Cinema Futura (edited by Mark Morris) Read online

  CINEMA FUTURA

  Edited by Mark Morris

  INTRODUCTION

  Mark Morris

  I remember the first ‘proper’ horror movie I saw. It was Michael Armstrong’s The Haunted House of Horror (1969), a gory little slasher which boasted the likes of Frankie Avalon, Dennis Price and Richard O’Sullivan among its eclectic cast. I remember it because it utterly traumatised me. I must have been about eleven years old, and I recall lying on the settee for some time after the film had finished, literally shaking with fear, too terrified to move.

  Now, of course, I look back on that formative experience with great fondness and nostalgia. And despite what Mary Whitehouse would no doubt have seen as its deeply detrimental effects, The Haunted House of Horror encouraged me, after a period of recuperation, to seek out more movies which might pack a similar emotional punch. In fairly rapid succession I saw Hammer’s The Brides of Dracula, The Evil of Frankenstein and The Reptile. I saw a slew of Amicus portmanteau movies – Tales From the Crypt; From Beyond the Grave; Vault of Horror. I saw several of those wonderfully sleazy and weirdly disturbing psycho thrillers which seemed to abound in the late 60s and early 70s – And Soon the Darkness; Assault; Fright; Hitchcock’s Frenzy.

  And, mixed in with the likes of Scream and Scream Again and Blood on Satan’s Claw, I saw a bunch of science-fiction movies, which – to my untutored mind – seemed just as strange and dislocating and terrifying as the out-and-out ‘horror’ films I was watching: The Fly; Them!; The Thing From Another World; Quatermass and the Pit; Night of the Big Heat.

  I’m not a technologically-minded person. I have a (very simple) mobile phone, but all this talk of iPads and Blackberries just confuses me. And if anything goes wrong with my computer/car/washing machine, I’m lost.

  I’m similarly baffled by science. On a surface level I find it fascinating and wonderful, but as soon as people start talking about protons and neutrinos and fully-integrated, bio-thermic circuitry (I’m just using woffly, sciencey words here, you understand; I have absolutely no idea what I’m saying), I just switch off. It’s like a different language to me.

  What this is leading to is an admission that although I love science-fiction, the kind of science-fiction I love is the kind that deals with people and monsters and alien invasions. I mean, I like spaceships and computers and weird alien planets, but only as part of the background colour – I have no interest whatsoever in how they work. For that reason I can’t get along with ‘space opera’ or ‘hard’ science-fiction. What’s the point of watching spaceships floating through space for hours and hours? And whilst alien planets are great to look at and read about, please don’t start going on about the intricacies of ‘terra-forming’ or ecological evolution, because that’s just white noise, as far as I’m concerned. What I want to know about are the people who live, or have landed, on the planet, the relationships they have with one another, the dangers they face. If there are big monstrous predators, I don’t want a textbook explanation of their evolution and anatomy. I just want to know what they look like. And I want to see them in action, chasing and eating people.

  What I’m saying is that although I adore science-fiction movies, horror films are admittedly my first love. Have you seen those books edited by Steven Jay Schneider – 101 Horror Movies You Must See Before You Die and 101 Sci-Fi Movies You Must See Before You Die? Browsing through them, I discovered that I’d seen 89 of the 101 horror movies listed, and 62 of the 101 science-fiction movies. When I came up with the idea for the first of these two movie books, therefore (it was entitled Cinema Macabre for those of you who might be happening upon this book with no prior knowledge of its context or history), my immediate instinct was to edit a book of horror movie essays. However, in the back of my mind I always had the desire to do a science-fiction follow-up at some point. And now here it is. And very proud of it I am too.

  So, aside from focusing on science-fiction rather than horror movies, how does Cinema Futura differ from Cinema Macabre? Well, it’s bigger for a start. Cinema Macabre had contributions from fifty genre luminaries, each writing an essay on their favourite – or a favourite – horror movie, whereas Cinema Futura pushes the word limit with sixty entries. There is no particular reason for this, aside from the fact that – as with Cinema Macabre – the response to my request for contributions was so overwhelming that, second time around, I decided to try to accommodate both more writers and more movies.

