Living in Harmony with Ian Rakoff

The Prisoner
The Prisoner

audio To coincide with the 42nd anniversary of the broadcast of The Prisoner episode for which he wrote the original script, Alex Fitch talks to writer, editor and raconteur Ian Rakoff about his experiences working on the cult 60s series and being an observer of British film culture in the 1970s and beyond. Rakoff talks about the bowdlerisation of his script for ‘Living in Harmony’, his experiences with Lindsay Anderson on such films as If…. and O Lucky , working with Nicolas Roeg, Stephen Frears and John
Boorman and his lifetime interest in comic books.

For more info about the variety of formats in which you can download/stream this podcast, please visit archive.org

Links:
Interview with Ian Rakoff on Electric Sheep contributor Paul Gravett’s website
Buy The Prisoner on Blu-ray from Network
Buy Ian Rakoff’s book Inside the ‘Prisoner’: Radical Television and Film in the 1960s from Amazon
Listen to / watch Alex Fitch’s interview with Malcolm McDowell and Mike Kaplan about working with Lindsay Anderson
Read Prisoner inspired rock group Do not forsake me oh my darling‘s list of favourite films on Electric Sheep

Electric Sheep Magazine Winter 09

‘I Fought the Law’ – The winter 09 issue of Electric Sheep looks at what makes a cinematic outlaw: read about the misdeeds of low-life gangsters, gentlemen thieves, deadly females, modern terrorists, cop killers and vigilantes, bikers and banned filmmakers.

The magazine is no longer available and we are no longer published by Wallflower Press.

Also in this issue: interview with John Hillcoat about his adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, the art of Polish posters according to Andrzej Klimowski, Andrew Cartmel discusses The Prisoner and noir comic strips!

The Films of Sally Potter

rage
Sally Potter's 'Rage'

audio

In an hour-long Q&A recorded at Cinephila West in Westbourne Grove, London, Sophie Mayer talks to director Sally Potter about her career, focusing on the films Orlando, The Tango Lesson and her new film Rage. Recorded and edited by Alex Fitch.

For more info about the variety of formats you can download this podcast in / stream, please visit www.archive.org.

Use iTunes?

Links:
Official movie website
Sally Potter’s website
More info about Sophie Mayer’s book The films of Sally Potter: A Politics of Love

Electric Sheep Magazine Autumn 09


‘Ther’s tha devil movin’ in my blood’. The autumn 09 issue of Electric Sheep looks at religious extremes on film from Christic masochism to satanic cruelty. The extraordinary White Lightnin’ explores the Old Testament world of demented mountain dancer Jesco White while Klaus Kinski disastrously reinterprets the New Testament in Jesus Christ Saviour – and subversives Alejandro Jodorowsky and Kenneth Anger dynamite divine myths.

The magazine is no longer available and we are no longer published by Wallflower Press.

Also in this issue: Terry Gilliam’s The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, Raindance 09, political animation, and louche mariachi rockabilly Dan Sartain picks his top films!

Dario Argento + Goblin

Dario Argento directs Adrien Brody on the set of Giallo
Dario Argento directs Adrien Brody on the set of Giallo

I’M READY FOR MY CLOSE-UP

In an interview recorded at the Cine-Excess film festival in London, Alex Fitch talks to Italian cult filmmaker Dario Argento about his career from writing ‘Spaghetti Westerns’ scripts in the 1960s such as Once Upon a time in the West to his most recent film Mother of Tears. Argento talks about the importance of music in his work, why he doesn’t like being pigeon-holed as a horror director and his new project Giallo.


5pm Resonance 104.4 FM (London) / streamed at www.resonancefm.com


audio Listen to the podcast of the Dario Argento interview + Goblin Q&A led by Alex Fitch at the Supersonic music festival in Birmingham.

Goblin circa 2009 - Fabio Pignatelli / Massimo Morante / Maurizio Guarini / Agostino Marangolo
Goblin circa 2009 - Fabio Pignatelli / Massimo Morante / Maurizio Guarini / Agostino Marangolo

Alex Fitch talks to the Italian prog rock band Goblin – Fabio Pignatelli, Massimo Morante, Agostino Marangolo and Maurizio Guarini – about scoring Argento’s films from Profondo Rosso (Deep Red) to Non ho sonno (Sleepless).

For more info about the variety of formats you can download this podcast in / stream, please visit www.archive.org

Use iTunes?

Links:

Read a transcript of Alex’s interview with director Dario Argento in Electric Sheep Magazine
Goblin‘s official website
Cine-Excess website

Watch the trailer for Giallo:

Electric Sheep Film Club: White Lightnin’

Still from White Lightnin' by Dominic Murphy
White Lightnin'

Date: Wednesday 2 September

Time: 9pm

Venue: Prince Charles Cinema, London

Price: £5.00/£3.50 Prince Charles members

Certificate: 18 tbc

Dir: Dominic Murphy, UK 2009

Prince Charles Cinema website

ticketWEDNESDAY 2 SEPTEMBER, Prince Charles Cinema, 9pm : WHITE LIGHTNIN’ – Special preview and Q&A

A dark, surreal semi-biopic about glue-sniffing, hard-drinking, hell-raising Appalachian mountain dancer Jesco White (impressively played by newcomer Ed Hogg), British director Dominic Murphy’s controversial debut feature takes us deeper and deeper into Jesco’s crazed visions and wild religious fantasies, culminating in horrific revenge and violent redemption.

