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
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.

- - -

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

- - -

- - -

credits, sponsors and partners

Dreams of Darkness and Colour
Friday 16th March 2012
7.30 P.M., total running time c. 80min
This program explores the role of costume in several silent cinema journeys into darkness, all of which are executed in colour.

The Red Spectre (Le Spectre rouge)
Dir. Segundo de Chomón, Pathé Frères, 1907, France
In a dark cavern a devil-like magician performs a series of tricks putting to great use his magnificent cloak.

The Pillar of Fire (La Danse du feu)
Dir. Georges Méliès, 1899, France With Jeanne d’Alcy Costumes and sets by Georges Méliès
(Hand-colored)
Based on H. Rider Haggard’s novel She, a demon conjures a woman wearing a voluminous white dress who performs a dance à la Loïe Fuller.

The Butterflies (Le Farfalle)
Dir. unknown, 1907, Italy
(Tinted and hand-colored)
Geishas dance and play with a butterfly woman whom they have imprisoned within a cage. Her lover comes to rescue her, only to find himself killed by the group. A butterfly revenge ensues.

Rapsodia Satanica
Dir. Nino Oxilia, 1915, Italy
With Lyda Borelli, Andrea Habay, Ugo Bazzini
Alba’s gowns by Mariano Fortuny (Tinted and stencil-colored)
A prime example of the diva genre, Rapsodia Satanica is a masterpiece of silent Italian cinema. It features Lyda Borelli as Alba d’Oltrevita in a Faustian tale of a woman’s search for eternal youth and worldly pleasures. The most persistent themes punctuating the film are Alba’s narcissism and her manipulation of a thin, diaphanous veil in scenes of seduction, reflection and melancholy. The veil assumes a life of its own as it is moulded and layered over her face and body, producing an ethereal, phantasmic effect made even more striking by the use of colour.

Moulin Rouge
Saturday 17th March 2012
1.30 P.M.

Dir. E.A. Dupont, 1928, Great Britain, c. 90mins
With Olga Tschechowa, Eve Gray, Jean Bradin.
Amidst the illuminations of the cafés, theatres and streets of Paris - shot on location and on lavishly constructed sets at Elstree studios - German director E.A. Dupont tells the story of Parysia: shimmering star of the Moulin Rouge. Key for Dupont is the juxtaposition between the glamour of the stage and the stark, often vulgar, reality of the world outside. In a move which destabilises a purely voyeuristic consumption of the film, the director gives equal focus to the chorus and their audience: we see the leering gaze of the gentleman patrons of the music hall as much as the exotic dance routines on stage. The film’s translation of a theatrical spectacle into a screen spectacle displays Dupont’s cinematographic virtuosity as a director.

La Danseuse Orchidée
Saturday 17th March 2012
6.00 P.M.

Dir. Léonce Perret, 1928, 120 mins
With Ricardo Cortez and Louise Lagrange. Costumes by Maison Boué Soeurs.
La Danseuse Orchidée represents an emerging genre of film that asserted the cultural internationalism of the new post-war generation and defined the ‘modern’ through dance, costume, and décor. American actor Ricardo Cortez plays the lead opposite Louise Lagrange in this story of dramatic intrigue surrounding an exotic dancer known as The Orchid and the man who loves her. This new restoration by Pathé Gaumont provides a rare glimpse into the exquisite European melodramas of the silent era.

Arabian Nights
Sunday 18th March 2012
3.20 P.M

Dir. John Rawlins, 1942, 87 mins
With Maria Montez and Sabu.

Known as the ‘Queen of Technicolor’, Maria Montez stars in this resplendent 1940s reworking of the exotic desert adventure tale so popular with cinemagoers in the 1920s. As ‘Scheherazade’, a circus dancer, Montez parades in a series of flamboyant Eastern costumes, designed by Vera West, as she attempts to evade the nefarious schemes of the caliph’s brother ‘Kamar’, played by Leif Erickson. Rawlins’s production won Oscars for Best Colour Art Direction and Best Colour Cinematography.

Pink Narcissus
Sunday 18th March 2012
7.45 P.M.

USA 1971. Dir James Bidgood.
With Bobby Kendall, Don Brooks. Costume and set design James Bidgood. c.71 min
With experience in still photography and stage costume design, but no training in film whatsoever, Bidgood shot Pink Narcissus on the cheap in the confines of his bedroom, using Bolex cameras with 8mm Kodachrome and eventually 16mm Ektachrome stock. It took over seven years to make and the result is an epic and bold work. A series of homoerotic fantasies, the film’s singular aesthetic is at once highly camp and deliberately trashy, yet moving and stunningly beautiful. Its charming ‘naivety’ evokes early film pioneers such as Méliès or de Chomon and like them Bidgood was heavily invested in fabricating his own elaborate sets and costumes, as well as his own universe of solutions and tricks. Sadly, the film was not edited by the artist himself who had, by the early 1970s, lost creative control of his mesmerising footage

Kinoscope Parlour
Monday 12th March - Sunday 18th March 2012

Fashion in Film’s Kinoscope Parlour at the Arnolfini will play a selection of early dance, trick and féerie films of the 1890s and 1900s on three peepshow machines.

Find out more here...