Classiq - An online journal that celebrates cinema, culture, style and storytelling.

26 April 2024

“This Is Truly Who I Am”: In Conversation with Artist Heather Chontos

The creations of Heather Chontos are like worlds in themselves, made from fragments and chaos which she attunes and brings to life through light and colour. She creates from life and every piece of work is a lived presence, her emotions, rather than motifs or themes, unified into new and evolving environments.

Her art is not planned or calculated in any way. It is what comes naturally to her. She trusts her inner voice. She changes materials and scales, but the medium she chooses, linen, paper, wood, is always in close relation to the natural world – her art exists within it. And I believe this is one of the purest forms of beauty. And to be able to create art like that denotes not only a sense of respect, and even humility, for our world, but the deepest interior artistic enrichment. Heather Chontos makes art. She couldn’t be but the artist she is, fully aware that to exist here, now, means to be who she truly is. She has been herself from the first and the transformations that have taken place in her art have come from within. And I believe this is the highest form of art. She has found the liberty of being an artist, and to pursue whatever it is that there is to be found, her surroundings her open-air studio. When a shift of light, a look, a rare moment occurs, she will be present. Her curiosity always new, her passion not just for art, but for the possibility of giving an artistic language to emotion and life itself.

It is an honour to have Heather Chontos as my guest today. We talk about her journey in life and in art, about Peter Lindbergh and a different vision on visual storytelling, about light as an essential, departing element in her creative process, the gift of giving, and building a house, a studio and a garden in rural Portugal.

Photo courtesy of Heather Chontos

Heather, what is the best thing about working with your hands?

I have given this a lot of thought because working with your hands presents itself like a gift to a person. It is a personal luxury, but the most enjoyable thing is the freedom and independence it gives you. You can create what you desire from the source of oneself and this truly means that there is no need for an external intervention. It is very freeing.

An extraordinary form of freedom. I see your art as very intuitive in the use of different mediums. Is there a specific medium you prefer, and why?

I love to use materials that have a certain patina or texture to them. For a little while now, I have been playing a lot with painting on found wooden surfaces and I really love this. Materials that have been worn, weathered and/or used show their story on the surface and when you paint or draw on its surface, it sort of highlights these stories, wood especially, but also old papers and fabrics.

“I love the surprises, the un-known elements make for a different way
of navigating the dialogue between myself and the materials.”

Do you also think that wood is a surface, more than other materials, where more improvisations and surprises can occur, which can take you to new and unexpected places? And I am asking in regards to your painting on wood, but also in regards to your sculptures.

Yes, I love the surprises, the un-known elements make for a different way of navigating the dialogue between myself and the materials. I don’t enjoy the mundane, the familiar or the expected nature of sore bought materials and wood fits into this perfectly, especially found wood. I recently received a wonderful gift from a friend who found me this rounded triangular piece of wood that washed up on a beach. She said she saw it and thought of me. I have a great adoration for the beauty of materials in nature worn by time and experience. And yes, this is for me the same in painting and in my sculpture.

Photo courtesy of Heather Chontos

You like to experience with colour. Without trying to rationalise it, would you call it a natural partiality to colour?

It does seem that way. I often try to create something in a more black and white because I used to, all the time, but something internal won’t let me. It’s very infrequent that I feel satisfied upon the creation of something lacking in colour. I love the nuance of colour and its tonality. The slightest shift in the tone of one single colour can either bring together a composition to the harmonious dialogue I want to have with my work or it can throw it so far off that I can feel nothing but immediate offense or dislike for what I have made. That is a pretty powerful sensation.

I would like to talk a little about your Shinrin-Yoku exhibition, from 2021, inspired by the natural world, the forest in particular, and the Japanese language. Nature is often the point of departure in Japanese art, and it is probably not accidental that their language is also an art form. Thinking of your large scale paintings, expanses of strong colour and your attention to details from nature, I would like to ask: do you feel closer to Japanese art than other types of art?

Japan, historically, has such a thoughtful culture, such care, and it appears that they delight in beauty in the simplest of ways. The importance of expression through language, food, art, design, and also fashion often shares an inspired respect for nature and many of its forms and colours. So I would say it is not necessarily Japanese art that I feel most connected to, but rather it’s care and love for nature within their culture. I don’t really feel very close to any particular region for its art. I am generally not so interested in what other people are doing. Most of the art I feel most connected to was created by people who are no longer with us.

Would you care to share a few names with us?

Well, it most likely won’t be any surprise that I love Helen Frankenthaler, Cy Twombly, Miró, Sonja Delaunay, Ellsworth Kelly and my late friend Etel Adnan. I love Andy Goldswirthy, but he’s still here.

Photo courtesy of Heather Chontos. Shinrin-Yoku exhibition, 2021

“The slightest shift in the tone of one single colour
can either bring together a composition to the harmonious dialogue
I want to have with my work or it can throw it so far off
that I can feel nothing but immediate offense or dislike
for what I have made.”

Photo courtesy of Heather Chontos

What is your earliest drawing memory?

