I'll kick this off with something completely from the left-field. David Gladwell is perhaps most famous for being the editor of Lindsay Anderson's disaffected classics If... and O Lucky Man!. He is a talented director too and went on to make the utterly bizarre and disturbing Requiem for a Village, an anthropological study of the inhabitants of Suffolk farming village as machinery begins to take over from traditional methods of labour. An Untitled Film, like Requiem, is a film of contradicting and unexpected images centered around farming. It's filmed in luscious slow motion, so that the actions of the humans and animals become both utterly chaotic and magnificent. It's quite strange, but let let the images suck you in.
F**k! I LOVED this, Tom - thanks for sharing. I found it utterly chilling somehow. The sequencing of images reeked of impending catastrophe somehow - somewhere in between the opening sequence to Don't Look Now and one of those 1970s 'keep safe' tv information films that scared my generation half to death...
ReplyDeletehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zirp59zm1qE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vb00H6mCTM8&feature=related
What with that kid in the tree looking on, it was as if we were being treated to some kind of traumatic incident being imprinted on the child's brain - something about the death of the chicken as a primal scene. Look at me, trying to make sense of it - impose narrative on it, I guess. It was all a bit 'rural gothic' - and my brain is still buzzing with associations. I really liked it - so thanks again!