Fashion in Film Festival: If Looks Could Kill will open at New York's Museum of the Moving Image on May 4th 2012. Find out more here.

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Full programme for Fashion in Film Festival 2012 in New York released. Find out more here.

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Fashion in Film's Kinoscopes available to tour. Find out more about their London and UK installations.

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Limited edition catalogue
The 2nd Fashion in Film Festival If Looks Could Kill limited edition catalogue is selling out fast. Available online, and in store at Tate Modern book shop, BFI Southbank Film Store and Cinéphilia.

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Texts now published online
All texts from our first catalogue (now sold out) are now available here.

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credits, sponsors and partners

The 3rd Fashion in Film Festival presents

BIRDS OF PARADISE

1 - 12 December 2010

Full Programme
Book Tickets

The 3rd Fashion in Film Festival is proud to present Birds of Paradise, an intoxicating exploration of costume as a form of cinematic spectacle throughout European and American cinema.

There will be exclusive screenings of rare and unseen films, plus two special commissions as part of the season: an installation for Somerset House by the award-winning Jason Bruges Studio and a London-wide Kinoscope Parlour, an installation of six peephole machines designed by Mark Garside after Thomas A. Edison’s kinetoscopes.

From the exquisitely opulent films of the silent era, to the sybaritic, lavishly stylised underground films of the 1940s -1970s, costume has, for a long time, played a significant role in cinema as a vital medium for showcasing such basic properties of film as movement, change, light and colour. The festival programme explores episodes in film history which most distinctly foreground costume, adornment and styling as vehicles of sensuous pleasure and enchantment.

Experimental films by Kenneth Anger, Jack Smith, Ron Rice, José Rodriguez-Soltero, Steven Arnold and James Bidgood constitute one such episode. Their decadent, highly stylised visions full of lyrical fascination with jewellery, textures, layers, glittering fabrics and make-up unlock the splendour and excess of earlier periods of popular cinema, especially ‘spectacle’ and Orientalist films of the 1920s; early dance, trick and féerie films of the 1890s and 1900s; and Hollywood exotica of the 1940s.

The festival boasts many rare UK screenings including Nino Oxilia’s Rapsodia Satanica (1915/1917), Jack Smith’s Normal Love (1964), José Rodriguez-Soltero’s Lupe (1966), Michael Curtiz’s Red Heels (1925), Albert Capellani’s The Red Lantern (1919) and Germaine Dulac’s La Princesse Mandane (1928).

Programme Curator Marketa Uhlirova
Associate Curator and Kinescope Parlour Co-curator Inga Fraser
Tate Programme curated by Marketa Uhlirova, Ronald Gregg, Stuart Comer

Birds of Paradise: Costume as a Cinematic Spectacle is also the title of a forthcoming illustrated book edited by Marketa Uhlirova and published by Wallflower Press in Spring 2011. Contributors include Catherine Hindson, Jody Sperling, Giovanni Lista, José Teunissen, Sumiko Higashi, Lucy Fischer, Karl Toepfer, Esther Leslie, Juan Antonio Suarez, Ronald Gregg and Ryan Powell.

Full Credits

Tickets available from venues.

Venue Information: