Part 1. Part 2. Part 3. Part 4. Part 5. Part 6. Musical Anachronisms – Naturally and Overtly. “Let’s just say there aren’t many films set in the reign of William and Mary in which the devil rebuilds his body by harvesting the skin of children…” (Gatiss, 2010, BBC). To address the presence of musical anachronisms in films of all types is a tricky subject … Continue reading The Music of Folk Horror – Part 7 (Musical Anachronisms).
This review contains plot details. Dostoevsky is a brutal writer, wringing moral development out of human suffering and calamity perhaps like no other. When approaching his film adaptations, there is a gulf between the filmmakers that get clogged down with obsessive period details (a problem that plagues adaptations of that other great humanistic Russian, Tolstoy) and the filmmakers that understand that it is the emotional … Continue reading Norte, The End Of History – Lav Diaz (2013).
“Above all, don’t lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love.” Dostoevsky in The Brothers Karamazov. The above quote from Dostoevsky’s masterful work, The Brothers … Continue reading Deception and False Uptopia in the Films of Yorgos Lanthimos (Dogtooth, Alps).
The ghost story has had a resurgence lately in film and television. Perhaps the increasing reliance on distancing technology and social media has lead to a desire to retread older forms that now seem prescient but there’s no doubt that the genre as a whole is alive and well, especially for commercially minded lower budget film; the blueprint set up by Hammer’s adaptation of Susan … Continue reading Blackwood (2013) – Adam Wimpenny.
Part 1. BBC Monitor and the Use of Audio-Visual Form as Musicological Comment. The medium that Russell first gained traction in was not in fact film but in television documentaries. The flop of his first feature film, French Dressing (1964), marks the advent of his daring creativity entering into his work as television director; a role he had begun at the BBC for their documentary … Continue reading A Musicological Study of Ken Russell’s Composer Films – Part 2 (Monitor and Bartok).
Part 1. Part 2. Part 3. Part 4. Part 5. Musical Avant-Garde and Overt Anachronisms in Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971). “I think the other thing that appealed to me was the rural setting. The nooks and crannies of woodland, the edges of fields the ploughing, the sense of soil was something I tried to bring into the picture” – Piers Haggard (Gatiss, 2010, BBC). … Continue reading The Music of Folk Horror – Part 6 (Blood on Satan’s Claw).
Cinema is littered with famously unfinished projects; ideas with varying degrees of entailing preparation that often violently suggest the question of “what if?”. It’s one of the few types of media that allow such situations, being one that relies on a certain level of monetary profit guaranteed in order to be made in the first place. Orson Welles nigh on made a career of trying … Continue reading Jodorowsky’s Dune (2013) – Frank Pavich.
Communities that live on the fringes of modern society have always had a particular interest to a certain breed of filmmakers. Ken Loach focuses on some aspects of this in his work while Pier Paolo Pasolini positively insists on involving isolated and under-represented groups of people, whether within his narratives or in the production of the films themselves. Even last year’s Sight & Sound best … Continue reading An Episode In The Life Of An Iron Picket (2013) – Danis Tanovic.
The Russell Prism: How Ken Russell’s Auteuristic Aesthetics Presents a Reception Study of Classical Music and its Composers. The following essay was a dummy-run dissertation for my Masters course before realising that the subject had already been covered thrice in audio-visual academia. Though none of three essays analyse or go into the depth of the work (instead choosing to shoehorn their own subject matter through … Continue reading A Musicological Study of Ken Russell’s Composer Films – Part 1 (Introduction).
Part 1. Part 2. Part 3. Part 4. Diegesis in The Wicker Man. Some of the music assessed in the last section raised further questions besides their thematic and narrative content. Though this element was an important part of the analysis, another aspect almost appeared to be ignored; that of the diegesis of such performances. For a horror film, The Wicker Man presents the viewer … Continue reading The Music of Folk Horror – Part 5 (The Wicker Man’s Diegesis).
Celluloid Wicker Man 