Tag: Symbolism
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Abel Gance’s Napoleon – 1927
Looking at the practicalities of even showing Abel Gance’s Napoleon makes you wonder how on earth it ever got made. Not only is the full version five and a half hours long but at the very end the film goes tryptych – with three images projected simultaneously side by side to give a stunning split […]
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Voyage of the Acolyte – Steve Hackett 1975
I have a huge soft spot for Prog Rock, well – to qualify that, I have a soft spot for a handful of Prog Rock albums that I came across when I was first venturing into Science Fiction and Fantasy. Basically I was after anything that looked a bit spacey – or fantasy-esque, with soaring […]
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Eschatus – Bruce Pennington (1976)
One of the strangest books to come out of the 1970s fantasy art imprint Paper Tiger had to be Bruce Pennington’s Eschatus (1976). I’ve already briefly spoken about Pennington as one of the iconic science fiction book artists of the era, working largely with New English Library. His work stood in stark contrast to the […]
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Zardoz (1974)
What better way to recover from New Year’s Eve than a leisurely afternoon watching John Boorman’s cult classic Zardoz. Putting aside the seriously disturbing sight of a post-Bond ever so slightly flabby Sean Connery dressed in Vampirella’s swimming costume and thigh length leather boots while sporting a porn moustache it’s difficult to know where to […]
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Dante Deluxe
Funnily enough it was Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle who turned me on to Dante. Their decidedly odd libertarian take on the original, Inferno, came out in 1976 and had the Science Fiction author Allen Carpentier dying after falling out of window (Asimov’s fault) and being led through Dante’s hell by Benito Mussolini. I started […]
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Autun Purser – Fantastic Travel Destinations
I came across the wonderful Fantastic Travel Destination posters of Autun Purser at Dysprosium and immediately bought the complete set of cards and a print for one of my own personal favourite locations – the Lidenbrock Sea from Verne’s A Journey to the Centre of the Earth. He’s very kindly written a post about his […]
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Interview with Jim Burns
Go here for my review of Jim Burns’ latest book The Art of Jim Burns: Hyperluminal. Can you talk us through one of your paintings from concept to finished image – both in terms of the idea and the practical execution. My choice would be Tea From an Empty Cup or Crucible purely because of […]
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The Company of Wolves (1984)
Wandering through Kate Bush’s imagination a couple of weeks ago made me think of a peculiarly English brand of dark fantasy that started in the late Victorian era with writers like George MacDonald and Lucy Clifford. These and others managed to write children’s stories possessed of such toe-curling nightmarish terror that they continue to haunt […]
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The King of Elfland’s Daughter – 1977
For years the TV program Top of the Pops and the Sunday Top 40 on Radio One had a stranglehold on popular music in the UK. Bands sank or swam depending on where they were in the charts and how much exposure they got on the BBC on a Thursday evening. Rankings depended entirely on singles […]
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More Grotesque – the world of Bosch and Bruegel
This is the second post in a short series about the Grotesque, that sub-genre of Horror and Fantasy that’s characterised by physical distortion, dream imagery and the ordinary made monstrous. In this article I’m going to talk about the Grotesque during the Renaissance, specifically in the works of artists like Hieronymous Bosch and Pieter […]
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Patrick Woodroffe
I’d already planned on doing an article on the fantasy artist Patrick Woodroffe when the news came in that he’d passed away and so, sadly, this has become my personal tribute to his powerful and often frightening imagination. Patrick Woodroffe was one of a small group of painters and sculptors working in the 1970s whose […]
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The Grotesque
This is the first in a series of posts looking at the Grotesque in literature and art. It’s a subject that’s fascinated me for years (in fact I wrote my Masters thesis about it during the time of the Old Republic). I thought I’d kick off by trying to understand what makes something in writing […]
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Tove Jansson – the Truth about the Moomins
A while back I wrote a post about Tove Jansson’s last Moomin book, Moominvalley in November (1971), pointing out that behind the innocent guise of a charming children’s tale lurked a masterpiece of Nordic existentialism. I had no idea. I’ve just finished Boel Westin’s biography of the author Tove Jansson: Life, Art and Words, translated […]
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Dark Fantasy: is it suitable for the servants?
This week’s post is a guest article by Jane Dougherty, the author of the wonderfully grim fantasy novel The Dark Citadel. First in a series, it tells of a future religious/fascist dystopian society sheltering beneath an immense dome, around which prowl demons and creatures of legend. It’s refreshingly sinister and pulls no punches in its […]
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The Japanese Wuthering Heights – Arashi ga Oka (1988)
Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights is a really odd book. On the surface it’s the first bodice-ripper – a passionate tale of doomed love set among the Yorkshire Moors. Yet our ideas about the story, and the tragic duo of Cathy and Heathcliff, often come from the myths that that have built up around the novel, […]
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White Tiger (2012)
Spoiler Alert – if you haven’t seen the film and plan on doing so, watch it first then read this. This is a very odd Russian symbolist fantasy set during the Second World War, and based very loosely on Moby Dick. After a battle on the Eastern Front a tank driver is found with 90% […]
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Nicholas Roerich – Eldritch Artist
When I was in Moscow I got the chance to visit the Nicholas Roerich Art Museum. Roerich lived in the early half of the twentieth century and was part of a movement that revolutionised Russian painting. He was keenly interested in spiritualism and tried to found a new religion for the 20th century based on […]
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Early Fantasy Art: the Symbolists
The Symbolist and Decadent movement in European art has always been overlooked. It stands between the twin monoliths of Impressionism and Cubism, and is overshadowed by both. It’s also tainted by association with late 19th century Narrative Art, where the story of a painting was more important than the style or quality. A lot of […]