Hartismere School

Est. 1451. An outstanding coeducational secondary school & sixth form college and England's first academy

Home Login

Surface Matters


Todd Haynes’s latest film mistakes aesthetics for meaning.

See also...

The Brilliant Subversiveness of ‘Carol’s’ Conventional Ending

Carol review: 'Cate Blanchett will slay you'

Cinematographer Edward Lachman on ‘Carol’ as a Stylistic Foil to ‘Far From Heaven’

Cinematographer Ed Lachman, ASC, On Shooting “Carol”

Carol (Haynes, 2015)

Carol (2015) Cinematography Analysis

Behind Carol: the photographers who influenced Todd Haynes’ award-winning film

Explore...

Why Are Wong Kar-Wei Films so Dreamy?

The Absent Gaze: Navigating Feminist Cinematography on Notebook

Under the Skin explained

Do the Right Thing - Screenshot podcast

House of Flying Daggers - mise-en-scene

Pan's Labyrinth

Under the Skin - audiovisual alienation

Understanding Fallen Angels - To be a Lost Soul

World of Wong Kar Wei - go 7 minutes and 13 seconds in!

Edward Lachman Shares His Secrets For Shooting Todd Haynes’ ‘Carol’

New...

Summer 2026 Examinations

Stranger Things, The First Shadow. The Phoenix Theatre, Friday 11th September.

Design and Technology

Invigilators

Actor Martin Sheen gets into Character- BBC Sounds

June 2026 Year 12 Mocks

Waveney Valley Transport

April 2026 Year 10 Mocks

Discover...

Film Studies Carol Aesthetics Examinations GCE ZEN Transport GCSE Options Spike Lee Keystage 5 MUBI March Key Stage 3 Oscars Yimou Cinematography Pan's Labyrinth Year 12 Drama Invigilators Fallen Angels Sixth Form Year 12

Uh-oh - we were unable to load our website on your browser so we're showing you a plain HTML version.

We use many features found in modern browsers and regrettably yours seems incompatible.

However this legacy version contains (very, very nearly) all the same content. Each page is rendered on our server and doesn't rely on any browser features except the odd font. It doesn't even need Javascript or fancy CSS. It's like being in 1995!

Your browser is reporting itself to us as Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; ClaudeBot/1.0; +claudebot@anthropic.com). Please consider updating your browser to make the most of our website.

If you would like to try our proper website again - you can do so here...