Category: Landscape

Film, Folk Horror, Landscape, Literature, Psychogeography, Television

Walking “A Warning To The Curious” (M.R. James).

A few years back, whilst on holiday in Norfolk, I began exploring some of locations used for the BBC’s famous M.R. James adaptations, specifically for Lawrence Gordon Clark’s adaptation of A Warning To The Curious (1972).  Though I had been far from thorough in this escapade (I completely missed the film’s most iconic structure in the church at Happisburgh), on finding myself in Suffolk, I … Continue reading Walking “A Warning To The Curious” (M.R. James).

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Art, Film, Landscape, Psychogeography

Journey Within Practice – Richard Long and Chris Marker.

The work of Richard Long is so indebted to the act of walking into a landscape that it seems a rather obvious aspect to point out.  While many of his transient works, especially of the sculptural variety left in various wildernesses, required the act of the artist to walk, it is often the photographic capture of the finished event in question that, in the majority, … Continue reading Journey Within Practice – Richard Long and Chris Marker.

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Film, Folk Horror, Landscape, Short Film

Trailer – Salthouse Marshes.

Above is the trailer for my last film of the year, Salthouse Marshes.  Continuing on from last year’s theme in a trend I hope to continue with on a yearly basis, the film is a short, landscape obsessed ghost story.  With the BBC seeming reluctant to bother with a ghost story for Christmas any more, it feels necessary to in some way plug the gap … Continue reading Trailer – Salthouse Marshes.

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Art, Folk Horror, Landscape, Television

Uncanny Portals And Standing Stones (Children Of The Stones, The Owl Service and Barbara Hepworth)- Part 2.

Part 1. Portals, Dimensions and Time. For Barbara Hepworth the process actually began in Yorkshire, and Cornwall is the second and last English phase of a basic topographical emotion which is no longer a matter of geography but one of the mind and creation. Neither is it any longer a matter of feeling for landscape in the narrow sense but one of the relation of … Continue reading Uncanny Portals And Standing Stones (Children Of The Stones, The Owl Service and Barbara Hepworth)- Part 2.

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Film, Landscape, Literature

Emerson’s Nature and Sleep Furiously (2008) – Gideon Koppel.

Nature is always present or at the very least contrasted against something in Gideon Koppel’s nostalgia portrait, Sleep Furiously (2008).  In spite of the film being a very clear ethnographic postcard from the director’s past, having lived previously in the Welsh town of Trefeurig, it manages to underline its gentle portraiture with a sense of pervading nature and landscape; where even the most concrete of … Continue reading Emerson’s Nature and Sleep Furiously (2008) – Gideon Koppel.

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Film, Folk Horror, Landscape

Isolation And Madness In Cul-De-Sac (1966) – Roman Polanski.

Few films are as explicit in their depiction of character relationships that are at the mercy of the fluctuating landscape than Roman Polanski’s 1966 film, Cul-De-Sac.  Polanski had been to both ends of the environmental spectrum within his previous two films – the open waters of Knife In The Water (1962) and the cramped, claustrophobic London of Repulsion (1965) – and Cul-De-Sac sees him returning … Continue reading Isolation And Madness In Cul-De-Sac (1966) – Roman Polanski.

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Art, Folk Horror, Landscape, Television

Uncanny Portals And Standing Stones (Children Of The Stones and Barbara Hepworth)- Part 1.

Introduction. The building of form within the space of landscape has become a common occurrence in sculpture for a number of years now.  The moving of artistic forms out-of-doors provides so many new potential contexts that it seems almost puerile to suggest so.  One aspect of particular interest is when these new forms of Earthologistic sculpture come into contact, perhaps even competition, with older forms of … Continue reading Uncanny Portals And Standing Stones (Children Of The Stones and Barbara Hepworth)- Part 1.

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Landscape, Literature, Psychogeography, Short Film

Short Film – An Impossible Dérive.

An Impossible Dérive is a film that channels a number of my own current interests.  Though predominantly about the changing landscape and topography of the city centre of Liverpool, it is also about using psychogeography and the writing of John Wyndham to assess and comment upon the fallout of such change within the landscape.  The title, An Impossible Dérive, refers to two different aspects of … Continue reading Short Film – An Impossible Dérive.

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Art, Landscape, Literature, Psychogeography, Short Film

Short Film – Holloway (Robert Macfarlane)

It feels odd to finally be able to say that Holloway is finished.  This oddness derives not just from the fact that it has been the longest planned film that I’ve produced so far (starting all the way back from Robert Macfarlane’s first email to me in February 2014) but because the subject of the film itself is never-ending.  The holloways of Dorset do not … Continue reading Short Film – Holloway (Robert Macfarlane)

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Film, Landscape

Fugitive in the Landscape

In the British tradition of the Chase & Pursuit drama, there are several reoccurring themes. The idea of a lone individual being chased through different landscapes by a group was popularised in Britain by the Second World War but was around far before then. The basic set-up has an individual wanted for some crime or misdemeanour (sometimes falsely). They are pursued by various parties, from the law … Continue reading Fugitive in the Landscape

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