christopher-underwood

What a stunning and fascinating one, although I should mention at the beginning that this is a very interesting photography biography but that there are no photographs and this is rather slow (so much the better) and of course the full title with, 'imaginary'. The director is Steven Shainberg and he made Secretary (2002) this will give you some of the idea of this. If you loved that one, like I did, that you should love this as well. Nicole Kidman and Robert Downey Jr both very good and it might have been difficult as clearly Kidman has a problem with nudity and Downey Jr having to deal with hair, everywhere, known as hypertrichosis. It has rather strange, thrilling and disturbing images and we can almost see in front of us as the famous pictures are almost magically to appear. It's inspirational and spine-tingling that surely it wants us to get out one of Diane Arbus books straightaway.

I really like the books of Ruth Rendell, some under the pseudonym as Barbara Vine and she had published some 80 books. Claude Chabrol I also like and he had made something like 60 films, some of them wonderful. He made a couple of his of Rendell's, the first one was The Ceremony (1995) a great film made out of, A Judgement in Stone. Later on, this film was made in 2004, and from her's of the same title. The book is fine but unusually with Chabrol in this one I'm not sure he really gets it quite right here. It is a bit complicated and a rather odd tale and I think he wanted it to be amusing as well, but maybe it wasn't a good idea. It is interesting but with the stone head with bed, the candles and no people, and some dead but not dead, maybe it is just too much going on.

Over the years I have seen this amazing one several times. The first time it was, Witchcraft Through the Ages and a video which was a rather poor print but considering it being so old I still thought it was incredible. Later on I watched on DVD and narrating by William Burroughs, which was interesting and although the print was better although I preferred the intertitles. This time, thanks to Radiance I have four versions and three different scores and I watched the 'Esoteric Cut'. This was really more or less the same version but so much better than I had ever seen. Later I will watch another and one of The Witch versions. The film itself was made by Benjamin Christensen in 1922 and I understand that he first had several years before had a copy of the 15th century 'Malleus Maleficarum' that had been thought of as a German guide for inquisitors and their witch hunts. Christensen wondered if these hunts had really been of misunderstandings of mental or disorders triggering mass hysteria. And we see some of this. To make this stunning film he used drawings, woodcuts, and paintings and with actors using special-effect make-up and with puppetry, stop motion animation. So even if this sometimes seems a bit slow surely this has never been seen before.