FFC 2 (2) pp.

175186 Intellect Limited 2013

Film, Fashion & Consumption

Volume 2 Number 2
2013 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/ffc.2.2.175_1

Nikola Mijovic
London College of Fashion

Narrative form and the

rhetoric of fashion in the
promotional fashion film

Abstract Keywords
Online promotional fashion film has become a significant aspect of the symbolic promotional fashion
production of fashion in the twenty-first century. This article presents a broad film
overview of the genres most prominent aesthetic and formal tendencies. Three narrative form
approaches to fashion film-making are discussed: first, the non-narrative, where rhetoric of fashion
the status of fashion as a designed object is foregrounded; second, the conventional pastiche
narrative, in which fashion acts as an aspirational symbol; and finally, the organic auteurism
narrative approach, where the visual style and the formal system of the moving Karl Lagerfeld
image are constructed around clothing. The films discussed include Portent (2009), Lucrecia Martel
directed by Nick Knight, Karl Lagerfelds Remember Now (2010) and Once Upon
a Time ... (2013), and Lucrecia Martels Muta (2011). The article assesses this
medium in relation to its potential to challenge the existing paradigm associated
with the rhetoric of fashion on the one hand, and the narrative film form on the
other. Promotional fashion film, while being a form of new media, is also firmly
situated within the domain of postmodernism, which may explain its limited ability
to undermine the established dominant representational codes.

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Nikola Mijovic

Introduction
I am using the term promotional fashion film to denote principally the short
films commissioned by fashion companies as part of their online branding
and marketing. Such films fit into the category of new media, but it should be
acknowledged that they are not entirely new: a century ago, during the era
of silent cinema, fashion newsreels were already being produced in order to
popularize Parisian styles to the international (mostly American) audience; in
the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, fashion image-makers such as Erwin Blumenfeld,
William Klein and Guy Bourdin also made short films as an extension of their
photographic work. However, it was not before the age of the high-speed
Internet and digital equipment that promotional fashion films became a ubiq-
uitous presence and an essential aspect of the symbolic production of fash-
ion. From the perspective of the fashion industry, they are a cost-effective
way of utilizing new technologies. Significant financial investment is neces-
sary for staging catwalk shows and creating traditional advertising campaigns.
And while some promotional fashion films are also produced on high budg-
ets, the great majority remain within four-digit figures. These short films can
involve fewer models, often just one or two; they can be shot with relatively
cheap high-resolution digital cameras and assembled on a standard computer
equipped with the widely available, user-friendly editing software. It is there-
fore natural that many young, less established designers would be drawn to
this way of showcasing their work. At the same time, there is a sound pecu-
niary logic for major fashion players here too, so it is hardly a coincidence
that this mediums rise to prominence has been concurrent with a prolonged
period of economic downturn in the West.
Nevertheless, while it may be straightforward to explain the recent growth
of this medium in both an industrial and technological sense, the question of
its cultural significance may be more complex. As Andrew Utterson suggests,
technology, in general, fulfils an industrial role that is carefully managed to
augment, but not undermine, the existing paradigm (2005: 5). My aim here
is to assess the promotional fashion film in relation to this claim; one exist-
ing paradigm being the classical cinematic narrative form; the other the
dominant rhetoric of fashion, or the socio-economically and culturally deter-
mined ways in which fashion is understood, represented, talked and written
about. I also wish to present a broad overview of the genre, highlighting the
main stylistic and formal tendencies. Three different approaches to making
fashion promos will be discussed, based on the directors utilization of, or
distancing from, the classical narrative form. Finally, my goal is to map out
the general critical framework by introducing some concepts and debates that
could be used as theoretical tools for the analysis of these fashion films, such
as pastiche, theories of authorship and spectatorship.

A non-narrative approach: Fashion as a designed object

Film scholarship during the 1970s was marked by a sustained critique of
the ways in which the classical narrative paradigm furnished, or rather
fixed, an ideological viewing position for spectators. The twin discourses of
Althusserian-Marxism and Freudian-Lacanian psychoanalysis were utilized
by Laura Mulvey (1975), Stephen Heath (1981) and Christian Metz (1982),
amongst others, to argue that spectatorship in the context of classical
Hollywood involves subject formation, an effect of being stitched into film
narration through identification and point of view with both character and

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camera, all of which serves the interests of patriarchal and bourgeois ideolo-
gies. The narrative form and the way in which we take up a position within
narration is understood to be at the core of this process.

