The Fine Art of Fashion: Yves Saint Laurent

by Kimberly Lindbergs | September 29, 2007

Categories | Blogathons, Costume Design, Luis Bunuel

Catherine Deneuve and Yves Saint Laurent, 1966

Since Flickhead’s Buñuel Blog-a-thon is sill going strong and I’ve clearly got Belle de Jour on my brain, I couldn’t resist sharing a few more brief thoughts about my favorite Louis Buñuel film.

One of the most memorable things about Buñuel’s Belle de Jour is the fabulous fashions designed by Yves Saint Laurent and worn by the lovely Catherine Deneuve. I’ve never been able to afford Yves Saint Laurent’s fashions myself and it’s doubtful that I’d look as good as Catherine Deneuve does in them even if I could, but I enjoy watching Belle de Jour just to gaze at Catherine Deneuve’s amazing wardrobe. In this regard, I suppose I have more in common with the low-class prostitutes in the film who seem totally enamored with Deneuve’s wardrobe as well. And who can blame us? Yves Saint Laurent was an incredible designer and his sixties-era fashions featured in Belle de Jour are absolutely stunning.

Catherine Deneuve modeling a Yves Saint Laurent design, 1966

Yves Saint-Laurent first started designing costumes for films when he was only 24 years old and working with Christian Dior at the House of Dior, but his real success as a costume designer came after he had started his own design house in Paris. In 1963 Yves Saint-Laurent was hired to create wardrobes for the beautiful Claudia Cardinale and Capucine in Blake Edwards’ The Pink Panther (1963) and his designs impressed critics and audiences. He would go on to design fabulous wardrobes for Leslie Caron in A Very Special Favor (1965) and Jean Seberg in Moment to Moment (1965). His amazing costume designs were also featured in Arabesque (1966) with Sophia Loren, although the credit tends to go to Christian Dior for that film and you can see some of Yves Saint-Laurent’s work in the entertaining fashion focused comedy A New Kind of Love (1963) with Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, which ended up winning Edith Head an Oscar for Best Costume Design.

In 1966 the 29 year old Yves Saint-Laurent was hired to design the wardrobe for Catherine Deneuve in Buñuel’s Belle de Jour, and Deneuve and Yves Saint Laurent developed a lifelong friendship on the set of the film. The designer has called the lovely and talented Catherine Deneuve his “muse” and he has used her as a model many times since the two made Belle de Jour together. Catherine Deneuve has also insisted on wearing Yves Saint Laurent’s amazing costume designs in many of her films and besides an off screen friendship, the two developed a very close working relationship over the years on films such as La Chamade (1968), Mississippi Mermaid (1969), Liza (1972), Un flic (1972) and The Hunger (1983) which all feature fabulous Yves Saint-Laurent’s fashion designs worn by Deneuve.

Yves Saint Laurent is responsible for some of the greatest film fashions seen on screen during the sixties and seventies, and some of his finest work as a designer can be found in Buñuel’s brilliant Belle de Jour.

If you’d like to see more of Yves Saint Laurent’s wonderful sixties-era fashions please visit my vintage Yves Saint-Laurent Flickr Gallery as well as my Belle de Jour Flickr Gallery.

Recommended Links and References:
- Official Yves Saint-Laurent site
- Yves Saint-Laurent at Fashion Encyclopedia
- Yves Saint Laurent at IMDb
- Yves Saint-Laurent at Wikipedia

My Buñuel Blog-a-thon Contributions:
- What’s in the Box?
- Ode to Marcel
- The Fine Art of Fashion: Yves Saint-Laurent

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Ode to Marcel

by Kimberly Lindbergs | September 28, 2007

Categories | Actors, French Cinema, Blogathons, Spanish Cinema, Pierre Clementi, Luis Bunuel

Pierre Clementi in Belle de Jour (1967)

