Cinema Futura (edited by Mark Morris) Page 6

  A few months after the blackout, all the village women, including Zellaby’s wife Anthea (played without the usual hysteria by another Hammer stalwart, Barbara Shelley), discover that they are pregnant. Dr Willers, the vicar and Zellaby – representatives of the two bastions of reassurance in time of crisis, science and the Church – appear baffled by the phenomenon. This scene reminds me of the technique used by Wes Craven in A Nightmare on Elm Street when he systemically pulls away the props of parental protection and faith (Nancy Thompson’s mother is a drunk and the crucifix is demonstrably impotent). Likewise, Rilla has taken away the reassurance of a rational or faith-based explanation, thereby robbing the viewer of the usual sources of comfort. On the subject of faith, there are two seemingly significant religious images in the film: the church clock and the clock with the crucifix on Zellaby’s mantle. These timepieces mark out the beginning and the end of the aliens’ ‘miraculous’ lives, but their significance is illusory. It has seen immaculate conception firsthand, but with its ineffectual vicar and a professor who faces death without a prayer, religion has no place in Midwich.

  The children are born. Twelve blond-haired babies, all with domed heads (achieved with oversize wigs) and ‘strange eyes’. A further limitation on the film that may have seemed irksome at the time, but which works to its advantage, was the shoestring budget. The book gives us sixty ‘cuckoos’ but Rilla could afford only twelve. Sixty children on the screen may have seemed menacing through sheer weight of numbers, whereas the small group we are eventually presented with are eerie precisely because of their apparent vulnerability. Rilla also had to make the film in black and white – another hidden boon as the autumnal, monochrome skies seem to reflect the emptiness in the faces of the children.

  Almost immediately the rapidly developing children begin to exert a formidable will. When Anthea accidentally overheats her son’s milk he compels her to plunge her hand into scalding water. This becomes a theme as, later in the film, anyone who poses a threat to the collective meets a sticky end. After one of their number is almost run down, the children’s hive mind forces the motorist to drive his car into a brick wall (a wall which remains intact, cleverly foreshadowing an image that will return at the denouement). The motorist’s brother then tries to take revenge with a shotgun, only to fall under the children’s hypnotic and murderous stare. In a scene straight out of Hammer, the outraged locals march on the house where the children are lodged, flaming torches in hand, but can only watch in horror as their leader sets himself ablaze.

  These scenes are simple in their execution: the children face off against their adversary, there is that penetrating stare followed by a burst of (largely off screen) violence, and yet each episode is chillingly effective. Coupled with the straight-forward but startling effect of the glowing eyes (achieved with freeze frames and animated overlays) these scenes helped to sell the film to a huge international audience. Another simple technique was to overdub the voice of lead child David (played by the suitably ethereal Martin Stephens). The voice of a female actress imbues David’s speech with a sharp, commanding authority; another example of the clever use of sound employed throughout.

  As concerns are expressed in government circles, Zellaby is brought in for a conference in Whitehall. We discover that there are other sites around the world where dome-headed interlopers have been born, notably the Soviet Union. There follows a fairly superficial discussion of those fears that preoccupied the Cold War mind: annihilation or subjugation by superior nations (the Russians were then the only power to have a presence in space); infiltration by outsiders; the loss of identity and individualism; the horrors of unchecked scientific progress. Of course, these fears were reflected in the alien children of the film, but Village of the Damned has a lean seventy-seven minute running time and such weighty issues are never fully explored. The in-depth philosophising is left for the novel, where Zellaby and his friends expound in ways that seem both thoughtful and, occasionally, antiquated. The one memorable line from this scene is given to the Colonel, who answers the suggestion of murdering the children by saying, ‘This isn’t a police state… yet…’

