Tag: Surrealism
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A Field in England (2013)
The English Civil War period has always been a rich source for horror. James I whipped everyone up with his book Daemonologie in 1597 and his subsequent promotion of, and attendance at, witch trials. Keith Thomas’s classic study Religion and the Decline of Magic argued that in the 16th and 17th centuries the shift to […]
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Aeon Flux – the animated series
I stumbled across Cyberpunk when living in Tokyo. This had both its advantages and disadvantages. Half the time it felt like I was living in a true William Gibson world, especially when walking through Shinjuku at night or hanging out in some grungy bar where cyber geeks rubbed shoulders with the Yakuza. Unfortunately it only […]
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Countdown to Thumb
A flat singularity carried the unfinished body of God through an empty universe. The colossus lay on his back, a being so vast he might easily have put his arms around a world, if any still existed. His left hand rested palm upwards. In the shadow of the Thumb a brass and wooden flying machine […]
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Jean Cocteau’s Orphée, (1950)
Last year I wrote about Jean Cocteau’s beautiful re-telling of the story of Beauty and the Beast, La Belle et la Bête (1946). In many ways it was a perfect movie for the age, giving war-weary French audiences an hour or two’s respite in fantasy while re-asserting French tradition and culture through the art of […]
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La Belle et La Bête (1946)
Think Beauty and the Beast and the first images that spring to mind will probably come from the 1991 Disney film and subsequent stage shows. All good stuff and a few rollicking tunes to boot. However the best version, to my mind, is the earlier French film La Belle et La Bête, made in 1946 by […]