Tag Archives: Miskatonic Institute

Vulgar Structures; or Andrzej Żuławski’s Love Triangles

miskatonic-possession
Possession

Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies – London

Instructor: Daniel Bird

Date: 13 October 2016

Time: 7-10pm

Venue: Horse Hospital

Address: Colonnade, Bloomsbury, London WC1N 1JD

Prices: £10 advance / £8 concs / £11 on the door

Miskatonic website

Writer and filmmaker Andrzej Żuławski, who passed away earlier this year, worked in many different genres: war films (The Third Part of the Night), gothic horror (The Devil, Possession), melodrama (The Most Important Thing: Love, My Nights Are More Beautiful Than Your Days, La Fidelite), thrillers (La Femme publique, Cosmos), science fiction (On the Silver Globe), costume dramas (La Note bleue),crime films (L’Amour braque), erotic dramas (Szamanka) – even musicals (Boris Godunov). However, all of Żuławski’s films share the same fundamentally vulgar structure: the love triangle. This class looks at the love triangle fundamental to all of Żuławski’s films and squares it with this remarkable director’s life and loves.

About the instructor:

Daniel Bird is a writer, filmmaker, and one of the world’s leading scholars on Eastern European cult cinema. He has curated numerous retrospectives, overseen film restorations, participated in DVD commentaries and is best known as the biographer of both Walerian Borowczyk and Andrzej Żuławski. Daniel Bird first interviewed Żuławski for Eyeball magazine with Stephen Thrower back in 1997. He organised ‘A Weekend with Andrzej Żuławski’, the first Anglo-phone overview of Żuławski’s films, at the Cine Lumiere in 1998. The following year he visited the set of Żuławski’s La fidelite in Paris and worked with with Anchor Bay Entertainment to release Possession on DVD in the U.S., for which he also moderated a commentary track with the director. Over the years he continued to work with Żuławski, liaising with festivals, distributors and producers on retrospectives, DVD releases and film projects. Last year he made the English subtitles for Żuławski’s Cosmos and produced a restoration of On the Silver Globe.

About the Miskatonic Institute:

Named for the fictional university in H.P. Lovecraft’s literary mythos, The Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies is a non-profit, community-based organization that started in Canada, founded by Kier-La Janisse in March of 2010. The school currently has branches in Montreal and London, with Miskatonic London operating under the co-direction of Kier-La Janisse and Electric Sheep Founder/Editor Virginie Sélavy.

All classes take place at the historic Horse Hospital, the heart of the city’s underground culture. Season ticket is £35 and will be available shortly. Individual class tickets are £10 advance / £11 on the door / £8 concessions and will be available 30 days in advance of each class.

For full details of the next courses please check the Miskatonic website. For all enquiries, please email Miskatonic.london[at]gmail.com.

Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies – London unveils fall 2016 line-up

Miskatonic_Autumn2016

Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies – London

Fall 2016 season:
Sept – Dec 2016

Dates: 22 September, 13 October, 10 November, 8 December

Time: 7-10pm

Venue: Horse Hospital

Address: Colonnade, Bloomsbury, London WC1N 1JD

Prices: £10 advance / £11 on the door / £8 concs / £35 full season ticket

Miskatonic website

THE MISKATONIC INSTITUTE OF HORROR STUDIES – LONDON UNVEILS FALL 2016 LINEUP

The Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies – London returns to the Horse Hospital for another semester of film and pop culture classes, with a 2016 fall line-up led by some of the genre world’s most renowned critical luminaries.

Mark Pilkington (Owner of Strange Attractor Press, writer/director of Mirage Men) launches the season in September with his lecture Rituals in the Dark: Evoking Magic on Film. From the grit of medieval grimoires and spellcraft to the spiritual liberation of mid-twentieth century witchcraft, this lecture will look at a number of representations of magic on film, from the silent era, through Expressionism, B-movies, the avant garde and into the mainstream.

He will be followed in October by visiting instructor Daniel Bird, whose studies in Poland led to his becoming the pre-eminent biographer of both Walerian Borowczyk and Andrzej Żuławski. In Vulgar Structures; or Andrzej Żuławski’s Love Triangles, he will use his intimate knowledge of the late Żuławski’s work to look at the love triangle fundamental to all of his films, and to square it with this remarkable director’s life and loves.

