Archive: Film Reviews, August 2003
Australian Science Fiction Film Festival, May/June 2002
Dir: ,
A Review by Polona Petek, University of Melbourne, Australia
The inaugural Australian Science Fiction Film Festival, with consecutive screenings at the Dendy Opera Quays in Sydney (9-15 May 2002) and Kino Cinemas in Melbourne (13-19 June 2002), was described by its organisers as the celebration of one hundred years of science fiction cinema. Fittingly, the festival opened with Georges Méliès' silent classic La Voyage Dans La Lune (France, 1902), generally considered the first science fiction film, followed by the Australian premiere of one of the most recent ventures within the genre, Cory McAbee's sci-fi comedy The American Astronaut (USA, 2001), which was enthusiastically received by the audiences at the 2001 Sundance Film Festival.
In the following six days, the festival offered a broad, but somewhat random selection of older and more recent science fiction aficionados' favourites. The prolific 1950s were represented by a sole film, Fred Wilcox's Forbidden Planet (USA, 1956). We saw Kubrick's Dr Strangelove (UK, 1964), but not his equally, if not more, pertinent to the genre 2001: A Space Odyssey (UK/USA, 1968). Kaufman's Invasion of the Body Snatchers (USA, 1978) was screened; not so the original, Don Siegel's 1956 classic of the same name. The Star Trek and the New Generation fans had the opportunity to see Star Trek: Generations (David Carson, USA, 1994), the film that links the two TV series. On the other hand, there was no time devoted to one of the most influential, popular and widely discussed science fiction films of all time, George Lucas' Star Wars (USA, 1977), and its sequels. The Alien tetralogy was represented by the first film, Ridley Scott's Alien (UK/USA, 1979). The year's Short Circuit short film competition featured eight entries by local filmmakers: Clone Alone (Myles Conti), Dark Age Of Light (Tom Taylor), Darklands (Jamie Marshall), Harbirth (Martin Thorne), Harvey (Peter McDonald), Headspace (Joshua Holliday), Suburban Knight (Dean White) and Winter Harvest (David Blumenthal).
Filmmakers, film critics and academics joined the event in two panel sessions. "How to Build a Rocket" provided an opportunity to discuss nuts and bolts of sci-fi filmmaking with John Tatoulis, the director of Zone 39 (Australia, 1996), the local filmmaker Pete Ford, and Robert Sutherland, the director of the closing night feature The Inside Story (Australia, 2002). The "Science Fiction Designs the Future" forum with the academic Dr Angela Ndalianis and two Melbourne based film critics, Paul Harris and Megan Spencer, offered a different, non-industry view of the genre, its origins in art and science, its development, the most memorable moments and current prospects. The session also included the screening of a short lecture by one of the genre's literary gurus, Isaac Asimov, on science fiction literature and magazines.
The choice of films in the festival programme certainly seemed arbitrary. The fact, however, is hardly surprising if one considers the immense body of films that comprise the science fiction genre (the Internet Movie Database search, for instance, returns 4,354 film and television series titles matching the description), and even less so if one takes into account the absence of a consensus among film scholars as to what exactly the defining elements and the limits of the genre might be. Rather than insisting on one of the more or less reductionist definitions of science fiction, the festival highlighted the fact that cinema audiences represent an important element in discussions of genre: science fiction fans are quite willing to attribute the label to a range of rather diverse films.
There is, however, another interesting and potentially more productive insight, brought into focus by the selectors of the festival and implied in the name of the event itself. Genre as a theoretical concept was first embraced by film theorists to make possible a non-auteurist approach to cinema and to facilitate discussions of cinema as a popular medium. Later, particularly with the postmodern breakdown of the distinction between high art and popular culture, genre and authorship studies became more easily reconcilable. What has so far attracted a lot less interest in the discipline, however, is the possibility of fruitfully combining the genre criticism approach with the study of a national cinema. As one might expect, of course, there are studies of the science fiction genre within American cinema (Sobchack, 1999; Seed, 1999). The Australian take on the genre, on the other hand, is still waiting to undergo a serious and extensive study. This year's festival catered particularly to all those science fiction devotees with a taste for Anglo-Saxon science fiction. Nonetheless, one could spot a pronounced ambition to bring into focus Australian (Anglo-Saxon) science fiction films; that is, films produced by Australians, made in Australia and/or by Australian filmmakers.