My earliest drawing memory would be a stick figure on a bathroom wall, but that was more like some rebellious experiment to see what I could get away with. My mother had a subscription to many different fashion magazines, Vogue, Elle, but most importantly at the time was Harper’s Bazaar. Thus was the time of photographer Peter Lindbergh who I worshiped. My walls were plastered with images from these magazines and I would add drawings and paintings to them. I loved Nadja Auermann’s face and would add to her images quite often. I was probably 10 or 11 at the time.

I love that you mention Peter Lindbergh and Nadja Auermann in the glorious days of fashion photography. And I do believe that his fashion photography, usually in black and white, and the way it was presented, in the pages and large spreads of the magazines, lent itself easily to storytelling and creativity and appealed to the imagination. Have we lost that today? And have you kept the magazines?

I am currently in the process of re-designing my website and the visual story it tells as if it were one of these spreads in a magazine. I am lucky enough to work with some amazingly talented people like the creative director Marsha Meredith of Madder Lake and photographer Jo Metson Scott. The visual cues are coming from this central idea of large scale pages of visual storytelling and the impact that it has. So I don’t think we have lost it, but we have lost this way of sharing our visual stories due to social media and the way we share imagery. It is, for example, when film went to digital and the time and quality was not used in the same way to get the final image. No more Polaroids warming under our armpits, instead, a band of pointed fingers around a screen at one of a hundred frames collected through a cable attached to the camera were analysed by teams of people saying “move this to the right”, “move this to the left” and then back again with the options of perfecting everything frame by digital frame. It lost the magic of chance of something happening that was un-expected, un-planned, that was so boring to me and so now some of that quality of content is forgotten and/or unknown by these new generations. I really sound like an old lady when I say this, but, for me, all of the magic was in the suspense and the imperfection of a captured moment and that feels a bit lost now, it feels like we concoct our content to ridiculous and unnatural standards. And it’s all the same, so boring. Does that make sense?

Photo courtesy of Heather Chontos

No, I don’t have the magazines anymore. I did for a very long time, but moving all around he world as I did with my girls made it impossible to hang on to these things, but I have these images burned into my brain. It was the start of my visual education and my love for the imagery.

Yes, it makes perfect sense. Everything is the same now, there is a uniformity in everything, from the way people dress to the visual and media content we consume. Making art with your hands, that enables you to deepen your relationship to the physical, real world, is one way to fight that, I believe. What else?

Taking care of animals and growing something you can eat. These are the best options to bring awareness to the depth of the actual world around us. Take care of an animal, love it, listen to it, see it, understand it, know it. It will change how you see everything if you are paying attention. Plant a seed or plant many, plant fruit trees, or a full vegetable garden. It is the purest form of reciprocity. It’s really so simple, give a little more of yourself and don’t ask for too much in return. Recognise the beauty in a balance of give and take.

Photo courtesy of Heather Chontos

“It’s really so simple, give a little more of yourself
and don’t ask for too much in return.”

Photo courtesy of Heather Chontos

Can you tell me a little about your background and the path that led you to making art?

Well, I have always made art in one form or another. I was always trying to make something. I cut up clothing to make new designs, I re-invented old books and magazines, I tried to build carpentry projects and at one point at age 13 I became obsessed with the shape and silhouette of the female figure. I would draw it on large pieces of cardboard I would find in the garage and depict it in chalk pastel, drawn and shaded to perfection.

My mother was always dealing in antiques and we were often out on weekends at flea markets treasure hunting. My mother was big into stenciling and painting stenciled birders all over the wooden walls of our old farmhouse in New York. My father worked for a gas and electric company but was also a carpenter and was always lovingly restoring our home by himself. He would tear down old abandoned barns that had collapsed and bring home the old wooden planks to re-do the floors. I feel like all of this influenced me greatly without realising it. My appreciation for materials certainly came from this. I was always curious and adventurous, an explorer that got myself into trouble many times, but always in a mode of discovery. I suffered an illness at 14 that caused complete blindness in both of my eyes for most of that year. It lit a fire to go out into the world and explore further. I left home at 16 to live with a family in Barcelona on an exchange program and it opened up a whole new world. My host family were creative in a new way, an architect and a fashion and textile designer. They introduced me to Miró and Tàpies, to a deeper understanding of Picasso and Dalí. I went on to study art history and conservation in London, I was always painting and drawing, completely self taught, but could not allow myself the freedom to say I was an artist. I wanted to fit into the mold of expectations, that I would perform academically and find a stable career. Fast forward to age 30, single mother of two little girls, a career in set design, prop styling and fashion illustration, I decide to pack that in and finally self-proclaim my self given title of “artist” and I have continued to work every day since this is truly who I am. I could never really be anyone else at this point.

Photo courtesy of Heather Chontos

“Going alone is something that not everyone can manage,
but when you find your true relationship with your work,
with your art specifically, you really don’t have
too many options, but to go alone.
Outside voices are noise.”

You studied art history, and yet it feels like you wanted to escape that in a sense. Do you believe that if you go alone, you can go further?