“He had a legend, the aura of genius, a friend to the mysterious and the strange. I arrived full of holy terror and mad hope all at the same time. I was struck immediately by one thing, only one: he’s a man of whom you only see the face. The fabulous mouth, worked by life, heavily wrinkled skin, the driven eyes, but in their black ring, a sparkling light. I was incapable of saying a word, I don’t even remember if it was a production office, an apartment, a hotel room. I looked at the deep earth of his face, the clear water of his regard. They told me ‘Speak loudly, we don’t know if he’s deaf or if he pretends to be . . .’ But how to speak? I repeated to myself ‘Come on. You have to speak.’ I thought that my silence and my insistence on staring would become intolerable. Someone else would surely have addressed me, would have started to speak, if only to reduce the tension a little. He was content to just look at me. Simply, directly, as if we had met there for a mutual exam and that words weren’t necessary. A guy walked in, perhaps an assistant, I can’t remember. Buñuel turned towards me. ‘This is Clémenti. Show him the script.’ If I understood properly, I had just been hired for Belle de Jour…With no other director did I have such a feeling of confidence.”
- Pierre Clémenti on Luis Buñuel and his role in Belle de Jour from his book Quelques Messages Personnels

My favorite character in Louis Buñuel’s Belle de Jour is Pierre Clémenti’s wonderful turn as the sexy thug Marcel. Pierre Clémenti was a beautiful and talented actor who appeared in many great films before his untimely death in 1999 including The Leopard (1963), Benjamin (1968), Les Idoles (1968), Partner (1968), The Conformist (1970), Sweet Movie (1974), La Cicatrice intérieure (1972) , Steppenwolf (1974), Quartet (1981) and Belle de Jour (1967).

I haven’t written anything substantial about Pierre Clémenti yet, so I thought I’d take the opportunity provided by Flickhead’s Buñuel Blog-a-thon to post a photographic tribute to Pierre Clémenti’s character Marcel in Belle de Jour, which was haphazardly put together from various screen shots I recently took from the film.

To view more screen shots from Luis Buñuel’s film please see my Flickr Belle De Jour Gallery.

Recommended Links and References:
- The Passion of Pierre Clémenti: European cinema’s christ-devil child
- Pierre Clémenti at Paris dans les années 70 (French language fan site)
- Pierre Clémenti - Acteur réalisateur (French language fan site)

My Buñuel Blog-a-thon Contributions:
- What’s in the Box?
- Ode to Marcel
- The Fine Art of Fashion: Yves Saint-Laurent

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What’s In the Box?

by Kimberly Lindbergs |

Categories | Books, Rants & Raves, French Cinema, Blogathons, Spanish Cinema, Luis Bunuel

Critics and film scholars have spent countless hours analyzing Luis Buñuel’s film Belle de Jour (1967) and the mysterious Asian box that appears in one of the movies most memorable and erotic scenes. As someone who has read a lot of Marquis de Sade’s work, I’ve personally never seen the box as being very mysterious or profound, so I thought I would share my own thoughts about the buzzing box for the Luis Buñuel Blog-a-thon currently being hosted by Flickhead.

Many reviews of Belle de Jour seem written by rather chaste critics who often insist on weighing Buñuel’s film down with its clear social implications and debatable morality, instead of fully embracing it for the erotic masterpiece that it is. Like most of the surrealists, Luis Buñuel was clearly inspired and fascinated with the work of authors like Marquis de Sade, Octave Mirbeau and Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, and traces of Buñuel’s obsession with their work can be found throughout Belle de Jour. From its emotionally distant characters, to its masochistic ideas and brothel setting, the film could be read as a checklist of erotic themes found in early French literature.

When I saw Belle de Jour for the first time and watched the scene with the infamous buzzing box, I was immediately reminded of the sounds of insects and a brief passage in Marquis de Sade’s erotic classic Philosophy in the Boudoir, where he referenced a tale told by the 15th century Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci. This titillating tale involves native women in Florida who supposedly made their men place “small poisonous insects in their male members until they swelled up tremendously and caused an insatiable libido.” It also explains that these insects could cause a man “dreadful pain” and “ulcers, ” but the negative implications aren’t as interesting as the erotic ones. With this odd tale lingering somewhere in the back of my mind, my first assumption about the buzzing box was that it contained insects that the box’s owner planned to use on himself as a sort of aphrodisiac to pleasure Catherine Deneuve’s character Séverine with.

