The 1970's Science Fiction Movie Poll

Quintet is a chore, but it looks pretty fantastic.

I love tarkovsky, but apparently I have some heretical views on him.

andrei rublev - this is my favorite movie, ever, so it towers over everything else in his BoW not to mention all of filmdom. my great love is for the 185 minute cut though, which is pretty much unavailable in the US. there is no perfect version of rublev in existence, and if there is it's certainly not the criterion workprint. their labeling it a "director's cut" is one of the more grotesque instances of marketing-driven abuse of the term. however, the film in any format is a bloody brutal love letter to creative types everywhere.

when the painter apprentice rublev and his teacher theophanes engage in a spririted debate about the morality of pandering to an audience, it's soooo far from the tarkovsky cliche of characters as stoic marble-shitting oil paintings. hey I'm an atheist so I shouldn't care about the christ and all that but the screenwriting is so fucking good it makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up.

Theophanes: All right, tell me in all honesty, are our people ignorant or not... I can't hear you!

Andrei: Yes, ignorant! But who's to blame for that?

Theophanes: Their stupidity is to blame!

Andrei: Have you never sinned because you're ignorant?

Theophanes: Yes, I have, too. O God, forgive, reconcile, and curb our passions! The Day of Judgement is coming. We'll all burn like candles.

Mind my word, it will be hell! People will lump the blame for their sins on one another, justifying themselves before the Almighty.

Andrei: I don't understand how you can paint, having thoughts like that. You even accept praise. I'd have taken vows of schema long ago and settled down in a cave for good.

Theophanes: I serve God, not people. Today they praise, tomorrow they'll abuse what they praised only yesterday, and after that they'll forget both you and me. They'll forget everything! All is vanity! All is useless!

The human race has already perpetrated all stupidities and wrongs, and now it's just repeating them. Everything falls back into place again, and goes round and round... If Jesus came back to Earth again, He would be crucified once more!

Andrei: If you remember only evil, you can never be happy before God.

Theophanes: What?

Andrei: Maybe some things should be forgotten, but not everything. I don't know how to say it...

Theophanes: If you don't know, then be silent! Listen to me!

Andrei: You think that good can be done only single-handedly?

Theophanes: Good? Have you forgotten the New Testament? Jesus gathered people in the temples, too. He taught them. And then they gathered together in order to execute Him.

"Crucify him!" they shouted. And His disciples? Judas betrayed Him, Peter renounced Him. They all abandoned Him! And they were the best!

Andrei: But they repented!

Theophanes: That was much later, don't you understand? When it was too late.

Andrei: It's true, people do evil, too. And it's very sad. Judas had sold Christ out. But do you remember who bought Him? The people? No, the Pharisees and their scribes. They couldn't find any witnesses, no matter how hard they tried. Who would slander Him, the innocent?

And the Pharisees were great deceivers, literate and cunning. They even learned to read and write in order to gain power, taking advantage of His ignorance. People ought to be reminded more often that they're human beings, that all Russians are of one blood and of one land!

Evil can be found anywhere. There will always be those ready to sell you for 30 pieces of silver. And the Russian man gets more and more misfortunes. The Tatars raid him thrice a season, then comes a famine or a plague. But he keeps working and working, bearing his cross with humility. Never despairing, but enduring it silently. And only praying to God to give him enough strength to endure. Can the Almighty not forgive such men their ignorance?

You know it yourself that whenever something goes wrong, or you're exhausted and despairing, and suddenly... you meet some human eyes, and it works as if you took a Communion, and the weight is lifted from your heart.

Isn't it so?

mirror - his next best, and although it's as conventional as a candy squid, it's actually a good place to start for a newbie. free flowing and spot on, like good jazz or poetry.

solaris - occasionally tarkovsky tried a little too hard for the "epic" vibe, and this film is a casualty. would be better if the first 45 minutes were lopped off. after that it's a pretty heady + paranoid little film but by that time you might be too stupified to notice.

stalker - his most overrated film in my book. he shot a large part of the film and then had it destroyed by a careless lab, forcing him to start again from scratch. sometimes I wonder if that took some of the wind out of his sails (though he was no stranger to operating under adversity). the philosophical psychobabble of the characters gets irritating after a while. hands up, who wants to slap the writer? the ending gets me though, that understated effortless imagism, talk about sticking the landing.

ivan's childhood - arguably a sounder film than stalker, but he was still aping bergman at this point and hadn't struck his own path.