I studied art history out of some sense that I was truly an academic. I wanted the world to know that I was intelligent, that I was to be taken seriously. And when I was younger, this felt like a good way to do it, when truly all I wanted was to be an artist. I really don’t enjoy the analytics of art history, it is a lot of fluff and conjecture. I just didn’t understand that I felt that way until later. I started university at age 17 so I was very young. I really thought I was so very clued up, but I was not. I was a child, I was evolving, but still a child. Going alone is something that not everyone can manage, but when you find your true relationship with your work, with your art specifically, you really don’t have too many options, but to go alone. Outside voices are noise, a distraction and you have to truly trust yourself and listen to yourself, so, yes, you can always go further if you go alone because that is commitment and focus on a level that is necessary. I am married to my work, it is my relationship, that and my pups and horses, but truly I am in love with the dialogue of my inner voice and what I can create if I trust it.

Photo courtesy of Heather Chontos

You have an international background, having lived in many different parts of the world, from New York and London to Barcelona and France. You’ve already mentioned how living in Barcelona opened up a different understanding of art. Did you feel that living in a certain place left a defining mark on your work?

I used to think that travel and certain places were what inspired my work and, of course, many place inspired or triggered a certain sensation or response to the surroundings, but there is not one that truly left a defining mark, rather it is the collection of them all, the variation that gave me a great sense all of the possibility. I don‘t like to travel anymore because I don’t want to impact the Earth negatively now that I have a better understanding of how travel can damage her so profoundly. I want to stay home now, but these influences of all the wonderful cultures I have experienced from Africa to Southeast Asia to Eastern Europe and South America stay with me, opened up my heart and mind to all the beautiful cultures and worlds that exist out there and that will stay with me forever.

Where do you call home now? And where does an artist call home?

Currently I call Portugal home. I live in a very rural part of Eastern Portugal in the Serra Sao Mamede natural park, just over the border from Spain. I live with my youngest daughter Zana age 15. I am designing and building a house with my studio and a farm with my horses, dogs, and chickens.

I can only speak for myself, but, as an artist, “home” is wherever my heart takes me.

Photos courtesy of Heather Chontos

You started out in a different artistic field and you have also worked as a set designer. Was it film set design? I am a big film lover.

It started out in print, in fashion mostly, to begin with, and then interiors, then food. I was fortunate enough to work with some of the photography greats who had open minds to allow for true creative expression in the image they wanted to portray. When I became bored of the more calculated and less creative approach in the industry, I was lucky enough to move into television, but mostly commercials. At this time, I was more focused on my artwork by then and, though I wanted to get into film, I went full throttle for my painting. However, the moving image was much more fascinating to me because finally, again, there was an element of surprise. You could not control filming something that you threw into mid air, so it was exciting that something could happen by chance again. I still would love to design a film set, all the details, the props, the nuanced details, it would be so fun. Like in Poor Things, I was salivating over the set design and costumes, so incredible, truly a wonder. I loved that.

“I am in love with the dialogue of my inner voice
and what I can create if I trust it.”

Yes, Poor Things was a visual feast. We are craving for the unique and the unexpected. Do you have a favourite film (films), or one that has influenced you creatively?

This questions really stumped me because I needed to reflect on why I can’t say yes, I have a favourite film and it inspired me this way or that way… I have always loved film and been interested in it. I would go to the short film festival in New York City when I was a teenager and watch films from Ireland and Iceland and other parts of the world I had never been to. I am terrible with names so I can’t remember any of their titles. I loved La Grande Belezza, that was wild. I loved the visuals and sound in DUNE, I thought that was incredible and I watched it several times, which I never do, there was a combination of hitting all of the senses that was done so beautifully. The newer rendition of La piscine was also wonderful for many reasons, but again, the imagery struck me the most, I love a good story depicted well visually, something that hits my senses, but I can’t say any of them have ever necessarily inspired me on a whole. I tend to pick things apart visually and take the morsels of goodness that are the most delightful to me and leave the rest.

Photo courtesy of Heather Chontos

“Nature provides that for us, we have lost touch.
Sadly, most people are not paying attention to anything;
big or small, they are focused on some invisible end result or expectation
and they are missing out on everything in between, under and around them
that makes life beautiful and precious.”

Photos courtesy of Heather Chontos

In this time and age, what do you wish people appreciated more?

Well… where do I begin? Living here the way I do, in this rural pocket of Portugal, I don’t take anything for granted. It took 6 months to have a water and electricity connection. We collected our water every day from a local drinking well and schlepped it back home a few times a week. We had power only through a solar powered battery that we charged things with. I cooked outside on an open fire or with a camping gas cooker. These were the only options we had whilst everything was put into place and we made do, it was fun actually, most of the time. It reminded me of how we always just presume we will have these commodities, but there could come a day that we don’t have such easy access and it will shock very many people. It may sound cliché, but it is in the small things, the smallest of small things that we may truly find appreciation for what we have. Nature provides that for us, we have lost touch. Sadly, most people are not paying attention to anything; big or small, they are focused on some invisible end result or expectation and they are missing out on everything in between, under and around them that makes life beautiful and precious.