The focus of the cinematic institution, of its industrial, commercial

and ideological practices, of the discourses that it circulates, is narra-
tive. What mainstream cinema produces as its commodity is narrative
cinema, cinema as narrative. Hence, at a general social level, the system
of narration adopted by mainstream cinema serves as the very currency
of cinema itself, defining the horizon of its aesthetic and ideological
possibilities, providing the measure of cinematic literacy and intelli-
gibility. Hence, too, narrative is the primary instance and instrument of
the regulatory processes that mark and define the ideological function
of the cinematic institution as a whole.
(Neale 1980: 1920)

The narrative structure, however, does not necessarily act as a formal princi-
ple for the creation of promotional fashion films. In fact, the most prominent
sub-genre of this medium is not narrative in a conventional sense. Plot and
characterization, the building blocks of narrative cinema, are eliminated from
this particular category of promotional fashion film, which can be described
as fashion editorial that moves, shot in an attractive setting/location and
accompanied by a seductive soundtrack (typically classical, electronic or
dance music). Unsurprisingly, the directors of such films tend to be fashion
photographers.
The main advantage of these short films in comparison to a still fashion
photograph is that they can show clothes in movement. Nick Knight, the
founder of SHOWstudio, one of the leading online platforms for fashion film,
explains: [c]lothes are designed to be seen in movement. One could argue
that a still photograph of a piece of clothing is to some degree a compromise
of the designers original vision (in Kansara 2010). At times, these films can
be very effective at foregrounding the materiality of the garments and convey-
ing their status as designed objects through interaction with the body, crea-
tive use of lighting, cinematography and editing, as well as the latest digital

Figure 1: Still from Portent, director Nick Knight, 2009.

177
Nikola Mijovic

effects and techniques such as 3D scanning and motion capture. Ruth Hogben
has sought to develop her work in this direction (see Khan 2012 for a more
detailed discussion of Hogbens collaboration with designer Gareth Pugh), and
so has Matthew Donaldson in his film Grand Slam (2011), featuring Korean
table tennis player Sooyeon Lee, whose ping-pong skills are elevated to the
status of art through the use of extreme slow-motion high definition video.
Accordingly, the colourful and ornamental clothes that she is wearing and the
fringed accessories designed by Geraldine Chevrolet also come to life.
From the perspective of the avant-garde film-maker [the] fundamental
search for cinematic forms which do not conform to a linear narrative struc-
ture and resolution is the main characteristic which differentiates experimen-
tal film from mainstream cinema and is ultimately its major claim to radical
intervention at all levels (Le Grice 2001: 290). Films constructed using asso-
ciational forms, abstraction, loops and other non-narrative techniques, were
a reaction against the industrialization of film production and distribution as
well as the standardization of film form. The directors of promotional fashion
films frequently resort to borrowing such avant-garde techniques, but not as
a means of question[ing] the cinema format (Le Grice 2001: 22) or expand-
ing consciousness (Youngblood 1970: 41). There is surely a more practical
reason for it: a focus on story and character would be likely to draw the view-
ers attention away from the clothes. But also, according to Vito Campanelli
(2010), web aesthetics are incorporated into the general flow of new media,
which is all about different forms of imitation appropriation, sampling, remix,
reinterpretation. In Andreas Huyssens words: [a]ll modern and avantgardist
techniques, forms and images are now stored for instant recall in the compu-
terized memory banks of our culture (1986: 196). So, A Dance to the Music
of Time for designer Cecilia Mary Robsons Spring/Summer 2011 collection,
directed by Sandra Freij, is a tribute to Resnais Last Year at Marienbad (1961);
Yang Fudongs First Spring for Prada S/S 2010 is inspired by surrealist art; Joli
(2010) by Elle Muliarchyk for Phillip Lim and Lane Crawford is a homage to
Maya Deren; Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadins short film featur-
ing the actor Michael Pitt for Yves Saint Laurent (2009) evokes both Stephen
Dwoskins Moment (1968) and Warhols Screen Tests (19641966). Repeatedly,
there are reference to Chris Markers La jete (1962), a seminal work of the
cinematic avant-garde, almost exclusively composed of still black and white
images recorded on the animation rostrum and woven into a lyrical science-
fiction narrative through editing and the narrators voice. Several promotional
fashion films resemble La jete in formal and stylistic terms, without address-
ing the timeless existential questions related to love, loss and memory with
which Marker seems to have been concerned.
As Campanelli argues, this is a process in which meaning is inexorably
subsumed under an aestheticized surface (2010: 197). In this light, revisit-
ing the stylistic tropes and techniques of the avant-garde is no different to
casually borrowing the themes, composition and lighting from Renaissance
paintings, or reassembling the iconic images of popular culture. In the promo-
tional cultures visual memory bank, they are all of the same value, availa-
ble on free loan, awaiting their turn to be converted into new currency by
means of pastiche and other forms of imitation. Frederic Jameson (1991) has
famously defined pastiche as a blank parody, a parody that lost its sense of
humour. On the other hand, Richard Dyer (2007) sees it in a more favour-
able light. He believes that by foregrounding the mechanics of representation,
pastiche has the potential to unmask the social world and our identity within

