Stylistic Influences - mood, colour, plot, symbolism and style

Films that inform the project for their themes on the environment, horror, surrealism and storytelling are 'The Green Knight', 'Crimson Peak', 'Meshes of the Afternoon'.

The Green Knight by David Lowery is a retelling of the Arthurian Legend, Gawain and the Green Knight. This film interests me in many levels. How it handles the source material, the symbolism and representation of the environments, as well as the unreliable perspective of Gawain. I really like this film's approach to breaking down the Legend into smaller chapters, it helps create a structure that the viewer can follow and get smaller contextual clues. I considered doing something similar with my film, however, this does not work very well on a smaller scale as I found out when writing a first draft, and with some experiments, so I have decided to change my approach. The symbolism and environmental representation are something that I am very inspired by. Green is a colour of rot and decay when inside the walls of Camelot, but in the natural world it is the colour of life. King Arthur's face looks sickly and plagued in a lot of the close-ups we see of him like he's wasting away. This theme of colour runs throughout the film and is an important thematic device. The land around Camelot is war-torn and barren, contrasting with the wilderness that Gawain journeys into which is rich with vegetation and animals.

Crimson Peak by Guillermo del Toro is a dark gothic horror about a woman's health declining in a creepy house surrounded by a red clay mine. She is haunted by the ghosts of women who came before her, who were married to her husband and who mysteriously died. The film is framed as if it is being told from a novel that we later find out the main character wrote. The visual aesthetic is initially what drew me to take inspiration for my film. It's dark and luxurious in colour palette, with strong chiaroscuro reminiscent of a baroque painting.

Meshes of the Afternoon by Maya Deren is a short surrealist film about a woman who falls asleep and experiences a looping, shifting dream where she follows a mysterious figure. It has an interesting structure and narrative which I would like to explore within my own work. It's repeating itself but with subtle changes, it's looping through itself, and time is meaningless as it all exists within this one dream space. The woman cannot trust what she sees or experiences. In constructing my film's plot, I want to experiment with a non-linear structure and surrealist abstraction.