Download the full program as PDF - Fashion Film Festival

A mAjor 

extrAvAgAnzA 

in costume 

spectAcle, DAnce 

AnD DiAbolicAl 

glAmor 

14 April - 2 may 2011 

new York: museum of 

the moving image; 

the graduate center, 

cunY 

11 - 12 november 2011 

Yale university, 

new Haven

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 stylized 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 1940s. 

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. 

birds of paradise delves into the archives to show 

that costume and adornment have often been a key 

component in film and have, from early on, proved 

absolutely vital in showcasing such basic properties as 

movement, change, light and, of course, color. Stressing 

the aesthetic aspects of cinema, the program suggests 

one way of closing the cleavage (or at least temporarily 

suspending the opposition) between avant-garde film 

and mainstream commercial cinema. This is very much 

in the spirit of such progressive journals as the pre-war 

French cinéa-ciné pour tous and the post-war American 

Film culture, and of course, the very attitude of the 

experimental filmmakers featured. 

The festival presents many rare screenings including Nino 

Oxilia’s rapsodia satanica (1915/1917), a newly restored 

print of Jack Smith’s normal love (1963), Jose Rodriguez- 

Soltero’s lupe (1966), and Alexandre Volkoff’s secrets 

of the east (1928). There will also be favourites such as 

Cecil B. DeMille’s male and Female (1919), Erich von 

Stroheim’s the merry Widow (1925), as well as talks, film 

introductions and seminars. The festival takes place 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, 

Stephen Horne or Makia Matsumura. 

“The Fashion in Film Festival has established itself as a lively and 

wonderfully programmed cinema event that spans a wide range of 

genres and periods, finding a common link in the medium’s emphasis 

on visual spectacle, dazzling excess, and general enchantment. 

Museum of the Moving Image is thrilled to be the New York venue for 

this original and essential film festival.” 

David Schwartz, Chief Curator, Museum of the Moving Image 

Founded in 2005, Fashion in Film is 

an exhibition, research and education 

project based at Central Saint Martins 

College of Art and Design. Birds 

of Paradise is a second collaboration 

with Museum of the Moving Image, 

and is organized in partnership with 

Film Studies Program and Films at the 

Whitney at Yale University, The Center 

for the Humanities and The Graduate 

Center at City University of New York. 

The program is curated by Marketa 

Uhlirova, with Ronald Gregg, Stuart 

Comer, Eugenia Paulicelli, and Inga 

Fraser. It is organized for Moving Image 

by David Schwartz. 

Festival advisors: Serge Bromberg, 

Alistair O’Neill, Eric de Kuyper, Ronny 

Temme, Christel Tsilibaris, Marc Siegel.

MUSEUM OF THE MOVING IMAGE 

FriDAY, April 15 

7:00pm 

underground opulence 

Bursting with color, this program 

reconnects the avant-garde queer 

sensibility of underground film not 

with its literal inspirations (Hollywood 

icons such as Alla Nazimova, Marlene 

Dietrich, or Maria Montez) but rather 

with some genres in early film which— 

with their ornamental costumes 

and décor—anticipate some of the 

richness of the underground’s camp 

aestheticism. 

Total running time: 130 mins. 

Introduced by David Schwartz and 

Marketa Uhlirova 

Live music by Makia Matsumura 

tit for tat 

(la peine du talion) 

Dir. Gaston Velle, Pathé Frères, 

1906, France 

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 colored film is one of the 

finest examples of its kind. 

metempsychosis (métempsycose) 

Dir. Segundo de Chomón, Pathé Frères, 

1907, France 

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. A statue turns into 

a butterfly fairy who performs a number 

of ravishing costume transformations. 

Frame enlargement from Tit for Tat, dir Gaston Velle, 1906. Courtesy of Lobster Films. 

puce moment 

Dir. Kenneth Anger, with Yvonne 

Marquis, 1949 

Costumes from Kenneth Anger’s 

collection 

Puce Moment is a fragment filmed 

in 1949 and later edited by Anger 

himself into a stand-alone piece. It was 

conceived as the 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 whom are 

described in his exposé Hollywood 

Babylon). Referring to the purplegreen 

iridescent color 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. 

the pearl Fisher 

(le pêcheur de perles) 

Dir. Ferdinand Zecca, Pathé Frères, 

1907, France 

A deep-sea diver encounters strange 

and marvelous creatures in an 

underwater kingdom. The final 

apotheosis boasts remarkable sets 

Frame enlargement from The Pearl Fisher, dir 

Ferdinand Zecca, 1907. Courtesy of Lobster Films. 

festooned with strings of pearls that 

recall Méliès’s Orientalist décors for 

The Palace of Arabian Nights (1905). 

normal love 

Dir. Jack Smith, 1963 

With Diana Baccus, Mario Montez, 

Beverly Grant 

Costumes by Jack Smith and actors 

Print courtesy of Gladstone Gallery, 

New York 

Jack Smith, Untitled, c.1958-1962 (photograph from the set of Normal 

Love, dir Jack Smith, 1963). © Estate of Jack Smith. Courtesy of 

Gladstone Gallery, New York. 

After completing Flaming Creatures, 

Smith shot the more ambitious Normal 

Love in dazzling color, with elaborate 

sets (including a Busby Berkeleyesque 

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.


sAturDAY, April 16 

2:00pm 

secrets of the east 

(geheimnisse des orients / 

shéhérazade) 

Dir. Alexandre Volkoff, 1928, Germany/ 

France, 126 mins. 

With Marcella Albani, D. Dmitriev, 

Brigitte Helm 

Costume design by Boris Bilinsky and 

sets by Ivan Lochakoff 

Live music by Stephen Horne 

Print courtesy of National Film Center 

Tokyo 

A big-budget Franco-German coproduction, 

Volkoff’s “Luxusfilm of 

the year” is an exquisite fantasy of an 

escape into the “Orient.” The appetite 

for anything Oriental, galvanised some 

twenty years before by the Ballets 

Russes and fashion designer Paul 

Poiret, was still going strong in both 

European and Hollywood cinema 

toward the end of the silent era. Secrets 

of the East showcases some remarkable 

artistry by two Russian émigrés: the 

ornamental sets by Ivan Lochakoff and 

sensuous costumes by Boris Bilinsky 

were designed in a magnificent blend 

of Eastern and Western motifs, from 

stylised Islamic and far-eastern 

influences to Art Nouveau, Art Deco, 

and Expressionism. With its paradise 

atmosphere and a sumptuous 

stencil-colored sequence, the film is 

a fairy-tale world of fancy filled with 

adventure, magic, mystery and harem 

dancers. 

Secrets of the East, dir Alexandre Volkoff, 1928. Courtesy of Aurora Productions / The Kobal Collection. 

5:00pm 

male and Female 

Male and Female, dir Cecil B. DeMille, 1919. 

Courtesy of The Kobal Collection. 

Dir. Cecil B. Demille, 1919, 97 mins. 

With Gloria Swanson, Thomas Meighan 

Costume design by Clare West, Mitchell 

Leisen, Paul Iribe 

35mm print from George Eastman House 

International Museum of Photography 

and Film 

Introduction by Inga Fraser 

Accompanied by music from Stephen Horne 

DeMille typically inserted into his 

modern-day narratives exotic episodes, 

so-called “visions,” that provided 

seductive fantasy escape and featured 

climactic costuming. In Male and 

Female’s notorious dream sequence, 

Gloria Swanson dramatically enters 

into a lions’ den kitted out in a lavish 

all-white robe and headdress made of 

pearls, beads, and peacock feathers. 

The show-stopping outfit was designed 

by Mitchell Leisen and was reportedly 

so heavy that Swanson required the 

assistance of two members of the crew 

to move around the set. 

7:00pm 

A Double bill on costume and 

excess (Dedicated to Kenneth 

Anger) 

“Because America is the Pleasure Dome 

of the world... the materialistic dream 

is so strong that you have to be of the 

purity of Parsifal to banish Klingsor’s 

castle... there’ll always be a penalty to 

pay for these artificial paradises.” 

Kenneth Anger 

inauguration of the pleasure Dome 

Dir. Kenneth Anger, 1954/1966, 38 mins. 

With Samson De Brier, Marjorie Cameron, 

Joan Whitney, Anaïs Nin 

Costumes and sets by Kenneth Anger, 

Samson de Brier, and actors 

Anger’s Inauguration is a hedonistic 

costume extravaganza through and 

through. The idea for the film was in 

fact born at a masquerade party Anger 

attended in 1953. Held at painter Renate 

Druks’s home, the soirée brought 

together a coterie of avant-garde 

actors, directors and poets (many of 

whom star in the film), all exquisitely 

costumed for the occasion. According 

to the writer Anaïs Nin, Anger himself 

came dressed “as Hectate, goddess of 

the moon, earth and infernal regions, 

sorcery and witchcraft. Only one heavily 

made-up eye was visible. His long 

black fingernails were made of black 

quills. The rest was all a towering 

figure of lace, veils, beads and feathers.” 

Anger transformed this experience 

into a hallucinatory cinematic vision, 

a ritual that is both enigmatic and 

idiosyncratic. 

Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome, dir Kenneth Anger, 1954/1966. 

Courtesy of BFI.


the Devil is a Woman 

Dir. Josef von Sternberg, 1935. 76 mins. 

With Marlene Dietrich, Cesar Romero, 

Lionel Atwill 

Costumes by Travis Banton, wardrobe 

by Henry West 

We invited Kenneth Anger to tell us 

which film we should program alongside 

his Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome 

and he suggested “something by Travis 

Banton for von Sternberg or DeMille”. 

We took note. The Devil is a Woman, 

close to Anger’s own vision in Inauguration, 

makes masquerade its very leitmotif—from 

Marlene Dietrich’s inexorably 

made-up face to the near-grotesque 

disguises worn by revellers at Seville’s 

carnival during which this film is set. 