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 Narrative form and the rhetoric of fashion

it as nothing more than discursive constructs. He uses as a case study the 2002 1. Lagerfelds nostalgia
for a former socialist
film Far From Heaven, directed by Todd Haynes, who carefully reconstructed European country
the style of Douglas Sirks classical melodramas, while also reworking the fostered on the
Sirkian system through contemporary identity politics related to race and doctrine of his
namesake and author
sexuality that would never have been explicitly addressed during the 1950s. of Capital: Critique
Nick Knights promotional fashion film Portent (2009) could perhaps also be of Political Economy
seen in this light: the images are based on the visual language of classical (K. Marx, 1999) seems
contradictory,
art chiaroscuro lighting, candles, still life, the female nude, triptych forms, especially in the light
ornate frames and references to Caravaggio and Michelangelo accompanied of his recent comments
about the French
by an orchestral score; but he also updates them for the twenty-first century president Hollande,
by casting an Asian and a dark-skinned model to showcase the elaborately whom he called an
crafted clothes by Maison Martin Margiela, Viktor & Rolf and other high-end imbecile after he
has set a 75 per cent
designer brands. income tax on annual
income exceeding one
million euros. I think
The narrative approach: Fashion countries should be
run like big companies,
as an aspirational symbol Lagerfeld said
(Reuters2012).
The reluctance to engage with the more traditional narrative approach by the
fashion image makers discussed above may nevertheless seem anachronistic
in the current cultural context. In recent decades, many fashion photogra-
phers have understood that their advertising and editorial work (especially
the latter) does not have to be constructed primarily around clothes. The
consumer society, according to Jean Baudrillard, is marked by the historical
change in the political economy from a stage where the commodity-form
was prevalent to one where the sign-form is sovereign (1998). Within this
realm, Rosetta Brooks (2003) singles out the 1970s work of Helmut Newton,
Guy Bourdin and Deborah Turbeville as being a pivotal point in fashion
photographys shift of emphasis from the product to the product-image.
By the early 1990s, the photographic depiction of lifestyle became a major
preoccupation for fashion-image makers, drawing heavily on the aesthetics
of vernacular photography and cinema as their two main sources of inspi-
ration (Kismaric and Respini 2004). Consequently, narrative became one
of the key ingredients of the fashion image, often more important that the
clothing itself, which may now play a role of a mere detail, or be dispensed
with altogether. Karl Lagerfeld, the head designer and creative director of
the house of Chanel, whose filmography has grown steadily in recent years,
is one of the first directors to embrace this approach in the context of the
promotional fashion film, allowing the Chanel collection to act as costume,
rather than as the subject of his films. He uses the conventional cinematic
narrative as a means of suturing the viewer into his specific mode of fashion
discourse. This discourse is not built around the formal/aesthetic quality of
the garment (fashion as a designed object); instead, it centres on the idea
of fashion as an aspirational symbol of identity. Lagerfelds films are about
lifestyle and attitude.
Youth is a short term lease non-renewable. This is the first of several
ponderous lines uttered by Alexandre (played by the 56-year-old star of
French arthouse cinema Pascal Gregory), who parks his convertible Rolls-
Royce outside the exclusive VIP Room nightclub in Saint Tropez at the
beginning of Lagerfelds film Remember Now (2010). Inside, his acquaint-
ance Pamela introduces him to her coterie of young, hip and beautiful
friends: Baptiste, the new French singer, Robbie, everybody knows Robbie
and Milos from Yugoslavia.1 Curiously, the girls KK, Jessie, Gloria and

