Production Design: Young Girls of Rochefort

In this film education series, cinematographer, film colourist and educator Devan Scott illuminates the ways filmmakers have created mood and meaning through the manipulation of colour. Each 40-minute talk will examine a different colour process – including lighting, tinting, production design – within its historical context, and exploring its aesthetic, artistic and storytelling attributes.

Each talk will be followed by a complementary screening, in this case, The Young Girls of Rochefort.

The building blocks of a color palette begin with what’s in front of the camera: the set, the props, and the costumes. Our discussion of production design and art direction will cover all the ways in which filmmakers can control the look of the world of the film such as in Jacques Demy’s The Young Girls of Rochefort, in which he repainted large sections of the titular French city to bring alive his candy-colored Hollywood-inspired fantasia.

About the film: Shot in a seaside town transfigured into a Demy dream world with white and pastel buildings and a charming square (40,000 square metres of Rochefort’s facades had to be repainted to achieve the colour scheme), The Young Girls of Rochefort stars Catherine Deneuve and Françoise Dorléac (Deneuve’s real-life sister) as musically inclined twin sisters Delphine and Solange, whose mother Yvonne (Danielle Darrieux) pines for the memory of her former fiancé, the unfortunately named Simon Dame (Michel Piccoli). The three women, and the men who desire them, cross paths, fail to connect, misunderstand and misconstrue each other, but in the triumphant finale, discover that love is indeed attainable.

Talk: 1:00 pm
The Young Girls of Rochefort: 1:40 pm

The movie equivalent of finest vintage Champagne.

Trevor Johnston, 1000 Films to Change Your Life

This film will also play as part of the Total Cinema series.