Absolutely Wizard Movies - upcoming events

The Harry Potter franchise came to an end in 2011. While it’s branded as a children’s film series, it has all the epic scale and romantic grandeur of an old Arthurian medieval tale. This mixture of light and dark, of children’s adventure and troubled adolescences, of child’s play in opposition to malevolent forces, characterised each of JK Rowling’s novels as they were published and also flowed into the films as they evolved over their life cycle.

But in travelling this arc, the films did their own cinematic thing by referencing at least a hundred years of British cinema influences and even earlier pre-cinema pop culture. From the outset, the Potter films celebrated the best of traditional, stoic, class-conscious Britishness, borrowing from some of its culture’s most familiar markers. There are bits of Dickensian Gothic and Edwardian ripping yarns, from Oliver Twist and Tom Brown’s School Days, to the droll school comedies of Ealing Studios, or Lauder and Gilliat’s St. Trinians series. There’s the aspect of the Potter films that’s always lived in the Celtic twilight of Arthurian myth, or hinted at the demonic terrors that Hammer- and other Brit-horror and sci-fi movies explored in the late 1950s and ‘60s. But there’s also always a vaudevillian magic showmanship that goes back to Harry Houdini (a connection also to early cinema’s Trick Movies and the beginning of cinema special effects). And of course the students and masters of Hogworts also belong to the mild-mannered tradition of British super-heroes, including Sherlock Holmes and the James Bond movies (…and let’s not forget that 2012 marks the 50th anniversary of that father of all movie franchises).

It’s a good time to look back at some of the diverse genres and earlier models out of which Harry Potter – man and boy, children’s movie and adult adventure – evolved as the most successful of all Hollywood/Pinewood Trans-Atlantic movie franchises. Absolutely Wizard Movies conjures up the best of all this bric-a-brac of movies genres, with something for all film lovers.

Absolutely Wizard Movies continues in March.

Thanks to: Andrew Youdell, Fleur Buckley (British Film Institute); Nick Varley (Park Circus); Mark Spratt (Potential/Chapel Films); April McIlvoy (Walt Disney).

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