179
Nikola Mijovic

Lilly are only introduced by their names, apart from Carmen, who is given the
epithet of Pamelas best friend. Carmen is played by Elisa Sednaoui, a model,
actress and the spiritual goddaughter of stiletto sensei Christian Louboutin.
[Her] father is the architect of the shoe designers Luxor house (Blasberg 2011).
Alexandres swift and effortless seduction of Carmen begins immediately and
continues outside, where preparations are under way for a 1970s-themed
party. It is here that Lagerfelds directorial ineptitude becomes most manifest
he overlooks the basic premise of cinema: one should tell the story by visual
means. Instead, his distrust of the medium comes across through repeated
use of dialogue to underline the intertextual references that the entire piece
is constructed around: upon spotting the couple dressed like Mick and Bianca
Jagger for their 1971 wedding in St. Tropez, Alexandre tells Carmen (and the
audience): They think they are Mick and Bianca Jagger. Before that, he had
already explained to her that the two young men on the yacht, styled to resem-
ble the characters from the film Plein soleil (Clment, 1960), look like Alain Delon
and Maurice Ronet in a film whose title I forgot. A moment later, he observes
that a woman who spontaneously starts dancing in an erotic exaltation around
a motorcycle on the street, mimicking the famous scene from Et dieu cra la
femme (Vadim, 1956) is not accurately attired for a seventies style party. Brigitte
Bardot, he elucidates, was twenty years earlier. Finally, a woman adorned as
the disco-era model Donna Jordan tells them that she is Donna Jordan. After
the couple spend the night together, they drive to Pamelas place in the morn-
ing, where we witness the most improbably glamorous hangover scene, with
the whole gang singing and dancing inevitably to Sacha Distels song Allez
donc vous faire bronzer (Plage De St. Tropez). When all the young, attractive
bodies finally fall asleep, Lagerfeld himself turns up wearing a bright white
three-piece suit and shoes, dark sunglasses and silver gloves, reminding Pamela
that they have arranged to have lunch together. Yes, but this is Saint Tropez!
she replies. I see says Karl. One could say that in fashion photography of the
late twentieth century the models relinquished posing and begun to act, but
in fashion films of the early twenty-first century the reverse is true the actors
have given up acting and started posing instead.
Compared to the rest of the field, Lagerfelds films are certainly ambi-
tious in production terms. For his latest, Once Upon a Time (Lagerfeld,
2013), a period piece depicting the beginnings of Gabrielle Coco Chanels
career, the list of cast, crew and sponsors is so long that the closing credits
take a full five minutes out of the total running time of eighteen minutes and
nine seconds. This film is yet another example of the flagrant celebration of
conspicuous consumption and the superior aesthetic proclivity of the rich.
It opens with two delivery girls, dressed in their work uniforms, who laugh
at Chanels hat designs, finding them ugly. Gabrielle and her aunt Adrienne,
after walking past them, scornfully comment on the girls: It could have been
us . Fortunately for the Chanels, the business is a success, as a parade of
wealthy women eventually walk into the store, appreciate the merchandise,
and arrange for their secretaries or maids to return and purchase it in their
name. Remarkably, the young Chanel, played by Keira Knightley, comes
across as rather timid. Much of her dialogue involves flattering other peoples
tastes and admiring their accoutrements directly or from a distance, her lines
sounding contrived in more ways than one: I recognise her look and style and
elegance she says of a young lady walking down the street. Admittedly, the
clothes play a more prominent role here than in Lagerfelds previous film, but
that is only because the characters talk a lot about them.

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 Narrative form and the rhetoric of fashion

Figure 2: Still from Remember Now, director Karl Lagerfeld, 2010.

