The creator of those huge fruit/flower/veg heads now in Dulwich Picture Gallery‘s garden, is also a film maker. In fact Philip Haas is a film maker turned artist. You can see his Oscar winning film, ‘Angels and Insects’ on Thursday 9 August in East Dulwich.
THE BIGGER PICTURE @EDT film club runs monthly sociable evenings with film, music, shorts, intros, a bar and themed snacks, in that great space upstairs at the East Dulwich Tavern on Lordship Lane, East Dulwich. In support of Dulwich Picture Gallery, The Bigger Picture’s August film relates to its outside exhibition.
Angels and Insects (1995), 116 mins, cert 18
Starring Kristin Scott Thomas, Mark Rylance, Patsy Kensit, written and directed by Philip Haas.
Haas’s intriguing adaptation of a novella by AS Byatt is certainly not your average period drama.
A Victorian explorer-cum-naturalist, William Adamson (Rylance), returnes from the Amazon in financial straits, arrives at the country estate of his patron, amateur entomologist Harald Alabaster, who not only lends a surprisingly sympathetic ear to Adamson’s interest in Darwin’s theories on natural selection, but even looks kindly on the scientist’s courtship of his daughter Eugenia (Kensit).
Soon after their marriage, the newcomer has reason to feel unease: Alabaster’s boorish son Edgar openly considers him too low-born for his sister, while Eugenia veers confusingly between brazen sexual passion and lengthy periods of locking him out of her boudoir.
Happily, however, Adamson has an ally in Matty Crompton (Scott Thomas), a likewise impoverished dependant of the Alabasters, who shares his interest in insects and the discoveries of the age.
This elegantly perverse film observes the rituals of the natural world everywhere, even within the confines of exaggeratedly polite society. The characters in this strange tale are both obsessed by phenomena of the insect world and exemplary of them. The tale weaves complex, unnerving parallels between human life and the more sinister mysteries of nature.
As mesmerizingly bizarre a film as you may ever see. NY Times
This is a work of clarity, ambition and intelligence. Time Out
Philip Haas’s 4 monumental fibreglass sculptures in Dulwich Picture Gallery’s garden. They are inspired by Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s Renaissance paintings of the four seasons, Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter.
Information
Tickets: £7 Buy tickets online
Thursday 9 August 2012
7pm – bar, themed snacks
7.45 – Dulwich Picture Gallery short film about the making of ‘The Four Seasons’
8pm – film
Free raffle prize – 2 tickets for entry to Dulwich Picture Gallery including the Andy Warhol exhibition.
Film notes, exhibition notes
Upstairs at the East Dulwich Tavern
1 Lordship Lane
East Dulwich
London SE22 8EW
020 8693 1316
For more details and future films visit The Bigger Picture Website