  The only rule I had was that there should be no duplication of either contributors or movies from the first book – so, sixty new writers, sixty new films. Aside from that, the contributors were pretty much given carte blanche to choose whichever ‘science fiction’ film they wanted to champion – which, as with Cinema Macabre, resulted in an interesting and sometimes unexpected line-up. Although I said the same thing in the introduction to Cinema Macabre, it’s worth repeating here: this is no ‘60 Best Science-Fiction Movies of All-Time’ volume. It is an entirely subjective and personal choice of films, one per contributor. Naturally, within these pages, you’ll find widely-acknowledged classics of the genre: Metropolis; 2001: A Space Odyssey; Solaris; The Man Who Fell to Earth; Star Wars; Bladerunner etc. But there are some delightfully off-kilter choices here too – The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension; The Wonderful Ice-Cream Suit; The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra – as well as one or two films which may not generally be regarded by the majority of people as ‘science-fiction’ at all – The Man in the White Suit; The Purple Rose of Cairo.

  As I intimated before, there is a certain amount of cross-over between horror and science-fiction movies, and whereas Cinema Macabre contained ‘horror’ films which are often just as generally regarded as ‘science-fiction’ – Invasion of the Body Snatchers; The Omega Man; Alien; The Thing – so Cinema Futura contains ‘science-fiction’ films which are readily embraced by the ‘horror’ genre – Quatermass 2; Village of the Damned; The Fly; Donnie Darko; The Mist.

  One thing I find particularly interesting about ‘science-fiction’ is its perceived close association with ‘fantasy’ – perhaps because highly-advanced (speculative) technology is often widely seen as synonymous with magic? Hence some contributors, when asked to nominate a favourite ‘science-fiction’ film, simply chose a movie with fantastical elements but no real hint of ‘science’ – The 7th Voyage of Sinbad; Time Bandits; The Lord of the Rings. Curmudgeons might argue that such movies do not deserve a place in a book purportedly championing cinematic science-fiction, but as far as I’m concerned, science-fiction, fantasy and horror share a common perspective, in that they all deal with the speculative, the numinous, the other-worldly. They are genres which, by their very nature, should (and do) push against strictures and parameters and rules, and as such, I’m proud and delighted to confound expectations by including such movies here.

  Okay, on to statistics. It’s interesting to note that – aside from the two 1920s contributions from Fritz Lang – the common perception, if this book is anything to go by, is that science-fiction as a cinematic genre didn’t really get going until the 1950s. This is certainly true to an extent, though there was a smattering of significant science-fiction movies before the explosion of American and British ‘B-pictures’ in the post-war years – Voyage to the Moon (1902), A Trip To Mars (1918), Aelita (1924) and Things To Come (1936). The 1940s, however, is notable for its dearth of science-fiction films, perhaps because the world as a whole, embroiled in a war whic
h, to one extent or another, spread its influence across the entire globe, was reluctant to look too far into its own future. Horror movies, on the other hand, remained big business in the 40s, even if most of the output was generated by the US film industry, and Universal studios in particular. Notable horror titles of the decade that science-fiction forgot (or rather, the decade that forgot science-fiction) include The Wolf Man (1941), Cat People (1942), I Walked With A Zombie(1943), and a whole host of outings involving Dracula, the Mummy and Frankenstein’s monster.

  Once we hit the 1950s, however, science-fiction as a cinematic force gets into its stride, and – as we can see from the choices in this book – has remained a popular genre with movie-goers ever since. Certainly the films highlighted here are spread pretty evenly across the six decades from the 1950s to the present day. No decade since the 50s has less than seven entries, and perhaps surprisingly, particularly after a slight drop of favoured films in the 1990s, the 2000s takes the prize for the most entries of all with 13 – perhaps suggesting that, due to advances in, and the increasing affordability of, lavish and stunning CGI effects, we are currently enjoying a cinematic science-fiction ‘golden age’.