We are delighted to welcome Dominic Murphy for a Q&A after the screening.

With thanks to Momentum Pictures. White Lightnin’ starts its theatrical run at the ICA and Rich Mix (Bethnal Green), London, on September 25.

Next screening: WEDNESDAY 7 OCTOBER – Rollerball

Radio: Francis Matthews

Francis Matthew is Paul Temple while Captain Scarlet looks on
Francis Matthews is Paul Temple while Captain Scarlet looks on

To coincide with the release of the little known BBC TV adaptation of the Paul Temple mysteries on DVD, Alex Fitch and Robin Warren talk to actor Francis Matthews about his career from playing the aforementioned suave mystery writer turned detective to voicing the indestructible puppet Captain Scarlet and fighting Christopher Lee’s Rasputin in the underrated Hammer film about The Mad Monk.

10.30pm Thursday 13/08/09, repeated 5pm Friday 14/08/09, Resonance 104.4 FM (London) / streamed at www.resonancefm.com / podcast online at http://www.sci-fi-london.com 20/08/09.

Links:
Wikipedia pages on Francis Matthews, Paul Temple and Captain Scarlet.

Electric Sheep Film Club: Carnival of Souls

Still from Carnival of Souls by Herk Harvey
Carnival of Souls

Date: Wednesday 5 August

Time: 8pm

Venue: Prince Charles Cinema, London

Price: £5.00/£3.50 Prince Charles members

Certificate: 15

Dir: Herk Harvey, USA 1962

Prince Charles Cinema website

ticketWEDNESDAY 5 AUGUST, Prince Charles Cinema, 8pm : CARNIVAL OF SOULS

This seminal atmospheric horror film influenced such masters of fright and strangeness as George A Romero and David Lynch. After surviving a car crash that left her friends dead, Mary Henry is beset by nightmarish visions involving a menacing ghost and becomes increasingly isolated from her community. As daily life is gradually contaminated by the otherworldly, the film takes on the texture of a horrific dream, fluid and eerie, rich, dark, deep and infinitely memorable.

Next screening: WEDNESDAY 2 SEPTEMBER – Special preview of White Lightnin’ + director Q&A!

Goblin at the Supersonic Festival

Goblin circa 2009 - Fabio Pignatelli / Massimo Morante / Maurizio Guarini / Agostino Marangolo
Goblin circa 2009 - Fabio Pignatelli / Massimo Morante / Maurizio Guarini / Agostino Marangolo
Supersonic festival 2009 poster
Supersonic festival 2009 poster

This weekend, the cult Italian rock band Goblin are headlining the Supersonic festival in Birmingham, playing the final gig of the event at 11pm on Sunday 26 July. The band will be doing a Q & A on stage about their music with Electric Sheep Magazine‘s assistant editor Alex Fitch at 6.15pm. The name Goblin first appeared on the map in 1975, when the band recorded the soundtrack for Dario Argento’s film Profondo Rosso. This was the starting point for a decade-long, highly creative and widely influential collaboration between the eccentric filmmaker and Goblin, which turned the group into the aural signifier of Italian horror films of the 70s and 80s. They created soundtracks to such cult classics as Suspiria (1977) and Dawn of the Dead (Zombi, 1978).

For more info about the Supersonic festival and how to buy tickets, visit the festival website at www.capsule.org.uk/supersonic.

The Q & A will be podcast in a future Electric Sheep podcast

Links: Goblin‘s official website
Info about Goblin on wikipedia and the IMDb
Read Alex Fitch’s interview with director Dario Argento in Electric Sheep Magazine

The current state of gay cinema part 2 (Monika Treut / Paul Morrison)

Still from Ghosted by Monika Treut
Ghosted

I’M READY FOR MY CLOSE-UP
Monika Treut is an independent German filmmaker who has explored female and lesbian sexuality in her films since her debut feature, the controversial Seduction: The Cruel Woman, in 1985. She followed it up with the coming-out tale Virgin Machine in 1988. She turned to documentary in 1992 with Female Misbehavior, four portraits of ‘bad girls’ including Camille Paglia, and made the acclaimed Gendernauts in 1999, which portrayed a group of transgendered people in San Francisco. In 2001, Treut made Warrior of Light, a documentary on Yvonne Bezerra de Mello, an artist and human rights activist who works with slum children in Rio de Janeiro. In 2002, Treut travelled to Taiwan and became fascinated by the country. She made the documentary Tigerwomen Grow Wings about three generations of women, and recently returned to fiction with Ghosted, an unconventional love story between a German artist and a Taiwanese woman set between Hamburg and Taipei.

Virginie Sélavy talked to Monika Treut during the London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, where Ghosted has its UK premiere.

5pm Resonance 104.4 FM (London) / streamed at www.resonancefm.com

audioListen to the podcast: The second of two podcasts looking at the current state of gay cinema includes Virginie Sélavy’s interview with Monika Treut + guest interviewer Chris Patmore, from Films and Festivals magazine talks to director Paul Morrison about his film Little Ashes, which looks at the relationship between Dali and the poet Federico Garcí­a Lorca, as played by Twilight star Robert Pattinson and Javier Beltrí¡n respectively. (Part 2 of 2)

little
Federico Garcí­a Lorca played by Javier Beltrí¡n and Robert Pattinson as Salvador Dali in Little Ashes

For more info about the variety of formats you can download this podcast in / stream, please visit www.archive.org


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