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Silent Running (1971)

Douglas Trumbull, who supervised the special effects in 2001, directed this moving ecological fable, and there are strong echoes of Kubrick’s epic in the scenes of giant starships sailing along the tideways of space. The premise – that one day in the future all the vegetation on Earth has died, and that the last remaining trees are stored in vast, orbiting space vehicles – may take some swallowing, but the theme is so well handled that the film taps into all our unease about the abuse of this planet and its environment.

Much of Silent Running’s success is due to Bruce Dern’s superb performance as a watchman and gardener in one of the forgotten greenhouses. His dogged, cantankerous manner exactly suits the character of this last conservationist alive, who refuses orders to dump the vegetation, kills the crew, and sets off into deep space with only the trees for company.

Dark Star (1974)

Dark Star is the Catch-22 of outer space. The anarchic spirit of Joseph Heller’s novel, with its inverted logic and padded-cell humour, presides over John Carpenter’s extraordinary low-budget feature. Reportedly made for $60,000, Dark Star was originally filmed in 16mm by a group of students at the University of Southern California, and later transferred to 35mm. Watching this brilliant extravaganza, one is forced yet again to accept that talent alone is always enough.

Like many ostensible satires – in this case, of the science-fiction movie itself – Dark Star soon transcends its own subject matter. The sealed world of the spaceship, with its exhausted, near psychotic crew, its ‘dead’ captain in his cryogenic capsule periodically revived to be asked for advice, and its intelligent bombs that have to be argued out of detonating prematurely, soon begins to resemble that other spaceship called Earth.

The Man who Fell to Earth (1976)

A brave failure, Nicolas Roeg’s excursion into science fiction reveals the excitements, and hazards, of illustrating a conventional genre theme – the visiting alien destroyed by an uncaring Earth – with images taken largely from outside that genre. Here the alien is played by rock star David Bowie, whose strange, hypersensitive presence instantly convinces us that he has come from another planet. His growing estrangement is seen not as a reaction to the brute incomprehension of others, but in terms of his own seduction by our television and communications landscape, with its unlimited tolerance of deviant behaviour.

Above all, the Bowie figure is seduced by the fragmentation and sheer ironic style of life on Earth, perfectly exemplified by Roeg’s film technique – a mix of elegant photography and fashionable dislocations. But with his alien dismantled and demoralized, Roeg has nowhere to go, since he cannot rely on the genre’s conventions to rescue his film. And without the genre’s conventions the behaviour of his hero becomes merely modishly psychotic.

Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)

Spielberg’s mastery of the science-fiction medium was already evident in Duel, his 1971 classic of highway paranoia. From autogeddon he moved on to two major themes of science fiction, monsters (Jaws) and interplanetary travel (Close Encounters and ET the Extra-Terrestrial). That these have become three of the most successful films in the history of the cinema underlines my long-held belief that science fiction defines the popular imagination of the twentieth century.

Close Encounters combines lavish special effects with the complex and poetic story of a power-company technician whose life is transformed by a series of UFO visitations. He becomes obsessed with a strangely shaped mountain in Wyoming, a model of which he constructs in his family living room. The film proceeds by a series of powerfully allusive images, which climax with the arrival of the alien spaceship, a visionary landing that resonates for years in the spectator’s mind.

Alien (1979)

Alien is a tour de force of pure horror, a barrage of brutal eruptions (some literally so) that obscure the existence, behind the blood and terror, of an extremely elegant s-f film. Returning to Earth, the crew of the Nostromo is diverted to a remote planet and there unknowingly picks up the alien organism, which then proceeds to metamorphose its way through the cast until defeated by the courage and wiles of Sigourney Weaver, the s-f film’s first feminist heroine.

While all this is going on one has barely a pause to notice a host of fine details: the claustrophobic world of the spaceship, with its fraying camaraderie; the entropy of long voyages, time slowing down so that a brief conversation seems to last all day; the stylish interior of the Nostromo, a cross between a computer terminal and a nightclub; the final appearance of the alien, an insane mesh of ravenous teeth straight from the paintings of Francis Bacon that materializes just after Weaver strips down to her underwear. Dinner, fortunately, is delayed, at least until the sequel.