Dietrich’s uber-sensuous character 

Concha Perez enjoys a game of seduction 

while unapologetically flaunting 

Banton’s veils, outlandish headpieces, 

fans and fringes. 

sunDAY, April 17 

Frame enlargement from The Devil is a Woman, dir. 

Josef von Sternberg, 1935. 

2:00pm 

Dreams of Darkness and color 

This program explores the role of costume 

in several silent cinema journeys 

into darkness, all of which are executed 

in color. 

Total running time: c.80 mins. 

With an introduction by Eugenia Paulicelli. 

Live music by Stephen Horne 

the red spectre (le spectre rouge) 

Dir. Segundo de Chomón, Pathé Frères, 

1907, France 

Costumes and sets by Segundo de 

Chomón 

(Stencil-colored) 

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) 

Frame enlargement from The Red Spectre, dir. 

Segundo de Chomόn, 1907. Courtesy Lobster Films. 

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. 

Sensuous, the veil may evoke the craze 

for exotic dances that swept European 

and American stage and screen around 

the turn of the century but in Alba’s 

hands it is more introspective and 

eerie than seductive. It 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 color. Alba’s 

nemesis, the omnipresent devil, also 

operates his vampire-style cloak to 

great effect. 

With grateful thanks to the Italian Cultural 

Institute who have supported this 

screening on the occasion of celebrating 

the 150th Anniversary of the unification 

of Italy. 

Frame enlargement from Rapsodia Satanica, dir. Nino Oxilia, 1915/1917. Courtesy EYE Film Institute Netherlands.


4:30pm 

pink narcissus 

Dir. James Bidgood, 1971, 71 mins. 

With Bobby Kendall, Don Brooks 

Costume and set design by James Bidgood 

Pink Narcissus, dir James Bidgood, 1971. Courtesy of BFI. 

With a background 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 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 it 

is moving and stunningly beautiful. 

Its charming naiveté evokes early film 

pioneers such as Méliès or de Chomón; 

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. 

7:00pm 

Golden Butterfly (Der Goldene 

schmetterling) 

Dir. Michael Curtiz, 1926, Austria, 77 mins. 

With Lili Damita, Hermann Leffler 

35mm print from British Film Institute 

Live music by Stephen Horne. 

Golden Butterfly stars French actress 

Lili Damita, director Michael 

Curtiz’s then-wife. Her film career was 

launched by a beauty contest, though 

she already had experience as a revue 

dancer on Parisian stages, performing 

under the pseudonym Lily Deslys. The 

story of Golden Butterfly epitomises the 

familiar jazz-age conflict between female 

independence and morality where 

Damita’s dancer is portrayed as a moth 

driven to the glitter of the stage only 

to be burnt. Following the successful 

Red Heels, this was another of Curtiz’s 

ambitious European co-productions 

set in the spectacular music halls and 

designed to rival the dominance of 

Hollywood cinema in the mid-1920s 

(ironically, the director and his star left 

for Hollywood soon after). Shot in London, 

Cambridge and Berlin, it showcases 

the high glamour of metropolitan 

night life as well as some accomplished 

dance routines under the art direction 

of the ‘master of atmospheric mysteries’ 

Paul Leni. 

The Golden Butterfly, dir Michael Curtiz, 1926. Courtesy 

of Phoebus-Film/Sascha/ The Kobal Collection. 

FriDAY, April 22 

7:00pm 

steven Arnold special 

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. The 

screening also pays homage to an innovative—yet 

often overlooked—poet of 

the Beat Generation, ruth weiss, who 

stars in all the films featured. weiss 

worked with Arnold in the late-1960s, 

and among many other jobs she did to 

support her writing career, was also 

that of a chorus girl. 

The program will be introduced by 

Stuart Comer 

various incarnations of a tibetan 

seamstress 

1969, 10 mins. 

ruth weiss, Pat Eddy Lowe and Stephen 

Kelemen 

Costumes by Steven Arnold 

“Originally, it was to be a serious look 

at Westerners influenced by Eastern 

trends. As it developed, however it 

became much more humorous with 

characters in yoga positions with high 

heels and smoking cigarettes at the 

same time.” Stephanie Farago 

messages, messages 

1972, 23 mins. 

With ruth weiss, The Joseph, Pandora 


“A journey of the psyche into the world 

of the unconscious. Made when Wiese 

and Arnold were students at the San 

Francisco Art Institute, the (...) film 

is influenced by Dalí, Buñuel and the 

German expressionists.” Michael Wiese 

the liberation of mannique 

mechanique 

1967, 15 mins. 

With Sonia Magill and ruth weiss 


Frame enlargement from Messages, Messages, 

dir Steven Arnold, 1972. © Steven Arnold Archives. 

Frame enlargement from The Liberation of the 

Mannique Mechanique, dir Steven Arnold, 1967. 

© Steven Arnold Archives. 

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.


sAturDAY, April 23 

2:00pm 

cobra Woman 

Dir. Robert Siodmak, 1944, 117 mins. 

With Maria Montez, John Hall, Sabu 

Costumes by Vera West, sets Russel A. 

Gausman, Ira Webb 

A star of Universal’s Technicolor 

adventure films in the 1940s, the 

Dominican-born siren Maria Montez 

became the centrepiece of Jack Smith’s 

Hollywood idolatry two decades later. 

(Smith famously singled Montez out in 

his essay “The Perfect Filmic Appositeness 

of Maria Montez.”) The star who 

founded her own fan club and who 

reportedly once exclaimed “When I see 

myself on the screen, I am so beautiful, 

I jump for joy” was a blueprint for the 

(admittedly more knowing and parodic) 

campness and narcissism of Jack 

Smith’s stars. With reference to Montez, 

Smith stated that bad acting can in 

fact expose a priceless slice of life, an 

approach echoed in Andy Warhol’s cinema. 

In Cobra Woman Montez is cast in 

a dual role as Tollea of the South Seas 

and her evil sister Naja, priestess of 

the Cobra People on a forbidden island. 

The film showcases her charms in Vera 

West’s sensuously soft, pastel gowns 

as well as more gaudy outfits. West 

was a former fashion designer trained 

by Lucile and became the doyenne of 

costume design for horror and monster 

movies in the 1930s and 1940s. 

Frame enlargement from Cobra Woman, dir Robert Siodmak, 1944. 

4:30pm 

Flaming creatures 

and sensuous pleasures 

Total running time 55 mins. 

Flaming creatures 

Dir. Jack Smith, 1963, 43 mins. 

With Francis Francine, Sheila Bick, Mario 

Montez, Joel Markman 

Costumes by Jack Smith and actors 

Flaming Creatures, dir Jack Smith, 1963. Courtesy 

of Fashion in Film Festival and The Film-Makers’ Cooperative. 

Deemed obscene by New York State, 

Smith’s revolutionary Flaming Creatures 

is an elusive masterpiece which 

continues to fascinate. Shot in blackand-white 

on outdated film stock, 

it reproduces some of the sensuous 

pleasures and high glamor 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 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, 

Smith brilliantly transforms his basic 

set and thrift store ‘couture’ into a dazzling, 

Sternberg-like mise-en-scène. 

the most Wonderful Fans 

of the World 

(De mooiste waaiers ter wereld) 

Dir. unknown, 1927, Netherlands/ 

France, 12 mins. 

With Pépa Bonafé; Komarova, Korgine, 

Sergine; John Tiller Follies Stars 

This is a luxuriously stencilled short 

film shot in France and distributed 

in the Netherlands in 1927. Like the 

better-known full-feature La Revue des 

revues, it was filmed on the stage of a 

Parisian music hall, only this time it is 

considerably snappier and presented 

without an over-arching narrative 

framework. The film includes Orientalist 

numbers such as “In the Temple of 

the Fakirs” and “The Chinese Fan” and 

makes great use of close-ups. 

7:00pm 

Drag glamour 

total running time 95 mins. 

Frame enlargement from The Most Wonderful Fans 

of the World, dir unknown, 1927. Courtesy EYE Film 

Institute Netherlands 

This program pairs Jose Rodriguez- 

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 

glamor into a psychedelic, cubist-like 

dimension.


The screenings will be followed with a 

panel discussion about the legacy of 

the queer aesthetic where the spectacle 

of fashion plays a dominant role, from 

the shimmering dresses in Kenneth 

Anger’s Puce Moment to Jack Smith’s 

reimaging of the 1940s’ Hollywood 

Orientalism, to the stunning, surreal 

imagery of Steven Arnold. Ronald 

Gregg, Ela Troyano, Stuart Comer and 

Agosto Machado will explore the designs 

and production of these visionary 

spectacles, the wearing and posturing 

of costume and make-up, and the cinematography 

that brought these visionary 

spectacles to excite and haunt our 

imaginations. 

lupe 

Dir. Jose Rodriguez-Soltero, 1966, 50 mins. 

With Mario Montez, Charles Ludlam 

Costumes by Montez Creations 

A visually stunning celebration of the 

life and death of Mexican Hollywood 

star Lupe Velez, Rodriguez-Soltero’s 

film is an ecstatic explosion of color, 

costume, music, camp performance, 

and multiple superimpositions. Unconstrained 

by any given style, Rodriguez- 

Soltero drew inspiration from new wave 

and experimental film; Latin American, 

pop and classical music; trash culture; 

experimental theater, 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 

Dir. Ron Rice, 1964, 45 mins. 

With Jack Smith, Beverly Grant, Mario 

Montez 

Costumes Jack Smith and actors 

“Before his untimely death in Mexico 

in 1964, Ron Rice was among the most 

charismatic figures of the New York 

underground. His Chumlum is beauti- 

fully disconcerting. Intricate superimpositions 

mix indoor and outdoor milieus 

and the capers of a colorful gaggle 

which includes Jack Smith and Mario 

Montez as they loll about, pursue, and 

listlessly fondle each other in a riot 

of costume and color. Experimental 

musician (and Velvet Underground 

drop-out) Angus MacLise composed 

the spacey soundtrack.” Juan Antonio 

Suárez 

sunDAY, April 24 

2:00pm 

the merry Widow 

Frame enlargement from Chumlum, dir Ron Rice, 1964. Courtesy 

of Fashion in Film Festival and The Film-makers’ Cooperative. 

