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Costume design Professor Deborah Landis fashions workshop from history and student experiences while teaching in Cuba

Deborah Landis, founding director of UCLA’s Copley Center for the Study of Costume Design, has worked on numerous films including “Animal House,” “Blues Brothers” and Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” video. (courtesy of Natasha Rubin)

By Elisa Mosler

Jan. 23, 2011 11:34 p.m.

Last May, when costume design Professor Deborah Landis was invited to conduct a workshop at a film school in Cuba, she had no idea what to expect. She certainly didn’t think that she would be designing costumes for 18th century merchants, pirates and the new American Republic, French Royal, French Republican and British navies.

The founding director of UCLA’s Copley Center for the Study of Costume Design, Landis is an experienced costume designer who has worked in Hollywood and Europe for many decades. Her work includes “Animal House,” “Blues Brothers” and Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” video.

Landis was invited to Cuba by Margarita Jusid, an Argentine art director and Landis’ friend, to teach a workshop at Havana’s Escuela Internacional de Cine y Television. In November, Landis taught a weeklong workshop on costume design to 18 students from all over Latin America. The workshop was based on Alejo Carpentier’s “Explosion in a Cathedral,” a Cuban historical novel about the impact of the French Revolution on the Caribbean. Jusid had chosen to work with the well-known novel, knowing it is a literary classic in Latin America.

“The novel is fantastic, incredible. This is the Thomas Hardy of Cuba; he is known throughout the Spanish-speaking world. The novel was a revelation to me,” Landis said. “I taught as if this book were a screenplay.”

Before conducting the workshop, Landis had to become familiar with all aspects of 18th century Caribbean life, slave culture and plantation life, as well as some features of the French Revolution.

Landis got her UCLA students to help her with her research, creating a 500-page PowerPoint presentation that she later left to the Cuban film school as a donation.

Landis’ students had backgrounds in directing the art in movies, so they were used to focusing on the characters’ surroundings in a film, not the actual characters themselves. Nevertheless, they adapted quickly.

“The fact that they’re art directors means that they had a good grasp of color, silhouette and perspective. They were not novices at all in terms of how to design costumes,” Landis said.

As there was neither Internet nor access to research or historical documents at the school, Landis could not expect her students to undertake their own extra research for the project. After working through her research with them, Landis decided to give her students a more personalized task instead: to pick two of the three lead characters from the novel and to design them the way they would exist as modern people from the students’ own hometowns.

“I thought we’d have the most successful outcome working with just the students’ own experience and the beautiful descriptions in the novel,” Landis said. “It was very, very successful. Because they knew the people, they were able to design them. That is really the goal for the costume designer; we have to know the people before we design them, whether it’s a modern or period movie.”

This character-based approach shapes Landis’ approach to costume design. Before tackling any new project, Landis stresses the importance of talking about and getting to know the characters for whom she will design. Otherwise, she said, there is no way to remain authentic and accurate to them.

“It’s really about getting down to the characters in the story,” Landis said. “You don’t go to the movies to see the rooms; you go to see the people. It makes you invested in the outcome of the story. The people will always be the foreground, at the center of the frame.”

Landis’ interest in costume design first arose, not so much from a passion for fashion, but from a fascination with history and literature. She tutored history throughout school and studied history in college before switching to theater.

“I really loved history ““ for me, all those stories were really alive. These people were walking around in my head,” Landis said. “Costume people are really just about the fantasy. It’s about the story.”

Aside from working as a full-time professor at UCLA’s School of Theater, Film and Television, Landis is currently working on the costume design for “Burke & Hare,” an English comedy starring Simon Pegg, scheduled for release in the U.S. next fall. She also plans to publish her second book, titled “Design Design: The Art of Motion Picture Costume Illustration,” this spring. The dissertation she is working on now, “Deconstructing Glamour,” will be published next year.

In February, the School of Theater, Film and Television will organize a lunchtime screening of Landis’ experiences in Cuba. The program will include footage of the workshop, as all of Landis’ classes were filmed.

“I’m just one of those lucky people who started dressing up when they were little and didn’t stop,” Landis said.

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Elisa Mosler
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