  Let’s move on to directors. It would appear from the evidence here that both James Cameron and Terry Gilliam are the two most popular directors among science-fiction aficionados, with three entries apiece. Snapping at their heels, with two entries each, are Fritz Lang, Andrei Tarkovsky, Stanley Kubrick, Woody Allen and Darren Aronofsky. Woody Allen’s inclusion as a top ‘science-fiction’ director is perhaps the most astonishing, especially as he has proven himself more popular among our contributors than the likes of David Cronenberg, George Lucas, Ridley Scott and – perhaps most notably – Steven Spielberg. In fact, Steven Spielberg, despite being the director of acknowledged science-fiction ‘classics’ such as E.T., Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Jurassic Park, only just managed to sneak into the book at all – his 2002 movie Minority Report was the 59th of 60 films to be chosen.

  Having said that, one could perhaps argue that Peter Jackson also has three entries here, if not for the fact that his Lord of the Rings trilogy has been cunningly selected by Amanda Hemingway as one movie. If we acknowledge that Lord of the Rings is, in fact, three separate movies, then that would make Peter Jackson the most acclaimed genre director across the two books, as he is one of a half-dozen genre-hopping directors who feature in both Cinema Macabre and Cinema Futura, the others being David Cronenberg, Stanley Kubrick, Nicolas Roeg, Ridley Scott and Robert Wise.

  Before I put this Introduction to bed, there are a few people I would like to thank. First of all the wonderful Pete and Nicky Crowther of PS Publishing, for agreeing to this second volume and for continuing to run a genre publishing company which remains astonishing in its excellence, and to whom all serious horror, science-fiction and fantasy fans throughout the world owe an unpayable debt. Secondly I would like to thank the legendary Steve Jones, for his enthusiasm, generosity and knowledge. And finally – and once again – a huge thank you to my wonderful contributors, for donating their time and their love and their magnificent words to this project. I raise a glass to you all.

  And now… let’s go to the movies.

  METROPOLIS

  (Director: Fritz Lang; starring: Alfred Abel, Gustav Frölich, Rudolf Klein-Rogge, Brigitte Helm - 1927)

  Stan Nicholls

  It started when I was a kid, with stills in magazines such as Famous Monsters of Filmland and Spacemen, and various film books. A futuristic cityscape, gigantic machines and a really cool robot stoked the fevered inclinations of the younger me. Years later, when I finally caught Metropolis itself, it was kind of strange to see those static images brought to life.

  Set in 2026, the metropolis of the title is a vast, multi-layered conurbation, its soaring towers circled by swarms of aircraft. The city’s populace is divided into two classes: the privileged elite who loaf above ground, and the workers, slaving over machines in subterranean squalor. Appalled by what he finds when he ventures below, one of the elite, Freder Fredersen, witnesses a revolution brewing. Its leader is the young, charismatic Maria, who advocates non-violent change. Freder soon falls for her, and sides with the oppressed. But his father, Joh Fredersen, Master of Metropolis, plots to kill the revolt by enlisting Rotwang, a deranged scientist. Rotwang creates a female robot – a robotrix – in the exact likeness of Maria. Acting as an agent provocateur, the counterfeit Maria’s task is to incite the workers to violence, giving Joh the pretext to crush them.

  It all goes wrong, of course. The robotrix proves as nutty as her creator, nearly drowns the workers and almost destroys the city before being burnt at the stake by a mob. Rotwang kidnaps the real Maria and carries her unconscious to the top of a church tower. Freder rescues her and Rotwang plunges to his death. Maria pacifies the workers. Joh reconciles with his son, accepts Maria and begins a rapprochement with the underclass.

  Famously, director Fritz Lang was inspired by seeing the Manhattan skyline during his first trip to America. Collaborating with his wife, screenwriter and novelist Thea von Harbou, supported by producer Erich Pommer, Metropolis turned out to be arguably the most ambitious film ever made at that time. It was certainly the most expensive at seven million reichsmarks ($1 million), which translated to present values makes its budget comparable to the biggest blockbusters. For the producing studio, Universum Film Aktiengesellschaft (UFA), it was a make or break risk.

