The Screengrab : punishment park

Visions of Change: Cinematic Utopias & Worst Case Scenarios (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 22:00:00 GMT

LOCAL HERO (1983)

Whither Bill Forsyth? Withering, apparently: after a charming run of movies in the 1980s (including Gregory’s Girl, Comfort and Joy and Housekeeping), the Scottish director flamed out with 1993’s Being Human (a terrible film which, unsurprisingly, stars Robin Williams), disappearing for good after 1999’s Gregory’s Two Girls (which may or may not be terrible, since I only just learned of its existence through the Internet Movie Database). But Forsyth can make sequels and terrible Robin Williams movies from now until doomsday and he’ll still be one of my favorite directors of all time, if only for bringing Local Hero into existence. A simple but compelling vision of utopia, the film takes place in a gorgeous Scottish fishing village where everyone is welcome and accepted at the local ceilidh, from punk rockers and homeless beachcombers to American businessmen, Russian sailors, African preachers and pretty big city scientists who just might turn out to be mermaids. Movies (especially the Hollywood variety) are usually too impatient, loud and cynical to capture the best parts of actually being human – the beauty of a fantastic night sky, the electric giddiness of a new flirtation, the relaxed camaraderie of smart, decent people – but Forsyth seduces us with the salty sweetness of his celluloid world the way the fictional village of Ferness eventually seduces the film’s shaggy dog protagonist, Mac (played with deadpan cable-knit sweater warmth by the ever-reliable Peter Riegert), an oil company executive tasked with paving paradise to put up a shiny new oil refinery...and, like most real-life utopias, the sense of bittersweet impermanence only heightens the appeal of the place.

SOLARIS (1972)

The beginning of Tarkovsky's Solaris takes place in a retro-future world so sterile and strange that it was filmed in Tokyo. There's a lovely long tracking shot as our hero, Kelvin, drives through the city. I long to sync it with the retro-future sounds of the krautrock band Neu!, which similarly used repetition, driving drums and avant-noise to achieve transcendence. Kelvin visits his parents' house, too, and it is a little Eden of a cottage with a nearby pond. Kelvin soon leaves the cold, clean Earth for the broken-down spaceship circling the planet Solaris, which is potentially sentient. It's not long before his ex-wife, a suicide, shows up in the flesh, so to speak. The end of the film finds Kelvin in his little Eden again, although everything is different now. It's a mirror of Kelvin's perfect little Eden, but the reflection cannot live up to the reality. And the reality is lost to memory, anyway. The above clip is from the end of the movie, so be forewarned. (Soderbergh's remake is interesting, but lacks the punch of Tarkovsky's film.)

BRAZIL (1985)

Terry Gilliam, according to legend, had always wanted to do a movie of George Orwell’s totalitarian dystopia, Nineteen Eighty-Four. But Michael Radford beat him to it, so he had to invent his own version. It’s probably a good thing he did – Gilliam, whatever his strengths as a director (and they are many, as many as his weaknesses), is probably too weird to make an adaptation of the rise and fall of Winston Smith that made any kind of sense. But as great as Radford’s movie was, Brazil is greater, not in spite of, but because of the fact that it’s so relentlessly strange. The ever-watching eyes of the state peer endlessly at its own civil servants, with results that are as hilarious as they are tragic. Technology is meant to be miraculous but is instead disastrous, and the most subversive thing someone can do is to fix things. Government torturers dress in absurd masks and order the deaths of the wrong people through bureaucratic cock-ups. The heads of state and upper-level party functionaries, instead of being grim and faceless tyrants, are self-deluding clowns who make themselves unrecognizable with plastic surgery or spout endless, hollow sports metaphors. Orwell had seen life’s horrors in his time, and reflected them in his novel; but Terry Gilliam chose to focus on life’s absurdities, and his nightmare vision of the future was one of a man who couldn’t believe that human beings, asinine and incompetent as they were, could even get a dystopia working properly.

PUNISHMENT PARK (1971)

When it was released (to complete indifference from the public and general hostility from the handful of critics who saw it), Peter Watkins’ unnerving pseudo-documentary seemed, to some, unnervingly real. Its nightmarish dystopia seemed, to those who opposed Nixon and his crackdown on anti-war activists, right around the corner: dissidents would be rounded up and used as little more than cannon fodder in military training exercises. Watkins is still the master of the alternate-historical documentary, and for its target audience, the scenes (mostly improvised by an amateur cast) of sneering young soldiers putting increasingly hysterical political prisoners through their paces must have come across as chillingly plausible. In later years, the film became hard to find, which might have seemed for the best: with the eschatological frenzy of the Vietnam era beginning to fade, it probably came across as increasingly strident and paranoid, with every thoughtful dissenter who claims that in a time of government oppression, the honorable path is that of a criminal, there’s an overblown windbag spitting at the pigs and screaming about the Man. It finally came to DVD at just the right time, though: in the post-9/11 era of the USA-PATRIOT Act and governmental scorn for Constitutional protections, it was newly relevant. Latter-day conservatives feverishly dreaming of being locked in confiscation camps by Comrade Obama might even find something to like in it, if its protagonists weren’t a bunch of dirty hippies.