Dirs. Erich von Stroheim, Monta Bell, 

1925, 137 mins. 

With Mae Murray, John Gilbert 

Costumes by Adrian, costume supervision 

by Richard Day and Erich von 

Stroheim; set decoration Cedric Gibbons 

and Richard Day 

16mm print from George Eastman House 

Live music by Donald Sosin 

With her career extinguished by the arrival 

of sound, Mae Murray’s sensuous 

charms remain linked with the silent 

era. Following the stereotype, MGM 

cast the former Ziegfeld girl as a shimmering 

follies dancer who performs 

her routines in provokingly “abbreviated 

costumes.” But the film takes the 

routine glamorisation of the actress 

to another level. Given that von Stroheim 

openly scorned high-maintenance 

stars and Murray in particular, it is 

likely that the indulgence in close-ups 

of her face bathed in a golden aura of 

back-lighting is down to cameraman 

Oliver Marsh who, being one of four 

cinematographers on the set, reportedly 

worked as much under Murray’s 

direction as under von Stroheim’s. The 

director’s own agenda was to use an 

adaptation of Franz Lehar’s famous 

operetta to comment on the decadence 

of European aristocracy by explicitly 

foregrounding themes of sexual lust, 

voyeuristic pleasure, and fetishism— 

much of which got lost in the editing 

room. The Merry Widow shows Murray 

in some dazzling costumed entrées. 

The satin-velvet dress held on a diamond 

necklace and complete with 

birds-of-paradise headpiece worn in the 

triumphal Waltz scene was designed 

by the young Adrian who got his first 

big break in Hollywood partly thanks 

to Murray. The film was originally shot 

with Technicolor sequences. 

The Merry Widow, dir Erich von Stroheim, 1925. Courtesy of BFI.

Salomé, dir Charles Bryant, 1923. Courtesy of United Artists / The Kobal Collection / Rice. 

4:30pm 

salomé 

Dir. Charles Bryant, 1923, 74 mins. 

With Alla Nazimova, Mitchell Lewis 

Costume and sets by Natacha Rambova 

With an introduction to the work of Natacha 

Rambova by Pat Kirkham 

Accompanied by music from Donald 

Sosin 

The cult status that Salomé enjoys today 

owes much to the outlandish, highly 

stylised sets and costumes à la Aubrey 

Beardsley. The designer Natacha Rambova 

was a protégé of the lead actress 

and producer Nazimova who reportedly 

sank much of her own money in the film. 

Despite being a box-office failure the 

film remains a landmark in the history 

of cinema, bridging the mainstream and 

the avant-garde. Its radical modernist 

aesthetic, camp stylisations and deliberately 

exaggerated acting is a departure 

from the turn-of-the-century portrayals 

of Salomé as an overtly eroticized 

seductress. Nazimova’s film is arguably 

less exhibitionist than it is a comment 

on exhibitionism (one reviewer even complained 

it had little worthy of censorship) 

as it thematizes looking, voyeurism, 

and transgressive sexual desire—an apt 

homage to Oscar Wilde indeed. 

6:30pm 

Fashions of 1934 

Dir. William Dieterle, 1934 

With William Powell, Bette Davis. 

Costume by Orry-Kelly, musical numbers 

by Busby Berkeley. 

New 35mm print courtesy of the Packard 

Humanities Institute. 

Fashions of 1934 is one of a long line 

of films from the 1930s and 1940s that 

exploited the success of New York’s super-revues 

such as the Ziegfeld Follies 

and Frolics, the Earl Carroll Vanities, 

or George White’s Scandals. Its musical 

Fashions of 1934, dir William Dieterle, 1934. Courtesy of Warner Bros / The Kobal Collection. 

number “Spin a Little Web of Dreams” 

has Busby Berkeley’s signature all over 

it—here he combined to great effect 

the sensuousness of the follies’ costuming 

and décor with his trademark 

kaleidoscopic choreography. As if this 

was not enough, the film displays some 

remarkable gowns courtesy of Hollywood 

favourite, Orry-Kelly (who himself 

had designed sets and costumes for the 

Scandals). As its title suggests, Fashions 

of 1934 is set in the fashion industry 

and has a good old dig at many 

a sensitive issue at its heart – from 

creativity versus commerce, originality 

versus copy and exclusivity versus 

mass-availability, to the rivalry between 

Paris and New York.

the graduate center, cuny 

seminArs At tHe grADuAte center 

19 April and 2 May 2011 

The Graduate Center seminars will bring together international scholars with 

an interest in fashion and film to debate issues of costume, movement and 

spectacle in cinema. The seminars will also screen rare footage ranging from 

early European and American film, to underground cinema and contemporary 

fashion film. Free entry. Tickets at the door. 

tuesday, April 19 

2:30 - 5:30pm 

the elebash recital Hall 

metamorphoses: clothing in 

motion from early cinema to 

contemporary Fashion Film 

This seminar will look at clothing and 

adornment in film as a device of pleasure 

and sartorial knowledge; one that has 

had a long history in shaping cinema’s 

aesthetic languages. It will articulate 

some of the connections between early, 

experimental and underground cinema, 

as well as the contemporary “fashion 

film” and more, asking questions about 

stillness and motion, the material specificities 

of clothing on the screen, and the 

contexts (technological and other) of their 

Untitled film still by Erwin Blumenfeld, 1958–64, presented in SHOWstudio’s 

Experiments in Advertising: The Films of Erwin Blumenfeld, 2006. Courtesy of the 

Erwin Blumenfeld Estate and SHOWstudio.com. 

production and dissemination that allowed 

for dress to be a prominent player 

in new experiments in image-making. 

Moderator: Eugenia Paulicelli 

Respondent: Robert Singer 

Speakers: Marketa Uhlirova − Costume 

as a Special Effect: Early Cinema and 

Beyond; Antonia Lant − Painted or Pure? 

Sartorial Knowledge in Griffith’s The 

Painted Lady; Ronald Gregg − Orientalism 

and Fashion in 1960s Underground 

Film; Penny Martin − Fashion Film and 

Before 

monday, may 2 

5:00 - 7:30pm 

skylight 

Fashion in Film: europe and 

America 

Since the emergence of cinema in the 

late-19th century, the role of costume, 

fabrics and fashion has been crucial 

in conveying an aesthetic dimension 

and establishing a new sensorial and 

emotional relationship with viewers. 

Through the interaction of fashion, 

costume and film it is possible to gauge 

a deeper understanding of the cinematic, 

its complex history, and the 

mechanisms underlying modernity, the 

construction of gender, urban transformations, 

consumption, technological 

and aesthetic experimentation. 

Moderator: Amy Herzog 

Respondent: Jerry Carlson 

Speakers: Jody Sperling − Loïe Fuller 

and Early Cinema; Caroline Evans − 

Early Fashion Shows and the “Cinema 

of Attractions,” c. 1900-1925; Michelle 

Tolini Finamore − “Exploitation” in Silent 

Cinema: Poiret and Lucile on Film; Drake 

Stutesman − Spectacular Hats! A New 

Kind of Identity in a New Kind of Love 

(1963) 

Presented by the Center for the Humanities; 

Concentration in Fashion 

Studies, MA in Fashion: Theory, History, 

Practice in the MA Liberal Studies 

Program, Film Studies, Women’s Studies 

and the Center for Gay and Lesbian 

Studies in conjunction 

with the Fashion in Film 

Festival. 

A frame enlargement from a film showing a mannequin at Worth, c. 1926-7. Courtesy of Caroline Evans and Lobster Films.

yale university 

“secrets oF tHe orient”: 

DurAtion, movement, AnD costume in tHe cinemAtic 

experience oF tHe eAst 

A symposium with screenings at Yale university 

11 - 12 November 2011, Whitney Humanities Center 

Borrowing the title of the 1928 German-French studio spectacular, this 

symposium will expand on the Orientalist strand in Birds of Paradise. It will 

consider the movement, duration, texture and other aspects of “dressing” film 

through costume, sets and props as having played a crucial role in defining 

Western visions of the East throughout the 20th century. It will also address the 

use of costume as an important aesthetic device in Asian cinema. Participating 

speakers will include Charles Musser, Anapuma Kapse, Amy Herzog, Alistair 

O’Neill, Eugenia Paulicelli, Becky Conekin and Ronald Gregg. 

For more details check our websites nearer the time: 

fashioninfilm.com; yale.edu/filmstudiesprogram/events.html 

Hero, dir. Yimou Zhang, 2002. Courtesy of BFI. 

COSTuME IN EARly CINEMA, 

THE AESTHETIC OF OpUlENCE, 

AND THE lIVING SCREEN 

Marketa uhlirova 

While footage presenting fashion is extremely scarce in 

the first decade of film, early cinema nevertheless demonstrates a profound fascination 

with costume and artifice. As early as 1894, William Heisse and William 

K.L. Dickson at Edison Manufacturing Company filmed Carmencita and Annabelle 

Whitford Moore performing serpentine and butterfly dances. 1 In each of these 

films the spectacular costume itself was the key attraction on show. Based on the 

groundbreaking stage performances of the American dancer Loïe Fuller, films of 

serpentine and butterfly dances, and their variations, formed an entire sub-genre 

within early cinema, and their impact on the emerging medium was considerable. 

As, indeed, was the impact of capturing billowing costumes in motion, so much 

so that cinematic dances “à la mannière Loïe Fuller” or “genre Loïe Fuller” may be 

seen as the bridge between two conceptions of early cinema: one that records the 

external world, as in Edison and Lumière, the other a cinema that privileges theatrical 

artistry and artifice to forge a new “aesthetic of opulence,” 2 as championed 

by Georges Méliès and best exploited by filmmakers at Pathé frères, most notably 

Gaston Velle, Segundo de Chomón and Ferdinand Zecca. 

