Editor’s Note: I’m gradually figuring out that my Snapshots category is for films which baffle me a little but whose visual or other elements won’t leave me alone. I’d characterize myself as someone who’s much more comfortable talking about plot and character than about, well, anything else to do with film. So please indulge me.
The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976, Director: Nicolas Roeg): It really doesn’t surprise me a bit that this film baffled the critics upon its release. Perhaps the presence of David Bowie in his first film role led them to believe it would be a musical. Or perhaps they expected a straight-up sci-fi film like some others from that era (Logan’s Run, Rollerball). What they got instead is something like a sci-fi western satire, which of course makes no sense at all. It didn’t help that in the US, twenty minutes of crucial footage was excised.
Roeg wasn’t at all worried about working with a non-actor like Bowie, having worked with Mick Jagger in Performance a few years earlier. He knew that rock stars like Jagger and Bowie were performers, able to inhabit a persona just as skilfully as any actor. And Bowie’s performance is fine; he’s able to harness his physical charisma perfectly playing a cipher onto which the other characters project their own needs.
The film still baffles today, even as it dazzles with some great visuals. The closest I can come to unlocking some its meaning is to say that it’s the story of an alien becoming human. Bowie plays “Thomas Jerome Newton,” a visitor from a planet which is dying from drought. His mission is to find water and return with it to his planet. But he quickly becomes corrupted by his contacts with people and ends up secluded in a huge apartment like Howard Hughes. At the beginning of the film, his alien intelligence allows him to register some unique patents and form a company that becomes incredibly successful. But his wealth leads those closest to him to betrayal, and the government, suspicious of his company’s success, destroys his business, confines him and carries out medical experiments to see what makes him different. There is a mishmash of ideas at work in the film, but at root it’s the story of an innocent corrupted by exposure to the venality of human society.
His relationships are formed with other outsiders, who are drawn to his vulnerability as well as to his intelligence, wealth or influence. Mary Lou (Candy Clark) falls in love with him, and uses him to escape her life as a hotel maid with a booze problem. When he reveals his true self to her in a memorable scene, she is unable to bear it. Nathan Bryce (Rip Torn), a college professor with a weakness for co-eds, devotes his life to scientific research for Newton. He’s the only one who really guesses Newton’s secret, and he vows to help him develop the technology needed to get him back home. And Oliver Farnsworth (Buck Henry), the man to whom Newton entrusts his company, is a gay man in the 1970s, when discrimination would have been much worse than it is now. But each of these trusted confidantes betrays him in one way or another, because of lust, greed, or a desire for power.
At the end, he doesn’t even seem to mind so much. “We’d have probably treated you the same if you’d come over to our place,” he tells Bryce when asked if he’s bitter. The angelic being introduced at the beginning of the film has become as jaded and cynical as the rest of us. The Man Who Fell to Earth is a strange, sad and haunting thing.
Note: The stills are from the standard-def DVD. The Blu-Ray from Criterion looks very nice indeed, and if you have the option, I’d recommend the Blu-Ray unreservedly.
A few other tidbits about the film:
- The last still above, of Brueghel’s painting Landscape with the Fall of Icarus is an important touchstone, as is W.H. Auden’s poem Musée des Beaux Arts which comments on it. Both pieces emphasize that Icarus’ fall was pretty much ignored by the rest of the world. Newton’s plight is similarly smothered by the world; first by its curiosity, then by its suspicion and finally by its indifference.
- Bowie did record some music for the film but it wasn’t used. It ended up as Side 2 of his album Low (1977)
- Bowie also used the interior of the space travel set (in the fourth still above) for the cover of his album Station to Station (1976)
Essay by Graham Fuller on the Criterion website
(8/10)
Tagged as:
blu-ray,
criterion,
scifi
Wow. When the Toronto After Dark Film Festival decided to move from October to August, I never realized how quickly it would come up again. But even though I’ve been spending most of my time thinking about TIFF lately, I’m still planning to see a bunch of great genre cinema over the next week. Here’s my tentative schedule:
All screenings are at the Bloor Cinema (Bathurst subway stop) and individual tickets are usually $10 in advance, $12 at the door. It’s good to see that all the festival VIP passes sold out again this year, so the Bloor should be rocking at every screening with some of the most enthusiastic audiences at any fest I’ve attended.
Tagged as:
#afterdark09,
blaxploitation,
horror,
scifi
Although this site generally focuses on Toronto-area film festivals and events, I can’t resist putting in a plug for Montréal’s incredible Fantasia International Film Festival. Running all the way from July 9–29 (and yes, I know the poster says the 27th, but trust me, it runs until the 29th), this year’s fest features more than 115 feature films as well as a generous selection of shorts. Fantasia’s focus is on genre cinema (horror, sci-fi, etc.) and there’s been a real explosion in both the quality of these films as well as audience interest.
Looking through their programme has me looking forward to Toronto’s own genre fest, Toronto After Dark, which is running from August 14–21 this year. Though our fest is much more modest (at least for now), I’m confident that the programmers will be bringing the very best from Fantasia to Toronto in August. And if they don’t, then I’ll just have to get myself to Montréal next summer.
P.S. Hey After Dark guys, can you get a poster as cool as this one for your fest? Thanks!
