Fashion Media

Our film draws on the distinctive relationship between fashion and noir, particularly in the use of ‘reflection and distortion [and] urban locations… resulting [in] a dramatically shadowed, psychologically expressive visual approach and a semi-documentary style’ (Cecil 2012). Despite this, the film recontextualises the conventional definition of noir in that the subject matter and hence, the fashion presented has been altered for a contemporary context. The overall styling selected complements the androgynous image of the eponymous Gongini while also drawing attention to the constructed nature of gender through fashion.   

Duality is a significant theme within the film, ascertained by two settings, two characters and ultimately, two running narratives. The film has been shot entirely from a third-person perspective as ‘human vision becomes an adjunct… instrument and automation of the scopic regime’ (Feldman 1997), providing voyeuristic power regarding the ‘iconography of the image itself: content, compositional clues, focus, colour, and the response of those photographed to the presence of the camera’ (Frosh 2001). 

The multiplicity of bodies, none of which are fundamentally tangible thus reveals the nature of the body as permeated by discourse, where ‘clothes and objects are an intrinsic part…[of the] body exposed to transformations…a body that will feel and taste all that the world feels and tastes, if it simply lets itself’ (Calefato 1997).  The fusion of both the masculine and the feminine and the eventual metamorphosis into the solitary figure further personifies this, but also demonstrates the reconstruction of contemporary gendered identities.