Category: Essays and Articles
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by Adam Page At the end of David Cronenberg’s Crash, James Ballard climbs down into the ditch where his wife Catherine lies bleeding in the wreckage of a car she has just driven off a motorway overpass on purpose. He cradles her, asks if she’s alright. She is. He says: “Maybe the next one, darling.”…
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By Adam Page There is something which isn’t mentioned in film school, or if it is, it’s mentioned in the same way a sommelier will mention the house red; fast, with no eye contact before moving on to the bottles that matter. The French New Wave, a glorious, cigarette-burnt revolution in cinema, a movement that…
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by Tyler Gaucheron-Land Despite being the director behind one of cinema’s earliest science-fiction classics, 1927’s Metropolis, Fritz Lang hardly otherwise touched the genre throughout the many decades of his career. Crime films was where Lang spent most of his time establishing his position as an early master of cinema, with the likes of the gargantuan…
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By Adam Page I have spent enough time in dark places, both literal and metaphorical, to know that monsters have always been queer. I don’t mean in the reductive sense, or the cheap metaphorical way that is always trotted out at film school seminars. I mean queer in the original sense of the word: unsettling,…
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by Daniel Owens The routine was firmly established by now. I’d arrive home on a night after an hour’s journey from Oxford Community College where I “studied” music (“got high, failed to learn anything and screamed into a microphone in an attempt at being a metal vocalist” would be a more accurate description). I wouldn’t…
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By Samuel Leary THE EVENT On January 27th, I was lucky enough to attend Dead Duck Film Club’s screening of Park Chan-Wook’s beloved modern classic, The Handmaiden (2016), at Savoy Cinema in Nottingham. Following their Dead Duck Cult Film Festival in November (for which I previously wrote an article ) and a screening of Let…
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by Daniel E. Smith Released in 1975 through BBC2’s Playhouse teleplay anthology, Diane remains a relatively underseen work in Alan Clarke’s filmography. This may in some part be due to the undeniable bleakness of the teleplay’s subject matter, focusing on incest and rape and how one (namely, the titular Diane) learns to deal with them…
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by Ceridwen Millington Affliction (1997), starring Nick Nolte, James Coburn, Sissy Spacek and Willem Dafoe is a film that is easy to watch subjectively, feeling pity and anger as Wade Whitehouse suffers the sins of the father. The story follows the aforementioned character, a man is ostensibly a sardonic, alcoholic cop and general town dogsbody.…
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by ‘K’ In 1955, a queer-coded thriller pierced the French cinema landscape, appearing in the horizon as a tower of layered anxieties and deceit. Tensions of different kinds vertically stack up like bricks: conspiratorial, romantic, psychosexual. Some anxieties boil over a dead body that can’t be found, and others burn between living bodies that never…
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by Ros Tibbs New French Extremity: French New Wave’s Edgier and Violent Cousin One period of filmmaking that unlocked a whole new level of the medium’s artistic properties and cultural significance is the French New Wave, an art movement that rejected the traditional modes of cinema in favour of something experimental and thematic, with notable…
