[We're delighted to share a post from our friend and colleague, Dr. Enrica Picarelli, an Italian scholar currently at the Centre for Comparative Studies, Lisbon University. Her blog is Space of Attraction and eminently worth reading. This piece is both longer than our typical post and slightly more theoretical in scope and academic in jargon. The terms haptic/hapticity will be, perhaps, unfamiliar, but they are great words to know, referring as they do to the sense of touch or tactile experience and ways of "feeling" the visual. ]
Last February, the art collective Nest, based in Nairobi, released To Catch a Dream {click here to see the Vimeo video}, a 13-minute collaborative fashion film featuring Vivienne Westwood’s muse Ajuma Nasenyana and a team of award-winning stylists from Kenya, including Namnyak Odupoy, Ami Doshi, Kepha Maina, Jamil and Azra Walji, Katungulu Mwendwa, Ann McCreath and Adele Dejak. Jim Chuchu, whose work on Kenya’s LGBT community has been screened to acclaim at festivals worldwide (Voulrias 2014), directed; Wangechi Ngugi produced. Because of its high production values and cast of acclaimed artists, the online release of To Catch a Dream was widely anticipated, mentioned, shared, and positively reviewed in lifestyle publications and social media.
To Catch a Dream is an exploration of withdrawal, desire and death focusing on a young widow in mourning, haunted by the memory of her husband. Every night he appears in her dreams, until the exhausted protagonist decides to chase his ghost with a dream-catcher. Crossing dimensions in her sleep, she travels across the land of the dead for one last encounter with her love and other otherworldly entities. Ultimately, the encounter proves fatal and she is trapped in death’s dreamworld.
I consider To Catch a Dream in this post because its production values, aim, and effects attest to the transformations of promotional forms in the 2.0 environment and to the difficulties scholars have defining, and therefore delimiting, the scope and properties of discreet advertising formats. In a review, journalist Diana Opoti asks whether to label To Catch a Dream “an ad campaign” or a “fashion film” (2015). Her hesitation stems from the fact that, as happens with many promotional formats, the immediate commercial aim of the feature – the showcasing of apparel by renowned designers – is somehow eschewed. Audiences interested in learning about the garments displayed on screen have either to wait for the credits, scan the promotional poster or rely on external information, such as reviews or the cast’s press statements. The primary goal of the production is, in fact, to engross viewers in an unfolding narrative. Sunny Dolat, stylist and fashion director, notes that the garments “reflect the different phases of the widow’s journey through the dreamworld,” thereby elevating the narrative element above the aestheticized displaying of apparel for commercial purposes (UpNairobi 2015).
This instrumental use of clothes and accessories allows Nest to address place-based and culture-specific issues in a story-driven audiovisual project. Dolat continues:
Ajuma's red, slim cut Dream Country ensemble, with black detailing, detachable leather sleeves and their flowing chiffon extensions was intentionally designed to evoke the memory of bridal wear. Another character, the Air Guide, wears a piece showing strong elemental references. The opulent peacock feather neckpiece and voluminous loops of sheer cloth celebrate desert breezes with each of Air Guide's motions (Opoti 2015)
Fashion, in this instance, becomes character, contributing to the weaving of a storyworld about “our disquieting modern identities, re-imagining our pasts and inhabiting mythical African futures” (Nest). In concert with the choice to shoot the dreamworld among the iconic landmarks of Magadi and Lake Naivasha and to have the characters speak in local languages (Dholuo, Swahili, Kikamba, Sheng, Tigrinya, Kimeru and Turkana), To Catch a Dream creates an atmospheric spectacle that attracts for a number of reasons. Among these is the intention to root the commercial concerns of the eight stylists in a project devoted to exploring “layers of how Africans are seen and unseen” (Nest). The project’s potential lies as well in its execution, where artistic vision incorporates elements of various genres, including fantasy, gothic, costume photography, and cinematographic teaser/trailers.
To Catch a Dream exemplifies the role of the fashion industry in pushing the boundaries of advertising and commercial formats. Fashion films have more and more become crossbreeds of different promotional genres. They borrow conventions from trailers, documentaries, teasers, video-art, and film proper, while preserving a formal autonomy that makes them a successful means of consumer attraction. Nest co-founder George Gachara explains that To Catch a Dream was developed as an experimental fashion intervention and short film, designed to provide a medium for the creation and sharing of fashion experiences, products and knowledge. It embeds fashion in an evocative spectacle where atmosphere –the lived or screen-mediated experience of a culture and location (East African & Kenya) that are both exotic and uncannily familiar – constitutes the main source of value.
