Folie Á Plusieurs: Olfactory Language Of Cinema

by: Eugeniya Chudakova

Folie à deux (/fɒˈli ə ˈduː/; French pronunciation: ​[fɔli a dø]; French for "a madness shared by two"), or shared psychosis, is a psychiatric syndrome in which symptoms of a delusional belief are transmitted from one individual to another.The same syndrome shared by more than two people may be called folie à trois, folie à quatre, folie en famille or even folie à plusieurs ("madness of many" )—Wikipedia

In the month of March, during Esxence 2014, I arrived to talk to Mark Buxton about his "cinema" projects. Besides his scent for Wes Anderson's The Grand Budapest Hotel, presented at the fair, Mark was working on an olfactory image of Michel Gondry's Mood Indigo. Then, I had a chance to try the very first version of this scent—a cold, dark, slightly watery smell that later became part of the project called Folie Á Plusieurs. The project was created by Kaya Sorhaindo, who already had an experience in artistic perfumery  with his previous work, the Six Scents Fragrances project, started in 2007 and based on collaborations between perfumers and designers. Leaving Six Scents Fragrance in 2012, Kaya decided to start new aromatic affair. So, Folie Á Plusieurs was born, as a range of art house perfumes co-created by a renowned perfumer and a creative from the fields of contemporary art, design, music, film or literature. (folie-a-plusieurs.com)

"Beautiful things are those that madness prompts and reason writes. For this reason our scents are prompted by the works of artists to write new definitions for the ways that perfumes are presented , experienced and appreciated. These are artists that live their lives parallel to the times, yet their works  transform an era. And through the medium of scent their fantasies, delusions, creatures and creations will become your  reality, your truth, your companions, your inheritance and their madness is what you will come to demand in every creative experience. This is the shared madness of la folie a plusieurs employing scent as a medium for forming new human relationship."—Plusieurs-Manifesto

For now Folie Á Plusieurs, in collaboration with Soho House Berlin, are working on Le Cinema Olfactif project, designed to create a cultural universe that could unite perfumery and cinema. The process is as follows: the Folie Á Plusieurs team chooses some film for which they would like to create an olfactory image, corresponding to its atmosphere.  Then they search for a perfumer who could make a scent that reflects his own vision of the film. The process of scent creation here is totally under the Perfumer's control (unlike the Six Scents project, where the perfumer was just an interpretor of an art director's ideas into aromatic language). When finished, the cinematic scent is sprayed during a screening of the selected film. In addition, visitors receive a vial with the scent to have a possibility to retry it later. The good news is that these vials can be purchased from the Folie Á Plusieurs website, for those who cannot visit the screenings.

The collaboration with Mark Buxton became the first for Folie Á Plusieurs. Kaya and Mark have known each other since the Six Scents Fragrance project. Being aware of Mark's interest in cinema, Kaya invited him to work on Le Cinema Olfactif.

Mood Indigo, 2013 Michel Gondry

As I have already mentioned, everything started with the film based on Boris Vian's novel L'Écume des jours. The film belongs to one of the main dreamers of modern French cinema, a famous music videop maker who has worked with Bjork, Radiohead, Daft Punk, The White Stripes, etc.—Michel Gondry, known for his specific sense of humor and rather cartoonish way of telling the story.

"For me the film L'Écume des jours as a whole was carried by jazz music; I like this ambiance. Flowers play a strong role (water lily) and the film that starts gay and luminous turns very dark. 'INDIGO' the fragrance is based on dark woody notes with a lot of incense that represents jazz music for me. There is a short passage in the fragrance where you smell the light, bright water lily. The camomile and red pepper give rhythm and movement to the whole accord."—Mark Buxton

Top notes: when eyes first met, awkwardness, joy, this could be love
Heart notes: things are all right, quiet before the storm
Base notes: darkness, loss of a beloved one, death, resentment, reflection

Love Exposure, 2008 Sion Sono

The second film to have a"smell track" became the four-hour-long tale by Japanese director Sion Sono, Love Exposure—a forthright grotesque, disarmingly naive film, possessing purely Japanese style and craziness (but far from being senseless) and a vigorous story.

"I was inspired by the film's mixture of love, lust, violence, sex and religion. A story told with certain kind of humour and tension that builds up and leads you to an unforeseeable ending. Love. A delicate floral scent, somehow innocent, but heady and strong at the same time. Lust. Clean but kinky animal notes that run through the scent like a red thread: costus, indol and cumin and ambergris. Violence. The surprising bloody note from  the bucchu oil, bay and metallic notes. Sex. A smell of hot wet skin communicated through a mixture of musk, vanilla and sandalwood. And Religion. Translated through my all time favourite incense with light sharp woody notes and a touch of amber."—Mark Buxton

Top notes: delicate but kinky, pursuit of innocence, small wet panties
Heart notes: the smell of strength, perseverance, blood shed in the war of love
Base notes: hot skin after sex, the holy, the defiled

Daisies, 1966 Vera Chytilová

The third perfume-cinema experience fell on the cult work by Czech New Wave classic Vera Chytilová, who left us in the month of March 2014—Daisies.

"Inspired by the characters' colourful acts of rebellion 'Daisies' the scent opens up with an orchestra of green fruity and edible notes that capture the opulence and gluttony of bourgeois culture. The heart has a society of sweets and florals that decay in a dramatic and witty twist of wood, leather and opoponax resin in the base."—Mark Buxton

Top notes: spilling cocktails, dancing under the apple tree, zest squirting from forbidden fruit
Heart notes: cake fights, smeared lipstick, conversations in powder rooms
Base notes: the fading picture of Dorian Gray

There is already an announcement for the fourth project. This time Mark Buxton created an aromatic universe of legendary The Virgins Suicides by Sophia Coppola. Unfortunately, the details of the scent are not still revealed, but we will definitely follow the upcoming events and experiments by Le Cinema Olfactif.