Friday, September 13, 2013

retro cinema

Nicola Woodham writing for Electric Sheep, a webzine dedicated to a "deviant view of cinema", about Panos Cosmatos's Beyond the Black Rainbow (2010)

"Cosmatos’s first feature [is] a psychedelic, sci-fi reverse vision of the future set in 1983 in the sinister Arboria complex, where inmates/customers are promised ‘a better happier you’....  Cosmatos says he wanted to create a ‘poisoned nostalgia’ that revelled in all the pleasure of a ‘Reagan-era fever dream inspired by hazy childhood memories of midnight movies and Saturday morning cartoons’....  Beyond the Black Rainbow is seamless in its aesthetic rendition of a film produced in the 1980s....  Black Rainbow is a fan’s film and this is reflected in...  the ‘new old’ score. Composer Jeremy Schmidt, alias Sinoia Caves, uses original 1980s synths, such as the infamous Mellotron, used heavily in the 1970s and 1980s.... to great effect by... Goblin keyboard player and horror film composer Claudio Simonetti. Schmidt admits to ‘setting’ his music in the period Cosmatos wanted to recreate, and his score is remindful of a spectrum of sources, from New Age electronica styles to Tangerine Dream’s demonic, bassy film soundtracks for Sorcerer (1977) and The Keep (1983)...  John Carpenter’s malevolent minimal synths, as well as some of Wendy Carlos’s psychotic synth-string pieces for The Shining"




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