, does not mean systemic change. They have been systematically excluded from the system of art within western society, and artists from non-western countries have also been systematically excluded from the broader narrative of art history even though they have been creating amazing art.
The framing of the art canon as a meritocracy, and not as the cultural tool that it is, ignores the fact that marginalized people have been constantly excluded from this art canon, and of the wider narrative of art history, because of racism, bigotry, misogyny, and etc. The art canon is simply a way to consolidate that system and the power it holds. The question of « Why have there been no great women artists ? » or as a matter of fact, you could insert any kind of marginalized people here, sort of brings the answer that there has been no great artists from these communities because they weren’t worthy enough, talented enough, or did not work hard enough to do so. This ignores the fact that the system is created to stop these people from succeeding and being acknowledged as great artists in the canon of art, and, that as I have mentioned, there are artists of these communities who have had succeeded in western countries. It also ignores the fundamental and inherent quality of the art canon, as it is a tool of white supremacy, used to assert a certain idea of what art should be, and what kind of art is worthwhile, and what kind of artist should be talked about. And this is why there are no [insert any kind of marginalization here] artists. Not because they weren’t talented. But because the system is not built to recognize them.
Which brings us to the fact that we simply need to be more inclusive ideas of art and art history that historically excluded people of color, queer people, disabled people and anyone who is marginalized in any kind of way. There has definitely been a cultural shift, with a renewed desire to create more diversity and inclusivity in the world of art and culture, a desire to be more inclusive, a dynamic that is somewhat new, and that I totally attribute to the changing landscape of the world of art to the new tools of mass communication and the internet. I think that we are still finding our footing when it comes to our relationship with this new tool and this new way of relating to the world. But globalism, the internet and mass media brought to us a democratization of art and art history, an almost unlimited access to art and knowledge about art in an unprecedented way, with art collections being available online, google arts and cultures, resources and the possibility of learning about art and art history that is easier than ever before in history.
This democratization of the world of art also brings a new platform for artists that doesn’t need the validation of artistic institutions to exist. Which makes it possible for everyone to find a possible audience for their art, without needing to be legitimized by the higher institutions of art. Even though the world of fine art is as elitist as ever, being an artist is no longer as exclusionary as it used to be. Social media has been a tool that’s been used by artists to be able to promote, market and share their art without the need to abide by the strict confines of the art world. There’s a lot of things we are still figuring out with social medias, a lot of negative aspects and downsides to it, but there’s no denying that it has been at least an equalizer of sort, as it provides everyone with an internet access a voice and a platform to which to display their art, especially for marginalized people who would not otherwise have this access.
I also have to specify that people of color in their respective cultures and countries will of course be part of the artistic landscape in a way that they might not have been in a western context, but the canon of art is a very western notion, that is very euro-centric and is very exclusionary. As I explained earlier, it is a tool of white supremacy, and art history as a field has been historically western centric, even though with globalism, the work of non-white people in the field of contemporary art is brought to the limelight, and the art historians bring a new and needed perspective to the way we think about art. Because as it stands, art history poses a very western gaze on all of art history, whether its own history, or the art made by non-white people and cultures. In my opinion, it is a way of looking at non-western art that is very fetishizing, and still does not hold it up at the same level of western art. Consciously, or unconsciously, the art history canon is a way of determining what is important and what is not, and with the fact that this canon includes mostly only white men…. Well, it does tell you what it needs to tell you.
Even when the world of western art was including non-white people in their arts, the way they depicted and represented them was very stereotypical, offensive in the best of times, and straight up racist and disgusting in the worst of times. These are pervasive ideas that will form the vision that will be popularized of non-white cultures, a stereotypical and artificial vision, but that will nonetheless articulate the way the Occident will comprehend these cultures, but also assert its own vision of the west on non-western cultures as well. Once again, I beg all of you to read Orientalism by Edward Said, which I think is a foundational text of the post-colonial approach to art history. The art canon is a colonial concept, and so it is with an understanding that it has to be unraveled and completely deconstructed, that we move on forward.
There have been a number of artists coming from marginalized communities to try and face the concept of the art canon, of these ideas and aesthetics that have been held up as the epitome of what good art is. Some artists will then reappropriate the aesthetic of classical western paintings in order to center themselves in the historical and artistic narrative. These aesthetics center only white people, a certain idea of what the world order should look like, and of who is permitted to be represented in this kind of way, and so a lot of contemporary artists use this canon and those visual tropes to present a new idea of what art could be, and whose voices and art can be uplifted.
It’s art so as to create a new canon of art, in which the inequalities and injustices of the past no longer exist. It is a post-colonialist angle that is taken by these artists from marginalized communities, so that they can put forth a perspective that’s been historically ignored, and to give a voice to people whose artistic output subverts the western art canon. The simple existence of this kind of art creates a dialogue between the art of the past and the art of the present, all the while using the visual language that was established by this same canon. This act of using these visual symbols is usually called « artistic reference ».
This anti-colonial point of view on the reference and artistic citations in painting and on the way racialized artists will use that iconography in a way as to appropriate the canons of traditional western classical painting. It is possible to mention the work of Yinka Shonibare, a nigerian-born british artist, with his dark skinned sculptures inspired by western classical paintings, but clothed with traditional african textiles. His works of art put this hybridity of cultures in perspective with the canon of art, as well as the notions of colonialism, taste and art. As he says himself in his biography
« Although I speak Yoruba well, I think in English and it’s rather strange, you know. You move from one way of thinking. Then you think in Yoruba: sometimes you think in English and you dream in English sometimes. It’s that kind of existence that in a way my work tries to talk about; my work is actually not about the representation of politics but the politics of representation. »
With his creative output, he truly looks to bridge the feeling of otherness that the simple fact of existing as a non-white person in a western society brings, no matter how long you have been there. The politics of representation, as he calls it, is something I have mentioned earlier, but it truly reveals itself in how this canon of art is devoid of any sort of representation for any person that deviates from the mold it looks to assert, and thus these artists will reclaim the conversation and draw themselves as part of the portrait of art history. With sculptures such as Mr & Mrs Andrews without their Heads (1998) which is a direct reference to the Thomas Gainsborough painting Mr & Mrs Andrews (1748), of these two characters, without their heads as the title would indicate, dressed in typical 18th century fashion, but using, instead of the usual fabrics, Dutch wax-print textiles with african motifs.
In doing so, Shonibare uses the visual trope of the portrait of the rich white british aristocracy of the 18th century, and by dressing them in african textiles, brings a commentary on imperialism. He contrasts this classical style of portrait by staging instead these forms that are dressed in traditional african textiles, and use the visual analogies in these classical portraits, that communicates the subjects as being of a certain social standing, and transposes them onto these sculptures dressed in traditional african textiles, which subverts the historical meaning of these portraits. It turns the concept onto its own head. My personal favorite work of Shonibare is his recreation of The Swing by Fragonard ; The Swing (after Fragonard) (2001). A sculpture based on the rococo painting of Fragonard, that is the representative work of art of the genre, in my eyes. This sculpture replicates the pose of the woman in a three dimensional form, with a dark-skinned mannequin wearing the same 18th century dress, but replicated in african textiles. It is a stunning recreation of these garments, that really is so pleasing to the eye, but most importantly brings to the mind, questions of colonialism, of who has been historically represented in this favorable light throughout western art history, and who was invisible, or negatively represented. This artwork juxtaposes these two realities and blends them. The colonial history, and the post-colonial work that is being done.
The entire artistic production of the canadian indigenous artist Kent Monkman also is a deconstruction of this art canon, and of a constant dialogue with the works of the past, especially of the classical oil paintings of the 18th and 19th century. His art output is an anti-colonial work whose goal is to center indigenous experiences in scenes visually inspired by 18th and 19th c. paintings, and also create a fictionalized universe set in these scenes, but he completely subverts the colonial gaze by making them queer, indigenous, and anti-colonial.
Monkman created a lot of art that’s amazing, and he has been exhibited in several museums, and I have been very lucky to see a lot of his work exhibited, but personally none of it was as striking as his Trilogy of Saint Thomas (2004). This collection contains Not the End of the Trail , The Fourth of March and The Impending Storm. These three paintings are huge, roughly 180cm x 240 cm, and it is simply a sight to see in person. At first glance, they would seem like a traditional landscape painted in a very classical style, it would seem almost generic. We have all seen hundreds and hundreds of landscapes of the same genre, but these ones feature queer indigenous characters as well as colonial figures, in dramatized scenes. He references not only the general style of the era, but also specific poses and paintings, such as the two characters from The Impending Storm being directly referenced from the painting The Storm by the artist Pierre-August Cot in 1880. By centering his own characters, his own indigenous perspective, Monkman shifts the narrative of these paintings by using these colonial paintings as a starting point. He uses the language of these western classical paintings, the visual language that has been employed to paint a very precise narrative of indigenous people, and asserts the colonial power over the territories of North America, and a colonization that is still ongoing. Monkman takes that visual language that we all come to understand, even unconsciously, and turns it around to create his own narrative, and begin a discussion with the past.
This is an artistic process that lets marginalized artists, and specifically racialized people, put a critical view on the past and confront, if at least on the artistic and theoretical level. Instead of having to bear the western gaze, and the narrative written by white people, as a way to assert white supremacy and further the goals of colonialism, imperialism, as well as the modern iterations of imperialism, it then becomes a way to reappropriate the visual portrayal of themselves. It is thus an opportunity to define their own identity, with their own voices and art, as to take that fake and imagined vision constructed by the western gaze, built of images from fabricated aesthetics, and create something genuine and authentic. What we can see in Monkman’s work of arts, but also in Shonibare’s work and other artists that have the same artistic process of using the art canon, is a way to interrogate and disrupt this tool that has so long been considered as the objective basis for any appreciation of art.
One of the interesting things when it comes to this sort of art, is the juxtaposition of times and perspectives. The paintings that are being reappropriated being painted during the 18th and 19th century, and these pieces of art that are being created today, there are these two conflicting timelines and two conflicting worlds that are being melded and manipulated to create art that truly interrogates the consequences of colonialism on the art that has been created, but also on the way art history and art functions as a communication device. This deconstruction of the art canon does bring us a better understanding of the role of imperialism in art, by melding these timelines and reconstructing the art canon, but also art history.
Monkman’s art practice consists in taking the visual tropes of the western canon and using them and subverting them in a way that really centers his narrative and his understanding of history. Of course, as a queer artist, his art also has a lot of focus on sexuality, gender and the constructs of masculinity, especially as an indigenous artist, but always through the understanding of colonialism and the continuous effects of imperialism on his existence as a queer artist. This post-colonial practice is a central perspective of his art, and is a way of telling a different history that has been silenced so far, but using the visual language that we all understand. It is by using artistic citation and artworks that are established in the art canon, as well as the common imaginary and a common iconography that it can make a re-contextualization of art history possible through these works of art.
This is what the art canon also does, it gives us all a visual language and a common visual ground that we all can reference and understand what it means and what it wants to convey, even if we do not analyze it but only understand it implicitly. The iconography is far from being universal, it is definitely very euro-centric, but because of a little thing called imperialism, it is something that is comprehended on a global level, because this art canon truly imposed its visual language. And it’s by using these common tropes and this common visual understanding that we all have, that these artists, such as Monkman, can efficiently and immediately communicate what they mean, and subvert the original works of art and turn a colonial tool into a post-colonial analysis.
The gaze, as overdone as it might seem a concept when it comes to talking about art and media, is still, in my opinion, a core tenet of the understanding of art. What, or more specifically most of the time, who is the art representing. But also who is doing the looking. It is extremely paramount, when it comes to the understanding of how a work of art is created, and then received, to see who is being seen. It’s important who has the voice, and, essentially, the power, when it comes to art. For too long, white people and western art institutions held the sway on the conversation around art, and the control in the way non-white people were represented in works of art, if they were visible at all.
The essays of the art historian John Berger Ways of Seeing is a good starting point, in my opinion, of a deeper comprehension in the way we see art, and how it influences the way we will create and understand that art. The perspective from which we look at something influences how we see it and how we understand it. The art of looking at something and how we perceive it, all of us have a specific gaze that we put upon the media that we consume and create. There’s a reason so much has been written about the male gaze in regards to art created by men and the way they represent women. In the same vein, I think there’s unmistakably a western or white gaze that is being put upon non-white people, their art, and also the way they are being represented in medias. Understanding this concept is thus extremely important when it comes to truly understanding the deconstruction of the art canon by non-white contemporary artists, from people who were always being seen and depicted, to artists who are now actively looking back.
When it comes to works of art that actively use the art canon as a basis for their reflections on art, a lot of women from the MENASA communities use these visuals tropes in their work. Contemporary artists, such as Lalla Essaydi and Zoulikha Bouabdellah, to mention only a few of them, try to confront in their artistic production themes of colonialism, representation and gender. It then becomes a way to face the colonial past and to reconstruct their own identity, with the use of an art practice that opens a dialogue with these artworks of the imperial past. To take these images that were used to impose a western perspective of their own identity and history, and use the specific tropes of orientalist art is a way to discuss and subvert those ideas. By doing this, these artists bring back the focus on their own perspectives and own history, and the artists from the MENASA communities reappropriate the canons and visuals of the western orientalist paintings of the 19th century, and re-contextualizes their own identity with the colonialism they endured.
Orientalism, the art movement, is a genre of painting from the 19th century that was created by western painters, mostly french painters, of the vague and exotic Orient. You can think of the works of western artists such as Eugène Delacroix and his famous painting Women of Algiers in their apartment in 1834, along with more than 80 oriental inspired paintings, as well as Benjamin Constant or Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, to name only a few of them. These french artists represent in their art an imagined and romanticized vision of the Orient, a vision that is still pervasive and influential to this day on the way people will comprehend and imagine these cultures. Some of these artists will paint these landscapes and scenes, only from the descriptions of travels and travelogues and will never even set foot in the actual place they’re depicting, which solidifies the fact that these paintings are works of fiction more than a faithful representation of what truly are these places and people. Orientalist paintings are truly about the fabricated vision and representation of the Other.
