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Fashion In Film Festival

Fashion in Film Festival will premiere in London in May 2006 with its very first edition titled Between Stigma and Enigma, a retrospective showcase of film and video work on fashion. It is screened at three unique London venues: Cine lumiere (French Institute), the Horse Hospital and the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA). Featuring a mix of early and classic cinema, contemporary art, as well as documentary, instruction and propaganda film, it will send viewers on blissfully satisfying and fickle journeys peppered with fine clothes and foxy attitudes. Fashion in Film Festival is delighted to host a special screening of the rarely seen cult film Qui etes-vous, Polly Maggoo? and to welcome its director William Klein as the Festivals 2006 Guest of Honour. Film screenings will be followed by lectures, informal talks and Q&A sessions with filmmakers, artists, critics and fashion designers including Anna-Nicole Ziesche, Jean-Francois Carly, Penny Martin and Shelley Fox. Films will also be accompanied by music especially composed for the occasion, including an exclusive collaboration with The WOLFMEN (Marco Pirroni and Chris Constantinou) on soundtracks for two silent films that form part of the Shoes, Eroticism and Fetish programme. Tickets and venue information: Cine lumiere, French Institute 17 Queensberry Place LONDON SW7 2DT www.institut-francais.org.uk box office: 0207 073 1350 The Horse Hospital Colonnade Bloomsbury London WC1N 1HX www.thehorsehospital.com box office: 0207 833 3644 Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) The Mall London SW1Y 5AH www.ica.org.uk box office: 0207 930 3647 Ticket prices Full Price 7 Concessions 5UKP For the films we're showing please goto Fashion in Film Festival website or click here :

Saturday 20/05 The Horse Hospital 8pm: Wardrobe Emergencies: Fashion and the WWII Conflict Includes the following: Fashion for Shelter (Mode pour abris). Pathé Gaumont Archives, France 1939. Fashion Inspired by the War (La mode inspirée de la guerre). Pathe Gaumont Archives, France 1939. Berlin Fashion School. UFA. Germany 1940. Tin Hats for All. Pathe News. GB 1941. Germ Masks for the Crowds. Pathe News. GB 1941. Safety Styles, U.S. News Review. USA 1942. Stockings. Pathe News. GB 1941. Day-to-Day Frock. Pathe News. GB 1943. Evening and Day Frock. Pathe News. GB 1943. How To Make Do and Mend. Warwork news. GB 1943. Rationing in Britain. Ministry of Information. GB 1944. Clothes distribution to children in Athens, Greece. Ministry of Information. GB 1945. Shoes distribution to Greek Refugees in the Middle East. GB 1944. Clothes and the Man. RAF/Analysis Films. GB 1941. Fashion show of recycled garments. Deutsche Wochenschau. Germany 1944. Clothing for War and Peace. War Pictorial News. GB 1945. Fashion show for WAAF women. GEN Special. GB 1945. Stockholm: a fashion show in miniature, Welt in Film. Germany 1945. Lady with a Hat (En Dame med hatt), dir. Elsa Kvamme. Norway 1999. Running time: approx 68 mins. Focusing on European and American newsreels, instruction and documentary films made in the Second World War (19391945), the first part of this programme looks at the rhetorical shift that occurred in fashion during this time of widespread conflict. Confronted with the War, fashion responded by entering into a dialogue with politics. Suspending its autonomy, it rearticulated not only its own logic and purpose but also those of society and the world around. (Programmed in collaboration with Imperial War Museum, London). War footage is followed by the Norwegian film director Elsa Kvamme presenting her 1999 documentary Lady with a Hat. The film is a staggering journey through the life and career of the Jewish hat maker May Aubert, with a special focus on the Second World War period. During this time the resourceful Aubert applied her millinery skills to the subversive use of smuggling 100, 000 Norwegian Kroner from Sweden to Canada. Sunday 21/05 The Horse Hospital 5pm: Assuming a Pose Four Beautiful Pairs, dir. A.E. Weed for American Mutoscope and Biograph. USA 1904. (Archival film from the collections of the Library of Congress.) Smooth with the Rough. Pathe News. GB 1944. School for Mannequins. Pathe News. GB 1944. I Feel, dir. Jean-Francois Carly / Showstudio. Belgium, UK 2005 . How Mannequins Are Made (Come si fabbricano i manichini), Giornale Luce. Italy 1941. Shelley Fox 14, dir. Shelley Fox in collaboration with the Showstudio. UK 2002. It’s Like Being (C’est comme etre), dir. Marie France and Patricia Martin. Belgium 2003. Photo Shooting, dir. Jen Wu. UK 2001. Volume, dir. Jean-Pierre Khazem. France 2000. Music composed by Richard A. Janssen. Running time: approx 40 mins. Screening will be followed by fashion photographer JeanFrancois Carly and fashion designer Shelly Fox in conversation with Penny Martin, Editor-in-Chief of Showstudio. At the heart of this programme is cinema’s preoccupation with moments where reality meets fiction. For this fashion’s acts of posing, dressing up, staging and masking offer ideal material. In a number of languages the word pose connotes not only a position or posture of the body but also artificiality and falsity in ones conduct, in other words, pretence. By imitating cultural norms, models who pose become oddly reassuring fabrications. The collective observer moulds them as if they were inanimate objects. Similarly in this programme, a rich source of fascination is the confusion between the artificial body of a shop dummy, and the real one of a poser who is shown in the moving image as momentarily immobilised and thus conspicuously exposed. Saturday 27/05 The Horse Hospital 3pm: Loving the Alien Paris is Burning, dir. Jennie Livingston. USA 1990. Liquid Sky, dir. Slava Tsukerman. USA 1982. Running time: 183 mins. 7:10pm: The Wild, Wild World of Jayne Mansfield, dir. Charles W.Broun Jr. & Joel Holt. USA 1968. True Stories, dir. David Byrne. USA 1986. Running time: 189 mins. Movies about alien beings from other worlds are generally seen as good box office. This programme, in complete reversal, looks at the work of four diverse directors who dared to turn the camera on the sub-species of fashion aliens who exist within our society. Covering everything from high glamour to lowlife, and cult to couture, each film brilliantly integrates into its storyline a completely outlandish fashion strand of its day, whilst also clearly illustrating how fashion in its extreme sits uncomfortably in the real world. (Loving the Alien is guest-curated by Roger K. Burton.)

Earlier Event: 27 April
YOU KILLED THE UNDERGROUND