Intercessional review

Intercessional review

On the suggestion of my tutors I have been watching certain films or series including Apocalypse now, 28 days later, the road and channel 4s Utopia. For further inspiration

Some consistent themes that appear includes:

Darkness and fog: this is an essential motif, in both “Apocalypse Now” and in Goya’s work it serves to create a nightmarish hallucinatory environment and symbolically emphasizes a divorcement and dissociation from civilization and rationality. The profuse darkness and fog in this media enforce the visual aspects and create an ever worsening cycle of fear madness and confusion.

Human decadence: Apocalypse now is a good example for this being a pessimistic and highly critical commentary of the superficial and morally-void cultural identity of the American soldiers. In the opening scenes we are introduced to the American army pointlessly blowing everything to high hell and then treated to surfing during an ongoing air raid. It was looking at these immoral and confused actions that ended with Kurtz going insane through a despair event horizon! 28 days later serves as an allegorical one as the scientist suggests that “Rage” is what infected humanity and brought it to the edge of extinction. Several other features of this zombie-apocalypse seem to exemplify this as the colonel is the most abject amoral man seen in the movie and an ape is seen strapped down and watching various tv screens depicting violence and carnage.

Natural climate change: while never explicitly stated it is implied that the Road is the effects of a nuclear winter that is slowly killing off everything. The skies are covered in dense cloud and the world is getting colder and bleaker every moment. The landscape is dark foreboding and grim to say the least and the urban vestiges are abandoned and crumbling in disuse while the environment seems to be composed of dust. Nowadays global warming is a major issue and the idea of the Earth suddenly becoming poisonous to us is of thematic relevance in media everywhere.

Remaining vestiges: in various apocalyptic films the most poignant effect is how they portray surviving vestiges of humanity and can instil a sense of presence juxtaposed with emptiness of the lost civilization. In Utopia one of the Network agents and antagonists muses over the ideal world as sterile and empty “I see a planet turned into a desert with thousands starving dying.”

There are many of these aspects that can be visually appealing for my work and I would like to explore all kinds of contexts and directions for this