Mad Max 2 (1981)

This second, and by the far the best, of George Miller’s Mad Max trio is a tribute to the power of the s-f film to break free of its conventions and renew itself in a creative burst of ideas and images. On one level the ultimate road movie, Max Max 2 is a compellingly reductive vision of post-industrial collapse. Here the end of the world is seen as a non-stop demolition derby, as gangs of motorized savages rove their desert wastes, bereft of speech, thought, hopes or dreams, dedicated only to the brutal realities of speed and violence.

Above all, Mad Max 2 is an example of how sheer virtuosity can triumph in the film medium. A host of images wrench the retina -garish vehicles, fearful road armour and weird punk hairstyles, the sense of a world discarded after Judgement Day. In its raw power and vast scenic effects, Mad Max 2 is punk’s Sistine Chapel.

American Film 1987

Courting the Cobra

Projections 2 edited by John Boorman and Walter Donohue

The confidence of film directors, their zest and appetite for life, are nothing less than daunting, especially to the novelist, a gloomy soul sitting alone in the darkened auditorium of his own head and never certain that the lights will come on. Judged by the few grumbles in Projections 2, even a film director’s lowest moments sound remarkably like a novelist’s highs.

I once asked the veteran profile-writer Lynn Barber, who has interviewed hundreds of successful people in almost every profession, to name the happiest and most fulfilled of all. ‘Film directors,’ she promptly replied, a verdict amply confirmed here. Yet most filmmakers are unemployed at any moment, and reduced to peddling their latest projects from one unwelcoming office to the next. Film directors, as David Hare comments, are like deposed royalty, encountered in hotel lobbies as they wander the globe. They retain their tides, but lack a kingdom.

Launched last year by John Boorman and Walter Donohue, Projections is the best of the new series of film books, neither too popular nor too specialist, and free of the over-academic criticism that brings the entire paraphernalia of Marxism and psychoanalysis to the job of decoding John Ford westerns. Projections is packed with lively gossip and provocative ideas, underpinned by a shared passion for the medium of film. Directors, screenwriters and cinephotographers speak their minds with a frankness rarely seen in other professions.

In his introduction to Projections I, John Boorman wrote wittily and ruefully of the difficulties he met in financing his recent films. He described the ordeal of making the sales pitch in a producer’s office, a process that I have watched in Wardour Street over the years and which resembles the snake-charmer’s courtship of the cobra, with the same plaintive little tunes, frozen immobility and fear of those bored, deadly eyes, swaying slighdy from the effects of a large lunch. None the less, films are still made, and the most expensive dreams in the world are turned into light, and play against the silver wall of the planetary imagination. I hope that future numbers of Projections will look at the producer’s creative contribution, always underestimated. The Hollywood of fifty years ago, its greatest era, was a producer’s Hollywood where most directors were less important than the cameramen. Given the huge financial constraints, film may well be the least likely success story of the twentieth century.

One of the most interesting features in the new volume is a round-up of directors invited to predict the future of the cinema in the next millennium. Paul Schrader imagines the novelist and film director working in conjunction with the neuroscientist. ‘The next version of Ulysses may well come in pill form,’ he concludes, though many people already regard Joyce and Proust as the closest thing to a Valium. Even more apocalyptically, John Boorman guesses that not only the lens may become redundant, but also the eye and the camera, with electrical images fed directly into what I assume will be a kind of brain-bypass, something which we have already experienced in the form of television.

Other enjoyable features are long interviews with the maverick Robert Altman, director of M*A*S*H and The Player, and Hollywood’s enduring one-man awkward squad, and with the British screenwriter Sydney Gilliat, who collaborated with Frank Launder on the script of Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes. Gilliat offers his astute reflections on the curious and devious personality of Hitchcock, whom some have described as emotionally under-developed and little more than a grown-up schoolboy with a taste for lavatory humour. Gilliat knew him as a complex and scheming character, especially destructive of other people and determined to take all credit for himself.

Lucid and entertaining, Gilliat reminisces about the 1940s, the golden years of British film, and though now in his mid-eighties seems brimming with new ideas and as keen as ever to get behind a camera. His last words are typical of filmmakers as a whole, those hustlers, poets, bullies and mountebanks, every one a Cortez glimpsing an imaginary Pacific – ‘Any offers?’

