Search Results

In earlier chapters, it was argued that a movie fictionally “recounts” its story in audio-visual terms. On face of it, this implies that fictionally there is someone or something in the work that does the recounting. This conclusion is compatible with the viewer’s knowing nothing about the personality or character of the minimal recounting agency. If we ask whether movies have “narrators,” we could be asking whether such a minimal recounting agency is fictionally active in the film. Or we could be asking if the movie depicts a relatively robust character who fictionally carries out the work-internal narration. The answer to the first question is usually, “Yes,” and the answer to the second is almost always “No.” Most people have strong convictions that movies don’t have narrators, but it is explained why those intuitions are conflicted and unreliable.

This chapter introduces the reader to the Splat Pack, a group of contemporary horror film-makers such as Eli Roth, Rob Zombie, Neil Marshall, and Alexandre Aja. It examines how mainstream media hyped the Splat Packers, citing articles — including the one written by Alan Jones for the April 2006 issue of the British film magazine Total Film — that portrayed them as independent, subversive film-makers who operate outside the Hollywood mainstream. One of the ways in which journalists — and the Splat Packers themselves — construct the group's image of oppositional outsiderdom is by likening them to past horror directors like George Romero and Wes Craven from the 1960s and 1970s, the so-called ‘Golden Age’ of subversive American horror films. This chapter suggests that the media hype heralding the Splat Pack's arrival offers an intriguing glimpse into how notions of independence, outsider status, and claims of subversion are used to sell films and the personalities of their directors.

The opening chapter, ‘The Camera-I: Patrick Keiller’s Early Short Films and Essays’, reconstructs Keiller’s early career and his shift from architecture to film-making, reading the use of ‘subjective camera’ and the creation of ‘subjective townscape’ in his early experimental works as crucial to the developing sensibility of his later docu-narratives. Excavating a history of the ‘London Film-makers’ Co-op’ and examining Keiller’s early essays before looking at the short films Stonebridge Park (1981) and Norwood (1983), it explores the ‘atmosphere of unemployed reverie’ and paranoiac, noir methods that provided a footing for the later Robinson series. At the same time, it offers a view of the exciting world of political agitation and experimental film of 1960s London.

This chapter investigates how well the Council’s evolutionary development served in enabling it to satisfy the differing constituencies of support that form part of the landscape of film provision. Drawing on original interviews with senior figures from the UKFC and with key industry stakeholders, it assesses the challenges the organisation faced in handling a multiplicity of interest groups, concerns and expectations and how effectively the Council addressed competing economic, industrial and cultural objectives. This chapter also considers how the Council negotiated the various tensions between regional, national, European and international interests in an increasingly transnational film industry.

This chapter explores how experimental filmmaker Lis Rhodes subverts the hegemonic relationship between sound and image across her body of moving image work in order to highlight and address inequitable power structures and the absence of the female voice in music and society. This is achieved on a material level by translating the optical soundtrack into visual presentations in her direct animation Dresden Dynamo (1971–72) and within an expanded, performative context in her audiovisual composition Light Music (1975). Further to this, Rhodes’s later films, Light Reading (1978) and A Cold Draft (1988), continue to rebalance the audiovisual relationship by giving countenance to the female voice, acousmatised from the images presented on screen.

This chapter portrays Clarke's ‘voice’ as a filmmaker, and reveals the ‘voices’ that his productions articulated. It discusses Clarke's interrogations relating to the state and media discourses within the discursive framework of academic writing, and acknowledges the extent to which these voices have been expressed latently. The way that Clarke articulates the ‘political dilemma’ is also discussed. The Thatcherite discourses, which Clarke documented, ultimately silenced the kind of drama with which he was associated. Eventually, directors gained more influence than writers, as drama shifted to a more visual form of storytelling. Finally, the chapter uses analytical tools to unpick Clarke's contribution to their style and form, and to attempt to understand their effects. Clarke died on 24 July 1990. Many of his collaborators and admirers have argued that his technique of making radical plays died with him.,

This chapter presents an interview with film maker Terence Davies, conducted on 8 May 2006 at Kettners Restaurant, Soho. Davies was born in Liverpool in 1945 and grew up in a working-class Catholic family. The films With Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988) and The Long Day Closes (1992) marked Davies out as the most important and distinctive British film-maker since Michael Powell. He subsequently adapted and directed two novels by American authors: John Kennedy Toole's The Neon Bible (1995), and Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth (2000).