Moving Image Extravaganza: Fashion in Film Festival

I'm republishing today an interview about the Fashion in Film Festival I did for Dazed Digital.

The biennial Fashion in Film Festival (FFF) is kicking off across leading London venues this week.

Since it was first launched in 2005 the festival celebrated the connections between fashion and moving images through films, documentaries, shorts, videos, and experimental collaborations with artists from different fields.
Entitled “Birds of Paradise” this edition, state Curator Marketa Uhlirova and Associate Curator Inga Fraser, will be an extravaganza of costumes, lights and colours.

The rich programme features some rare screenings of early silent films and underground movies from the 1940s-1970s, including works by Kenneth Anger, Jack Smith, José Rodriguez-Soltero and Germaine Dulac, plus two installations, one by the award-winning Jason Bruges Studio and the other designed by Mark Garside after Thomas A. Edison’s kinetoscopes.

What prompted you to explore this year’s theme?
Marketa Uhlirova: I remember one defining moment – watching Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures at the Film-makers’ Cooperative in New York. I was with my friend and one of the festival co-founders Christel Tsilibaris, just about to launch our first New York edition about three years ago. And then there was the inimitable MM Serra, the director of the Co-op, hovering over us, and we were all marvelling at the reel. I knew immediately I wanted to scheme around that film one day and thought of Kenneth Anger straight away. Then some time later I became aware of the serpentine dances in early cinema – all the imitators of Loie Fuller’s like Annabelle Whitford Moore, Crissie Sheridan, Lina Esbrard and so many others. These female dancers were some of the very first subjects of cinema, and many of the films were hand-coloured and stencilled. There was a level of intensity and sheer pleasure in the spectacle of dress and artifice that matched Smith and Anger’s work.

While preparing the programme for the festival, was there a film that you discovered that truly amazed you for its costumes and sets and that you had never seen before?
Marketa Uhlirova: I have been amazed a lot during the research for this season, and there have been quite a few really special moments like being introduced to the work of José Rodríguez Soltero by our collaborator Ron Gregg at Yale. And then there is the insane work of Steven Arnold that my friend Stuart Comer, who is also another of our guest curators, showed me at Tate Modern. I have actually thought of amazement as one of the criteria that would distinguish a ‘maybe’ film from a ‘definitely’ film. It had to feel physical. Rapsodia satanica by Nino Oxilia was one of those moments when you are just completely happy. And then there is a surprise film I can’t mention yet that I am hoping to premiere in New York and had nagged Gaumont Pathé Archives to restore. With a bit of luck that’s what they are doing now.

Inga Fraser: For me it was the extraordinary dance sequence at the end of one of the early films in our programme, Le Farfalle (1907). Initially a straightforward (but very charming) Orientalist film, it suddenly breaks from the narrative and bursts into this fantastically expressive serpentine dance. The dresses are stencil-coloured and the effect is just electric. I also loved Moulin Rouge, it is completely delirious at times!

Which is the rarest film that will be screened?
Marketa Uhilrova: That depends on how you define rarest. We have quite a good line-up in that respect. Everyone should check out Secrets of the East at the BFI; the print is coming all the way from Tokyo. I doubt it has been shown in the UK, at least most probably not since 1928. We are also really thrilled to be screening a brand new print of Jack Smith’s Normal Love at Tate Modern – especially because Smith is so crucial to the programme. Smith’s estate was recently acquired by Barbara Gladstone Gallery in New York and I am sure we’ll soon be seeing some of the amazing photographic work that has been pretty much inaccessible until now. He was, and continues to be such an influential figure.

Inga Fraser: Germaine Dulac’s Princess Mandane is certainly worth a mention as a film that is hardly ever screened. It is also a fairly mainstream feature which is a rarity in Dulac’s filmography – she is obviously best known for her surrealist film work.

