Film Review: The Reflecting Skin
1990′s The Reflecting Skin, directed by Philip Ridley, is a weird movie and rather obscure. It’s very interesting, and quiet, bizarre, grotesque, over-the-top, and terribly beautiful, all at once. Visually, it’s amazing. The cinematography is gorgeous, very unforgettable. It has such atmosphere… Eerie, chilling, ominous, cryptic, ascetic yet lush. Admittedly some of the acting is just god-awful (especially the child actors!), but the movie overall is kind of brilliant. Destined to be thought terrible and intolerable by many, I loved it. It is quite possibly the movie that most embodies an “American Gothic” quality/aesthetic, a haunting sense of desolation and hopelessness, mirrored by the land, and a hypocritical, unforgiving puritanism.
Taking place in rural America in the 1950s (whose landscape of yellow wheat fields and desolate, isolated, gray wood frame houses standing in the midst of them is shot very impressively and gorgeously), The Reflecting Skin is, sort of, about child abuse, innocence, imagination, death, mortality, and love. The main character is a young boy named Seth Dove who creates an elaborate fantasy around a mysterious, otherworldly-seeming English widow who lives nearby, believing her to be a vampire who is preying on his loved ones. I suppose it’s partly about the unimaginable innocence of youth… Instead of registering and owning a sense of evil in the world, Seth displaces it onto this mysterious figure, a source of external, supernatural evil, thus allowing him not to understand these strange, horrific, traumatic events around him.
The “vampire,” pale, regal, and obsessive, is such a strange, lovely, macabre, spectral, enigmatic character, with the most absolutely haunting speeches, remote yet intense, vehement, and unnerving meditations on aging and love. Icily menacing yet alluring, preternaturally quiet with sudden outbursts of piercing, violent, grotesque, deeply primal, forlorn emotion, mercurial as a madwoman, she was played pretty much to perfection by Lindsay Duncan. She should be an iconic figure, in my opinion.
This movie is fascinating, and even if you end up not liking it, you should definitely see it. The cinematography alone is worth it.
The entirety of the film (from the Japanese DVD) is up on YouTube.
Tags: 1950s, abuse, bizarre, children, cryptic, dark, film reviews, fragility, hauntingly beautiful, innocence, innocence/menace, macabre, metaphors, puritanical, religion, sexuality, strange beauty, surreal, surreal horror, trailers, vampires, visceral, witchy
Anja Millen’s “Carnival” Series
>>Anja Millen<<
Tags: alien beauty, anja millen, children, enlarged eyes, hauntingly beautiful, otherworldly photography, photomanipulation, portraits
Akino Kondoh
{Akino Kondoh‘s sketches and drawings for her short animations}
Beautiful.
Tags: black and white, bugs, children, creepy, innocence, intricate line drawings, ladybug, nostalgia, red, surreal, sweet/melancholy, trauma, twins/doppelgangers/doubles
Lost Fish’s Alice
These beautiful images are from the book Alice, à travers le miroir, a French edition of Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There illustrated by Lost Fish (see my previous post on her).
Tags: (twists on) traditional art, alice in wonderland, children, cute little girls, dollflesh, fragility, historically inspired, illustrations, innocence/menace, lolita-esque, lost fish, neo-victorian, pop surrealism, porcelain, precious, queens, red and white, surreal, sweet/melancholy
Internal Forest: The Paper-Cutting Art of Elsa Mora
Elsa Mora is an amazing and endlessly creative paper-cutting artist. With just sharp knives and scissors, she crafts evocative, entangling scenes (perfect for framing in shadowboxes), vignettes, and storytelling images of incredible detail out of paper, resonant with fairytale whimsy and deep emotion.
Tags: anatomical-themed, animals, blood, bugs, children, elsa mora, exposed anatomy, fairy tales, innocence, miniature, nature, paper-cutting, papercraft, red and white, sinister arts and crafts, unique rings, woods
Innocent Cadavers, The Flowers of Corruption: Art by Kikyz Ferrer
Tags: abstract, abuse, children, corpses, corrupted flesh, decomposition, exposed anatomy, fleshy, flowers, hauntingly beautiful, injuries, innocence, intricate line drawings, metamorphosis, trauma
Deathly Sweet: Macabre Ceramics by Maria Rubinke
Tags: babies, blood, ceramics, children, deer, dolls, innocence/menace, macabre, porcelain, red and white, sculptures, weird sculptures
Timothy Cummings
Tags: (twists on) traditional art, baroque, children, hauntingly beautiful, innocence/menace, medieval inspiration, neo-baroque, odalisque, realism, timothy cummings
The Art of Jodie Anne Candy
Tags: blood, bruises, children, enlarged eyes, expressive, hauntingly beautiful, innocence/menace, lolitaism, realism, saturated color, sweet/melancholy
Jana Brike’s “The Book of Taboo”
Jana Brike currently has a solo exhibit at ArtHatch in Escondido, California. Titled The Book of Taboo, this lush white-dominated, pink-tinged series focuses on prepubescent, androgynous girls and boys with milk-white skin and cherubic features, and portrays the theme of (yep, you guessed it) corrupted innocence. Lurid and twisted sexuality, eerie and sinister surreal imagery combined with the sweetness and purity of the diminutive figures, gambol and play in these portraits of children suspended somewhere between childhood and adolescence, between innocence and depraved malice. Jana Brike explains the influences behind these paintings here.
Tags: children, dollflesh, innocence/menace, jana brike, lolitaism, pop surrealism, sexuality, white
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