Fashion in Film Festival: Into the Garden of Chimerical Delights. Silent Film and Live Music. Barbican Cinema 1, Fri 30 May 2025
Workshop Programme
18 Apr — 29 May 2025
School of Art, Architecture and Design, LondonMet
Butterfly Dance (La Danse du papillon, extracts). France, 1897. Dir. Albert Kirchner (Léar), 40 sec. Courtesy of FPA Classics
Musarc, one of UK’s foremost experimental choral ensembles will conjure a live vocal and rhythmic soundscape for this mesmerising kaleidoscope of feminine imagery: women adorned or posing with floral arrangements, examining and manufacturing blooms, and magically conjuring or emerging from flowers. Others portray fairies and women in elaborate costumes personifying flowers and their pollinators, like butterflies and bees. Spanning various pre-World War I genres, including trick films and some of the first fashion newsreels and industrial process films, these shorts reflect 19th-century notions of femininity as synonymous with beauty, sensuality and enchantment. Yet, the various ornamental human-nature hybrids that populate many of these films also reveal potent undercurrents of ‘dangerous’ female exoticism, eroticism and power.
The programme features several new digital restorations from hand-coloured and stencil-coloured nitrate prints, including a sneak peek into some of the films included in Fantastic Flowers, the recent joint restoration project between Eye Filmmuseum, the Royal Film Archive of Belgium, and Filmarchiv Austria, to be premiered at this year’s Il Cinema Ritrovato festival in June.
The screening is followed by a panel discussion with Musarc, joined by the programme curators Marketa Uhlirova and Elif Rongen-Kaynakçi. Moderated by festival co-curator Dal Chodha.
With special thanks to EYE Filmmuseum Amsterdam, FPA Classics Paris, Les Archives françaises du film (CNC), Cinematek Brussels, Gaumont-Pathé Archives, Filmoteca de Catalunya and Filmoteca Española.
Programme designed, edited and with an essay by Joseph Kohlmaier
‘The films screened this evening are amongst the earliest to blur the boundaries between human and non-human forms with such imaginative flair. Women here are portrayed as delicate, almost otherworldly beings. They are entwined with the sensuous allure of flowers and ephemeral insects that, while dazzling, also suggest excess, transgression and sexual desire.’
— Marketa Uhlirova and Elif Rongen–Kaynakçi
Into the Garden of Chimerical Delights is part of Fashion in Film Festival’s 2025 season GROUNDED: Fashion’s Entanglements with Nature, a major UK-wide season exploring the relationship between fashion and nature through the lens of cinema.
Spanning the late nineteenth century to present day, the programme examines fashion’s role as simultaneously a barrier and a connecting tissue between humans and the natural world. With over 80 titles including rare screenings and UK premieres, GROUNDED presents diverse narratives addressing ecological and geopolitical concerns while exploring imaginative spaces of poetry, comedy, beauty, joy, horror and transgression.
Fashion in Film Festival is based at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London. GROUNDED is supported by the BFI, awarding funds from the National Lottery.
Composers and Performers
Andy Cowton (artistic director), Aranza Fernandes, Carol Mancke, Carolyn Roy (libretto), Derk Ringers, Fiona Thendean, Franziska Böhm, Hannah Archambault, Isabelle Pead, Joseph Kohlmaier (artistic director), Kalina Pulit (videography and documentation), Lizi Sanchez, Lola Wilson, Łukasz Kopeć, Mariam Bergloff, Max West, Michael Poole, Molly Astley, Natalie Savva, Rebecca Faulkner, Saori Miraku, Zeina Nasr
Venue and Ticket Information
Tickets £19.50 – Pay What You Can
Advance tickets are available from the Barbican Website.
Location
Barbican Cinema 1 is located within the main Barbican building on Level -2. Head to Level G and walk towards the Lakeside Terrace where you’ll find stairs and lifts to take you down to the venue floor.
Address
Barbican Centre
Silk Street, London
EC2Y 8DS