![]() ![]() Its visual backbone is Bergman’s The Seventh Seal Johnson is photographed at length taking part in a chess game with a hooded death (himself) on the shores of the highly-photogenic Canvey. The Ecstasy Of Wilko Johnson is suffused with film imagery, clip-upon-clip ranging from Nosferatu to The Mirror, Great Expectations, A Matter of Life And Death, and La Belle et La Bete. Here, Temple marries the world of music, with which he has long been associated (from The Great Rock And Roll Swindle on up) to cinema to relate a small-scale story of a man who only really comes alive when he is faced with death. Festivals, particularly those with musical strands, should be eager to show the latest from the artistically influential Temple. It’s a sequel of sorts to Oil City (released five years ago), and should mirror the same commercial path, perhaps pulling in some fans of Temple’s more recent Olympian feat, London – The Modern Babylon. Julien Temple returns to Canvey Island, the setting for Oil City Confidential, for Ecstasy, a trippy film which strongly bears his signature, featuring multiple film-clips and archival footage which meld into the derelict natural beauty of this forgotten island in the Essex estuary. Temple loops his cameras through amusement arcades and across the beaches to present Canvey Island as a place of beauty, the way it lives in Johnson’s mind. Subsequently, however, his death becomes far less assured. For the curmudgeonly, almost reluctantly erudite Johnson, his certain and imminent death results in a rapturous embrace of life and he is filled with energy, embarking on a farewell tour and releasing a chart album with Roger Daltrey. In The Ecstasy of Wilko Johnson, the former Dr Feelgood guitarist and Blockhead who featured in director Julien Temple’s previous documentary Oil City Confidential talks about life under the sentence of terminal pancreatic cancer.
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