I'm saving nostalghia and the sacrifice for the day I need them.

moral: never bring up tarkovsky on a thread I'm reading.

boy, if you consider The Mirror 'conventional' by any measure...

(it's screening in nYC tonight)

That post is almost as long as Andrei Rublev itself.

lol

(and mirror is as conventional as a candy squid, i.e. not at all)

oh, I missed that! I figured it was some common treat sold in Brighton. :)

actually a candy squid is a fishing lure, so I guess it's conventional if you're a fisherman. let's pretend I said squid candy. although that's probably conventional in japan. let's just pretend I said nothing.

The Tarkovsky films are in such a league of their own, I almost left them off this list -- they're not just dystopian, they're transcendental. My vote for Phase IV was based on the wider context of what all the films on the list were collectively going for -- I can't be surprised Stalker and Solaris garnered as many votes as they did but in hindsight this shouldn't have been a poll, just a discussion thread

Quintet has a lot going for it. Most of the film is slow pans over the set design for the underground city of the last five million people -- all the technology vandalilzed and destroyed, snow and ice covering almost every surface, occasional pockets of people cooking, drinking, and killing each other and wild dogs show up within three minutes after you die to eat you. Very hypnotic and immersive and I kept pausing the image just to stare at the sets.

Casting the hallmark actors from Buñuel, Bergman & mod 60's/70's Italian films turns this into a weird European art film -- this is the first time I've ever seen Rey or Andersson speaking in English. Gassman plays a minister who preaches to a huge room full of immobilzed infirm: life is a blissful interruption of the agonizing infinity of the Void

so sure I can see how someone who doesn't have the patience for Tarkovsky wouldn't like it. It's also really schitzo Altman in that the mood throughout is sober, moody and grim, but the dramatic punctuations are so bizarre that to most people they'd come across as unintentional humor or incompetence -- but this is the guy who directed The Long Goodbye so you can't help but suspect that the corpse's frozen grimace was supposed to be funny.

(If a bored moderator wants to remove the spoiler I didn't mean to post upthread, my thanks to them)

perhaps this was flavored by the last few posts on the thread but I was wondering if this was Altman responding to Tarkovsky. there's a scene in a small hotel room where Paul Newman switches on an electric light and the loudest sound on the soundtrack for the next several minutes is dripping water as the ice that's covering the bulb slowly melts away

interminable water scenes are sure signs of a tarkovsky fixation.

my favorite tarkovsky reference is in miike's audition, when the two guys holding the fake audition ask the girls a series of ridiculous questions, one of them being "do you like tarkovsky?" it's so absurd + dickheaded.

Thanks to this thread, that Loguns Run pic is now my wallpaper

(on my pc, not my house walls. but hmmm...)

my favorite tarkovsky reference is in fassbinder's 'the third generation' where the corrupt cop is staring out a skyscraper's window, staring at the traffic, and says 'I saw this incredibly boring film last night, nothing but endless shots of traffic' and the industrialist says 'was it called solaris?'

so I was thinking about milton's comments about what does and doesn't belong on the list, and the cronenberg thing again, and star wars. I thinnk what holds this list together is the consistent dystopian bent of the films. sci-fi is usually a dystopian/utopian game - is science and technology an enabling force (or, at least, a neutral element), or does it lift the lid on pandora's box? films like star wars, battle beyond the stars, buck rogers in the 25th century, these clearly hold a less jaundiced view of the future than phase iv, soylent green, a boy and his dog.

morbs doesn't think alien should be on the list 'cause it's a horror film, abbott doesn't think cronenberg should be on the list cause he's horror, milton doesn't think tarkovsky should be on the list 'cause he's transcendental. but the majority of the films on this list *are* horrific, in that the future state they envision (a place shaped by science and technology) is an absurd and alienating world eager to drop the hammer on the unlucky bastards who inhabit it.

solaris is ripe with existential dread, in league with the other films. rather than improving our lives, science (e.g. space travel) fractures identities, perverts desires, brings us into an uneasy, suffocating relationship with the unknowable terror of death. comparing the film to 2001 is rote, and their differences are significant, but their thematic basis are very similar - whether it's a big black monolith or a swirling psychedelic maelstrom, it's still the great unknown fucking with the human race on a whole other level.

