One of the new voices to emerge from Britain, Andrea Arnold brought a unique voice that featured the realism of Ken Loach with an aesthetic similar to the Dogme 95 movement of the late 1990s. Her emergence to cinema was something needed when another female British voice in Lynne Ramsay was forced into exile by more powerful forces in the industry. Though Arnold started out her career as an actress and TV presenter, her desire to create stories of her own would yield an already impressive collection of films in three shorts and three feature films with another feature film in development.
Born in Dartford at the Kent county in England, Arnold was the eldest of four children to a teenage mother as seeing her mother raise four children by herself would have a profound experience on the young Arnold. These experiences would lead to Arnold writing stories that played into her childhood as she became interested in dancing and acting by the age of 10. After leaving high school at age 16 to pursue an acting career and leaving for London two years later, Arnold got a job in being the host for the British children TV show No. 73 in the 1980s while being a dancer at Top of the Pops. By the early 1990s as No. 73 was coming to an end, Arnold decided to retire from acting and being a TV host as she went to Los Angeles to study directing at the AFI Conservatory.
The rest of the piece can be read here at Cinema Axis.
© thevoid99 2014
I read your piece over at cinemaaxis. She's a talent alright. Her short film Wasp is amazing, and so is Fish Tank. Both are unforgettable.
ReplyDeleteI hope to see the rest of her work. Those short films Milk and Dog I've had difficulty tracking down on youtube.
Well, if you get the Criterion DVD/Blu-Ray for Fish Tank, all three shorts are there.
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