27 January 2023

Cate Blanchett Is the Lead, but Nina Hoss Is the First Violin in Tár

Cate Blanchett and Nina Hoss in Tár, 2022. Focus Features

 

Tár tells the story of (fictional) renowned composer and conductor Lidya Tár, who, on the brink of recording the symphony of her life, has to face the consequences of her past actions. Tár is a wonderful piece of cinema, the way it is filmed, the way it takes its time to tell the story, the way it makes you part of this classical music world without demanding your speciality knowledge, the way Hildur Guðnadóttir‘s music and lack of music guide you through… Everything forms this perfect synergy. It’s probably the film of last year that made me feel the most that immersive power of cinema while watching it. This is a film that takes the audience seriously. Surprising, free in its thoughts, precise in execution. Cate Blanchett is remarkable as Tár. She is Tár. Domineering antiheroine, brilliant, intense musician, ruthless and authoritative in her pursuit of power. But the surprise came from somewhere else: Nina Hoss. Not because I was surprised by her performance – I’ve long admired her films – but because realising she was in the film, I hoped this film would surprise and take you on a ride without your knowing much what to expect.
 

Cate Blanchett and Nina Hoss in Tár, 2022. Focus Features

 

It has much to do with Nina Hoss’s screen presence. I love watching Nina Hoss on screen. Her presence is magnetic, her face a mystery. Of a scintillating quietude, of a pensive livelihood. There is always a depth you search for in her characters. You won’t get all your answers, you have to dig deeper, you have to go back and watch it again.

I first saw Nina Hoss in Homeland, and when I did, I had the same feeling I had when I watched her in Tár. Clare Danes was the lead there, and she was amazing, but it was Nina Hoss that brought something else to the plot, a little bit of the unknown. Then I discovered Christian Petzold’s films, many of them with Nina Hoss as protagonist. And what a revelation she was! Petzold both writes and directs his movies, and he is very good at creating microcosms with his films. In Barbara, she is a doctor who works in a hospital in a small provincial town, in 1980. This is her punishment for attempting to emigrate to the West. She used to work in the biggest hospital in Berlin. Now she is kept under constant surveillance, secluded in the country, with nobody to trust. She does her job systematically, patiently, and she waits. We are waiting, too, patiently, as the tension builds. You can’t see past her inscrutable face. She never shows fear, or her inner turmoil. “It was a role where I knew there would be no possibility of talking much, to explain her,” Nina Hoss revealed in an interview for Film Comment after the film’s release, in 2012. “I would have to do a different kind of work, to make it interesting, her being silent, but always being present. I had to create a backstory. It was very crucial for this part, that I knew why she tries to hide her true self. I thought she was [originally] a very lively, positive person.” You don’t see but feel the threat she faces through the subtleness of her fear. And that’s a pretty mighty feel to project on screen.

In Phoenix (2014), Nelly (Nina Hoss) is a German-Jewish cabaret singer who survives the concentration camp but her face gets disfigured and has to undergo reconstructive surgery, then tries to return to her old life in Berlin. Her husband, who is the one who might have turned her in, doesn’t recognise her and “hires” her as his wife so that he can claim her inheritance. Christian Petzold skillfully merges suspense, revenge, trauma, desperation, destruction, and, under his direction, a subject that has been (much too) often approached in cinema, upends convention, and that has much to do with the way it is told and with the way Nina Hoss carries the film, a wounded human being in the aftermath of a disaster who has the grace to pull off that sublime ending scene. And to think that a perfect ending is not that easy to come by in cinema…
 

Nina Hoss in Tár, 2022. Focus Features

 

In Tár, Nina Hoss plays Sharon, Lydia Tár’s partner. They share both a personal and a professional life together. Sharon is the concertmaster in the Berlin orchestra conducted by Tár. It is the most sought after position in a philharmonic (something I wasn’t aware of but subsequently found out from an interview with Nina Hoss in Vanity Fair), even more than that of a conductor – and it’s even more unlikely to be held by a woman. The concertmaster is the true musical leader, the conductor’s translator to and liaison with the orchestra, the one with very wide responsibilities, the one who must know when to act with authority and when to act as the orchestra’s voice. Not only that, but this is a position that is constantly challenged, everyone is after it, so one must always prove one’s worth, as Nina Hoss further explained.

