Archive

Warm Bodies

After a highly unusual zombie saves a still-living girl from an attack, the two form a relationship that sets in motion events that might transform the entire lifeless world.

Robot and Frank

Set in the near future, an ex-jewel thief receives a gift from his son: a robot butler programmed to look after him. But soon the two companions try their luck at a heist.

Animate Earth

Cardiff sciSCREEN has sister projects around Cardiff which debate ideas. One of these is Philosophy Cafe, and in March 2013 we joined forces with Philosophy Cafe to host a screening of Animate Earth.

The Master

A Naval veteran arrives home from war unsettled and uncertain of his future - until he is tantalized by The Cause and its charismatic leader.

W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn

Let me start with some simple, some may even say banal things – to be found on every Wikipedia site: Sebald was born on 18 May 1944 in Bavaria, he died on 14 December 2001 in Norfolk, England. His first names were Winfried Georg, a third name was given to him by his parents: Maximilian. But who wants to be called Winfried Georg Maximilian, especially when living in Great Britain?!

Medicine, Sensation and the 'Wolfman'

The ‘Wolfman’ plays on themes that would have been familiar to audiences in the late-nineteenth century when the events of the film are set. Film itself was beginning to make an appearance as an exciting new technology and although representations of the Victorians like to show them as stiff, repressed and controlled, contemporaries were fascinated by spectacle, sensation, horror and the macabre; a fascination that can be best described as the ‘attraction of repulsion’. But it is not just the gothic dimension of the Wolfman that would have been familiar.

Monstrosity and the Wolfman in Media and Culture

Tropes from the horror genre continue to fascinate and frighten us across a range of contemporary media forms including television, literature, and film. Indeed, the final line of Joe Johnston’s ‘The Wolfman’ perhaps sums up one of the questions so central to discussions over the representation of the werewolf, and cinematic monsters more broadly, within media and cultural studies. The final words of the movie echo those uttered earlier in the narrative - “It is said there is no sin in killing a beast, only a man. But where does one begin and the other end?”.

Measuring past changes in ice volume to understand ice sheet stability

In - at least - Hushpuppy’s imagination, melting ice sheets are the cause of the disastrous flooding in Beasts of the Southern Wild. Relating this to our current climate, if the Greenland ice sheet were to melt completely, sea level would rise ~7m and Chapter Arts Centre (in Cardiff) would become very soggy.

Aurochs - 'a little below the elephant in size'

In the film Beasts of the Southern Wild, the aurochs (plural aurochsen) is a strange hybrid wild boar/bull armed with both horns and tusks that comes to symbolise the disasters that looms over Hushpuppy, her family and her community.Early image of cave art depiction of the Aurochs

Left Out In The Wild? Floods in a Changing Climate

Climate change is very often characterised either explicitly or implicitly as a future issue – one that is temporally distant, the implications of which will be felt at some unspecified time often assumed as being in the long term future. The effects of climate change are, however, for some of us already being felt, both in a direct sense – people are experiencing climate related events like floods – or in more indirect ways – through changes that arise with attempts to respond to anticipated futures.