  While Zellaby attempts to monitor the children, events spiral out of control. The motorist is killed, his brother murdered, the mob leader burned alive, and Major Bernard forced into a coma with the instruction, ‘You have to be taught to leave us alone.’ Finally, action is required and Zellaby steps up. In a suspenseful finale worthy of Hitchcock, the Professor rigs a bomb in his briefcase and sets out for the children’s house. With the suitcase looming in the foreground, Zellaby tries to maintain the image of a brick wall in his mind while the children launch a psychic assault. Again, simplicity is employed to great effect as the image of the wall starts to crumble. Too late, the children see the ticking bomb…

  Village of the Damned has survived a lacklustre sequel, John Carpenter’s woeful remake and numerous parodies, including The Bloodening, a joyous Simpsons homage. It remains a small, unfussy, but perfectly formed gem of Cold War sci-fi that utilised simplicity in script, direction, costume and sound design to memorable effect. For my part, I will always think fondly of those ‘strange eyes’ – portals that propelled me into thrilling, undreamt of worlds.

  THE DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS

  (Director: Steve Sekely; starring: Howard Keel, Nicole Maurey, Janette Scott, Kieron Moore - 1962)

  Christopher Golden

  In the 1970s and early 1980s, one of the local Boston, Massachusetts TV stations had a regular weekend feature called Creature Double Feature. Every Saturday afternoon, they would throw together a pair of horror or sci-fi monster movies from Universal, Hammer, AIP, Toho, and others. It was a fantastic education in monsters for kids all over the area… a gift, really. My older brother and I would watch them all, and we loved the bad ones just as much as the good.

  Though they could never really compete, another local station sometimes attempted to run similar movies to draw some of the audience away from the joy of Creature Double Feature.

  But we were way ahead of them.

  That’s how one Saturday when I was maybe nine years old, my brother and I ended up sitting our small portable black and white TV on top of the big colour set, tuning them to different channels, and watching two movies at the same time. One was showing The Mole People, and the other was showing The Day of the Triffids. We watched them both with our usual enthusiasm and awe, but for decades afterward the two were blended together in my memory.

  Thirty years later my own son Daniel took an interest in such movies, and I revisited them both. There’s always a danger in doing that, and The Mole People… well, it made me cringe. The Day of the Triffids, however, was just as fantastic as I’d always remembered. In fact, it was better than I remembered.

  The 1980s BBC miniseries The Day of the Triffids is a far more faithful adaptation, and is significantly more pensive, grimmer, and more satisfying. And yet it is the film version that sticks with me. There’s a starkness and simplicity to the 1962 movie that is appealing. The background of the Triffids is altered from John Wyndham’s original novel – in this version, the Triffids grew from spores brought to earth in meteor showers, and a second similar event causes their horrific evolution. This change, and other ways in which the film varies from the novel, reflect the film-making trends of the time, though the analogy to the Soviet peril is far less overt than in other movies of its oeuvre. The ending, in which it is discovered that sea-water causes the Triffids to melt, is also very much a factor of the era. It is the worst of the film-makers’ sins against Wyndham’s vision, and owes much more to The War of the Worlds than to Wyndham.

  The liberties taken with the source material combine with the genre conventions of the day to make a film curiously lacking in hope, in spite of that ridiculous ending. While the Triffids themselves are interesting, the limitations of special effects in 1962 make them far less compelling than in the novel or the 1980s version. No, it is the hopelessness that is most interesting, and
doubtless the reason for the silly finale.

  Though ostensibly the hero of the piece – and portrayed as a prototypical stalwart protagonist by the film’s star, Howard Keel – the main character, Bill Masen, is ruthlessly self-serving when it comes to his own survival. As a child, watching the story unfold, this never occurred to me, but watching the film as an adult, and in the modern era, one cannot help but feel that this version of Wyndham’s protagonist is unworthy of our admiration. When he awakens to discover that the meteor shower’s light show has left most of the world blind, he does nothing to help those who are wandering helplessly in the streets. An American naval officer (a big switch from the novel), he focuses on getting back to his ship, and as the true extent of the horror becomes evident, on finding some place that will be a haven from the chaos and death.