Perhaps inevitably, the cinematic dance “à la Fuller” is 

generally anchored within a discussion of its originator 

and innovator. Fuller’s was essentially an update of 

the nineteenth-century skirt and veil dance. She built 

on these dances’ premise of using the skirt as a pivotal 

element in a performance—its capacity to hide and 

reveal the body, and its unique expressivity when in 

motion—but she radically transformed a popular variety 

entertainment into an avant-garde form, creating a 

thoroughly new vision whose significance extended well 

beyond the world of dance and the music hall. Throughout 

her career, Fuller continuously re-modeled her 

dresses, usually made from fine gossamer silk, gradually 

extending them to almost outlandish proportions—to 

as much as 100 yards around the skirt. 3 Depending on the type of dance, these 

dresses had giant wings attached to their torso, or were gathered at the neck with 

the arms manipulating them from underneath with the help of wooden wands. By 

undulating and swirling the excess of fabric, Fuller evoked the effects of an entire 

repertoire of natural phenomena such as waves, whirls and fire, creatures such as 

butterflies, bats and serpents, and flowers such as violets and lilies. Her costumes 

appeared to assume a life of their own as a constant stream of new forms appeared 

and disappeared, their monumentality further dramatised by a phantasmagorical 

orchestra of optical stage effects, especially projections of colored light. 

The serpentine and the butterfly dance proved to be 

among early cinema’s most persistent subjects. With numerous variations performed 

by scores of variety and vaudeville dancers for companies including, in 

addition to Edison, the American Mutoscope and Biograph, Lumière, Gaumont, 

Pathé and others, the dances were a permanent fixture throughout cinema’s first 

decade. In line with how the serpentine dance appeared on the popular stage, 

cinema made it the subject of various parodies (Leopoldo Fregoli’s La danse serpentine 

de Fregoli, 1897, Birt Acres’s and Robert W. Paul’s Performing Animals/

Skipping Dogs, 1895), presented it as a curiosity (La Serpentine dans la cage aux 

fauves, Ambroise-François, 1900), and integrated it into more complex, multipleshot 

trick films where it was combined with additional effects such as magical 

transformations (Pathé’s 1905 Loïe Fuller, attributed to Lucien Nonguet, where a 

bat turns into a dancer) and flames and smoke (Georges Méliès’s Danse du feu, 

1899 and Segundo de Chomón’s La Creación de la Serpentina, 1908, and La Danza 

del fuego, 1909), and it was used to form near-psychedelic multi-corps ballets 

(La Creación de la Serpentina or Cines’s Le Farfalle, 1907, which is also one of the 

most exquisite choreographies in this category). 4 

All this is testimony to the enormous contemporary 

fascination with Fuller. However, to argue that cinema’s 

Fullerian dances were purely an extension of Fuller’s 

remarkable achievements risks overlooking their significance 

within cinema. Such an argument implies cinema’s 

technological inadequacies vis-à-vis the theater, casting 

it as the medium that was unable to match the complexity 

of Fuller’s stagecraft. It highlights cinema’s pedestrian 

nature as it transported the serene, multi-dimensional 

aesthetic experience of the serpentine dance into the vernacular. After all, Fuller’s 

conspicuous absence from cinema itself suggests this view. 5 

Yet, the short films of Annabelle, Ameta, Crissie Sheridan, 

Bob Walter and others play an important role in early cinema—not so much 

as a historical document but, rather, as a unique type of cinematic image. Firstly, 

and on the most fundamental level, the Fullerian dances were embraced as an 

ideal medium to exhibit two of film’s vital properties: motion and time. Positioned 

more or less centrally upon a plain stage with darkened background, practically 

isolated from all other stimuli, the dancer and her changing shapes embodied 

constant change. The soft, organic whirling of her costume 

conveyed a dynamism and fluidity that made the 

serpentine dance an appropriate analogue of cinema’s 

capacity to present a seamless continuum. 6 

Secondly, cinematic dances à 

la Fuller ushered cinema towards a concern with visual 

spectacle that mimicked the elaborate stage effects of 

the theatrical machinery (la machinerie théâtrale), an 

approach that was soon more fully explored by Méliès, 

closely followed by filmmakers at Pathé and elsewhere. 

Thirdly, these cinematic 

dances are inextricably linked to the emergence of color 

in cinema, which, in turn, cannot be divorced from 

the discourse of opulence and magic. Edison’s 1894 

Annabelle Serpentine Dance is among the earliest color 

films in the history of cinema, and it is also this—or 

possibly another Annabelle film from 1894–5—that was 

one of the first color films to be exhibited in a public 

projection. 7 Cinema’s Fullerian dances were colored 

in a bid to imitate the stage effects of Fuller’s projections 

of multi-colored lights onto the moving costumes, 

and were typically listed as ideal subjects for coloring. 8 

Much like Fuller’s claims that she “adapt[ed] the movements 

of [her] dance to th[e colors’] effects,” 9 there are 

also many catalog descriptions of trick and féerie films 

by Méliès and Pathé which show that color was clearly 

considered an invaluable tool, and indeed formed an integral 

part in the planning of effects. The 1901 Charles 

Urban catalog, for example, made this point quite explicitly 

in its description of Méliès’s Danse du feu: “This 

film was especially made up for the purpose of colouring 

which is applied in a most surprising and artistic 

manner, increasing the wonderful effect tenfold.” 10 

There is every reason to believe that the dominant motifs 

employed to define the aesthetic of opulence—butterflies, 

flowers, fans, 

costumes and ornamental 

interiors—were 

specifically chosen as 

a means of presenting 

color to its most 

picturesque effect. Like 

costume in motion, 

color was of course another 

device by which 

constant change could 

be illustrated, and, as 

Charles Musser notes, 

also one through which 

early cinema’s masculine 

appeal could be 

transcended. 11 

Frame enlargement from Le Merveilleux éventail vivant, 

dir. Georges Méliès, 904. Courtesy of Lobster Films.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the group of 

serpentine and butterfly dances anticipates a conception of the cinematic image 

as an enclosed and self-contained space; a conception that soon comes to 

define Mélièsian cinema with its “artificially arranged scenes.” The dances make 

maximum impact when the costume fills the visual field with its presence—in 

many cases, the moving costumes quite literally demarcate the boundaries of the 

frame. Fanning out and sweeping across the screen, their fabric presents itself 

as the screen’s moving counterpart. This doubling becomes even more apparent 

in a number of the so-called “transformation scenes” 12 where actors face the 

static camera and metamorphose into screens through simple gestures of opening 

overized wings, cloaks or peacock tails which can then be further animated, 

especially with color variations. 

These so-called “transformation scenes” are characteristic 

of two genres within early cinema: the trick film and the féerie. Both were 

developed by Méliès 13 and drew heavily on the theatrical féerie and stage magic. 

Méliès was an ardent fan and also a practitioner of both (as the impresario in his 

own magic theatre, the Théâtre Robert-Houdin). His films adopted these as well 

as other traditions of nineteenth-century popular entertainment and science to 

conjure a world of supernatural wonders, introducing into the language of cinema 

the baroque concept of the marvelous (le merveilleux). 14 Méliès himself called this 

brand of cinema “fantastical scenes” (les vues fantastiques), positioning them in 

direct contrast to “ordinary subjects” (les vues ordinaires). He emphasized that 

besides transformation “there is also a great number [of films] involving tricks, 

theatrical machinery, mise-en-scène, optical illusions.” 15 This suggests that 

transformation was far from being the only major ingredient in his box of tricks. 

In Méliès’s cinema, there is a shift from a primary sense 

of amazement at the technological wonder of motion— 

the key aspect of what Tom Gunning has called the 

“aesthetic of astonishment” 16 —toward an amazement at 

the manifestation of visual opulence in its imaginative 

excess. Motion here is devised as a structuring tool in 

the staging of “special effects” that animate the lavish 

mises-en-scène. For Méliès, the artistry and charm of 

décor and costumes was as important as the originality 

of his tricks or that of the “star attraction.” 17 Méliès was 

particularly proud of pointing cinema towards aesthetic 

concerns derived from the theater, claiming that he 

gave cinema a new lease of life, effectively rescuing it 

from being a one-hit wonder. He was also proud that 

he designed his own sets, décor and costumes, and 

that he was generally present at every stage in a film’s 

production, and it was this auteurist approach that enabled 

Pathé, with its industrial model of production, to 

quickly establish itself as a serious rival in the trick film 

and féerie genres. 

The aesthetic of opulence is characterised by the “grand 

spectacle” of butterflies, fairies and devils who—gracefully or grotesquely—pose 

and gesture with their wings and cloaks, as in Méliès’s Conte de la grand-mère 

et le rêve de l’enfant (1908), or de Chomón’s La Légende du fantôme (1908), Le 

charmeur (1906) and Le Spectre rouge (1907); exotic vegetation, as in Méliès’s La 

Chrysalide et le papillon d’or (1901); palatial interiors and multi-corps processions 

and ballets, as in Méliès’s Le Palais des Mille et une nuits (1905); “optical effects” 

such as pyrotechnics, showers of gold coins and rays of light emanating from bodies, 

as in de Chomón’s Le scarabée d’or (1907), Zecca’s Ali Baba et les quarante 

Frame enlargement from Métempsycose, dir Segundo de Chomón, 1907. Courtesy of AFF/CNC, France. 

voleurs (1902) or Velle’s La poule aux oeufs d’or (1905); or dazzling underwater 

kingdoms, as in Ferdinand Zecca’s Pêcheur de perles (1907). Many of these themes 

appear at their best in the so-called apotheoses, the triumphal scenes and the ultimate 

glorifications of opulence which typically involve the whole troupe in ballets 

or other, more ambitious formations. This is where cinema used and reinvented 

some of the theatrical machinery that defined the nineteenth-century féerique. 