When it comes to the notion of orientalism, this time around, it is a concept developed by the theorist Edward Said and is truly essential to the understanding of post-colonialism in art history. Said posits that the western identity will construct and express itself in opposition to the Other, in this case : The ~ Orient ~. The west truly builds its own culture and character, not based on what it is, but on what it is not. And so, it is constantly in a (very violent if you ask me) dialogue with non-western cultures as well as the ever shifting concept of whiteness. But the Orient that the west talks about truly only exists in the western mind, created from an amalgam of non-western cultures, from North Africa to the Middle-East, India and East-Asia.
Lalla Essaydi is a north-african artist whose artistic output and body of work also lies in a deconstruction of these western perspectives on North Africa and the arab world. With the use of photography, she reinvents the stereotypes and visual tropes associated with arab and north african culture as a way to rethink this identity from a point of view that is not white nor western. The artistic reference of western orientalist paintings becomes an essential part of her art, and so is that constant dialogue with the past, with these canons of western art that are still so anchored in the popular consciousness when we think of art and they contribute heavily to the propagation and harmful effects of these particular clichés.
It is thus in this same idea that Lalla Essaydi will play with in her artworks, she is an artist who uses and overthrows this orientalist imagery of the 19th century in order to reappropriate these aesthetics and visuals that were once used to assert a very colonialist, fetishizing and demeaning gaze on the north african woman. She will depict the image of the north african woman that will not be the one in popular consciousness, the western imagery of north african women, that was looking at them in a very fetishizing and stealthy way, but that did not give them their own voices. These women were depicted by white western men, in a context often of colonization, which really brings again here the concept of gaze, it was white western men looking at the north african woman. The languid and exotic woman that is being looked at stealthily and covertly. But this gaze is violent and there are layers of both sexism, racism and otheri-sm in this look that is being put upon these women. These women are being seen, often against their consent, and are depicted in a way that does not represent reality. These are the stereotypes that are still very much overwhelming our imagination of the arab woman. It is the orientalist vision that has been privileged for so long in the western art world.
Essaydi chooses to use the archetypes that are so prevalent in these orientalist paintings and the vision that has been established of the arab woman and of the « oriental » world by western painters of the 19th century. Her series of photographs artwork, such as The women of Morocco will often stage moroccan women in poses that will be very reminiscent of orientalist paintings of 19th century, but instead of presenting these characters as a faraway and exotic vision, she will put them in the forefront and ground them in reality. These are a sharp contrast between the real woman and the imagined fictionalized version of her. Essaydi’s artworks will often be covered in arabic calligraphy written in henna, a reference to the traditional north african arts.
The photography of La Sultana (2008) for example, will directly visually reference the orientalist painting of Ferdinand Roybet titled Odalisque, a painting created in the 1870s. She also has a series called Harem Revisited where she really explores the concept of the Harem, where she subverts the violent and sexualized gaze of western men who depicted these women as something to be furtively seen, in a space that is so foreign to the west, so far from the european way of life that the only way they could comprehend it was in a fetishizing way, that both excited and aroused them, and yet gave them the freedom to still condemn them. And once again, I have to repeat that this whole story that was being fabricated about The Orient, is fake. Simply stories that the west was telling itself, in order to construct its own identity.
The work of Shonibare, Monkman and Essaydi, but also of many artists who come from racialized and marginalized communities, can be considered as a rewriting of the history of art, and of the context in which that history has been written. Their body of work can be taken as an affirmation of their own identity within the world of art and their places within the bigger canon of art history. It is a revisionist work that uses the artistic references of classical works of art, that are ingrained in the common imaginary, but also the understanding of what art history is, to start a dialogue between the colonial past and the present that is working toward a post-colonial reality. I will say that I do not think that we are currently in a post-colonial present, there’s still a lot of damages to be undone, and a reshaping of the entire field of art history and its use as an imperialist tool. There is a desire to deconstruct the concept of representation in the world of art and see how stereotypical depictions influenced the constructing of non-white people’s identities, especially when they are living within a western society, and have to deal with the systemic racism that still inhabits the world of art, art criticism and art history.
There is still a long work of post-colonialist analysis to do to be able to really reconcile and understand the way imperialism shaped the world of art, but also the way certain kind of people are perceived and constructed, while others have been afforded the luxury to have complex and favorable representations. Once again, it is a breakdown of the way the western art canon interacts with the contemporary non-white artists that creates this dialogue, which is an important process, in my opinion of the deconstruction of the concept in itself of the art canon. In re-appropriating these artistic tropes that are prevalent in the visual language, especially in the way non-white people are presented and represented, these artists can begin to reconstruct their own identity and facing their traumatic past and hoping for a better future.
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
The canon in art history: concepts and approaches
Questioning the Canon - The Baltimore Museum of Art — Google Arts & Culture
Leiden University Master Arts and Culture Specialization: Museums and Collections Master thesis Towards an Inclusive Art Histor
Evangelizing the 'Gallery of the Future': a Critical Analysis of the Google Art Project Narrative and its Political, Cultura
Feminist Art Histories and Masculinity: Reading the Mainstream Art Museum
How to Make Art History More Inclusive
An Illustrated Guide to Linda Nochlin's “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?”
Commissioning the contemporary: museum brands, art trends and creative networks
Art History, Postcolonialism, and the Global Turn
A Kantian Theory of Art Criticism
V&A · 'Entartete Kunst': The Nazis' Inventory Of 'Degenerate Art'
Canon of art history | Glossary
Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists? by LINDA NOCHLIN
TRANSLATION AS A CREATIVE ACT: CULTURAL HYBRIDITY AS A CONCEPT IN SELECTED CONTEMPORARY ARTWORKS
'The Swing (after Fragonard)', Yinka Shonibare CBE, 2001
Kent Monkman's work fascinates. An artist of Cree origin he revisits North American historical events and western cultural rep
The Otherings of Miss Chief: Kent Monkman's Portrait of the Artist as Hunter By Roland Maurice BA, BFA A thesis submitted
Studio Ghibli; and the aesthetic of comfort and the mundane.
When it comes to animation movies, Studio Ghibli movies are still some of the long standing staples of the genre, and for a good reason. A lot has been said about these films, their thematics, their characters, their stories and the studio that made them, as well as one of their elusive and yet most well known creators : Hayao Miyazaki. I will try to focus on the ways Studio Ghibli views comfort as well the coziness in these little slower moments that fill the universe of Ghibli films. These movies are generally universally loved by the public, despite the fact that they are aimed toward a younger audience. These movies are definitely created with the goal of showing it to a public of children and families, and yet they still are very complex and layered pieces of art and animation that all audiences can appreciate. These movies also do not look down on their audiences, they do not shy away from touching upon more difficult themes such as war, loss, and fear, in a manner that’s adequate for the public it is targeting. With this article, I want to write an extension on the article I have already written on the subject of slowness in cinema and that has been asked by one of my subscribers on patreon. If you haven’t read that article yet, you can read it HERE on my blog.
The films that have been created by Studio Ghibli, are, and with reason, a cornerstone of the animated movie industry. Despite the fact that these movies are definitely intended and made for a younger audience, I think we can all agree that these particular movies can be appreciated by everyone, at any age, and that anyone can find meaning and solace within these movies. Studio Ghibli movies are truly an excellent example of filmmaking that manages to capture a slower pace in media, slowing down the action to just offer a moment to breathe. Between all of the grand adventures and events that are happening in those movies, there are always moments of slowness to be found. Of calm. Of quietness. The characters of the Ghibli universe are permitted to simply exist sometimes.
The concept of slowing down in media is one that I deeply appreciate for the way it brings depth and serenity in stories. This is a very personal point of view of course, I find the modern pace of capitalist life deeply alienating at times, and sometimes I think we just need a moment to slow down and enjoy simply being. Doing nothing is a very anti-capitalist thing, in my opinion, and I greatly appreciate seeing this concept in books and movies. While being productive is always a nice feeling, and god knows I always enjoy being busy and having things to do, it is always in these moments where I feel submerged by everything I have to do that I yearn for some peace and quiet. While it is not always possible to have this, it is always possible for me to simply … start a movie, and try to escape a bit the weight of the world.
I personally think having these moments to be able to just breathe and be truly enriches a movie. Those moments of simple mundanity and ordinariness ground the story in reality even when the story is about a wizard living in a moving castle. Studio Ghibli movies are the epitome of films that can focus on fantasy and the imaginary and telling incredibly original stories, while also including this measure of the mundane, the routine and the ordinary in between the louder and more action-packed parts of the film. This way of constructing these films, makes it so that the universe feels more lived-in, real and comforting, the characters feel more grounded and rooted in reality.
Studio Ghibli: a brief history
Even though Hayao Miyazaki started working as an animator in the 1960s, working in TOEI animation and learning the tricks of the trade, it is only later in 1985 that he established Studio Ghibli as we now know it, with the partnership of Isao Takahata and Toshio Suzuki. It is with that previous working experience that he got to truly construct an identity as the type of animator he wanted to become, and the type of movies he wanted to produce. Before Ghibli, Miyazaki got involved with different animation projects such as Heidi (1974) , and Anne of Green Gables (1979) and a project that would never see the day : Pippi Longstocking. This project is quite interesting in how it simply … never got made, its a bit like a lost part of history, a what-if. Despite the fact that Hayao Miyazaki had drawn a lot of concept arts as well as storyboards for this project, they never got the green light from the swedish author Astrid Lindgren.
Nonetheless, it is obvious how all of these projects forecast how Miyazaki and his business partner Isao Takahata will more often than not try to center young girls as the main protagonists of their movies. A trend that will continue on for the most of their careers to this day. They will continue to focus on young girls and women as the main characters of the stories they are telling in such a complex and intricate way, all of their female characters are different from each other, with their own complicated inner lives, dreams and goals. It seems like such a basic requirement to request from our media, and yet even now, it is still not something that… will be guaranteed in the stories we consume. It is not to say that ghibli’s portrayals of women is perfect, but I do appreciate their very complex heroines and their adventures.
I will not try to pretend that I can totally understand the type of person that Miyazaki is, he’s a complicated figure at the helm of Studio Ghibli, the man behind the curtain. He is definitely a hardworking and self-critical person, but also deeply critical of others as well, wanting to set up very high standards of work that can be extremely difficult to achieve in a very high pressure environment. Thus is the complex personality of Miyazaki. I do not want to pretend he is a perfect man, and I do think some of his choices are things i don't quite agree with. There are some very valid and legitimate criticisms to be made about him, some by the closest people he works with as well as his own sons, especially Goro Miyazaki, who say that his father was always very distant, working long hours even by the era’s standards, and whose heart was obviously more into his work than his home life. Hayao Miyazaki valued work and putting in the time and effort into his art and job, pushing for very unhealthy job practices and work culture.
He is far from perfect, and seek perfection in his work, both from himself and the people he works with. There’s a lot to be said on that aspect, and yet I still very much think that he is that he is still a very fascinating person to reckon with, someone who brought very important and beautiful stories and revolutionized the world of animation in a really significant way. The universes he created are some I keep coming back to times and times again. I also highly recommend the documentary A Kingdom of Dreams and Madness (2013) if you have not seen it, as to have a glimpse of the way this animation studio functions on a daily basis. I find it always so very inspiring personally, each time I watch this documentary, I feel hugely motivated to create and to make something, no matter how small. Sometimes, it is simple about the sheer act of creating something, of spending some time away on the roof, looking at the skies while a cat is sleeping next to you.
His involvement with the Union during his early animator years left him with a leftist tendency that will continue on during his career and seep through the themes of his movies.From the very firmly anti-war stances to the pro-environmentalist and anti-capitalist and anti-consumerist themes, Ghibli movies are a proof that you can tackle these subject matters in a very conscientious way even in children’s media. It can be seen in the movie Grave of the Fireflies (1988), a heart-wrenching movie about two children trying to survive the last months of World War II. Even though Isao Takahata, who directed this movie, says the movie was not made out to be an anti-war movie, this stance is still very much woven in the very fabric of the movie, from its beginning to its ending.
This specific theme is very important here in terms of the experience of the mundane and the ordinary in Ghibli movies. Even within the most devastating of events, smaller moments of slowness can be found, and appreciated. Quiet moments of peace that feel even more poignant in the midst of struggle. Despite everything, I think we have all come to the conclusion that even when world-shattering events are happening, life truly must go on. And it does find a way to go on, and it feels mind-boggling that we all have to do our groceries, cook dinner, wash our laundry while terrible events keep happening, and yet, these mundane moments still occur. It is still possible to find a moment of respite and peace in the midst of uncertain times and terrible events.
But also, as Marco says it in Porco Rosso, « I’d much rather be a pig than a fascist » and I think this really does say it all.
The aesthetic of comfort
Despite being usually an animated movie set in a very obviously fantastical universe, Studio Ghibli movies tend to be very realistic in the way they portray the characters, their complexity, and also what are the real underlying conflicts. For example, in Kiki’s Delivery Service (1989) «The primary conflict isn’t about magic—it’s internal and invisible and wholly human: Kiki’s brief period of lost motivation and artist’s block. She gets it back when she wants to help Tombo, whom she loves. Simple as that. She doesn’t have to wage an epic battle to prove her worth» The stakes might seem lower in this movie compared to other stories, very mundane and ordinary, there is no war, there is no significant conflict, but I think this is what makes it so special in the end.
One of the particularities of Ghibli movies is how they deal with the notion of childhood, a notion that few animation movies have approached with such delicateness and seriousness. One of the things I really appreciate from Ghibli movies is that it does not shy away from treating children as complex beings. It does acknowledge the fact that children are also able of complexities and of understanding more than we think they do, and yet creating media that is easy for them to comprehend and appreciate, which I think is no small feat.
