Category: film

First, I dearly love the poster, which I presume is Polish, because Polish film poster art is always the best:

Stanislaw Lem’s PILOT PIRX stories are always considered to be on the softer end of his output — less philosophically knotty, less difficult. People take that to mean that the Pirx stuff is confectionery. That doesn’t mean they’re not interesting stories.

The setup is fairly standard. Top spacepilot Pirx is assigned a mission to lay probes in the Cassini Division, with a twist: some of his crew are androids, and he has to guess who is synthetic and who is human. If the android(s) evade detection and pass this fairly over-the-top Turing test, they get to go into mass production. The stress of this burden may prove too much for a new artificial mind with otherwise superhuman resources. Which leaves Pirx with the condundrum at the heart of the story: how can human weakness be used to thwart artificial superiority?

“Pirx is known for his unblemished honesty… as a human being, he does have some weaknesses.”

The androids herein are termed “anthropoid automations, so-called ‘finite non-linear.'” Pirx: “The pilot’s union will never allow it.” Space pilots union!

This is a Polish/Soviet co-production, and the biggest sign of that is the appearance of Alexander Kaidanovsky, star of Tarkovsky’s STALKER, released in the same year (1979). Also of note: Arvo Pärt scored a good deal of the film, which is kind of amazing, done in the year before Pärt left Soviet Estonia, where the Soviet end of things was sourced.

There’s an oddly Western feel to a lot of it: a Pam Am plane, people reading NEWSWEEK in English, mentions of the UN and UNESCO, Pirx in a denim leisure suit like Steve Austin, talk of Soviet-US cooperation, a Ballantine’s Scotch Whisky-branded ashtray. One imagines that, for at least some section of its original audience, that must have let some alien futurity leak into the setting.

Some of the camerawork has an unusual documentary feel to it, which compares interestingly with what must have been, for the place and period, an expensive production. It’s talky like British sf tv of the same period. There’s a lovely bit where a speech at the UN about the non-linears becomes one frame in a four-part screen showing the testing of crash dummies, all done in black and white.

The back half of the film is inside the spaceship, and it’s actually a marvel of solving design with little money. It’s utilitarian, clever with its use of space, drab in a way that mirrors ALIEN (which must have been in production at the same time) and well-directed. The ending, as convenient and telegraphed as it may appear, has a wonderful piece of imagery at its core, and the coda works to destabilise what came before. It’s a lot of fun, it looks and sounds great, and it’s thoughtful in that wonderful, lost 1970s way.

PILOT PIRX’S INQUEST (UK) (US)

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Robert Eggers seems to be emerging as a director of painstaking miniatures. I love this. His attention to and evolution of the details found in early film are wonderful — I find myself thinking that Guy Maddin would admire this film immensely. I think some films should be miniatures, I think art should support the miniature, and I hope Eggers and his people get to make a lot more films like this.

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This is a documentary by Ingmar Bergman about the island of Faro. It is, frankly, as miserable as you can imagine.

It’s like a compressed version of the decades-long British “Up” documentary skein – footage from different eras repeating staging, schoolkids interviewed on a bus found years later so we can see how their dreams died. An island slowly being choked off by neglect. Bergman lived and worked on Faro on and off for forty-odd years. Articles about Faro tend to cast it as an enchanted island. Apparently very few people on Faro saw it that way. But there is a sequence in the middle, where dozens of people come together to thatch a barn in a traditional style, that does approach magic. One of the old men overseeing it explains how the local reeds are used to waterproof the structure, showing how the rain runs down the fold of the reed. Of course, during that whole piece, there is this exchange too:

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Finally got to see SHIN GODZILLA, made last year by writer/director Hideaki Anno, whose name you may know from NEON GENESIS EVANGELION.  It is recognisably Anno from the top – the staring, dead animal eyes of the creature at the top of the movie could really only be his touch.  SHIN GODZILLA, known elsewhere as GODZILLA RESURGENCE, updates the original by adding the bureaucratic nightmare of the Fukushima reactor disaster to its core theme.  And it works brilliantly, imagining the response to the emergence of Godzilla as paralysed by procedure and politics, much as the response to Fukushima was.

It’s an extraordinary illustration of what you can make when you toss all the tired filmic conventions of saying it emotionally and learning and hugs and the hero’s journey and making sure everyone’s crying and just telling the story you want to tell without diluting or breaking it.  SHIN GODZILLA is a peculiarly pure experience.

SHIN GODZILLA (UK) (US)

(originally written 2 May 2017, recovered from morning.computer)

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This film apparently came out a couple of days ago. This clip is amazing. It appears to be a scene where Holly Herndon & Mat Dryhurst’s SPAWN AI goes full nihilist speculative-realism. Of additional interest — and it does explain some of these scene’s lines – it appears to be based on “a science fiction poem written by Swedish Nobel laureate Harry Martinson in 1956.” I would like to watch this film, I think.

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