Download the full program as PDF - Fashion Film Festival

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.