Click Here For Part One, Part Three & Part Four

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Hayden Childs, Leonard Pierce

Take Five: 1968

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 21:30:00 GMT

Brett Morgen's highly praised documentary Chicago 10, about the fallout of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago forty years ago opens in limited release this weekend. Morgen has claimed since it first debuted last year at Sundance that the film isn't really about 1968, but about 2008, and indeed, it seems to have fresh, albeit grim, resonance today, with the recent death of arch-conservative William F. Buckley, who had a memorable confrontation on the air while covering the convention. Steven Spielberg is himself crafting a fictionalized version of the same events for The Trial of the Chicago 7, and America gears up for one of the most electrifying presidential races in recent memory as an unpopular war rages overseas and tumult grips some of our closest allies. But as relevant as it might seem from a moviemaking perspective, in other ways, 1968 couldn't be further away; the revolutionary consciousness of that bloody year and the infinite possibilites that came with the Paris revolts seem like they happened on another planet. Still, in many ways, it was a magical year that casts a very long shadow over the lives of a number of people, many of whom are filmmakers. Here's a look at some of the better films about or influenced by that impossible year.

MEDIUM COOL (1969)

In many ways, the definitive film about the events of 1968, at least from an American perspective, will always be Haskell Wexler's Medium Cool. The first nondocumentary feature film directed by the legendary cinematographer was meant to be a highly fictionalized treatment of chaos and mayhem breaking out at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago; but it quickly transmogrified into something altogether stranger, blurring the line between truth and fiction, as reality quickly began to outstrip Wexler's fictionalized vision. Eventually, while filming, he found himself caught up in the (unstaged) action of the riots and police brutality that wracked the city and altered the political landscape of America, and one of his crew uttered the immortal warning: "Look out, Haskell! It's real!" (This later became the title of a very worthwhile 2001 documentary about the movie.)

PUNISHMENT PARK (1971)

Though it was neither filmed in nor set in 1968, one of the most famous — or infamous — of Peter Watkins' inventive pseudo-documentaries is completely suffused with the spirit of the times. The director himself has admitted to being highly galvanized by the events of that year, both in the United States and in Europe, and some of the nonprofessional actors he recruited to play roles in the film were participants in the Chicago riots. The film itself concerns a grueling trek through the desert by a handful of dissidents, escorted by a grim-faced group of soldiers in some sort of vicious game. It quickly degenerates into a terrifying realistic showdown between the forces of law and order and the voices of revolution and dissent; its creepy verisimilitude serves to remind us that maybe those days aren't as long past as we'd like to think.

IN GIRUM IMUS NOCTE ET CONSUMIMUR IGNI (1978)

Guy Debord, provocateur, poet, philosopher and filmmaker, was one of the key members of the Situationist International, and as such, one of the hidden architects of the bizarre, almost miraculous events of Paris, May 1968. Made in the decade following those events, this experimental film (the title means "In the night, we turn and are consumed by the fire") puts to work his theories of detournement — of taking cultural images and repackaging them with subversive intent — in service of both celebrating and eulogizing the near-revolution. Intriguing, frustrating, brilliant and flawed, much like the man himself, In Girum Imus Nocte Et Consumimur Igni is a movie worth seeking out. If nothing else, you have to love the audacity of a film that features a hand-typed note from God, claiming that if he'd known that it would eventually have produced a film so offensive, he would never have created the world.

THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING (1988)

Paris and Chicago weren't the only places deeply embroiled in chaotic upheaval in the year 1968. All over the world, from Italy to Japan, protest movements, government misconduct, and a seemingly unstoppable youth movement put nations in turmoil. One of the biggest hotspots was Czechoslovakia, where Milan Kundera sets his famously erotic, tragic and beautiful novel. It sets a promiscuous young doctor at odds with his own desires and emotions on the eve of the Soviet invasion, which is used as both political and personal backdrop against a timeless human story. Ably directed by Philip Kaufman and beautifully acted by Juliet Binoche, Lena Olin, and in one of his first major roles, Daniel Day-Lewis, The Unbearable Lightness of Being perfectly captures the tone of the days, twenty years later on.

REGULAR LOVERS (2005)

A number of European filmmakers have attempted to capture the Spirit of '68, both in documentaries and in narrative film. It's a difficult task, if for no other reason than that the causes of the revolt, as well as its ultimate collapse, are still poorly understood and subject to the endless predatory claims of those who say it belongs, ideologically, to them. This little-seen film by French director Phillippe Garrel perhaps comes closest, simply by being so messy, ambling and chaotic; by not attempting to frame an overweening narrative structure over those dreamlike days in Paris, Garrel gives us a rather astonishing evocation of them in all their rambling, inchoate, erotic glory. He quietly succeeds where Bernardo Bertolucci's earlier, and similar, film The Dreamers noisily failed.