Lookbooks Redux: "A Woman, A Part"

My last post on film lookbooks, in which I printed pages from the reference bible for Sean Dunn’s forthcoming The Fall of Sir Douglas Weatherford, generated a lot of comments, with one poster wondering about incorporating original images in lookbooks, not just those taken from other films, photography or painting. Because that’s what we did for Elisabeth Subrin’s feature, A Woman, A Part, I thought I’d post this short follow-up to that original post.

Elisabeth’s film, which I produced with Shrihari Sathe, is about a burnt-out television actress, played by Maggie Siff, who impulsively decides to walk off her show and head back to New York City and the group of friends she worked with in her earlier downtown theater days. Viewing her as the one who “made it” and skipped town, her friends are mystified by her arrival, unsure of what she wants from them. When she discovers that friends played by John Ortiz and Cara Seymour have based a character in their company’s latest work on her, she is forced to grapple with the limitations and possibilities of both her past and her future.

A scene in the script’s first act provides a visual set piece that we used as a throughline in the lookbook. The actress, Anna, frustrated by the poor writing on her show, ploughs through a stack of screenplays, hoping to find a more creatively rewarding feature role. With a bottle of wine, she sits by her pool and reads, with each script worse than the next. Upon finishing, she tosses each script in the pool, until, by the end, the soggy pages blanket the water.

Elisabeth went to the house of an LA friend, cast a friend in the role of Anna, and shot stills from this scene on a mixture of a DSLR and an iPhone. (The images here are from the iPhone.)

Designer Carl Williamson designed the lookbook, breaking up the images and juxtaposing fragments with the various required text blocks, which included a synopsis, bios but also testimonials to Elisabeth by those who knew and worked with her.

The pool imagery was then contrasted with another scene from a bit later in the film. Anna decamps to New York and moves into her old and empty apartment, which she’s held onto while she’s been working in Los Angeles. Inhabiting her old space, she finds and pores over photographs from her younger days. She revels in the solitude and empty space of this Brooklyn flat, finding in it both echoes of her past but also, possibly, a blank canvas from which to start anew.

The full lookbook contains much other imagery, including stills from Safe, Red Desert, Opening Night and other titles as well as stills from Elisabeth’s shorts and gallery installations. But as we went out with this film, the fact that we had created original imagery for the lookbook stood out, and the “scripts in the swimming pool” imagery leapt out to readers as an example of the visual possibilities of our story.

A Woman, A Part premiered at the Rotterdam Film Festival in 2016, played the now-defunct BAMcinemafest later that year and was released by Strand Releasing in 2017. It is now available on digital platforms.