In November, Warwick University scholar Catherine Lester will present Little Terrors: Children’s Horror on Film and Television. This class will explore in detail the area of horror films and television programmes created specifically for children in the UK and the US, with an emphasis on programming from the 70s and 80s.

And to close the season, the Horse Hospital turns into The Black Lodge when acclaimed horror author Maura McHugh visits from Ireland to bring us Working the Blue Rose Case: Signs, Codes, and Mysteries in David Lynch’s Fire Walk with Me.

Named for the fictional university in H.P. Lovecraft’s literary mythos, The Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies is a non-profit, community-based organisation that started in Winnipeg and Montreal, Canada, founded by Kier-La Janisse in March of 2010. Miskatonic London operates under the co-direction of Kier-La Janisse and Virginie Sélavy.

All classes take place at the historic Horse Hospital, the heart of the city’s underground culture. Registration for the full season is £35. Individual class tickets are £10 advance / £11 on the door / £8 concessions and will be available 30 days in advance of each class.

For the full details of the courses please check the Miskatonic website. For all enquiries, please email Miskatonic.london@gmail.com.

J.G. Ballard: Crash, The Atrocity Exhibition and Moving beyond Literature

ballard-640x420
JG Ballard

Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies – London

Instructors: Jack Sargeant

Date: 7 January 2016

Time: 7-10pm

Venue: Horse Hospital

Address: Colonnade, Bloomsbury, London WC1N 1JD

Prices: £10 advance / £8 concs / £11 on the door / season tickets £40 coming shortly

Miskatonic website

Building on Jack Sargeant’s previously published research on J.G. Ballard, this talk explores Ballard in the realms beyond literature, looking at his graphics, use of performance and the infamous Crashed Cars exhibition as well as the short film Crash, in relation to the aesthetic ‘perversions’ that emerged around his ground-breaking 1970s novels. The talk offers an exploration of Ballard’s radical experimental work, and traces its influence into the subcultural mise en scène of the era and beyond.

The talk will include a screening of The Unlimited Dream Company (dir: Sam Scoggins, 1983, 24 mins).

This is the first lecture of the Spring 2016 semester. The semester runs from January to May. Season tickets will be available shortly.

About the instructor

As an author Jack Sargeant’s work has been described as ‘dangerously inspirational’. His numerous books include Against Control, Deathtripping: The Extreme Underground and Naked Lens: Beat Cinema (like Deathtripping now in its third English language edition). His forthcoming book Flesh and Excess on Underground Film is due for publication in late 2015. He has written on film and culture for numerous books, anthologies and journals, and introductions for books by Lydia Lunch, Romain Slocombe, Joe Coleman and for William Burroughs’s Unforgettable Characters. He writes a regular column for FilmInk, and has written for The Wire, Xochi 23, Fortean Times, World Art, Real Time and many other publications. Jack has frequently appeared as a documentary interviewee in films including Blank City, The Advocate for Fagdom and Llik Your Idols. He is regularly called upon to assist in research for television and film documentaries. In addition to writing, Sargeant has lectured on underground film and culture, beat culture, William Burroughs and many other topics across the world. He has curated numerous film and art events, including co-curating the critically acclaimed ‘Sex’ at Melbourne’s Strange Neighbour gallery. He is currently programme director for the Revelation Film Festival in Western Australia.

About the Miskatonic Institute:

Named for the fictional university in H.P. Lovecraft’s literary mythos, The Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies is a non-profit, community-based organization that started in Canada, founded by Kier-La Janisse in March of 2010. The school currently has branches in Montreal and London, with Miskatonic London operating under the co-direction of Kier-La Janisse and Electric Sheep Founder/Editor Virginie Sélavy.

All classes take place at the historic Horse Hospital, the heart of the city’s underground culture. Individual class tickets are £10 advance / £11 on the door / £8 concessions and will be available 30 days in advance of each class. Season tickets are £40 and will be available shortly.

