Maria José Pires and Ricardo Bonacho have created a video inspired by Angela Carter’s short story ‘The Bloody Chamber’ (1979), entitled ‘The Bloody Chamber: A Taste of Angela Carter’. The video explores the “gastronomical imagery and metaphors” of Carter’s story through suggestive images and sound. Readers familiar with Carter’s tale may be reminded of lines like the following: “he stripped me, gourmand that he was, as if he were stripping the leaves off an artichoke”.
You can watch ‘The Bloody Chamber: A Taste of Angela Carter below or head over to Vimeo:
‘The Bloody Chamber: A Taste of Angela Carter’ was shown at Fireworks: The Visual Imagination of Angela Carter, a recent conference held in Bristol, and appeared alongside a number of other videos in Charlotte Croft’s miniature cinema, ‘The Fleapit’. The latter was inspired by Angela Carter’s final piece of writing about the Granada cinema in Tooting, which Carter referred to as “that apotheosis of the fake”. Crofts’ miniature cinema is controllable by smartphone, thereby “inviting [the spectator] to become a projectionist: dim the lights, open the curtains and play the movies”.
Crofts sees ‘The Fleapit’ as exploring Carter’s recurrent interest in the politics of looking:
“Programmed with micro movies that explore Angela Carter’s cinematic influences and the influence of her visual imagination, The Fleapit seeks to draw attention to the hidden mechanisms though which our viewing pleasure and suspension of disbelief are secured – much like Carter’s literary technique that walks a tightrope between revelling in artifice whilst simultaneously revealing its construction.”
For more information about ‘The Fleapit’, head over to the Get Angela Carter website here or to the Fleapit’s official WordPress site here. Charlotte Crofts will be giving a public reading of Angela Carter’s article on the Granada cinema at Tooting on Saturday 21 January 12pm at RWA. For more information on this and other public readings, click here.
Angela Carter Online 
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