|
text transcribed by WM
-
For more than twenty-five years, Ellen Von Unwerth has celebrated movies through her fashion
photography. Her photographs are generally straightforward, without special effects of the
allusion to a more complicated narrative; she simply uses characters from noted films as the
protagonists of her fashion essays, such as the piece for the October 1990 issue of Vogue
(available here, wm) in which models are used to
reincarnate Jean Seberg and Jean-Paul Belmondo in Jean-Luc Godard's New Wave counterculture
film Breathless (1959). Von Unwerth's fashion essay concentrates on the breezy life of
the doomed lovers as they tool around Paris riding a motor scooter, smoke at cafés, and
snuggle in bed. Von Unwerth exploits readers' identification with the characters in the film,
especially the generation that came of age in the 1960s, when European culture and bohemian
antiestablishment lifestyle were the vogue. More specifically, the New Wave French films
radically changed the way movies were made. They were consonant with the disjunctive and
nonlinear literature of the time. Their off-beat characters (often based on American
movie gangsters) and the details of their behavior and dress helped create an identity for
members of the American couterculture.
The photographs that Von Unwerth made for Alberta Ferretti in 1995 (below, wm) depict a
modified version of Hollywood's classic blonde starlet, tracked by an omnipresent photographer
as she goes about ordinary activities. The series draws us into several layers of popular
culture, beginning, of course, with the starlet, a type familiar to us through fan magazines
and films. As in Cindy Sherman's Untitled Film Stills, she is a character on whom we
project countless associations we have learned through movies. In this case, we cannot help
but immediately identify her with the tragic life of Marilyn Monroe--the star as victim,
even if it is a cliché. We are voyeurs, "seeing" the "starlet" in her "private" life, as
she might be photographed by paparazzi, or by a photographer commissioned to follow the
actress through a day, perhaps while on a press junket for a new film. There are similar views
within Sherman's Untitled Film Stills series. Von Unwerth's use of black-and-white film
also evokes the Sherman series and real film stills, and the gestures of the "actress" refers
to the clichés reserved for such photo-essays, and Sherman's stills. As Don DeLillo recently
wrote in an essay on the lingering effect of films: "Movies can shape a layer of memory,
leading us into a shared past, sometimes false, dreamlike, childlike, but a past that we've all
agreed to inhabit."
|
