Cinema Futura (edited by Mark Morris) Read online

  As the sub-head reads, the mentioning of multiple potential futures is employed in a scene where Sarah Connor is not believing that Reese is from the future (and why should she? Happily, this film does not use the expediency of immediate acceptance to advance its plot). So all those problems with Reese meeting himself if he survives, Sarah Connor meeting him again in the future etc etc are parked in one go.

  Second, he uses Connor’s gradual acceptance to point out why we should not twist our brains too tight. ‘You’re talking about things I haven’t done yet in the past tense,’ she says. Right audience, adds the narrative, let’s move on with the thunderingly exciting action.

  ‘Hooked into everything, trusted to run it all.’

  But no film can stand the test of time without theme and message and The Terminator is no different.

  The Terminator carries a warning about our reliance on technology. The desire to move to an automated world and make the lives of humans easier, simpler, able to cope with demand as population rises. The desire of man to produce a machine that is sentient, that has a consciousness but that will not make errors. Machines will make decisions based on logic alone, goes the argument. Machines will assess risk and act accordingly. The problem is that logic is a trap and consciousness does not confer conscience. It does not confer care for its charges. Machines are cold. Inhuman. And in The Terminator’s future, one machine has decided to eradicate man to eliminate threat to the earth.

  The embodiment of this theme is, of course, the Terminator itself. A machine created by machines in an automated facility, designed with a single uninterruptible purpose. And, when man and his guns has failed to stop the Terminator, it is undone by a metal press, part of an automated production sequence. So the circle is complete. Because though we should fear the march of technology, we must accept that we cannot do without it. Pandora’s Box is wide open.

  And even though at first sight, the film ends in victory for humankind, it is a hollow one. The Terminator is defeated and Connor is escaping into Mexico. But this is no happy ending. The cataclysm will still take place. All Connor does is survive to give birth to the man who will lead the resistance. At the beginning of the film, the vision is of mankind all but wiped out. Come the end of the film, this is still going to happen. The world has not been saved.

  ‘Do I look like the mother of the future? I mean, am I tough, organised? I can’t even balance my cheque book.’

  All right, enough of the heavy stuff, here’s a little fun. A few best bits for you:

  Best Scene: Tech Noir club scene. From the moment the action temporarily slows, the music takes on an echoing quality and mankind is reprieved because Connor knocks a bottle of water over with her elbow, to the blistering exit of Reese and Connor pursued by a scorched Terminator, this scene has everything there is to love about action movies. Everything.

  Best Line: Well, apart from the header above, there is a pair of lines to savour. Gun shop scene. Arnie is picking weapons, all of which we are told rather chillingly are ‘ideal for home defence’. He then utters this timeless (in a 1984 gun shop way) classic:

  ‘Phased plasma rifle in the forty watt range.’ And, without so much as a blink, the gun shop owner replies: ‘Just what you see, pal.’ Beautifully delivered.

  However, we must not forget this movie contains the first iteration of Arnie’s catchphrase, spoken in every one of his films since. Except perhaps, Kindergarten Cop. I wouldn’t know, I am happy to say. That line is, of course:

  ‘I’ll be back.’

  Best idiosyncrasy: There are a few, but one is head and shoulders ahead. It is the odd sight of our killing machine knocking on the door of his first victim’s house and waiting for her to confirm her name before slaughtering her in cold blood. How polite.

  ‘Don’t make me bust you up, man.’

  The Terminator is a supreme piece of filmmaking. It’s chase movie; apocalyptic future vision; love story; temporal paradox; and present day warning too. A warning yet to be heeded. Every piece fits and gives the whole a quality that will stand up probably forever because it is proper film-making. Cast and crew in harmony and not second to funky effects.

  If you haven’t seen The Terminator, why the hell not? It’s been out there for over twenty five years. You can pick up the DVD for a song. You really have no excuse. And you will see, good folk, that it is tight, focused, and far, far ahead of its sequels, one of which used a sledgehammer to demonstrate its themes and morality and the other, well, best not mentioned really.

