Frankenstein: The Making of a Myth
Although written almost 200 years ago, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the first and greatest myth of the modern scientific age, has like all enduring masterpieces, touched a nerve at critical points of human progress. Like the monster, Frankenstein haunts our age of global anxiety and unprecedented technological expansion as never before.
This film will explore why Frankenstein continues to dominate the contemporary zeitgeist. The story’s revision and relaunch has been triggered by Danny Boyle’s sensational new National Theatre production starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Jonny Lee Miller alternating the roles of Frankenstein and his creation. Boyle and his stars have agreed to be interviewed for this film and we have been given extensive and unique access to the rehearsal process. Danny Boyle, who began his career as an acclaimed theatre director, has wanted to bring Frankenstein to the stage for over a decade and he now does so as a visionary Oscar-winning film director with a dazzling and uncompromising reputation, prior to taking on the ultimate challenge on the world stage of the Olympic Games opening ceremony.
A co-production with the National Theatre for Channel 4
Directed by Adam Low
Arena: William Golding
In 1954 William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, a terrifying vision of the latent savagery of society and the struggle between good and evil, burst upon the polite world of English fiction. It was originally turned down by more than twenty publishers, but has since sold 20 million copies worldwide. Golding, an unknown schoolmaster and D-Day veteran, went on to win both the Booker and Nobel Prizes. His dozen novels, awesome in their scope, range from the dawn of humanity to medieval man and maritime epics, and reveal an imagination which is dark and powerfully compelling. Arena has been given unique access to Golding's family and to his extensive personal archive for the first film to be made since his death in 1993. Rooted in the mysterious west country landscape that Golding made his home, and with testimony from his neighbours including John Le Carré, James Lovelock and Pete Townshend, and his admirers Stephen King and Ian McEwan, it will embrace the bewildering range of Golding's genius, and the continuing importance of his vision.
Directed by Adam Low
The Pervert's Guide To Ideology
The Pervert's Guide To Ideology picks up from where THE PERVERT'S GUIDE TO CINEMA left off, bringing together the highly acclaimed collaboration between Director Sophie Fiennes and Philosopher and Psychoanalyst Slavoj Zizek. Working within Zizek's theoretical matirx, this 3-part, 90 minute film explores what psychoanalysis can tell us about ideology.
P Guide Production/Blinder Films in association with the BFI, Irish Film Board, Film 4 and More 4
Directed by Sophie Fiennes
A REGULAR BLACK - The Hidden History of Wuthering Heights
In association with Professor Cassandra Pybus at the University of Sydney.
Director: Adam Low
“This film promises to enliven discussion of Brontë’s Wuthering Heights in the way that Chinua Achebe did for Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.” Barbara Harlow, Louann and Larry Temple Professor of English, University of Texas
Soon to be available on DVD to education institurions
Moby-Dick in the Pacific: The Quest for Queequeg
Following in the successful wake of their BBC Arena film, The Hunt for Moby-Dick, Philip Hoare – winner of the 2009 BBC Samuel Johnson prize for non-fiction – follows the extraordinary course of the Pequod into the Pacific. The Quest for Queequeg will chart the fortune of both whale, crew and the tattooed, exotic figure of Queequeg the harpooneer - the first Pacific islander to feature in a work of literature. Such voyages changed the men who undertook them as much as they altered the new world they uncovered.
In association with Professor Iain McCalman and Professor Cassandra Pybus of the University of Sydney
Director: Adam Low