Sharon is the first violin. And the fact that she fills that chair says a lot about her character even if it isn’t articulated in words – and although the viewer may not be familiar with the exact workout of an orchestra, as I wasn’t, the importance of her position is obvious. And it tells just about everything about Sharon and her tenacity and skills. Restrained and calculated, she is the steely enabler. Sharon knows and understands more than she lets us see. Yet, she makes sure she is seen. She does not have much on screen time, and yet, with just a gaze or a raised eyebrow, she exerts power over everyone, including Lydia. She knows, and lets it happen. She is the key element of the film. Sharon and Lydia are not that different. Behind a powerful woman, there is a more powerful woman.
 

Cate Blanchett and Nina Hoss in Tár, 2022. Focus Features

 
 

MORE STORIES

Very, very natural and herself: Katharine Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby

Talking film costume: Nina Hoss in Barbara

“The process is the same. You build the character!”:
Interview with Avatar costume designer Deborah L. Scott

Posted by classiq in Editorial, Film | | Comments Off on Cate Blanchett Is the Lead, but Nina Hoss Is the First Violin in Tár
19 January 2023

Interview with Avatar Costume Designer Deborah L. Scott: “The Process Is the Same. You Build the Character!”

Avatar: The Way of Water, 2022. 20th Century Studios

 

When Avatar was released in 2009, it was a game changer. A film of tremendous ambition, singularity of vision and breakthrough technical achievement. But it took more than that to catch the public’s attention the way it did: the film has a story, and it is and remains a classic story with an impactful message. A good soldier goes native, finding peace among the people he has been trained to believe are his enemy. Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) is part of a mission of the U.S. Armed Forces that have colonised Pandora, a moon inhabited by the harmless indigenous Na’vi species, but rich in a valuable mineral. In order to be able to land and survive in the hostile atmosphere of Pandora, humans use “avatars”, genetically engineered bodies that look like the Na’vi and that remain wired up in a trance-like state on the ship. Using state-of-the-art and carefully employed film techniques, James Cameron took us on a journey to a new world, a lush and totally imaginary jungle that looks so natural and alive. Avatar invented its own language.

Avatar: The Way of Water takes us ten years in the future of Jake Sully and Ney’tiri on Pandora. Jake has left his human body for good to become a Na’vi, the blue, bioluminescent humanoid beings with golden eyes that move, convincingly, with the elegance of a panther. He and Ney’tiri (Zoe Saldaña) are now married and have four children, and have lived a peaceful life, tightly connected to the natural world around them, until the “sky people” attack their planet again. Forced to leave their home, they go to explore the unknown lands of Pandora…and its underseas. And once again, James Cameron continues to clear unknown lands in cinematic technical innovation – in the fourteen years since the first Avatar, there have been only a few truly notable 3D films – to submerge us into this new fully realised world.

The motion capture – the technique of electronic sensors placed on an actor in a lycra suit, whose movements are stored on a computer, then reconstituted and modeled in virtual images in a given setting – plays a primordial role in the cinematic revolution that is Avatar. But what we see on screen is a completely different thing. We see characters who have a story to tell. And costume undergoes its own groundbreaking evolution in Avatar while still operating within the mise en scène as an aid of character and narrative. In a unique filmmaking effort, Deborah L. Scott, who also collaborated with James Cameron on the first Avatar, invented a new costume paradigm, making detailed and finely crafted principal costumes and thousands of bespoke pieces and props that were then digitised for the film (one bespoke costume for each digital costume). In addition, she created the live-action costumes and helped customise the motion capture suits for the actors’ performances.

Over the course of five years, Deborah and her team hand weaved, stitched, beaded, embroidered, and braided, using a craft-based sampling-led design process. They then blended it with the technological innovations of her collaborators at Wētā FX to help bring the Na’vi of Pandora to life. Imagination, artistry, skill and technology all blend to create a unique and rich culture and to weave the material reality into Pandora.

Deborah L. Scott won the Oscar for her first collaboration with James Cameron, Titanic, and her past projects include such memorable films as Back to the Future, E.T. The Extraterrestrial, Heat and Minority Report. It is an honour to have Deborah as my guest today, where she goes into detail for her work on Avatar, those simple yet iconic Back to the Future costumes and how it is like to be on a Steven Spielberg movie set.

