Three minutes of absolute magic.
I pontificated on Essential Blu-Ray movies a while back and that short list remains valid today. These movies are essential not to the cinephile or auteur. Rather, they are key for any photographer.
None meets the definition of ‘essential’ better than Stanley Donen’s 1957 Funny Face with Fred Astaire, Audrey Hepburn and the powerhouse that was Kay Thompson. But the movie director had two special tools in his arsenal. One was the aristocratic couturier Hubert de Givenchy, recently deceased. No man more defined ‘elegant’ when it came to modern couture and in Audrey Hepburn – an actress of surpassingly bland acting talent – he found the perfect mannequin. The two would remain linked in the minds of the fashionistas for decades. The other was the ‘go to’ fashion photographer of the ’50s and ’60s, America’s own Richard Avedon, yet another Columbia dropout. When editor Diana Vreeland left Harper’s Bazaar for Vogue she took Avedon with her and the rest is history. A great collaboration defined fashion photography for two decades.
Avedon served as the expert photography adviser on ‘Funny Face’, as this wonderful image with Fred Astaire shows:
Just over half way through the movie the photography crew finally has the somewhat gauche Hepburn more or less beaten into modelling shape and what follows is three minutes of absolute magic. In those three minutes Astaire is shown crafting seven showstopper images as he directs Hepburn in various posing routines in magnificent Parisian locations.
Here he is getting ready for the first with the same giant plate camera in the Avedon image above:
In the Tuileries Gardens, outside The Louvre. The most perfect urban space on earth.
He uses a Rolleiflex as often as the plate camera, even adopting the tricky upside down orientation shown here:
Then the fun begins.
With the balloons at the petit Arc de Triomphe.
At Gare du Nord with the Flèche d’Or, the Paris to Calais train. Givenchy at his very best.
At the florist’s.
The Louvre.
Fishing in the Seine.
Not any doves. Parisian doves.
The Coup de Grace. Givenchy outdoes himself at the Paris Opéra.
7 images. 3 minutes. Absolute magic.