Among all the motifs that showcase costume as a living 

screen, those of women-butterflies (femme-papillon), 

women-insects and winged fairies are the most persistent 

and also the most emblematic. These fin-de-siècle 

phenomena were already familiar tropes from stage 

magic and féerie; one of Méliès’s first cinematic butterfly-women, 

in La Chrysalide et le papillon d’or, was in 

fact based on a famous stage illusion called The Cocoon 

(Le Cocon) by French magician Buatier de Kolta 18 shown 

in the Egyptian Hall in London in 1887, shortly after 

Méliès’s own brief stint there. 19 De Kolta’s trick was then recreated again in Gaston 

Velle’s Métamorpsoses du papillon (1904) and de Chomón’s Mariposas japonesas/Papillons 

japonais (1908), both of which are colored. Another remarkable film 

by de Chomón, Métempsycose (1907), was also based on an eponymous popular 

magic illusion which was essentially a variation on the Pepper’s Ghost. The film’s 

main attraction is a female figure who repeatedly opens and closes arms, each 

time unveiling a new pair of wings that turn into a cape decorated with motifs 

that, once again, evoke Fuller’s early painted costumes.

With his oversized 

fan in Le Merveilleux 

éventail vivant (1904), 

Méliès’s identified 

another excellent opportunity 

to create a 

living screen. As the 

fan opens, it obscures 

completely the perspective 

view of the gardens 

at Versailles painted as 

the scene’s backdrop, 

effectively asserting 

itself as a curtain, a 

surface on which to exhibit 

miraculous acts. 

Once open, the fan’s 

ornamental branches, 

decorated in the style 

of Louis XV, turn into a gallery of seven arcades with women “in gala attire” who 

then undergo a series of transformations of dress and accessories. When the fan 

mounting eventually disappears and gives way to a star-studded globe, the women 

simply emanate from it like a “human fan,” forming a sculptural tableau vivant. 

Méliès’s inspiration for this film came from a hugely successful féerie extravaganza 

at the Théâtre du Châtelet, The Sun Prince (1889), which boasted a living fan number 

in its apotheosis scene, a view that was described by The Era as “superb ... 

formed of nude fairies over whose forms stream rays of electric light.” 20 The theme 

was again re-worked later at Pathé with some remarkable results. 

It is impossible to divorce the fascination with material 

splendor in cinema’s “aesthetic of opulence” from the 

highly saturated visual culture of the late nineteenthcentury 

metropolis, where luxury and abundance could 

be seen in the context of the everyday. The modern city 

was its own machinerie théâtrale, generating with the 

surplus of commodities and images the neurasthenia 

and phantasmagoria theorised by Georg Simmel and, 

later, Walter Benjamin. The late nineteenth century 

was also a time when distinguishing oneself through 

nuanced consumer “knowledge” and appearances had 

become paramount. Disinterest in—or a lack of—such 

urbane sophistication was now more likely to signify 

provincialism than moral repugnance. Vis-à-vis this 

grown-up (and increasingly rationalized and bureaucratized) 

comsumerism, the cinematic marvelous offered 

an alternative discourse. It championed a deliberately 

old-fashioned and naïve world order, and emphasized 

that acquisition of wealth or status was only possible 

through supernatural intervention, or dream. In this respect 

it subverted the contemporary discourse of social 

mobility, offering a “retreat from the constraints of the 

real or the present, … an alternate plane onto which the 

real can be transposed and reimagined.” 21 

Frame enlargement from Le Merveilleux éventail vivant, dir. Georges 

Méliès, 1904. Courtesy of Lobster films. 

engenDering FAust: 

tHe veileD lADY in nino oxiliA’s 

RApSODIA sAtAnicA 

Eugenia paulicelli 

Rapsodia satanica, by the Turin-based writer and director 

Nino Oxilia, is a true masterpiece whose value deserves to be recognized and 

positioned in the wider context of the history of cinema in Italy and beyond. It is 

especially crucial to see how this early Italian film can be re-read today through 

the lens of dress and fashion so as to capture the philosophical underpinnings of 

Oxilia’s reinterpretation of the Faust legend, its gender implications, and its aesthetic 

folding and unfolding of his “dance of human passions.” 1 Unlike other versions 

of Faustian narratives, in Rapsodia it is an elderly woman, Alba d’Oltrevita 

(whose name we could translate as Dawn beyond Life), played by the Italian diva 

Lyda Borelli, who makes the pact with the Devil. The price she is asked to pay to 

regain her beauty and youth is to give up love. Youth and beauty are exchanged 

for a life devoid of emotion, passion, and sensuality—almost a contradiction in 

terms. This is especially so because in the beginning of the film, Alba unfolds herself 

into younger skin and becomes a femme fatale. 

Rapsodia satanica foregrounds themes of the fragility of 

human actions, emotions, the impossibility of divorcing love from youth and life, 

the transience of human existence and actions and, above all, time and its inherent 

slipperiness. All are themes quintessential to this film and perhaps also to 

film in general, especially at the time of experimentation and advancement in the 

arts and sciences in which Rapsodia was made. And this is another reason why 

Oxilia’s film is so rich. Time is embedded in the cinematic machine in its kineaesthetic 

multi-dimensionality. The composer Pietro Mascagni wrote the score for the 

film, signalling artistic collaboration between the relatively new cinematographic 

art and the world of high art, theater and opera. Rapsodia is a big production 

conceived as an opera totale of the Rome-based production house, Cines. In its 

very title, the film offers itself as a challenge to the tradition of the art of storytelling 

in the age of mechanical reproduction. 

In the castle of illusions where Alba lives, anything can 

happen. It is as if the castle itself were a movie theater 

in which acts of magic and illusion are performed on 

the screen, like a painting of Mephisto coming to life 

and jumping into the room where Alba sits, reaching 

out not only to her but also to the spectator. There is a witty cinematic allusion 

to technology and the transformation of the self that is incarnated on screen by 

the performance of the diva especially, as she changes through dress and movement. 

However, this metamorphosis from one scenario to another, through the 

film’s rhythms and interruptions, does not prevent her inevitable death. It only 

postpones it. The dances and masquerades defer death; there can be no salvation 

for Alba. The price she pays for youth is loneliness of the heart. Alba appears 

as the veiled lady, and as such she is both the author and the vehicle of 

transformation. The veil, in fact, accompanies all her rituals of dressing, redressing 

and addressing; a piece of fabric covers and uncovers, envelops and exposes 

her body and her face. It is Alba’s habitus. 

As a recurrent element in the whole film, the veil is also 

what binds the several threads of Rapsodia together in its narrative and nonnarrative 

moments. But Alba’s is a veil that is never stitched. In Oxilia’s film, the 

binding fabric that holds together its different acts always flows, never losing its

suspended meaning. It never wraps up. It is a veil that folds and unfolds as if ad 

infinitum. The film is an experimental rhapsody. Words connoting the sartorial 

domain are the film’s most powerful metaphors. “Veil,” or velo in Italian, brings 

with it a doubleness of vision contained in the terms velare (to hide) and rivelare 

(to uncover, reveal). This doubleness is also at play in representation (both cinematic 

and non-cinematic) and in the definitions of borders. Nietzsche in his Gay 

Science had already used the trope of the veil to undermine a philosophy of truth 

through the mediation of woman. He draws attention not to what hides beneath 

the surface, but to the truth of that surface. Here the sartorial and the cinematic 

converge. Both of them, in one way or another, “veil” the face of reality. But the 

face, as landscape, changes; it has hidden corners, areas of darkness and light, 

wrinkles and folds. Once again, the cinematic converges with the sartorial and 

with philosophy. The veil is not a static surface or canvas on which to paint, and 

neither is a woman. Both move, fold and unfold. 

In Oxilia’s film, the veil and the way it moves in cinematic 

space and on the body is, in fact, a mise en abyme of the 

will to live beyond the imprisonment of one’s own body 

and moral constraints. Alba’s movements and dances are 

fuelled by desire. This renders her character very modern 

and unsettling. The veil, for its part, has a long history 

in literature, fashion and visual culture. With specific 

reference to Italy, the veil’s original significance as a sign 

of modesty and chastity was radically transformed by women’s social practices in 

public spaces during the 16th century when it took on the contours of an entirely 

different symbol—that of sin and seduction. Departing from what it once stood for, 

the veil has become a symbolic site of struggle between two opposing forces: modesty 

and seduction—an interplay that is also at the core of fashion. 2 

If in Italian culture the veil has epitomised the transformation 

from the sacred to the secular, in Oxilia’s film the veil marks the transformation 

of the old Alba into a new, sensual femme fatale and leads her to her 

final dance, during which she becomes a priestess of love and beauty. Nevertheless, 

in Rapsodia a contrasting trajectory is at work through the ambiguity of the 

veil. Alba’s sensuality is eventually transfigured into a diaphanous and chaste 

presence as she wears her Delpho gown, designed by Mariano Fortuny, with its 

hundreds of pleats caressing her body which is also completely enveloped by the 

veil. This transfiguration comes from Alba having committed the crime of desiring 

the impossible, of halting the progression of time to regain youth and beauty 

through her pact with the devil. 

These multiple meanings criss-cross Oxilia’s film, 

becoming even more complicated in light of the cultural and artistic contexts 

to which the costuming in Rapsodia alludes. Although the dynamic of the veil 

maintains its ambiguity, it has a 

number of distinct features that 

touch upon the trope of the femme 

fatale, her reinscription within the 

context of the Faustian legend, the 

sensorial and emotional dimension 

of cinema, and how time is spatialized 

within. One of the most powerful 

incarnations of the feminine 

as a threat, the femme fatale is, as 

Mary Ann Doane writes, “a potential 

epistemological trauma.” 3 It is 

not by chance that figures such 

as Salomé (a trope of dangerous 

femininity), linked to a persistent 

Orientalism, are omnipresent in 

the culture of Decadentism, Art 

Nouveau, and Symbolism, during 

times of wide-reaching transformations 

in urban space, science and 

technology, and industrialization, as well as in definitions of gender roles. Structurally, 

however, the veil in Oxilia’s film embodies the fluid and slippery passage 

from one act to another, from one transformation to another, punctuating the 

sense of duration, interruption and suspension with its diaphanous fragility. The 

veil is also a fragile screen that keeps porous the borders of what is inside and 

outside, conscious and subconscious, private and public. 