There is definitely also a definite focus on working class characters instead of the more “prestigious” ones in Ghibli movies, there is a desire to center normal people, whatever that means, in their stories. Most of the characters have to work for a living, earn their lives, and the value of hard work is definitely something that is highlighted in the Ghibli universe. In Kiki’s Delivery Service (1989), the baker’s wife tells the young witch that work is work no matter how small and insignificant you might think it is, and all work should be paid, and it is a truth that should be remembered.
In that movie, here is no world shattering events, no wars or massive destruction, only a young witch trying to make something out of herself, losing her will and creativity and gaining it again. That particular theme is one that resonates a lot with people on a very basic level, especially in this current day and age where so many of us are trying to monetize our creative work. So often, trying to capitalize off a hobby and enduring the bone deep dreary weight of capitalism is what will make artists lose their original inspiration and will to create, when a hobby turns into labor, and this is, at its core, the journey that Kiki went through.
As Robert Ebert told Miyazaki, during an interview with him « I told Miyazaki I love the "gratuitous motion" in his films; instead of every movement being dictated by the story, sometimes people will just sit for a moment, or they will sigh, or look in a running stream, or do something extra, not to advance the story but only to give the sense of time and place and who they are.»
And he was right, Ghibli movies have these moments where the action is not something that is strictly essential to the plot of the movie, and yet it is essential to the essence of what Ghibli movies do. Miyazaki then explained what this concept for him meant for him :
«"We have a word for that in Japanese," he said. "It's called ma. Emptiness. It's there intentionally."»
Those slow moments between the actions are thus very deliberate, they mean to slow down the story and to slow down the pace. Unlike the generally accepted school of thought in modern Hollywood cinema, where every single scene and dialogue needs to move the story forward, Miyazaki lets his story and movies breathe and exist. This way of building a story does give it an added sense of calm and soothingness, but also it gives it a sense of realism. Instead of following a strict narrative outline, this fluidity makes the story feel more real and relatable.
These quiet moments and details that might seem innocuous and useless at first glance, and maybe look like they would slow and hinder the pace of the movie in itself, are ultimately what gives it this feeling of genuineness, of sincerity. It lets the characters as well as the plot have the space to breathe, evolve and grow.
« Although these scenes may seem slow or unimportant, they give space to develop the characters and to heighten dreams or feelings the characters are having such as feelings of isolation, wonder, or anxiety. It is in these moments of stillness that the audience can contemplate with the characters and feel what the characters are feeling. These moments remind the audience the importance of stillness in such a fast paced world and highlights the beauty of a slower paced life»
Studio Ghibli movies insert those slo
wer moments in between their more faster paced and action packed scenes, but also in the midst of world-changing events such as wars, as shown in Howl’s Moving Castle (2004). This demonstrates how people still live on during those crises, even with the danger looming over their heads. This kind of media gives me hope that we can live through this, that moments of happiness and peace are still to be found even within the madness of our very fast capitalistic and hyper consumerist life.
From visibly established routines to a focus on the mundane, the daily. the ordinary, Ghibli movies will definitely bring these seemingly unimportant acts and integrate them as essential to the general experience of the movie. You see the characters inhabiting the Ghibli universe working, studying, sleeping, eating, in a way, you see them being alive. In a manner of speaking, of course, these are fictional characters in fictional universes, but it is obvious that the universe and the lives these characters lead extend beyond what we’re seeing on the screen. They have whole lives and experiences that we might not be privy to, as the audience, but it is apparent that these characters are fully formed. They are going on and about with their lives, and it is this emphasis on the ordinary that makes them appear so realistic.
Falling and getting up again. Jumping and stumbling. So often, Ghibli’s characters are not perfectly graceful beacons of dexterity and elegance, quite the opposite even, their demeanor and posture will inform the character and their place in that world, and yet it is not always perfect and flawless. Sometimes, the characters will run and stumble and trip and fall and this mundanity of being.
This representation of the realness of what it is to be a person, that sometimes we trip and stumble, that we fall and get up again and yet, we continue to walk or run. It’s also a way of defining the different characters, of imbuing them with their own personality and mannerisms and be able to distinguish them even with such small details as the way they walk and carry themselves. This is definitely not exclusive to Studio Ghibli, animation as a whole uses movement and mannerisms as an essential tenet of character, but it is still very rare to see this sort of flailing included voluntarily in the films. Since the medium that these movies are created in is two-dimensional animation, it means that every single frame had to be carefully planned and executed, before being drawn and painted frame by frame. These movements could have been easily not included in the final cut of the movie, they could have been considered superfluous to the film, and yet they were. These imperfect moments are what ultimately makes it better.
Ghibli movies do that, not only in terms of physicality and concrete elements, but also when it comes to feelings and emotions. Emotions that we all feel and experience, from the feeling of restlessness to loss and fear, to love and courage. Ghibli movies really do showcase all of these feelings that we all feel, even though in a manner that is easy to understand for all audiences.
“Only Yesterday does not hit the dramatic highs of Miyazaki’s work, but that’s partly the point. It’s less concerned with presenting a grand thesis about the nature of being human than it is navigating the heartbreaks, triumphs and regrets that make us. But it’s still comforting for a film about the relentless march of time, the title even invoking both the speed with which childhood can pass us by and how close those memories stay with us.
It’s immensely relatable in how it evokes these little tragedies: the feeling of being a fraud; of missing out’ of wondering if you’ve left your childhood self behind; idealism; dreams and all. It asks us not to mourn what might or might not have happened, but to keep those memories close, and use them to move forward. That Only Yesterday makes this feel as wondrous as a castle in the sky or a land of spirits is nothing short of miraculous, and why it ranks among Ghibli’s best.”
The act of eating is one that is heavily emphasized in Ghibli movies, one only needs to read all of the articles dedicated to the mouth-watering food that fills its universe to understand that this simple act, of eating and of preparing food, is one that is very important. Countless of people have made videos on how to recreate some of the most iconic dishes and meals of the Ghibli universe, from Howl’s Moving Castle’s tempting breakfast to Spirited Away’s feasts, both the one that Chihiro’s parents eat at the beginning of the movie and the ones served to the bathhouse’s guests, and the simple snacks that are eaten throughout the movie, from the onigiri Haku gives Chihiro or the food she shares with Lin. Ghibli movies are very well known for how pretty and appealing its food looks, and simply taking the time to showcase the act of preparing and eating food, thus slowing down the pace and creating a break during the plot of the movie. There’s a certain type of media that does put a lot of importance on the act of slowing down, taking the time to cook, such movies such as Little Forest : Summer & Autumn and Little forest : winter and spring, for example. A lot of media that’s just about not doing much and preparing some food, which somehow has a very soothing effect. The act of eating and cooking is part of the greater character narrative and storyline when it comes to Ghibli movies, but also the act of sharing a meal and of eating together.
Food, the preparing of food as well as the sharing of a meal, is a love language in itself, in my very humble opinion, taking the time to prepare all of the ingredients and then a dish for someone else or for one self is an act of care. And it is definitely one of the ways it is used in Ghibli movies, from My Neighbor Totoro (1988) in which the eldest daughter is often seen having to prepare lunch and food for her younger sister and her father, since her mother is sick and hospitalized. I will not be talking here about eldest daughter syndrome here, but it is very much a Real Thing™️. It is simply in this representation of the act of cooking, and the care she puts in it, that we can understand not only the love she has for her younger sister and father, but also the very real responsibilities that she has to shoulder as such a young age.
In every single Studio Ghibli movie, this pattern appears, someone will make food, and it will be obvious how much time, effort and love it takes to prepare this dish, or someone will simply take a break from whatever they were doing and take a bite of a small but tasty snack. Somehow, the usage of food in the Ghibli universe is central to the way the characters will experience and move through the world.
It is in these small moments of respite and calm that the characters, and by extension, us, are allowed to breathe. Moments that are quiet, where two people will share a meal and just be. I always terribly appreciate whenever a movie, or any piece of media really, simply takes the time to let the story expand and move at its own pace. Studio Ghibli movies are always ones I love to go back to whenever the world feels overwhelming and slightly unbearable. I hope that we can all have more moments of peace and quiet, that things can slow down enough for us to catch our breath.
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
Hayao Miyazaki interview | Interviews
The Magic and Artistry of Studio Ghibli's Films
The Low-Stakes Pleasure of KIKI’S DELIVERY SERVICE
Wings and Freedom, Spirit and Self: How the Filmography of Hayao Miyazaki Subverts Nation Branding and Soft Power Shadow
Miyazaki’s Magical Food: An Ode to Anime’s Best Cooking Scenes
Food in Spirited Away: Consuming with Intent
Grave of the Fireflies: The haunting relevance of Studio Ghibli's darkest film
NAPIER, Susan. Miyazakiworld : a life in art. Yale University Press, 2018.
A Tapestry of Lace and Silk : the visual aesthetic and costume design of Crimson Peak (2015)
In the dark corners of an ancient mansion, you hear the rustle of a long dress on the floor, there behind a closed door, lies some ghosts and secrets that should never be unearthed.
A woman walks in the silence.
Crimson Peak (2015) is a movie directed by Guillermo Del Toro, and is one of the most obvious mainstream examples of the gothic romance in cinema in the recent years. With a story full of ghosts, a secret, a haunted house and of visuals directly inspired by the mid-century gothic romance book covers. This movie is visually highly stylized and immersive in a way I think a lot of filmmakers and studios tend to shy away from.
While Guillermo Del Toro’s movies tend to always be very stylized and visually cohesive, Crimson Peak is truly the one, in my opinion, where the production design was at its most compelling and beautiful. To me, it’s obvious how much care and attention has been given to even the slightest of details, to create the perfect visual identity for this film. I have read once that the gothic was very decorative, as a genre. From the dark mansions, and the flowing nightgowns to the flickering lights of the candles and the creaking floors. The ~aesthetic~ is something that is very important to a gothic romance story. It’s all in the atmosphere, as well as some important elements of the story in itself, that make a gothic romance. Gothic Romance is a genre that you have to lean into, and Guillermo Del Toro perfectly understood it when it came to Crimson Peak.
Before we go more into it, i just want to warn you all that there’s probably going to be spoilers in this article. I will try my best to avoid being overly blatant about what happens in the story in itself, because that is not my focus. My focus during this article will be on the production design of the movie, the way this movie looks and has been designed, especially when it comes to the costumes and the outfits the characters wear throughout the movie. I mostly want to go deep into the visual aesthetic of this film, from the decors and visual themes to the dresses and outfits that were created for this story. I want to talk about the visual aspect of the movie and how it translates within the genre of gothic and the medium of filmmaking.
Guillermo Del Toro : the cineast
Guilerrmo del Toro is a mexican director mostly known for having a very distinct style of dark fantastical movies often featuring monsters, myths, the folklore and fairytales. His movies alternate between being made in spanish or english. His stories and movies often explore the dark side of the fantastical, of fairy tales and stories told after the dark. and yet. they have a hopeful side to them .
While a lot of his movies were successful, I do think it’s El Laberinto del fauno (2006) (Pan’s Labyrinth) that really established him as a thriving filmmaker, despite how niche a lot of his movies and stories are. Which, by the way, as a quick aside, Pan’s Labyrinth is a very formative movie to me, I watched the year it came out, when I was 11 years old, my dad brought the DVD home, thinking it was a movie for children. And well. It was not. I ended up being TERRIFIED and yet mesmerized and this was my first contact with Guillermo Del Toro as a filmmaker but it certainly wouldn’t be the last. His movies are crystallized in my memory, and they awakened in me a love of this more gothic and fairy-tale inspired horror. He's definitely a movie director that brings his unique touch to whichever work he’s doing.
The Gothic is a very prominent part of Del Toro’s work, which he calls Gothick (and is indeed a word that represents the genre that got started by Horace Walpole’s book The Castle of Otranto in 1764) and he describes the relationship he has with this genre as “a way to discover beauty in the monstrous” The protagonists of Del Toro movies often embrace the darkness that exists around them and within themselves. For Del Toro, the gothic is the “only genre that teaches [us] to understand otherness.” You can see it in the narrative of so many of his movies, which culminates in The Shape of The Water, where the monster ends up being the victim of society, and the real monster is the character of Michael Shannon, who represents the pressure of society, the norms and accepted and what can happen if you deviate from what is accepted.
The narratives of Del Toro’s movies reject authorianism in any shape or form, whether the societal authorianism or the narrative ones, and this makes for a way of storytelling that often turns around all expected tropes.His movies are, at their core, anti-fascist and, in my very humble opinion, very relevant during our current political climate on an global level. I really do not feel like I am the right person to dive deep into this subject in a small article on the visual aesthetic of one of Del Toro’s movies, but I want to recommend the thesis The Dark Fantastic of Guillermo Del Toro : Myth, Fascism, and theopolitical Imagination in Cronos, The Devil’s Backbone, and Pan’s Labyrinth by Morgaan Sinclair. That thesis is widely informative and interesting to read and will probably dive deeper in those themes that are always somewhat present in every Del Toro movie.
He loves using “typical” genre stories and making them his own. From folk tales, fairy tales, vampire stories, legends, he uses these narrative motifs as a template for his stories, but he always subverts them in one way or another, exploring the darkness within. And this is what he also did with Crimson Peak, but now with the gothic romance genre as his template. Gothic Romance is one of those genres that is very formulaic in some ways, it has very common tropes and themes that are often used. For example, the way he explores the gothic house and its entire symbolism in his early movie The Devil’s Backbone (2001).
[These old-Gothic notions insinuate themselves in the Gothick terrain of del Toro’s films. The Devil’s Backbone, a ghost story set in a remote orphanage during the Spanish Civil War, seems at first glance to be a classic Gothick romance, which, as del Toro reminds us in his commentary, focuses on the house, the domicile, as an emblem and warped container of the human self. This symbolically charged structure, he says, always conceals a “dark secret,” linked to a treasure and deep passions, “that is buried in the past and affects the people living in it.” At the center of the darkness stands “a very pure hero—a new set of eyes to explore the secret and through the purity of his heart unravel the mystery.”]
