Computer Animation Arts

Michael Haneke's The White Ribbon is a 2009 German language film shot in surgically precise black and white. The time is 1913, the place is a small, isolated German village named Eichwald, and the narrative evolves around a series of unexplained acts of cruelty and malice perpetrated against the remote, rural community. The mark left by a trip-wire used in a booby-trap. A mysterious fire. The Baron's son is thrown in the river. In common with Haneke's Hidden (2005), The White Ribbon is purposefully ambiguous. Motives are never laid bare and pointed fingers fail to skewer definitive targets.  In this way, the film refuses easy categorisation, but for this viewer, at least, Haneke's menacing exploration of shame, reprisal and complicity continues a fine cinematic tradition of paedophobia : stories that evince or seek to evoke a visceral distrust or dislike of children.   While The White Ribbon determines for its audience neither moti...

Summary: An adaptation of Henry James’ famed novella The Turn of the Screw. A hedonistic and wealthy bachelor hires Miss Giddens as governess to look after his adopted niece and nephew at his enormous countryside mansion house. Enamoured with their charm at first - she is later unsettled by the strange behaviour of the children and mysterious figures she see’s on the mansion grounds, Miss Giddens is convinced the spirits of two dead workers have possessed the bodies of the children. Analysis: “Just as Hitchcock had gone back to black and white for Psycho, director Jack Clayton shot The Innocents in black and white, which, by 1961, had the curious effect of intensifying drama while creating distance between audience and characters...Cinematographer Freddie Francis reported that he devised special filters to blur the sides of the frame to make the film more claustrophobic and an element of mystery as to what was lurking in the corners...the result was an enduring gem of a ghost movie. It...