  Just watch it. More than once. And if you can argue me out of its excellence, I’ll buy you dinner.

  BRAZIL

  (Director: Terry Gilliam; starring: Jonathan Pryce, Robert De Niro, Katherine Helmond, Ian Holm - 1985)

  Steve Rasnic Tem

  Brazil, set ‘somewhere in the 20th Century,’ embodies that now-common observation that the best science fiction, rather than providing a prophetic peek into the future, imaginatively transforms our present for the purpose of illumination.

  In the world of film, science fiction movies almost always evoke the times in which they were made, in style and in obsession. The world of Brazil seems both familiar and unfamiliar, reflecting both the nightmares of our recent past and our ongoing anxieties.

  The setting of Brazil is an ergonomic nightmare.Clerks work at tiny computer screens which must be viewed using large, distorting magnifiers. Great flex-ducts carrying wiring, heating, and air conditioning invade living spaces and decaying infrastructures apparently as part of some ill-considered retrofit. A variety of devices for purposes ranging from mundane pre-work activities to busy office procedures to annoying security probings have a Rube Goldberg complexity, as if they were invented out of cleverness with no thought for the human beings who might be subjected to them. As director Terry Gilliam tells us in the Criterion edition commentary, he hates ‘inefficiency disguised as order,’ and the film displays this attitude in abundance.

  Such inefficiency makes systems vulnerable. Brazil’s plot hinges on an incident in which a literal bug falls into the works, turning ‘Tuttle’ into ‘Buttle’ on one of the government’s omnipresent incoherent forms. This results in the arrest and death of an innocent family man. The scene is at once bitterly satiric, funny, and painfully grim – an uncomfortable balance which Gilliam orchestrates throughout the film.

  Interwoven into this thread of tortured technological innovation is a film design sensibility pulled from the thirties and forties and early issues of Popular Mechanics. Larger-than-life structures inspired by Franz Kafka and Fritz Lang’s Metropolis dwarf these grayscale citizens. The characters wear clothing patterned after National Socialism and noirish Humphrey Bogart movies. Among the film’s dazzling array of elaborate detailing are hats evolved from shoes, and 1984-style totalitarian propaganda thinly disguised as fifties-era magazine advertising (‘Suspicion Breeds Confidence,’ ‘Loose Talk is Noose Talk’). The number of alternate world logos and print materials alone created for this movie is staggering.

  A fetishistic obsession with consumerism is evident. Shopping carts bulging with purchases are convoyed through the streets by eager customers. A march is held by members of ‘Consumers for Christ.’ Women wrapped in bandages select drastic plastic surgeries from catalogs.

  It all startles and amuses with each transition flavoured with a different set of historical references. Each strange new Gilliam camera angle disorients our sense of space and time. And then we are brought up short by the echoes of very real tortures and suffering (‘uninvented’ as Gilliam points out in his commentary, almost ‘documentary’). Then there’s the coincidental mirroring of our own recent concerns with terrorism and the often convoluted, and somewhat mysterious requirements of ‘homeland security.’ The similarities are perhaps made more understandable when we realize Gilliam made Brazil during the Thatcher years.

  Somewhere in the 20th Century, indeed, for Brazil reflects many of the major concerns of individuals living in the deve
loped countries during the century just past. The need for security, not just internationally but in the home. The crumbling infrastructures of our major cities. Issues of self-image. Lack of faith in, and fear of the government. The problem of meaningful employment. The hunger for intellectual and creative freedom.

  My friend Ed Bryant and I play this game where we imagine unlikely, but telling, movie house double feature combinations. Today’s double feature is Office Space and Brazil. Both envision (or simply spotlight) a world in which job status is measured in centimetres of desk or office (or better yet, cube) space. Daily tasks appear arbitrary, involving a focus on meaningless (or in Brazil’s case, cruel) documentation and poorly-designed equipment. Everything seems to be far more inefficient, far more difficult, than it needs to be.