What brought you to Portugal? Was it that the chance presented itself or was it something you pursued intentionally? Is there a place you’ve always wanted to live and you have? There is another reason I am asking this and I am bringing Van Gogh into discussion, as he believed that artists should move to more southern (in his case, the South of France), primitive regions, in search of vibrant colors, which would help take their art to a new stage.

The sheer beauty of this region of Portugal and its affinity with regenerative farming and land keeping was my initial inspiration, that and the opportunity to have enough land for my horses, my dogs and a place to build my studio and house is what brought me to Portugal. Oh yes, and isolation!

I always wanted to live in Montana, and I have. I also always wanted to live on the Continent of Africa, and I also have done that.

Well, for me, Van Gogh was right because of the light you get in the more southern regions. I need to be where the light fills me up. It’s an impossibility for me to thrive creatively without strong natural light, but not all artists need that. I think if you are painting or creating in a way where this is what feeds you, then you must find a pathway to it. What is mist clear for me is that when you feed your soul you become better at whatever you are doing in life. This is always true.

“What is mist clear for me is that when you feed your soul
you become better at whatever you are doing in life.”

It is. I believe that the idea that impacts me the most about your art is that life itself is your canvas. Heather, one last question: what brings you hope at the end of the day, personally and professionally?

That is a beautiful compliment and a keen observation which I am grateful for. Thank you for these thoughtful questions which I have truly enjoyed answering.
What gives me hope is just watching nature grow and evolve, knowing the sound of each bird around me as if it were my own voice, understanding the needs and wants of creatures who cannot speak my language. These things are the innocent beauties of life and being able to watch them evolve and change closely gives me hope that somehow it will be ok.

Thank you, Heather. I’m deeply grateful for this wonderful experience.

Photo courtesy of Heather Chontos

heatherchontos.com | Instagram: @hchontos

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Posted by classiq in Art, Culture, Interviews | | Comments Off

17 April 2024

Denim on Film: Michael J. Fox in Back to the Future

Michael J. Fox in “Back to the Future”, 1985, directed by Robert Zemeckis. Universal Pictures, Amblin Entertainment

When the stars align, or, more realistically speaking, when the many moving parts that create a film work in perfect harmony, a movie reaches the public’s imagination on a whole new level than the rest and is burnt forever in their collective memory. And sometimes they continue to reach the hearts of the next generation and the next. Back to the Future was one such film. And part of what made it memorable were the costumes. They were very much of the times, and yet they became iconic, they became those characters. Christopher Lloyd is the eccentric inventor Emmett “Doc” Brown in his HazMat suit… And Michael J. Fox is the 1980s teenage guitar player with his own band Marty McFly…

Marty is a seventeen year old who spends most of his time with Doc, whose latest homemade invention is a time-travel machine in the shape of a DeLorean car – “If I am going to build a time travel machine, why not make it in style?” – that accidentally sends Marty 30 years back in time, back to his hometown when his parents were themselves teenagers and had barely met. And so he interferes with the course of history ad his whole existence is put into question.

What probably best belies the timeless status of the film’s costumes is that Marty, having just traveled 30 years back in time, easily fits in, give or take his red puffer vest that does render a couple of ironic “Are you afraid of drowning?” comments. The rest of his look, blue jeans, a checkered shirt with a red t-shirt underneath, a two-toned denim jacket with patterned lining and popped collar, and a pair of white low top Nike Bruin sneakers, the teenagers of the 1950s are ready for. They are ready for newness. It is the brink of the teen generation, which the 50s brought along and which is exactly one of the elements that Robert Zemeckis and co-screenwriter Bob Gale wanted to be part of the film. The first blue jeans generation mediated through the image of film stars – 1955 was the year Rebel without a Cause came out and James Dean, dressed in blue jeans, white t-shirt and red windbreaker, gave the rebellious, disaffected youth an identity and launched a new revolution by dressing down. The teenagers of the ‘50s are ready for embracing a new look, ready to be aligned with their jeans, just as they are ready for embracing new music – when Marty has to take the place of a 1950s band member to perform at a high school dance where his parents kissed for the first time (thus later enabling his own future existence) and plays rock and roll before the birth of rock and roll to the enthusiasm of everyone, one of the musicians calls his cousin, Chuck Berry, saying: “Listen to this, it’s the sound you’ve been looking for!”

Michael J. Fox and Christopher Lloyd in “Back to the Future”, 1985. Universal Pictures, Amblin Entertainment

“Back to the Future is a comedy-adventure-science-speculation-coming-of-age-rock-and-roll-timetravel-period-film,” director Robert Zemeckis told Films and Filmmaking. It’s the blend of all those things that appealed to the imagination of moviegoers generations apart. It is a film that is witty in portraying two epochs and two generations with humorous, intelligent and ironic references to popular culture and American history and with a fantastic soundtrack that goes from the edgy 80s music (Huey Lewis and the News, Eric Clapton, Phil Collins, Fleetwood Mac) back to the early classic rock of Etta James, Johnny Otis, Chuck Berry. The contrast between the 1950s and the 1980s provides a good deal of humour for the film’s main characters, as Bob Gale explains, “I think one of the great time travel fantasies is the idea of going back and being superior because you have prior knowledge in so many areas.” Rock and roll didn’t happen and the rebel uniform did not happen until society was ready for them to happen.