  Lang was no stranger to fantastical and audacious subjects. He had already made M, the story of a child-murderer (and Peter Lorre’s debut); the eccentric Dr Mabuse series; a version of Wagner’s Die Nibelungen; and Destiny, in which one of the characters is Death. (In 1933 Lang immigrated to the USA after offending the Nazis, where he brought a European sensibility to Hollywood and became a leading exponent of film noir, his output including The Big Heat and While the City Sleeps.)

  No work of art can be seen in isolation from the cultural and political influences of its time. One context in which Metropolis should be viewed is that of German expressionist cinema, which had already produced such fantasies as Nosferatu, The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, several tellings of the golem legend, Waxworks, The Hands of Orlac, and many others. A strand that suggests German audiences were receptive to explorations of myth, the supernatural and speculations on what-could-be.

  Unfortunately, a segment of the population was also open to darker interpretations of certain aspects of the film. Specifically, this centered on the villainous Rotwang, who was widely assumed to be Jewish. This seems to have arisen because Rotwang’s house sports a pentagram, the five pointed occult symbol, and some people, probably willfully, confused it with the six-pointed Star of David. This was perhaps inevitable in a society where many had an increasing propensity to see Jews in a negative light. But there was no question of Lang being anti-Semitic; he was half Jewish himself.

  The Rotwang character appears to be at least as much an alchemist as a scientist. This chimes with other elements in the film that might be said to have a spiritual or quasi-religious flavour: the presentation of the pacifist Maria (a variant of the name Mary) as pure/virginal; the burning of the robotrix echoing a saint’s martyrdom (reminiscent of Joan of Arc); a sequence in which the parable of the Tower of Babel is depicted; the likening of one of the city’s great generators of energy to the Biblical Moloch, an Ammonite god; a denouement that takes place in a church. This imagery could have stemmed from the influence of Lang’s Catholic father; but perhaps it wouldn’t be too fanciful to see Metropolis, on one level, as portraying Germany’s struggle to leave behind its medieval past and become a modern industrialised nation – a fable of the demise of the old (pagan) world and the triumph of the (Christian/humanist) new. Put simply, its bizarre blend of sorcery and technology conveys the message: magic bad, science good.

  Another context in which Metropolis should be placed, and an influence that can’t be ignored, is the then emerging literary genre of science fiction.
From ancient myth, via Shelley’s Frankenstein, Edgar Allen Poe, Jules Verne, Jack London and Edgar Rice Burroughs, to name just a handful, the “scientific romance” was finally starting to coalesce into a definable literary form. Metropolis was released the year after the premiere issue of what is generally considered the world’s first recognisable sf magazine, Amazing Stories, which almost immediately spawned a raft of pulp imitators and rivals.

  The obvious comparison between written science fiction and Metropolis is HG Wells’ The Time Machine (published 1895), with its vision of a far future where humanity has evolved into two distinct groups – the gentle Eloi, descendants of a ruling faction who live in the sun, and the fearsome cave-dwelling Morlocks who feed on them. Lang’s political allegory would seem to be in accord with Wells’. Yet in a notorious review by Wells in The New York Times he described Metropolis as “the silliest film”. He stated that mega-cities were highly improbable, and asserted as a fact that “The hopeless drudge stage of human labour lies behind us.” He spoke of the film’s “malignant stupidity” and called the creation of the robotrix its “crowning imbecility”. Wells seems to have lost his much vaunted foresight when it came to Metropolis. But then, sf has always been pretty lousy at predicting the future. It’s a good thing that that isn’t its primary function, whatever people who never read the stuff might think.

  Not that Metropolis scored that well. Its future has no computers, no mobile phones, no genetic manipulation. It posits a world run on sweat and steam, and people gadding about in biplanes. Though it did hit one target, in a scene featuring television, realised through the first use of back-projection. But it can hardly be criticised for being as erratic in the predictive department as published sf. Because that isn’t the point. In fact, the film’s uneven blending of 19th and imagined 21st Century technologies gives it a strangely steampunkish look, adding to its already considerable charm.