When it comes to his films, Del Toro tends to often use archetypes as a way to effectively communicate certain concepts, but more often than not, he will turn these archetypes upside down. Del Toro tends to also use a lot of symbols in his movies, weaving a tapestry of overarching themes and meaning. He gives depth to his stories by a use of various artistic and literary references, historical references. building a story that contains layers upon layers. This depth also translates to the visual aspect of his movies, as Del Toro movies tend to be carefully and precisely crafted. The aesthetic is, as one might say, on point. From the somber and fantastical creativity of Pan’s Labyrinth to the epic and vibrants colors of Pacific Rim. Crimson Peak is, to me, one of the most visually beautiful and compelling movies of Del Toro, and this is what we’re going to get into a bit later.
A ghost story:
This story starts at the end. This is a narrative device Del Toro also used with Pan’s Labyrinth, the movie starts with the final scene, and we know that something terrible is going to happen, and it just keeps the tension and stakes high during the entirety of the movie, as we keep wondering when things will take a turn for the worse.
We can see Edith Cushing (Mia Wasikowska ) wearing her white nightgown, in a scene of fog and piercing white. Her blond hair is flowing down on her shoulders, her face is pale, and her hands.
Her hands are drenched in blood.
The first sentence of the movie is then spoken : “Ghosts are real. This much I know.” This immediately sets the tone for the rest of the movie.
And then. It goes back to the beginning, when she was just a young child, at the moment her mother died, when the ghost of her mother, veiled in black lace, came to warn her, to beware of Crimson Peak…
Edith Cushing is a young woman living with her father and who dreams of becoming a writer. She keeps trying to publish her story, not a ghost story, but moreso a story with a ghost in it. “The ghost is a metaphor” she says. A metaphor for the past and for regrets and violence that still permeates a place. She then meets Thomas Sharpe (Tom Hiddleston), an english baronet without fortune, and his sister Lucille (Jessica Chastain). After the sudden (and suspicious) death of her father, she marries Thomas and follows him and his sister back to England, in their strange mansion that stands isolated in the midst of english hills, atop a source of red clay. The Sharpes are an aristocratic family with no fortune and a decrepit mansion where strange things happen, where ghosts roam.
There’s also a social commentary here on the changing social norms and social classes. While the Sharpes are an aristocratic family, owning land and a title, they are not rich. Their clothes are good quality, made from good materials and hand crafted, but they are also old and not of the current fashion. They are in a very strange place socially, being higher up on the social class and yet, being broke and trying to figure out how to get money to take care of their crumbling estate.
Ghosts are real, we need to remember, and are a reminder of what has been forgotten and what has died. The past is still lingering on in the present, and violence of the past will not go unpunished. The ghosts of Crimson Peak are terrifying. I do not want to say much about them, because it would reveal too much about the plot and the story, but I want to talk about them in terms of visual design. The ghosts of Crimson Peak are terrifying, they are skeleton-like, and red. Vibrant red. They are nothing like I have ever seen before in terms of ghosts, and this is yet another way Crimson Peak sets itself apart from other movies.
Lucille says something at the end of the movie, and I will not say anything about the plot, so fear not for spoilers, she says “but the horror… the horror was for love” and I do think it says so much about the movie and about the genre. Gothic romance is not really a love story, but it’s not strictly a horror story either. It’s a blend of love and horror. And sometimes… the horror, the horror will be for the sake of love.
The building of a haunted house
Production design, when it comes to movies, relates to everything that has to do with the visual identity of the movie. The look and the stylistic choices that are made to make the movie look the way it does. From the costumes, to the sets, to the decor, and all the small details, production design is one of the most important parts of constructing a movie. It’s those elements that make out how the movie will look and what it will communicate to its audience.
The production designer works on all the aspects that pertains to the visuals of the movies, along with the director of photography. They manage everything from the costume, the sets and the decor. And they work closely with the director to craft the visual identity of the movie. Guillermo Del Toro always draws from a very vast range of thematic and visual inspirations when it comes to his movies : from gothic architecture, symbolist art, the surrealists, but also more popular inspirations such as comic books and even video games. So many of these elements are brought and matched to visually create a layered look to the film.
The visual storytelling, the ambiance, the atmosphere, all of these elements are a huge part of what makes Crimson Peak truly interesting. The visuals of the movies were not an afterthought to the script, but were an integral part of how the movie was constructed. Under the directives of Guilermo Del Toro, Thomas E. Sanders [Dracula (1992) ; Braveheart (1995)] constructed an intricate and vibrant appearance for Crimson Peak, which I think is one of the most memorable components of the film.
This movie takes the canons of gothic horror and gothic romance and embraces them, whether it is narratively speaking or visually speaking. I always love a story that leans heavily into its genre and its tropes and convention, only to make use of them in a different and new way. I can mention The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (2015) as another movie who embraces its genre, here the corny 1960s inspired spy movie, and just GOES WITH IT. I do so much appreciate when any type of storyteller and artist fully work within the genre and then try to expand the boundaries of that specific genre, all the while trying to create a work that is definitely recognizable as a certain genre.
As I said, the visuals are obviously very much inspired by the canons of gothic romance, whether it's the illustrations that were in the book of the 19th century, as well as all the historical inspirations from the late 19th century in which the movie is set. There’s also the obvious references to the book covers of the gothic paperbacks of the mid 20th century, with their jewel tones, and their heroines escaping a dark and looming manor behind them. Or sometimes, she is exploring the dark winding corridors, with only the help of a few candles lighting her way.
There’s this dichotomy that sometimes occurs when it comes to movies, of style over substance or vice versa. Which to me is a moot and useless point, because style is a form of storytelling as well. The way you construct the visuals of the movies, the decors and the costumes, and the way the film is shot, all of this is a way of telling a story and is as essential to a good movie. Even a movie that doesn’t put the emphasis on “style” also makes a visual choice. Not focusing on the visual elements such as the costumes, or the decor, is also a stylistic choice in itself. Even if the choice is to make the movie devoid of any outlandish visual assets. Taking these decisions are what ultimately make the movie be the way it is visually. A film is a visual form of storytelling,
When it comes to the sets, the movie is set mostly in two diametrically opposed houses, the airy and light house of the Cushings in Buffalo, homey and comfortable, and the cold gothic estate of the Sharpes : Allerdale Hall. Where the house in Bufallo was full of light and a warm color palette, Allerdale Hall is the opposite. That house is the typical gothic mansion, and one of the most important elements of any good gothic romance. Imposing, dark, with twisting corridors and actually decaying above them. Visually, it’s also distinctive with the colder colors that are used when filming there. It’s the ideal setting for the gothic romance story to happen. Sanders says that the only reference that he was given by Del Toro for the design of this house was the painting House by the Railroad (1925) by Edward Hopper. This painting was the beginning of a very long and arduous process as Sanders tried to create this perfect haunted house.
The house of the Sharpes, is atop a source of red clay, hence its name. It’s decrepit, falling apart, cold. “colder inside than out” says Edith when she first enters it. The house is slowly but surely sinking in the red clay that once used to be the source of the Sharpes’ fortune. Visually, it looks as if the house was bleeding, as if the house was alive. As Sanders says during an interview with Slate :
“We felt that the clay is the blood of the earth, and it’s also the blood of the house, and that the house was a living thing that embodied the family over all those years.”
Within the genre of gothic horror and gothic romance, the house plays a very peculiar part. Whether it is haunted or not, the house is very much often an important character of the gothic story, on the same level as the heroine or the antagonist or the ghost. The spaces of Allerdale Hale are tight and menacing, the house is full of dangerous sharp angles. This is not a warm house. Del Toro said that he repeated the wooden pattern on the columns three or four times, so that it looks slightly out of focus, like something is wrong, but you cannot pinpoint what it is, exactly.
Allerdale Hall is thus the perfect setting for this gothic romance to unfold, through the sharp and twisting corridors, with the gaping hole in the ceiling through which the snow falls and covers the red crimson blood of the house.
A nightgown to explore strange corridors at night:
The main costume designer for this film was Costume Designer Kate Hawley, assisted by Cori Burchell. Even though they hadn’t worked specifically on period movies and historical movies or more fantastical movies prior to their job on Crimson Peak, I cannot help but think that they did a marvelous job when it came to the costume design for this particular movie. Hawley had previously worked on Pacific Rim with Del Toro, so she was familiar with the way he worked and envisioned things. Together, they truly created a wardrobe that was absolutely wonderful for the movie of Crimson Peak. Highly stylized. Imbued with the fashion and artistic trends of the era, without being exactly Literal to the clothing of the time. She used costume design as a vehicle to communicate ideas and moods that were intrinsical to the characters of the story.
Hawley worked closely with Del Toro to create the costumes that would be perfect to convey the personality of the characters and would help build the depth of the movie. In her interview with digital magazine JEZEBEL, she says that she definitely considers Crimson Peak to feel like an opera, a piece of music in which there’s two distinct acts, and so the costuming had to also follow those two distinct acts and those two distinct worlds that the characters inhabit. From the color scheme and mood, to the details of the historical period. But most importantly, especially for a Guillermo Del Toro movie, it was vital for Hawley to look at it thematically first. Del Toro movies are always chock full of references to art, folklore and literature, and there is no surprise that the costume design should follow the same direction.
The costumes are an important narrative device as well, the clothing a character wears reflects their personality as well as their narrative journey. It can inform on the status of the character, their place in society, it’s an effective tool of storytelling. A good costume designer will use the wardrobe of each character to say something about the character in themselves but also create a cohesive visual look for the ensemble. From the colors to the chosen fashion style and to the accessories, fashion is a silent mode of communication that we all inherently understand, even if not on a conscious level. The wardrobe of each different character is thought and designed, to fit the character but the movie as a whole.
As our queen and icon, legendary costume designer and winner of eight separate academy awards for costume design, Edith Head says : “Fashion is not the primary thing, the primary effort in motion pictures is to tell a story”. And clothing do tell a story, whether or not you think they do. This is comes back to what I was saying earlier, that sometimes, people tend to not put any sort of importance on the clothing, considering it shallow and superficial, but I would argue that it’s a very subtle way of storytelling that says more about the character in a single outfit than a whole scene of exposition ever could.
Edith’s clothes are all very modern and current to the era the movie is set in (ie. 1901) The silhouette of all the clothes she wears are very much within the fashionable silhouette of the era, with the gigantic sleeves, and the cinched waist and slightly flare-y skirt. All of the dresses she wears throughout the movie have the leg-of-mutton sleeves that were so fashionable during the late 1890s and early 1900s. The color palette of Edith’s clothes is very much within a very soft and warm-toned palette, with a lot of soft yellows, ivories, creams, mustards and golds. this very much visually set her apart from the Sharpes. Hawley says she imagined Edith as a canary in a coal mine, her vibrant yellows and gold outfits in the dark and somber walls of Allerdale Hall. Hawley and Del Toro also used a pre-raphaelite portrait of Helen of Troy by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1863) as a visual basis to work on Edith’s aesthetic.
She’s a down to earth woman who is ready to make efforts and her dresses reflect this aspect of her personality, they are comfortable and practical, while still having that air of whimsy to them. From the gigantic buttons on her honey colored dress or the beautifully eccentric belt in the shape of hands. Kate Hawley, the movie’s costume designer, says that this belt is just an upscaled version of the small mourning jewelry in which a lock of hair of a loved one who passed away can be found in. “I took these little earrings, these little ivory hands, and we scaled them up so it was almost like a mother's hands clasped around her waist”. (I so desperately want a belt like that btw, it is creepy but i still want it, if any of you happen to find one, please do contact me, thank you so very much.) She matches her hat and gloves with her ensemble, and generally, Edith, is just very visually cohesive and coherent within her own style.
During a very romantically and sensually charged scene, she wears a beautiful evening gown in ivory satin and ornamented with pearls. She enters the room dressed in this lovely dress and a long satin cape of the same color and a pleated collar, her hair delicately swept up. This is Edith’s very own dramatic moment, where she gets to dance with her romantic lead and wears an outfit that is a bit fancier than her usual fare. This dress is still within the very soft and pale color palette that represents Edith. This particular dress is visibly inspired by a painting of the italian artist Giovanni Boldini : The Black Sash (1905), which furthers the fact that this movie’s visual aesthetic is deeper than what first meets the eye. From the delicate color and stark black ribbon down her back.
Edith, though, is our ingenue heroine of the gothic romance. One of the main archetypes in the gothic romance is the innocent heroine, a young woman thrown into a situation that’s claustrophobic, scary and dangerous. In every gothic romance, there comes a moment where the heroine leaves her bed in her nightgown, it’s a very striking visual that is the mark of the way we visualize gothic romance. She holds a candle, wearing only the lightest of clothing, and goes to explore the darkness within the walls she inhabits. Her nightgown ends up being the most significant outfit of the whole movie, it truly marks her as a gothic romance heroine, while she roams the corridors at night.
«I’ve never done so many nighties and nightgowns! It’s all about running around in night dresses through long corridors. That also blended to the fabric. When Guillermo said to me, “It’s about a house that breathes,” that’s why we chose the lightest fabric, just a little thing to try and help the storytelling with the idea of the house.»
Edith’s nightgown is striking, the movement of the heavily pleated garment fills the whole screen whenever she moves, it gives her a certain elegance and follows the cohesive silhouette and color palette that was established for her thus far, with its gigantic sleeves and the soft warm and earthy colors of the dressing gown she wears over her nightgown, as she goes down the dark stairs of Allerdale Hall.
Where Edith is the innocent ingenue, Lucille is the woman hardened by life and misfortunes. She is all sharp angles and contrasts, where Edith is soft and kind, with a seamless color palette. Lucille’s outfits are stuck twenty years in the past and this is very much a narrative device and tool that’s used through the usage of dress and costume design. By showing her in these lavish but old-fashioned dresses. it serves both the purpose of showing how rich and noble the family of the Sharpes is but also, it effectively communicates how they do not have the means to actually follow the current fashionable trends. It shows that Lucille is not one to want to have something of lower quality or cheaper than she thinks her standing deserves. Lucille is a woman that is stuck in the past and is not truly living in the current times. I think that even though these details often necessitate a basic knowledge of the dress silhouettes of the late 19th century and early 20th century, this tactic still visually works because it sets Lucille apart from the rest of the world. It expresses visually how she and her brother are distanced from the world outside.
