Future Imperfect: Slow Action

In the future, Samuel Butler’s Erewhon has been lost. Sociologists and ethnographers now believe utopia is attainable, though admittedly at a very high cost. Some sort of apocalyptic event has wiped out most of the world, but four island communities will vie for the designation of Utopia on Earth from an Asimovian encyclopedia in Ben Rivers’ experimental science fiction essay film Slow Action, which screens during MoMA’s ongoing film series, Future Imperfect: The Uncanny in Science Fiction.

Researcher-advocates will narrate anthropologic papers on their prospective island communities as Rivers camera explores the exotic locales. The city-state of Eleven offers the strongest case. Despite believing themselves to be holograms, the residents of Eleven sleep all day and venture out at night naked as jaybirds. They conduct their courtships through mathematical equations, so new arrivals better brush up on their diffy q’s, yet residents are always free to leave by boat.

Hiva is an island chain whose visible hardscrabble poverty contrasts sharply with the locals’ epic-heroic sense of self. While feudal fiefdom and communist collective compete under the archipelago’s lose central government, each resident maintains his own running narration of his life, building up to a dramatically scripted suicide.

Kannzennashima might be the truest Utopia yet, since it only has one resident, Harai, a castaway historian who finds sustaining glory in the “ruins of the ruins” of the island fortress. However, those who lived on the island ages before him would never have considered it utopian. Similarly, the characteristics of Somerset ought to instantly disqualify it. The streets are literally lined with gutters for blood, because the citizens exist in a constant state of warfare and rebellion. Fittingly, Trotsky and Rousseau are among the philosophical polestars of this community, whose residents wear burlap war masks that would not look out of place in a Texas Chainsaw Massacre or Nightbreed movie.

Slow Action incorporates elements of science fiction, but it is definitely in the Olaf Stapledon tradition, which was never particularly accessible. Perhaps unfortunately for Rivers, Lanzarote, the real-life setting of Eleven will be more recognizable to genre viewers after Lucile Hadžihalilović’s Evolution was filmed there. Likewise, anyone who has seen Battleship Island will immediately guess Kanzennashima is in fact the tragically historic Hashima. Hiva is Tuvalu, but frankly, it never really looks that exotic, while Somerset is indeed Rivers’ South West England birthplace.

There are some striking visuals and some intriguing bits of speculative ethnographic detail, but Slow Action is definitely the sort of film that depends on viewers to invest it with their own meanings. There is no great truth that emerges out of the film, but it ironically reinforces the idea utopia is an elusive and frequently dangerous ideal that humanity would be foolish to pursue. It also effectively showcases Rivers’ eye for assembling images as the director, editor, and cinematography.

For those who want a taste of avant-garde filmmaking, the forty-five-minute Slow Action is pretty easy to handle, but it has rather awkwardly been paired up with Barry Jenkins’ Remigration (a didactic film that never manages to go anywhere), presumably because of his eleventh-hour Oscar victory with Moonlight. Produced as part of ITVS’s Futurestates, it is one of the lesser installments of the series. Only Slow Action is recommended for discerning patrons of experimental film and cerebral science fiction when it screens this coming Tuesday (8/22) and Thursday the 31^st, as part of Future Imperfect at MoMA.

Future Imperfect: Ghost in the Shell 2 Innocence

These cops freely quote Descartes, Confucius, and Milton. It is impressive, but their cybernetic implants probably help. Batou has been augmented to such an extent, he has become a full-fledged cyborg, but he is still more corporeally human than his commanding officer, Major Motoko Kusanagi. She took what was left of her consciousness that she could claim for herself and disappeared into the network. However, she still has his back in Mamoru Oshii’s Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence (trailer here), which screens during MoMA’s ongoing film series, Future Imperfect: The Uncanny in Science Fiction.

Batou’s new partner Togusa has very few implants. He also has a family, so he is not thrilled about the hard-charging Batou’s tactics. The days following the Major’s disappearance have been uncertain for the Men in Black-ish Section 9, but they are still working cases, like the one just assigned to Batou and Togusa. A new model of specially modified gynoids (female androids) have run amok, killing their owners and then self-destructing. Both acts clearly violate the Asimovian principles of android programming that still apply in this world.

Evidently, these gynoids in question have been specially designed for adult entertainment purposes. That explains why the victims have kept things so hush-hush. The possible involvement of the yakuza also logically follows, but a shadowy off-shore company is the real brain behind the gynoids’ design. With the help of the ghostly Major and his reluctant partner, Batou will try to connect the dots, while also fending off a brain hack and caring for his beloved basset hound, Gabu (or Gabriel, depending on subtitles).

At the time of its production, Innocence was one of the most expensive anime films ever, forcing Production I.G to co-produce with Studio Ghibli. Over a dozen years after its theatrical release, it still looks terrific. The world-building is richly detailed and often awe-inspiring in scope. However, what remains most striking about the film is the intriguing relationship that continues between Batou and the unseen (but perhaps ever-present) Major. It is surely the reason for Innocence selection for Future Imperfect.

