In English

Did you know that Jesse Armstrong screened "Festen" for his entire crew before shooting the first season of "Succession" – or that the visual style was inspired by Annie Leibovitz and her famous photojournalism? And did you know that the visual style in "The White Lotus" was inspired by the Madonna Inn and local artworks featuring Hawaiian workers in the pineapple fields? Find out more in this interview-based article about the cinematography and visual design in two of the most interesting TV series from 2021? N.B.: The article contains spoilers.

IN ENGLISH. In terms of style and content, the new Twin Peaks is radically different from the original series, and it includes abstract references to different David Lynch productions while combining familiar faces and places with new situations, stylistic choices and characters. In many ways, the new series is about “returning,” about going back and trying to rediscover or even recreate Twin Peaks, but the revival is not a nostalgic revisit to a cozy, All-American small-town. That gum you like has come back in a different style.

IN ENGLISH. Alfred Hitchcock’s classic Notorious (1946), starring Cary Grant, Ingrid Bergman and Claude Rains, demands that we explore free-floating responses to its tormented triangle of characters. In terms of genre, is it suspense thriller or romantic melodrama? Go inside, around and about the film with Adrian Martin and explore its style, meaning and form.

VIDEO-ESSAY. The films of David Lynch often feature electronic devices that don’t work and people who seem to be speaking 'on different frequencies'. In this video-essay, Andreas Halskov explores noise, interference and faulty wiring as common elements in the works of David Lynch.

IN ENGLISH. An unlikely route to originality: see how the unusual visual design and color pallette of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is inspired by Erwin Fieger’s photographs.

IN ENGLISH. Anton Chigurh, the main villain of the Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men (2007), has been called a ”Monster for the Ages.” What makes him so? Jens Kjeldgaard-Christiansen shows how a moral psychological perspective can render the aesthetically supercharged antisociality of the character intelligible.

VIDEO-ESSAY. In this visual essay Jakob Isak Nielsen takes a closer look at the contribution of camera movement to “the language of cinema”. He suggests that any camera movement will serve one or more of six proposed functions.

VIDEO-ESSAY. David Lynch’ films are full of paradoxes, and in this video-essay Andreas Halskov deals with two of the Lynchian paradoxes (the genre paradox andthe register paradox), as seen in three of David Lynch’s famous productions: Blue Velvet (1986), Twin Peaks (ABC, 1990-1991) and Wild at Heart (1990).

IN ENGLISH. The animated version of Snow White, produced by Fleischer Studios in 1933, possesses a richly multifaceted oddness. It is a bizarre film full of digressions and inconsistencies, humorously riffing on the original fairytale. Ethan de Seife analyses this wonderfully bizarre film, which combines musical digressions with elements of both surrealism and realism.

IN ENGLISH. Zombies have never been more popular than in twenty-first century media as they spread virally from cinema and computer games to graphic novels and television. With each new incarnation, they undergo a transformation, sometimes subtle and sometimes drastic, but these changes impact upon how we engage with and understand the zombie. Stacey Abbotts investigates this phenomenon, focusing on one modern zombie series: iZombie (CW 2015-).