The Big Picture Magazinewrites about film, literature and landscape. He also works clinically within the fields of autism and psychoanalysis. Thinking critically about cinema, and exploring the ways in which films create different kinds of tension is a large part of his work, and has been a lasting interest since he bought his first TV and DVD player fifteen years ago.
What makes a ghost story is known to us in that subconscious way we also know the sound of a nursery rhyme or Christmas carol when we hear one. We may have no idea how to explain the constituent parts of these things, or how these elements combine to achieve the desired result. It’s something […]
Imagine a giant city floating in space, built not by one species, but a thousand; not as part of a master project planned this way from the outset, but evolving over time to accommodate the needs, desires and cultures of disparate worlds; always in close quarters, always disseminating knowledge throughout a bricolage of cosmic society. […]
Joanna Hogg’s second feature film follows in the footsteps of her first. Like Unrelated (2007), Archipelago (2010) is a brutally realist study of affluent people on holiday. However, instead of Italy, Hogg’s new fictional British family travels to the Isles of Scilly, returning to a much-beloved cottage for the final time before Edward (Tom Hiddleston) […]
The tall fence encloses the camp on all sides. Its metal uprights are spiked at the top. The railway cuts along its far side with a caravan, broken Volvo and lonely horse in the shade of the Tilbury flyover. Brambles and broken pallets present their sharp thorns and splinters to all who pass. Mia is […]
According to psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, our personalities are formed through our relationship to language as we encounter things, and seek to explain who we are in relation to them. This is a completely personal: no one person has ever been – or ever will be able to experience this in the exact same way, because […]
The festive period seems a pertinent moment to explore representations of decadence in film.
We follow the Rover through hostility and violence on his journey through the Outback.
The setting for Alien 3 is a dank world devoid of sunlight and common sense. David Fincher’s first feature film is often overlooked despite the influence of H.R. Giger’s ultra-detailed sci-fi art that remains so emblematic of the first two instalments in the franchise. Despite the emphasis on recreating the harsh aesthetic of the Alien […]