 

Costume designer Deborah L. Scott

 

Avatar was a revolutionary film, and the costumes were just the same. With Avatar: The Way of Water, it’s once again a brand new horizon. What was different in the way you approached the costumes now, as opposed to the first film?

We knew from experiences on the first film, that we were going to need to build all the costumes, props, accessories, and wigs, Na’vi and live action for this film. The technical advances since film one and the complexity of the designs for film two dictated this. We built everything to human scale (not the Na’vi scale) to allow for real-world use and testing. We found this was the best way to get the proper information passed along to the VFX team.
 
 


“The process of building the costumes is exactly the same as
any movie, even if they will only be seen in a digital format.
You build the character!”

 
 

Are the directors usually a big part of the costume process or is it more a conversation about characters and their evolution? The 3D of James Cameron is in a league of its own. He takes you on a journey and reminds us that a movie is made of many moving parts that harmoniously come together to tell the story. How does his filmmaking influence your creative process?

With an exacting and groundbreaking director like Jim, the teams are all asked to work at a very high level and we are supported getting there. The whole artistic team World Builds and Clan builds. Then it is mostly up to costumes (under our director’s guidance) to Clan build, Family builds and Character Build. We talked a lot about the characters and their journeys. Then it was up to me to design them and seek Jim’s approval as we moved forward.
 

Avatar: The Way of Water, 2022. 20th Century Studios

 

A costume designer’s job is to reinforce the story and help the actor form an identity of his/her character. But how does the process of building a digital costume go? And how does the collaboration with the performance actors go in a film like Avatar? What do they wear to get into characters, to help them get the feel and motion of the characters? Because there is so much more than visual effects and technology to it.

Yes! I am glad that you understand this. The process of building the costumes is exactly the same as any movie, even if they will only be seen in a digital format. You build the character! There is a hand in hand with the performers, as they must understand and be able to feel the costumes, props, and hair, even though they mostly wear only performance capture suits. This is one of the reasons we build all these things, to inform performance. The actors see all the designs and can wear the garments as they are made to fit them. For performance capture, we would make reference costumes so as not to cover the markers on the capture suits. Extensive motion tests are filmed as well.

There is much more than visual effects and technology to it. We are always mindful of the process, but the clothing can stand alone as any movie does. We design, and make all the costumes, props, accessories, and wigs, and then we feed everything down the digital pipeline with the performances.
 

How much research, how much imagination, how much handwork went into the costuming of this extraordinary, unique world? Did you use any real life references for the Na’vi tribe, and for the Metcayina water tribe?

Extensive research was done worldwide on clans that live on and near the water. This all informs the design from a real-world perspective. For example, the Metkayina were mostly pulled from all of Polynesia, and as far as Hawaii, New Zealand and Samoa, etc. It is a tremendous amount of hard work to research as completely as possible, and then I was allowed to let my imagination go. Which is a tremendous amount of fun, but also difficult so that you stay on task, creatively, artistically and practically. I was fortunate to have the wonderful Weta Workshop for most of the building of the costumes. The combination of old-world handcrafts and innovative technology were new and thrilling to everyone. We went to new and unique places for sure!
 

Back to the Future, 1985. Universal Pictures, Amblin Entertainment

 
 

“Fantasy, when you have to use pretty much only
your imagination, can be the most challenging and enriching.
But contemporary costume can be very satisfying.
You just don’t get as much attention for it.”

 
 

You have worked on other memorable films, but one in particular also caught the public’s imagination on a whole new level than the rest: Back to the Future. The costumes were very much of the times, and yet they became iconic, they became those characters. How did you work with Robert Zemeckis, Michael J. Fox and Christopher Lloyd to shape up those characters? And when does a film costume become iconic?

A film costume only becomes iconic when many things come together. 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!
 

E. T. The extraterrestrial, 1982. Universal Pictures, Amblin Entertainment

 

Another science fiction film, Steven Spielberg’s E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial, has triumphantly continued to demonstrate its universal appeal since its release in 1982. Again, the costumes are simple and yet they became iconic, the sum of all those elements you have pointed out above. I am mainly referring to the children’s costumes, of course, because one of the great things about this film is Spielberg’s approach to filming it, with the camera always at the eye level of the children, from whose perspective the events unfold. What is your most memorable experience from working on E.T.?