  One of the more darkly comic scenes in Brazil involves our hero Sam’s struggle with the desk (or half-desk) in his new, cell-like office. The desk keeps sliding into the wall; he struggles to drag it out again. Finally he inspects the office next door where he discovers another office worker pulling on this same desk they both share, dragging it back through the slot in the wall so as to gain more precious desktop real estate.

  Less than half of all Americans say they are satisfied with their jobs, down from 61 percent twenty years ago, according to The Conference Board Consumer Research Center. A recent report in The Guardian sets the UK figure even lower, at 35.2 percent. Frankly I suspect even these low figures are somewhat inflated, due to workers’ lowered expectations, to workers who no longer expect to be satisfied by any job, who ‘work for the weekend,’ for the paycheck which will buy them a bit of real or imagined freedom.

  In Gilliam’s Criterion commentary he describes how some people have been affected by the movie: laughing then, later, being brought to tears. The film’s satire cuts deeply. We laugh because we cannot help ourselves, and then we wonder if it’s appropriate to laugh at all. It’s a discomfiting film in which even the apparent reality of torture is presented with the rhythms and movements of musical comedy.

  It’s difficult to watch such a film without pondering the creative compromises we personally have had to make in order to function comfortably in the world. Adults discover very quickly in our society that there is no easy, universal solution for the dilemma of living a creatively nourishing life versus the structured business of doing your job and making a living.

  One of the criticisms leveled at Gilliam’s films, perhaps justifiably, is that they are self-indulgently chaotic. At times they practically drown in contradictory detail. He is charged with being undisciplined. He appears to know what he wants to say, but then he throws in anything that he finds interesting, that amuses him, sometimes obscuring the point. Certainly his most elaborate films – Brazil, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen and the recent The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus – have a detailed richness of such intensity they approach a kind of hallucinatory surrealism.

  My own view is that the worlds Gilliam creates uniquely combine closely-observed realism with an impossible baroqueness. This combination explodes them beyond a one-to-one correspondence with real world events and cultures into an inner world of the imagination. So, although Gilliam’s worlds mirror the world of our agreed-upon, ‘objective’ reality in instructive ways, their exaggerated, nightmarish feel presents an experience more in keeping with that of a fabulistic internal landscape, of the protagonist, a collection of characters, or the filmmaker himself. The dysfunctional totalitarian government becomes an internal human impulse which naturally opposes the nourishing and creative side of being. What at times appears to be exaggeration and overstatement on the part of the storyteller becomes the intensity of an internal fable with naturally high stakes. Both sanity and self are in jeopardy here. And yet for all this intense fabrication Gilliam usually manages to bring us back around to the real world. Our freedoms are being suppressed because a part of us wants that suppression. We are our own jailer.In Brazil, as in many of Gilliam’s other films, imagination is offered as a solution for the lack of freedom available in the real world. Sam’s daydreams, in which he is some sort of winged warrior soaring down through beautiful clouds to rescue the caged maiden, have as much weight as the more realistic parts of Brazil’s narrative. The effort might seem pointless as the resulting liberty is purely imaginary, but Gilliam appears to be suggesting that such freedom is at least better than none at all.

  Gilliam states in his commentary that one of his major themes is the ‘craziness of our awkwardly ordered society and the desire to escape it through whatever means possible.’ All of these movies involve an escape attempt through the use of the imagination, but the omnipresence of the oppression makes such an escape seem unlikely.

  So it is hardly surprising when Sam’s escape takes him back to the torture chair from where it began. He has temporarily succeeded in fleeing the oppressive regime but his successful escape is into a paradise of insanity.