  A natural instinct, to be certain, and a plot we’ve seen many times… except that Masen is leaving helpless innocents to their fate at every turn. Even when he returns to a sanctuary that a beautiful, sighted woman has set up for the blind, to find the place has been taken over by a group of sighted marauders who are molesting the blind women, he saves only the sighted woman, leaving the blind to their awful fate at the hands of the marauders and the stings of the Triffids.

  Earlier in the film, Masen rescues a young, sighted girl from a brutal man who has been blinded and who would enslave her as his ‘seeing-eye-girl.’ This is evidence enough that even the sighted are themselves helpless in this new world, and what it says about human nature and desperation is unpleasant. And yet, in spite of the paternal bond formed between Masen and the girl, Susie, our ‘hero’ is not absolved. Though the language of the film wants us to root for him, his callous, survival-of-the-fittest behaviour is reprehensible.

  And I love it.

  Not the behaviour, of course, but the way it forces us, the audience, to ask ourselves how we would behave if the world as we knew it had fallen apart completely… if we could help others, or help ourselves. It is the ugliness and unpleasantness of the film – played off as some noble quest for survival – that fascinates me. It may be acted and scored and shot like other genre films of its era, but scratch that surface and a subversive classic is revealed.

  Of course, the argument might be made that this is not at all what the film-makers intended, that it is merely a happy accident resulting from their attempts to gloss over the more unsettling elements of Wyndham’s masterpiece. To me, that makes it all the more interesting and worthy of study.

  As a whole, the Triffids phenomenon has had a huge impact. The term itself has entered common usage, and its influence can be seen elsewhere. Who can watch the beginning of 28 Days Later and not be reminded of Masen’s first, terrified moments after he wakes from his operation? And I’d be willing to bet that Stephen King had the chilling opening of the novel in mind when he was writing The Stand. In King’s wonderful novel, Stu Redman wakes up after his capture and incarceration to find everyone else dead. There follows one of the novel’s most haunting scenes, as Redman attempts to flee the CDC, while all around him lay the swollen victims of Captain Tripps.

  Monstrous plants they might be, but the Triffids are a fondly-remembered part of my childhood, and helped to twist me into the man I am today. How fortunate I am to work in a field where that is considered a good thing.

  LA JETÉE

  (Director: Chris Marker; starring: Jean Négroni, Hélène Chatelain, Davos Hanich, Jacques Ledoux - 1962)

  Christopher Priest

  The first image in Chris Marker’s La Jetée is an aural one from a dark screen: the sound of a jet engine, a plane taxiing at an airport. Almost at once the first visual image appears: this is la jetée itself, the long pier on the roof of one of the terminals at Paris’s Orly Airport. The picture is a crisp monochrome, a still photograph. The image zooms out to show the full length of the pier, and the film credits are run briefly.

  The time is the present, or at least the period described in the film as ‘some time before the outbreak of World War 3.’ The contemporary audience is of course aware that this image must be at least forty years in the past, in our past, but if there are signs of datedness in the film they are subtle. Most of the aircraft we glimpse are the sort of commercial jets still in use today. The pier and the terminal are a modern-looking construction, although in these more difficult times the public would probably not be allowed on a viewing platform so close to the aircraft. The pier is not crowded – a few figures stand around, reminiscent of the guests in the grounds of the hotel in Alain Resnais’s L’année Dernière à Marienbad. There is a glimpse of a car park, not full. The slip road leading to the front of the terminal is not a crush of cars and taxis. The pier stands as an image of a generic airport, recent but timeless.

  A quality of timelessness permeates the whole film. Virtually every shot is a still photograph, a tableau, a moment glimpsed and fixed into immobility. On that quiet pre-WW3 day, lit by a ‘frozen’ sun, a boy visiting the airport with his parents notices a young woman (Hélène Chatelain) standing alone at the far end of the pier. He sees her face, a plane flies low overhead with a roar of engines, the woman gestures with horror or fear. A man’s body crumples to the ground. Later, the boy realizes he has witnessed the man’s death.