The initial premise of la politique des auteurs, formulated in the 1950s by French
writers connected to the journal Cahiers du Cinma and expanded on by the
American critic Andrew Sarris during the 1960s, maintained that the director
is the principal figure to whom the authorship of a film is to be assigned (see
Caughie 1981; Gerstner and Staiger 2003; Grant 2008 for a comprehensive
history of the debates regarding the theories of authorship). Subsequently,
both structuralist and post-structuralist semiotics as well as film reception
theory have problematized this idea at length, but the way in which the
promotional fashion films are commissioned and promoted corroborate the
centrality of the directors role. Also, the origin of the distinction between
the two tendencies examined here so far with respect to story-telling could
be attributed to the directors backgrounds fashion photographers seem to
be somewhat reluctant to engage with the narrative form, while the more
traditional cinematic approach has been employed mostly by established film
directors, such as Roman Polanski (A Therapy, 2012, for Prada), when work-
ing with this genre. Truffaut, Bazin, Sarris and other early contributors to the
debate around authorship in cinema have argued that this medium deserves
to be granted the status of an art form, despite its profoundly industrialized
and commercialized nature and reliance on technology. They have attempted
to bolster this claim by attributing the creative ownership of a film to an indi-
vidual, the artist the film director. In the meantime, the media and consumer
industries have capitalized on this idea by turning critically acclaimed directors
into commodities. In the context of the promotional fashion film and celebrity
culture, the circle is complete and auteurism reaches its antithetical closure:
maverick directors have themselves become creative brands, involved in a sort
of brand fusion when commissioned by fashion companies to recycle their
signature style in a short format for online consumption: examples include
Harmony Korines films for Proenza Schouler, Kenneth Anger for Missoni
(2011) or Ava DuVernays The Door (2013) for Miu Miu (see also Berra 2012
for a detailed discussion of David Lynchs film Lady Blue Shanghai in this very

181
Nikola Mijovic

2. My discussion here is context). At the same time, celebrity pedigree counts as a sufficient qualifica-
concerned exclusively
with Lagerfelds work
tion for the famous or iconic figures such as Karl Lagerfeld to take on the role
as a film director, of a film director. Is it possible for fashion, brand potency and celebrity status
not as a costume to overwhelm all notions of apprenticeship?, Pamela Church Gibson (2012:
designer. It should be
noted nevertheless 98) asks in her analysis of another overly stylish film, A Single Man (2009),
that in the past he directed by another well-known fashion designer, Tom Ford. On the evidence
has also provided the of Karl Lagerfelds oeuvre,2 the answer would seem to be in the affirmative.
clothes for numerous
feature films, including
Matresse (1975),
Babettes Feast (1987), Organic approach: Fashion as narrative
High Heels (1991) and
Callas Forever (2002). In the classical narrative cinema, all components of film form and style (cine-
matography, sound, editing and mise-en-scne, which includes costume) are
subordinate to story-telling. Hence, clothes, as lower elements in a hier-
archy of screen discourses, primarily work to reinforce narrative ideas
(Gaines 1990: 180). Rare are those films where, in Stella Bruzzis words,
we are encouraged to look at costume rather than through it (1997: 36).
Her book Undressing Cinema (1997) scrutinizes those films where costumes
significance is elevated from being an unobtrusive supplement to the story
to becoming a spectacle that diverts from it, developing its own aesthetic
discourse. She argues that this reversal has significant implications in rela-
tion to debates about spectatorship and gender, posing a challenge to the
idea of the normative (male) gaze.
In the narrative promotional fashion film, including the quirky, French
New Wave-inspired, Yves Saint Laurent Spring/Summer 2010 Men/Homme
film directed by Samuel Benchetrit, and the pretentious Film 1 (2011) by
Martin de Thurah for BLK DNM, clothes may have a prominent role to play
with regards to the story and characters. However, they are not central to the
formal system of these films. Muta (2011), commissioned by Miu Miu and
directed by Lucrecia Martel, is an exception to this. Muta is not a traditional
narrative piece by any means the action, which seems to take place on a
post-apocalyptic tropical river cruise, consists of eight female models engag-
ing in various enigmatic rituals. Only a few deliberately unintelligible words
are uttered. Apart from this, the film is dialogue-free, and the images are
accompanied by a soundscape of mechanical or insect-like noises. Each shot
is playfully composed in such a way that the faces of the models are always
obscured by framing, lighting, props, different body parts, or by the use of soft
focus. This concealment means that the films ambiguous narrative and char-
acterisation are constructed almost exclusively through the use of costume,
accessories and make-up. The form of Martels fashion film seems to have
developed organically through her own creative response to the brief, which
was to showcase Miu Miu products.
Several visual references are also detectable in Muta: to Japanese horror
cinema (Audition, 1999, directed by Takashi Miike) and to Guy Bourdins fash-
ion photography. Miikes film reverses gendered practices of looking, through
(literal) fragmentation of the male body. Bourdin and Martel push the spec-
tatorial norm to the limit through the cameras (visual) tenacious dissection
and fetishization of the female body. This pastiche of the male gaze turns
Mutas faceless models into depersonalized mannequins. According to one
reading strategy, this could be seen as a subversive comment on the nature of
contemporary fashion consumption. Yet, the same strategy could also imply
that Lagerfelds ostentatious and indulgent films may be seen as a form of
pastiche, containing a self-reflexive, critical note an idea that was rejected

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 Narrative form and the rhetoric of fashion

Figures 3.13.2: Stills from Muta, director Lucrecia Martel, 2011.

outright by virtually all of the several hundred fashion students to whom

I have suggested this interpretation, in my quest for empirical insight.