Not only does the film directly address what it means to be human, it also includes plenty of fan-pleasing action and a loyal, slobbering basset hound (a recurring motif in Oshii’s films). It also stands alone relatively easily. If you happened to be one of the few people who accidentally saw the live-action Hollywood version, try to forget it entirely, if you haven’t already—and start fresh with Innocence. Highly recommended, Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence screens this Friday (8/18) and Saturday (8/19) at MoMA, as part of Future Imperfect.

Future Imperfect: The Year of the Plague

The doctor considers it a Crichton-esque super-virus. His musician-lover sees it more as the pent-up release of the masses’ accumulated physical and spiritual pestilence. Either way, it is a stretch to call this outbreak drama science fiction. Indeed, the impulse to sweep the mounting crisis under the rug is acutely human, in the worst way. The cover-up will be just as deadly as the disease in Felipe Cazals’ The Year of the Plague, which screens during MoMA’s ongoing film series, Future Imperfect: The Uncanny in Science Fiction.

It is odd Year of the Plague is not more frequently screened, because the screenplay was co-written by Nobel Laureate Gabriel García Márquez (with José Agustín and Juan Arturo Brennan). Supposedly, it is based on Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year, but it bears more of a likeness to Camus’s The Plague. Dr. Genovés is a senior attending physician at a leading Mexican university hospitality, who has no trouble recognizing the early stages of a plague from the fifty-some suspicious cases he has seen so far. However, his superiors and the government easily bury the plague victims amid the thousands of other people who died during the same time period due to more pedestrian urban pathologies. As a consolation, Genovés will commence an affair with a much younger and prettier aspiring musician.

Literally mountains of corpses start to pile up, but they know how to take care of that down there. When a Norwegian cabinet minister also succumbs to the plague, the government will recklessly and unethically send his body home with a deceptive congestive heart failure diagnosis and no environmental safeguards. Of course, he is the exception. Most of the plague’s victims simply don’t count for much.

Peste is an ultra-1970s-looking film, presented in a pseudo-documentary style, but with spare room here and there for dramatic character development. As a result, it is hard to forge an emotional connection with the film, even though it features several musical interludes. Yet, its retro-ness is also one of its greatest appeals. Frankly, watching polyester-wearing bureaucrats villainously scheme amid groovy office décor is always a cool nostalgia trip.

The docudrama approach necessarily hems in the cast, but Alejandro Parodi (bearing a vague resemblance to Mike “Touch” Connors) has the sort of presence you would want from your viral outbreak doctor. However, for Cazals and García Márquez, the real stars of the film are those dump trucks and mass graves overflowing with corpses.

Clearly, García Márquez was using the Plague as a metaphor for what he thought ailed society in the 1970s. It didn’t make much sense that his solution was to invest more power in centralized governments and further disenfranchise the individual as a political and economic free agent, but Latin American Leftism was never about logic. It was about faith in a secular god that failed. Year of the Plague is a strange time capsule from that overheated era, but its visuals and paranoid vibe still retain some potency for contemporary viewers. Worth checking out as a colorful product of its time, The Year of the Plague screens again tomorrow afternoon (8/13) at MoMA, as part of Future Imperfect.

Future Imperfect: Death Ray on Coral Island

For years, one of the most famous Chinese science fiction stories was written by a prominent archaeologist. Tong Enzheng’s story features some nakedly propagandistic dialogue awkwardly shoe-horned into its forty-some pages, but the author suffered greatly during the Cultural Revolution and eventually went into semi-self-imposed exile after the Tiananmen Square crack-down. The film adaptation produced during the early Deng years is considered the very first Chinese science fiction film (numero uno), but it won’t do much to burnish Tong’s literary reputation with contemporary viewers. Still, you can’t deny the spectacle of Hongmei Zhang’s Death Ray on Coral Island when it screens during MoMA’s ongoing film series, Future Imperfect: The Uncanny in Science Fiction.

Working on an unspecified Pacific Rim location off the Mainland, Prof. Zhao’s Chinese research team makes a breakthrough in the development of their atomic battery. Just as they start to celebrate with an evening of foxtrot ballroom dancing, the respected chairman of the supposedly humanitarian Venus research foundation starts sniffing around. Despite his reputation, he is actually the front man for a foreign power. Since Coral Island was produced in 1980, his shadowy patron has a conspicuously Russian name.

Unbeknownst to the now-murdered Zhao, the Venus Foundation first arranged for his mentor Hu Mingli to be committed to a mental asylum and then fooled him into believing they were his benefactors when they facilitated his release. Under the assumed name of Dr. Matthews, he has been working on a powerful laser weapon in their secret lab. Guess where its located. Somehow, Prof. Zhao’s foreign-born, ethnic Chinese assistant stumbles across Coral Island in his efforts to bring the murderers to justice. However, it will be Hu who saves Chen by zapping a hungry shark with a laser in what might be the single nuttiest scene ever realized with absolutely no ironic winking.