Her dresses and outfits are dramatic and striking, with the sharp silhouette of the 1880s, with the bustles. The colors of her dresses are always in deep tones, like reds, blues or black. The colors are very rich and vivid. The first dress that we see Lucille wearing is the beautiful red dress during the scene where she plays piano. A silhouette typical of the 1880s with the bustles and the very extravagant detailing. That one dress is a striking red, with a skirt that has a long train. The one very important design detailing is the back of the dress, replicating a spine of sorts in the middle of her back. Those sharp angles forebode a sense of danger that is conveyed strictly through the construction of the dress, and the arrangement of the textiles, the various shades of red fabric intertwined to create this gorgeous pattern that goes down the skirt. Her hair is swept upward and decorated with fine red jewels, and the pale complexion of Jessica Chastain only make the whole ensemble more striking.
Compared to the two other components of the main trio, Thomas Sharpe’s outfits seem much more muted and sober. His clothes, same as his sister’s, are also too old to be fashionable, but made of high quality materials. The color palettes of his clothes are very dark and deep, with touches of deep blues and greens. When you transpose him into Allerdale Hall, he fits seamlessly within the decor, meanwhile he seemed out of space and out of time in the sunny and modern decor of Buffalo.
A desire for accuracy :
Historical accuracy is always a point of contention when it comes to movies set in a particular historical setting, in this case in the early years of the 1900s. And before we go any further, is historical accuracy even That important when it comes to an effective costume design ? I honestly think historically accurate costumes are very important when it comes to setting your movie. The visual immersion and world building when your story is set in a specific time and place, like for example, in this movie, set in Buffalo, United-States, and England, during the year of 1901, depends on these important elements, such as the costume design and the decor. Especially when a movie is not tending toward the fantastical. For this reason, I really do think that having period accurate costuming, design and makeup is incredibly important when it comes to immersion and creating a visually cohesive world.
Nonetheless, to me, this part of the costume design is less important than what the costume design says about the story and the characters. As I said earlier, costume design is a very subtle but powerful narrative and visual tool to use in filmmaking. And for this reason, I personally think it’s more important for a costume to be efficient when it comes to storytelling than to try to achieve perfect accuracy. Simply put, a costume designer is not someone whose aim is to recreate historical garments perfectly (if this is your jam, I follow a bunch of creators on youtube who actually do that, using historical sewing techniques as well). Their aim is to use the clothing for a storytelling purpose.
There is this thread by fashion historian and curator Hilary Davidson on the subject of ahistorical costume design and this is what she has to say about Crimson Peak:
“Kate Hawley's designs for Crimson Peak (2015) are immersed in artistic trends of the fin-de-siecle, making costumes that embody the period's aesthetic spirit without being completely literal”
When it comes to Crimson Peak, are the costumes historically accurate. For the case of Crimson Peak, the answer is yes and no, at the same time. More than creating historically accurate costumes, Hawley wanted to create an atmosphere, with dreamy costumes that would serve a narrative purpose, and use historical sources as a guideline and inspiration Liberties will often need to be taken to complement the story and to serve the purpose of storytelling nonetheless, I do think that the more researched and accurate the costuming is, the more complex and interesting it can be . and I do think it ended up being SO SO INTERESTING.
Costume design is more than simply making historically accurate costumes, a costume designer needs to know fashion history and fashion trends, but ultimately, their job is not to recreate exact replicas of the clothing of a certain historical period. What a good costume designer has to do, is to create a wardrobe that fits the story that is being told, and fits within the general universe it's set in and gives you information on the character. What Hawley did was to respect the silhouette of the period, from the foundation garments to the outer garments, and then, when it came to the actual costumes, she could play around with the details to convey a certain mood and narrative. The underpinnings always do define the general structure and shape of a garment, and it’s one of the most important elements when someone wants to construct a historically accurate costume. Even if, like Hawley, liberties are then taken when it comes to the actual clothing, the “spirit” of the clothes is respected. From the corsets and to the petticoats and all the subsequent layers, it was important for Hawley to have all of these elements in a historical accurate way, because it would change the posture and the demeanors of the actors. It shapes the way they stand and the way they move through the different spaces.
Visually, Crimson Peak is a masterpiece of a gothic romance. From the sweeping nightgowns to the imposing and sharp gothic mansions, and the scary ghosts behind the door, Del Toro and his team have created a movie that takes everything that is wonderful about gothic romance to the highest theatrical level, and I, for one, always enjoy this visual and cinematic experience.
For the defense of slowing down: a study of slowness in cinema.
Leisure - Poem by William Henry Davies
What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.
No time to stand beneath the boughs
And stare as long as sheep or cows.
No time to see, when woods we pass,
Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass.
No time to see, in broad daylight,
Streams full of stars, like skies at night.
No time to turn at Beauty's glance,
And watch her feet, how they can dance.
No time to wait till her mouth can
Enrich that smile her eyes began.
A poor life this is if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.
For the defense of slowing down: a study of slowness in cinema.
This article is one that I have been meaning to write for a while and that is very important to me in a lot of ways, but also I feel like with the amount of people staying at home and who have had to slow down their pace of life one way or another in the past months, it just feels oddly relevant. A lot of people have been forced to ease the pace of their lives, and have had the time, maybe for the first time in years, to spend on things they couldn’t before. People who have been trying to take care of themselves in any way they can, by maybe learning how to cook or bake bread, maybe finally having the time to just take a nap and not feel any guilt because they aren’t productive.
This might be more personal than usual because I feel like I really do need to put this subject in perspective to myself first, and then in perspective to the general context and climate that is shaping our world. We live in a culture where productivity is valued more than anything, where you are expected to go above and beyond, and to run yourself to the ground in the pursuit of success, of money, of efficiency. If you don't have a side project or four, it might feel like you are a bit of a failure because don’t you know you have to take advantage of every opportunities out there to make a name for yourself ? This hustle culture that is becoming predominant everywhere, but especially in western culture, is definitely a byproduct of capitalism in a way it never have been seen before. You only have to take a look in the self-help section of a bookshop or a library to feel exhausted : The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business, or Ready for Anything: 52 Productivity Principles for Getting Things Done.
While I think being a hardworking person and trying to be productive in order to achieve your goals, there’s definitely a point where it’s too much for one person to handle, and when this constant stress of needing to be successful all the time and to always go above and beyond what is needed becomes a societal expectation placed on all of us, that’s when it becomes dangerous. There’s a certain climate that is saying that we need to be constantly productive to be valuable to the system, or else, what is the point of you existing.
And my friends. the only point is you being alive. And being content. and that’s what matters in the end.
The point isn’t to further a corporation’s agenda, the point isn't to exhaust yourself trying to play the game of a system that is designed to fail you. The point is that, maybe, someday, you wake up a bit earlier than usual, and you drink your tea in a world that is still quiet and peaceful. The point is, maybe that you feel safe, that you feel content, that you feel loved, and you have the time to just breathe.
And to just be.
Take a breath.
So most of my friends know this, but I feel like I need to share this to give my proper perspective on this subject. Before finishing my Bachelor’s degree in Art History, I had previously done two years in architectural design. It seemed like a good idea at the time, it was a creative endeavor that seemed fulfilling and yet also a smart move practically speaking. I wanted to be able to find a job after finishing university, and maybe continuing on to grad school to eventually become an architect. That was the initial plan when I was 20 and started university. Fresh-eyed, full of hope and determination.
Those two years were a nightmare.
To sum up really quickly, I was so stressed and anxious, I ended up having constant panic attacks and breakdowns for a whole month, every single day of that month, which made me take the difficult decision to give up on that degree. I had an actual burnout before my 22nd birthday and had to take a full year off to recover from this.
I think it’s then, that I truly was hit by how dangerous fatigue and exhaustion could end up being, both mentally and physically. How, when pushed by the constant pressure to perform and to catch up to a standard that keeps rising, and to a speed that keeps getting faster and faster, one is bound to crack at some point. The stress and anxiety that this puts on people can easily get to be too much to handle. That year off, being forced to slow down, to reconnect with myself and with who I am and with what I wanted from life really was one of the most beneficial things to me and I just wanted to give a bit of my story to make you understand where I am personally coming from, when it comes to slowing down, and to slowing the pace of life. Unfortunately, most of us have a story that resembles this in some way shape or form. I know I was incredibly lucky to be able to take that year off, and it's a privilege many of us might not be able to have.
So this is why I think i can say, that for a lot of us, we are just tired. We are so tired. I know I am exhausted. Life can just be so tiring, there’s this really fine line between being productive and having an active life and being run to the ground. It’s a fine line that a lot of us thread, and it can get overwhelming very easily. Indeed, «life has become fast-paced, as people try to live up to these expectations. Yet, while many people might be materially affluent, their quality of life and work-life balance are often unsatisfactory, and potentially lead to stress and burnout (Schor, 1998).» I feel that especially for the current modern life experience, a lot of us can relate to that, in ways it may not have been felt before in previous generations. Time has always been precious, but it just feels like there’s never enough hours in the day to be able to finish all the things you want to do.
The luxury of time. Time to do nothing.
It might seem that we have more time, but «that free time is used to cram more activities into the day and to travel further to work». Which means that we are all trying to manage to do everything at once, whether it’s working, and trying to continue learning, and needing to keep yourself in shape, and to keep your space clean, and also needing to keep a social life, and sleeping well, and etc and etc. It feels like you always have to do this and that and the list of expectations and goals to meet is never ending and constantly adding up. Indeed, «it is not just free time that people desire, but more time for meaningful things». You are just one person, and there’s only so much one can do before it gets to be too overwhelming. And in those moments, I think it’s important to just. Take a deep breath and Slow down.
We need rest. we need fulfillment. I think there’s a lot of disenchantment toward modern life, by the dream that have been sold to us since we were young. Just work harder and you’ll make it. Work more hours, do more things, put yourself out there, run yourself ragged to the ground and then you will finally get what you deserve (money ! fame ! success ! love ! Family ! Friends! ) and yet all we have is exhaustion and stress and anxiety and pain. I think this whole context has made it so that there’s a resurgence lately of an appreciation for slower media, whether we are talking about movies, books or something else.
I think it can be really interesting to mention the newest Animal Crossing game (Animal Crossing : New Horizons) that has been played by a lot of people since its release, which has been considered like «the video game equivalent of a relaxing getaway — and we could all use that kind of respite right now.» Those kind of slower paced games where you have to build your own life and take care of a city, village or, in this case, island (slow-life simulation games) let players exerce control in their island in a way they feel they might not be able to in their own live. This is a very wholesome game that players can get really engrossed into, and that can provide them with much needed relief and escapism from the troubles of real life, when things get really hard. Those type of games also need you to take things slowly, one step at a time, which I think is very interesting when we think about low-stress sources of entertainment.
«In this, the game forces you to take it one day at a time. You can bypass this by "time traveling," or setting your Switch system clock ahead of time to advance quicker than the game intends for you to, but this isn't how it's meant to be played. You're supposed to feel a sense of slow, but meaningful progression throughout the course of your island adventure, and artificial time changes take away from that»
I could also mention the growing popularity of the cottagecore aesthetic on various social platforms such as tumblr, Instagram and twitter. While being predominantly a visual and aesthetic trend, cottagecore does reflect a growing desire by younger people in their teens and early 20s to have simpler and slower life. Dreams of just living in a tiny house, with maybe a vegetable patch, and all of the time in the world to just bask in the sun. As «[a]n obvious backlash to the hustle culture embodied by Fiverr ads, cottagecore attempts to assuage burnout with a languid enjoyment of life’s mundane tasks.» This aesthetic trend then seems an answer to the growing consumerism and rapid pace of life.
This seems like an unattainable fantasy to most of us, which is why I think a lot of people have been gravitating toward those aesthetics and ways of thinking and living. «It’s a romanticised idea that we could leave behind all the stress and craziness in our lives to go live off-the-grid, where emails can’t reach us and our only task is baking bread or making jam. » I know this isn’t something that everyone longs for, but to me, this sounds like a dream and something that seems like a distant hope. I do wish I could take some time off in a small cottage or mediterranean house, maybe not forever, but maybe spend a few months with the freedom of having the time to myself and using that time the way I desire. Just so one can breathe, reconnect with oneself and have enough energy to keep moving on. «Cottagecore is the perfect escape, it’s soothing and calming but it’s also relatively attainable. Maybe we can’t all go live in a cabin in the woods, wearing nothing but flowy dresses while tending to our garden of wildflowers. But we can learn to cross stitch, we can bake bread, we can buy some watercolours, we can have a picnic in our backyard.»
I am always so anxious about so many things and the only thing I want at any given moment is to have a small house and no responsibilities greater than doing the groceries and watering the plants in my garden. I think that life has gotten very hard and difficult to handle, what with the climate crisis, the political unstableness, the economical unstableness, the rise of the alt-right, and now the whole global pandemic going on, it’s easy to understand why people would feel drawn toward comforting things : « Rebecca Jennings ties a push for coziness in branding (and trends like cottagecore) to the feeling that "things are bad, and people are anxious about whatever ongoing horrors are metabolizing in geopolitics, the environment, and capitalism." »
I want to be safe financially and fulfilled. I want to have the time and space to do the things I really want to achieve instead of giving my time away to a system that does not care about me.
I want to have the calm of heart that I have lost years ago and that I yearn to regain.
nostalgia & aesthetic
There's an aesthetic of nostalgia that is really present in a lot of slow living content and slow media. I don't think ANY of us want to go back in time where things weren’t better for any of us unless you maybe are a white straight cis man, and even then.... In my opinion, slow living and wanting to slow down is not a rejection of technology or modernity in itself, but inherently a rejection of capitalism. You do not have to be productive to be valuable, and to be deserving of happiness, of peace, of love and of dignity. You deserve all of that no matter how useful or not you are to the capitalist system. It’s not about going back to oppressive social norms, but moving forward from them.
