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Film

The Beast (1975) – Walerian Borowczyk (Arrow Video).

By the mid 1970s, the ease in censorship over large swaths of Europe lead to cinema pushing boundaries and taboo like the medium had never done before.  The decade was awash with cinematic controversy and intelligent but often disturbing treatises on sexuality, drug culture, language, and violence.  1975 seems to be the pinnacle of the boundary pushing that started with films such as Ken Russell’s … Continue reading The Beast (1975) – Walerian Borowczyk (Arrow Video).

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Folk Horror, Landscape, Literature, Television

Red Shift (Play For Today, 1978) – John Mackenzie (BFI).

A shifting sense of time, space, and place can bring huge advantages to fantastical works of fiction.  The feeling that time is a folded concept, repeating and resetting in a quasi-ritualistic ceremony of life adds a sheen of the monumental to even the smallest and most intimate of dramas.  This sheen is the absolute embodiment of the work of writer, Alan Garner, and is never … Continue reading Red Shift (Play For Today, 1978) – John Mackenzie (BFI).

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Film Music and Sound, Folk Horror, Landscape, Literature, Television

The Aural Aesthetics of Ghosts in BBC Ghost Stories – Part 3 (William Ager).

Part 1. Part 2. A “Disembodied Voice” of some form is a clear norm for representing a creature that, by its very definition, is now bodiless.  This means that, as an aural technique, it is used frequently throughout many other ghost stories as well.  In Lawrence Gordon Clark’s films, the aural trait occurs several times with different and varying effects, though never with the layered … Continue reading The Aural Aesthetics of Ghosts in BBC Ghost Stories – Part 3 (William Ager).

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Film, Film Music and Sound

A Musicological Study of Ken Russell’s Composer Films – Part 6 (Mahler).

Part 1. Part 2. Part 3. Part 4. Part 5. Mahler (1974) and the Balance Between Personal Reception and History. Mahler is an apt end for this period in Ken Russell’s musical exploration for a number of reasons.  It firstly completes the transition in the director’s popularity as well as the full fledgling of creative confidence.  It also manages to amalgamate all of the elements … Continue reading A Musicological Study of Ken Russell’s Composer Films – Part 6 (Mahler).

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Film, Folk Horror, Landscape

The Folk Horror Chain

The Folk Horror Chain The following is a rough transcript of a paper delivered at the A Fiend in the Furrows conference, held at Queens University, Belfast on the 20th of September, 2014. Introduction Folk horror is a strange form of media. There’s an unusual craving for defining and canonising in spite of being a sub-genre which seems inherently intuitive. This unusual combination of shared thematic … Continue reading The Folk Horror Chain

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Film

Blanche (1971) – Walerian Borowczyk (Arrow Video).

A palette of strange objects, muted imagery, and medieval oddness awaits the viewer of Walerian Borowczyk’s Blanche (1971); only the third feature film in one of the most surreal and haphazard cinematic careers of all European art house directors.  Though now more infamous as a purveyor of perverted worlds and eventually soft-core titillation (Emmanuelle 5 in 1987 being a complicated low point), Blanche shows the … Continue reading Blanche (1971) – Walerian Borowczyk (Arrow Video).

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Film Music and Sound, Folk Horror, Literature, Television

The Aural Aesthetics of Ghosts in BBC Ghost Stories – Part 2 (The Disembodied Voice).

Part 1. The Aural-Thematic Ties In BBC Ghost Stories. “He first began to write the ghost stories for which he is now famous in late 1892 or early 1893 while he was a fellow of King’s.  They were composed initially to be read aloud in his college rooms as a Christmas treat for his friends.”-  Oliver (p.15, 2012). When looking at the source material for … Continue reading The Aural Aesthetics of Ghosts in BBC Ghost Stories – Part 2 (The Disembodied Voice).

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Film, Landscape

A Spell To Ward Off The Darkness (2013) – Ben Rivers + Ben Russell.

Doused in a natural ethnography based upon the landscape, A Spell To Ward Off The Darkness (2013) is a strangely hypnotic mixture of fact and fiction by filmmakers, Ben Rivers and Ben Russell.  Both have come from making shorter works and the episodic sense of place and the perspectives of time are all questioned through visual sociology and a natural embarkation of documentary film. There’s … Continue reading A Spell To Ward Off The Darkness (2013) – Ben Rivers + Ben Russell.

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Film Music and Sound, Television

A Musicological Study of Ken Russell’s Composer Films – Part 5 (Dance of the Seven Veils).

Part 1. Part 2. Part 3. Part 4.  When approaching a cinematic portrayal of Richard Strauss, Russell is, for the first time in his biographical canon, openly honest about its position within cultural texts.  Dance of the Seven Veils has a sub-heading that reads “A comic strip in 7 episodes on the life of Richard Strauss” which is the first open admission that this is … Continue reading A Musicological Study of Ken Russell’s Composer Films – Part 5 (Dance of the Seven Veils).

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Film

American Interior (2014) – Gruff Rhys and Dylan Goch.

Travelogues and musicians have a natural affiliation; for the latter’s art, travelling will always be a prerogative with touring being an essential part of their creative psyche in order to perform and promote their music.  This is not, however, the main link between the subject of Dylan Goch’s American Interior (2014) and its presenter, Gruff Rhys.  Rhys is the frontman of the Welsh band, Super … Continue reading American Interior (2014) – Gruff Rhys and Dylan Goch.

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