  At first blush this hardly seems a satisfactory solution, but I think there is optimism in the fact that Sam was able to find an imaginative out to his dilemma, however high the cost. The paradise he dreams of (a setting more suitable to the bouncy Brazilian theme music of Aquarela do Brasil) appears increasingly unlikely in the world Gilliam has created. We have already seen a glimpse of the expanses of devastation hidden from view behind the endless miles of continuous billboards lining the road. The only ‘paradise’ actually within his reach is the one he’s manufactured in his mind. This is not the sort of ending which is going to please all viewers, but I think it is an admirably complex and uncompromising one.

  Just as most human beings cannot escape the need to make a living, society is not generally constructed in such a way that our most creative acts will be rewarded sufficiently to maintain both body and soul. That awkward order which has swallowed us all is not going to go away anytime soon. To rid ourselves of it entirely is probably impossible. It may very well be intrinsic to the human psyche itself. But somehow the imagination, when skillfully applied, is able to make a pathway through it.

  THE PURPLE ROSE OF CAIRO

  (Director: Woody Allen; starring: Mia Farrow, Jeff Daniels, Danny Aiello, Irving Metzman - 1985)

  Robert Shearman

  Woody Allen would not appreciate his inclusion in this book.

  It’s hard, sometimes, to be a Woody Allen fan. Especially when he appears on interviews so frequently deriding his own movies, and telling you not to bother watching them. One of the highlights of my year, ever since I saw The Purple Rose of Cairo on its release in 1985, has been to attend the premiere of the latest Allen movie – as, without fail, each and every year he cranks yet another out to a largely indifferent public. But it’s hard to find anyone to share my passion. I’m blessed with many friends – but I can count on one hand those who’d sit through a Woody film with me. In fact, I can count them on one finger. My wife can’t stand Woody Allen – and a recent suggestion that we watch all forty odd of his movies in strict chronological order (only the Canonical Ones, which he wrote and directed – I mean, I’m not mad) all but prompted divorce proceedings.

  The antipathy that people show Woody is born out by his own treatment of science fiction in his only other fully fledged acknowledgement of the genre. Everyone remembers Sleeper – it’s one of his ‘early, funny ones’, when Woody looked more like the charming clown and less the embittered old man. The French called it Woody et les Robots, and there are robots in it, and orgasmatrons, and Woody slipping over on a giant banana skin. The anachronism of the jazz soundtrack exists only to belie the futuristic setting; this is Allen looking at sci-fi, with all its ambition and imagination, and rather despising it. It’s a funny film (especially that bit with the banana), but there’s a cynical tone to it. It can’t stand the tone it’s aping. As I say, Woody would not appreciate being in a book celebrating great science fiction. He has spent his lifetime chasing the legacies of Bergman and Fellini, not George Lucas.

  Well, that’s tough, Woo
dy. Because you created a sci-fi classic in spite of yourself.

  Because The Purple Rose of Cairo is another matter altogether. The premise is very simple. In Depression era small town America, a woman called Cecile, trapped in a loveless marriage and a dead end job, finds escape only in the local movie theatre. There she is able to forget her troubles for an hour and a half, and lose herself in a world of aristocrats at night clubs and on world tours, falling in easy love and celebrating it with easy songs. And there too she sees one of these movies so many times that she captures the attention of one of the bit part characters – who is so enchanted by her that he climbs down off the screen to be with her.

  It’s not the blurring of reality and fantasy that is so very fresh – the same basic story has been told many times, from Buster Keaton to Arnold Schwarzenegger. It’s the very rigorous way that Allen examines the premise that turns it from a comic conceit into proper sci-fi, the way that he builds a world upon this fantastic premise and looks at the logical consequences of it in such detail. Other characters left behind in the movie are dismayed by the way they can no longer proceed with the story, and have lost any purpose to their scripted lives; others want to escape their black-and-white lives as well, and are denounced as Communist agitators. And in the real world, the spectators are either intrigued or angered by a movie offering no plot or consequence: ‘I want what happened in the movie last week to happen in the movie this week, otherwise what’s life all about anyway?’ The implications are terrifying; the nature of our world is shattered, and its very reliance upon the regularity of work and drudgery – this is a matter for the FBI.