Authors Electric

Having recently watched Roman Polanski’s 1976 psychological thriller,  The Tenant , for the first time, I was struck once again by the degree to which films have influenced me when it comes to narrative structure. Which isn’t to say that I haven’t been influenced far more by the past 400-years’ worth of novels we’ve been gifted to read…but somehow, as Tanita Tikaram put it back in the 80s, cinema has been the Twist in My Sobriety where narrative is concerned. I’d loved The Fearless Vampire Killers  and Rosemary’s Baby , re-watched them many times since initial encounters with them during childhood(!)... And it seems my response to Polanski duplicates my response to Tarkofsky, or to Knut Hamsun, or to Mikhail Bulgakov, where I seem to fall in love early with one piece of work (Tarkofsky’s Solaris , Hamsun’s Hunger , Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita )…this one piece of work then mesmerises me as I watch and re-watch, or read and re-read, through decades, attemptin...

Woody Allen has said in an interview how much he had loved Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 black satirical comedy, DR STRANGELOVE, and that, like many others, he then waited four expectant years for Kubrick’s next film to appear. Allen sat in the darkness of the cinema and watched all of 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY. He exited the cinema, just thinking “what was that?” He couldn’t make head nor tail of Kubrick’s new film and was very disappointed. A week later, says Allen, he went back to see 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY. On the second viewing, Allen loved it and concluded this was one of the best films he had ever seen in his life. And so the confounding of expectations…particularly in cinema and literature, genre expectations, can go… Kubrick seemed to delight in radical shifts in subject matter from film to film: from noir to war, from satire to science fiction, from the distant past of SPARTACUS to the dystopian future of A CLOCKWORK ORANGE; from the candle-lit 18 th century picture-frame ...