The French filmmaker Bertrand Bonello is famed for being a key figure in the cinematographic avant-garde. His movies, including The Pornographer (2001), On War (2008), Tiresia (2003), and his homage to Cindy Sherman in 2005, have been fundamental
Organised around a regular pattern: in this column each interviewee picks the picture that illustrates their interview, answers six questions that are the same for all contributors and then two more that are designed specifically for them.
The French filmmaker Bertrand Bonello is famed for being a key figure in the cinematographic avant-garde. His movies, including The Pornographer (2001), On War (2008), Tiresia (2003), and his homage to Cindy Sherman in 2005, have been fundamental in the elaboration of what James Quandt, in an article for Artforum, called the 'New French Extremity'. Lesser-known is Bonello's interest in fashion and conversations with fashion designers, although these are visible in the design of his films. He has just finished shooting his next film, L’Apollonide.
How would you connect fashion to elegance?
Some people can be very fashionable without being elegant, others can be very elegant without being fashionable. Elegance means attitude and style, whereas fashion relies on elaborate, well-thought conceptions; at some point, someone takes a sheet of paper and a pen and starts to draw. Elegance is something you don’t think about; if you do, you’re not that elegant. But of course, I do think that fashion takes inspiration from elegance.
What is the role of history and art history in your conception of fashion?
Fashion constructs its own history, we can date a drawing, or a particular cut. For instance, it is easy to see that, throughout the history of women’s wear, the moment when someone decided to lift a skirt represents a momentum. The fact of being able to date a drawing constructs a history that is part of history as a whole. What is beautiful in fashion, and can be seen in its history, is the combination of depth and lightness. Lightness, in so far as people often notice how it is designed to look pretty. And depth, because such a comment doesn’t really give a fair account of what is happening in a dress. There is always something more, it always echoes something else, which, amongst the most talented designers, has to do with intuition.
Would you describe fashion as a language and a discourse, as Barthes did it?
A language, yes. The discourse is elaborated by the people who circulate around fashion itself. I don’t really believe that designers have a discourse —I believe in the ability of a designer to find the right cut at the right time. Of course, I find it relevant to define a discourse based on that; it's nonsense to insist on fashion’s so-called 'superficiality'.
The word "intellectual" was coined in a time of great political distress. Does fashion have a political role? And in which way?
I took the example of women’s wear, because it is clear and simple. I think that we have to do things politically instead of doing things political. It belongs to a designer to do fashion politically; it doesn’t mean that he has to do things that immediately find a political echo, but it does mean that, in a cut, in a drawing, lies an artistic and political gesture.
Would you relate the idea of "fashion" to the one of "style"?
To speak from an example, I have seen enough of Nicolas Ghesquière’s collections to be able to identify the way he designs waists; I can recognise his style. I find him incredibly daring, while remaining faithful to a certain form of classicism. Some time ago, I wanted to work on a reinterpretation of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, and I thought I would ask him to design the dresses. His shows have an unbelievable, obvious beauty. It also speaks to me that he has such a strong relation to cinema — I remember his cuts inspired by the German filmmaker Dreyer.
What does fashion have to do with intellectuality ?
I think that there has always been an appeal amongst the intellectuals for superficiality, and the fact of saying that it isn’t that superficial, that, behind, it echoes something deeper, a certain melancholy. I understand how they can relate to fashion, to the fact that it isn’t only about being pretty and looking good. What’s more, I really have the feeling that we should make a difference between designers and the fashion world. What can be painful, and not intellectual, is the social sphere, whereas the designer, the person who has a vision, expresses it through a real gesture, that can be appreciated and analysed by the intellectuals.
There is a general feeling that fashion is being more and more invaded by influences from other fields, including filmmaking. At the same time, it sometimes seems that cinema is nurtured by fashion. How do you stand towards this tension ?
We have to make a clear difference, in cinema, between fashion and clothes: it is unbelievable how much certain clothes can define a film. There are many examples of that: Charlie Chaplin’s character exists because of his costume; in Gus van Sant’s Elephant, the guy wears a yellow T-shirt, and the character is found. When a spectator, fifty years later, sees these clothes, he is immediately reminded of a particular film. As far as 'pure fashion' is concerned, the situation is completely different; there is the idea of dates, that I find quite interesting. An actress is dressed by Yves Saint Laurent, she wears a dress from the collection he did in 1976, and she fixes the film, because we know that it dates from that year. It’s not a pair of jeans that could have been worn ten years earlier or later, it is a dress from that particular year. Then, there are more obvious associations, when a designer is asked to design costumes specifically for a film: in that case, it doesn’t always work. Even when the designer is Jean-Paul Gaultier, one often wonders: why does it work on a runway, and not behind a camera? When I thought of Nicolas Ghesquière for a reinterpretation of Vertigo, what interested me was that we could have looked at the dresses from 1958 and figured out how we could reinvent them fifty years later. It would have been a contemporary translation of this problem of dates.
In many of your movies, from The Pornographer (2001) to On War (2008), you pursue an attempt to redefine nudity. How is the dialectic between clothes and nudity performed in a movie ?
When an actor has found his costume, he can say that he has found a very important part of the character he has to perform. Finding the perfect line for a body is cinematographically much more difficult than revealing it in its nakedness. Nakedness has more to do with working on light and the lens, which are going to be like clothes for the actor, whereas finding a costume, a style, has an impact on the way actors behave and will perform. I’ve just finished a costume film, and one of my obsessions was to find heavy costumes, so that, even if my actors were going to boil, they would have several fabrics on them. At the very moment when they raise an arm, it has to happen progressively, not all at once. For the sake of the actor’s performance, we have to feel that the body is weighed down by the fabric.
In two weeks Donatien will be interviewing the artist Francesco Vezzoli