I loved the scene where Elliot is leading E.T. into the house. This is one example of watching Steven nurture not only the actors, but the set as well. Being there at those kinds of moments was really special.
 

Last year marked the 25th anniversary of Titanic, which was your first collaboration with James Cameron and won you the Oscar. Do you have a favourite costume from the film?

That is a difficult question. When I rewatch it, there are moments that I have forgotten and come back to me. I think, in general, the thrill of having all the characters and background artists together in the formal dining room was certainly a high point and a lot of work! I always return to Kates’s suit and purple hat. What a moment Jim made of it! The teen’s fashion of the time was quite fleeting and she was lifted from an absolute fashion moment in time. It says everything about the start of her character’s journey. Beautiful, finessed, complete, masculine, yet feminine and a bit over the top. She was going to make it in a man’s world, for sure.
 

Titanic, 1997. 20th Century Fox, Paramount Pictures

 

Kate’s costumes in Titanic had this incredible transformative power, it definitely has a character arc in costumes. In a film like Avatar, costumes are employed differently, and yet Avatar: The Way of Water was not only a continuation, but also a departure from Avatar. You added something to the story. Are we to expect the same thing from Avatar 3?

Absolutely! We continue with the Sully family and their journeys, together and alone, with the Metkyina and add in two more very special clans, that I am very excited to have designed!!
 

In any good film costume design is relevant and defining in telling the story. But is it true that the historical films are usually more fascinating in a visual way and more enriching for a designer?

They can certainly be more noticeable and fun! Exploring all those time periods and reproducing them to help the narrative of the film be told. But certainly, fantasy, when you have to use pretty much only your imagination, can be the most challenging and enriching. But I do have to say, hitting the exact right note on a contemporary costume can be very satisfying. You just don’t get as much attention for it.
 

They say that every film would be and would look different if it had been made by another costume designer. Would you do differently any of your films?

I’m not sure if I would do anything differently… but if I had to do any of them over again, I am sure I could come up with other ideas. The choices are always vast on any project, as long as they build character and establish the narrative visually.
 

Thank you, Deborah, for taking us on this film costume journey.

 
 

MORE STORIES

In conversation with costume designer Vicki Farrell

Emotionally caged and extravagantly clad: The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant

The Lost Daughter: In conversation with costume designer Edward K. Gibbon

Posted by classiq in Film, Film costume, Interviews | | Comments Off on Interview with Avatar Costume Designer Deborah L. Scott: “The Process Is the Same. You Build the Character!”
13 January 2023

January Newsletter: An Extraordinary Life, An Ordinary Man, and Finding Alain Delon

Photo to the right: David C. Phillips, print available on shop.classiq.me

 
 

Photos: Classiq Journal
(unless otherwise stated)

 
 

”Even though that may not be okay for you, it’s okay
for me. I just get so pissed off when everyone imposes their
standards and evaluations and their remembrances of what
they worked on, what they did, and they assume that’s
the way it happened for me, too.”

Paul Newman, The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Man

 
 

Photo to the right: Nadya Pajarillo, print available on shop.classiq.me

 

Viewing

L’insoumis, 1964
Alain Cavalier

The Smiths have this image of an immovable Alain Delon on the floor on the cover of their The Queen Is Dead album. I have always been intrigued by that cover, and yet I didn’t want to look into it, I didn’t want to find out what film it was from, just waiting to one day come across the film and have that image revealed to me. I have finally come across that film. It is L’insoumis, a film I knew nothing about when I started watching it, for the reason that it was just one of Alain Delon’s films I had somehow overlooked. And suddenly, there it was that image of Alain Delon, that for years had remained unplaceable. I loved the film. It has this unperceivable quality to it. It also has some incredibly shot action scenes and hauntingly beautiful close-ups of Delon. But it is the way the story builds up until that final scene that simply erupts in this wordless, powerful moment, that stays with you.
 