cronenberg's 70s films (shivers, rabid, the brood), although full of jolting horror scenes, all derive their narrative impetus from amoral doctors tampering with human biology and unleashing a shitstorm of bad juju. cronenberg's chilly, detached approach to the material is, well, "scientific," and serves to reinforce the sci-fi orientation of his work. not to mention, as abbott pointed out, his biological fascination with virus and the flesh.

if I had to pick films on the list that don't fit this criteria, they would be things like mad max (which technically occurs in the future, but isn't that far from the wild angels / race with the devil type exploitation hijinks), star trek, and to a lesser extant, close encounters (which follows the dystopian model for almost the entire film until its bait-and-switch ending - surprise, it's utopian).

there was an interesting analysis of alien back in the 80s, can't remember who wrote it, but it read the film as a metaphor for a sexually abusive family. the alien as the phallic, abusing father, the computer system as the cold, remote mother enabling the father's bad behavior, the astronauts as childlike -- asexual innocents, no romantic relationships between them, the film opens with them all sleeping in the same room. they wake and are slowly introduced to an adult world of deceit and penetration.

Third Generation provides lots of lols.

Alien and Star Wars are so retro to me the space stuff is just genre-drag.

now I'm thinking of ash choking ripley with a rolled-up porno mag. there's a lot more going on in alien than "boogeyman on a spaceship."

I mean, it is "boogeyman on a spaceship," but then there's the psychosexual stuff, and the antonioni/tarkovsky-like pace and aesthetics. there are something like 10 lines of dialogue in the first 15 minutes. still surprises me how popular a movie it was.

I just watched Capricorn One, not seen it for years. Apart from the sadly lacking ending I think this is just a superb movie.

The congressman guy (big lebowski) has some terrific lines and makes a great character.

I think my fave moment is when the guy is climbing the canyon cliff telling the joke to himself, only to reveal the two choppers parked eerily on top. Sends shivers.

Fucking hell, did this REALLY need to be remade? http://www.aetv.com/the-andromeda-strain/

oh no:(

Is that him from A-HA on the left ?

just watched phase iv again this week. surprised at how well it holds up. directed by saul bass! he designed all those great movie posters like vertigo and the man with the golden arm.

phase iv is super creepy & psychedelic, with some of the best acting by real ants ever filmed and a great burbling electronic score. I was talking to a friend who had vague memories of seeing it as a child, but he had perfect recall when it came to the scene where ants started crawling out of the 3 circular holes in a dead guy's hand.

DVD NOW PLZ

we did an 80's sci-fi movie poll too, right? i can't find it.

50s one is easy to find.

Saul Bass also did the opening-title sequences for most of the films he created poster images for.

was phase iv the ants film where they walked through a house filled with ants and these people were breathing through straws, or something?

that's not in Phase IV

phase iv is super creepy & psychedelic, with some of the best acting by real ants ever filmed and a great burbling electronic score.

it's by David Vorhaus, raiding some of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop sound beds used on 'Dr. Who' and the White Noise 'An Electric Storm' album. the music in all these films is one of the main sources of appeal

I just love the fact that after a long, long career directing the title sequences & storyboarding for some of the biggest directors in Hollywood, when he finally traded in all his favors to direct his own film, he decided to make a film about superintelligent ants (and I can imagine the pitch: 'but here's the twist... it stars REAL ANTS'

http://faculty.cua.edu/johnsong/hitchcock/storyboards/psycho/bass-storyboards.html

type Saul Bass into youtube and you'll see the parade, the one for 'Seconds' is my favorite - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JGq_ON4aXew

ant sequences were directed by Ken Middleham, this is the only interview with him where he talks about Phase IV & The Hellstrom Chronicle: http://www.cinefex.com/backissues/issue3.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hellstrom_Chronicle

in other news I found a cheap copy of 'Parts: The Clonus Horror'. Incompetent on almost every front, but still a 70's science fiction film. It might be better to watch the MST3K version of this one, (unlike 'Phase IV')

I also bought a copy of 'The Silver Globe' on Amazon: http://www.fright.com/edge/silverglobe.html

was phase iv the ants film where they walked through a house filled with ants and these people were breathing through straws, or something?

