2019 | Early Cinema’s Costume Attractions

30 January – 2 February 2019

Copenhagen

Early Cinema’s Costume Attractions, presented by the Fashion in Film Festival as part of Copenhagen Fashion Film 2019, is a programme focusing on the emergence of costume as a form of moving image spectacle at the turn of the 20th century.

Featuring French and Italian works by cinema pioneers such as Georges Méliès, Gaston Velle, Segundo de Chomón, Ferdinand Zecca and Alice Guy-Blaché, the selection stresses the vital role dress has played in film from its very beginnings. While in its first decade cinema rarely presented clothing as ‘fashion’, it nevertheless exhibited a profound fascination with costume, which was embraced for its highly kinetic, expressive or metamorphic capacity. These qualities then significantly informed the later ‘fashion films’ as they began to be regularly distributed by companies like Pathé Frères and Gaumont in the 1910s.





Themes and Events

Talk: The Aesthetic of Opulence in Early Cinema’s Costume and Fashion Films

Friday 1 February, 5pm, CPH Foodspace

Focusing on issues of colour, metamorphosis, staging, perception and visual abundance, this film talk simultaneously connects and set apart early cinema’s ‘costume spectacles’ (produced between mid-1890s and 1910) and later ‘fashion films’, as they began to be regularly distributed by companies like Pathé Frères and Gaumont in the following two decades.

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Exhibition: A Story of Fashion Short Film

30 January – 2 February 2019, CPH Foodspace

This selection of hand coloured and stencilled early ‘costume’ films stresses the key role that costume played in early cinema, showcasing some mesmerising dress manipulations and magical transformations.

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