The course dates of the Spring semester are 7 January, 11 February, 10 March, 14 April, 12 May. For the full details of the course please check the Miskatonic website. For all enquiries, please email Miskatonic.london[at]gmail.com.

Engulfed by Nature: Psychological and Supernatural Landscapes

symptoms-455
Symptoms

Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies – London

Instructor: Jasper Sharp

Date: 14 May 2015

Time: 7-10pm

Venue: Horse Hospital

Address: Colonnade, Bloomsbury, London WC1N 1JD

Prices: £10 advance / £8 concs / £11 on the door

Miskatonic website

‘There is magic all around us’, Udo Kier famously states at a key point in Dario Argento’s Suspiria (1977), a sentiment reiterated by one of the characters in Richard Stanley’s Dust Devil (1992), which sees its protagonists drawn out of their mundane suburban environment in small-town South Africa into the heart of the Namib desert to be confronted by their darkest demons.

Stanley’s film in particular presents a sublime example of how landscape and elemental conditions can be evoked to express dangerous forces existing beyond man’s perceptual and belief systems, but also, in contrast, how heightened psychological states can be given visual form through use of such timeless spaces, taking the viewer out of their comfort zones and back into nature at its most wild, mysterious and untamed.

In an ever-urbanising world, the textures, rhythms and sounds of nature can be made to seem increasingly alien and alienating on film, making us realize we are but a small part of a wider world beyond our control. Works ranging from Kaneto Shindo’s Onibaba (1964) through José Larraz’s Symptoms (1974) and Jerzy Skolimowski’s The Shout (1978) reframe our perceptions, interrogating the boundaries between the physiological and the supernatural, as interior worlds collapse beneath the weight of exterior ones.

This lecture and screening by Jasper Sharp will look at how such mysterious invisible forces of nature are given vent in a number of films depicting the rupture between these rational and irrational domains. It will explore how pantheistic belief systems that hold that spirits reside in everything, such as Japan’s Shinto religion, overlap with a British folk tradition of supernatural writers such as Arthur Machen and William Hope Hodgson, and how foreign directors often have a keener, more nuanced eye for the expressive potential of the English landscape to portray characters off-kilter with their environment.

About the instructor:

Jasper Sharp is a writer, curator and filmmaker. He is the co-founder of Midnight Eye.com, since 2001 the premier online resource in the English-language about Japanese cinema. His book publications include The Midnight Eye Guide to New Japanese Film (Stone Bridge, 2003), joint-written with Tom Mes, Behind the Pink Curtain (FAB Press, 2008) and The Historical Dictionary of Japanese Film (Scarecrow 2011). His writing has appeared in publications all over the world, including Sight & Sound, The Guardian, Variety, The Japan Times, Kateigaho and Film International, and he has contributed liner essays, commentaries and interviews to numerous DVD releases. He has curated high profile seasons and retrospectives with organisations including the British Film Institute, Deutches Filmmuseum, Austin Fantastic Fest, Cinematheque Quebecois and Thessaloniki International Film Festival. Between 2010-14, he was the director of Zipangu Fest, established to showcase Japanese independent film in the United Kingdom, and is currently the programme director of Asia House Pan-Asian Film Festival. He is the co-director, with Tim Grabham, of The Creeping Garden (2014), a documentary about slime moulds and the people who study and work with them, which won the Best Documentary Filmmakers Award at Fantastic Fest in Austin. A book of the film, The Creeping Garden: Irrational Encounters with Plasmodial Slime Moulds, is due for publication by Alchimia in the Spring of 2015.

About the Miskatonic Institute:

Named for the fictional university in H.P. Lovecraft’s literary mythos, The Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies is a non-profit, community-based organization that started in Canada, founded by Kier-La Janisse in March of 2010. The school currently has branches in Montreal and London, with Miskatonic London operating under the co-direction of Kier-La Janisse and Electric Sheep Founder/Editor Virginie Sélavy.

All classes take place at the historic Horse Hospital, the heart of the city’s underground culture. Individual class tickets are £10 advance / £11 on the door / £8 concessions and will be available 30 days in advance of each class.

The final course date is 11 June. For the full details of the course please check the Miskatonic website. For all enquiries, please email Miskatonic.london[at]gmail.com.