Footnote #82 - Brechtian Theory

Footnote #83 has Chris and Alex examine body horror following their Halloween special looking at the The Substance (Coralie Fargeat, 2024), this time working through some of the histories and implications of ‘body horror’ as a term that speaks to representations of bodily destruction, physical transformation and mutation within the horror genre and a label that helps define the many other gruesome things that horror (and non-horror) cinema does with bodies. Listen as they discuss the origins of body horror and the physical spectacle of decay; violation, abjection, and ‘leaking’; the tactics of horror designed to provoke physical and emotional reactions in its audiences (fear, sweat, revulsion); how practical effects contribute to an alienation of the spectators’ sense of self through the images of bodies and ‘extra-bodies’; intersections between gender and genre and the limits of control and regulation; and horror itself as a genre not just interested in bodies but a clearly-defined ‘body genre’ that creates a particular kind of bodily experience. **Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo** **As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts** **As featured on MillionPodcast’s Best 10 UK Animation Podcasts and Best 60 Movie Podcasts in the UK**

The belated Fantasy/Animation Halloween special arrives with this examination of The Substance (Coralie Fargeat, 2024), a gruesome body horror that functions as a pointed commentary on femininity, aging, and the cultural currency of women as disposable images of gender. Chris and Alex are joined in this episode by Dr Deborah Jermyn, who is Associate Professor in Film and Culture at the University of Roehampton. Deborah’s key research and teaching interests lie in the fields of women, feminism, culture, contemporary media industries, gender and aging, US cinema and genres (particularly the work of women practitioners), and celebrity across a breadth of media and creative industry contexts. Deborah’s recent work on “the menopausal turn” examines the social and cultural implications of the burgeoning attention to menopause across UK and global media. Listen as the trio discuss the film’s reflections on the revulsion of aging and the casting of Demi Moore as central to its depiction of an aging star; gerontophobia and the abject as it is found in spectacular images of decay; the politics of youthfulness, eating disorders, and exercise addiction; Coralie Fargeat’s resistance to anti-de-aging technologies via the presence of Margaret Qualley, and what the practical effects work provides the film’s ageist narrative; and how The Substance uses horror to negotiate bodies that are ‘aged out’ of the entertainment industry. **Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo** **As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts** **As featured on MillionPodcast’s Best 10 UK Animation Podcasts and Best 60 Movie Podcasts in the UK**

This bonus episode the Fantasy/Animation podcast marks a very special instalment with Chris asked to moderate a roundtable celebrating the launch of the new book Music as Classical Reception: Amplifying Antiquity (Oxford University Press, 2025), edited by Dr Emily Pillinger (Reader in Classics and Interdisciplinary Humanities at King’s College london) and Dr Miranda Stanyon (Senior Lecturer, English Literary Studies at the University of Melbourne). The book conceptualises the emerging field of classical reception in music, and looks at the convergence between musicality and classical antiquity across a number of ancient and modern case studies. Joining Chris, Emily, and Miranda to discuss the book is Dr Joanna Paul (Senior Lecturer in Classical Studies at the Open University), who reflects on her chapter from the collection titled “Amplification, Reverberation, and Distortion: The Curious Story of Pompeii and Popular Music” that looks at the 1972 part-concert film part-documentary Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii (Adrian Maben, 1972). Topics in this special episode include the reverie of Pompeii (famously buried by the catastrophic eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD) and how the film places the spectator within the simmering soundscape; performance, liveness, and the ‘animation’ (by music) of space; amplification, distortion, displacement, and immediacy in the film’s rendition of Pink Floyd’s musicianship and cohesion (and tension) as a band; documentary, reality, and what visual effects discourse can tell us about Adrian Maben’s layering of different media forms and temporalities; and the strategies by which Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii narrates the fantasy of Pompeii as a site frozen in time. **Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo** **As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts** **As featured on MillionPodcast’s Best 10 UK Animation Podcasts and Best 60 Movie Podcasts in the UK**

Prompted by the recent Fantasy/Animation podcast episode on Digger (Alejandro González Iñárritu, 2026), Chris and Alex take listeners in Footnote #82 on a journey through the work of German theatre practitioner and playwright Bertolt Brecht, looking closely at Brechtian theory and Brechtian film theory to understand how non- or anti-cathartic distancing effects in Epic Theatre work to invite a different kind of spectatorial response and engagement. Topics include the modernist strategies of deconstruction and the challenges such techniques make to immersion; Aristotle, notions of catharsis, and the point of political art; the illusionism of Hollywood and the emergent agitation and assaultive nature of cinema’s many countercultures; the viewing positions engendered by films with socio-political urgency and different kinds of film movements; and how from constructed set designs to performance and representational styles a Brechtian framework helps us understand intention and the spell of the fiction. **Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo** **As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts** **As featured on MillionPodcast’s Best 10 UK Animation Podcasts and Best 60 Movie Podcasts in the UK**