Tagged as:
#fantasia2009,
fantasia,
genre,
horror,
Montréal,
scifi
Space. The final frontier. To boldly go where no short filmmaker has gone before…I was looking forward to this collection of sci-fi shorts for two reasons. First was to see the sort of kitschy retro-camp stuff where the effects and costumes are crappy on purpose. But secondly, I wanted to see if some of these directors could use the limitations of the short film format to explore some idea about the future in an interesting way. I’m happy that this programme came through on both fronts.
- Die Schneider Krankheit (11 minutes, Spain, Director: Javier Chillon): I had higher hopes for this film, a mock 50s short filmed in propagandistic style. A spaceship crashes in West Germany with a chimpanzee astronaut aboard. He quickly infects the whole country with a strange virus, which changes life for everyone. The fact that it’s made to look like a German film though actually made by Spaniards may have diffused some of the impact, as we heard the Spanish narrator dubbing the German soundtrack, with English subtitles as well. Some great visuals, though (and not a frame of archival footage, though it all looks archival). (Official site with trailer, poster and even lobby cards.) (7/10)
- Civilian (4 minutes, USA, Director: Seaton Lin): Based on real interviews with a woman who claimed to be abducted by aliens, this short film focuses too much on portraying the act of hypnotizing her and not enough on what she claims to have seen. Far too short to be memorable, even with such compelling subject matter. (See the whole film here.) (6/10)
- Marooned? (15 minutes, USA, Director: Ryan Nagata): Filmed in Death Valley, Marooned? got quite a few laughs with its story about a live-action roleplaying game that goes very wrong. Michael McCafferty is well-cast as the middle-aged sci-fi nerd who hires a couple of guys to play in the desert with him before a knock on the head has him wondering if he really is stranded on an alien planet. (Official site) (8/10)
- Star Games (3 minutes, UK, Director: Jasmin Jodry): Stunningly choreographed gymnasts and divers are combined with archival footage of zeppelins and Art Deco New York to create a gorgeous narrative of athletes becoming literal stars. (Watch the whole film here.) (9/10)
- The Attack of The Robots From Nebula-5 (El ataque de los robots de nebulosa-5) (7 minutes, Spain, Director: Chema García Ibarra): A mentally disturbed man believes that a robot invasion is imminent. His attempts to warn his family are futile, mostly because his drawings of the invaders are so childish. A great mixture of sweetness and menace, with great deadpan narration from the misunderstood messenger of doom. (Official site) (8/10)
- The Survivor of The Hippocampus (Le rescapé de l’hippocampe) (13 minutes, France, Director: Julien Lecat): French chanteuse Juliette Noureddine (above, left) is brilliantly cast as a madam who enters her friend’s brain on his request to delete the memory of his brother. Wildly inventive on a tiny budget and extremely short production schedule (the film was created for a contest). (Official site) (9/10)
- 2000: A Documentary Science Fiction (7 minutes, Bulgaria, Director: Andrey Paounov): From the director of quirky doc The Mosquito Problem and Other Stories comes this pseudo-doc, supposedly made in 1973 by the members of a metalworks’ cinema club in Communist Bulgaria. Its view of the year 2000 is charmingly off-kilter, featuring intermarriage between humans and robots, and families of space explorers. Certainly loses something outside of Eastern Europe, where its satire would feel sharper. (7/10)
- Cold and Dry (Tørt og kjølig) (12 minutes, Norway, Director: Kristoffer Joner): Essentially a thought exercise: what would happen if we could freeze-dry people and revive them in the future? Scientist Torstein thinks he’s helping society by freezing the criminally insane, the sick and the old, reasoning that surely society will be able to help these people in the future. But soon, freezing begins to appeal to anyone with a problem that can be solved in the future; that is, everyone. Smart and lean. (9/10)
- Postman Returns (3 minutes, Netherlands, Director: Mischa Rozema): So short as to be essentially plotless and characterless, this animated short nevertheless pushes the boundaries of whatever type of 3-D rendering software was used to create it. (Watch the whole film here.) (8/10)
- Captain Coulier (Space Explorer) (13 minutes, Canada, Director: Lyndon Casey): Inspired, according to the director, by Canadian winters, this campy space sitcom felt like being trapped in a van with four of your friends driving across the prairies. The humour is as spontaneous as the sniping is inevitable, but it’s all hilarious. Purposely cheesy art direction serves the overall goal of portraying an inadequate spaceship crew whose captain struggles with his own, um, inadequacy. (Official site) (9/10)
Tagged as:
#wsff09,
scifi,
shorts,
worldwideshortfilmfest
Just a heads-up to any filmmakers, local or otherwise, who haven’t yet submitted their work to Toronto’s best horror, sci-fi and action film festival. They’ve moved the dates this year to August 14–21, so that means the submission deadlines are also different this year. You have just TWO DAYS before the final deadline of May 15th, and I know that the more work they receive, the better the eventual programme will be.
Stuff I’d like to see at Toronto After Dark this year:
Not sure if any of these filmmakers have submitted or been invited, but here’s hoping!
P.S. I’m sure the lads over at Twitch have a few on their wish list as well.
Tagged as:
#afterdark09,
horror,
scifi