But Marty’s denim look is ultimately very ‘80s and is very much his own. A denim look, when done right, will always be timeless, but what places this one firmly in the eighties is the denim jacket. Fashion was practical yet fun in the ‘80s, they wore what they felt like, and they felt strongly about it. Everyone was an individual, the clothes became your trademark. His clothes are Marty’s trademark, too, just as his music is, just as his Sony Walkman is.

“A film costume only becomes iconic when many things come together,” costume designer Deborah L. Scott told me in our interview. “A film that captures the imagination of the public, a character performed by a brilliant actor, a great script that informs us all, and then the right costume to accent all these things. All of the creative and brilliant people that I had the good fortune to work with on this project were amazing. To create this world, everyone was on board. When I watch it now, I can’t believe how kooky Chris Lloyd is, in performance and look… but they go together! And Michael became as iconic as it gets… maybe not as beautiful as Audrey Hepburn’s black dress but still memorable. And the looks don’t seem too dated either. Such kismet!”

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4 April 2024

April Newsletter: Without Ever Reaching the Summit, Petko and Wonder Boys

Photos: Classiq Journal

”I found violence in the first gesture, kindness in the second;
a desire to conquer as opposed to a desire to discover.”

Paolo Cognetti, Without Ever Reaching the Top

Viewing

Wonder Boys, 2000
Curtis Hanson

The best comedy of the last 25 years. A movie about writers writing, character-driven, quirky, funny, poignant. I think this is my favourite Michael Douglas role (Frances McDormand does some of her finest work, too… she always does) – a college professor who had a very successful novel early on in his career and now he has been trying to reprise that with a second book he hasn’t been able to finish for years, hiding behind his teaching job and smoking pot. I think he is a character you can’t just sum up easily and that makes him a tremendous character. Words also fail me to describe the part music plays in the film. I will just say that it features one of my favourite and one of the best songs on film, Things Have Changed, which Bob Dylan composed for the movie.

En kvinnas ansikte (A Woman’s Face), 1938
Gustaf Molander

If you haven’t seen Ingrid Bergman in her Swedish films, you haven’t seen her real talent.

Hard Times, 1975
Walter Hill

Walter Hill’s directorial debut with the perfectly cast Charles Bronson, the most popular movie star of the time, as a silent loner, an authentic Depression worker-looking (his cap and his face are simple and effective enough to establish him as such – “he can throw a look and command a moment off that look,” said Walter Hill) drifter who knows how to earn some money with a punch and gets caught up in the fighting game with the help of a hustler, James Coburn (lean, sharp, suited up and charming), and his partner Poe, Strother Martin, who told Hill he wanted to play his character as if he were Tennessee Williams. It worked out perfect.

Un témoin dans la ville (Witness in the City), 1959
Édouard Molinaro

It is a lesser known French noir that has Lino Ventura as a lesser known character, that of an unsympathetic character. “I believe that what makes Lino charming is this seriousness that he has deep inside, this extremely powerful physical specificity which hides something serious and painful,” said Claude Sautet about the lead man in his film Classe tous risque. But in Witness in the City, something else drives him and his unjustifiable crimes, and Lino Ventura suddenly no longer has the viewer on his side (which he usually does, regardless of the role he plays, be it gangster, ordinary man or law enforcer), which, of course only makes us love him even more as an actor. Everything happens at night, in the streets of Paris, thrillingly shot by Henri Decaë, wringing every drop of tension you.

Reading

“I found violence in the first gesture, kindness in the second; a desire to conquer as opposed to a desire to discover,” Paolo Cognetti writes in Senza mai arrivare in cima. Viaggio in Himalaya (Without Ever Reaching the Summit), noting the difference between ascending a mountain as a goal in itself and the most important pilgrimage in Tibet that just circles the mountain of Kailash, the difference between the Christians who stab crosses on the peak of the mountain and the Buddhists who draw circles at the base of the mountain. These words say everything about what this book is about, a true travel story that I read in one sitting. I love the mountain and I have read many books on the subject, of pioneer climbers, great explorers or travel writers, but this little book sits closer to my heart, because it brings back a sense of wonder and it brings man closer to nature, not as a conquerer, but as a curious mind, eye and heart. Cognetti is the author of Le Otto Montagne (The Eight Mountains), which I haven’t yet read, but having seen the film and loving it tremendously, I was looking forward to reading the book. I found this one first instead, which he wrote after The Eight Mountains, after a journey he had always wanted to make, in a remote Himalayan region at the confluence of Nepal and Tibet, following in the footsteps of his hero, Peter Matthiessen, who wrote The Snow Leopard.

