Case Study #2

A second editorial by Steven Meisel for Vogue Italia (November 2008) titled Cottage in Riva al Mare recreate scenes from Ingmar Bergman’s film Persona.  His filmic story is self evident, yet he goes further than to merely reference stills from the film.  The 34 page editorial is composed mostly of black and white images with the occasional accent of colour.  These more muted tones emphasize the natural light, soft focus and a relationship between the environment, models and garments.  This effect creates a merging of fur and hair, sand and skin, textured knits and straw weaves suggesting the melding of person and landscape in the rock escarpment and turbulent ocean.  Interestingly this is most probably the motif that represents the melding of the women’s personalities within the film.  The weather too has a role in shaping an atmosphere, and reflects the nature of the women – placid verses turbulent.  The overall tone of the shoot is foreshadowed by the weather and explores themes of love, loathing, secrecy, drama, beauty, confusion.  These themes are also relevant to the troublesome melodrama. 

Meisel uses strategies such as doubling, mirroring and repetition.  Reflection and repetition are important features of this editorial and are recurring motifs within Meisel’s work more broadly.  These motifs are specific to this work and its narrative as the film explores the relationship between carer and patient.  Viewing the editorial without foresight of the film generates a sense of ambiguity regarding the women’s relationship. Are these women twins, sisters, friends, lovers or is it the imagined experience of a schizophrenic.  Thus this longing to know and solve the riddle is a point of mystery and curiosity, a key component of tension and desire in narrative that both Laura Mulvey and Margaret Maynard discuss in their essays.

The role of the spectator is also important in this example as the images are presented as frames from a film.  At times the perspective is obscured, fragmented and repeated evoking a sense of the voyeuristic.  Like the cameras ability to steal and track private or intimate moments, this is the effect of cinema, the method creates such characteristics for the purpose of this editorial in shaping and driving the narratives ambiguity and creates a desire to watch and know what unfolds between these women.