If Coral Island’s narrative sounds haphazard and unwieldly, it’s because it is. There is no question this is the kind of movie you want to go into with a few wingmen, like Crow and Tom Servo. Yet, the seemingly random plot points pale in comparison to the “white-face” actors playing the Venus bad guys in whitening makeup, prosthetic noses, and impossibly red wigs. What would the Social Justice Warriors say? Regardless of racial politics, it is an indescribably bizarre sight to take in.

Yet, we have to give Zhang Hongmei credit for framing some striking images—particularly the exteriors of the prison-like asylum (talk about projection, the old sanitarium functioning as a dungeon for political prisoners was a mainstay of both Soviet and Maoist Communism). His color palate is also surprisingly bright and groovy. Frankly, this film could pass for a product of 1969 or 1972, well before its 1980 release. Yet, it is the weird little details, like the ballroom dancing and the period trappings that inspire such nostalgia, such as the enormous floppy disks that really make Coral Island so much fun. In fact, the film is far less didactic than the story is reported to be.

MoMA is not sure, but this could be the film’s American premiere. You need to see it to believe it and even then, you will hardly believe your eyes. However, expectations must be kept low with respects to all the things we usually expect from movies. Recommended for its historical significance and unintentional camp factor, Death Ray on Coral Island screens again this Monday afternoon (8/7) as part of Future Imperfect at MoMA.

Future Imperfect: Dead Man’s Letters

It was produced in 1986, but this Soviet post-apocalyptic drama envisions a world of widespread environmental devastation and a weak central government that still tries to maintain its authority through brutal and arbitrary assertions of power. In other words, nothing has changed for Soviets, except maybe for the millions who died in the nuclear blast. Existence rather than life goes on for a professor futilely searching for his missing son in Konstantin Lopushansky’s Dead Man’s Letters, which screens during MoMA’s ambitious but oddly titled film series, Future Imperfect: The Uncanny in Science Fiction.

The Professor is sort of like a post-apocalyptic Nicholas Sparks character. He essentially narrates the film through ruminative letters ostensibly written to his son Eric, even though he realizes it is highly unlikely they will ever be read by the intended recipient. His wife sort of survived, but she is fast succumbing to radiation sickness, dementia, and who knows what else. They have found temporary refuge in a shelter below a Hermitage-like museum, which explains the high quality of surrounding bric-a-brac and detritus.

In flashbacks, we witness the impact at Soviet ground zero and watch the Professor’s desperate search for Eric in various makeshift hospitals and morgues. Grotesque yet visually arresting, these sepia-toned sequences have the look and feel Hieronymous Bosch. They are some of the most effective passages of the film. However, the high point is undeniably the eulogy the museum director gives to mankind before committing suicide in despair. Rather than condemn man, he praises our tragic outsized ambition and the capacity to love that produced so much great art. Frankly, it is quite a refreshing sentiment, compared to the contemporary eco/outbreak/zombie thrillers that argue humanity is fundamentally evil and deserves to give way to snail darters and cockroaches (looking at you, Girl with All the Gifts).

Both the style and subject matter of Letters largely overwhelms the veteran cast. Nevertheless, as the Professor, Rolan Bykov still manages to project dignity and a profound sense of loss. Physically, he resembles Wojciech Pszoniak in Andrzej Wajda’s 1990 Korczak, especially when the Professor assumes guardianship of a group of outcast children. Yet, it is Iosif Ryklin who truly defines and redeems the film as the museum director (sometimes credited as “The Humanist”). His farewell address is the sole identifiable element that qualifies Letters for MoMA’s Future Imperfect, a series that explores the ways science fiction is uniquely qualified to determine what it means to be human, but it is more than sufficient justification.

Letters’ unambiguous religious symbolism might surprise many, given its Soviet origins. However, the end titles make it clear the film was partly (if not largely) produced with the Western nuclear freeze movement in mind. Clearly, the hope was if the gullible West took a gander at the suffering wrought by nukes, they would force Reagan administration to unilaterally halt the military build-up, cluelessly giving the Soviets time to regroup and rebuild. We now know nobody was more concerned about the potential destruction a nuclear war would cause than Ronald Reagan himself, but he could see deception and manipulation for what it was.

Lopushansky assisted Tarkovsky during the production of Stalker—and it is easy to see the master’s influence. We can also see echoes of Letters in Aleksay German’s Hard to Be a God. Of course, both Stalker and German’s film were based on novels written by the Strugatsky Brothers, Arkady and Boris, the latter also being a co-screenwriter of Letters, so you could say all three films are closely related. As a result, Letters is one of the better Soviet Bloc post-apocalyptic movies, far superior to August at the Hotel Ozone (screening tomorrow). Recommended for those who appreciate strong imagery or are nostalgic for some Soviet duck-and-cover, Dead Man’s Letters screens again today (7/30) at MoMA, as part of Future Imperfect.