The music of The Wicker Man

wicker_man.jpgLeft: The scarce first edition of the Hamlyn novelisation. From the Coulthart library.

I realised some years ago that all my favourite films have great soundtracks, almost without exception. Something about the blend of drama and well-chosen music really excites me, so it’s no surprise that The Wicker Man would appeal, having as it does a wonderful folk soundtrack. Nice to see from the discussion that follows how influential this soundtrack has been although I’m surprised they didn’t mention the multiple cover versions of Willow’s Song. Once again Hollywood has seen fit to gift us with a completely redundant cover version of their own; the less said about the imminent remake, the better.


‘It was a way into a magical world’
The Wicker Man is the unlikely inspiration to a new generation of British folk musicians. So we put the film’s musical fans in a room with its director to discuss its enduring appeal. By Will Hodgkinson.

Will Hodgkinson
Friday July 21, 2006
The Guardian

ONE OF THE unlikeliest motivating factors in the current wave of new British folk music is a horror movie from three decades ago. The Wicker Man, the story of an upright Christian police officer investigating the disappearance of young girl on the Scottish island of Summerisle, and stumbling across a pagan cult, is hardly a masterpiece. But it has endured as a cult classic because it is unique, fascinating and evocative. Its folk-based soundtrack and use of ancient rituals and mythology have made it the focal point for a new generation of British musicians. So, as the gods of creation poured golden light into a sacred hall (a meeting room at the Guardian) on a summer afternoon, we assembled a handful of Wicker Man-obsessed musicians to discuss the film’s influence with its director, Robin Hardy… (more)

Nosferatu

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Poster design by Albin Grau.

Friedrich Murnau’s Nosferatu, A Symphony of Horror (1922) isn’t the first horror film but it’s certainly the first truly effective one which is why it’s been so influential over the years, inspiring a remake by Werner Herzog (1979), the vampire’s appearance in Salem’s Lot (1979), Coppola’s Dracula (1992), and a fictionalised account of its creation in Shadow of the Vampire (2000).

The Internet Archive have a copy available as a free download. If you’ve never seen it then this is your chance since silent films rarely turn up on TV. Many early films exist in multiple versions due to the vagaries of film storage (different cuts, decaying prints, etc). Nosferatu was nearly destroyed altogether after a successful lawsuit by Bram Stoker’s widow, Florence, which means that all the prints are in a less than satisfactory condition. My own favourite is the BFI edition (which DVD now seems to be deleted), taken from the definitive “Bologna” restoration, with scenes tinted throughout (as silent films often were) and with a tremendous new score by Hammer composer James Bernard.

Murnau went on to make better films but Nosferatu retains an uncanny power owing to the rare combination of the director’s technical brilliance and Albin Grau’s fabulous vampire design, worlds away from Stoker’s sinister aristocrat. This is the place where cinema showed it could fully compete with horror fiction by summoning its own archetypes from the recesses of the imagination.

Wasted Talent: A Scanner Darkly

scanner.jpgWasted talent

John Patterson
Friday July 14, 2006
The Guardian

If you’re making a serious movie about drugs, it doesn’t hurt to assemble a cast that knows whereof it collectively speaks. And for his adaptation of A Scanner Darkly, Philip K Dick’s unsettling 1977 masterpiece about drugs, fractured identity, paranoia and betrayal, Richard Linklater has found a quartet that runs the full gamut of the drug experience. You’ve got Keanu Reeves – who for all we know has never even smoked a single joint, but whose name is a byword for stoner inarticulacy – playing Dick’s addict- cum-narcotics-detective Bob Arctor. As Arctor’s dealer-addict paramour Donna, we have Winona Ryder, all grown up since her apparently pill-induced moment of shoplifting madness. Hemp activist Woody Harrelson plays one of Arctor’s drug-addled housemates, while the other is played by no less august an imbiber of chemicals and sacred roots than Robert Downey Jr, who has what one might call an embarrassment of riches in this field.

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Good Night and Good Luck

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Only just caught this and it’s an excellent piece of work from Clooney and co. (his second time as director). Impossible not to see parallels between Ed Murrow’s determination to expose the excesses of McCarthyism with the current battles between the press in America and the belligerent rabble currently occupying the White House. Senator Joe McCarthy famously developed a pattern of accusing all his critics of being Communists or fellow travellers with the Communist cause. Likewise today we have the Bush administration accusing their critics of being traitors and terrorist sympathisers. Swap the word Communist for terrorist and the arguments remain identical. Last week the New York Times was accused of treason for publishing a report into secret service investigations into international banking activity, not the first time America’s newspaper of record has suffered accusations of treachery. As the NYT said in response:

Government officials, understandably, want it both ways. They want us to protect their secrets, and they want us to trumpet their successes. A few days ago, Treasury Secretary John Snow said he was scandalized by our decision to report on the bank-monitoring program. But in September 2003 the same Secretary Snow invited a group of reporters from our papers, The Wall Street Journal and others to travel with him and his aides on a military aircraft for a six-day tour to show off the department’s efforts to track terrorist financing. The secretary’s team discussed many sensitive details of their monitoring efforts, hoping they would appear in print and demonstrate the administration’s relentlessness against the terrorist threat.

Meanwhile Republicans continue to howl for the editor’s head. Why does America seem to slip into this kind of rigid authoritarianism so easily? This is one question not answered in Clooney’s film, perhaps understandably; it’s not an easy one to answer. Ed Murrow reported from London during the height of the Blitz and, at the end of the Second World War, from Buchenwald; he didn’t need lectures about patriotism or the evils that men are capable of. His articulacy compared with the showroom dummies that comprise today’s TV presenters is astonishing. His words are as relevant now as they were in the 1950s:

“If we confuse dissent with disloyalty – if we deny the right of the individual to be wrong, unpopular, eccentric or unorthodox – if we deny the essence of racial equality, then hundreds of millions in Asia and Africa who are shopping about for a new allegiance will conclude that we are concerned to defend a myth and our present privileged status. Every act that denies or limits the freedom of the individual in this country costs us the . . . confidence of men and women who aspire to that freedom and independence of which we speak and for which our ancestors fought.”

“We cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home.”

Postscript: There’s a good analysis of the NYT debacle and why it’s such a serious issue here.