An article that appeared in Cinemagraf magazine in 1916 stated that, thanks to early silent films, women developed very refined tastes and acquired “a genuine and rich elegance” that they applied to their wardrobes and to the décor of their houses. Do you feel that some of the rediscovered masterpieces featured in the programme can still teach us something about elegance, style and taste?
Marketa Uhlirova: Yes, the 1910s is a decade when we see the emergence of the cinema for the bourgeois – a type of films specifically designed to appeal to this class through their length, narrative sophistication, morality, setting, décor, costuming, artistry and other aspects. This issue has been on my mind while thinking about this season. In fact, one of the directors we feature, Cecil B. DeMille, is a glaring example of a very visual director, one that is intensely preoccupied with costume and décor. And these did have a reciprocal relationship with the fashions and trends in interior design of its day. Sumiko Higashi wrote an excellent book on DeMille where she talks about how he deliberately used images of material splendour to stimulate people to buy. DeMille was also notorious for spending large sums on his sets and décors. He really was a Hollywood director of his time if we think of the crazily luxurious mansions, wardrobes and lifestyles of the 1920s studio megastars like Gloria Swanson or Marion Davies. This in turn is something that Kenneth Anger was interested in, and not only his famous exposé Hollywood Babylon I and II.

Is there a film featured in this year’s programme that you feel inspired through its lavish costumes, fabrics or body/silhouette metamorphoses any contemporary designers?
Marketa Uhlirova: Those who work with fashion design and imagery tend to adore cinema, and so many in the fashion world are very sophisticated in their film tastes and film knowledge. McQueen had an interesting mind, a great sense of drama and certainly worked with interesting references which also included cinema. But there are many, many others.

Inga Fraser: I am not sure I could say for certain whether any of these films have directly influenced contemporary designers. I might point to some of the more lyrical sequences in films like Rapsodia Satanica and Pink Narcissus, in which the protagonist lingers over or manipulates cloth – there seems to be a parallel with the work of designers like Elie Saab or Dries van Noten, in their reverence for materials. The camera’s eye, like the designers’ eye, is essentially fetishistic here.

Can you tell me more about the Kinoscope Parlour installations and the Hemline: the Moving Screen Artwork? In which ways will they complement the festival programme?
Inga Fraser: In the London-wide Kinoscope Parlour we are showing some of the beautiful late-19th and early-20th century dance and trick films in a way that embraces some of the mass entertainment and vaudeville spirit of early cinema. It stretches our exploration of costume as cinematic spectacle to revisit the spectacle of cinema itself in the early period. Jason Bruges Studio’s Hemline also expands on the experience of cinema but conceptualises costume in motion in a more sculptural way. Loïe Fuller was a dancer whose stage productions combined both science and art and completely captivated audiences at the end of the 19th century. Jason Bruges Studio have taken their cue from what we know about Fuller’s technological sorcery, and from what we see in the early filmed serpentine dances, and produced a phantasmic moving light sculpture for the Somerset House. The piece interprets that reciprocity between film and costume spectacle from a contemporary perspective.

Marketa Uhlirova: We are thrilled to have had such good collaborations with Mark Garside on the Kinoscope Parlour, and with Jason Bruges Studio on Hemline. We are also immensely grateful to Claire Catterall and Sarah Mann at Somerset House for taking the risk and opening their door to a project at a point when Jason Bruges Studio were still experimenting with various approaches. It is really important for us to include in the festival the work of contemporary artists, designers and image makers, if only because it makes us see the historical material we feature in a new light. Working in this way puts us all on the spot a bit more; it raises the game and it certainly raises new kinds of questions that we would not otherwise even think to ask ourselves. To a certain extent, this also goes for working with our art directors (previously Sean O’Mara, this year Keith Gray) who more than anything else help us figure out what we are NOT doing vis-a-vis the historical material we scrutinise…

At the moment there is a lot of talk about fashion and film: according to you, what makes a good fashion film?
Inga Fraser: For me a good fashion film harnesses the same creative spirit and generates the same sort of energy that you can find in the heyday of music video production in the ’80 and ’90s. Fashion film probably can’t have quite as much exposure and impact, but filmmakers should still aim to be as daring, imaginative, and as diverse in content and approach.

Who will be enchanted more by this year’s edition of the festival, fashion or film fans?
Marketa Uhlirova: You tell us!

Fashion in Film Festival, across leading London venues, 1st-12th December 2010

All images courtesy of the Fashion in Film Festival.

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