Chris and Alex disrupt their normal programming schedule to bring you this recently recorded (and very last minute) podcast episode on Digger (Alejandro González Iñárritu, 2026), the divisive political satire and black comedy still playing in cinemas. The film plots the trials and tribulations of boorish Digger Rockwell, a billionaire oil tycoon whose Arctic drilling triggers a global catastrophe in Greenland. Yet its narrative tells only part of its story - Digger’s poor box office return and growing reputation as a big-budget misfire reflects the many polarised opinions that it has generated, which both target its self-indulgence and heavy-handed political commentary while praising its ambition and screen performances. Topics for this spoiler-filled instalment include distanciation, provocation, and the success of its reflexive storytelling strategies; visual effects as a symbol of artifice and the labour of persuasive prosthetic aging; Tom Cruise’s star persona and traditions in the big-screen ‘animation’ of his face; narrative layering and the film’s rhetoric of fantasy as it is mapped against a split narrative of ecological disaster and national trauma; and what the struggles both in front of and behind the camera reveal about Digger as a treatise on humanity, accountability, and insanity. **Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo** **As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts** **As featured on MillionPodcast’s Best 10 UK Animation Podcasts and Best 60 Movie Podcasts in the UK**

The Fantasy/Animation footnotes return after the summer break with Footnote #81 that maps the studio system as an organising principle and defining industrial structure of Classical Hollywood production between the 1920s and 1960s, and a term that pertains to the rise of industrialised, consumer-focused, and globalised filmmaking practices. Topics for this episode include Fordist models of mass production and the role of studios, stars, and genres as repeating constants; the mechanics of vertical integration and the prestige of the ‘Big Five’/’Little Three’; the importance of theatrical exhibition and distribution, and the profitable chain where films travel from the production lot to the movie theatre; and the collapse of the system and its re-emergence in a contemporary animation era where studio recognition adheres to something of a Classical template. **Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo** **As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts** **As featured on MillionPodcast’s Best 10 UK Animation Podcasts and Best 60 Movie Podcasts in the UK**

The brand new series of the Fantasy/Animation podcast kicks off with this opening look at Disney’s celebrated animated/live-action musical Enchanted (Kevin Lima, 2007), a film that cleverly negotiates Disney’s history and prestige as a global animation studio by parodying the Classic cartoons of Hollywood’s Golden Age and offering audiences a comedic pastiche of the Mouse House’s very own Renaissance era animated features. Topics for Chris and Alex to grapple with in this episode include Disney’s careful curating of their history and the question of branding and authorship; sincerity and Enchanted’s function as a form of Disney revisionism; the importance of the film’s 2007 release and the role of fantasy in the Disney/Pixar corporate merger; gender, femininity, and creative labour; intrusive vs. portal quest fantasy as it plays out in contemporary New York; the drama of mixed media hybridity; and the codes and conventions of Enchanted’s “fairytale nonsense” that allows it to openly declare its use of animation as fantasy. **Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo** **As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts** **As featured on MillionPodcast’s Best 10 UK Animation Podcasts and Best 60 Movie Podcasts in the UK**

To coincide with the recent big-screen release of The Odyssey (Christopher Nolan, 2026), the final Fantasy/Animation archive episode of the summer looks back the filmmaker’s science-fiction blockbuster Inception (Christopher Nolan, 2010) that featured as its special guest Todd McGowan, Professor of Film Studies in the Film and Television Studies Department at the University of Vermont. Todd is the author of a number of books on psychoanalytic film theory, film comedy and popular media, including The Real Gaze: Film Theory after Lacan (2007) and The Fictional Christopher Nolan (2012), and joined Chris and Alex back in 2021 to discuss the fantasy of dreams, Inception’s rhizomatic, mazelike narrative structure, and Nolan’s commitment to puzzling plotlines, the reconstitution of beginnings, and practical effects imagery. **Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo** **As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts** **As featured on MillionPodcast’s Best 10 UK Animation Podcasts and Best 60 Movie Podcasts in the UK**

The next archive episode of the Fantasy/Animation podcast goes all the way back to Episode 24 and the discussion of the celebrated animated documentary Waltz with Bashir (Ari Folman, 2008) which featured a conversation with special guest Dr Bella Honess Roe, author of the influential book Animated Documentary (2013). Listen as the trio discuss the recent industrial and scholarly turn towards animated documentary and the medium’s capabilities for representing the real; discourses of trauma and what it means to ‘animate’ dreams and a national-cultural memory; combinations of the factual and the fantastical that are weaved throughout Ari Folman’s autobiographical narrative; and how Waltz with Bashir illustrates animation’s status as a creative medium of catharsis. **Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo** **As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts** **As featured on MillionPodcast’s Best 10 UK Animation Podcasts and Best 60 Movie Podcasts in the UK**

For this second archive episode, Chris and Alex revisit Episode 138 of the podcast that gave listeners their first taste of Pixar’s Toy Story (1995-) franchise thanks to this look at the 1995 original. The discussion of Pixar’s debut feature featured as its special guest Lucy Fife Donaldson, who is now Professor of Film Studies at the University of St Andrews and whose work focuses on film and television style, audiovisual design and 'below-the-line' labour, performance and the body. Topics in this episode included a closer look at the textures, surfaces, and scuff marks of Toy Story and its peripheral detail rendered in pristine computer graphics; worldhood and the toys’ own journey through digital space; play and plasticity; and the stylistic potential of registers of miniaturisation and magnification. **Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo** **As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts** **As featured on MillionPodcast’s Best 10 UK Animation Podcasts and Best 60 Movie Podcasts in the UK**