This somewhat unusual assumption on my part is also fueled by Luis Buñuel’s own personal fascination with insects which appeared in many of his films, but at first glance could seem notably absent from Belle de Jour. Buñuel’s fascination with insects was first shown in An Andalusian Dog (Un chien andalou, 1929), but you can also find insects in his other films such as the scorpions in The Golden Age (L’ Âge d’or, 1930) and the cockroaches in The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (Le Charme discret de la bourgeoisie, 1972). According to Buñuel scholar Julie Jones who also provides the commentary for the Belle de Jour DVD and seems to agree with me about the insect quality of the sounds emanating from the mysterious box, Luis Buñuel associated insects with “the life of the instincts” and even wanted to make a film about insects.

If my casual assumptions are true and Buñuel is referencing the Amerigo Vespucci/Marquis De Sade tale in Belle de Jour, it could also easily explain Séverine’s sudden joy in participating in a sexual act with that particular client at the brothel. Séverine is clearly a submissive woman who the Madame Anais has insisted needs a “strong hand.” Her desires seem unquenchable and a long session of intense lovemaking with a sort of “super man” would undoubtedly excite and please her. The untranslated conversation between Séverine and the man seems to indicate to me that he will be the one using whatever is in the box during their sexual encounter, which is why he clearly tells her “Don’t be afraid.” It’s also important to notice how the man guards the box and holds it closely to his body in the film. It’s his secret and his possession, which could indicate that whatever it contains directly affects him even more than those around him.

Buñuel never fully explained the contents of the box within the film himself and seemed to enjoy the confusion it caused among critics and audiences, but I think the influence of de Sade’s writing on Belle de Jour and Buñuel in general might betray him here. As I mentioned above, the work of Marquis de Sade greatly inspired the Surrealist movement and Belle de Jour is ripe with references to Marquis de Sade’s novels, including Philosophy in the Boudoir where the tale of strange insects and their effects on the male anatomy are alluded to. It is a book that Buñuel read and must have known well, and I’m sure his own personal interest in insects would have made the Amerigo Vespucci/Marquis de Sade tale incredibly fascinating and appealing to him. Especially because it so deeply and directly links insects to “the life of the instincts” which Buñuel clearly obsessed over.

Renowned Surrealist Margritte’s artistic interpretations
of Marquis de Sade’s Philosophy in the Boudoir

Since I’ve never read Joseph Kessel’s original novel Belle de Jour which Buñuel based his film on, I can’t elaborate on my assumptions as much as I would like to, but the inspirations for Kessel’s book seem very clear. It’s obvious that Kessel based his fictitious female character of Séverine on the male character of Severin found in Sacher-Masoch’s book Venus in Furs and he probably found inspiration in the erotic writings of Anais Nin, who I assume inspired the name of the brothel in Belle de Jour and its Madame. With all of these erotic literary references littered throughout Belle de Jour, I think it’s natural to assume that Buñuel’s mysterious buzzing box could possibly be linked to the insects briefly referenced in Marquis de Sade’s Philosophy of the Boudoir.

So the next time you find yourself wondering what’s in the box, I can only suggest considering insects and their erotic implications, as well as their symbolic importance in Buñuel’s own work.

Books Referenced and Recommended Reading:
- Philosophy in the Boudoir by Marquis de Sade
- Marquis De Sade: His Life And Works by Iwan Bloch
- Venus in Furs by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch
- The Diary of a Chambermaid by Octave Mirbeau
- Delta of Venus by Anais Nin
- Little Birds by Anais Nin
- The Autobiography Of A Flea by Anonymous

Films Referenced and Recommended Viewing:
- Belle de Jour (1967)
- Un Chien Andalou (1929)
- L’Age d’Or (1930)
- Diary of a Chambermaid (Le Journal d’une femme de chambre, 1964)
- The Discreet Charm Of The Bourgeoisie (Le Charme discret de la bourgeoisie, 1972)

My Buñuel Blog-a-thon Contributions:
- What’s in the Box?
- Ode to Marcel
- The Fine Art of Fashion: Yves Saint-Laurent

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