You cannot help but notice a striking paradox when you attend the grand film festivals. It doesn’t matter whether you are in Cannes, Venice, Berlin or Toronto. Much of the darkness of our time is generously paraded across these silver screens. Take the Venice festival, for example. This year, the majority of films entered in the competition presented the most dismal and most hopeless situations, and included, among others, the war in Iraq, the chronic exploitation of society’s weakest, and the sordid manoeuvres of the multinational corporations, to cite only a few. Another example, this time in Cannes, was the rightfully deserved winner of the Palme d’Or, a film by the young Romanian Christian Mungiu, which described the terrible story of a young woman forced to have a clandestine abortion in Ceausescu’s Romania.
After seeing these very trying films, your mind and heart still in turmoil, you are handed a glass of champagne, and abruptly find yourself in another milieu, this time shoulder to shoulder with debonair men in tuxedos and elegantly beautiful women, who are all covered in fabulous jewellery with a magnificent watch on the wrist. Only a few minutes earlier, one of these elegant ladies was in a torrid love scene that made everyone in the audience blush, while the Armani-clad man standing next to you had just played a miserable refugee brutally expelled from everywhere he wandered.
Yet this paradox between all the misery and bitterness of the world on one hand and all the glamour and glitz on the other is what gives film its enduring and mythological power. The cinema – and this is to its credit – knows how to often (but not always) approach the emotional core of life. It thus maintains an unequalled power of attraction, a power that goes way beyond its most commercial aspects.

Two arts of time
Watchmaking understands this relationship and has been aligning itself more and more closely with this art. Of course, it is the face of glamour and people that is of special interest to watchmakers who see film and its festivals as an exceptionally good platform to promote their products.
The connection between cinema and watchmaking also has deeper roots. They are both ‘arts of time’. Along with light and people, we might say that time is the primary material of cinema. Like watchmaking, film is the art of ‘clothing’ time. Whether it is clothed with a ‘story’ or with a precious ‘material’, the notion of time and how it passes are at the centre of the concerns of both cinema and timekeeping.
There is also a deeper, more hidden aspect that unites these two art forms. In their own way, they each chronicle the passing of time, and thus also death. The presence of death is one of the central elements in the great majority of films (and not only crime thrillers). In order to be elevated to the status of ‘hero’, a character must always, either directly or indirectly, be confronted with death.
Watchmaking has a more ambiguous and more mysterious relationship with death (with the current exception, perhaps, of Séverin Wunderman who is the only watchmaker to have not hesitated in covering some of his watches with skeletons and skulls). But, in looking back in history, it has not always been this way. In timekeeping’s beginnings, and especially between 1620 and 1640, one of the dominant trends was to insert watch movements into small skulls. These famous memento mori represented a way to ‘remember death’, and affirmed that the measure of time is essentially the measure of the distance that separates us from death.

A machine to create stars
But let’s return to the cinema, to glamour, and to watchmakers. By its unequalled power of identification, film is a machine to create ‘stars’. Actors and actresses, more than any other artists, have the power to incarnate just about anyone (you, them, me, us — in one way or another, people identify with, or project themselves into, a given character). Actors can situate themselves anywhere in any given situation, way beyond daily life. This is precisely why we call them ‘stars’. They are luminous objects, both near (we can see them) and far (they are inaccessible).
By sliding a watch onto the wrist of one of these ‘stars’, watchmakers rise to their level. James Bond, for example, is not your neighbour. His fictional world will never be accessible to you, but by wearing the same watch as he does, you capture a little of his world. You become a little bit like James Bond.
We can ridicule the assertion (which seemingly is a bit childish), which gives the allusion that wearing a James Bond watch makes a person a little like James Bond, but, whether we like it or not, we are all consciously or unconsciously ‘victims’ of this idea, even if we might deny it.

Cannes, Venice, Taormina…
Because of cinema’s ability to create strong identification, and the values that it shares with timekeeping, watchmakers would be wrong not to take advantage of what the world of film can offer. Below we discuss three examples of the relationship between film and watchmaking, each using a different strategy: Chopard with the Cannes Festival; Jaeger-LeCoultre with the Venice Festival; and Harry Winston with the more limited but very glamorous Taormina Festival.

And the music...
Besides cinema, there are many connections between watchmaking and show business in general. Musicians, for example, also possess, like actors, a strong power of identification that comes undoubtedly from the intimate link that we create between their music and certain moments of our own existence. Yet the universe of music is less utilised by watchmakers than film. We mention below, however, an original and innovative example of the connection between Parmigiani and the Montreux Jazz Festival.

Source: Europa Star October - November 2007 Magazine Issue