Wearing Time: Returns, Recalls, Renewals

The four-day festival program, co-curated by Tom Gunning and Marketa Uhlirova, explores how film and fashion together evoke and reflect on the past, and its connections with the present, and future.

The diverse historical and contemporary films include commercial cinema features, documentaries, artists’ films, newsreel items, and fashion films. The festival asks what concrete manifestations of time fashion and clothing enable: What kind of chronologies and histories? Origins and memories? Echoes and shadows? Projections, visions, or premonitions?

Few things indicate the past as immediately as styles of dress. Period films are often referred to as “costume dramas” for this reason. As well as designating the past, clothing also marks the periods and stages of individual lives. Narratives of aging and rejuvenation depend on convincing changes in fashions, hair, and make-up. The opening of an old closet arouses nostalgia and feelings of loss for the body that inhabited the now-empty clothes. There is something uncanny about rediscovering an old familiar dress and indeed, it can awaken ghosts and revenants that return to haunt the living.

Clothes can also signal different times of day and rituals that accompany these. As a major source of visual spectacle, Hollywood films in the studio era often announced the number of costume changes a leading lady would go through. Not only can dress become a vehicle with which to travel through time, is can also measure time; it allows us to wear time, even as time wears us out.

From the earliest trick films to the dance numbers of contemporary Bollywood films, cinema can magically make clothing transform, appear, and disappear – but also, importantly, re-appear. Fashion in film has always been an important sign-posting device, deployed in multiple ways: to guide the viewer through time; to confuse, deceive, and disorient; or even to dress the wounds of time.

 

ABOUT THE CURATORS AND CONTRIBUTORS

Tom Gunning is Edwin A. and Betty L. Bergman Distinguished Service Professor of Art History, Cinema and Media Studies, and the College Classics at University of Chicago. He has written extensively on problems of early and silent film, American avant-garde cinema and Hollywood film.

Marketa Uhlirova is Director of Fashion in Film, a research and exhibitions project based at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London.

Kate Sinclair is Research and Production Assistant at Fashion in Film and a freelance stylist with past clients including Vanity Fair and The Sunday Times Style.

Anupama Kapse is Assistant Professor of Film Studies at Queens College, CUNY. Her
specializations include silent cinema, comparative historiography, theories of
film, melodrama, spectatorship and star studies.

 

VENUE AND BOOKING INFORMATION

Fashion Project

Bal Harbour Shops

9700 Collins Ave., Bal Harbour, FL

www.fashionprojectbhs.com

786.245.2200

info@fashionprojectbhs.com

For press and any other information about the festival please contact Kate Sinclair -  k.sinclair@csm.arts.ac.uk

 

CREDITS & THANK YOU

The festival is presented in collaboration with Miami International Film Festival, Lowe Art Museum, and Lynn and Louis Wolfson II Florida Moving Image Archives. The screening room is designed by Tui Pranich and Tui Lifestyle.

Organised by Kate Sinclair at Fashion in Film, and Cathy Leff and Alessandra Grignaschi at Fashion Project, the festival is generously sponsored by Bal Harbour Shops and Whitman Family Development. With grateful thanks to all individuals and organizations that made this program possible: Agnès Bertola at Gaumont Pathé archives; Zoran Sinobad at the Library of Congress; Cheryl Stephenson at Bal Harbour Shops; Judith Clark, James Hennessy, Samantha Traeger, Luisa Jimenez, Alejandra Zamparelli, and Andrea Gollin at Fashion Project; Tui Pranich and Kathleen Taylor of Tui Lifestyle; Rene Ramos at Lynn and Louis Wolfson II Florida Moving Image Archives; Jill Deupi and Susanne Haase at Lowe Art Museum; Jaie Laplante and Sarah Roffman at Miami International Film Festival; Michael Plunkett and Margaret Zwilling at Metro Pictures; Annette W at Studio Michelle Handelman; Tiffany Greenwood at Swank Motion Pictures; Ondřej Beck at Krátký Film Praha; Ben Crossley-Marra at Janus Films; Nathan Faustyn at Strand Releasing; Dave Franklin at Rialto Pictures; John Klacsmann at Anthology Film Archives; Lynn Wu at Public Television Service; Maria Bergenman at SVT; John McKnight at BFI; and Charlie Smith at Charlie Smith Design.

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