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fantastic Cinema : Blow of heart for Editions DEEP RED

Founded in 2003, Editions Deep Red have over the years expanded their catalog of books exciting on the fantastic cinema. Go through all the publications this year : the diptych Images and Words of the horror of Guy Astic and Shining in the mirror of Loig Le Bihan.

As we would create a decompression chamber between two sessions in dark rooms, sometimes it is good to dwell for a moment ray cinema bookshop. We discover then that one minute of film can extend over dozens of pages, hours of reading, providing for the seventh art the possibility of a parallel life in a space-time complementary. It is through this enthusiasm that I had one day the chance of getting the books edited by Deep Red, the name of the most engaging, since it makes direct reference to the fantastic cinema, by means of Dario Argento (Profondo rosso is the original title of the Chills of anguish).

Having eyes bigger than the belly even when it comes to spiritual food, I first paid attention to the encyclopedia of 1000 pages, entitled 100 years of fantastic cinema and science fiction , in which Jean-Pierre Andrevon, novelist, short-story writer and editor to The Screen Fantastic, supported more than 5000 articles related to the genres mentioned above. And then just to the side of the monster Andrevon, the coverage of which in the likeness of the creature of Frankenstein seems to be wisely chosen, I aventurai my eye on another book, stamped with the same border colour of blood, Dreams and american series : The manufactures of other worlds. A title that was timely at a time when the television series will want to also be sensory, as lynchiennes, as dreamlike as the film.

Leaning on the publications output this year, one perceives the objective of the editions of Deep Red to place the genre films in the topic of study is rich and relevant, so that from their iconic status in popular culture, they achieve the function of transmission belts to be polymorphic between the various arts, schools of thoughts and points of view on the world. The director of the editions himself, Guy Astic, put his hand to the paw by signing two books titled words and Images of horror, gathering together his texts on the approach of two sets to be analysed ; in the first case the body, Excess and rapture, and in the second, the territory, Territories of terror .

For Excess and rapture, Guy Astic has chosen as the thread of the prose frenzy of novelist Clive Barker, that he qualifies as a entry in a game of “prolific imagicien” :

Between exhibition and study, Barker practice the art as “the exercise of cruelty” (Battle). The perforated physiological that he continues to replay that breaks with the established forms to endanger the body, the mind and the perceptions, and expressions never seen before.

It is understandable then that the author of the Books of Blood and Hellraiser to be judged by Astic as the figure holder capable of structuring the analysis of the collection, which is constantly crossed and driven by the metamorphosis of the written word and the screen :

No possibility of new body without the demonstration of violence perpetrated to achieve this ; no new worlds, locations novel without dislocation physics without instabilities and pathways of organic up until then inenvisagées.

If the career of Barker boils down to five goals and four scenarios, Astic in designs yet the richness as well as the intensity :

The cinema of Barker opens to the mythologies ancient and modern, which mishandle the man in his flesh and in his soul, that the dissecting, leave it gaping. And what he tells us and shows us is barely bearable because there was no second degree, escape or recovery possible. If necessary, the raw and unadorned, horror, and dark magic.

Such worms teeming in a body, the extracts of the literary work of Barker are scattered at strategic places, so that they are spread over the whole of the body of the text and contaminate the works of other filmmakers. A favourable opportunity for calling the master of body horror David Cronenberg, and his famous Fly :

The monstrosity is relative in the eyes of Cronenberg, as normality and reality are constantly changing settings. The transformation can be a form of overtaking. The mutant, knocking down some of the barriers of the human, The Fly describes the relationship of a being to certain of his potential.

Leaves to link literature and cinema, Guy Astic opportunity to extend the exercise until a work for television, Buffy the vampire slayer :

The series of Joss Whedon worked out the slaughter of the ritual immemorial, to be more problematic the question of murder, through complex displays of the being that kills, be that suffering and be doomed to death.

And since it is question of the body in all its states, Outrages and rapture dares to look face to face and the state of transition between the world of the dead and the living, by going around the side of the morgue, a place of “dreadful in-between” where the corpse appears as ” the in-too much removal “.

All possible narrative paths that may branch off ; a way to emphasize the moment in unstable the after-death […] In this place of cold dissection or interim storage, the human cannot definitively leave the party.

For Territories of terror, Guy Astic chooses another prominent figure, Stephen King, including the need to contextualize geographically and culturally the stories horrific, invites you to a journey in the edge areas, the ends of the worlds, the transitory states. And this exploration concerned that constantly threatens to turn the travel to the strolling, wandering, or even to perdition.

The heroines of Stephen King touch the bottom, in holes in lost. In some respects, there creeps the novelty gothic, in this internalization oversized, which expands the private sphere in the heart of a chaos-world central and marginal, personal and universal.

