Dance and Child’s Play in Wasp and Small Deaths

Almost halfway through her short film Wasp (2003), Andrea Arnold decides to take a break from the onward flow of the narrative and send her main characters into a kind of recess. Zoe (Natalie Press) comes out of the pub where she is flirting with a man called David to meet her kids in a […]

Escape from Late Capitalism: Fish Tank and Two Days One Night

“If you could be any animal, what would you be?” “A white tiger.” – Mia, Fish Tank “I don’t exist. I’m nothing, nothing at all.” – Sandra, Two Days One Night Unlike most poor or working class “everyman” characters, the body labouring under capitalism’s long shadow in Andrea Arnold’s Fish Tank (2009) and the Dardenne […]

Editor’s Note: Home

“You think you had it rough? I didn’t find this place, I had to build it.” -Vienna (Joan Crawford), Johnny Guitar The word “home” conjures images of an ethereal space, with pies on windowsills and white lace curtains blowing in the breeze. It’s where the heart is. Yet as Vienna reminds us in Nicholas Ray’s […]

Empty Hearths: Andrea Arnold’s Wuthering Heights

For admirers of Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel Wuthering Heights, Andrea Arnold’s 2011 film adaptation may seem like blasphemy. In a deft auteurist move, Arnold excises all traces of the supernatural that have defined the source text as a masterpiece of gothic literature. This, however, is not a cynical modern update aiming to appease a secular […]