Daily Archives: July 17, 2017

Surreal sci-fi: Jubilee, The Craven Sluck, Her, World on a Wire, Przekadaniec and Strange Days. Composite: PR

When putting together MoMAs new film series, Future Imperfect: The Uncanny in Science Fiction, its curator, Josh Siegel, set out to compile a list of pictures that defined the genre within more earthly parameters. He decided to seek out sci-fi that took place on Earth, had no aliens or invasions, and instead investigated what it meant to be human at the time of the films release. Before the retrospective, Siegel, along with museums chief curator of film, Rajendra Roy, discussed their favorite films in the series.

This is a Mike and George Kuchar fantasy about a housewife who seeks stimulation and finds it in the most unlikely place. Bob Cowan actually plays two roles. He plays the wife of the husband with whom the housewife is cheating, as well as the housewifes own husband. Its a challenging, tongue-in-cheek, demented performance. They were scraping money together to make these films, but they were fairly ingenious in their creativity, imagination and resourcefulness. JS

This is one of those films thats cherished by a certain film-going set in the Czech Republic, and is one of a number of post-apocalyptic films in the series. Its by Jan Schmidt and is about the last surviving group of women on Earth, who are left in a forest and have to survive on their own and seek a way of perpetuating human civilization. They sort of oscillate between these two atavistic or primitive states. Its very bleak, cruel, but also very beautiful. JS

This is a short by Andrzej Wajda. It was a collaboration with the Solaris author, Stanislaw Lem, who I think is probably the most widely read science-fiction writer in history, but somebody who is less well known in the west. The film is ostensibly a comedy about a race car driver who nearly kills his own brother in a race. He also almost dies, but he inherits half of his brothers organs after the incident. Then the insurance company denies coverage because they say that his brothers not really dead because he lives on in his brothers body. Its this kind of absurdist conundrum about the problems we face with getting denied medical coverage in the US. JS

With a small budget, George Romero was able to create something exceedingly enjoyable and fast-paced, while at the same time actually having something profound to say about American society on two levels. On one level its a film about a germ the military is working on that ends up in the water stream of a small Pennsylvania town and renders everyone in the town a homicidal maniac. But theres also this demented comic element that I think is deriving something from Preston Sturges films; throughout this kind of comical suspense film about germ warfare and anti-government groups trying to survive the takeover of their towns is this really interesting take on the American family. JS

This is a film originally made for West German television in the early 70s. Its close to us because we actually helped fund and finish the restoration that took place a few years back. Its really an amazing example of Rainer Werner Fassbinders vision taken into a new realm. He was able to bring his own unique, intense sensuality and sexuality into this realm. I think that has long-lasting implications and influences throughout other future-dystopian narratives, including The Matrix, to a certain extent. RR

This Krsto Papi film is based on one of Alexander Grins stories and involves a struggling, impoverished writer who is ostracized and basically a pariah. He stumbles on an underground society of rat people who he discovers are dining on champagne and roast pig, on the suffering of workers, and he tries to tell people about this conspiracy thats brewing in the sewers of the city. Its essentially a body-snatchers story. But it was attacked paradoxically as kind of an anti-communist allegory at the time by critics. In fact, what it really is is an attack on collectivity, its impact on feudalism in the mid-70s and the idea of falling into lock-step with the totalitarian state. JS

Derek Jarmans film came out in the late 70s at the height of the cold war. He brings this queer aesthetic, that was rooted in an anti-establishment, tear-it-all-down anarchy. I dont see how anyone walks out of that screening not making parallels to where we are today this feeling of utter hopelessness in the conventions and structures of society that we live in. Again, although its dirty and raw and super-punk, I would hope kids see it and say, Fuck yeah! RR

This is a slightly more contemporary pick, even though its over 20 years old. I think its incredible how when people talk about the implications of the current generation of virtual reality experiences, there are two areas where it seems like theres a viable future for it. First is in creating situations of empathy like Alejandro Gonzlez Irritus project that puts you on the border between the US and Mexico creates an incredible sense of empathy. The other is porn. Kathryn Bigelow really took on the idea that the future of intimacy and sexuality would take place in a virtual realm, which is incredibly spot-on and obviously very current. RR