Daily Telegraph 1993

The Samurai of the Epic

The Warrior’s Camera: The Cinema of Akira Kurosawa Stephen Prince

In 1971 Japan’s greatest filmmaker, Akira Kurosawa, director of Rashomon and The Seven Samurai, slashed his wrists with a razor, apparently in despair over the collapse of his career and failure to find commercial backing for his future films. Kurosawa’s attempt to kill himself – a way out of his problems, incidentally, that he never allowed his samurai heroes – lies at the centre of The Warrior’s Camera, an extended inquest into this would-be suicide and Kurosawa’s motives. Suicide may well be an act perfected by the Japanese, but it is hard to imagine Billy Wilder walking stoically into the surf off Malibu after the failure of Fedora. Movies, even those as witty and brilliant as Wilder’s, are not worth wetting one’s toes for.

But Kurosawa was never a maker of movies. Film was his medium at a time – the forties and fifties – when the film was at least the equal partner of the movie, and the cinema had yet to separate into the art film, a species that may soon be extinct, and the entertainment movie that now swamps our imaginations. Some movies, like Point Blank and Double Indemnity, are intense and ruthless enough to count as films, but this was never a doorway open to Kurosawa.

Truffaut, in his published conversations with Alfred Hitchcock, compliments him on his good sense in going to Hollywood, and comments that there is something about England that is inherently uncinematic. Truffaut refers to the anti-dramatic nature of English life; our stolid routines and subdued manners, and even our weather, Truffaut claims, are anti-cinematic. At first sight, how much more these strictures would seem to apply to the notion of a Japanese cinema – especially the rain, which certainly drenches many of Kurosawa’s films. Given the glacierlike rigidities of pre-war Japanese life, the total deference to authority and social consensus, and the suppression of the smallest gleam of individuality, it’s plainly a miracle that a Japanese cinema ever emerged at all, let alone a maverick talent like Kurosawa’s.

Stephen Prince suggests that Kurosawa only found the freedom to make his immensely personal films thanks to Japan’s defeat in the Second World War. The shattered population, gazing at their fire-bombed, moonscape cities, realized where consensus and obedience had led and were prepared for a few years to visualize some kind of alternative. From the start of his career, making wartime propaganda films, Kurosawa believed in the power of cinema to bring about a national regeneration, and was convinced that the Japanese would find their salvation by thinking about themselves above all as individuals.

In 1950 he produced Rashomon, a masterpiece of subjectivity in which the murder of a warrior and the rape of his wife are seen from four conflicting viewpoints. As Stephen Prince points out, what is so tantalizing about Rashoman is its refusal to validate any of the witnesses’ stories as the true account. In a world of absolute relativity, there is no way of knowing who is telling the truth. These same ambiguities prevail in Kurosawa’s films with contemporary settings -Drunken Angel and Stray Dog, among others – bleak visions of post-war criminality that draw on the same sources as the Italian neo-realist cinema, and convey the unmistakable impression that the Japanese, more than any other people, enjoy being depressed.

His samurai epics, above all The Seven Samurai, show Kurosawa again subverting traditional views of Japan’s historical past. The originality of the film, and an aspect that failed to translate into its Hollywood remake, The Magnificent Seven, was the unprecedented decision by the warriors, whose loyalty was to their feudal lord, to espouse the cause of the peasants – as strange as we would find the decision by a group of Grenadier Guards officers to set off for Yorkshire in the 1984 coal-strike and defend a village of striking miners.

Despite a long series of distinguished films, Kurosawa’s career was already threatened by the sixties. With the triumph of television, Japanese cinema audiences stayed at home to watch formulaic samurai epics produced at a fraction of Kurosawa’s lavish budgets. As well, a new kind of consensual thinking and corporate obedience had emerged with the rise of Japan Inc. The global victory won by Sony, Datsun and Matsushita Electric left no room for tortured self-doubt or moral relativities. The Japanese cinema fragmented into soft-porn and mass-entertainment industries, leaving behind a small group of art-film directors who loathed Kurosawa’s sweeping epics and what they saw as his ‘Hollywood’ narratives.

Today Japanese cinema manages to produce an occasional oddball like Tampopo. But its great days seem to lie in the past, along with the great days of American and European film, a vanishing world that survives in cinematheques and the TV graveyard hours and, one step from oblivion, in the nearest that the consumer society comes to cultural nirvana, the video-rental classics shelf.

Guardian 1991

La Jetée

This strange and poetic film, directed by Chris Marker, is a fusion of science fiction, psychological fable and photomontage, and creates in its unique way a series of potent images of the inner landscapes of time. Apart from a brief three-second sequence – a young woman’s hesitant smile, a moment of extraordinary poignancy, like a fragment of a child’s dream – the thirty-minute film is composed entirely of still photographs. Yet this succession of disconnected images is a perfect means of projecting the quantified memories and movements through time that are the film’s subject matter.