I also feel like slow living brings a self care as deeper than the shallow superficial and capitalist self care that's being sold to us. I’m not going to deny that it feels nice to do an extensive skincare routine before sleeping, but there’s a lot to be said about a nightly ritual that makes you feel more grounded in yourself and taking care of yourself and the body you inhabit versus the gigantic capitalistic machine that is the Beauty Industry™. The same way the simple acts of taking of yourself and taking the time to slow down can be a revolutionary act of self-love, they can also be taken advantage of and capitalized on by the huge capitalist industries that use wellness, self-care and self-love as marketing tactics. In our era, it feels simply impossible now to get away from the “treat yourself” campaign. Industries have tapped into the real desire of people to live a more meaningful and happier life by making it mostly into a trend, and not an intentional change to someone’s lifestyle to make it better.
I am of the opinion that slowing down shouldn’t be a trend, but a very deliberate act taken in order to take care of ourselves, of our mental health and our physical health. I think it’s a very essential need that we have to not feel burnt-out and to not feel trapped and stifled by our own lives, and having the space and energy to pursue our dreams and desires.
(Not to say the culprit is capitalism … but the culprit is capitalism) (also not to advocate for revolution on a public platform but revolution)
What I mean by slow media, and slowness in media is that content that tends to be more of the slice of life genre. They are peaceful, quiet. Maybe nothing much happens at all, but it rings very true and very real. Those moments of calm are soothing when maybe the rest of my life really is not. The way someone relates to art and media is very personal and can vary a lot, but the escapism that this sort of stories provides and I feel that with the faster pace of life that has become the norm, it might become something that we seek more often than not.
To me, this sort of media feels like relief.
slow cinema
Cinema has long been a medium that is very efficient at communicating epic and grandiose stories. Movies that are jam packed with action and drama and heightened emotions and tension. And while those movies can be very good and entertaining, I think there’s also a place in the world of cinema for movies that are slower. In fact, there’s a distinct genre of movies where the focus is not on a very fast paced plot or extravagant action scenes and dramatic events, but where the importance is placed on the mundane. Where the slow moments of everyday life and the quiet emotions that we all feel take precedence. It’s possible to name filmmakers such as Yasujiro Ozu or Agnes Varda.
We could also talk about movies such as the Before Trilogy by Richard Linklater (Before Sunrise (1995), Before Sunset (2004), Before Midnight (2013)), where each movie spans a very short period of time and consists entirely of conversations between two people. Those movies are slow, ordinary and yet extraordinary in the sense that it’s two people who have found each other and are speaking and connecting. There’s nothing much that’s happening in those films, and yet it’s impactful.
The movies made by those directors who tend to favor slower cinema often showcases a simpler plotline, but a more complex emotional arc. They are full of slow and quiet scenes, which makes those movies soothing, calming and nostalgic.
What is slow cinema though ? in the academic sense, slow cinema is often defined as «a modern cinematic production trend that emphasizes slowness and duration of time» Even though there’s a lot of more contemporary cinematic examples of slow cinema in more experimental movies such as directors Abbas Kiarostami or Tsai Ming Liang whose movies are very much in line with what is slow cinema. When it comes to slow movies, «Flanagan writes that the stylistic features of ‘slow films’ are “the employment of (often extremely) long takes, de-centred and understated modes of storytelling, and a pronounced emphasis on quietude and the everyday,”» The techniques used in slow-paced movies will often communicate a romanticization of everyday life, of routine, of moments that are quiet and peaceful.
There’s a lot of emphasis put on the passage of time, whether it’s a slow drag of time, with nothing much to do, the quiet moments that punctuates our daily lives or the years passing by and the plotlines in those movies spanning years, generations and even lifetimes. I think this is one of the reason why this kind of cinema can be really relevant in our times, where we feel that time is a precious commodity that isn’t ours anymore, and where time is filled with the pressure of being constantly productive, slow cinema poses itself as the antithesis of that.
«Slow Cinema situates itself solidly within art cinema both in aesthetic and methodology: it is defined by authorship that hinges on the representation of reality. It carries with it a disposition towards the consumption of time that forces the audience to labour through and critically engage with the film itself.»
It’s possible to see that this type of cinema is something that’s very sought after lately, as proven by this letterboxd list The Absolute Beauty in Everyday’s Mundanity, which has been liked by a total of 6,092 people at the moment of writing this article (including me). Containing 209 movies that fit into what the list maker considers as being slow movies that showcase the beauty of everyday life, this list demonstrates that there’s a very definite space for movies that have a more deliberate pace and who, instead of trying to heighten the stakes and action constantly, do take the opportunity to just. Slow down.
An enchanted month.
Elizabeth Von Arnim (1866-1941) was a english author active during the early 20th century. She wrote both fictional and non-fictional books, and the ones I have read from her are very in this vein of slow living, taking the time to just sit in a garden, and let time heal you. It's from her book Enchanted April (1922), which is one of my favorite books and that I wholeheartedly recommend, that the consequent 1992 movie, released by the BBC, was adapted from.
Von Arnim made a point to give a prevalent place in her books to the spaces where one could feel at ease and free from the constraints dictated by social norms and what people might expect from you : «In the garden, Elizabeth von Arnim could think, reflect, and distance herself from the oppressions and duties of the highly rigid and strict German culture that she had adopted through her marriage to Count Henning von Arnim. In observing the varying seasons of nature in conjunction with an active pleasure in literature, she perceived the garden as a metaphor of her life in terms of the development of her soul, and in this context, she believed herself to be in "the process of becoming".» I think it’s possible to draw a parallel between the demands of life that are growing increasingly harder to handle. While Von Arnim puts is mostly in relation to the social norms that were in place during the 1920s, it’s possible to see that the desire for slowing down during the 2020s stem mostly from a tiredness of the ultra-capitalistic world we live in.
The story of Enchanted April starts during a dreary month of march. Grey. Tiring. We have all went through months like these where the responsibilities and list of things to do, and slow drag of the days gets to be unbearable. Mrs Lotty Wilkins sees an a journal advert to rent a castle in Italy for a month, and under the grey drizzling London skies. And she yearns for that moment of respite. Far from her obligations, from her nagging husband and being able to take time for herself for the first time in years.
Eventually, four immensely different women will end up in this castle in San Salvatore, Italy, for a whole month. Each of those women have a distinctive purpose in this book, but they all seem to be looking for something similar: an escape from their frantic and boring daily life, a relief from routine, from the lack of connection and intimacy that they feel. In the midst of those charmed italian gardens, you feel like they can finally take a breath, loosen up and rest.
«She moved about with quick, purposeful steps, her long thin body held up straight, her small face, so much puckered at home with effort and fear, smoothed out»
And just reading that, or watching the movie, gives me a similar respite. The sun lits all the shots, the wind blows gently in the tree leaves, and the clothes that are worn are looser, more comfortable. This movie is charming, humorous and delightful. But most of all, it’s slow paced and soothing. You have drawn out scenes where nothing much happens but the moments are peaceful and reassuring. I rewatch it every april, because while I cannot take a month off to spend it in an isolated italian castle, oh god I Yearn So Much For It.
Even though, this story is set during the 1920s, thus being a contemporary story written by Von Arnim, I cannot help but feel that this story is one that is still deeply relevant today, in the 2020s. The thoughts of the characters seems very familiar and relatable : «For Lady Caroline Dester, the process of change is longer, more involved, and more isolated. She approaches San Salvatore with a “dream of thirty restful, silent days, lying unmolested in the sun, getting her feathers smooth again, not being spoken to, not waited on, not grabbed at and monopolized, but just recovering from the fatigue, the deep and melancholy fatigue, of the too much”»
In Enchanted April, this month in Italy is a moment of quiet rest for these four women, bt also a time dedicated to oneself and to introspection. «Initially, each woman desires to be alone for long stretches of time: Mrs Fisher in her room, Lady Caroline in a chair in the top garden, and Mrs Wilkins and Mrs Arbuthnot in the gardens and hills. Each is free to reflect on her life and begin to have a clearer understanding of herself in relation to others. »
A late afternoon:
Yasujiro Ozu (1903-1963) is one of the prominent filmmakers in Japan during the first half of the XXth century. His movies had a very distinct style and technique to them that made his work really unique to himself. A lot of filmmakers tried to replicate or imitate the stylisation of his work, but there was something in Ozu’s work that was very particular to the period of cinema he lived in. He was active from the later half 1920s until his untimely passing on his birthday in 1963. This means he lived through the Second World War as well as through a time of great change and evolution in the world.
It’s possible to write a hundred pages on Yasujiro Ozu alone because there’s a lot to say about him and his movies, whether it’s about the narrative and the story he chose to portray or the techniques and stylisation that characterize what is an Ozu movie. I thought it was relevant to mention him when talking about slower movies and slower paced media, because of the impact that he had on film, especially when it comes to using the medium to tell stories of lost and quiet moments.
With the increased modernity and a rapidly changing world, Ozu’s films, such as Tokyo Story ( 1953), Late Spring (1949) and Floating Weeds (1959) tried to capture the very modern life he and his contemporary were experiencing and the way they dealt with these changes. Even though Ozu’s movies were particularly specific to a certain period and country, it’s indeed impossible to disassociate Ozu’s movies from the fact that they were made in Japan, and that Ozu went through the pre-war, war and post-war era and continuously made movies during these times.
Which means that his films do reflect a certain time in Japanese history which makes them incredibly specific and contemporary to the society he lived in. «However, I believe that the film is less about articulating the value of modernity against the challenge of tradition than observing the subtle state whereby the former unknowingly pervades the latter. In this sense, rather than the overt manifestation of free movement outside of the home, the trivial motion inside the confined domesticity are a more essential element in Ozu’s films. In other words, in Ozu, modernity exists within the everyday, a stable flow that undulates but hardly overflows.» Nonetheless, the issues and subjects tackled in those movies, such as intergenerational conflict, the difficulty that people have to catch up with a world with values that are rapidly changing, and modernity. Those problems are a universal experience, but were communicated in a unique lense through Yasujiro Ozu’s movies.
The focus of most of Ozu’s films is centered around the familial unit, and the conflicts and moments that arise between them as life moves forward. The everyday moments in a world that gets harder to navigate each day. The story of a daughter who is pressured to married, and the dilemma and conflicts between the societal expectations that people have of her, her own wants and needs and also the desire to be able to strike a balance between those two elements. I think that this, while not being necessarily being a universal experience, can still be an incredibly relatable one.
Once she gets married, she needs to move forward with her life and leaves her widowed father to live alone, which really showcases the simple and universal realities of real life. The plotlines of Ozu’s movies focus on simple and universal conflicts and problems, the stories he tells through those movies are nonetheless things that are universal and. the way he presents them are beautiful, quiet and, most importantly, real. «More broadly, Ozu’s omission of important events also speaks to his interest in the mundane, his desire to uncover the emotional nuances within small talk, daily routines, and other “boring” details of everyday life.»
There are quiet moments of silence, of rain falling while someone is folding clothes or eating. Laughter and companionships. Tears and pain and love and hurt and all of the very important emotions that compose the human experience. «the great filmmaker used to evoke a sense of melancholy and poetry in everyday existence.» which is something that truly is a balm to the soul in my own humble opinion. There’s a lot of vulnerability in this slowness, a very real sadness and emotionality that is very raw and yet mundane in its encompassing universality of the human experience.
The stylistic choices that Ozu decides to take all tend toward this one goal of showcasing the quiet movement of life, while hinting at the tumultuous feelings that people might feel, and the world around them. His movies were simple and slow but very meaningful as well. «Ozu’s films often violate the stylistic conventions of mainstream filmmaking. For example, one “rule” in classical Hollywood cinema is that every shot should clearly and obviously advance the narrative. Yet Ozu’s films frequently feature what commentators call “pillow shots” – namely, shots of landscapes, objects, or interiors that have no apparent connection to the protagonists and what they’re doing plotwise.»
His movies focus on the relationships between people and the world they inhabit, and the growing modernity, and also capitalism, of it. «As you’ll quickly come to see, Ozu is hardly a fan of modernity. In films like The Only Son, Late Spring, Late Autumn, and An Autumn Afternoon, he suggests, among other things, that economic modernization has engendered inequality, feelings of alienation, empty consumerism, and the Americanization of Japanese life.» Those feelings of alienation that we currently feel toward our own lives, our own time and our own time are very relevant for us in 2020. While I do think that those movies represent a certain time and a certain context, and you cannot talk about Yasujiro Ozu without really contextualizing both him and his work, I think it can be really relevant to today. Ozu made movies for himself and for the society he lived in but that doesn't mean that those movies can’t still be important today.
Ozu did impact international cinema, as can be seen for exemple with the movies of Wes Anderson, as seen in this visual essay that compares their body of work. both narratively and stylistically. I won’t go into more details about Anderson here, because he is one of my favorite directors and i hope to write an entire article on him soon, but i thought it was relevant to mention this. Most importantly, Yasujiro Ozu left an imprint on japanese cinema that can still be seen to this day in contemporary movies. I could mention filmmakers such as Naoko Ogigami, with movies such as Rent-a-cat (2012), Close-Knit (2017) and Kamome Diner (2006), all movies that have a decidedly slower pace and kinder vibe to them. Hayao Miyazaki and the movies Studio Ghibli produced also are an example of that slower cinema, but we’ll touch upon this a bit further down the line.
