I had, for some time, been wanting to dive into the city of Paris but had, for unconscious reasons, always put it off. I could never figure out truly why the thought of this city had both a powerful draw and a hand pushing on my chest to keep my distance but, after finally visiting this summer, I knew the reason why. It was because … Continue reading Wanders: Paris & Cinema
Even before the recent events that occurred in Charlottesville, a certain scene from Michael Haneke’s 2000 film, Code Unknown (Code Inconnu), had been repeatedly playing on a loop in my mind’s eye. I quietly admitted to myself recently that the scene in question is without a doubt the most telling and poignant dramatic escalation I have seen in twenty-first-century cinema and it seems to show … Continue reading Politics of Sequence in Code Unknown (2000, Michael Haneke)
Above is the trailer for my only narrative film this year, Green Teeth. There has been a huge gap in my film projects recently, caused by writing a second book and having a huge chunk of time taken up with a project that fell through late last year. Green Teeth as a project came along quite by chance when adventuring on several walks with the … Continue reading Trailer – Green Teeth
I cannot remember when exactly I first read Alan Garner’s The Owl Service (1967). Like its inspiration, The Mabinogion, or the Stone of Gronw that sits at the centre of its mystery, it seems to have always been there. It’s an unusual feeling because the novel is not particularly old by standards of literature – it turns fifty on the 21st of August – and yet it feels old. It may … Continue reading Owls and Flowers: Alan Garner’s The Owl Service At 50
So much has been written about W.G. Sebald and the use of photographs in his novels that it seems almost fruitless to write further around the subject. With it being one of the defining features of his work, and with a rapidly increasing library of volumes and handbooks exploring the writer’s legacy, I struggled to initially frame the subject I want to write about here: … Continue reading Chasing The Ghost – Excavating Sebald’s Portraits
I have never seen Barry Flanagan’s short video piece, Hole In the Sea (1969), yet I’m not quite sure if I ever quite want to. The short piece, filmed by Flanagan with Gerry Schum in Holland for a Land Art TV exhibition, currently exists in colour and in black & white, contained variously in the Pompidou archive in Paris and the Stedelick Museum in Amsterdam. … Continue reading Responses: Hole In The Sea (1969, 1970), Barry Flanagan
This paper was delivered at the Resonant Edge Hauntology Symposium on the 15/06/2017. Full interviews with Grant Gee and James Leyland Kirby will be published later this summer. My talk today is about two specific forms: the writing of W.G. Sebald and the musical work of The Caretaker. My aim is to show the links between the two, with reference to ideas of Hauntology but … Continue reading Memory and Disintegration in the work of W.G. Sebald and The Caretaker
As World War Two loomed, Paul Nash’s obsessions leaned towards more esoteric forms. The landscape became a fantastical entity, the realm of old magic that had already been of much interest to the artist, but one that gradually heightened as reality darkened around him once more. He moved more to photography as a medium in itself, as well as to take reference material for his … Continue reading Responses: Paul Nash’s Monster Field
As typical when finishing a book that attempts to build a canon, as I have tried to do with Folk Horror, the signalling of its publishing means a whole host of new potential examples surface and come to light. Though there were things in the Folk Horror book that I simply left out by sheer chance – Edgar Wright’s Hot Fuzz (2007) being a key … Continue reading Folk Horror Curios
It was a rather surreal feeling to find that, whilst watching this year’s Eurovision Song Contest in a flat in France, the work of writer and filmmaker, Alain Robbe-Grillet, continually kept coming to mind. At first I failed to understand what exactly it was that was bringing his typical visual and narrative ploy of human beings frozen, in front of my mind’s eye. I soon … Continue reading The Frozen Time Of Alain Robbe-Grillet
Celluloid Wicker Man 