Best New Releases. 2014 has been a year that I’ve genuinely struggled to keep up with in terms of new releases. The sheer wealth of material out there and the incessant obsession of online reviewers to desperately be up-to-date has been an interesting but ultimately fruitless exercise to try and mimic. Luckily, I’ve watched a good number of excellent films from all around the world … Continue reading 2014 Review and Top 10s.
Part 1. Part 2. Part 3. Part 4. Part 5. Part 6. “The Ghost In The Machine”: The Haunting Nature Of Unnatural Diegetic Sound. “M.R. James’ objects are imbued with our deepest fears, deepest terrors and resonances. The whistle can bring up a storm or bring a monster from the deep. The crown, that if you touch, its guardian will tear you to pieces.” – … Continue reading The Aural Aesthetics Of Ghosts In BBC Ghost Stories – Part 7 (Haunted Objects).
The following article contains plot twists. Hysteria and Nigel Kneale’s Baby. A very particular and often quoted segment from Freud’s summations of hysterical patients will be used here to begin the contextualisation our analysis. Whilst writing about the generalities surrounding such cases of hysteria and eventually compulsion neurosis, Freud came up with a short but rather useful sound-bite to describe every patient he had seen. … Continue reading Technological Hysteria in Nigel Kneale’s The Stone Tape (1972).
In the vast, carved landscapes of Anatolia lies a hotel embedded into the very rock of the land itself. Inside it are people and debates that show the fractured relationships of the creative and the giving, the emotional and the distanced. They are speaking a mixture of words by director, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, his wife and screenwriter, Ebru, and the great Russian playwright, Anton Chekhov. … Continue reading Winter Sleep (2014) – Nuri Bilge Ceylan.
When watching Nigel Kneale’s infinitely weird TV series, Beasts (1976), there’s a great sense of underlying currents behind what appear to be strange amalgamations of the everyday with something of the Other. Though the links between the episodes are often animalistic, ranging the ghost of a dolphin in Buddyboy to the hoards of rats in During Barty’s Party, the majority of the episodes all, at … Continue reading Hysteria and Curses in Nigel Kneale’s Baby (Beasts, 1976).
Part 1. Part 2. Part 3. Part 4. Part 5. Human Interaction With The Landscape And Its Soundscape. “The wind was bitter from the north, but was at his back when he set out for the Globe. He quickly rattled and clashed through the shingle and gained the sand, upon which, but for the groynes which had to be got over every few yards, the … Continue reading The Aural Aesthetics of Ghosts in BBC Ghost Stories – Part 6 (Excavation).
For my last film of the year, I wanted to put into practice some of ideas that I explored in my presentation at this year’s Folk Horror conference, held at Queens University Belfast in September. I had already filmed the footage before I presented my paper (though didn’t get it developed until a good few weeks after that) but had already been forming the ideas … Continue reading Short Film – Tarot.
With a Bressonian flair and palpable tragedy, Diego Quemada-Díez’s The Golden Dream (2013) is a refreshing experience. The film deals with the journeys of three young people from Guatemala trying desperately to reach north America, drenched very clearly in some misleading propaganda surrounding the American Dream. The issue presented in the film isn’t simply one of escape but of false hopes and the eventual betrayal … Continue reading The Golden Dream (2013) – Diego Quemada-Díez.
Part 1. Part 2. Part 3. Part 4. Natural Diegesis And Aural Interaction With Landscape. One of M.R. James’ most recognisable writing traits is his emphasis on rural settings. From his own personal experience, of both exploring the churches of France on holiday bike-rides and living and holidaying in Suffolk and Norfolk, the rural landscape became almost as much of a story trope as the … Continue reading The Aural Aesthetics of Ghosts in BBC Ghost Stories – Part 5 (Landscape).
Part 1. Part 2. Part 3. Part 4. Part 5. Part 6. Part 7. Lizstomania and the effect of Rock Aesthetics on Classical Reception. After making Tommy, Russell clearly felt as if there was still new territory to be explored. The last of his composer films would not simply be a final whimper in the delving into a musical and cultural history, but an all-out … Continue reading A Musicological Study of Ken Russell’s Composer Films – Part 8 (Lisztomania).
Celluloid Wicker Man 