£6.00
(£4.50 conc.)
Doors 2:00pm
Film 2:30pm
A film and book club for avid readers and Deptford cinephiles. Every second Sunday afternoon of the month, we will meet up to watch a film adaptation of a book or a writer’s biopic.
dir. Jonathan Glazer
year. 2013
country. UK
run-time. 108min
starring. Scarlett Johansson, Antonia Campbell-Hughes, Paul Brannigan
rating. 15
Screening: Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin (2013)
Books: Michel Faber, Under the Skin (2000)
Mark Fisher, The Weird and The Eerie (2016)
The Weird and the Eerie by Mark Fisher has been chosen as the starting point for this month’s discussion. Fisher’s evocative book of essays focuses on our fascination with the unhuman, the outside and the unknown, and these two modes, the ‘weird’ and the ‘eerie,’ which may not be horrifying but are always unsettling. In the essay, ‘Inside Out: Outside In: Margaret Atwood and Jonathan Glazer’, Fisher presents two complementary cases of the eerie, contrasting Atwood’s 1972 novel Surfacing, in which the narrator feels as if she is an alien play-acting the role of a woman with the alien protagonist of Jonathan Glazer’s film, Under the Skin (2013).
Loosely based on Michel Faber’s sci-fi novel from 2000, Under the Skin follows an otherworldly, extra-terrestrial being, disguised in a female human body, who drives the gloomy streets of Glasgow in pursuit of her prey: Scottish men. Starring Scarlett Johansson and scored by Mika Levi, this critically acclaimed and intoxicatingly strange film is a dark exploration of the uncanny and what it means to be, and to feel, human.
The screening will be followed by a Q&A with author, Michel Faber.
Michel Faber has written nine books. In addition to the Whitbread-shortlisted Under the Skin, he is the author of the highly acclaimed The Crimson Petal and the White, The Book of Strange New Things, which was shortlisted for the Arthur C, Clarke Award and won the 2015 Saltire Book of the Year, and most recently Undying, his first poetry collection. Born in Holland, brought up in Australia, he now lives in the UK.
Mark Fisher (1968-2017) was a co-founder of Zer0 Books and, later, Repeater Books. His blog, k-punk, defined critical thinking for a generation. He wrote three books, Capitalist Realism, Ghosts of my Life and The Weird and the Eerie and he was a Visiting Fellow in the Visual Cultures department at Goldsmiths, University of London.
“Visually stunning and deeply disturbing.”
“amid its scorching, fractured images, there is one certainty, brought into crisp focus. This is, very simply and straightforwardly, a masterpiece.”
