Considers how the use of landscape in British film can help form a sense of unease
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Discusses case studies of British films released in the first two decades of the twenty-first century, including Dead Man’s Shoes, the Red Riding Trilogy, Wuthering Heights, Kill List, Tyrannosaur, A Field in England and The Selfish Giant
Explores how these films, through their use of landscape, both subvert and renew recognised modes of screen storytelling such as eerie, pastoral, heritage and epic
Engages with scholars from a range of disciplinary areas – film studies, landscape and hauntology
A consideration of how some recent British films are defined by their atmospheres of unease, which grow out of a bold and distinctive treatment of landscape. An uncertain tendency in recent British cinema has been to conjure atmospheres of eerie unease, depicting landscapes through which lost figures wander.
The films of, among others, Andrea Arnold, Clio Barnard, Paddy Considine, Shane Meadows and Ben Wheatley play out against these landscapes, which are formed of abandoned sites that are neither rural nor urban, but somewhere in between. These liminal spaces are disorientating enclosures from which the viewer infers something malign: the pestilence in the ditch. These contaminated metaphysical spaces are travelled by the films’ characters and viewers alike.
Uncanny Landscapes in 21st Century British Cinema: The Pestilence in the Ditch opens up whole new layers of discussion of British landscape cinema. From examining the poetry of John Clare and the enclosures, to considering the road racers in The Selfish Giant as the descendants of Goldsmith’s village, this book looks at the films discussed in a totally fresh and expansive way.
Guided by a dazzling and genuinely illuminating range of cultural reference, Lawrence Jackson has journeyed to the edgelands of British cinema in the company of film-makers such as Andrea Arnold, Clio Barnard, Paddy Considine, Shane Meadows and Ben Wheatley. The result is a remarkably acute and deeply disturbing study of the pestilent landscapes of present-day England.