When Alba transforms herself before the devil’s and our 

eyes, her wrinkles disappear. She unfolds into a new 

fold, taking her from the interior of her dark castle to 

the exterior of the garden and the feast of light therein. 

Here we see many youths dancing and enjoying themselves. 

This sequence stands in sharp contrast to the 

somberness and darkness of the first part of Rapsodia. Alba emerges into the 

garden wearing a Poiret-style dress accessorized with a veil. The dance the young 

women perform here has a fresh and light feeling. From this moment onwards the 

light voile or chiffon fabric remains ever present through Alba’s transformations, 

only differently draped. Each one of her transformations, and their attempts to 

defeat the passage of time and death, is announced by a new dress and masquerade. 

One of the most dramatic moments of the film comes at a costume ball for 

which when Alba dresses as Salomé. It is here, at one of the most conventional 

and fashionable gatherings of the time where high society ladies showed off their 

fancy dresses, that Sergio, one of Alba’s two aspiring lovers, commits suicide. 

Alba, left alone in her Castle of Illusion, gazing at her reflection in a mirror, notes 

the reappearance of a wrinkle. Another fold. And another series of transformations 

where the veil and her dresses now gradually lose any allusion to sexuality 

and exoticism. We now see her wearing an unfitted monastic tunic that is stiff 

and sober in contrast with the lightness of the veil she wears during her walk in

the garden. The veil is the reminder of her happy recent past surrounded by love 

and youth. As Alba walks, the camera dwells on a close-up of a beautiful, colorful 

butterfly, a common art nouveau detail and a symbol of spring, youth, and 

transformation. Upon her return to the castle, Alba asks her maid to bring her 

the most beautiful flowers in the garden, with which she decorates the room—a 

profusion of them. She does so wearing an exquisite asymmetrical ankle-length 

black dress with strapped sandals (an ensemble that could easily be found in any 

of today’s fashion magazines). The veil is left on a chair. After this solitary celebration, 

Alba, as the intertitle tells us, “veil[s] herself as the priestess of love and 

death.” Now wearing the Fortuny Delpho gown in the penumbra of the interior, 

Alba looks at herself in the mirror, her entire body caressed by pleats and draperies. 

The series of shots has a most exquisite painterly quality. 

The final folding and the unfolding of the veil is undoubtedly 

the film’s most dramatic sequence. As she walks out, into the open, 

Alba assumes a ghost-like appearance. The movement of her body softened by 

her veil and the delicate pleats of her gown now take on shades of pink, evoking 

the uncertain color of dawn. Alba and her earthly, bodily incarnation become 

almost engulfed by the lightness of texture. In this sequence, it seems that her 

body is somehow returned to the very beginning of life, when the infant is nestled 

in the womb. It is life before life, life in between, life on the screen with its painterly 

quality. The fold before the fold: “A fold is always folded within a fold.” 4 The 

newborn’s skin is wrinkled and will unfold to new life. 

In this last sequence of Rapsodia, we see a literal and 

material relationship in the rendition of color on screen 

and the stenciling technique, the pochoir, used to obtain 

this powerful effect. Incidentally, Mariano Fortuny 

used the pochoir method for precise color transfer 

to cloth. Once again the cinematic and the sartorial 

converge. The technique feeds the idea that reality and 

dreams could be mechanically reproduced—an idea that 

is at the core of modernity and is the result of a series 

of interferences, interactions and fusions of time and 

spatiality as shown in early cinema, and especially in 

Rapsodia. Here, time unfolds in space, embodied in the 

veiled Alba, until she unveils herself in the face of mortality. 

This moment of truth and revelation can only be, 

as Derrida puts it, “in quotation marks.” In other words, 

translated—veiled—onto screen. Meaning is suspended, 

as is the veil thrown over a surface and hinting at the 

desire hidden in the twists and turns of its folds. 

FAsHion, tHriFt stores, AnD 

tHe spAce oF pleAsure in 1960s 

Queer unDergrounD Film 

Ronald Gregg 

Flaming Creatures was only one of several films to 

emerge out of 1960s New York underground cinema that paid little heed to conventions 

of narrative and spatial and temporal continuity. Like Chumlum (Ron 

Rice, 1964) and Lupe (Jose Rodriguez-Soltero, 1966), it instead focused on and 

recreated the sensuous pleasures of dazzling, ostentatious fashion, spectacular 

mise-en-scène, and exaggerated acting associated with a particular period 

of Hollywood film. All three films produce something similar to the “cinema of 

attractions,” whose emphasis on exhibition and spectacle over “diegetic absorption” 

and narrative, according to film historian Tom Gunning, dominated the first 

decade of silent cinema. As Gunning explains, the “cinema of attractions” was 

supplanted by the emphasis on narrative in classical Hollywood cinema, but it 

continued to influence musicals and other genres and erupted again in certain 

avant-garde films. 1 “It is possible,” Gunning notes, “that this earlier carnival of 

the cinema, and the methods of popular entertainment, still provide an unexhausted 

resource—a Coney Island of the avant-garde, whose never dominant 

but always sensed current can be traced from Méliès through Keaton, through 

Un Chien andalou (1928), and Jack Smith.” 2 Smith, together with his star, the 

actor Mario Montez, and other experimental filmmakers and actors, discovered 

in the “cinema of attractions” a spectacular form and style that granted them the 

freedom to ignore professional standards of film-making and dominant conventional 

narrative structures. Their films instead provided a hallucinatory vision 

of themselves as a “cinema of attractions”—a fountain of “intersexual, polymorphous 

joy.” Flaming Creatures and its underground progeny Normal Love (Jack 

Smith, 1963), Chumlum and Lupe transported their audiences away from this 

despondent narrative into a “space of pleasure”—a concept that Susan Sontag 

evokes in her famous defense of Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures in The Nation in 

1964. They did so by following Smith, Montez and their playful co-conspirators 

into the fantastical world of Hollywood glamor, fashion, and B-movie actresses. 

How Smith and Montez got there is worth pondering. 

Like so many artists in the 1960s underground scene, 

Jack Smith and Mario Montez struggled to pay the rent 

and feed themselves on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. 

J. Hoberman notes that Smith’s “was a marginal 

existence lived on the edge of bohemian squalor.” 3 In his 

review of Flaming Creatures, Gregory Markopoulos describes 

Smith’s near poverty. But as poor and embattled 

as they both were, Smith and Montez refused to live in 

abjection. Hollywood spectacle was their inspiration. 

Jose Rodriguez-Soltero told me that he often watched 

films with Montez and Smith in Montez’s apartment. They were such an inspiration 

that even when Montez was performing in Theater of the Ridiculous productions, 

he would run home as soon as he was done to “see a film like Gold Diggers 

of 1935 or The Barefoot Contessa on television.” 4 

Their immersion in Hollywood spectacle inspired and 

enabled both Smith and Montez to turn their everyday existence into lives of Hollywood 

fantasy. Both decorated their apartments in a faux-luxurious style inspired 

largely by Hollywood epics, particularly the shadowy, lavishly textured films

of Joseph von Sternberg and the Technicolor Orientalist and South Sea spectacles 

produced by Universal Studios and starring Maria Montez. In Arabian Nights 

(1942), Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves (1944), Cobra Woman (1944), Sudan (1945), 

and other Montez films, Universal set designers created a sensuous backdrop of 

brightly colored, jeweled interiors full of tapestries, curtains, tiles and columns 

inspired by an Orientalist fantasy of Moorish design. Smith and Mario Montez 

enthusiastically reproduced their excess. 

But while Hollywood designers had enormous budgets 

to create sets and costumes, Smith and Mario Montez 

had to rely on thrift shops and trash heaps to build their 

fantasies. Like the assemblage artist Joseph Cornell, 

who scoured the used bookshops and record stores of 

Fourth Avenue to find bric-a-brac, engravings, French 

and German books, postcards, photographs, films, and 

movie magazines, both Smith and Montez were masters 

of the found object, the throwaway, the vintage, and the 

forgotten. Both of them seized upon the ephemeral, the mass-produced, the childlike 

and the moldy and used them to emulate the worlds created by von Sternberg 

and the Universal designers. They furnished their rooms, as Smith’s biographer 

Edward Leffingwell puts it, “with pickings from the invisible department store of 

the street.” 5 Smith frequently outfitted his apartment so that it could serve as a 

fantasy set for his photographic shoots, films and theatrical productions. Montez 

also adorned his apartment with bold colors and spectacular décor. For several 

years, it featured a bathtub covered with two gold plastic laminated boards, a 

dining table with lion’s feet, a maroon carpet and chartreuse sofa, and rainbowcolored 

curtains. The centerpiece of his living room was the television, his entrée 

to Hollywood, which he decorated by placing a pearl necklace around the screen. 6 

These same Hollywood sources influenced Smith’s Flaming 

Creatures and Ron Rice’s Chumlum. Smith in particular learned from the films 

of von Sternberg that he didn’t need color film or a large, expensive set to create a 

sumptuous and exotic visual world. As Andrew Sarris has noted, Sternberg needed 

very little space to create his mise-en-scène, which was “not the meaningless background 

of the drama, but 

its very subject, peering 

through nets, veils, 

screens, shutters, bars, 

cages, mists, flowers, and 

fabrics to tantalize the 

male with fantasies of the 

female.” 7 Smith filmed the 

black and white Flaming 

Creatures on the rooftop 

of the Windsor Theater, 

a Lower East Side movie 

house, with outdated film 

stock, giving it a faded, 

ghostlike quality. He 

painted a single backdrop 

of a large vase of flowers, 

but created the impression 

of a richer, multidimensional 

set through his 

Frame enlargement from Chumlum, dir Ron Rice, 1964. Courtesy of Fashion in Film 

Festival and The Film-makers’ Cooperative. 

varied compositions and 

camera positions, mov- 

Jack Smith, Untitled (Mario Montez), early 1960s. © Estate of Jack Smith, courtesy Gladstone Gallery, New York.

ing from a static tableau vivant to swirling actors dancing 

like dervishes, shot from overhead. The exoticism of set, 

costumes and actors was heightened by Smith’s choice of 

Orientalist and pop music for the soundtrack. 