Tár, 2022
Todd Field

I have to admit I have mixed feeling about this film, which tells the story of renowned composer and conductor Lidya Tár, who, on the brink of recording the symphony of her life has to face the consequences of her past actions. On the one hand, Tár is a wonderful piece of cinema, the way it is filmed, the way it takes its time to tell the story (something that so many films of today rampantly lack), the way every set and scene are impeccably thought out, the musical score by Hildur Guðnadóttir that is a character in itself (the silences throughout the film are just as important as the music), the performances: Cate Blanchett remarkable in the role of Tár, but also a favourite of mine, Nina Hoss, as well as the rest of the cast really. Everything forms this perfect synergy. It’s probably the film of last year that made me feel the most that immersive power of cinema while watching it, feeling like a fly on the wall. And yet, I have to be honest here and say that there are certain parts of the story (an original screenplay by Todd Field) that are maybe too intricately woven into the realities of our times, namely the feminist and genre issues. And that would have been fine, too, were they not so clearly formulated and spelt out.
 

Escape from New York, 1981
John Carpenter

1997. Manhattan is a walled maximum security prison. Breaking out is impossible. Breaking in is insane. But break in Snake Plissken does. He is a criminal, former war hero, who is chosen for his skills to rescue the president of the United States whose plane has crashed in New York City. Kurt Russell plays Plissken and John Carpenter said Plissken could not have been played by anybody else. And here is why this sci-fi works the way it does: “Right now Manhattan is Disneyland,” Carpenter remarked in an interview with The Flashback Files. “It’s fake. Everything’s great there, so it really wouldn’t work. Escape from New York is really a movie of the seventies. That was when I wrote it. New York was going through some real problems then. A lot of crime, a lot of decay. It was a whole different place.”
 

Starman, 1981
John Carpenter

Another John Carpenter sci-fi, Starman challenges once more the genre and I have talked about it at length here.
 

Reversal of Fortune, 1990
Barbet Schroeder

Based on real life events, this is the story of Claus von Bulow’s two trials on the charge of attempting to murder his wife. Sunny von Bulow fell into an irreversible coma on a January morning and the family and police suspected foul play, with Claus as prime suspect. By the end of the film you don’t quite get the answers you were expecting, and that’s the beauty of it, especially that it’s narrated by Sunny, who walks us through all the details without revealing the essential, because she doesn’t know it, and asks for our thoughts. And that’s the trick, that’s what makes you keep watching. Having a penchant for courtroom dramas and thrillers, I took great joy in watching the trial preparation led by Alan J. Dershowitz (Ron Silver), the Harvard professor who conducted Claus von Bulow’s appeal and wrote the book that inspired the film. Jeremy Irons and Glenn Close play Claus and Sunny von Bulow, and you may be tempted to ask yourself: how hard is it two play two rich people with too much time on their hands, who mostly lie around the house? Well, you just have to watch the film and see just how demanding their roles were – who else but Jeremy Irons could allude to all the things he alludes to under that impenetrable façade, and how different is Glenn Close’s Sunny at those different parts in her life portrayed in the film?). It’s actually the kind of performance that deserves to be acclaimed more than the physically transformative roles that always get the most attention. Reversal of Fortune is mischievous, funny, tantalising, deceitful and cynical. It makes you aware that under the appearances (and it plays even better with its rich characters) there might lie a whole different truth.

 

 

Reading
 
The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Man

I don’t think I have ever read an autobiography that is so sensitive and rough at the same time. This has nothing to do with the movie business and the films we saw Paul Newman in and loved. It is a sharp and accurate look into one’s own life, and the result is not absolute understanding or revelation, but the effort of setting things straight, and dismantling many myths in the process, and ultimately the realisation that one remains an observer. This flawed image of a human being, of a Hollywood star is so much more moving and deeply relatable. “I’ve always had a sense of being an observer of my own life. I have a sense of watching something, but not of living something. It’s like looking at a photograph that’s out of focus, because the camera was shaken and the head is blurry. In fact, you can almost see three or four separate distinct images, depending on how it’s been vibrating. It’s spacey, I guess I always feel spaced out.” He doesn’t dramatise himself, doesn’t give him self-importance, and he plainly confesses that he had the luck to find the drive to overcome the label people always put on him that unquestionably involved his looks. “I think Paul was waiting for someone to make a demand on his talent,” said Sidney Lumet, who directed him in The Verdict. “He knows what good acting is, and good acting is about self-revelation.” I think this book is as close as it could be to a self-revelation of the man.

