Understory: Alan Clarke's Elephant
In the good seats: Essays on film, 2025
My essay Understory is about Alan Clarke's 1989 made-for-tv-film, Elephant. The film is a sparse, unsettling sequence of eighteen execution-style murders set during the Troubles in Nothern Ireland. Published in In the good seats: Essays on film, edited by Nathan O’Donnell.
In the good seats: Essays on film is a collection featuring some of the most talented writers working today, setting their sights on what’s so alluring and moving about film and cinema. A childhood movie encountered on the big screen, a favourite celluloid instant, a resonating discovery, an awkward first date; the threadbare seats, the click and whirr of the projector, the sense of scale expanding.
Each essayist in this book unearths those particularly breathless and unforgettable moments when their lives were touched by film. Like a projection of light beaming across a darkened hall, In the good seats pulls us closer to those flickers of magic that film and cinema usher forth.
With contributions by Darran Anderson, Maggie Armstrong, Dodie Bellamy, Susannah Dickey, Maria Fusco, Francis Halsall, Daisy Lafarge, Michael Magee, Ian Maleney, Toye Oladinni, K Patrick, Devika Ponnambalam, Ali Smith, and Cathy Sweeney.
Published by Paper Visual Arts, Dublin (March 2025)