33. Mood-worlds of the Slowdown
Olelakan Jeyifous and Simon Stålenhag offer competing visions for Slowdown mood-worlds.
Ben Highmore’s evocative phase “mood-world” provides a way in to describing these aesthetics, patterns, infrastructures and scenarios as they are forming, given the word-pair’s usefully open sense of pliability, contingency, and movement.
Interestingly, bearing in mind Van Eyck’s playgrounds, Highmore used the phrase when theorising the cultural importance of waste-grounds and bomb sites in post-WWII Britain, often adopted as scrappy, improvised and somewhat dangerous playgrounds. The waste-ground constitutes an “affective landscape that played host to a mood-world that was sometimes morose or despondent, sometimes indifferent or disdainful or preoccupied, sometimes resilient or defiant, sometimes joyful and exuberant, and sometimes resigned. Often the figuring of waste-ground offered an assemblage of mixed moods.”
The mise-en-scéne for the film adaptation of Ian McEwan’s The Cement Garden springs to mind, but primarily the post-wartime ‘Ealing comedies’ like Hue and Cry (1947), Passport to Pimlico (1949) and The Lavender Hill Mob (1951.)
