Inside the Archive #57: Costume design on screen and insights from a nitrate collection

If your bleak midwinter could use some post‑festive cheer, make your way to BFI Southbank, where a dazzling season of films invites you to bask in some of the swishest sartorial style ever to cut a dash across the silver screen.

Programmed in collaboration with the Film Costumes in Action team (Melanie Bell, Sarah Street and Alice Sage), ‘And the Award for Best Costume Design Goes to…’ is an expertly curated selection of twelve films that highlight the range of skills and practices involved in the design and fabrication of film costumes. The result aims to celebrate the ways that painstakingly created costumes set the scene just as much as locations and scenery, while also revealing character visually, more immediately than action and dialogue can.

To prepare for this season, we revisited the records of the chosen films in our Collections Information Database (CID) to refine our cataloguing of the costume department credits. The resulting details could then be featured in the season’s special costume-focused programme notes.

This process exposed some surprising differences in the tweaks and additions that were required. On one hand, no changes were needed for All About Eve (1950), which, typical for its time, has just two onscreen costume credits plus three verified ‘uncredited’ wardrobe staff. On the other hand, we added around forty new credits for Black Panther (2018), covering roles such as buyers, concept artists, speciality costumers, and textile artists across three sizeable units. Indeed, the season’s two most recent films, Black Panther and The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014), for which we added around twenty‑five credits (including dyers, cutters, and fabric painters), ended up so large that we thought it wise to add a note to the records explaining the reason behind their unusually in-depth costume sections.

Mere quantity was a doddle compared to other issues that arose. The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964) needed no credits added, but we did see fit to revise the CID translation of the original French credits. The CID wording “Gowns by” harked back to the glamorous days of MGM musicals that inspired Jacques Demy’s film, but it felt extravagant when, in fact, our heroine is often wearing a raincoat, and the unvarnished translation would be “C. Deneuve Is Dressed by.” We amended it to land on the side of the literal rather than the poetic.

Translation was an issue too with The Leopard (1963), where our checking uncovered a CID misunderstanding of probable longstanding. The Italian onscreen credit ‘Costumi della Ditta SAFAS’ should be rendered as ‘Costumes Created by SAFAS’ (referring to the noted fashion house). A file did exist for the firm SAFAS, but we noticed that there was also a file for a person named Ditta Safas. Evidently, a cataloguer of yore had taken Ditta (meaning company, or fashion house) as someone’s first name, and so there lurked our apocryphal costume designer with a paltry credit or two to her name, waiting for the day we would swoop in to expunge the error and spare CID further blushes.

We found that In the Mood for Love (2000) features no costume credit per se, but that the credits encompass a throwback to the days when Production Design (nowadays usually referring to the look of the sets) meant the overseeing of both the art direction and the costumes. A delve into the Sight and Sound oral history for the film’s 25th anniversary found the production designer, William Chang Suk-ping, discussing his work on the costumes and giving expert insights into the changing of Chinese ‘qipao’ fashion from the 1920s to the 1960s. We added a note to the record, making this inference explicit.

The plot thickened most with the tangled costume credit for Gate of Hell (1953), which won the 1954 Oscar for best (colour) costumes, and yet respectable sources differ over who did the designing. The official Oscar winner, Sanzo Wada, was a noted colour consultant (and designer), renowned for publishing a six-volume Dictionary of Colour Combinations. Yet Shima Yoshizane (Kenzo Mizoguchi’s frequent costume collaborator) is cited elsewhere as the likely costume designer in the sense we think of the job today, while other sources would suggest it was a collaboration. Unable to feel we had entirely cracked the case, we thought it best to lay out the evidence in a note on our record and let the reader decide.

Modest additions or rewordings were made for Ran (1985), Moon (2008), Velvet Goldmine (1998) and My Beautiful Laundrette (1985). The quirkiest correction was perhaps for The Piano (1992), where our sixteen costume credits needed very little attention, but it was amusing to find a credit for ‘Cobbler/Shoe Maintenance’ catalogued wide of the mark in the database’s field for Construction Manager. Since that category seemed rather large shoes for it to fill, we duly ushered this cobbler safely into the costume section, where it belongs. For a jollier January, come for the costumes, digest the drama and be sure to stay (naturally) for the credits.

– Patrick Fahy, Documentation Team Leader

Hands on contact with newly gifted film materials feels like a privilege, particularly when they are from the earliest years of cinema. I have recently been working on a newly arrived private donation to BFI National Archive containing over 30 reels of nitrate cellulose prints; a collection of beautiful early silent films from the first half of the 1910s.

These highly flammable nitrate film items are transported to the archive in specialist containers. However, inside they are often found in a range of incongruous packaging, including plastic bags, shoe boxes or old biscuit tins. My personal favourite is a small toy suitcase. Ideally, though, they come in film cans – often rusty – which bear useful information. While they can sometimes provide false leads, the information on film containers often gives invaluable clues about the provenance and storage history of the contents, as well as helping to identify what lives inside.

Some cans are tinted, stencilled or hand-painted, with many proving to be unique, and, very excitingly, arriving to the archive as complete or near-complete. What makes this collection distinctive is that almost all the containers are originals manufactured by film companies active in the silent era. They are also in remarkable condition, with one even holding the film purchase receipt inside.

Within the collection are beautiful gold-painted cans by Pathé, surely the sign of a premium product by one of the companies dominating the market at the time. Gaumont’s square tins are plain but distinctive and are embossed with their London offices’ address. There are larger branded tins for the American First National Pictures. Barker Films, later known as Ealing Studios, opted for cardboard boxes, which were cheaper to produce and are in remarkable condition, making a stand among all the metal ones.

An ingenious, albeit also less fireproof, storage system came in the form of wooden boxes with sliding lids, capable of holding two spools of film each. I had not come across these before, and it would be interesting to find out if their use was widespread or a homemade design.

It is estimated that between 75 and 80% of silent-era film heritage has been lost through destruction, recycling, poor handling and neglect. A dizzying number by all accounts, and even that fails to highlight that 20 to 25% of surviving nitrate film often arrives in archives incomplete or in fragmented form. The beginnings and ends of theatrically screened prints are often the most damaged parts of a film reel, bearing the brunt of poor handling, projection mishaps and transport. This is especially the case for one-reelers such as newsreels or magazines. This damage means they can be missing vital information to help us identify and date their production.

Looking at this collection, not only do they all have titles, but they are at times still joined to a small section of original clear or tinted stock. The same applies for the end titles and company logos. Surprisingly, the parts of the film that are normally most vulnerable to damage are fully intact in this collection. One reel even betrays the manufacturing process of film tinting, displaying a splatter of red dye on the original blank leader. These small details matter to film archivists because they can tell us a lot about a print’s material history and how the different parts that wrap the image and sound have protective, informative, and operational functions.

Interestingly, out of the 30-plus prints, almost all are made of cellulose nitrate, except for one reel of non-flammable safety film. The material’s significant shrinkage and distinctive camphor smell are characteristic of cellulose diacetate, one of the earliest safety film bases, introduced in 1909. This film features the RMS Lusitania, the British ocean liner sunk by a German torpedo in 1915. Separately, a different film was rescued from that same British ocean liner and has found its way into the BFI National Archive. Work on this extraordinary collection has only just begun but it has already offered rare insight into how films were made and presented in cinema’s foundational years.

– Sonia Genaitay, Curatorial Archivist

And the Award for Best Costume Design Goes to… season plays at BFI Southbank in January.

The Inside the Archive blog is supported by the BFI Screen Heritage Fund, awarding National Lottery funding.