Last week was a less straightforward and conventional haunted house film, with its focus on the essential erasure or subsumption of the domestic into the service industry economy. I wanted to keep that theme going with this week's entry, Oliver Assayas’s Personal Shopper. The story follows Maureen Cartwright, played by Kristen Stewart, who works as … Continue reading The Haunted House on Film Part Four
The last piece in the series (read it here, why not?) covered something of a classic so for this installement it seems appropriate to go for a more contemporary director who is clearly indebted to the form and aesthetics of older horror film. Who better than Ti West? However, I have to start with something … Continue reading The Haunted House on Film Part Three
After starting last week with the piece on Fulci, I thought I would turn to another film that takes even heavier inspiration from Henry James’s novella, “The Turn of the Screw.” The Innocents, directed by arguably the most literary of British film directors, Jack Clayton, is utterly peerless. It is formally and thematically bold in … Continue reading The Haunted House on Film Part Two
Over the next few months I’ve decided to spend some time exploring the haunted house in horror film. Given the simplicity of the plots, and the general structure which has become so well established as to be cliche, these films are a useful way of exploring both the historical and ideological constructions of housing, and … Continue reading The Haunted House On Film Part One
The multiplicity of interpretations to which the Commune has been subjected, and the multiplicity of interests which construed it in their favor, show that it was a thoroughly expansive political form, while all the previous forms of government had been emphatically repressive. Its true secret was this: It was essentially a working class government, the … Continue reading The Democratic Modernism of Peter Watkins
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