Costume design for film
Charlotte Flemming's first film credit was for Quartett zu fünft (1949), with the director Gerhard Lamprecht. Over the next forty years she would design for over 130 films, distinguishing her as "the busiest costume designer in German film", according to Deutsche Kinemathek. [2]
In 1971, Flemming contributed costumes to Trotta , a period film set in Vienna in the aftermath of the First World War. It was nominated for the Palme d'Or at Cannes and won Germany's Goldene Lola as well as multiple awards for directing and acting. The lead actress Rosemarie Fendal remembered her costume fittings with Flemming, when the design could swiftly "change the dress and me... I have disappeared. The image reflected in the mirror is the part I will play". [1]
Flemming's best known designs among English-speaking audiences were for Bob Fosse's musical Cabaret (1972). Liza Minelli played the lead character of Sally Bowles, an American cabaret singer surviving in Weimar Republic-era Berlin. The costumes Flemming designed for Minelli are memorable for their use of boyish tailoring, black sequins, and references to 1920s trends like Egyptomania. "Charlotte Fleming's costumes - which included bowler hats, stockings and teeny halter-neck dresses" have become "synonymous with the character", according to Tatler. [3] Recent commentators have criticized the use of 1920s fashions for a film set in the 1930s, while recognising that they effectively "emphasize the trashy diva / naive waif sensibilities of Minelli’s Bowles". [4] Award-winning costume designer Sandy Powell has cited the anachronisms of Cabaret as highly influential, explaining that a shot of Sally's green nail varnish was "not very 1930s at all, but that's what I love about it. I love seeing the 1970s in the 1930s and vice versa". [5]
A couple of years later, Flemming returned to the interwar cabarets of Berlin for The Serpent's Egg (1977) directed by Ingmar Bergman. The main character Manuela has been described as having "a hint of Sally Bowles about her". [6] Bergman credited Flemming with having "tenacity and obsession", qualities that he considered necessary to survival in filmmaking, and would employ her again to design costumes for From the Life of the Marionettes (1980). [1]
Costume historian Deborah Nadoolman Landis noted that Flemming's costume design drawings are "hard-edged", and are distinctive for including scenery, props and interiors behind the drawing of the actor in costume. These contextual details are usually omitted in costume design drawings, in favour of centring a figure drawing of a character against a plan background. [1] Flemming's drawings thus offered a "point of departure and discussion" with directors, according to producer Wolf Schwarz. [1]
Flemming's archive of over 1500 costume designs and 100s of photographs is held in the collection of the Deutsche Kinemathek—Museum für Film und Fernsehen. [2]