Black Narcissus as a Graphic Narrative

Originally written on 1 August 2007

Rationale:
I love the cinematography of Jack Cardiff (92 years young). He worked on films such as Lawrence of Arabia 1962, A Matter of Life and Death (Stairway to Heaven) 1946 and Black Narcissus released in 1947.

Black Narcissus is my favourite feature film of all time, principally because of Cardiff’s use of Technicolor to photograph the film. For more details on Jack Cardiff check out Chapter 04 of my website where you will find a link in the quote by him. I have seen the film in full perhaps 15 times over the last 30 years or so. I only saw it once in a cinema presentation back in 2005. Guest of honour at the screening was Jack Cardiff himself I even got to meet him and he signed my DVD version of the film.

In July 2007 I thought to myself “I need to create something inspired by my love of this film”

I read the original novel by Rumer Godden published in 1939 and I re-read Sarah Street’s 2005 text analysing the film published by I. B. Tauris.

I am only concerned with developing narrative structures and I feel that the graphic novel format might provide me with the opportunity to produce a work that clearly shows my appreciation of the story and the cinematography of the film.

I cannot compete with Jack Cardiff’s use of Technicolor so I decided to produce my artwork as high contrast black and white images. The maximum number of pages will be 24. However the book has 33 Chapters so I might have to produce 33 images not sure really.

The artwork will come from drawings scanned in and re-worked using Adobe Illustrator software.

Let’s go!!!

Karl