I stumbled upon the Brigitte Lacombe exhibit at Phillips a few weeks ago. Of course I was all ohhh and had to share!
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| Ah that bus.... |
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| Brigitte Lacombe. Sofia Coppola and Kirsten Dunst, 'Marie Antoinette', Château de Pontchartrain, France, 2005 |
The scene was filmed at Chateau Pontchartrain. Have any of you been? It is very hard to find photos of it! Enjoy these few and please share any you may have.
More about the exhibit:
Phillips presents Brigitte Lacombe: Complicities, celebrating the work of internationally acclaimed photographer Brigitte Lacombe in a selling exhibition. For the first time in her 40 year career, Lacombe will exhibit her work in New York, revealing her unique insider perspective on the world of Cinema.
Portraits and reportage in both black-and-white and color display the range and intensity of private moments captured by Brigitte Lacombe from 1977 to today, including large format limited edition prints of Martin Scorsese, Meryl Streep, Dustin Hoffman, Mick Jagger, Andy Warhol, Leonardo DiCaprio, Michelle Williams, Sofia Coppola, Kate Moss, Cate Blanchett, and others.
Lacombe has become one of the most celebrated photographers among editors, collectors and artists worldwide.
Adam Gopnik, writer and essayist, on the exhibit Brigitte Lacombe: Complicities states:
“Brigitte Lacombe’s photography has, over forty years of work, taken many forms. She is most famous, perhaps, for her formal, minimalist but moving portraits of the famous, some of them her friends --portraits as austere on the surface as they are wise and affectionate beneath. (The late Richard Avedon used to regard one Lacombe portrait of a three-year-old child, caught between anxiety, intellect, and adorability, with the closest thing to envy that competitive genius ever achieved.) But another world of her work involves her informal observations of actors and directors and other creative people at work. Though called ‘behind the scenes’ they are really made outside of masks, where what happens ‘backstage’ is often another, and happier, kind of theatre. Complicity, intimacy, quiet wit – in a way, Lacombe’s pictures, though often of iconic people, are not what is too often and cheaply called ‘iconic. They don’t seek out the familiar being famous, but the shared enterprise of making things up, including our own selves. We see inside; they remain intact. This mystery of her art is also, in another way, the mystery of intimacy itself, which both holds out its arm and respects its distances. How she finds these moments and makes these pictures is Lacombe’s mystery, and unsolvable.”
The chateau is privately owned. There is one picture of the interior on Gettyimages. But if you look closely at the "before" picture of Marie Antoinette's bedroom on the art director's site, you'll see a very similar wall decoration to the Gettyimages pic.
ReplyDeleteIn addition to the Queen's bedroom, the room with the tub (per Lacombe's credit) and the so-called love nest (which has no corresponding room in the Trianon) are also "recreations" by the art director. And if these are recreations then that makes it likely that all rooms listed on her site (Salon doré, the Meridienne, the King's bedroom and the Versailles Chapel) were also recreations.
This is impressive because aside from the non-existing Trianon room it is extremely hard to tell if this is what happened. But it makes it unlikely that the actual interior of Pontchartrain was ever used. It seems that it was just the canvas upon which Versailles was recreated. I have no idea why they did it in an actual castle rather than a studio. Better light? Because they could? To hide very well even in the credits the fact that they didn't get that much access in Versailles?
Ironically, hiding the recreation of Versailles instead of advertising it from the rooftops probably cost the movie an Academy Award for Art Direction.
Thanks for the links and all the information on the chateau and film sets, it is great!
DeletePS your work is gorgeous!