Introduced by the festival’s co-curator Tom Gunning. Total running time c. 75 min.
Underground filmmaker Jack Smith once described film stars as ‘flaming creatures’. Being enveloped by light, female stars especially owe much of their aura to the costuming and artifice that go into constructing their image. This programme brings together female stars from cinema’s past – re-imagined, and even re-assembled – from a later perspective that abstracts them from a narrative context, and allows us to see them precisely as incandescent images of desire clothed in costumes of fantasy and role play.