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

New York: 15 April — 2 May 2011

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

The program highlights those episodes in cinema history which most distinctly foreground costume, adornment, and styling as vehicles of sensuous pleasure and enchantment. Underground films by Kenneth Anger, Jack Smith, Jose Rodriguez-Soltero, Steven Arnold, and James Bidgood constitute one such episode.

Their exquisitely decadent, highly stylised visions full of lyrical fascination with jewelry, textures, layers, luxurious fabrics, and make-up unlock the opulence of earlier periods of popular cinema, especially “spectacle” and Orientalist films of the 1920s; early dance, trick films and féeries of the 1890s and 1900s; and Hollywood exotica of the 1930s and ’40s. The program forges a link between the characteristic visual intensity of American underground cinema and the dreamlike, marvelous world of silent cinema. In their magical and sometimes phantasmagorical tableaux, costume and artifice are not merely on display. Instead, they dazzle, seduce, surprise, or dramatically metamorphose – they become a type of special effect.

The festival presents many rare screenings including Nino Oxilia’s Rapsodia Satanica (1915/1917), a newly restored print of Jack Smith’s Normal Love (1964) and Jose Rodriguez-Soltero’s Lupe (1966). There will also be favourites such as Cecil B. DeMille’s Male and Female (1919), Erich von Stroheim’s Merry Widow (1925), as well as talks, film introductions and seminars at Museum of the Moving Image and The Graduate Center, CUNY this April and May, followed by a symposium with screenings at Yale University in November.

All silent films will be accompanied with live music by Donald Sosin or Stephen Horne.

Programme Curator Marketa Uhlirova
With Ronald Gregg, Stuart Comer, Eugenia Paulicelli and Inga Fraser.

Birds of Paradise: Costume as a Cinematic Spectacle is also the title of a forthcoming illustrated book edited by Marketa Uhlirova and published by Koenig Books in Fall 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.

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Full credits

Tickets available from venues.

Venue Information:

Fashions of 1934, dir William Dieterle, 1934. Courtesy George Eastman House

Rapsodia Satanica, dir Nino Oxilia, 1915/7. Courtesy EYE Film Insitute, Netherlands

Salomé, dir Charles Bryant, 1923. Courtesy of BFI

Lupe, dir José Rodrįguez-Soltero, 1966. Courtesy of Fashion in Film Festival and The Film-Makers Cooperative