In Fabric

IdleRich

IdleRich
What the fuck was that about then? I always enjoy watching this guy's films (up to a point) but I wouldn't pretend to begin to understand any of them. Does anyone have any idea what he's trying to do?
 

version

Well-known member
I've never heard of it tbh. I've just seen it's a Peter Strickland thing who I have heard of, but I haven't seen any of his stuff.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Oh you should check this out then. It's got a kind of out of time feel as it seems to mash up a seventies, eighties and even, at times, nineties aesthetic - but more than all that it recalls the weird educational programmes we (or I at least) watched at school. The plot is sort of about a haunted dress bought from a beautifully art-deco department store presided over by a be-wigged mystical vampire and her creepy old boss who masturbates over her as she molests the mannequins at night. And there is a washing machine repairman who hypnotises people accidentally when he lists the faults with the machines. And the world is kinda our world but it's a kinda fascist-capitalist society (oh so it is our world) where bosses can take their employees to task for waving in the wrong way to someone outside or work. Music by Cavern of Anti-Matter. There is a hell of a lot to unpick in there. Oh, it's got Julian Barratt and Barry Adamson in it - one of my facebook friends said it was like Suspiria (which was a definite influence) meets Are You Being Served - and that's spot on.

 

IdleRich

IdleRich
I often get Peter Strickland confused with Ben Wheatley in my head cos they both have this similar English feel and draw from the same pool of actors. And they obviously have some feeling of kinship or whatever cos I notice Wheatley was exec producer on this film. Strickland however is much... weirder, or more idiosyncratic. In fact more personal I'd say, when I watch his films I have this feeling that he has a very specific idea that he wants to get across, or at least, a very clear vision of what he's doing. It's just that for the viewer it can be quite hard to access to that idea, but there is a sense in which it doesn't matter cos you can feel shards of something cool and important going on even if you can't grasp it all. As opposed to some things where you feel that the director is just saying "Blah blah capitalism... blah something... exploitation... mumble mumble bad... etc" or, to pick on one thing, Lodge 49 where it felt as though they completely just making it up as they went along.
 

poetix

we murder to dissect
I liked The Duke of Burgundy a great deal...

One thing I found intriguing about The Duke of Burgundy was the way it set its laborious fetish-games in a male-free, child-free, female-only world – the world of artsy lesbian softcore reimagined as a temporary autonomous zone – in which sexuality had no patriarchal referent or context: no reproductive hazard, no men to please or pacify, no discernible “metaphysics of force” of the kind outlined in Dworkin’s Intercourse. What social facts are being reproduced through embodied sexuality here? Ultimately, and rather tellingly, the axis of domination resignified in the lovers’ games is class. The key question at each moment is, who is working for whom? It’s clear that the relationship is rather tyrannical, that the submissive party is actually obnoxiously demanding, and that what she demands above all is emotional labour: say the lines with conviction, be spontaneous, surprise me. She’s like a terrible neoliberal employer: not only do you have to go through with this whole scripted routine, you have to do it with a smile (or, in this case, a convincing “coldness”), adorned all the while with the requisite number of “pieces of flair”. The feeling of relief when the lovers agreed to give it all a break for a bit was palpable – this was the true utopian moment in the film.

http://www.codepoetics.com/blog/2015/03/10/samois-gamgee/
 
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