Girls on film at the L'Oréal Melbourne Fashion Festival 2011

screen cap 'catwalk' via 123nonstop.com

Arguably more fashion-specific documentaries have been lensed in the past four years, than in the last two decades combined, with offerings including Lagerfeld Confidential (2007), Marc Jacobs & Louis Vuitton (2007), Valentino: The Last Emperor (2008), The September Issue (2009) and Picture Me (2009). That's not counting the recent proliferation of fashion shorts and videos, whose distribution has obviously been facilitated by the net. For anyone who is interested in seeing some older examples of the frockumentary genre, in addition to some less high-profile recent examples and who happens to be in Melbourne next week, this year's L'Oréal Melbourne Fashion Festival, which officially kicks off tomorrow - and which frockwriter will be attending as a guest of the organisers and Tourism Victoria - has an abundance of offerings.

As part of its ongoing fashion on film series, the Australian Centre for the Moving Image [ACMI] is running a festival dedicated to the model doco called Fashion Models on Film.
 

screen cap 'model' via ACMI

Featured are Sarah Ziff and Ole Schell's controversial Picture Me: A Model's Diary (2009); Robert Leacock's Catwalk: Milan, Paris and New York (1996), which tagged along after Christy Turlington during one runway season; Frederick Wiseman's Model (1980), which profiled New York's Zoli agency (since subsumed into Click) and Dressed for Summer 2011 (2010), the Spring/Summer 2011 chapter of French journalist Agnès Boulard's longrunning French television series on Paris Fashion Week.

ACMI's screenings kicked off on Thursday with Picture Me, but here is the remainder of the program:


Picture Me                           Sun 13 Mar 2011, 5.30pm
Model                                  Sun 13 Mar 2011, 7.30pm
Catwalk                               Mon 14 Mar 2011, 3.30pm
Dressed for Summer 2011  Mon 14 Mar 2011, 5.30pm
Model                                  Mon 14 Mar 2011, 7.30pm
Picture Me                           Tue 15 May 2011, 2.30pm
Model                                  Wed 16 May 2011, 2.30pm
Dressed Up                         Wed 16 May 2011, 7.30pm
Catwalk                               Thu 17 Mar 2011, 2.30pm

ACMI  

Address: Federation Square, Melbourne

Phone: +61 3 86632583

Web: http://www.acmi.net.au/fashion-models-on-film.aspx

screen cap 'catwalk' via 123nonstop.com

On Monday this week, as part of the broader LMFF cultural festival, ACMI also hosted the launch event of a new Australian initiative called NoHome.tv.
 

Conceived by Alastair McCann and Justin Watson, NoHome.tv is a fashion film portal that will go live on March 20th, showcasing submissions from, among others, Alexi Freeman, Arabella Ramsay, Beat Poet, Carly Hunter, Limedrop, Orri Henrisson, Upper Left Arm and Sweden’s Acne – with consumers encouraged and enabled via the site to remix the films.
 

On Thursday, sadly prior to the arrival of many out-of-towners for LMFF, a separate project called FASHIONFILM screened a number of short films at the Rooftop Cinema in Melbourne’s CBD, notably Mark Skaszy’s Corrine Day Diary, which documented a decade in the life of the late, great British fashion photographer.