Hoinar prin America Latină , by Silviu Reuț, is another travel book that I couldn’t put down and I am sorry it doesn’t benefit from an English edition. A journey as a means of knowledge, of opening up to the world, of discovery in the true sense of the world. Each chapter title to be accompanied by the mention of a song (I, too, associate certain places and travels and feelings with certain musicians and songs). It’s the kind of travel book and personal journey (6 months, 12 countries, 40.141 km) that enriches and reaffirms… truths, feelings, beliefs, and the art of travel (that is usually done by foot and with a backpack, that seeks out that feeling of complete freedom and that sometimes leaves you unprepared in the face of the new and the unpredictable).

I caught on The Racquet’s Rennae Stubbs – Andrea Petković podcast during the Australian Open this year (in their latest episode, just out, they recap the Miami tournament) and now I am hooked forever (you’ll find it in my Regulars section at the end of the newsletter). The next thing I knew was I had to get Petko’s book, Zwischen Ruhm und Ehre liegt die Nacht. “All I know about tennis is that those who love tennis love life.”

Where the Red Fern Grows is one of the great classics of children’s literature and now a firm favourite in our home.

Next on my list: Harry Dean Stanton: Hollywood’s Zen Rebel

Listening

The album: Brothers in Arms, Dire Straits

The soundtrack: Wonder Boys

Making

The art of Heather Jeanne Chontos. “Explaining abstract art would be like explaining all your emotions. […] There is no hidden meaning, there is no hidden connotation. I am not trying to send a message, and I am not trying to represent something. It is what it is. My impulse is a request to perform, to create, to make something. So therefore I do it.” The documentary film Heather Chontos is out now and you can check it on @december.artfilms.

Exploring

Wim Wenders picking ten of his favourite films from the Criterion Collection. He loves film, he knows film, and he is so funny. One of my favourite directors. “If you ever make a movie and you have rain or snow or anything just don’t do it before you have seen all of the Kurosawas and study and read how he produced weather. And then you can go and make a movie with rain. But just don’t do it without consulting Kurosawa.” I watched Until the End of the World exactly one year ago (and I am glad I waited so long because I saw the director’s cut version) and I still think of it often and whenever I do I see the world in that colour palette. He says it’s the best work he’s done.

On an end note

During the Indian Wells, photographer Aaron Laserna managed to capture the game and the atmosphere around my favourite sport in a different light than I usually get to see, reminding me of how I saw tennis and how tennis looked, both from close and afar (when the colours in photography were so far away from the harsh digital colours of today) in my childhood. It was the game that mattered. Classic, classy, the most elegant, the most beautiful, the most competitive sport in the world. And now we are off to the most wonderful time of the year, clay season!

The regulars: The interviews, newsletters and podcasts I turn to every week and/or every month because they are that good. Craig Mod’s newsletters: Roden and Ridgeline. Soundtracking, with Edith Bowman. Alicia Kennedy’s newsletter. Racquet’s Rennae Stubbs tennis podcast. Gone to Timbuktu, Sophy Robert’s podcast on the art of travel. Wachstumsversuche, with Sarah Schill. Sirene and Racquet, in print.

”All I know about tennis is that those who love tennis love life.”

Andrea Petković

Swedish poster for “A Woman’s Face”, 1938, directed by Gustaf Molander

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25 March 2024

Amy Madigan Is an ‘80s Hawksian Heroine in “Streets of Fire”

Amy Madigan in “Streets of Fire”, 1984, directed by Walter Hill

The rock concert sequence in Streets of Fire, with the on-stage photography of the singers rapidly intercut with black foreground silhouettes of the audience waving and clapping their hands, mixing imagery and music and energy to great cinematic effect, is one good opening scene, one that made me wish the film to feel and look like only one long shot. Streets of Fire is the kind of film where form transcends content, and, in cinema, form should transcend content. Streets of Fire is also something difficult to define, and that’s what makes it quite an electrifying flight from reality. A neo-noir cum modern Western cum big city outlaw-biker rock ballad (Jim Steinman, Ry Cooder, Stevie Nicks and Tom Petty, among others, compose one great soundtrack), Walter Hill’s carefully stylised film, shot by Andrew Laszlo, takes us to a futuristic, anarchic, neon-illuminated world fueled by fifties nostalgia yet thrillingly unidentified in place and time.

“I enjoyed Hill’s hard-hitting, entertaining pictures, like Red Heat”, Samuel Fuller wrote in his book, A Third Face. “Walter was a no-bullshit kind of director with whom I got along right away.” Hill is considered a solid craftsman among Hollywood’s mainstream filmmakers. He was second assistant director to films such as Bullitt and The Thomas Crown Affair, before he made his mark as a screenwriter for another Steve McQueen film, The Getaway. His working with Sam Peckinpah on that particular movie was what prompted him to become a director, as noted by Quentin Tarantino in his book, Cinema Speculation, reiterating a conversation he had had with Hill. In the 80s and 90s, Walter Hill established his reputation as one of the most distinctive directors of the American action-movies cinema, the kind of director that, according to Tarantino, makes genre films because they love genre films and because they are good at making them.

