B) Read the text and check your answers

2) Costume and make-up

Like setting, costume can have specific functions in the total film, and the range of possibilities is huge.

Costumes may be quite stylized, calling attention to their purely graphic qualities. Throughout Ivan the Terrible costumes are carefully orchestrated with one another in their colours, their textures, and even their movements

Costumes can play important motivic and causal roles narratives. The film director Guido in Fellini’s 8 ½ persistently uses his dark glasses to shield himself from the world. To think of Dracula is to recall how his billowing cape enwraps his victims.

Any portion of a costume may become a prop: a pair of glasses (Potemkin), shoes (Strangers on a Train, The Wizard of Oz), jacket (Le Million). In Titanic, Rose’s diamond pendant is both a treasure which the explorers hope to find and her romantic link with Jack.

Film genres make extensive use of costume props – the frontier six-gun, the gangster’s automatic pistol, the dancer’s top hat and cane. Every major film comedian has turned a specific costume into a panoply of props: Chaplin’s cane and derby, Fields’s cigar and top hat.

Costume is often coordinated with setting. Since the filmmaker usually wants to emphasize the human figures, setting may provide a more or less neutral background, while costume helps pick out the characters. Colour design is particularly important here. The Freak Orlando costumes stand out boldly against the neutral gray background of an artificial lake. The director may instead choose to match the colour values of settings and costume more closely.

Ken Russel’s Women in Love affords a clear example of how costume and setting can coordinate and contribute to a film’s overall narrative progression. The opening scenes portray the characters’ shallow middle-class life by means of highly saturated primary and complementary colours in costume and setting. In the middle portions of the film, as the

characters discover love on a country estate, pale pastels predominate. The last section of Women in Love takes place around the Matterhorn, and the characters’ ardor has cooled. Now the colours have become even paler, dominated by pure black and white. By intergrating itself with setting, costume may function to reinforce the film’s narrative and thematic patterns.

All these points about costume apply equally to the actors’ make-up. Make-up was originally necessary because actors’ faces wouldn’t register well on early film stocks. And, up to the present, it has been used in various ways to enhance the appearance of actors on the screen. Nikolai Cherkasov didn’t look particularly like Eisenstein’s conception of Czar Ivan IV, so he wore a wig and false beard, nose, and eyebrow for Ivan the Terrible. Changing actors to look like historical personages has been one common function of make-up.

Make-up can aim at complete realism. When Laurence Olivier blackened his skin and hair to make a film of Othello, he strove to be as convincing a Moor as possible. Women often wear make-up that looks like the ordinary street cosmetics currently in fashion, and most men’s make-up is designed to look as if they were not wearing any. Yet it is equally possible to use make-up in nonrealistic ways. Bizarre make-up plays a major role in genres like horror and comedy. Just as they adopted distinctive costumes, famous comedians often created an amusing look using make-up.

In recent decades the craft of make-up has developed in response to the popularity of horror and science-fiction genres. Rubber and plasticene compounds create bumps, bugles, extra organs, and layers of artificial skin in such films as David Cronenberg’s The Fly and Tim Burton’s Edward Scissorhands. In such contexts, make-up, like costume, becomes important in creating character traits or motivating plot action.

c) Answer the questions:

1. What role do the colours of costumes play in a film?

2. How can costume become a prop?

3. Does costume coordinate with setting?

4. What role does make-up play in a film?

5. Does make-up differ from genre to genre?

6. What materials are used in make-up?