costume can have specific functions in the total film, and the range of possibilities is huge. Erich von Stroheim, for instance, was as passionately committed to authenticity of dress as of setting, and he was said to have created underwear that would instill the proper mood in his actors even though it was never to be seen in the film. In Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation, a poignant moment occurs when the Little Sister decorates her dress with “ermine” made of cotton dotted spots of soot. The costume displays the poverty of the defeated Southerners at the end of the Civil War.
In other films, 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 colors, their textures, and even their movements. One shot of Ivan and his adversary gives their robes a plastic sweep and dynamism. In Freak Orlando, Ulrike Ottinger (herself a costume designer) boldly uses costumes to display the spectrum’s primary colors in maximum intensity.