The North East Film Archive is one of a network of regional film archives established to collect, preserve and show film made in, or about the North East of England. Our collections are non-fiction, and date from the early 1900s to the present day, providing a rich record of life in the region over the 20th century. Many of our films are available to watch, free of charge, on our website.
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Lady of Shallot
A cursed heroine chooses between two worlds in an enchanting animation of Alfred Tennyson’s enduring poem about unrequited love.
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Overview
This romantic animation in soft pastels by Sheila Graber illustrates Tennyson’s most famous narrative poem, based on a figure in Arthurian legend who dies of her unrequited love for Sir Lancelot. The cursed, imprisoned heroine and her magic mirror, through which she observes the outside world, intrigued Pre-Raphaelite artists fond of femme-fatales, but is also read as a metaphor for the life of the artist, or to comment on, and combat, Victorian attitudes towards women.
Still working as an amateur in 1976, Sheila Graber experimented with a home-made multi-plane rostrum and new 16mm camera to create this slow, poetic film. But Graber’s flickering tapestry of colour and pattern, woven by the creative (lonely) Lady of Shalott on a loom resembling a screen (not yet that of a computer), suggests the vibrant, fast-moving ‘visual music’ of Len Lye’s experimental work. The imagery Tennyson deployed, writing in a century characterised by the visual wonder of optical toys and microscopic and telescopic technologies, was also prescient of the cinematic shadow and spectacle to come.
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