The jetty of the title is the main observation platform at Orly Airport. The long pier reaches out across the concrete no-man’s-land, the departure point for other worlds. Giant jets rest on the apron beside the pier, metallic ciphers whose streamlining is a code for their passage through time. The light is powdery. The spectators on the observation platform have the appearance of mannequins. The hero is a small boy, visiting the airport with his parents. Suddenly there is a fragmented glimpse of a man falling. An accident has occurred, but while everyone is running to the dead man the small boy is looking instead at the face of a young woman by the rail. Something about this face, its expression of anxiety, regret and relief, and above all the obvious but unstated involvement of the young woman with the dead man, creates an image of extraordinary power in the boy’s mind.

Years later, World War III breaks out. Paris is almost obliterated by an immense holocaust. A few survivors live on in the circular galleries below the Palais de Chaillot, like rats in some sort of abandoned test-maze warped out of its normal time. The victors, distinguished by the strange eye-pieces they wear, begin to conduct a series of experiments on the survivors, among them the hero, now a man of about thirty. Faced with a destroyed world, the experimenters are hoping to send a man through time. They select the young man because of the powerful memory he carries of the pier at Orly. With luck he will home on to this. Other volunteers have gone insane, but the extraordinary strength of his memory carries him back to pre-war Paris. The sequence of images here is the most remarkable in the film, the subject lying in a hammock in the underground corridor as if waiting for some inward sun to rise, a bizarre surgical mask over his eyes – in my experience, the only convincing act of time travel in the whole of science fiction.

Arriving in Paris, he wanders among the strange crowds, unable to make contact with anyone until he meets the young woman he had seen as a child at Orly Airport. They fall in love, but their relationship is marred by his sense of isolation in time, his awareness that he has committed some kind of psychological crime in pursuing this memory. As if trying to place himself in time, he takes the young woman to museums of palaeontology, and they spend days among the fossil plants and animals. They visit Orly Airport, where he decides that he will not go back to the experimenters at Chaillot. At this moment three strange figures appear. Agents from an even more distant future, they are policing the time-ways, and have come to force him back. Rather than leave the young woman, he throws himself from the pier. The falling body is the one he glimpsed as a child.

This familiar theme is treated with remarkable finesse and imagination, its symbols and perspectives continually reinforcing the subject matter. Not once does it make use of the time-honoured conventions of traditional science fiction. Creating its own conventions from scratch, it triumphantly succeeds where science fiction invariably fails.

New Worlds 1966

Blue Velvet

Blue Velvet is, for me, the best film of the 1980s – surreal, voyeuristic, subversive and even a little corrupt in its manipulation of the audience. In short, the perfect dish for the jaded palates of the 1990s. But a thicket of puzzles remains. First, why do the sensible young couple, played by Kyle MacLachlan and Laura Dern, scheme to break into the apartment of the brutalized nightclub singer (Isabella Rossellini) and risk involving themselves with the psychopathic gangster – Dennis Hopper in his most terrifying screen performance?

A curious feature of Blue Velvet is the virtual absence of the youngsters’ parents, shadowy figures who take almost no part in the action. I assume the film is a full-blown Oedipal drama, and that the gangster and the nightclub singer are the young couple’s ‘real’ parents. Like children hiding in their parents’ bedroom, they see more than they bargained for. Playing his sadistic games with the singer, the gangster rants ‘Mummy, mummy, mummy’; a useful pointer to David Lynch’s real intentions. The young man longs to take the gangster’s place in the singer’s bed and, when he does, soon finds himself playing the same shocking games, a crisis that can only be resolved by killing his ‘father’ in the approved Oedipal fashion.

The second puzzle is the role of the severed ear found by the young man after he visits his father in hospital, and which sets off the entire drama. Why an ear rather than a hand or a set of fingerprints? I take it that the ear is really his own, tuned to the inner voice that informs him of his imminent quest for his true mother and father. Like the ear, the white picket fence and the mechanical bird that heralds a return to morality, Blue Velvet is a sustained and brutal tease, The Wizard of Oz re-shot with a script by Kafka and decor by Francis Bacon. More, more…

Time Out 1993