Conclusions
The Internet and other forms of new media have had an immense effect on
the way we communicate, work, consume, socialize and make sense of the
world. However, many of the visual forms associated with novel technolo-
gies have yet to make an impact on the discursive norms and practices of the
established media. In this context, Uttersons (2005) point cited in the intro-
duction to this article would seem pertinent: there is very little evidence so
far that the promotional fashion film has undermined either the entrenched
rhetoric of fashion or the existing film paradigm. Concerning the former, the
promotional fashion film has inherited the principles of the traditional fashion
media it celebrates fashion for its incessant creative energy, for its concep-
tual and artisanal qualities, for its transformative potential in the arena of
social identity, or as an instrument for the expression of individuality. At the

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Nikola Mijovic

same time, it has continued to perpetuate the narrow ideal of physical beauty
and other representational stereotypes, while encouraging social competition
and inequality. Furthermore, it has shed no light on the links between the
consumption and the production of fashion, failing to address the unsavoury
industrial practices that are ethically and environmentally unsustainable.
Regarding the latter, the fashion film of the digital era has been overwhelm-
ingly derivative. I have singled out Muta as one example of a considered and
innovative engagement with the medium. But Martels approach is still that
of a traditional film-maker, who has missed out on other possibilities intrinsic
to this form, to do with its production (digital compositing and effects) and
exhibition (interactivity).
Some commentators, such as Henry Jenkins (2006), have applauded the
democratic promise of the nascent convergence culture where old and
new media intersect, where grassroots and corporate media collide, where
the power of the media producer and the power of the consumer interact in
unpredictable ways (Jenkins 2006: 2). Digital fashion film enthusiasts and
amateurs are yet to fully exploit this potential; some of them, like Gsus Lopez
(Ephemeral Nature, 2011), have questioned the dominant code through humour
and unconventional casting. But most succumb to the seductive rhetoric of
the creative industries and make work that conforms to its rules, echoing
Foucaults suggestion that [w]e can easily imagine a culture where discourse
would circulate without any need for an author ([1969] 2009: 333).
Finally, the notions of pastiche, intertextuality and hybridity, as well as the
erosion of distinctions between art/commerce and high/low culture, situate
the fashion film firmly within the sphere of postmodernism. Similarities with
music videos are apparent, furthered by the fact that both these moving image
forms have emerged in the promotional interest of the two industries (fash-
ion and music) that have long enjoyed synergistic relationships with the film
industry. Peter Wollen ([1988] 1997) has ruminated on the music video as the
form that symbolized the adolescence of postmodernism, drawing on Blochs
idea of the human condition being defined by its potential futures, unidenti-
fied desires and unarticulated wants. From this perspective, although digital
fashion film is still in its infancy, on the timeline of postmodernism it may well
signpost a retirement age.

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Suggested citation
Mijovic, N. (2013), Narrative form and the rhetoric of fashion in the promo-
tional fashion film, Film, Fashion & Consumption 2: 2, pp. 175186,
doi:10.1386/ffc.2.2.175_1

Contributor details
Nikola Mijovic is a lecturer in Cultural and Historical Studies at University of
the Arts London. His current research is focused on European cinema, and
on the material and the symbolic production of fashion. Previously, he has
contributed an essay on the film The Beauty of Sin to the collection The Cinema
of the Balkans, edited by Dina Iordanova (Wallflower Press, 2006). His writing
has appeared in international film journals, including Cineaste. Nikolas theo-
retical work runs side by side with his creative practice as a film-maker. His
short films have been shown worldwide and his first feature film as co-writer/
director is currently in production the project has received the Cinelink
award at Sarajevo Film Festival.
Contact: University of the Arts London, London College of Fashion, 272 High
Holborn, London WC1V 7EY, UK.
E-mail: n.mijovic@fashion.arts.ac.uk

Nikola Mijovic has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act,1988, to be identified as the author of this work in the format that
was submitted to Intellect Ltd.

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