Walter Hill made his directorial debut with Hard Times, 1975, with the perfectly cast Charles Bronson, the most popular movie star of the time, as a silent loner, an authentic Depression worker-looking (his cap and his face are simple and effective enough to establish him as such – “he can throw a look and command a moment off that look,” said Walter Hill) drifter who knows how to earn some money with a punch and gets caught up in the fighting game with the help of a hustler, James Coburn, and his partner Poe, Strother Martin, who told Hill he wanted to play his character as if he were Tennessee Williams. It worked out perfect. Hard Times was followed by The Driver, 1978, set in a desolate, nocturnal metropolis, where Ryan O’Neill’s is another character of few words, whose special talent is to drive getaways cars in robberies and not get caught – it was a film that picked up on Western and noir elements that culminated in a classic showdown between cop and thief.

Amy Madigan, Michael Paré and Rick Moranis in “Streets of Fire”, 1984, directed by Walter Hill

In Streets of Fire, at its 40th anniversary this year, The Bombers gang, led by an unforgettable Willem Dafoe in his first Hollywood role, kidnaps rock singer Ellen Aim (Diane Lane), and her former boyfriend, soldier of fortune Tom Cody (Michael Paré), is brought in to rescue her. The stunning Amy Madigan, who first pursued a career in music in the 1970s before transitioning to acting in the 80s and studying at the Lee Strasberg Theater and Film Institute, auditioned for the role of Paré’s sister but suggested she portray his tough male pal instead. Hill, an admirer of Howard Hawks, gave her the part but didn’t rewrite it. As McCoy, Madigan was the perfect 1980s Hawksian woman and she pretty much walked out with the entire film.

“Howard’s idea was always that a woman should play a scene with a masculine approach – insolent,” Lauren Bacall, the ultimate Hawksian heroine wrote in her book, By Myself and Then Some. “Give as good as she got, no capitulation, no helplessness. […] A perfect example of Howard’s thinking was His Girl Friday, which was a remake of The Front Page, but changing the star reporter to a woman – Rosalind Russell. And it couldn’t have worked out better.” After Hawks decided to cast newcomer Lauren Bacall opposite Bogart in To Have and Have Not, he urged screenwriter Jules Furthman to push Marie’s hard-edged dialogue and one-on-one lines as far as he could. He also told Bogart: “You are about the most insolent man on the screen and I’m going to make the girl a little more insolent than you are.” When Bogart told him there was “fat chance of that”, Hawks replied, “I’ve got a better than fat chance… In every scene you play with her, she’s going to walk out and leave you with egg on your face.”

“I think he’s wonderful,” Isabelle Adjani, who agreed to make the transition to Hollywood roles in Hill’s The Driver, playing alongside Ryan O’Neill and Bruce Dern, “very much in the tradition of Howard Hawks, lean and spare. The story is contemporary, but also very stylised, and the roles that Ryan and I play are like Bogart and Bacall.”

But what else is there that makes Amy Madigan’s McCoy such a unique character? The costumes. According to the American Film Institute, the costumes for Streets of Fire were a collaboration between costume designer Marilyn Vance and Giorgio Armani – approximately 200 costumes were sewn in duplicates and triplicates in Armani’s factory in Milan and the fashion designer also contributed pieces to dress the extras. Marilyn Vance, whose film work includes The Breakfast Club, Pretty in Pink and Pretty Woman, worked with Walter Hill for the first time on the film 48 Hrs, where she dressed Eddie Murphy in an Armani suit. “I have contributed to movies of all kinds,” said Giorgio Armani in his eponymous book, “the fantastic in The Dark Knight, directed by Christopher Nolan, the historical in The Untouchables, by Brian de Palma, and the brutal in Streets of Fire, directed by Walter Hill. When a filmmaker calls me, I always evaluate the project carefully. In fact, cinema allows me to work with clothes in a way that upholds my vision of style; in that I help to build a character. It’s the kind of operation that, when it really works well, rewards you in the most satisfying of ways: eternity. A successful character surpasses the barrier of time, he or she becomes a legendary figure and not just because of the way they act, but because of the way they’re dressed.”

Sometimes, and that applies to both costumes that are made for films and costumes that are supplied by fashion houses or designers, liberties are taken to make a film a bit more comprehensible to modern times, but without the costumes ever losing their spirit and narrative power. I believe Armani has been chosen so often to contribute to the costume department not because he was Armani – his success as a fashion designer only skyrocketed after the film American Gigolo – but because he could make his clothes work for a character, because he could adapt to the needs of the film, because he is, first and foremost, a craftsman who draws his designs by hand, and because he is a stylist, too, who knows “absolutely everything there is to know – where to put the pins, how to place the jackets in the best possible position, how to shape the waistline,” as photographer Aldo Fallai remarked. Ultimately, it’s the costume designer who decides that his work will fit with what they want to achieve.

