Category Archives: Science Fiction

Never Let Me Go is a 2010 film directed by Mark Romanek and adapted from the novel by Kazuo Ishiguro.
It appears to me that there are two types of good science fiction movies. Those which visually invents a world either speculative or metaphorical which strike us for its inventivity; and the others that do not allow any kind of special effects, and introduce a plot within our world which thus moves us for the proximity of this depicted society. Never Let Me Go is part of this last category, probably the hardest and mastered, in my opinion, by Fahrenheit 451, the Francois Truffaut’s adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s novel of the same name.

The film starts in the 1970′s in a country school boarding school separated from the world. Classes and the general atmosphere is similar to what we know of boarding schools at this time, except that we very quickly understand that all those children do not have parents and are destined to become organ donors until they complete (die) after a certain amount of donations. The story thus follows three of those children in their youth, experiencing love and friendship just like any other human being.
The others are actually very rarely present in this movie, and one could see in this fact, the lost of humanity in those who created, in order to serve them, un-humans who end up being the only representatives of humanity. This film illustrates the institutionalization of the production of exclusion in which Michel Foucault was eminently interested and that he investigated in several of his books like The Birth of the Clinic in 1963 and The History of Sexuality in 1976. In this case, the exclusion is even more vicious as it is re-included within the system in an absolute scheme of exploitation from one category to another. It is interesting to see that this same exploitation is integrated and accepted thanks to a shift of terminology. Those donors do not die, they complete and they are said to donate their organs as if they actually chose it. Of course, the fact that this society does not necessarily implies a new architecture seems to be less interesting for architects; however this shift of terminology interests us as citizen as this occur on a daily basis in our current society; also one should be careful about the way architecture is dealt with in this film. It is very subtle but the heterotopic Victorian Boarding School to the austere (yet really intriguing I have to say) post-modern concrete hospital via the typical English coastal houses reproduced several time along the street, without being inherently linked to this specific system, carry very appropriately the dehumanized space of this society .

I just heard an interesting interpretation of the meaning of existence for the Monolith that Stanley Kubrick introduced as the main actor of his Space Odyssey. Carole Desbarats who teaches at the FEMIS (main school of cinema in Paris), claims that the monolith comes from the divine order in the Torah, which forbids one to represent any living creature. This famous Black Monolith would therefore stands as a pure iconoclast a-representation challenging the cinematographic medium and introducing an hyper-powerful transcendental entity in his narrative.

This interpretation is included in something broader in Carole Desbarats’ thoughts which is the theory according to which Stanley Kubrick would have a profound defiance towards the word, the verb or the concept. She thus quotes the example of the famous “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.” sentence that Jack Nickolson’s character write on hundred of pages in The Shining, or, in the same film, the word REDRUM that his son keeps saying or else, the fact that the character of the poet in Lolita writes his text only when he is on his toilets.

This conversation was on the radio so it did not take enough time to develop this theory, but that’s probably worth exploring…

I just re-watched La Jetée by French director Chris Marker and I am still fascinated by the uniqueness of this 29 minutes movie. Marker,  along with Peter Watkins (see previous articles 1 & 2), can be said to have invented a new type of Cinema that uses a documentary style in order to create fiction, the film crew being present in those movies as a fictive character.

When he created La Jetée in 1962, he already directed seven movies of this kind, proposing a socialist reading to situations in France, Finland, China, Russia and Cuba (Brazil, US, Vietnam, Chili, Germany, Romania and most of all Japan will follow in the coming thirty years) . However, La Jetée, registers in a slightly different type, just as much unique, which tends more towards “proper” fiction but using only photographic stills to compose his movie. Marker calls this genre “Roman Photo” (Photographic Novel) but really, he is only emphasizing the mean cinema has been always using, the succession of stills which, when articulated all together by the spectator’s mind, creates a comprehensible narrative. When the “normal” cinema uses twenty four of those stills per second, Marker varies rhythms of his photographs that either compose a coherent sequence or on the contrary, follow one space (and one time) to another.

As far as the story is concerned, I don’t want to say too much as some of my readers would have not seen yet amongst who, some would have watched the very good 12 Monkeys by Terry Gilliam that was directly and expressively inspired by La Jetée. If I reveal what the ten first of the movie unfold, this story introduces a man who is sent from a post-apocalyptic Paris’ underground future back to the past thanks to the intense mental image memory he keeps from his childhood of a man dying in front of him on the jetty of Orly’s airport.
This notion of mental image is very important as the stills from the movie can be all interpreted as such. In a more personal way for the spectator, it is extremely interesting to observe how one remembers this film; not by scene like in any other movies, but rather by fragments, and images since their persistence impacts our memory with great insistence.

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The 3rd Letter is a 15 minutes movie created by Polish director Grzegorz Jonkajtys in 2010. The plot is pretty classic in the science-fiction field but still very efficient in the representation of a capitalist system using biopolitical means to control its sustainability in time. Using an aesthetics sharing between Blade Runner (Ridley Scott) and eXistenZ (David Cronenberg), The 3rd Letter introduces the super power of a bureaucratic healthcare (the recent debate on the socially cruel American healthcare was maybe in Jonkajtys’ mind) which own the power of people’s life and death via a lucrative recharging of universal pacemakers’ batteries.

The video is visible after the break.
Thanks Ethel

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Borrowing Ethel Baraona’s quote of today: “There is nothing built on stone. Everything is built on sand, but it is our duty to edify as if the sand should be stone” -Jorge Luis Borges

Being currently in the Middle East, it will be hard for me to get my mind out of it. Here are two pictorial invasions of the desert in European cities, Barcelona and Paris. The first was a campaign of information during Barcelona’s drought in 2008 and the second one is the not so new Cedric Klapish‘s Peut être (1999) that dramatized a near futuristic Paris which has been filled by the sand. Life being on the roof, a whole subterranean way of living is happening inside the former buildings; unfortunately it seems that it was not Klapisch’s main interest…