One of the most authoritative voices in tennis, Mats Wilander, talks to Sebastián Valera just a few days before the Australian Open. They talk the Grand Slam titles favourites this year, all-time greats, biggest challengers in the game, and the lack of consistency in women’s tennis. “What are we asking these players to be? Do they have to be in social media? Do they have to be a model? Do they have to win the US Open? Do they have to defend the points? Wowowow, let her be, slow down. I hope she keeps playing tennis.”

 
Listening

The Pedro Almodóvar interview for the podcast At Your Service. His films are so special and unique and I believe he gives the answer to that in this episode. He also talks the present film he’s working on, his beginnings as a filmmaker, the Spanish he grew up in, the strong women in his life, his frequent collaborators, Penélope Cruz and Antonio Banderas, his favourite contemporary filmmakers and all-time cinema masterpieces (I just love how he refers to Godard’s first film, À bout de souffle, by its original French title and has no idea what the English title is) and he makes a plea for watching movies in a cinema.
 

The album: Disintegration, The Cure

 
Making
 

A photography book is more likely to fall into the category of making rather than of writing a book (just the way a photographer says he makes, not takes a photo), or so I believe. Especially when the photographer is Joni Sternbach. How often does it happen to you these days to go back over and over again to a photograph you’ve seen and wonder: How was it made? Very rarely indeed. And how often does it inspire you to describe it as made by hand? Almost never. But this is why Joni Sternbach’s photographic series titled Surfland is so singular – evoking a feeling of both wonder and tranquility, an acute sense of time and place, a perfect imperfection that only handmaking and artistic intuition can achive, standing apart in this age of ubiquitous photography, and relating so well to the world of surfers and their spirit, their passion, their patience, their calm, and the certain state of mind it takes to ride above.

Using large format cameras and hand-poured plate collodion process, Joni Sternbach creates unique and strikingly beautiful portraits of unrivaled texture and depth along coastlines across the globe. She has been working on her ongoing series Surfland since 2006, documenting the surfing culture across the world, capturing and celebrating the diverse range and the way of life of people that are devotees of the sea. This is photography made by hand. It has soul. It’s one of a kind. There is something so extraordinary and mystifying about Joni Sternbach’s photography and I had the pleasure of interviewing her some years ago.

Her most recent book however, Kissing a Stranger, gathers her early work, from the 1970s and 1980s, and “in essence it is a portrait of the artist as a young woman forming her visual language through freedom of experimentation and expression”. These photos are not only a product of the woman and artist she was back then, but also a portrait of the times.
 

Exploring

TOKIO TŌKYŌ TOKYO², a pop-up newsletter by Craig Mod, about seven days of winter walking the city of Tokyo, a city he has now been walking for some twenty-three years. The newsletter starts on January 16 and ends on January 23. I have subscribed to all of Craig Mod’s previous pop-up newsletters and they simply are a different kind of experience, so remote from everything mainstream. Plus, he’s a wonderful writer.
 

 
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. The Adventure Podcast: Terra Incognita. Sirene magazine.
 

Posted by classiq in Books, Culture, Film, Newsletter | | Comments Off on January Newsletter: An Extraordinary Life, An Ordinary Man, and Finding Alain Delon
9 January 2023

One Classic Look: Karen Allen in “Starman”

Karen Allen in John Carpenter’s “Starman”, 1984. Columbia Pictures

 

In John Carpenter’s 1984 sci-fi Starman, Jeff Bridges is a space being trying to make contact with humans, after answering a NASA message intended for aliens. Upon arrival on Earth, he takes the physical appearance of a late person, the young husband of Jenny Hayden, who still can not come to terms with her tragic loss. Unsurprisingly, the humans who have brought him to Earth become hostile and the extraterrestrial becomes a national security target.

John Carpenter considers himself a child of Hollywood who never lost his love for old Hollywood films. He also considers himself a student of Hitchcock in cinema, and he was indeed hailed as the new Hitchcock when Halloween came out in 1978. But he wanted to forge his own path and style in cinema and he just kept onward, always succeeding in breaking away a little from what was expected of him. Halloween, The Thing, Christine are all films acclaimed for raising the bar on cinematic horror, but it is truly the suspense and thriller elements that pervade them and make them classics. About Starman, Carpenter said in an interview for The Flashback Files that “I just realised at some point that they were never going to let me do a romantic comedy. I was just going to be in horror and stay there, which is fine. But I wanted to get my shot at it. And that was a perfect chance to do it. I’m very happy with how that film turned out.”

