The Bodies Beneath:
The Flipside of British Film & Television
William Fowler & Vic Pratt
400pp / 210mm x 148mm
Paperback
£15.99
With a foreword by Nicolas Winding Refn.
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The missing links of British cinema...glorious...punk rock.
- Nicolas Winding Refn
Compiled with love and a true fan’s passion for the subject matter… one tidy little volume that feels solidly academic and readily accessible to all in equal measure.”
- The Irish Times
Some cinematic paths lie neat and well-tended, others are ominously overgrown and ignored. Dig down deep to and the bodies beneath...
Occult rites are staged in hippie strip clubs; music hall dame Old Mother Riley haunts a vampiric Bela Lugosi; TV puppet Sooty doles out intoxicating pharmaceuticals; velvet-voiced Vincent Price presents a full-fat cookery programme...
Veteran film curators William Fowler and Vic Pratt crack open the caskets of forgotten or neglected British films and telly to serve up a feast of curiosities to tempt the palate of even the most jaded cinephile. Their unflinching, all- embracing investigative gaze is as likely to reassess an established classic as it is to focus on cobweb-covered delights like pioneering 1930s female film director Mary Field’s beautifully bizarre The Mystery of Marriage, the much- maligned Doctor Who epic ‘The Trial of a Time Lord’, underground offerings like Anna Ambrose’s experimental art piece Phoelix and Andy Milligan’s bawdy bloodbath The Body Beneath.
All is grist to this monstrous mill, as the authors tamper with outmoded video formats and meddle with magenta-bias safety film in their mission to finger- paint an entirely unexpected, highly irreverent and thoroughly personal picture of film and television culture in twentieth-century Britain.
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About the author
William Fowler, cofounder of The Flipside, is a film archivist, writer, and curator at the BFI. His film retrospective and restoration projects include Queer Pagan Punk: Derek Jarman, This Is Now: Film and Video After Punk, The Lacey Rituals: Bruce Lacey and Here's a Health to the Barley Mow.
Vic Pratt is a film archivist, writer, historian, Blu-ray and DVD producer. Co-founder of The Flipside, he has programmed numerous cinema screenings at venues in the UK and overseas and has written on British and International film and television history for a wide range of books, magazines, websites and DVD releases.
