Style and Themes
The film's visual style is a mixture of British realism and Hillier's German Expressionist style. But this is harnessed to a neo-romantic sense of the English landscape. This sense that 'the past always haunts the present' in the English landscape was a powerful theme that would be mined by countless British novelists and film-makers from the 1960s onwards.
Described as 'morally weird but forever English', its characters, rare for mainstream cinema, play out their moral choices instead of merely verbalising them.
Read more about this topic: A Canterbury Tale
Famous quotes containing the words style and/or themes:
“I might say that what amateurs call a style is usually only the unavoidable awkwardnesses in first trying to make something that has not heretofore been made.”
—Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)
“I suppose you think that persons who are as old as your father and myself are always thinking about very grave things, but I know that we are meditating the same old themes that we did when we were ten years old, only we go more gravely about it.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)