  Memory is not a narrative, it is not linear in form. It consists of fragments, images or incidents, moments glimpsed as if in still photographs. Memories from twenty years earlier will present themselves in a sequence that is created by the unconscious.

  Some years after the incident at Orly – it might be twenty years, but it is enough time for the boy to have grown into a man – Paris is in ruins as a consequence of World War 3. The man (Davos Hanich) is one of several prisoners held as subjects of experiments. They take refuge from the devastated city in the tunnels beneath the Palais de Chaillot, an empire of rats. A crude scientific project is under way, but most of the experiments fail: disappointment, madness and death are all around.

  One day the experimenters come for Hanich and although he fears the head of the team, the man turns out to be reasonable in manner. He explains the project to Hanich in calm terms. The human race is doomed, he says. The only hope for mankind lies in Time: the past or the future. Hanich has been selected because of his obsessive memory of the incident at the airport.

  The attempts to travel in time begin. After many painful, terrifying and unsuccessful attempts he begins to see images of a remembered past: a field where horses are grazing, a dozing cat, a sun-filled bedroom, pigeons flapping away in a town square… finally the pier at Orly. One day he sees a woman on the pier he thinks might be Chatelain, but passes her by. Later she smiles at him from a car.

  Certain now that he recognizes her, Hanich makes repeated contacts with her, his confidence growing with each encounter. They conduct a harmless affair, meeting in sun filled parks, in crowded streets, among the cases of a natural history museum. One day she sleeps while Hanich watches over her. As she stirs her eyelids move open lightly. It is an intense and poignant moment in the film, the only use of a motion camera. Those few seconds of innocent waking are full of understated, undeclared meaning. She seems to see Hanich at last, embedding him in her consciousness, releasing him from the future to stay longer with her in this present. Love is growing between them.

  She does not know, he does not know, that the experiment is about to end. It was only the first. The second experiment now follows: he must travel to the future to negotiate with the people there. They too have mastered time travel. He is charged with bringing back from them some lesson or device which will help mankind survive the present crisis. He succeeds.

  Hanich’s reward is that he is told he has been accepted as a member of that future society, and may stay there permanently in safety. He has an alternative request, though. Against the wishes of the experimenters he asks to be returned to the time of his childhood, to the pier at Orly, where he believes the woman is waiting for him.

  He arrives on the warm Sunday a
fternoon, mingles with the people on the roof at Orly. He seeks Chatelain and glimpses her where as a boy he first saw her, standing alone at the far end of the pier. He runs desperately towards her, but at the moment she turns to see him one of the experimenters appears with a weapon. Hanich’s terrible destiny is fulfilled.

  The circle is closed, time loops into a continuum.

  La Jetée is a rare example of high cinema meeting serious speculative fiction. The images from this short film from four decades ago have seeped inextricably into the visual and cerebral consciousness of a generation of writers and other film makers. It was not released in the UK until 1966, when it was exhibited as a support feature to Alphaville, then being greeted as a breakthrough nouvelle vague experiment. Forty years on Alphaville looks gimmicky and obscurely frivolous, and is not highly regarded even within Jean Luc Godard’s own work, but La Jetée remains as potent and resonant as it was when new. Although Marker has made many other films, most of them documentaries or political polemics, nothing else has achieved this peak of cinematic artistry. Neither of the two actors, Hanich and Chatelain, their stark countenances, frozen gestures and despairing stares becoming iconic, have appeared in any other film since. All this somehow preserves La Jetée’s purity, leaving it immutable, ageless, unfading. It is, quite simply, one of the most beautiful and important films made in the 20th century.

  ALPHAVILLE

  (Director: Jean-Luc Godard; starring: Eddie Constantine, Anna Karina, Akim Tamiroff, Valérie Boisgel - 1965)

  Lucius Shepard