O loveliness fugitive! Whose glance has so suddenly caused me again to live,

Shall I not see you again till life is o’er!

(from Baudelaire’s ‘To a Passer-by’)

Words capturing some of the dynamics in the opening scene of The Fugitive Stag’ …

Tthe Fugitive Stag tells the story of what happens when history and myth become embodied in a single form, that is both goddess and woman … something new … something altogether new …

A world where the Shamanic and Mystical heritage of the Celtic Fringe meets the Exotic World of Global High Fashion and Beauty and a Religious Orthodoxy ‘Hell-Bent’ on winning its Holy War against Goddess …

I bet the C.7th St Hubert never thought that he would metamorph into an early C.21st movie hero! I never thought I would be the temporary guardian of a St Hubert carving from the 1500s …

What a theme tune! And oh so ‘modern.’ Pick it up at 22:50 to 26:00 and enjoy the musical thread of The Fugitive Stag.

Richard Strauss: Eine Alpensinfonie Op.64 (An Alpine Symphonie) (Karajan) https://youtu.be/ji6_6soqtNk via @YouTube

The great Russian born conductor Semyon Bychkov writes – The core of The Alpine Symphony is human life and what one goes through in it, with the joys and the sorrows and struggle and achievement. So, it is deeply existential. Doesn’t it happen in life all the time? How many detours every one of us makes in life? Think beyond that actual physical experience of going through the bushes (eg), think of it as a metaphor.

We spend our lifetime trying to figure out why we’re here.  Bychkov believes the Alpine Symphony offers some answers. “I can’t live without it. It tells me about our world, our reason to live. It is a guide to life for sure.” Hear! Hear!

It was Richard Strauss’s ‘Thus spoke Zarathustra’ – inspired by the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche – that was used as the theme tune for Stanley Kubrick’s ‘2001: A Space Odyssey, way back in 1968!.

Much more about the ‘fugitive stag’s’ musical score in future blogs.

From W B Yeats ‘Hound Voice’ –

“And in that terror’s name obeyed the call, And understood, what none have understood, Those images that waken in the blood.”

But ‘Stag’ is a celebration, even in death, of Medb’s (Medusa) power and beauty, and of the battle that looms on the horizon … the Feminine Apocalypse.

As in Blake’s ‘Vala’, or The Four Zoas (1797 …) and Shelley’s poem on the Medusa (1824), the opening scene turns Medb’s death into an apocalyptic event, distinguishing the forces of heaven and earth, of light and darkness.

But it is an Apocalypse where opposites are not in opposition but are struggling to attain balance. Medb’s beauty heals but it is a healing that entails embracing the reality of death and destruction, in order to transform a violent and corrupt form of civilization. She demands a total contemptus mundi and challenges us to look within and place our faith in that unknown divinity, our own buried lives.

is an epic ‘questing’ film, with mythical elements, set in an apocalyptic ‘near-future’ – in a world very similar to ours.

is not ‘arthouse’ neither is it a high concept film, and yet it has elements of both, in that characters and their struggles are integral to the drama of a ‘goal-driven story’.