‘When I was not confined to the house, I would spend my days and my nights on the Edge.’ – Alan Garner On a frosty but sunny January morning, I was steadily making my way along the M56 towards Macclesfield. I was on my way to Alderley Edge in Cheshire, the stalking ground of writer Alan Garner. In 2015 I had made this journey in … Continue reading Alan Garner’s Edge
Jean-Luc Godard always had an interest in the relationship between politics and the spaces it influences. The topographies of modernity happened to coincide with his sharp turn towards cinematic political questioning, in films such as Tout Va Bien (1972), La Chinoise (1967), and Week-end (1967), looking in particular at a factory, an inner-city flat/Maoist commune, and a busy roadway. These spaces provided more than a backdrop for Godard’s political arguments: they seemed to actually … Continue reading Libidinal Circuits
Somewhere in this nexus of concrete and structural steel, this elaborately signalled landscape of traffic indicators and feeder roads, status and consumer goods, Vaughan moved like a messenger in his car… – Crash (1973), J.G. Ballard In the dead space before Christmas 2015, I found myself meandering back towards my old secondary school on The Wirral peninsula, one of only two things that I still … Continue reading Wanders: The M53 Cavern (A Northern Concrete Island)
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).
Richard Lester’s film collaboration with The Beatles, A Hard Day’s Night (1964), has been attributed many aspects of foreshadowing modern culture. From the almost accidental invention of the surrealism-infused music video to the defining of pre-counter-culture 1960s Britain and London, the film acts as both a periodical bubble and an innovative audio-visual experience that is as prescient today as it was then. One segment in … Continue reading Ringo’s Dérive in A Hard Day’s Night (1964).
Here’s a trailer for my next short film called The Coastal Path. It’s a ghost story and filmed on both digital and super 8 film. I’ll be going into detail about the film when it is eventually available to watch online (i.e. when it’s finished) but for now, I wanted a trailer just to sum up the work so far. It has taken a lot … Continue reading Trailer – The Coastal Path.
Celluloid Wicker Man 