-- Ste, Wednesday, 19 March 2008 15:09 (4 hours ago) Link

you are thinking of it happened at lakewood manor aka ants!

http://imdb.com/title/tt0076214/

http://amigareviews.classicgaming.gamespy.com/pic/itcamefromthedesert-e.png

ant sequences were directed by Ken Middleham, this is the only interview with him where he talks about Phase IV & The Hellstrom Chronicle: http://www.cinefex.com/backissues/issue3.html

agh, must pay for content. I'm not much of an fx geek but I would love to know how some of those scenes were filmed.

oh yes, just downloaded phase iv, totally remember it.

stumbled across this recently, but haven't watched it yet: peter fonda's low budget eco-terror time travel movie from 1973 called idaho transfer. looks like a real treat.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idaho_Transfer

that looks great

definitely want to recommend 'On The Silver Globe', though it could easily go in the 80's poll -- 90% of the footage was shot in the 70's, but the polish government aborted the film before the special effects were completed, so the director cut in very strange 80's footage of polish citizens & commuters wandering around while describing what the SFX space travel & alien battle scenes would have been like

if it had been completed, it'd be mentioned in company with 'Holy Mountain' and 'Sweet Movie'. the shots are beautiful, the plot is beyond ambitious. the editing is strange, the first half of the film is basically presented as an in-camera document shot by three survivors of a ship that crash lands on the moon, and who repopulate an entire incestuous colony who eventually come under attack from a horde of horrible bird creatures. for most shots, any pause of more than two seconds is edited out, so the film more disorienting than most modern reality television. many shots feature hundreds of extras swarming around beaches and caves, orgies, incomprehensible rituals, well it is the moon they're on. it's not for everyone, every line by every actor is delivered in abject histrionic wails with long monologues like 'what aren't you in what exists, nothing? the human soul justifies my deeds, delicate souls... but they are ridiculous! but the ridiculous are strong... the icy space within myself merged in hateful vision, is this the END? AAAAARRGH!' etc. etc.

in short, kind of a trial but I've already watched it twice

I just saw Andromeda Strain. First big surprise: OMG THIS IS SO FUCKING AWESOME HOW DID I NEVER HEAR OF THIS. Second big surprise: This was made in 1971?!?!?!

OMG I must see Idaho Transfer! I grew up near Craters of the Moon, it's such a terrifying and evocative place.

This was made in 1971?!?!?!
You saw the one with Arthur Hill or the remake?

Arthur Hill.

There was a remake?

I guess the "You're going to a love-in!" line should have made me think it wasn't from '77-'79 like I was guessing (based on the special effects).

I made up the remake. I don't know if there was one or not.

...teehee?

'Idaho Transfer' and 'Silver Globe' both sound fascinating. Dunno how I missed this poll, would probably have voted for 'Rollerball', which I've seen four or five times.

Strain Andromeda The

http://musicthing.blogspot.com/2006/07/cool-life-and-cool-gear-of-gil-mell.html

the soundtrack is my favorite thing about it:
http://www.discogs.com/release/739020

Elvis linked to the Andromeda remake upthread, it looks normal

OK, I didn't make it up, I must've half remembered it from the part upthread that I no longer read.

I started watching but haven't finished idaho transfer (not from lack of interest). so far it's a bizarro piece of work which the minds on this thread should appreciate.

the only movie I've seen where the rules surrounding time travel are just a flimsy excuse to film cute hippie chicks with their pants off (no metal can be worn during travel; travellers must be under 20 years old). science fiction indeed... maybe influence on alien lol?

the guy who directed on the silver globe also did possession with isabelle adjani. possession is not "good" by any yardstick but is a corker that should be seen at least once for its alternating o_O and roffles effect on discerning viewers.

first time I saw Possession I loved it but kind of had it at arms length -- the dialog is perfectly coherent and civililzed, a transcript would be familiar to anyone who's been through a breakup, it's just that the acting is so psychotic and physically exaggerated that it can be hard to take the film seriously. but after four times through, I get it, it is a good film.

Only other movies I'd add to the list would be No Blade Of Grass and The Final Programme, but both of those only marginally fit (NBOG is superseded by Mad Max, and TFP doesn't get the ridiculousness of Moorcock down)

-- Elvis Telecom, Friday, January 25, 2008 6:24 AM (2 months ago) Bookmark Link

Saw The Final Programme last night -- jeez how'd I miss that, it's totally ridiculous. Not surprised the same guy directed a few Avengers episodes & Abominable Dr. Phibes, it's like Baker-era Dr. Who set in dystopian Swinging London. I shouldn't have been expecting too much of the ending, but it was fun, I watched with a few friends who had no expectations whatsoever and they didn't know what hit them.

where's the '60s sci fi poll?