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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. - - - Full programme for Fashion in Film Festival 2012 in New York released. Find out more here. - - - Fashion in Film's Kinoscopes available to tour. Find out more about their London and UK installations.
- - - Limited edition catalogue
- - - Texts now published online - - -
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The Tate strand pairs early film treasures with experimental films of the American Underground to reveal the opulence, artifice and excess in both. Sumptuous masterpieces by Segundo de Chomón, Gaston Velle and Ferdinand Zecca join riotous explosions in colour, costume and camp by legendary experimental filmmakers Kenneth Anger, Jack Smith, Ron Rice, José Rodriguez-Soltero, Steven Arnold and performer Mario Montez. Co-curated by Marketa Uhlirova, Ronald Gregg and Stuart Comer. Tickets £5, concessions £4 |
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Friday 3 December Tate Modern
Tit for Tat (La Peine du talion) Gloriously winged insects seek revenge for the injustices brought about by the popular practice of lepidoptery: the catching of butterflies and moths for the purpose of scientific observation. Velle’s richly coloured film is one of the finest examples of its kind. Metempsychosis (Métempsycose) The special effects pioneer Segundo de Chomón reinterprets for the camera a famous stage illusion that featured a metamorphosis from one object (or person) into another. Here a statue turns into a butterfly fairy who performs a number of dazzling costume transformations that are a feast for the eyes. Puce Moment Puce Moment is a fragment filmed in 1949 and later edited by Anger himself into a stand-alone piece. It was initially conceived as feature-length film Puce Women, and was to be Anger’s tribute to the mythological Hollywood of the Jazz Age and the perversely luxurious tastes and lifestyles of female sirens such as Mae Murray, Barbara La Marr, Marion Davies and Gloria Swanson (some of which are described in his exposé Hollywood Babylon). Referring to the purple-green iridescent colour of 1920s flapper gowns, Anger’s mood sketch evokes the archetypal moment of a film star’s dressing up. It is a dizzying parade of vintage gowns: their beading, sequins and embroidery shimmer aggressively in front of the camera, taking up entire film frames. These near-abstract images are juxtaposed with close-ups of Yvonne Marquis referencing classic Hollywood glamour. The Pearl Fisher (Le pêcheur de perles) A diver encounters strange and marvellous creatures in an underwater kingdom. The final apotheosis sequence boasts remarkable sets festooned with strings of pearls that recall Melies’s Orientalist décors for The Palace of Arabian Nights (1905). Normal Love After completing Flaming Creatures, Smith shot the more ambitious Normal Love in dazzling colour, with elaborate sets (including a Busby Berkeley-esque multi-tiered cake made by Claes Oldenburg), and costumes inspired by horror films and Maria Montez epics. Smith cast poets, artists, and actors from the New York underground scene, including Mario Montez as the Mermaid, Beverly Grant as the Cobra Woman, plus Andy Warhol and a very pregnant Beat poet Diane di Prima as chorus dancers on Oldenburg’s cake. Smith never finished editing a definitive version of the film, but what remains wonderfully illustrates his visionary appropriation of Hollywood sensuality and excess. This is a fantastic opportunity to see a brand new print of Normal Love! |
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Saturday 4 December Tate Modern Introduced by Dominic Johnson, Lecturer in Drama at Queen Mary College, University of London. Floating in archival time and space, this programme incorporates an anonymous 1920s film fragment full of erotic mystique and sensuousness, the decadent peacockery of 1960s underground films that it brilliantly matches, plus a more recent film that reassesses the figure of Salomé. Erotic fragment This short erotic fragment shows a topless female dancer in a combination of close-ups, as she performs – somewhat awkwardly – a type of Oriental veil dance. The transitions between shots sometimes reveal striking