(rent-a-cat [2012] d. Naoko Ogigami)
a little world of our own
With this in mind, it’s easy to see that there’s a sub-genre of japanese cinema that really make a concerted effort at incorporating the concepts of slowness in their stories, whether it's the slower pace of the story or actual slow living principles. Those movies often address the fantasy of leaving everything behind (your work, your problems, your issues, your sadness) to go live in a small town or quitting your job to follow your dreams, or simply to feel like your time is yours again. This list on letterboxd which showcases many movies of that genre in japanese cinema (currently 157 movies on date of writing this article)
A good example of this type of stories would be the duology of the Little Forest movies, as well as the subsequent korean adaptation in 2018. These movies were both adapted originally from a manga by Daisuke Igarashi. Little Forest : Summer/Autumn (2014) and Little Forest : Winter/Spring (2015) follow the story of a young woman who leaves her busy city life to go back to her hometown and decides to live in a slower way, taking care of her vegetables and living according to the seasons. The two movies are infinitely slow, focusing on the main character cooking, resting, eating, and eventually resolving the conflict that she has with her mother. The life she lives in these secluded parts seems uneventful but happy and calm which seems all that she desires. She doesn’t need to contribute to the capitalist system of society to be deserving of being able to live in peace, and this makes her feel less alienated from the world she lives in.
Spirited away
I also don’t think it’s really possible to mention slower moments of everyday life in cinema without talking about the movies that probably were the first introduction to this for many of us. The movies of Studio Ghibli, with Hayao Miyazaki at the helm of it, are little masterpieces of animation. The movies are intended for a younger audience but can be appreciated by everyone. Studio Ghibli movies are another example of filmmaking that manages to capture this slower pace in media. Between all of the adventures and events that are happening in those movies, there are moments of slowness. Of calm. Of quietness.
As Robert Ebert told to Miyazaki, during an interview with him « I told Miyazaki I love the "gratuitous motion" in his films; instead of every movement being dictated by the story, sometimes people will just sit for a moment, or they will sigh, or look in a running stream, or do something extra, not to advance the story but only to give the sense of time and place and who they are.» Miyazaki proceeded to explain what this concept was for him «"We have a word for that in Japanese," he said. "It's called ma. Emptiness. It's there intentionally."» Those slow moments between the action are very deliberate, to slow down the story and to slow down the pace. Contrary to the generally accepted school of thought in modern Hollywood cinema, which is that every single scene needs to move the story forward, Miyazaki lets his story and movies breathe. This way of building the story gives it an added sense of calm and soothingness, but also it gives it another sense of realism. Instead of following a strict narrative outline, this fluidity makes the story feel more real and relatable.
Despite being an animated movie set in a very obviously fantastical universe, Studio Ghibli movies tend to be very realistic in the way they portray the characters, their complexity, and also what are the real underlying conflicts. For example, in Kiki’s Delivery Service (1989) «The primary conflict isn’t about magic—it’s internal and invisible and wholly human: Kiki’s brief period of lost motivation and artist’s block. She gets it back when she wants to help Tombo, whom she loves. Simple as that. She doesn’t have to wage an epic battle to prove her worth» The stakes might seem lower in this movie, very mundane and ordinary but I think this is what makes it so special.
The quiet moments and details that might seem innocuous and useless at first and slower the pace of the movie in itself, are ultimately what gives it this feeling of genuineness. It lets the characters and the plot have the space to evolve and to grow.
« Although these scenes may seem slow or unimportant, they give space to develop the characters and to heighten dreams or feelings the characters are having such as feelings of isolation, wonder, or anxiety. It is in these moments of stillness that the audience can contemplate with the characters and feel what the characters are feeling. These moments remind the audience the importance of stillness in such a fast paced world and highlights the beauty of a slower paced life»
Studio Ghibli movies insert those slower moments in between more faster paced and action packed scenes but also in the midst of world-changing events such as wars, as shown in Howl’s Moving Castle (2004). This demonstrate how people still live on during those crises, even with the danger looming over their heads. Which is something that I think can be very relevant in today’s time where the past twenty years have been increasingly more unstable and the … few months of 2020 were a Shit Show in itself, if you want my opinion. So this kind of media gives me hope that we can live through this, that moments of happiness and peace are still to be found.
A charmed life
Slower cinema is something that has existed for as long as cinema existed, but I do think that it’s a very current feeling to want to be able to slow down the pace of our lives, and be able to enjoy time in a more meaningful way. Personally, I know life has gotten ridiculously hectic for me in the past two years, and while there’s a lot I always want to be doing and I’m very happy about how my life is coming together, this doesn’t mean that sometimes, it doesn’t feel Very Overwhelming and alienating to constantly feel the need to be productive. What we can bring to the capitalist system isn’t what determine the worth and value of who we are as people. «"As speed is seemingly equated with efficiency and professionalism, however, slowness can become a way of signaling an alternative set of values or a refusal to privilege the workplace over other domains of life.”» I hope to be able to live my life on my own term and to be able to spend time on things that are important to me and feel like my time is my own.
Slow media is everywhere lately, whether it’s in cinema, books, games, but also in a more broader sense with the slow life movements, the minimalist trends, but also a general awareness of sustainability, the amount of mass production and mass consumerism in our modern world.
In order to sustain that fast pace of constant production of things, you inevitably have to sacrifice on either the quality of the product, the work conditions or on the materials in order to be able to keep up with the extremely high rhythm sustained by capitalism. It can also be compared to the fast work pace imposed on people who work on the sets of movies or video games for example. I think we all heard of the debacle with the Sonic (2020) movie as well as Cats (2019) and the pressure that was put upon the vfx artists to re-do the movie and complete it extremely fast, which brought poor working conditions on them.
Slowing down is, in my opinion, of the utmost importance for us to be able to live better, but also to be able to do better things. To have better working conditions, to be able to have a better craftsmanship, people having more time to do things and do them better instead of scrambling to constantly catch up to a production rhythm that is just simply way too fast. This ties in with the environmental aspect of slowing down, because if you take more time to make things that are of a better quality and that will last for a long time, there won’t be such a need for a constant production of those things but unfortunately that’s capitalism Babey.
a quiet respite
Ultimately, the act of slowing down and taking a stand against the fast pace imposed on us by the constraints of capitalism is a very personal one, but I think it's worth considering. And when it’s not possible to actually slow down, I hope those movies and these slower medias can give you a respite even if life isn’t giving you much of one. I do think that having the opportunity to meaningfully slow down the pace of your life, and taking the time to think, breathe, and reconnect with the more mundane parts of your life can be beneficial, especially when there’s a constant pressure to perform and to excel in this fast-paced modern life.
I just hope we can try to take care of ourselves deeply, connect with ourselves but also with each other. We need time to feel, breathe and actually live and not just beat to the drum of a corporation and of this sadistic capitalist system who will never care for you. Corporations do not want you to slow down and they want to get your money by any means necessary, which we have obviously witnessed a lot during this Global Pandemic. Which is why I think there's a real pushback against this fast pace of life and the mass consumerism, by slowing down,
On this note, i hope you appreciated the article, i hope you are taking care of yourself during those hard times and i hope the media you are consuming is something that makes you feel better, and i hope you don't put too much pressure on yourself.
please just breathe. hopefully it will be okay.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Slow Life & Slow Cinema :
Matthew Flanagan. 'Slow Cinema': Temporality and Style in Contemporary Art and Experimental Film. University of Exeter as a thesis for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English in October 2012.
ZEESTRATEN, J. Strolling to the beat of another drum: Living the ‘Slow Life’, Master’s Thesis, Lincoln University, 2008. <https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/e0c6/f533e7d8f9254eddbadc0fe6dbb7d4a5ea8c.pdf >
SCREENING BOREDOM THE HISTORY AND AESTHETICS OF SLOW CINEMA Orhan Emre Çağlayan. A Thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Film Studies University of Kent February 2014
LAVIN, Mathias. Prolonger Ozu, avec Kiarostami, Akerman, Hong Sang-Soo.
FLANAGAN, Matthew. Towards an Aesthetic of Slow in Contemporary Cinema, 16:9, 2020 <http://www.16-9.dk/2008-11/side11_inenglish.htm>
RASSOS, Effie. Everyday Narratives Reconsidering Filmic Temporality and Spectatorial Affect through the Quotidian, A Thesis Submitted in Fulfilment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy School of Media, Film and Theatre University of New South Wales August 2005
LETTERBOXD. The Absolute Beauty in Everyday’s Mundanity. Hungkat, 2020. <https://letterboxd.com/kun/list/the-absolute-beauty-in-everydays-mundanity/>
LETTERBOXD. A Slice of Japanese Life. Seraphimjc, 2020. <https://letterboxd.com/seraphimjc/list/a-slice-of-japanese-life>/
Enchanted April:
BOLLARD, Jennifer Jane. The Felicitous Space of Elizabeth von Arnim, Master’s Thesis, University of Canterbury Christchurch, New Zealand, 1995 , <https://ir.canterbury.ac.nz/bitstream/handle/10092/11887/Bollard_thesis.pdf;sequence=>
VON ARNIM, Elizabeth. Enchanted April, Waking Lion Press, 2008 (first published 1922)
YOUNG, Katie Elizabeth. More than "Wisteria and Sunshine": The Garden as a Space of Female Introspection and Identity in Elizabeth von Arnim' s The Enchanted April and Vera, Master’s Thesis. Brigham Young University, 2011. < https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4032&context=etd>
Yasujiro Ozu:
The Cinema Cartography, Yasujirō Ozu - The Depth of Simplicity, Youtube video, 2015 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2G7oeyOsfSg>
JOO, Woojeong, The flavour of tofu : Ozu, history and the representation of the everyday. PhD thesis, University of Warwick, 2011.
BETH, Suzanne. Destruction, puissance et limites du cinéma dans les films d'Ozu Yasujirô, Doctorate Thesis, Université de Montréal, 2015. <https://papyrus.bib.umontreal.ca/xmlui/bitstream/handle/1866/13600/Beth_Suzanne_2015_these.pdf?sequence=2&isAllowed=y>
EMERSON, Andrew. The Beginner’s Guide: Yasujiro Ozu, Director, The Film Inquiry, 2019
The Magic and Artistry of Studio Ghibli’s Films, The Artifice, 2017 <https://the-artifice.com/magic-artistry-studio-ghibli-films/>
JAREMKO-GREENWOLD, Anya. The Low-Stakes Pleasure of Kiki’s Delivery’s Service. on Birth, Movies, Death, 2017. <birthmoviesdeath.com/2017/07/18/the-low-stakes-pleasure-of-kikis-delivery-service>
STEY, George Andrew.. Elements of Realism in Japanese Animation, Master’s Thesis, University of Ohio, 2009. <https://etd.ohiolink.edu/!etd.send_file?accession=osu1250700496&disposition=inline>
Cottagecore:
SKELLEY, Jemima. Cottagecore Is the Soothing Online Aesthetic We All Need Right Now, The Latch, 2020. <https://thelatch.com.au/cottagecore-aesthetic/>
HAASCH, Palmer. People online are flocking to 'cottagecore,' an online aesthetic that idealizes agricultural life, to calm their hyper-stimulated nerves, The Insider, 2020. <https://www.insider.com/cottagecore-isolation-aesthetic-tumblr-explained-social-distancing-2020-4>
SLONE, Isabel. Escape Into Cottagecore, Calming Ethos for Our Febrile Moment, New York Times, 2020. < https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/10/style/cottagecore.html>
animal crossing:
VINCENT, Britanny. Find fulfillment in Animal Crossing New Horizons' slice-of-life gameplay, CNN underscored., 2020https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/30/cnn-underscored/animal-crossing-new-horizons-review/index.html
WEBSTER, Andrew. ANIMAL CROSSING: NEW HORIZONS IS A CHILL, CHARMING LIFE SIM THAT PUTS YOU IN CONTROL, The Verge, 2020. <https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/16/21179238/animal-crossing-new-horizons-review-nintendo-switch-features>
This movie is one that I constantly revisit, the beauty and softness of it is something I want to carry with me. The soft colors, the delicateness of the moments that we see, and yet a story that moves hearts. This is the sort of stories I want to be able to tell and this is why I really wanted to write about this film.
I am just going to preface this article by saying that BRIGHT STAR (2009) directed by Jane Campion is one of my all time favorite movies and that I am going to be extremely biased in this article. Now, that this is out of the way, let’s move on to the article. Bright Star is a movie about the love story between John Keats and Fanny Brawne. But ultimately, it is a story about yearning, poetry and loss, at its core, it’s a story about love. Every shot of this movie encapsulates the tenderness and kindness which drives the story and Jane Campion’s directing. This movie is a highly romanticized version of John Keats’ life that centers Fanny and John’s romantic relationship and not necessarily on Keats’ career as a future legendary poet. The angle she chose to tell this story is a very soft and kind one, that is very empathetic toward both its main characters.
I’m going to start by placing the movie in its cultural context as well as in the cinematic industry that was prevailing in 2009 and still is today. Jane Campion is one of my favorite female directors and one I would qualify as an Auteur. Unfortunately, the cinema industry being as it is, I feel like so few women have the standing in the industry as artists that a lot of men have. Not to turn this into an interlude on the inherent inequality of the cinema world at large, but it’s easy to think of male directors that have a certain aesthetic and a recognizable way of making their movies. I’m thinking of Wes Anderson, Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino, Guillermo Del Toro etc etc. For better or for worse, those cineasts are known for a certain style of works that is attributed to them . Female cineasts who get to be artists for more mainstream are very few in between, Jane Campion is one of them, but I could also name Anna Biller, Agnès Varda and Greta Gerwig. Women work at all scales of the industry and yet it feels their work is not valued enough for varied reasons. The industry doesn’t want to take A Risk (™) on a female cineast the way they do with male movie makers. The industry still has so much progress to do when it comes to centering stories made by people that aren’t straight cis white men, the films being produced for a mainstream audience are still majorly directed, produced and written by white men. You only have to see the recent award shows where the best directors nominees were all white men, despite women and people of color presenting amazing work constantly. Representation is important in what you see in the movies, non-white actors and stories featuring marginalized people, but what is also truly important as well, and I feel isn’t talked as much in the broader discourse about this subject, is how it’s important to have diversity behind the camera as well, whether it’s the director, writer, producer, crew, etc. I think we can safely say that progress was indeed made since 2009, but a female filmmaker being celebrated is still so rare to this day that i feel it’s important to remark on.