Ron Rice used his own apartment 

for Chumlum, which starred Smith and Mario 

Montez, along with other underground actors. Chumlum 

was influenced by Smith’s Flaming Creatures and the 

colorful, sumptuous Normal Love (1963), which Smith 

was working on at the time of Rice’s shoot. Rice also created 

an extravagant Orientalist and South Sea aesthetic 

consisting of moving hammocks, brilliant fabrics, and 

exotically dressed and bejeweled characters in various 

poses and movements. Chumlum’s rich, dazzling visuals 

are enhanced by Rice’s multiple superimpositions 

composed in-camera, which dominate the film. These 

superimpositions create layers of vibrant colors, jewelry, 

rope hammocks and costumed characters, which make 

the film more abstract and psychedelic than theatrical. 

Smith and Mario Montez drew 

upon the same Hollywood sources when they designed 

costumes for their film and theatrical productions. The 

costumes designed for Maria Montez by Universal’s costume 

department, headed by Vera West, were especially 

influential. West’s designs for gowns worn by actresses 

both on and off screen used bold coloring and alluring 

designs to counteract the darkening mood in the United 

States in the late 1930s and 40s as it witnessed the 

fascist march toward power and war in Europe. West’s 

designs for the wartime Montez vehicles complemented 

the spectacular sets designed by R.A. Gausman and Ira 

S. Webb. She dressed Montez and the supporting female 

characters in green, red, white and gold Arabian-style 

dresses, pants and blouses, white veils, and elaborate 

multicolored headdresses and turbans, while draping 

them from head to foot with glittering jewels. Make-up 

removed all blemishes, and Montez wore perfectly applied, 

voluptuous red lipstick. 

Despite being filmed in back and white, Flaming 

Creatures portrays a spectacular collection of exotic creatures, many of whom 

were men, who posed, promenaded, put on lipstick, and danced in the exotic 

costumes, make-up and “junked up” accessories inspired by West’s designs. 

Francis Francine played an elegant Arabian woman, dressed in a turban, brocaded 

Moorish dress and long white gloves. Joel Markman played an alluring 

vampire with a Marilyn Monroe blond wig, arched eyebrows, and a simple, slinky 

form-fitting dress. Rene Rivera became Dolores Flores (later changing his underground 

film name to Mario Montez), a Spanish dancer complete with fan, lace 

mantilla, comb, and flower in his mouth. 

Drawing on the same Hollywood imaginary, Mario 

Montez made costumes for many of his later film and theatrical roles using the 

vintage clothing, fabric, make-up and accessories he found in thrift shops and 

dime stores. Like many women of his generation, he learned to stretch his clothing 

budget by sewing his own costumes. Montez developed a discerning eye for cheap 

dresses and accoutrements that could be transformed into the marvelous. By 

Frame enlargement from Lupe, dir José Rodríguez-Soltero, 1966. Courtesy of Fashion in Film Festival and The Film-Makers’ Cooperative. 

1967, he would boast, “I don’t like cheap things. Of course, most of the time I design 

and sew my own costumes, but when I go to thrift shops I don’t pick up just 

any old thing. The gown I bought the other day, for example, was a Ceil Chapman, 

and it was quite expensive. I insist on looking my best in front of the camera.” 8 

By the time of Rodriguez-Soltero’s Lupe, Montez had 

established his own costume house, Montez-Creations, 

which made costumes for Lupe and Theater of the Ridiculous 

productions. His imagination knew no bounds, 

even if his budget did. In 1969, he told Queen’s Quarterly 

that he spent $50 a year on costumes and $20 

on make-up. Charles Ludlam and other Theater of the 

Ridiculous members claimed that it was Mario Montez who taught them about 

make-up as well as how to use glitter and sequins to create the fantastic. 9 

This space of pleasure was expanded to the community 

that came together to create these fantasy worlds. They produced the sets together, 

performed together, and dressed and put on make-up together, extending

the pleasure in each task. After his first visit to the rooftop set of Flaming Creatures, 

Tony Conrad commented on how surprised he was “when it turned out that 

people took three hours to put on their makeup” and “when people took several 

more hours to put on their costumes.” 10 Andy Warhol witnessed a similar scene on 

the set of Smith’s Normal Love: “preparations for every shooting were like a party— 

hours and hours of people putting makeup on and getting into costumes and 

building sets.” 11 According to Markopoulos, Smith “spent hours, a whole night” 

before shooting Normal Love, “arranging, changing, shifting, replacing, placing objects, 

people, cheese cloths, fabrics about a prefabricated moon pool.” 12 As Stefan 

Brecht commented on the community that came together in the Theater of the 

Ridiculous, “while the framework of reference of conventional theater experience is 

the individual presentation of the play, in this theater it is the [collective] production 

of the play—the series of presentations, rehearsals, composition of the script 

… the performance gives a glimpse into a process of personal interactions within 

a continuing community, everyone contributing personally.” 13 Or as Michael Moon 

puts it, this community of performers created a “voluptuous fringe” 14 —the creative 

excess which Flaming Creatures and Chumlum document so brilliantly. 

Lupe, Rodriguez-Soltero’s homage to the Mexican-born 

actress Lupe Velez, displayed Montez’s capacity for self-transformation more than 

any other film. Like Maria Montez, Velez’s B-movie career and tragic end led to her 

becoming a gay diva (she committed suicide in 1944). Velez became a star in the 

late 1920s and was a major focus of the tabloids due to her high-profile romance 

with Gary Cooper and subsequent marriage to Johnny Weissmuller. Toward the 

end of her film career she starred in the B-movie Mexican Spitfire comedy series at 

RKO, playing a stereotyped fiery Spanish woman. 

Rodriguez-Soltero’s Lupe stands in sharp contrast 

to Andy Warhol’s Lupe (1966), made at the same time. While Warhol focusses 

on the sad, lonely, sordid end of Velez’s life, Rodriguez-Soltero and Montez 

celebrate her operatic-like successes and tragedies. They portray her as choosing 

and living a life of excess, and even in her death they show her body and soul 

ascending to a saintly, inspirational place. Unlike Warhol’s minimalist, deadpan 

aesthetic, with its improvisational, long take structure, Rodriguez-Soltero’s Lupe 

is “visually very generous,” as Sontag would have put it. Filmed on Ektachrome- 

EF and printed on Kodachrome-II stock, it contains exuberant explosions of Vera 

West-like reds and greens and amazing superimpositions shot in the camera. 

This lavishness draws loving attention to Mario Montez’s costumes and makeup. 

While Warhol’s film depicts the self-destruction of the star (played by Edie 

Sedgwick), Rodriguez-Soltero’s Lupe celebrates the freedom and pleasure of Mario 

Montez’s transformation into this cherished actress, relishing his ascension and 

departure from ordinary life—a life constrained by political, moral, and economic 

structures—into an alternative space of glamor and pleasure. 

By creating an unfettered “cinema of attractions,” 

Smith, Mario Montez and their contemporaries 

appropriated Hollywood excess in order to construct 

and perform their own utopian spaces of pleasure. Their 

glamour and gestures, generous visuals and vibrant 

music created spaces of pleasure for both audience 

and performers. They enabled a group of impoverished 

filmmakers and actors to affirm their lives and their 

right to existence. Anything but abject, they became 

the exotic, glamorous and confident Scheherazade and 

Cobra Woman. 

contributors to neW YorK seAson 

jerry carlson is Professor and Acting 

Chair of the Department of Media 

& Communication Arts at The City 

College and a member of the doctoral 

faculties of French, Film Studies, and 

Comparative Literature at the Graduate 

Center, CUNY. A multiple Emmy 

award-winning Senior Producer for 

CUNY-TV, he created and produces the 

series City Cinematheque about film 

history, among others. 

stuart comer is Curator of Film at 

Tate Modern, London. He oversees film 

and video work for the Tate Collection 

and Displays and organises an extensive 

program of screenings, forums and 

lectures focusing on current cultural issues 

and the history of artists’ film and 

video. He has contributed to numerous 

publications and periodicals, including 

Artforum; Frieze; Afterall; Parkett; and 

Art Review. Recent freelance curatorial 

projects include ‘Andy, as you know I 

am writing a movie...’ at Beirut Art Center 

and the 2007 Lyon Biennial. 

caroline evans is Professor of Fashion 

History and Theory at Central Saint 

Martins College of Art and Design, University 

of the Arts London. She has published 

widely on fashion in the 20th and 

21st centuries. Her recent publications 

include Fashion at the Edge: Spectacle, 

Modernity and Deathliness (Yale UP, 

2003) and The House of Viktor & Rolf 

(co-authored with Susannah Frankel, 

Merrell, 2008). Her forthcoming book 

Modelling Modernity: Fashion Shows in 

France and America 1900-1929 (Yale 

UP) is due to be published in 2012. 

inga Fraser is Associate Curator of 

Fashion in Film at Central Saint Martins 

College of Art and Design, University 

of the Arts London. She has cocurated 

and coordinated major projects 

including Kinoscope Parlour (London, 

2010) and the forthcoming “colour inventory” 

installation for Arnhem Mode 

Biennale. 

ron gregg is Senior Lecturer in 

American Studies and Film Studies 

and Director of Film Programming for 

the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale 

University. He has published articles 

and curated programs primarily on topics 

of gay identity and queer representation, 

for festivals internationally including 

the San Francisco International 

LGBT Film Festival, Chicago Gay and 

Lesbian Film Festival, and the South 

African Gay and Lesbian Film Festival. 

