Now in its fifteenth year, and having reached a milestone thirty titles in the cinematic collaboration between Miu Miu and world filmmakers, the latest installments are simply delicious. And you’ll want to read on for the motivations behind the two shorts.
Alice Diop and Joanna Hogg are extraordinary women. And their cinema reflects their personal vision of course. If all art is personal, as some say, these two filmmakers also prove that what is personal can also often be political.
Coming together for Miu Miu Women’s Tales, a groundbreaking, ongoing experiment which highlights the female experience through a series of short films whose only mandate for the creatives who make them is to use the latest collection of Miu Miu clothing and accessories in any way they wish, Hogg and Diop have made shorts number 29 and number 30, respectively.
These beautiful cinematic short stories are always introduced in Venice, as part of the Giornate degli Autori selection. Giornate, as it is affectionately called, is an official sidebar of the festival on the Lido which celebrates, as their name hints, auteurs. Hogg’s short is titled Autobiografia di una borsetta (Autobiography of a Handbag) and Diop’s Fragments of Venus. Both women admitted they were influenced by literary works for their titles but also in the structure and theme of their shorts, during an insightful conversation inside the Hotel Excelsior on Sunday morning.
I’ve long been a fan of the series, which has included short works by both established filmmakers like Agnès Varda and Lynne Ramsay, as well as by known women experimenting in cinema — like Palestinian movie star Hiam Abbass and American actress Chloë Sevigny — but also by groundbreaking world cinema directors like Haifaa Al Mansour, Mati Diop and Lucrecia Martel.
In Autobiografia di una borsetta, Hogg follows a white Miu Miu Wander handbag on a journey from its rightful owner, a young girl from an affluent Italian family, through some misadventures and all the way to an ending that is both touching and true. In this world where fashion has become so fast and expendable, the Wander bag, voiced by non-actor Isetta Tollapi in a delicious Tuscan accent, ends up wondering about her future, now that she no longer has an owner.
In Fragments of Venus, Diop instead finds the contradiction between the ancient images of Venus and what those images have done to modern Black women. While in a museum, her muse wanders around looking at old masters paintings, with their white vision of beauty, outside on the street of Brooklyn, NY the truth of modern Black beauty is revealed, in all its shape and sizes, and astounding grace.
In an excerpt from the Miu Miu website, Diop wrote: “My time in America, especially my recent stay while teaching at Harvard University, nourished me, and allowed me to question what it means to be a French, Black woman in French society.”
While we may attack social media and the internet for chipping away at our humanity, and communication skills, one thing it has been great for has been knowledge. If we look for it. We can no longer say we don’t know because we now see, thanks to Google, what other people look like all over the world, where they live, what they do. In the Renaissance those resources, to look something up on Google wasn’t available and so painters would use a model from their area to portray an icon from across the world, thus creating a whole identity problem in non-white races.
From Joanna Hogg’s ‘Autobiografia di una borsetta’ photographed by © Brigitte Lacombe
For her short, Hogg admitted she was inspired by a couple of literary works. One is Hogg’s friend, the intellectual John David Rhodes who, along with Elena Gorfinkel published The Prop, a book which attempts to answer the questions around book answers these questions around those material objects that are used to construct cinematic worlds. The title of the film comes from a 1843 serial novel by by James Fenimore Cooper titled Autobiography of a Pocket Handkerchief.
During the chat in Venice, moderated by moderated by Penny Martin, Editor in Chief at The Gentlewoman, both women admitted they were reticent about working on a commissioned film. “I need emotion to make a film,” Diop said, “I felt yesterday like what I felt three years ago to present Saint Omer,” which also premiered in Venice in 2022. “I never accept commissions, but when Verde [Visconti, who curates the program for Miu Miu] approached me at the start of the year, she found the exact moment to explore the Robin Coste Lewis poem.” The poem Diop referred to is titled ‘Voyage of the Sable Venus’ and was published in 2015 by the American poet and artist. The poem’s title references the slave trade to the West Indies, and its central section consists of titles, catalog entries or exhibit descriptions in Western art that depict the black female form going back to 38,000 BC.
Diop’s career has been fueled by her own “political urge to shine light on those people who haven’t been featured in cinema.” She also described how she came to love the Lewis poem. “It’s a very powerful poem based on research by Lewis where she collected and composed an epic poem which features an enumeration of titles,” the French Senegalese filmmaker said. “How could a film do all this, working through the central question of cinema? Robin does this with implacable beauty that we can’t see.”
Hogg’s acceptance of the project was also born out of a challenge she posed to herself.
“At first I had no idea of what I was going to do,” said the British filmmaker and screenwriter, “I knew I wanted to challenge myself, throw myself into the dark as with every film I make. I wasn’t thinking of genre, I wanted to make something equally personal but also play a bit. One of the ways was that I wanted the protagonist to be a prop. A friend [Rhodes] had written a book about prop in cinema. It’s about “property” that is often owned by someone else and I was interested in this idea of a prop changing hands.”
Hogg shot the short herself, her first time doing so in her career. “The risk I wanted to take is I wanted the gaze of this film to be my own,” she explained, “I wanted it to be very direct and didn’t want to translate it to someone else. It was fundamentally important to me to take that step and photograph it myself. I generally work with a male cinematographer.” But this time around she wanted “to strip everything down and have this camera be almost invisible in a way.” And she succeeded, as we follow around the handbag on her journey of survival, identifying with her ordeal all the way.
The honesty of Diop’s cinema is what we remember most from her films and this time around, it’s no different. “Whether I am making a fiction or an essay film like this what I’m aiming to do is to bring up the most authentic emotions possible,” she admitted, “in no way fabricated.”
When asked who each filmmaker would envision as a next auteurs for Miu Miu Women’s Tales, Diop quickly replied, in French “Celine Sciamma and Claire Denis.” Hogg’s choice may be a bit more challenging to convince, as she replied “Chantal Ackerman” who of course has passed on to a different cinematic reality, in the afterlife. But yes, a Miu Miu Women’s Tales short by Ackerman, though never possible, definitely also exists in that same alternate reality.
When each woman was asked what they’d like audiences to take away from their short, Hogg said she hoped people would “take something that is very personal away — I am always very touched when people respond to my work. I tend to discard it when I’m finished and am surprised that my stories live on.” Diop closed the talk by answering “Once the film is delivered it no longer blogs to me. And what moves me most is when viewers reveal something I didn’t see.”
All images by Brigitte Lacombe courtesy of Miu Miu, used with permission.