I analysed in a previous post the power of Caligari-inspired prints, also mentioning other films such as Anton Giulio Bragaglia’s Thaïs and Robert Wiene's silent horror film Genuine: Tragedy of a Strange House (1920), usually known as Genuine: The Tale of a Vampire.
Cooperative Designs’ Spring/Summer 2011 collection made me think a lot about the graphic sets seen in these films.
The new collection includes knits mainly based around a limited palette featuring black and white, burnt orange and red that call back to mind the colours used by the Bauhaus, the art of Natalia Goncharova and the Moscow Futurists and the work produced by Russian state art and technical school Vkhutemas and by one of its teachers, constructivist painter Aleksandra Ekster.
Yet there is also something in the geometric and abstract figures creating chaotically interesting and patterns featured in this collection that evokes the sets and costumes created for Genuine by Expressionist painter César Klein and the work of scenarist Carl Mayer.
Genuine features a stylised décor, a sort of confusing forest of painted cardboard characterised by a dreamlike atmosphere that mesmerises the watcher.
The film plot deals with a strange character named Lord Milo who buys in a slave market a woman called Genuine, who was the priestess of a secret sect.
Milo keeps her confined in a sort of tropical grotto surrounded by exotic plants in his house, taming her most aggressive instincts, but, soon, Genuine finds the way to free her uninhibited wild exoticism and her savage lust, turning once again in a dangerous femme fatale with destructive instincts.
Genuine tried to emulate Caligari’s success, but didn’t manage to do it, yet the madness and conflict in this film are perfectly symbolised on a visual level through the lavish images, the zigzagging motifs of the sets and the rich and bizarre costumes.
Indeed actress Fern Andra wore some extraordinarily exotic garments in the film, among them also a knitted bodysuit (check out the 44-minute condensation of the film embedded at the end of this post around 06:38).
In Cooperative Designs' S/S 11 collection there was an interesting emphasis on overloaded, complex, dynamic and abstract distortions that break the perspective and cause confusion and anxiety, and on the sort of Expressionist jagged and irregular shapes that usually convey strong and unsettling emotions.
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