Film

Conversations and reflections

Item: Dark Matter
Author: Felicity Chaplin

Michael Winterbottom’s survey of independent filmmaking

by Felicity Chaplin •

December 2021, no. 438

Dark Matter: Independent filmmaking in the 21st century by Michael Winterbottom

British Film Institute, $34.99 pb, 208 pp

Film

Conversations and reflections

Michael Winterbottom’s survey of independent filmmaking

by Felicity Chaplin •

December 2021, no. 438

Stanley Kubrick’s Napoleon is perhaps the best-known film never made. But what about others that never happened? What might a closer look at these reveal about the state of filmmaking? Such unmade films constitute the ‘dark matter’ of British director Michael Winterbottom’s book Dark Matter: Independent filmmaking in the 21st century. The invisible dark matter of the cosmos shapes our universe; without it many galaxies would fly apart. For Winterbottom, an examination of cinematic dark matter ‘might help to explain the wider landscape of British independent cinema’ this century.

Felicity Chaplin

Felicity Chaplin is Lecturer in European Languages at Monash University. She is the author of two books, Charlotte Gainsbourg: transnational and transmedia stardom (Manchester University Press, 2020) and La Parisienne in cinema: between art and life (Manchester University Press, 2017), and is a contributor to the forthcoming edited collection Refocus: The films of François Ozon (Edinburgh University Press, 2021). Felicity has written extensively on cinema, stardom, celebrity, fashion, French female identity, and cultural histories of Paris. Her work appears in Australian Book Review, Australian Journal of French Studies, Celebrity Studies, Metro, Screening the Past, and Senses of Cinema.