Lynn Hershman Leesons film is 15 years old but the idea of cloning, and the decoupling of sexuality and reproduction, is such an intriguing hypothesis. Her ability to decouple the procreative nature of sexuality, but embed the lustful nature of human interaction even in the clones form, is fascinating. Were getting to the point where actual clones are on the not-so-far-off horizon. Leeson has always been interested in the relationship between science and art, and the practice of scientists in relation to creation, and this is a perfect synthesis of the two. RR

I wanted to include something that might be more familiar for audiences because we want this to be an accessible series. A film like Her obviously has contemporary weight for people in terms of the way they interact, meet each other and fall in love, fall in love with ideas of people, fall in love with actual devices: thats something everyone can dive into and think about in their own lives. RR

Link:

Human, all too human: 10 sci-fi films that show what it means to be alive - The Guardian (blog)

Nearly 50 years ago, Charlton Heston represented the modern human race in the original Planet of the Apes. His character was unquestionably the alpha male among his own kind, who were enslaved and unable to speak for themselves, but the mastery of the apes was absolute and the poor guy had to flee for his life to gain his freedom, only to learn ... well, we know what he learned at the end of the movie.

By that point of his career, Heston was well-established in Hollywood. He had begun landing key roles in his late 20s; he was 33 when he starred as Moses in The Ten Commandments (1956) and 36 when he embodied Ben-Hur. His Academy Award-winning performance set him up nicely for the 1960s. He became a box office star and was able to exercise a fair degree of creative control, as he recounts in his autobiography In the Arena.

In 1968, Heston made his first science-fiction picture, Planet of the Apes. He says he told director Franklin Schaffner: "I smelled a hit in this from the beginning, but I think maybe we also made a very good movie." (Heston was always very happy to claim credit on his successful films.) Appearing in the first sequel, Beneath the Planet of the Apes, only reluctantly, Heston says he 'talked the director into letting me detonate an atom bomb in the last scene, presumably wiping out both the ape civilization and any further sequels.'

Sometime after those experiences, Heston says that he "stumbled across" I Am Legend, a short novel by Richard Matheson -- his first -- that was originally published in 1954. The novel, which I recently read again, tells of an apocalypse from the perspective of Robert Neville, a scientist who believes he is the sole survivor of a worldwide pandemic.

It is slowly revealed that the disease resembles vampirism. Neville suffers the tragedy of losing his dear young daughter, and then must kill his beloved wife after she succumbs to the disease and shortly thereafter rises from the dead. He is haunted by the calamity that he alone has survived; he feels compelled to search out vampires by day and kill them permanently.

The novel is a poignant journey through everlasting grief. Ten years later, it was adapted into The Last Man on Earth in Italy, starring Vincent Price as Neville. Matheson, by that time a veteran of film and television scripting, wrote the screenplay, but it was later revised and changed so much that he used the pseudonym of Logan Swanson for his cowriting credit. Price is quite effective in the lead role and provides the best reason to watch the film, which unaccountably slows down in its second half and drags out the narrative, despite running only 86 minutes.

George A. Romero took direct inspiration from Matheson's novel for his own Night of the Living Dead. And then Heston "stumbled across" it and worked with producer Walter Seltzer to bring it to the big screen.

Heston pats himself on the back for coming up with a "different approach to the script" (along with Seltzer) by identifying the source of the apocalypse as a bacteriological war started by the Chinese. Cowriter Joyce Corrington claims credit herself, saying in a 2003 interview included on the Blu-ray: "It was all about vampires, and it just didn't feel right to do vampires. I have a PhD in Chemistry ... and germ warfare was on my mind as something that could wipe out mankind, so we used that instead of vampires."

But did any of them actually read Matheson's novel? He clearly identifies a disease as the reason for the apocalypse, so he deserves the credit for that idea. Instead, Heston and the Corringtons focused on removing nearly any suggestion that the victims in any way resembled vampires. They also stamped out any hints that, in his increasingly blinkered and isolated existence, and desire to rid the world of the infected, Neville had been committing genocide, preempting any possibility that someone other than himself might ever survive.