superimpositions, especially as the camera homes in on a multi-string pearl necklace that cascades down from her spectacular showgirl’s headpiece. Salomania Salomania reconstructs the ‘dance of the seven veils’ from Alla Nazimova’s 1923 silent film Salomé and features sections from ‘Valda’s Solo’ which the choreographer and filmmaker Yvonne Rainer created after having seen Nazimova’s film. Salomania takes up Salomé as a transgender figure and the motif of a queer appropriation of the exotic. At the beginning of the 20th century, ‘Salomania’ gripped stage and screen performers alike as they took, in their droves, to dancing the dance of the seven veils. The figure of Salomé stood for sexual freedom and became an icon of ‘sodomite’ subjectivity. The film features Rainer performing alongside artist Wu Ingrid Tsang Flaming Creatures Once deemed obscene by the state of New York, Smith’s revolutionary Flaming Creatures is an elusive masterpiece which continues to fascinate. Shot in black and white on outdated film stock, it reproduces some of the sensuous pleasures and high glamour from Hollywood’s golden days, especially referencing such stars as Marlene Dietrich and Smith’s beloved Maria Montez. He gives his cross-dressed actors the polymorphous freedom to preen, dance, and playfully inhabit the rapturous and exotic fantasies of Hollywood cinema. Through a combination of fantastic tableau-vivant compositions and cinéma vérité camerawork, he brilliantly transforms his basic set and thrift store ‘couture’ into a dazzling, Sternberg-like mise-en-scène. The Liberation of Mannique Mechanique The artist, photographer and filmmaker Steven Arnold was a muse and model of Salvador Dalí, who always referred to Arnold as his 'prince'. Andy Warhol star Holly Woodlawn claimed that if Warhol’s Factory was ‘typical New York,’ then the circle around Arnold in Los Angeles ‘was Versailles’. Arnold’s work provides a fascinating bridge between the early cross-gender experiments of Claude Cahun and Pierre Molinier and what the media theorist Gene Youngblood termed the ‘polymorphous subterranean world of unisexual transvestism’ that he saw as a hallmark of the emerging ‘synaesthetic cinema’ of the 1960s. Loosely based on William A Seiter’s 1948 film One Touch of Venus, Arnold’s first film is a macabre, decadent and ambiguous work presenting mannequins and models who travel through strange universes towards possible self-discovery. |
 Flaming Creatures, dir Jack Smith, 1963. Courtesy of Fashion in Film Festival and The Film-Makers Cooperative
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Drag Glamour Introduced by Ronald Gregg, Senior Lecturer and Programming Director, Film Studies at Yale University. This programme pairs José Rodríguez-Soltero’s lavish Lupe with Ron Rice’s landmark psychedelic masterpiece Chumlum. It features two of the most accomplished uses of superimposition in underground film, transporting drag glamour into a psychedelic, cubist-like dimension. Lupe A visually stunning celebration of the life and death of Mexican Hollywood star Lupe Velez, Rodríguez-Soltero’s film is an ecstatic explosion of colour, costume, music, camp performance and multiple superimpositions. Unconstrained by any given style, Rodríguez-Soltero drew inspiration from new wave and experimental film; Latin American, pop and classical music; trash culture; experimental theatre, and Kenneth Anger’s exposé Hollywood Babylon. Lupe is also a love poem to the underground star Mario Montez who designed his own sensational costumes and took immense cultist pleasure in identifying with the tragic Latino star. Chumlum Before his untimely death in Mexico in 1964, Ron Rice was among the most charismatic figures of the New York underground. Chumlum is beautifully disconcerting. Intricate superimpositions mix in- and outdoor milieus and the capers of a colourful gaggle which includes Jack Smith and Mario Montez as they loll about, pursue, and listlessly fondle each other in a riot of costume and colour. Experimental musician (and Velvet Underground drop-out) Angus MacLise composed the spacey soundtrack. |
 Lupe, dir José Rodrįguez-Soltero, 1966. Courtesy of Fashion in Film Festival and The Film-Makers Cooperative
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