VIII. The Enigma of
the Fashion Object
This programme celebrates the secret life of clothes, and the enigmatic qualities that emanate from the filmic treatment of their materiality. Including extraordinary footage by filmmakers and artists such as Georges Méliès, Hans Richter and Erwin Wurm, it is a collection of film techniques which set clothes’ empty shells in motion. Through various modes of displaying they allow clothes to assume new shapes or spin off into abstraction. Clothes and cloth are presented in rituals such as folding and unfolding, touching and feeling, soaking and inflating, transforming, flying or dancing. They are independent, at least to a degree, of the body parts that normally give them meaning. By obscuring their immediate function, films in this programme reveal clothes as estranged, dreamlike, playful and elusive—making them potent carriers of fascination, desire, emotion and sensual pleasure.
With an introduction by programme co-curator Marketa Uhlirova and artist-filmmaker Anna-Nicole Ziesche in conversation with fashion designer Hamish Morrow.
→ Read Marketa Uhlirova’s essay ‘The Enigma of the Fashion Object’ here.
→ Read Caroline Evans’ essay ‘Anna-Nicole Ziesche’s States of Mind and Dress’ here.
→ Read Marion von Hofacker’s essay ‘Richter’s Films and the Role of the Radical Artist 1927-1941’ here.
→ Read Lynda Nead’s essay ‘Georges Méliès’s Le déshabillage impossible and Ferdinand Zecca’s Monsieur et Madame sont pressées’ here.
→ Read Renate Stauss’ essay ‘Erwin Wurm’s 59 Positions’ here.
→ Read Sam Serafy’s essay ‘Warner’s Corset Advertisement’ here.
→ Read Petra Dominková and Vaclav Kofron’s essay ‘The Extinct Globe and the Found Glove’ here.
Warner’s Corset Advertisement
Tuesday 16 May, 20:30 | ICA Cinema | Duration: 3'Advertising was always important in the development of the Warner's business, and this film reflects years of experience gained from the company's extensive print advertising campaigns. It is a textbook example of product endorsement, employing methods that would later become standard in television commercials. The film ends with a striking stop-motion sequence showing an animated corset rising into frame, unrolling and fastening and unfastening itself.
Ghosts Before Breakfast (Vormittagsspuck)
Tuesday 16 May, 20:30 | ICA Cinema | Duration: 9'Hans Richter's Ghosts Before Breakfast challenges the realism of filmic image with abstract and graphic forms. Clothes here are some of the everyday objects that turn against their users between the eleventh and the twelfth hour. Arguably, it is most disturbing when the objects that decide to "follow their own law", as Richter himself put it, are clothes. When they desert their wearer, they not only physically bare parts the body - a nightmare itself - but they also take with them their representative purpose.
Going to Bed Under Difficulties (Le Déshabillage impossible)
Tuesday 16 May, 20:30 | ICA Cinema | Duration: 2'Grotesque situations based entirely around clothes' rebellion and subversion were championed in this Georges Méliès' eccentric mise-en-scènes that combined elements of theatrical performance with cinematic editing methods. In Going to Bed Under Difficulties clothes stubbornly refuse to leave their wearer. Their constant reappearance on the exasperated man’s body - a repetitive cycle that nevertheless does not repeat the clothes - and their subsequent removal and placement on hooks behind him is an amusing travesty, as well as an impressive showcase of commodities, in this case, a comprehensive gentleman’s wardrobe around 1900.
In a Hurry to Catch a Train (Monsieur et madame sont pressés)
Tuesday 16 May, 20:30 | ICA Cinema | Duration: 2'In Ferdinand Zecca's In a Hurry to Catch a Train, a direct variation on Méliès' earlier How He Missed His Train (1901), a man and his wife unsuccessfully try to get dressed. The comical innovation Zecca brings to an old gag consists primarily in the confusion and misplacement of gendered clothes. Importantly, as Méliès, he goes beyond animating clothing by virtue of filming it on a person's body. Instead, he uses the clothes' motion (appearances, disappearances, reappearances, movements around the set) to spectacular and awe-inspiring ends.
The Extinct World of Gloves (Zaniklý svět rukavic)
Tuesday 16 May, 20:30 | ICA Cinema | Duration: 16'The gloves in Jiří Bárta's 1982 animation become metaphors for people. In the film's six episodes told through "found" film footage, gloves assume roles as diverse as policeman, dictator, war victim, lascivious hedonist, adulterous mistress, her cavalier and her dissatisfied husband. The humour and poignancy of The Extinct World of Gloves derives not only from the well-observed typology of the glove characters Bárta presents, but also from the sophisticated body-language upon which their performances are chiefly based.
A Week in Film no. 12 (Týden ve filmu)
Tuesday 16 May, 20:30 | ICA CinemaA commercial advertising stockings shows women models/presenters pointing out to the camera the delicate texture of "silon", the Czechoslovak rival of nylon.
Tough Stockings
Tuesday 16 May, 20:30 | ICA Cinema | Duration: 2'A commercial advertising stockings shows women models/presenters pointing out to the camera the delicate texture of nylon, dressing their hands with them for the benefit of the camera. But far from being caressed as precious goods, stockings here are also submitted to some quite bizarre, even drastic acts: pressing into a walnut shell, draping over a cactus plant, scraping with a nail or taken for a walk stretched over high-heeled shoes. In order to demonstrate their resilience, they have to be put on trial.
States of Mind and Dress
Tuesday 16 May, 20:30 | ICA Cinema | Duration: 9'With background in fashion design, Ziesche uses a film to animate the "empty shells" of clothes in order to arrive at new shapes. Effectively designing through the motion picture, she attempts to push fashion design into the realm of the image, beyond the physical object. In Ziesche’s video work the garments are central to the expression of meanings. There is, perhaps, an element of haunting in some of her videos, particularly States of Mind and Dress. But what seems to a more pressing matter is the possibility of communicating emotions through the complexity of textures, folds and movements in clothes and textiles.
59 Positions (59 Stellungen)
Tuesday 16 May, 20:30 | ICA Cinema | Duration: 20'In the 59 struggles for a position in Erwin Wurm's 1992 video piece 59 Positions, the artist's body and clothes are displayed in the act of deforming each other. As Wurm's improbable, misshapen sartorial creations pose in silence for the camera, they appear at once substantial yet perplexing, solemn yet pathetically clumsy.
Chapels: Bernhard Willhelm
Tuesday 16 May, 20:30 | ICA Cinema The processes of designing clothes (and oneself) through film are evoked in Diane Pernet’s experimental mini-documentary series Chapels, and most obviously in an episode about the Belgian fashion designer Bernhard Willhelm (2002). Pernet too has background in fashion design and thus a most sympathetic accomplice to Willhelm; her off-the-wall filmmaking mirrors his approach to fashion. Together they concoct a fable where the dressmaker's studio collides with his kitchen and where copious amounts of cloth are cut, celebrated and finally made into food.
One and One Now Make Two While Before It Only Made One (Un et un a present ca fait deux avant ca faisait qu’un)
Tuesday 16 May, 20:30 | ICA Cinema | Duration: 5'Belgium, 2000. Dir. Marie France and Patricia Martin.
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