On Sunday 18th June at the Exeter Phoenix, Dr Anna Watz (University of Linköping) will be presenting an evening celebrating the work of Angela Carter, with film screenings of The Company of Wolves (1984) and The Holy Family Album (1991). The screenings will be accompanied by an informal academic discussion with Dr. Watz and Dr. Felicity Gee (University of Exeter). To book tickets for this exciting event, head over to the Exeter Phoenix website by clicking here. To read a transcript of a recent Q&A with John Ellis, the producer of The Holy Family Album, click here. You can read a description of the films, taken from the Exeter Phoenix website, below.
The Company of Wolves (18)
Dir. Neil Jordan, UK, 1984, 95 mins.
Co-written by Angela Carter and Neil Jordan The Company of Wolves is a retelling of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’. Framed as a dream, Rosaleen disobeys the lesson her grandmother teaches her in the original tale: never trust strangers and never stray from the path. Rather than become the wolf’s victim, she kisses him and turns into a wolf herself, choosing personal and sexual freedom over the conventional world of marriage and adult responsibilities that she fears.
The screenplay layers several tales from Carter’s 1979 short story collection The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories including ‘The Company of Wolves’ and ‘The Werewolf’. Carter and Jordan, who worked closely together on the script and set, also drew on Carter’s first adaptation of ‘The Company of Wolves’ as a play for radio in 1980.
The Holy Family Album
Dir. JoAnn Kaplan, UK, 1991, 27 mins.
Produced by Professor John Ellis, this controversial documentary lays bare Angela Carter’s taste for the blasphemous and shocking. The Holy Family Album is a sacrilegious take on the history of Christian painting and iconography. Carter re-imagines this tradition as a series of photographs in God’s family album, voyeuristically displaying every moment of family life and simultaneously hiding a few dark secrets. God himself, however, is absent from the photographs, for He is the photographer behind the images, “calling the shots” as Carter puts it in her voice-over narration.
Angela Carter Online 