Le fantastique: A Curious Tour of the French Weird

Le fantastique: A Curious Tour of the French Weird
Lecturer: Virginie Sélavy
Dates: 25 October 2018
Time: 6.30pm
Venue: BFI Southbank, London
Fee: £6.50
Tickets go on on sale at 11.30am on 25 September 2018
BFI website

Electric Sheep founder Virginie Sélavy traces the development of Le Cinéma fantastique in a talk to introduce the forthcoming BFI film season ‘Fantastique: The Dream Worlds of French Cinema‘.

“What pleases is what is terrible, gentle, and poetic”
Georges Franju

From the very first films by the Lumière brothers, French cinema has been perceived as tending towards the real; but there’s an alternative tradition that also stretches back to the dawn of cinema – that of the fantastique. It incorporates elements of fantasy, horror and science fiction into bizarre, atmospheric tales in which the unexplained and the supernatural intrude into reality. From the magical illusions of Georges Méliès, the fantastique flourished again during the German occupation, reached poetic heights in the films of Jean Cocteau and Georges Franju, found parallel expressions in Belgium, and was revitalised in the post-New Wave 1970s and beyond.

Taking in fairy tales, horror and science fiction, the marvellous and the strange, the dreamlike and the uncanny, Le Cinéma fantastique is a French filmic tradition ripe for rediscovery. In this talk, Virginie Sélavy will trace its development from Georges Méliès to Lucile Hadžihalilović, looking at the influence of Surrealism, the wartime golden age and the experiments of the 1970s, up to the present day.

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Virginie Sélavy is the founder and editor of Electric Sheep, the online magazine for transgressive cinema. She was the co-director of the London branch of The Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies from January 2015 to December 2017. She has edited the collection of essays The End: An Electric Sheep Anthology, and has written about Jean Rollin, Michael Powell and Victorian London on film. Her work has appeared in various publications, including Sight & Sound, Cineaste and Monstrum. She regularly gives talks and runs courses on topics ranging from women exploitation directors to Surrealism and May 68. She is currently working on a book on Sado-Masochism in cinema.

Witches and Witchfinders: Sorcery and counterculture in the films of Michael Reeves

Witches and Witchfinders: Sorcery and counterculture in the films of Michael Reeves

Lecturer: Virginie Sélavy

Dates: 17 October 2018

Time: 7pm – 10pm

Venue: Horse Hospital, London

Fees: £8 advance/£10 on the door

Tickets are on sale via www.wegottickets.com

Horse Hospital website

To mark the 50th anniversary of the release of Witchfinder General, Electric Sheep founder Virginie Sélavy explores the sorcery theme that runs through director Michael Reeves’s work.

Best known for his savage tale of religious persecution Witchfinder General (1968), director Michael Reeves only completed three feature films in his short life. Despite this, he remains a hugely influential figure of 1960s British cinema, and a singular voice in the countercultural context of the time. Through his three films, Reeves offered a unique and contrary take on the dominant themes of the period, notably freedom and rebellion, which he strikingly framed, in all three cases, within stories of sorcery.

Indebted to Mario Bava’s Black Sunday (1960) and sharing its female star, Barbara Steele, Reeves’s first feature film, Revenge of the Blood Beast (1966), drops a hip young English couple into an Eastern European backwater steeped in legend and superstition. His following film, The Sorcerers (1967), locates witchery in contemporary London and connects it with the nascent psychedelic scene. With its tale of a young couple tormented by a spiteful witch hunter, Witchfinder General is no less permeated by contemporary concerns with generational conflict, oppressive authority and individual revolt, despite the fact that it is set in the 17th century.

To mark the 50th anniversary of the release of Witchfinder General, this talk will examine the sorcery theme that runs through Reeves’s work in relation to key countercultural ideas and place it in the context of other witch films of the period. It will show that under the cool, liberated, thrill-seeking, free-love, anti-authoritarian surface of the 1960s Reeves sees the dark side of the cultural revolution and reveals mankind’s eternal propensity for violence.

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Virginie Sélavy is the founder and editor of Electric Sheep, the online magazine for transgressive cinema. She was the co-director of the London branch of The Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies from January 2015 to December 2017. She has edited the collection of essays The End: An Electric Sheep Anthology, and has written about Jean Rollin, Michael Powell and Victorian London on film. Her work has appeared in various publications, including Sight & Sound, Cineaste and Monstrum. She regularly gives talks and runs courses on topics ranging from women exploitation directors to Surrealism and May 68. She is currently working on a book on Sado-Masochism in cinema.

For more information visit the Horse Hospital website.