Armed with Madness trailer!

A two-minute trailer has been released to promote the new graphic biography by Mary M Talbot and Bryan Talbot, Armed with Madness: The Surreal Leonora Carrington. Directed and edited by designer Jordan Smith, it features music composed by Gary Lloyd and is available to view on YouTube here.

Jordan has collaborated with Bryan before, notably producing the cover to Alice in Sunderland, based on Bryan’s pencil rough.

Gary, who in the past has worked on projects with Alan Moore and Iain Banks, composed the music for the modern dance performance piece When You Light a Candle You Also Cast a Shadow, featuring a poetry cycle written by Mary. The trailer soundtrack includes the fine voice of soprano Isabelle Mohan and a specially recorded cameo by composer-musician Gary Carpenter playing the same Nordic Lyre that he used for Willow’s Song in the film The Wicker Man (1973).

Reluctant muse and feminist champion… society heiress and rebel refugee… the last of the Surrealists: Leonora Carrington played many roles in her long and extraordinary life. Renouncing her privileged upbringing in pre-war England for the more exciting elite of Paris’s 1930s avant-garde, she comes to rub shoulders (and more) with the likes of Pablo Picasso, Man Ray, and Salvador Dalí, after embarking on a complicated love affair with Max Ernst. But the demons that have both haunted and inspired her work are gathering, and when the world goes mad with the outbreak of war and the Nazi invasion, Leonora’s own hold on reality collapses into a terrifying psychotic episode of her own. Eventually fleeing war-torn Europe, she emerges into a new and richly creative life in Mexico City, establishing herself as a prodigious painter, writer, and advocate of women’s rights.

Armed With Madness: The Surreal Leonora Carrington is published in April in the USA and May in the UK by Self-Made Hero.