The trippy movie that inspired Picture Parlour’s debut album: “Kind of ‘Truman Show’ esque”
I often found myself drowning in content. Not art, but content. Such is the way of modern life that media en masse is being fed into my consciousness and I feel dangerously close to forgetting just how special a piece of impactful art can be.
It’s only when I sink into the depths of an exciting new album or absorb myself in the darkness of the cinema, that the meditative practices of experiencing great art are reminded to me. That moment when everything around you pales into insignificance and the warm weight of this artistic expression comes crashing down on you. In essence, that is what fuels the creative fire of Picture Parlour.
Their music isn’t just packed with explicit visual references that overtly not to their influences, but more that undertone of feeling that exists in cinema’s finest moments. It’s a sort of emotional provocation created through considered nuance and so it’s unsurprising to hear some of the names they regard as creative influences.
“David Lynch is obviously always from day one, he’s been like the kind of major inspiration of, like, our visual world, probably more so with the EP” Picture Parlour recently told Far Out.
But it was one, more obscure 1970s film that sparked creativity amongst the band. They continued, “When we’re in the States, like we’d go to the little local cinemas that we could scout out and see what they’ve got on.”
It was there they stumbled upon The Holy Mountain, Alejandro Jodorowsky’s 1873 avant-garde film that follows an alchemist leading a group of people to a place of pursued enlightenment. Intensely psychedelic and wholly immersive, it’s a film that transports its viewer deep into its carefully curated world, where existential questions of morality lie within. An apt place for any musician looking to improve their creative nous in songwriting, but it was a more specific element of the film’s ending that provoked something within the band.
“It’s that scene at the end where, like, in The Holy Mountain, where they pan out, and then it’s like, you see all the camera crew and stuff, we were like, when we’re writing, talking about it we were like, that is how we felt with, like, our experience in the industry, like everybody else, you know, kind of Truman Show esque, where, like everybody else is in on the gag, and then, like, you pan out and you see it for what it is.”
As I outlined at the very beginning of this article, there is a growing confusion between art and content in the modern world. A line that’s increasingly blurred for burgeoning musicians, who alongside fighting to be heard in a desperately difficult artistic landscape, are forced to be full time content creators as a means of promoting themselves.
Which is why this meta-ending of Jodorowsky’s 1873 film would have felt so on the nose for Picture Parlour. A band whose songwriting feels as immersive as the runtime of a psychological thriller, and as intriguing as its cinematography, only to be confronted with the rather vapid reality of how art is viewed in the real world, come to its conclusion.