In the same interview, he also articulated the most accurate and beautiful thing about the humans’ fascination with the outer space: “Well, look, we have no idea if there are any alien life forms out there and, if there are any, how they would look like and be like. We have no idea. We’re making movies about ourselves. They’re about the dark side and good side in all of us.” And I believe this is why this science fiction story is special: the personal element, and the way the character of Jenny Hayden addresses this, the way she finds hope amidst that great pain. That says a lot not only about her character, but about human behaviour and the human species as well, the way we raise above our grief, or above hardships, or a world in crisis. There is actually a line in the film that corroborates this thought, and it’s when Jeff Bridges’ character tells Charlie Martin-Smith: “You know, what I like most about you people is that when things are at their worst, you are at your best.”

Both Karen Allen and Jeff Bridges deliver wonderful performances (and have great chemistry), a spectrum of emotions at opposite sides, beautifully, and sometimes funnily, complimenting each other. About her role, she told The Hollywood Reporter: “My preparation for the role for the most part had to do with filling in Jenny’s history with her husband. So I knew how profound it was for her to see him again in the flesh even under the strange circumstances of the story. I felt that was the element that overcame Jenny’s fear and drove the story forward for her.”

Jeff Bridges is very natural at being strange, a stranger in a strange world, and, together with Karen Allen, he managed to establish this reality we watch on screen. Of course this Starman taking the form of Jenny’s late husband (doesn’t this make perfect sense, aliens taking the physical appearance of humans, were they do land on Earth?) would wear what he wore in the film that she obsessively watches at night right before the extraterrestrial lands in her living room. Khakis, red plaid shirt with a brown leather bomber jacket on top, and a red baseball cap – that’s the ol’ American look alright. Because another great thing about the film is how well it captures the times and the place, all that vast American landscape, the cross-country ride, with its patina and texture and those roadside stops and diners. Keep off the main attractions, out of chain hotels, and an ear to the ground for local knowledge, the film seems to say, and that’s just the right way for the Starman to get acquainted with the human American race. I like the fact that this film couldn’t be reproduced today, in all its authenticity and minimalist sci-fi visual effects.

Except maybe for the costumes. Just like Jeff Bridges’ look would easily translate today, Karen Allen’s remains a classic. Blue jeans tucked in cowboy boots and her husband’s bomber jacket which the Starman leaves her after hers is stained with blood when she is shot by the policemen hunting him. Almost four decades on, this look is still very much of the times.
 

Karen Allen in John Carpenter’s “Starman”, 1984. Columbia Pictures

 
 

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19 December 2022

A Sight to Behold: Katharine Hepburn in “The Philadelphia Story”

The Philadelphia Story, 1940. MGM

 

“It’s so fun to do a really good comedy,” Katharine Hepburn would recall about filming The Philadelphia Story in her autobiography, Me: Stories of My Life. And it’s so fun to watch a high class, good comedy this time of year that has nothing to do with Christmas.

George Cukor was one of Hepburn’s favourite directors and her “best friend in California”. “We made many pictures together – always happily. Must have had the same set of standards. We both adored the business – we loved to work – we admired each other. The same liberal point of view – the same sense of right and wrong”.

The Philadelphia Story was based on the 1939 Broadway play by the same name, by Philip Barry. Howard Hughes bought the movie rights for Katharine as a present. She had also starred in the play, having returned to the stage after her recent setbacks at RKO. She sold the movie rights to MGM, in return of complete creative control. She wanted George Cukor. She also wanted Spencer Tracy and Clark Gable, but they wouldn’t do it. L.B. Mayer, the head of MGM, said they could give her James Stewart and she agreed. She brought along Cary Grant. And they did a great screwball comedy, and an effortlessly classy film, together. “The script by Don Stewart retained all the delirious humour and quality of the play” and George Cukor “was a wonderful director and this was his ideal material”, Hepburn said.
 