Jane Campion was still a celebrated filmmaker, despite having taken a hiatus from the film industry, and Bright Star (2009) did very well. The movie received many awards and nominations in such prestigious institutions such as Cannes or the British Independant Film Awards. Campion describes the film as more intimate than the previous ones she had made and in this regard, she is right. The way the film is shot and directed brings you closer to the characters and the story. The intimacy and the tenderness is almost overwhelming at times, she uses shots that are both very close and very near to give you a close sense of nearness and intimacy and to convey the emotions the characters are feeling, but also Campion uses a lot of very ethereal and shot. Hands brushing, butterflies flying around while one is lying on the grass, make this movie a literal visualization of soft romantic yearning.
One of the most important things to me in this movie, is how kind the narrative is toward Fanny Brawne. History hasn’t been kind to her, especially when we know that historians in general (ad im talking precisely white male cis straight historians who have been the ones to mainly write our History) have created the narrative that she was a despicable person, that she was a frivolous woman who didn't deserve to be in the vicinity of their favorite poet, simply on account of her being a woman who was more interested in clothes than rhymes and verses. and maybe she was, but on all accounts, John Keats was terribly in love with her, and she was equally in love with him. I just want to preface this by saying I would die for keats, I adoooore his poems and his writing and I have his complete works on my bedside table at this very moment.. I feel like its a very special kind of misogyny (or a very mundane one, now that I think about it) where the simple feminine presence of Fanny brawne near John Keats somehow tarnished him. The fact that she loved feminine things was a flaw that she needed to overcome for most male historians, they thought her futile and shallow, simply for the fact that she was a woman who was interested in clothes and delicate pretty things.
But more than that, she was also a skilled seamstress, she made her own clothing and was delightfully creative and hardworking, and the way Campion frames the craft of Fanny in the movie shows how valuable she thinks this skill is. Garment making is a really complex craft that requires skill and time and hardwork and to this day still isn’t valued the way it should be. So it should be no surprise that history, mostly written by male white cis historians, remembers Fanny Brawne as a vapid shallow woman who only cares about clothes. We can see that the character of Charles Brown, who will later be introduced as one close friend of Keats, is a bit of a placeholder for this sort of perspective. He constantly tries to thwart Keats and Brawne’s budding romantic relationship because he doesn’t think Keats should bother with such frivolous affairs. The movie is incredibly kind and tender in the way it showcases how craft, any craft, whether it be sewing or writing poetry, is work and a labour of love, and does not diminish the value of either to the advantage of the other.
John Keats is ofc a central part of this story. Ben Whishaw succeeds perfectly in bringing the tragic poet to life. Whishaw is perfect to play a poet who is about to die of consumption, he’s just very tragic that way. His delivery is perfect and he is the perfect casting for John Keats. (If you have the time, this reading of La belle dame sans mercI by Ben Whishaw is so delicate, beautiful and legit brings tears to my eyes ) I’m sure most of you know the story of Keats, but it’s still very tragic to think about : a poor and unsuccessful poet who died incredibly young and who never got to truly see how impactful his art would be in the future. Keats is still remembered today, but he never got the chance to enjoy the success his poetry had, years after his death. He never got to marry the woman he wanted to marry because he didn’t have the means to do it. He created beauty from his words and then died alone in Italy at just 25 years old. It never truly hit me before this year, when I did my annual rewatch of the movie, how young Keats truly was, being now 24 years old at the time of writing this article, it truly was a life that has been cut too short.
The directing of Jane Campion is very deliberate, and i think there’s a vision to this movie that is incredibly powerful and obvious. The movie’s pace is very slow, but I think sometimes we need media that just takes the time to slow down and to just enjoy the scene enfolding in front of us. I’m thinking about some scenes where you can only see Keats sitting on a chair outside. He is writing. The wind is moving through the leaves, the birds are singing in the distance, and Keats is writing. A lot of people would say that the scene is useless when it comes to moving the plot forward, and I guess i would agree, strictly speaking, that it doesn’t do much in terms of moving the plot forward, but it does set the atmosphere wonderfully. You can feel the calmness and the ethereal feeling of Keats’ poetry. Campion scatters moments like these throughout the movie, where she takes the time to slow down and get lost in the moment. It’s something that i particularly adore in media, as life constantly feels like it’s getting away from me, it reminds me to slow down and take the time to breathe.
The delicate colors of the cinematography are another aspect that I think really brings such a soft and tender dimension to the movie. The director of photography for this specific movie is Greig Fraser who also did the cinematography for such movies as Rogue One, Vice, as well Batman film starring Robert Pattinson but we aren’t talking about that atm. The colors that have been used throughout the film are very soft and soothing. Soft pinks and soft greens, as well as deep rich hues of blues and browns. There’s a haziness to this movie that very much feels like being thrown into a poem.
This wouldn't be an article written by me if there wasn't any mention of the costume design. The costume design in this movie is being taken care of by Janet Patterson, who had worked previously on other Campion’s movies (Portrait of a Lady, The Piano). The work she does here is marvelous. She manages to create such a beautiful wardrobe for each of the characters. From the colorful dresses of Fanny Brawne to the outfits of the last extra, everything is carefully thought of, and the attention to detail really stands out when you look at the clothing, from the historical research to how well the costumes fit within the realm of the BRIGHT STAR cinematic universe. John Keats’ outfits, in particular, were particularly delightful, he,s always clad in deep blues and clothes that seem worn and comfortable. Something about these darker blues just seem so melancholic compared to the rest of the costumes, especially in contrast with Fanny Brawne’s brighter dresses.
The last thing I will touch upon is the tenderness of the story in itself, despite how sadly it ends. The love story between John Keats and Fanny Brawne unfolds slowly, and then all at once. Despite all of what they go through, the love and the care they give each other is tremendous. And the times they have to be apart, you feel the yearning and longing for the other as if enveloping the scene. Having to wait for another letter, having to acknowledge that they can’t be together is heartbreaking, especially as Keats is desperately trying to do right by Fanny. They want to get married, but Keats is an unsuccessful poet who is in debt, and Fanny is from an upper middle class family and won’t be allowed to marry beneath her rank. I feel like it’s such a mundane story and yet, it feels world shattering to them, especially the last moments they share when Keats becomes ill and he has to leave for Italy to rest and try to get better, but they both know that it’s probably the last time they’ll see each other breaks me. The tenderness in each movement and each conversation they had was tinged by the heavy weight of saying goodbye one last time.
And then. The letter arrives. With the news of Keats’ death. And his fiancée cuts her hair, dons a black dress. And mourns him.
Fairytales and bedtime stories for children were always part of the general culture, especially in western society, but from the late 18th c., they steadily gained popularity until the late 19th century and beginning of the 20th century where the popularity of these stories was at an all time height. The stories were often found in small illustrated books that were read by both adults and children alike. From Perrault to Andersen, as well as various foreign tales. That era was also known as the Golden Age of Illustrations, since the wide releases of illustrated books made book illustration a very important part of popular visual culture. The late XIXth century will see a growing industry for the illustrated book. The context of the industrial revolution as well as a renewed interest for folktales and fairytales will make for a very busy era of illustrated books. The reprinting of a lot of traditional fairy tales by Andrew Lang as well the constant new editions and new fairy tale books during that specific era (1870-1920 according to most sources) will create a climate where lots of books will be published and even though, it will be mostly european tales, sometimes more foreign tales such as the 1001 nights will also be published and illustrated.
Artists like Arthur Rackham, Edmund Dulac, Aubrey Beardsley and many other will definitely impact the visual culture of the times, and still how we think about fairy tales illustrations to this day. In fact, some of the strongest visual influences behind the early Disney movies that were inspired by fairytales were indeed those illustrators. In fact, Kay Nielsen, who is one of the most well-known illustrators of the Golden Age era will become a creative director in the Disney Studio.
The particular historical context of the XIXth c. in Europe will bring a newfound fascination for the Orient (™) with the colonial empires of european countries such as France and the United Kingdom exercising their powers over countries such as Algeria, Egypt, India and many others. This era brought an interest for all things exotic and foreign. People longed to be mystified ad captured by the exoticism and romanticism of a foreign land. Of course, this all reeked of the white privilege and the western gaze but we’ll come to this. I’ll first start by explaining what is orientalist art, it’s art made specifically by white/western people incorporating stereotypical elements of what the Occident thinks the Orient looks like and pushing these pieces of art as accurate and representative of what the Orient really is. A lot of orientalist artists will never have left their countries and only make their art based on travel journals. So it’s a very biased art based on a second_, which will already a biased perspective of what the orient looks like because oh boy do white ppl in the XIXth love looking at foreign countries from the Orient™ as if it's some sort of curiosity that’s there for their entertainment. The most important element to consider to truly understand what is orientalist art, is that it’s art made by white people FOR white people. It won’t be a real representation of those countries, the culture and the people that will live in it. Orientalist art will create a truly foreign, exciting and, most importantly, imaginary idea of what the Orient is. It’s truly an invention of the West.
One of the main scholars of Orientalism and post-colonial theory is Edward Said, and what he will explain of what is Orientalism. For Said, Orientalism will be a way for the Western World to speak about the Orient from the western perspective. Orientalism will be a way to look at the Other and to truly otherize the East by putting it in contrast to the West. Said explains that the western culture will develop its own identity by putting it in opposition to what it considers foreign. Before I go further, i just want to say that what i define by the word Orient here will be the arab world as well as the entirety of the asian continent. Those old timey whites were just like oh. u look foreign… that means ur oriental 😔 what do you mean china and india are wildly different ? no same shit. So the base concept of Orient will be really vast and will mostly be used to talk about anything that is Other compared to the West. The West will define itself by showing itself as rational and normal while the East will be irrational and abhorrent, and yet. So fascinating to them.
Now that i’ve established the base concepts we will be working with, it’s time to start talking about the fairytales and the illustrations in themselves. I will talk mainly about Edmund Dulac in this article and his work within the fairytale illustration genre as well as his orientalist leanings. Also. sometimes it makes sense (even tho. its like. bro. please be better) and sometimes he puts a dude in a stereotypical turban in a the little mermaid illustration. Dulac is a french artist established in London, who will be really well known during most of his career. He illustrated books and magazines for most of his career. The main book we will talk about in this essay will be Stories from the Arabian Nights, written in 1907, and published and translated by Hodder & Sloughton. This edition will contain 50 colored illustrations as well as a pseudo arabic typography to give an exotic feel to this book and the tales it contains.
As it’s possible to notice by the first page, Dulac will create a very immersive oriental universe in this book that will bring the tales to life in a universe full of oriental aesthetics (whatever THAT means). The illustrations will be more inspired by Orientalist western paintings of what they imagined the Orient™ to be, rather than a depiction of what it truly is. And look, i’m aware that this is the 1001 nights, and since it's a phantasmagorical imaginary story, there should be no such thing as realist or not, but in the Dulac illustrations, the imaginary east will be a jumble of whatever they think the oriental looks like as well as a mish-mash of cultures that are wildly different one from another and it’s not really about a coherent imaginary universe, it’s just how the west will think of the east.
For example, one of the most well known orientalist artists will be Eugène Delacroix, who will make orientalist art wayyy before any of his travels to Morocco and Algeria, proving that it was never about accuracy, but mostly about a fictional, imaginary vision of what the East is supposed to be, especially in contrast to the west. The wild exotic East inspires, scares and fascinates western artists. It’s possible to compare one of Dulac’s illustration in this book with one of Delacroix’s most well known orientalist paintings Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartement, and you can see that the visual compositions of both art pieces will be very similar. The oriental woman is shown as languid, relaxed, the epitome of everything that the western woman isn't. (also i just want to say that i'm talking about cultural identity here and not like. the realness of daily life. Also i don't want to get into sexism and stuff RIGHT now but there’s like. for every woman involved here lol) Mostly, what i want to say is that women in the western society should be proper, civilised, polite, quiet. And this is what orientalism is about, once again, its putting the Orient™ in contrast to the West, so that the West can build its own cultural identity by comparing itself to the East.
It’s also possible to notice that the colors that will be used for these paintings and illustrations will be very rich and vibrant. The color scheme will be used to add a sense of exoticism and foreignness. The imagined East will be luxurious, wild, pleasurable, the complete opposite of a western society that will still be plagued by very strict sociological rules. This imagined freedom and temptation of sins will fascinate the western viewer.
Dulac will use mostly watercolors for his illustrations, this will help him create a very soft yet fantastical atmosphere to his illustrations. It will help him communicate the exoticism of the settings in which the tales will take place in. His illustrations will accompany tales and stories that have an oriental origin, and yet published and tailored to a western audience. So the visuals of this story will be created specifically to cater to a western public and that’s where the orientalism and the post-colonial perspective of these illustrations will start being in play. You can’t ignore the relations of power between the colonized and the colonizer. More than simply a curious look upon the east, the west will look at the East with a colonial gaze. The illustrations will indeed appropriate and incorporate elements of oriental art, but it will only be a reflexion of western society.
As you can see, in the following illustrations, more than wanting to represent the East, Dulac wants to give his illustrations an oriental flavors with elements that reminds of what people think the orient looks like. The influences will be arabic, indian, chinese, etc, and it will all be creating the Oriental universe of this fairytale book.
The postcolonial approach is very interesting and important in this case, because it will help the voices of the marginalized people who didn’t have a say in the visual representation of their own identity to reappropriate it. Those images, even if they do depict the Orient, won’t belong to the Orient. It belongs to the West.
The thing with those illustrations is that they are gorgeous. They truly are. Dulac was known as one of the best illustrators of the Golden Age and he really was, (tbh that era was amazingly full of talented and inspiring artists, some that are remembered today, and other who were forgotten but GOD THE SHEER TALENT) Those illustrations truly are of their times with their desire to showcase the Orient without having to face to colonial trauma they inflicted on these people or the reality of what those countries are. This specific book of Edmund Dulac and Housman is an interesting mix between two genres of art that were very predominant in the late XIXth century aka Orientalist Art as well as the typical book illustrations prints.
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