The Cinema Beneath the Lake
‘Cinema with a fox head, wolf head, a shark-tooth grin. Cinema wearing its intestines as a waistcoat, with a carapace. Cinema with six legs. A cinema that leads us down blind alleys without guarantee is a cinema that has our best interests at heart; one that reduces us to rubble, mixes us with the dust of the cosmos, erases our history, re-routes our nerves. One that lurks in this water of the other, shoots us through with a blank apprehension of our cloying tastes and ambitions. Is any of this possible? Speak of the Devil. Here is that organ of the Marvellous: radial canals, manubrium, statocysts, tentacles. Pigment spots shining torches into the water’s sedimentary scuzz.’
[Eisenstein’s Treatise on Non-Human Cinema, The Cinema Beneath the Lake]The Cinema Beneath the Lake is a surrealist film-novel, first conceived as the creative outcome of my practice-led PhD at the University of Salford and now published by Orbis Tertius Press (Canada, 2025). My PhD research, Diving to ‘The Cinema Beneath the Lake: a novel as immersive, synthetic-magical exploration of the surrealist prose of Claude Cahun, Ithell Colquhoun and Leonora Carrington’, investigated Surrealism as both practice and theory. The novel extends that research into creative form: not an illustration of the academic work, but its experimental continuation.
The novel stages an immersive, synthetic-magical exploration of the everyday marvellous: a cinema that exists beneath the surface of a lake, where image, dream, and narrative fracture and reform. It refuses stable categories, moving between fiction, film, and poetic prose.
Copies are available here
Praise for The Cinema Beneath the Lake:
“The novel is a joy to read, the language is so compelling as to create new literary-cinematic realms that this reader found difficult to depart from.”
Felicity Gee, President of the International Society for the Study of Surrealism, author, Surrealist Women’s Writing, Surrealism and Film After 1945: Absolutely Modern Mysteries
“What holds the novel together? -… for example, the beautifully crafted language, all its lively and improbable encounters, its poignantly mystical elements, and finally, not least the fact that it conveys so much of the essence and spirit of surrealism, including that movement’s more grotesque aspects.”
Ian Seed, poet, Night Window, The Underground Cabaret
“The novel creates its own unique taxonomy. Crammed with erudition and entertainment, it is an astonishing and revelatory achievement.”
Richard Shillitoe, psychologist and author, Ithell Colquhoun, Magician of Nature