The Big Picture Magazine
Fairy tales are for kids. Or are they? Natural landscapes have inspired imaginations for centuries. Norway’s spectacular scenery in particular has conjured a considerable legacy of folklore, fairy tales, and mythology; it is a landscape full of mystery, with plenty of pockets to hide in. André Øvredal’s Troll Hunter (2010) takes us back to Norway’s narrative origins, […]
If “art is an act of violence” as the uncompromising Nicolas Winding Refn has attested, then his vicious Viking abstraction Valhalla Rising must surely belong in the Louvre. Cut to the bone in terms of narrative and dialogue, the only thing harsher than the inevitability of (often brutal) death in Refn’s powerful and primeval journey […]
A feathered archipelago stretching northward into the Arctic Circle, Canada’s Nunavut territory is known for its rich and storied Inuit art, including sculpture, music and dance. It’s also the home of a 21st century wave of independent filmmaking – stories told by the Inuit population using homegrown talent. At the centre is Isuma, the award-winning […]
The great outdoors – here a maritime space – is a protagonist in its own right in John Boorman’s two-character film Hell in the Pacific (1968). The two marooned soldiers, played by Lee Marvin and Toshirō Mifune, fight for survival on an uninhabited atoll and fight each other before facing together the hazards of the […]