Even when working within the confines of film costume however, Armani retains a strong aesthetic identity. That is easily to observe in films such as American Gigolo and The Comfort of Strangers, films set in 1980 and 1990, respectively, thus displaying contemporary Armani designs, but in The Untouchables (released in 1987, but with a story set in the 1920s) or Voyager (original title Homo Faber, from 1991, but set in the 1950s), that had to deal with period reconstruction, costumes still had a very individual trait. Costume appropriation depends not only on the period of the story, but on the period when the film is released, and, most importantly, on the director’s vision.

Amy Madigan and Michael Paré in “Streets of Fire”, 1984, directed by Walter Hill

In Streets of Fire , costume appropriation once again works beautifully. The costumes are memorable not because they stand out, not because they are the mirror of a specific time or period, but precisely because they are not of a particular time and period. They feel timeless and timely at the same time. They depict characters that only exist in that world, a neon-soaked “Rock & Roll fable”, from another time, another place, each character a walking story unto themselves. In Streets of Fire, the costumes create the world.

Diane Lane’s hard-rock-grit-meets-femme-fatale red dresses or William Dafoe’s signature pair of leather overalls, that make his debut role even harder to forget, and which, on some level, may be a throwback to the motorcycle gangs of the 1950s epitomised on screen by Marlon Brando as the leader of the Black Rebel Motorcycle Club in the controversial film The Wild One, are easy to remember, but the truly memorable one is not even Michael Paré’s Western-inflicted trench coat perpetually rising and rolling behind him. It’s Amy Madigan’s look. Her McCoy is also the most vibrant and original character. Under her uniform of confrontation, run-down leather baseball cap, grey bomber jacket and oversized boyfriend jeans, she is much more than a banal tomboy. It suggests a new attitude, being faithful to herself and nobody else, so her clothes become something aspirational. Although I haven’t found any source to indicate that Amy clothes’ were completely provided by Armani, her look undeniably bears the signature of Armani. And what could have been a more perfect match for a female character that was originally created for a man than the designer who has always championed the down-to-earth essence of a subtle elegance and who freed men and women from rigidity, suggesting new attitudes? She is protesting the status quo, seeking change in a certain sartorial androgyny, and she couldn’t do it better than dressed the way she is.

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19 March 2024

Once Upon a Photograph: Alain Delon by Jean-Marie Périer

Alain Delon photographed by Jean-Marie Périer, 1966
(from the book “Alain Delon: Amours et mémoires”, by Denitza Bantcheva with Liliana Rosca)

At first glance, I thought this photograph was a film still from Plein soleil. The look, the clothes, something about it… It was Alain Delon’s first major part and he played Tom Ripley to perfection – even Patricia Highsmith agreed. The role was initially meant for Jacques Charrier, but Delon fought with the producers and the director to get the role. He also had Bella, director René Clément’s wife and the film’s costume designer, on his side and he eventually got to play Ripley. With his arresting good looks and animal instinct, he burst on screen and made a more sinister Ripley than Matt Damon would succeed to in Anthony Minghella’s film four decades later. We don’t need dialogue to be made aware of the character’s darting intelligence. This is in itself a great cinematic achievement, something that reminds me of Hitchcock’s films. “Movies are made of very simple ideas,” David Mamet, another Hitchcock disciple, wrote in his book, On Directing Film. “The good actor will perform each small piece as completely and as simply as possible.” Delon managed to portray a complex character without many words. And it was a very complex character to interpret, according to Clément himself: “Does criminal innocence exist? Delon must, in the crime, preserve this purity which cannot be judged, because it stems from a psychology which escapes us by escaping the norm of humanity.” Throughout his career, Delon would push “the negation of his own mythology inside a film that respects the rules of the genre,” Jacques Deray, who made nine films with the actor, would reveal.

Back to the photograph, when I saw the credit and read photographer Jean-Marie Périer’s words (the photo was taken in 1966, but Périer’s words are from 2019), I appreciated it even more, discovering new meanings to it.

“I don’t like people who say bad things about Alain Delon. I have known him since 1956. He was returning from Indochina where he had done his military service. The first time I saw him he was walking along rue Saint-Benoît in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, which at the time was the center of Paris, with its terraces full of people… Alain was then unknown and didn’t even know he would be an actor. Believe me if you want, but seeing him pass, the terraces all along the street stopped. He emanated a rare presence whose significance I don’t know if he realised, and then there was this face… Of course it was thanks to this physique that he began his career, but then, if you look at his film career, he has spent his life taking risks if only to prove to people, and perhaps to himself, that he was not just handsome. At twenty-five years old, whether at the Cannes film festival, or at the wheel of his Ferrari on Via Veneto in Rome, he was truly king of the world. Being and having been Alain Delon can not have been so simple. He often showed me his friendship by letting me photograph him, which was not his favourite exercise. Thank you, Alain.” – Jean-Marie Périer as quoted in the book Alain Delon: Amours et mémoires, by Denitza Bantcheva with Liliana Rosca

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