Passing of the word to the image, the geography of King raises the question of the representation of these ” places worn down to the gothic breathless “, by which the writer gives an account of the ” défabulation room “, away from contemporary America to its cultural roots, symbolic, and narrative :

In the quasi-gothic world, traditional, everything takes place without any reduction in scope or a real disjunction between the decor and what that is called to evolve. In the worlds of the King on the other hand, the non-coincidence between the frame first and this one we call the space of drama, off-stage, which never stops pouring into the stage area, is striking.

The trip cinéphilique continues to other territories that are unstable and of concern, by asking themselves a few moments in the metropolis of London, which, in the image of Great Britain sensitive to the calls of globalization, despite its insularity, oscillates between seclusion and networking. If the name of the british capital appears in the title of the horror film from John Landis, The werewolf of London, which already reinvented, réagençait, provided a spatialisation new to the city at the pace of the demonstration that was the protagonist, and other filmmakers of the genre(s) have also proposed their visions of madness, horror, or revealing of the city.

Tobe Hooper with Lifeforce :

London seems to explode under the pressure of possible film together, becoming the crucible of Evil in all its forms, all its genres.

Or Christopher Smith with Creep :

In us immersing in the underground, Creep scrambles the cards in the wrong, leafing through its origins and its locations. The creature, The Other, is not the only executioner ; […] it is the body too, which is denied, of consciousness london, the projection is deformed from its guilt.

Other territory where the fantastic cinema flourished, thanks to the generation of J-Horror, Japan has experienced at the turn of the millennium, a form of “sarcasm existential” insidiously disseminated by such filmmakers as Takashi Miike (The Death line), Takashi Shimizu (Ju-On) or Hideo Nakata (Ring).

The technological means of observation, recording and transmission are widely put to contribution in order to show to what extent the individual and the society, entering into the age of progress, have increased their vulnerability. The (over)hype and the mesh communication is not used to connect just people to people, people in the world, but to wire them directly to evil.

Diagnosing the bankruptcy of the patterns community, system integrators, and relational, these japanese films also allow for the telescoping action between two times, two conceptions of time :

The time inconsistent, capricious is closer to the extremes, multiplied chausse-trapes, the representations that gape between the here and now, and the immemorial or the old.

Through the choice of its objects of study, Guy Astic reminds us that the encounter of space and time is a phenomenon inherent in the fantastic cinema. It is therefore timely that the journey leads the reader up to Los Angeles, the twilight zone dear to David Lynch, is conducive to the flaws with the spatial and temporal where damage to the edge of existence. Where this feeling continued to be in front of the scenes, anachronistic, backdated, as if Mulholland Drive was a reluctance between many eras.

Lynch extends his work on the absence of the rest of the appearances, investing frontally the universe hollywood that his productions have continued to graze until now. Result : Mulholland Drive is a film lived on dread-to be both necessary and artificial created by Hollywood.

For Astic, Lynch records the movement of figuration and de-figuration, ” the beat-spectral images-cinema “. The constant play of Mulholland Drive on appearances seems then to ask a question that already appeared in Sunset Boulevard : Where will the characters-actors when they are absent ? In which are they suffering ?

Published in the month of June, Shining on the mirror, sinks also in the twists and turns of the fantastic cinema by focusing on a single subject of study, the fascinating masterpiece of Stanley Kubrick. To try to fight your way in the labyrinth film, the author Loig Le Bihan is forced to approaching the work as much as his reflections in the mirror (the original novel by Stephen King, the television adaptation of Mick Garris), by assigning a place to each type of approach, each potential interpretations, in particular by semiology, by the analysis of the dialogue of the film with the history of the twentieth century. The result is a book with the meticulous care and to the information density to be exceptional, where you perceive as rarely the abundance and the progressive interpenetration of the intentions placed in the project :

Screenwriter Diane Johnson showed a penchant for roots fabulaires gender when Kubrick opted more and more resolutely to the strange, and soon the strangely disturbing. On one side, Bettelheim, Freud.

Le Bihan back, and the thread of the intentions and the transformations they have caused to the architectural construction of the film, the seeding of a multitude of details that invites the viewer to the surinterprétation :

The surinterprétation to me also seems the most appropriate means to account for a film of course still determined by the logic of a narrative, and a likely fictional, but with many “beaches” of indeterminacy which testify to its complexity […]. The surinterprétation is necessary, therefore, that the work manifests a logic immanent involving a constellation, that is to say, as a whole, of discontinuous and limited to determining mutually. “

To lovers of fantastic cinema, which, after a program that is as generous, would still have the appetite of a few sound readings, I will advise to consult the catalog of Deep Red, rich festivities such as : Guillermo del Toro. Men, gods and monsters, Joe Dante. The art of the game, Álex de la Iglesia The passion to turn, or even The Full Midi-Minuit Fantastique… : http://www.rougeprofond.com/LIVRES/RACCORDS/index.html

Arkham

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