Tuesday, 2 February 2016

BBC "The Art of Gothic" by Andrew Graham-Dixon review

The programme "Art of Gothic" was wery interesting to me because I had very little knowledge of the Gothic genre and now I feel like I'm more confident in this particular subject.  I've learnt a lot about various apects of the Gothic genre not only in literature and art but when it comes to the symbolic meaning of it as well and how it is reflectet onto the society.

One thing that It's now stuck in my memory is that nowadays people still get influenced by the Gothic genre by always wanting to escape from the real world and hide their true selves behind a screen. They do this with the help of modern technology, just as people back then used to do reading Gothic novels, which were very popular but people disregarded them.

Another interesting part of the documentary is when  Andrew Graham - Dixon shows us how historical events influenced the Gothic movement as we see now and across the years. For example, the Industrial Revolution was one of the biggest events that really influenced the Gothic movement. As the landscapes were changing, so did the society and all that comes with it, including the novels written at that time. The novels became a reflection of what could be seen in the society and in the surrounding area where people and writers lived.

It's really interesting how such thing as modern inventions and technology seem so familiar to us and we aren't scared of new technology appearing, not even highly intelligent robots that look like humans, and how people back then considered even the inventions that we consider now the simplest so scary. They saw the scientific progress as a way to play God and as witchcraft, being afraid of new changes but still continuing to change. In an ever changing world, people wanted to escape and they did that though Gothic literature that shows us how they percieved the world back then.

"The Art of Gothic" is an extremely useful programme to watch because it delivers essential information so we can understand how people were thinking in the Victorian Era, when Gothic as a genre appeared.  What the programme makes is to prove how timeless the Gothic genre is and how we unconsciously see gothic influences even today and we don't know about them and don't label them as gothic even if in essence, they are.

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