Writer. Editor. Film Scholar. Script Consultant
It was a pleasure to contribute to BBC Screenshot on Shock Value, presented by Mark Kermode and Ellen E. Jones. It airs on Friday 9th August at 7:15pm on BBC Radio 4 and will be available on the BBC iPlayer shortly afterwards. Programme listing for Screenshot Shock Value on BBC Radio 4
In the next episode of the Straight On Till Morning radio show, I talk to Jane Giles and Ali Catterall, the co-directors of the new documentary Scala!!! Or the Incredibly Strange Rise and Fall of the World's Wildest Cinema and How It Influenced a Mixed-up Generation of Weirdos and Misfits. Thursday 4th January 2024, 8pm,... Continue Reading →
Amid the political upheaval of late 1960s France, Jean Rollin offered anachronistic visions of ruined castles and decaying cemeteries, steeped in the Gothic novel of the 18th and 19th century via his love for surrealism. But despite their seemingly archaic Gothic settings, Rollin’s films transgress genre expectations, and in particular, the conventional opposition between female... Continue Reading →
Ever since the image of a woman’s eyeball being sliced with a razor was dreamt up by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, a whole renegade strand of cinema has delighted in brutally assaulting its audience, violently forcing it to face the gory nature of the body and the mulchy depths of the psyche. The cinematic... Continue Reading →
An unholy hybrid of Otto Preminger’s Laura and Curt McDowell’s Thundercrack!, Nikos Nikolaïdis’s delirious Greek-tragedy-inflected sado-masochistic comedy noir Singapore Sling is one of those wondrous alien objects that excitingly tear through the cinematographic sky once in a while. It remains the most famous of Nikolaïdis’s films outside of Greece, even though he made eight theatrical... Continue Reading →
Virginie Sélavy 