As in the case studies Marketa Uhlirova analyzes in her work on fashion films, a “synergy” forms between film effect and fashion effect, whereby sensorial persuasion and illusion address the viewer as both spectator and potential buyer (2013:122). The phenomenological state thus achieved is analogous to the spectatorial pleasures associated with the cinema of attraction, based on the simultaneous experience of defamiliarization and the acquisition of new knowledge. Fashion film “extend[s] the properties of physical garments into new mental spaces where experimental effects of impressionistic and poetic cinema play a significant role – as do the qualities of sound and rhythm,” she proposes. (2013:123).
Montage is, obviously, the principal mechanism behind the creation of the mental space of illusion and persuasion that entices media users as actual viewers and consumers. Borrowing from Laura Mark’s study, Gary Needham refers to the “haptic” aesthetic of fashion films, where cinematic conventions like close-up and slow motion combine with diegetic and non-diegetic sound editing to deliver the impression of materiality (2013:108). To Catch a Dream follows a cinematic model, investing in soundtrack and narrative rhythm to establish anticipation and induce deferral. These affects mark the escapism of both the filmic and the spectactorial (consumer) experience.
Consequently, this film oscillates between narrative closure and the postponement of the pleasure of wearing, touching or buying the garments displayed on screen. Indeed, it promotes the imaginative act of coming in contact with the material referents of the filmed objects as well as with the extended narrative universe that we only glimpse in the film. It is here that To Catch a Dream borrows most notably from the experience of watching a trailer.
The fashion film, in fact, operates in line with the “anticipatory consciousness” that Lisa Kernan ascribes to trailer spectatorship, whereby “trailers are what we imagine – and hope – the films to become; the films they promote are thus ever richer in the imagined interstices of the paradoxical trailer montage than they can ever be in their narrative ‘fullness’ on the screen” (2004:210). Since trailers “hover in the consciousness of the viewer as incomplete, unformed ‘ideas’”, they can be viewed as a “hopeful beginning” whose success plays on the constant deferral of pleasure (2004:210). Similarly, shorts films that promote fashion garments through audiovisual narrative set in place a universe that demands the viewer’s investment in the fiction, bringing it to life through the literal embodiment of its elements.
To Catch a Dream exemplifies a genre of productions that exploit the style and persuasive power of costume in movement, along with the editing and narrative conventions of mainstream cinema, to redefine our understanding of commercial promotion and artistic practice. This ever-evolving hybrid of aesthetic forms, “sit[ting] somewhere on the margins of conventional advertising” (Uhlirova 2013:121), invites us to consider and systematize how to look at fashion and what to take from this engagement with identification and point of view.
Bibliography
Kernan, L. (2004), Coming attractions: Reading American movie trailers. University of Texas Press.
Needham, G. (2013), ‘The Digital Fashion Film’ in Bruzzi, Stella, and Pamela Church Gibson, eds. Fashion cultures: theories, explorations and analysis. Routledge.
Nest, ‘The Nest’, Nest. http://www.thisisthenest.com/about/
Opoti, D. (2015), ‘Kenya: When Fashion Meet Film’, The Star, 20 February http://www.the-star.co.ke/news/where-fashion-meet-film
Nest, (2015), ‘To Catch a Dream’, Vimeo. https://vimeo.com/116848487
Uhlirova, M. (2013), ‘The fashion Film Effect’ in Bartlett, Djurdja, Shaun Cole, and Agnès Rocamora, eds. Fashion Media: Past and Present. A&C Black.
UpNairobi (2015), ‘Film Review: To Catch a Dream’, Up Nairobi, 24 February. http://www.upnairobi.com/dt_portfolio/film-review-to-catch-a-dream/
Voulrias, C. (2014), ‘Kenyan film tells stories of LGBT lives’, Al Jazeera America, 5 September. http://america.aljazeera.com/blogs/scrutineer/2014/9/5/kenyan-film-tellsstoriesoflgbtlives.html
RSS Feed