27/02/2010

Berlin 18/02/2010 – The final day of the Berlinale Talent Campus offered participants an extraordinary outing to a workshop at the Theaterkunst, the largest supplier of costumes for cinema in Germany. The company, founded in 1907, has dressed actors in a great many German and international films, from Metropolis to films by Wilder, Rohmer, Herzog... The list is long!

For the chosen young talents (including not only costume designers, but also novice producers), the workshop consisted of searching through over 250,000 uniforms (the full collection comprises over 10 million items) to try to find, with the help of texts and photographs, the costumes of the main characters in Tarantino’s latest film Inglourious Basterds [+see also:
trailer
film profile], which was shot mainly at Babelsberg studios.

While the participants were getting busy, members of the Theaterkunst guided us around the vast spaces filled with a staggering number of cassocks, armour, hats and accessories sorted and catalogued by era and nation, each of them representing an entire story. We could have spent hours and hours on these premises bombarding our excellent guides with questions.

Back from this visit, we got the chance to see the costumes recreated by the young talents, who justified their choices and attempted to analyse the aesthetic and functional purpose of every costume in the film. The discussion touched on the complex hierarchical symbols of the SS divisions; ways of enhancing aspects of a character through their clothes, whilst staying within the realm of philology; and how to handle blood, explosions, mud and other dirty situations. Fascinated by these explanations, we nonetheless couldn’t fail to notice on our right-hand side the well-worn costume donned by Klaus Kinski in the role of Francisco Manoel da Silva in Werner Herzog’s Cobra Verde!