We bring our whole personal history to every movie we see, even ones we’ve seen (many times) before; as we’re in a constant state of change, so the movies we watch seem to change with each viewing.
Bias and preconception in movie-watching
Writers
Spectrum of Horror: from class to crass
Two disks illustrate the spectrum of British genre production in the ’70s and ’80s: Pete Walker’s cinematic horror Frightmare and David Rudkin’s epic BBC fantasy Artemis 81.
Three recent losses
The great English cinematographer Oswald Morris, whose work in both colour and black-and-white added enormously to the films he worked on. He had a long and fruitful association with John Huston (his work on Moulin Rouge in 1952 pushed the boundaries of what Technicolor was supposed to be able to do), and also shot several […] Read More
Ghosts of Television Past, part two
While some of the films and plays in the series of disks I wrote about last week, devoted to ghost and horror stories made for British television, reveal the budgetary and technical limitations of their time and medium (low budget sets, somewhat coarse and murky video recording), the BFI has lavished its attention on one […] Read More
Blu-ray Review: Things to Come (1936)
While it’s quite common to like a movie despite its flaws, it’s also possible to appreciate a film in spite of its content. Griffith’s achievement can be admired even as we are appalled by the racist politics of Birth of a Nation; we can recognize the visual beauty of Riefenstahl’s use of camera and editing […] Read More
Sean Garrity and Bill Fugler’s Blood Pressure
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g16oTd3MlTE”
There’s always a slight strangeness to watching a film made by people you know. It’s never an entirely objective experience, but there’s always a real sense of relief when you like the movie. Last week, I caught one of the premiere screenings of Sean Garrity’s Blood Pressure at the Cinematheque here in Winnipeg. I’ve known […] Read More
Adapting Lovecraft
I’ve recently been reading – or re-reading – most of H.P. Lovecraft’s longer stories since I bought the collected works for my Kindle. There are things about Lovecraft that I really like – his sheltered, bookish protagonists poking through old dark buildings in search of musty documents which may reveal the awful truth about our […] Read More
Nigel Kneale & British genre television
British TV has always been primarily a writer’s medium; since the ’50s, the biggest stars have tended to be the writers, with writers’ names attached possessively to projects. Television production was often built around writers such as Alan Bennett, Alan Bleasdale and Dennis Potter, who was one of the biggest, with each of his new […] Read More