It's a chilling thought, namely, that in trying to preserve what was left of humanity, Neville was, in fact, destroying it. In Neville's own mind, diseased not by a virus but by isolated loneliness, he was doing what was necessary.

None of that is preserved in The Omega Man. What the film establishes is that Neville is a righteous gunsmith; the opening sequence features Neville, a former soldier, careening through the empty streets of Los Angeles in a large convertible, stopping only to fire his automatic weapon blindly at distant figures he sees in an office building.

Neville stops at a movie theater to fire up Michael Wadleigh's documentary Woodstock so he can watch it for the umpteenth time. Clearly, irony is intended as Neville has memorized a key passage, but as he steps back outdoors, he realizes it is nearly dark. He races home to his house on the studio backlot, where he encounters ghastly figures who have been disfigured by the bacteriological war and who are intent on killing him.

The essential element that the survivors are sensitive to light -- hey, just like vampires! -- allows Neville to prowl the city by day, searching carefully for them so he can kill them all. It also forces him to barricade himself into his multi-story house at night, since they are constantly seeking him out to destroy him because he is a member of the military-industrial complex, and thus a reminder of what once was.

Thus, Neville is shown to be a very righteous dude, chased after by the hippie rabble -- hey, just like Woodstock! -- even though all he wants to do is find a cure. Neville is hip to the cause, though; he is sufficiently open-minded that when he stumbles across a healthy survivor, an African-American woman named Lisa (Rosalind Cash), he is willing to cross racial boundaries to romance her, quite a surprising thought in 1971, the year of the film's release. (Joyce Corrington says that was her idea too, as a means of creating conflict and a little "racial pizazz.")

Neville is immune to the virus, so he comes to realize that adding components of his blood to a serum he's cooked up in his home laboratory can actually heal people. In his autobiography, Heston writes: "The analogy to Christ as Savior is inescapable, though there's no such reference in the script, and we didn't plan the shoot in those terms. Still, there were irresistible spins I added in performance." The one thing he notes specifically is the final scene, which I'll avoid spoiling.

By that point, though, The Omega Man has fallen victim to the same traps as the first version, slowing down its narrative drive just when it should be speeding up its intensity. There is much more traditional action, but the shots get more leisurely, somehow, even as Heston and/or his stunt double races a motorcycle away from the diseased survivors. The film clocks in at 98 minutes, though it feels longer.

I've seen the film several times, but my original affection for it has diminished over the years. On Blu-ray, its limitations become more obvious.

Director Boris Sagal began his career in the live television era of the 1950s and started directing features in the 1960s. Evidently he was a competent journeyman, but it's difficult to shake the notion that he shot The Omega Man like a TV movie, even with the presence of Russell Metty, an Academy Award-winning cinematographer for Spartacus.

When theatrically released in August 1971, the film did well, in view of its presumably modest budget, earning nearly $9 million at the box office. Heston described it as "a large hit in the theaters. It was high bloody time; of the four films I'd made in the previous two years, none had been huge at the box office."

Heston returned to science fiction two years later with Soylent Green and, a bit later, helped to invent disaster porn with Earthquake ( a personal touchstone) and then tried to expand it with Two-Minute Warning (a minor film with one standout, extended sequence).

Cash, who made his big-screen debut in Klute, went on to appear in The New Centurions, Hickey & Boggs, The All-American Boy, and Uptown Saturday Night, all notable and all released within three years. She continued active, mostly in television, until her death in 1995.

Likewise, director Sagal continued busy, almost entirely in television, until his death in 1981. Writers John William Corrington and Joyce Hooper Corrington later collaborated on the screenplay for Battle for the Planet of the Apes, based on a story by Paul Dehn, which features radiation-scarred human who kinda resemble the ones in The Omega Man. They also scripted Martin Scorsese's Boxcar Bertha and Steve Carver's The Arena before turning to television.

The Omega Man is no Planet of the Apes, but the contrast between Richard Matheson's novel and this film version is certainly instructive. And, despite my reservations, Heston's supremely confident screen persona remains fascinating, if not always compelling, to watch.

70s Rewind is a column on movies released during the writer's favorite decade for filmmaking.

Read more:

70s Rewind: In THE OMEGA MAN, Charlton Heston Tries to Save the Planet - ScreenAnarchy (blog)