What makes a Burton film Burtonian? This collection of articles explores the postmodern universe created by a filmmaker who mixes genres, aesthetics and cultural references in each of his ...productions. Frankenstein’s creature soon emerges as a central figure, as the literal patching up and stitching of bodies or costumes that mirrors what Mélanie Boissonneau aptly calls Burton’s “Frankenstein method” (318), which consists in appropriating, assembling, and thus re-inventing existing material. B...
In 1981, Andrew Birkin was awarded the BAFTA for Best Short Film for his adaptation of Saki’s ‘Sredni Vashtar’ (1911). This article explores the film’s soundscape to show how it participates in the ...construction of the oppositional system that underpins Saki’s short story. Carl Orff’s ‘O Fortuna’ is used as a symbolic signifier strictly associated with the world of the child, as opposed to the adult’s. The piece interacts with diegetic sounds to create a complex web of echoes and dissonances. Thus, ‘O Fortuna’ is set in sharp contrast with the tick-tock of the clock that can be heard in the dreary Edwardian house. As it is associated with the colour red, the music also highlights by contrast the greyness of a constraining adult world. Colour and music thus combine to give shape to the world of a child chafing under the yoke of the real.
In his Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction (1999), Robert Mighall presents ‘anachronistic conflict’ as the defining feature of the mode. The resurgence of pagan gods and the discovery of a fossil ...race are the two main triggers of such a conflict in Arthur Machen’s supernatural tales of the Nineties. The aim of this paper is to explore how the horrifying returns articulate with the Anglo-Catholic writer’s sacramental worldview, focusing in particular on the use of the wine symbol in his texts. The Dionysian theme reverberates throughout Machen’s fiction, where the double-natured god may induce either debasement or elevation. In both cases, sacramental wine enables man to partake in the reality that lies beyond the veil of appearances.
When mentioned at all, Hieroglyphics is usually described as an essay in which Arthur Machen exposes his views on literature. The aim of this paper is to show how the “Prefatory Note”, a sort of ...frame narrative, blurs the borderline between essay and fiction and makes the status of the text problematic. In this preliminary text, a narrator bearing the initials “A. M.” explains that he spent long hours listening to a scholarly hermit whose views on literature he later put down on paper. Machen thus encourages the reader to identify him not as the enunciator but as the listener ; he dissociates himself from the essayist, even though the latter expresses ideas that are also his. This is part of a game of masks that is played on several textual levels.
The Great God Pan, Machen’s first major success, is a dark tale that exploits late Victorian anxieties about scientific progress, especially the post-Darwinian fear/fantasy of regression to bestial ...levels. The text seems intent on making the reader’s flesh creep, and yet many early reviewers stated that it failed to do so, some going as far as claiming that the novella made one shake with laughter rather than with dread. The aim of this article is to highlight the semantic, structural and stylistic ingredients used to arouse dread or anxiety and, ultimately, to try and determine why Machen’s text has failed to generate the « appropriate » emotional response.
En 1981, Andrew Birkin remporte le BAFTA du meilleur court-métrage pour son adaptation de la nouvelle de Saki intitulée « Sredni Vashtar » (1911). Cet article explore l’univers sonore du film pour ...montrer comment il se fait signifiant de la division en deux « mondes » établie par le narrateur de Saki dès le début de la nouvelle. Les limites du territoire de l’enfant sont tracées par le « O Fortuna » de Carl Orff, musique non diégétique qui entretient des rapports complexes avec les sons ambiants. Il s’oppose en particulier au tic-tac de l’horloge qui se fait entendre dans la morne demeure édouardienne. De même, par son association à la couleur rouge, il s’oppose à la grisaille du monde sur lequel règne l’adulte détesté. Couleur et musique s’allient ainsi pour donner forme à l’univers d’un enfant qui s’arc-boute sous le poids du réel.
Cet article étudie les métamorphoses de la capitale britannique dans The Hill of Dreams, en s’attardant sur la transformation de la ville en scène de théâtre flamboyante (« fiery stage ») sur ...laquelle se joue un rite orgiaque ancien. Cette transformation obéit au principe de persistance qui sous-tend toute l’œuvre de l’auteur gallois, le passé se révélant être toujours présent. Dans les récits fantastiques, le passé prend la forme d’une race primitive qui a survécu dans la campagne galloise. Dans The Hill of Dreams, Londres a également son « Petit Peuple » (Twylidd Teg) : la classe laborieuse. La peur du prolétariat qui hantait les esprits de l’époque est ainsi exprimée dans un langage typiquement machenien.
...I approve of « Ritualism » in the service of the church, and from the same premiss I draw the conclusion that Keats was a poet and that Pope was not. ...you see, admiring certain lines cut in an ...old oaken box, I am led by the strictest logic to dislike the religious policy of Edward VI, with all the other consequences in order. Here, in the most retired street ofthat retired quarter, he occupied two rooms on the ground floor of a big, mouldy house, standing apart from the street and sheltered by gaunt-grown trees and ancient shrubs ; and just beside the dim and dusty window of the sitting-room a laburnum had cast a green stain on the decaying wall. The laburnum had grown wild ... and some of its black, straggling boughs brushed the pane, and of dark, windy nights while we sat together and talked of art and life we would be startled by the sudden violence with which those branches beat angrily upon the glass.
Can Peake’s Gormenghast novels be termed baroque? This paper suggests the beginnings of an answer by examining one aspect which is usually considered a distinguishing feature of baroque art, namely, ...its marked preference for curves, broken lines, spirals or arabesques over straight lines. Peake’s baroque resistance to the constraint of linearity is evidenced by two different types of ‘deviations’: the numerous peripheral episodes or subsidiary diegetic strands and the countless lavish descriptions, both elements throwing into relief Peake’s baroque urge to show all. A close examination of these deviations leads to more general reflections on the opposition fixity/fluidity in the novels, the stress being laid on the metamorphic quality of the gigantic imaginative world created by Peake.
PDF