The Philadelphia Story, 1940. MGM

 
Hepburn plays Tracy Lord, a tempestuous, hot-blooded heiress whose imminent marriage to her upper-class fiancé is disrupted by her former husband, Cary Grant, who pays her family estate a visit accompanied by two society reporters, James Stewart and Ruth Hussey. The film was the first time Katharine and costume designer Adrian worked together. He was one of the few American designers of the era capable of making an individual statement, and he had the incredible talent of letting an actor’s true personality and natural beauty shine through even behind the most extravagant gowns, especially when it came to the greatest nonconformist stars of the times, Katharine Hepburn and Greta Garbo.

In The Philadelphia Story, which would revive her career, Katharine’s goddess gowns, transcending the magnetism of her personality, highlight her beauty, vulnerability and her human and feminine side too little perceivable in her previous movies, and much of the merit goes to Adrian. The designer’s “challenge was to counter the perceived haughtiness that was sinking her personality,” Christian Esquevin writes in the book Adrian: From Silver Screen to Custom Label. “He did this with costumes that struck a balance between flair and elegant simplicity. Hepburn’s physique was the type Adrian liked – tall, broad-shouldered, athletic, similar to Garbo’s but with even thinner hips. She had a long neck that Adrian alternately encased in high collars and showed off simply in open necklines. He often used white in her costumes, reinforcing a flowing and classical line of purity and strength echoing Greek statuary.”

The Philadelphia Story, 1940. MGM

 

In an early scene, Katharine appears in a black pantsuit worn over a white blouse. The jacket is short and tight, with a high collar and without lapels, and has a large white breast pocket and oversized white buttons. Christian Esquevin writes that Adrian’s sketch for this trouser suit has producer Joe Mankiewicz’s penciled note to Hepburn. “Are you sure these too should be slacks? Fine by me if fine by you.” Katharine always used the word slacks to refer to trousers. And they certainly were fine with her. She is wearing another trouser look further on in the story, a sign that Adrian always tried to let her real personality seep into the character. The character in classic Hollywood movies was not just a character, it was an image, a star-making vehicle, a representation of both the character and the actor playing it. And Adrian was the kind of costume designer that let the real Katharine Hepburn, with all her presence and self-confidence, in on the screen. It’s easy to understand why the two of them stroke a beautiful collaboration. About The Philadelphia Story, Life magazine wrote: “When Katharine Hepburn sets out to play Katharine Hepburn, she is a sight to behold. Nobody is her equal.”
 

The Philadelphia Story, 1940. MGM

 

Adrian called the creation above a dance frock – here are more images of the costumes in the film. It’s the look Katharine wears when she meets the two reporters, and, before she makes her entrance, Macaulay Connor (James Stewart) says: “I can fill them in right now: the rich, rapacious, American female. There’s no other country where she exists.” And then Katharine enters the room wearing this very pastoral American look. “It is composed of a red and white gingham skirt, flounced with four layers of ruffles stylishly placed on the bias, and a blouse of mousseline de soie, edged at the sleeve, collar and string tie in the same gingham.”
 

The Philadelphia Story, 1940. MGM

 

The most talked about gown in the movie is the Greek goddess white chiffon gown with stepped gold sequin belting and bodice decoration, emphasizing Katharine’s lean figure. The dress is one of Adrian’s Hellenic motif costumes he designed for the actress, emphasizing her patrician character in the movie. Cary Grant’s character, Tracy’s former husband C.K. Dexter Haven, comments in one scene that she “has the withering look of the goddess”. And her new fiancé calls her “beautiful purity like a statue”.
 

The Philadelphia Story, 1940. MGM

 

But the dress that best reflects her character and her transformation (a journey of self-discovery for everyone involved unfolds as the film seamlessly, wittily progresses) is the wedding dress, orchid-white, accessorized with a white-brimmed picture hat and chin strap streamers. Her midriff is protected with a smaller fabric “buckle” fastened by string ties. The weightless fabric, transparent silk organza, is beautifully fitting Katharine’s svelte silhouette and character. There is the real Katharine somewhere in that character. “Who is Katharine Hepburn? It took me a long time to create that creature.” But Katharine Hepburn always remained a tomboy and non-conformist in real life: “I just had good timing: the pants came in, the low heels came in, the terrible woman came in, who spoke her mind.” She had more than good timing. Katharine Hepburn was simply ahead of her times.
 


 

The Philadelphia Story, 1940. MGM

 
 

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Posted by classiq in Film, Film costume | | Comments Off on A Sight to Behold: Katharine Hepburn in “The Philadelphia Story”