Download the full program as PDF - Fashion Film Festival

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.