Tilda Swinton stars alongside Chen Zhili (Blossoms Shanghai) and Chinese pop artist Lia Du in a short film directed by Oscar-nominated German director Wim Wenders for Chanel’s Métiers d’Art 2024-2025 show that celebrates art and craftsmanship.
The show will be held on December 3 on the banks of the scenic West Lake in the Chinese city of Hangzhou. The latter provides a suitable backdrop for the Metiers d’Art exhibition, given the city’s vibrant heritage of silk manufacturing and trade. Hangzhou’s lush landscapes and lakes have been an inspiration to many artists, most notably Chanel founder Gabrielle Chanel, whose imagination is reflected in Wenders’ film.
At her home in Paris, Gabrielle Chanel contemplated the lake every day. It was also displayed on a painted Chinese screen that adorned her private office in her house on Rue Cambon. It was part of a collection of about twenty Coromandel pieces, dating from the 17th to the 9th centuries. ten. Which she collected throughout her life.
“It has been an honor to be close to the House of Chanel for more than twelve years, and my enthusiasm for the work we can do together grows every year,” said Swinton, who worked at Chanel. Pedro Almodovar’s “The Next Room”, which won the Golden Lion of Venice, has put it in the Oscar race. She previously won the Oscar for Best Supporting Role for her role in the movie “Michael Clayton” in 2008.
“Chanel takes seriously its role as a cultural patron and a source of support and encouragement for artists and arts institutions across the planet, and this work has never been more important, in my view,” Swinton continued.
In Wenders’s poetic film, the screen comes to hypnotic life, allowing Swinton to embark on a journey through Hangzhou where she immerses herself in the landscape and meets local artists. Filmed on location between Paris and Hangzhou, the film blends past and present, fantasy and reality, juxtaposing the natural backdrop with symbols of modern life, from laptop screens to cameras. It also praises intercultural dialogue.
Although she never visited China herself, Gabrielle Chanel was deeply inspired by the images on her Chinese screens, which fed her visual language. Chinese cultural icons appeared through her creations in the 1950s and 1960s.
Wenders, whose latest feature “Perfect Days” represented Japan in the 2024 Oscar race and was nominated for best international picture, said he “spent some time in Mademoiselle Chanel’s office and studied her Coromandel screen” to prepare for the film. “It made a huge impression on me. In a way, it was like a very early movie screen or a huge comic strip with lots of little stories.”
“Everywhere I looked, there was another scene of everyday life,” he says. “The greatest inspirations for all my films have been places. Most of them started with the desire to find the story that belonged to a particular place that I found and loved. That story had to belong there, and it couldn’t ‘take place’ anywhere else.”
Meanwhile, “Hangzhou embodies a profound cultural heritage while embracing the spirit of modern innovation, a vision that aligns with Gabrielle Chanel’s pioneering ideals,” said Chili.
She praised the film because it is “full of poetry, full of magic and exploration, very similar to the feeling that Hangzhou gives me. As dusk fell, while filming, the misty beauty of the garden left us in awe, and we captured this feeling together and shared it through photos.”
Du said she “has always believed that culture is a vital source of inspiration for artistic creativity.” She finds it “appropriate that so much poetry and tradition should emerge from a place like Hangzhou, as it still has a strong cultural foundation.” “Although it is now a modern and advanced city, it maintains a perfect blend of culture and modernity,” Du said.