Computer Animation Arts

A few years back I screened Tobe Hooper's Poltergeist for CAA year 1 as part of an 'Unheimlich' film programme that also included Invasion Of The Body Snatchers (1956) , Invaders From Mars (1953) , The Stepford Wives (1975) , Halloween (1978) and Blue Velvet (1986) .  The underlying theme was American cinema's ambivalence for perfect lawns and picket fences.  Here are shared visions of suburban disquiet and the horrors of homogeneity; here are narratives in which home and hearth become 'final girl' obstacle courses and crawl-spaces, in which domestic space is invaded - sometimes brutally, but more often with stealth and chilling, invisible haste. ( They're here already! You're next! ) .  Indeed, with the exception of Poltergeist , all these films end uneasily with the threat to our domestic space unvanquished in the final reel; sure, Blue Velvet appears to restore order and equilibrium, but no one actually believes everything is going to be o...

More John Barry means more James   Bond , and his film score for the fourth in the spy franchise, Thunderball (1965).  This was the Bond movie with the jet pack and much parodied 'pool of sharks'.  Musically, it's got that unmistakeable blend of menace, jazz and big band orchestration that so evokes the time and place of early Bond...  Apparently, after hitting - and sustaining - the last big, ballsy note at the end of the theme song (featured below), Tom Jones fainted in the recording booth! "It was a combination of the time (the early '60s), a collision of musical cultures (the end of the big-band era, the beginnings of rock) and the offbeat qualities of Ian Fleming's creation that led to Barry's unique mix of jazz, rock, pop and traditional orchestral writing. "John is part of the original DNA of the Bond film franchise," says Barbara Broccoli, producer of the Bond films since 1995 and daughter of original Bond producer...

John Barry , born in 1933,  died aged 77 in January 2011 .  I'll be featuring works by this late, great oscar-winning composer over the coming weeks for your listening pleasure, and w hat better way to introduce Barry's musical legacy t han with the brassy delights of his Goldfinger (1964) score, the soundtrack that locked down the musical identity of the long-running James Bond franchise.  I defy anyone listening to the excerpts below not to thrill to the jazzy raunchiness of Barry's music.  This is sexy, dangerous stuff...  Alpine Drive/Auric's Factory Oddjob's Pressing Engagement Goldfinger theme, lyrics by Anthony Newley and Leslie Bricusse , performed by Shirley Bassey

Bernard Herrmann's score for Alfred Hitchcock's game-changing 1960 classic frightener Psycho couldn't be further from the lush orchestration of his 7th Voyage of Sinbad . Herrmann's strings-centric music hardly needs any introduction, so famous is his composition accompanying the iconic, much parodied murder of luckless Marion Crane . Psycho 's score is one of the great pleasures of cinema; it is pared down and propulsive, driving the film fowards at a terrific whip. Like the film itself, Herrmann's music is 'black and white' - a monochrome of strings. The Psycho Suite