Amy Herzog is Associate Professor of 

Media Studies and Coordinator of the 

Film Studies Program at Queens College. 

She is also a member of the Ph.D. 

Program in Theatre at the Graduate 

Center, CUNY. She has published articles 

and chapters on a number of topics, 

including the philosophy of Gilles 

Deleuze, film theory, musical film, and 

the history of coin-operated film machines. 

Her book, Dreams of Difference, 

Songs of the Same: The Musical Moment 

in Film (University of Minnesota Press) 

was published in 2010. 

stephen Horne is one of the leading silent 

film accompanists based in the UK. 

His speciality is to combine up to three 

instruments in one live score—piano, 

flute and accordion. He is a house pianist 

at the BFI Southbank and plays 

for festivals and venues internationally, 

including Lincoln Center New York, 

the National Gallery, Washington and 

Pordenone Film Festival. 

pat Kirkham is Professor at the Bard 

Gradaute Center: Decorative Arts, 

Design History, Material Culture, New 

York. She is a distinguished historian 

of design and has also written widely 

on film and gender. She is the editor 

of Women Designers in the USA, 1900- 

2000: Diversity and Difference (Yale 

University Press, 2000) and author of 

Charles and Ray Eames: Designers of 

the Twentieth Century (MIT Press, 1995) 

among many others.

Antonia lant is Professor and Chair of 

the Department of Cinema Studies of 

the Tisch School at New York University 

and a member of the National Film 

Preservation Board. She has published 

widely in the areas of women and Orientalism 

in cinema. Her publications 

include Blackout: Reinventing Women 

for Wartime British Cinema (Princeton 

UP, 1991) and The Red Velvet 

Seat (Verso, 2006). She is now embarking 

on a new project “Texture Matters” 

in collaboration with scholars at the 

University of Vienna. 

Agosto machado began his illustrious 

career in New York’s experimental theater 

in the 1960s. He has worked with 

Jack Smith, John Vaccaro and “Playhouse 

of the Ridiculous,” H.M. Koutoukas, 

and appeared in many plays 

at La Mama. He also acted in numerous 

plays with his close friend Mario 

Montez, including Harvey Fierstein’s In 

Search of the Cobra Jewels and Jackie 

Curtis’ infamous Vain Victory. 

penny martin is Editor in Chief of 

The Gentlewoman and Professor of 

Fashion Imagery at London College of 

Fashion, University of the Arts London, 

before which she was Editor in Chief 

of SHOWstudio.com between 2001–08. 

She has curated numerous exhibitions 

and contributes to magazines including 

Fantastic Man and W. 

makia matsumura is an award-winning 

composer, pianist and silent film 

accompanist based in New York. She 

has accompanied screenings at the Lincoln 

Center, the Pordenone Silent Film 

Festival and the National Film Center 

at the National Museum of Modern Art, 

Tokyo. She has also composed orchestral 

music, and created new soundtracks 

for film and television. 

eugenia paulicelli is Professor of Italian, 

Comparative Literature and Women’s 

Studies at Queens College and at 

the Graduate Center, City University 

of New York where she co-founded and 

co-directs the Concentration in Fashion 

Studies. Among her publications 

are Fashion under Fascism. Beyond the 

Black Shirt (Berg, 2004) and The Fabric 

of Culture: Fashion, Identity, Globalization 

(co-editor, Routledge, 2009). She 

recently curated the exhibition “Fashion 

+ Film. The 1960s Revisited” and is 

now working on a book on fashion, film 

and emotions. 

David schwartz is Chief Curator at 

the Museum of the Moving Image, and 

editor-at-large of the Museum’s online 

publication, Moving Image Source. He 

has organized a wide range of retrospectives 

covering avant-garde cinema, 

classic Hollywood, contemporary independent 

film, animation, documentary, 

world cinema, and much more, and he 

is the regular moderator for the Museum’s 

Pinewood Dialogues, an ongoing 

series of conversations with key creative 

figures in film, television, and digital 

media. 

robert singer is a Professor of English 

at Kingsborough, CUNY and Deputy 

Executive Director/Professor of Liberal 

Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center. 

His areas of expertise include literary 

and film interrelations, interdisciplinary 

research in film history and aesthetics, 

and comparative studies. He co-edited 

Zola and Film (2005), The Brooklyn 

Film (2003), and he also co-authored 

the text, The History of Brooklyn’s 

Three Major Performing Arts Institutions 

(2003). He is the vice-president of 

AIZEN, and he has written and directed 

several independent short films. 

Donald sosin is an acclaimed composer 

and pianist who is celebrating 

40 years in the silent film music world 

this year. He and his wife Joanna 

Seaton have brought their unique 

blend of original vocal and instrumental 

music to major international film 

festivals including New York, Telluride, 

Shanghai, San Francisco and 

TriBeCa. They have been featured at 

the National Gallery, the Virginia Film 

Festival, and Italy’s film retrospectives 

Bologna and Pordenone. Sosin is currently 

the resident pianist for Museum 

of the Moving Image, the Film Society 

of Lincoln Center and BAM. 

jody sperling is a dancer, choreographer, 

and dance scholar based in 

New York City. She is the Founder/ 

Artistic Director of Time Lapse Dance, 

a company that presents visual-kinetic 

theater fusing dance, circus arts and 

mesmerizing fabric-and-light spectacles 

after the style of Loie Fuller (1862- 

1928). Sperling is an expert on and 

the foremost contemporary interpreter 

of Fuller’s work. She has lectured and 

performed internationally, and her 

writings have appeared in publications 

including The Village Voice, Dance 

Magazine and The International Encyclopedia 

of Dance. 

Drake stutesman is the Co-chair 

of The Women’s Film Preservation 

Fund and the editor of Framework: 

the Journal of Cinema and Media. She 

is writing the biography of the milliner/couturier, 

Mr. John, who created 

two fashion empires and designed 

hats for the films of Garbo, Dietrich, 

Monroe and others from the 1930s to 

the 1960s. She has lectured in costume 

design, cinema and literature 

at New York University and University 

of Stockholm. Her work has been 

published by, among others, the BFI, 

MoMA, Reaktion Books, Koenig Books, 

and Bookforum. 

michelle tolini Finamore lectures in 

fashion history at Mass College of Art 

and has taught courses on fashion, design, 

and film history at the Rhode Island 

School of Design. She has worked 

in a curatorial capacity at a number 

of major museums and as a fashion 

specialist at Sotheby’s. She recently coauthored 

the book Jewelry by Artists: In 

the Studio, 1940-2000 (Museum of Fine 

Arts, Boston, 2010), and has written 

numerous articles for publications including 

Fashion Theory and Architecture 

Boston. 

ela troyano is an award-winning 

Cuban-born filmmaker. Her half-hour 

ITVS short, Carmelita Tropicana: Your 

Kunst is Your Waffen, won the coveted 

Teddy Bear at the Berlin International 

Film Festival in 1994 as well as the 

Audience and Critics Award at the San 

Francisco International Lesbian and 

Gay Film Festival. Her debut feature 

film, Latin Boys Go To Hell, remains a 

cult hit on the Web and was recently 

shown on Showtime. Both of these 

films were screened theatrically in the 

U.S. and at festivals in Europe, Australia 

and Japan. 

marketa uhlirova is Senior Research 

Fellow at Central Saint Martins College, 

University of the Arts London, 

and Director/Curator of the Fashion in 

Film Festival where she oversees all of 

its programming. She is also the editor 

of Fashion in Film’s publications, 

including If Looks Could Kill: Cinema’s 

Images of Fashion, Crime and Violence 

(Koenig Books and FFF, 2008) and the 

forthcoming Birds of Paradise: Costume 

as Cinematic Spectacle (Koenig Books 

and FFF, 2011). She has contributed 

articles on fashion and art to publications 

including Art Monthly and Fashion 

Theory.

museum oF tHe moving imAge 

36-01 35 Avenue (at 37 Street) 

Astoria, NY 11106 

tickets: 

$10 adults, $7.50 senior citizens and 

college students, $5 children ages 3-18 

www.movingimage.us 

tHe grADuAte center oF tHe 

citY universitY oF neW YorK 

The Elebash Recital Hall and Skylight 

The Graduate Center of the 

City University of New York 

365 Fifth Avenue 

New York, NY 10016-4309 

tickets: Free 

www.gc.cuny.edu 

tHAnK You: Kenneth Anger, Mary 

Barone, Daniel Bish, Blanka Brixová, 

Maria Chiba, Frances Corner, 

Stephanie Farago, Barbara Gladstone, 

Keith Gray, Tom Gunning, Anke Hahn, 

Jan-Christopher Horak, Tomoko 

Kawamoto, Vincenza Kelly, Martin 

Koerber, Marleen Labijt, Simonetta 

Magnani, Ivan Mečl, Aniello Musella, 

Alex Nahlous,Gary Palmucci, Alicia 

Polmanteer, Rachael Rakes, Jane 

Rapley, Tommy Saleh, Aoibheann 

Sweeney, Todd Wiener, Daniel 

Feinberg, Trong Nguyen, Rosa Saz, 

MM Serra, Zoran Sinobad, Anne Smith, 

Juan A. Suárez, Werner Sudendorf, 

Akira Tochigi, Riccardo Viale, Josie L 

Walters-Johnston. 

verY speciAl tHAnKs: Caroline 

Evans, Dita Lamačová, Ruth Massey. 

tHe seAson is supporteD bY 

The British Council; Italian Cultural 

Institute of New York; Film London; 

Arts Council England; London College 

of Fashion. The season is part of 

the PMI2 Project funded by the UK 

Department for Business, Innovation 

and Skills (BIS) for the benefit of 

the United States and UK Higher 

Education Sectors. 

www.fashioninfilm.com

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