The films that were introduced as Australian in this year's programme included Epsilon (Rolf de Heer, 1995), Zone 39 (John Tatoulis, 1997), Dark City (Alex Proyas, 1998), The Matrix (Wachowski Brothers, 1999), two new features, Neophytes and Neon Lights (Shane Hall, 2001) and The Inside Story (Robert Sutherland, 2002), and three short films, The Thief Of Sydney (Toby Zoates, 1984), Broken Allegiance (Nick Hallam, 2002), and Sev Trek: Pus In Boots (John Cook, 2002). Particularly the last two, Hallam's homage to Star Wars and Cook's hilarious animated variation on the TV series Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987-1994, created by Gene Roddenberry), were warmly greeted by the festival audience.
The narrative of The Inside Story revolves around a book that functions as a portal between parallel realities, or at least between different modes of reality: between the past, the present and the future as well as between the realms of everyday life, fantasy and creative imagination. Through a chain of fantastic events, which are never logically -- or shall we rather say scientifically? -- explained, and which deny the audiences any point of reference, these realms lose their initial ontological status irretrievably. Although the film features fascinating special effects and one of its protagonists is a scientist -- an astrophysicist to be quite precise -- it came as rather a surprise to see the film included in the programme of a science fiction festival. Vivian Sobchack has argued that 'it seems not enough to say that the horror film is about magic and religion and that the SF film is about science…both genres involve interaction between magic, science, and religion -- and the only thing which really separates the genres is the dominant emphasis' (op. cit.: 58) given to one of these discourses. In The Inside Story, the discourse of science is not even equal to, let alone privileged over, religion, occultism, magic or artistic expression, and the film's classification as horror (or horror comedy) rather than science fiction seems a more obvious choice.
Dark City and The Matrix present a different problem. While no doubt prominent examples of science fiction, their designation as Australian is to some extent problematic. Dark City was written and directed by Alex Proyas, who was born in Egypt and moved to Sydney at the age of three. Except for his early shorts and first feature Spirits of the Air, Gremlins of the Clouds (1989), each of his subsequent films (including The Crow [1994] and Garage Days [2002]) was at least in part produced by American studios, Dark City by Mystery Clock Cinema and New Line Cinema. With its digital special effects designed by the Australian DFILM Services, filming locations in Los Angeles and Sydney, and the cast including British, American and Australian actors, the film is rather an excellent example of the globalised nature of the current film industry. The same holds true for The Matrix (1999), written and directed by the American-born Wachowski Brothers (who made their directorial debut with the provocative post-noir Bound in 1996). Its international cast, crew and company credits indeed include several Australian actors and companies -- production company Village Roadshow Productions, special-effects designers at the DFILM Services and the Makeup Effects Group Studio among others -- and most of the filming was carried out in studios and on locations in New South Wales, Australia. Yet, The Matrix should rather be viewed as an outstanding international cinematic achievement.
Epsilon (1995, written and directed by the Dutch-born filmmaker Rolf de Heer), Zone 39 (1997, directed by the Melbourne based filmmaker John Tatoulis and written by the renowned Australian TV writer Deborah Parsons) and Neophytes and Neon Lights (2001, the debut feature by the Australian director and writer Shane Hall) were shot entirely in Australia and funded predominantly by Australian production companies. More importantly, and although their plots and even settings might seem rather different at first sight, these films share an element one is tempted to call a distinctly (although not exclusively) Australian feature within the science fiction genre film, namely, their deployment or at least evocation of landscape. (From this perspective, the absence of George Miller's Mad Max trilogy at this year's festival becomes even more obvious.) John Baxter observes the "familiar elements" of Australian science fiction cinema: "a limitless desert, part prison colony, part Aboriginal reservation, part redneck backwater, part abandoned firing range but mostly toxic dump, roamed by a population of black visionaries and white criminals or crazies…a polluted factory site, outback desolation, Big Brother regime" (Baxter, 1998: 31, 34). Baxter carefully adds that this employment of Australian landscape corresponds to the image of Australia in the European cultural imagination, whereas, in my view, it actually exemplifies the white Australian perception of the land.
Acknowledging contributions to the study of science fiction made by Susan Sontag (2001), Vivian Sobchack (op. cit.), Barbara Creed (1993) and others, and drawing on Baudrillard's (1983) notion of simulacrum, J.P. Telotte argues that science fiction "has focused its attention on the problematic nature of human being and the difficult task of being human" (Telotte, 1995: 2). He does not object to the commonly identified iconographic and narrative elements of sci-fi cinema, such as robots, deep-sea exploration, interdimensional, intradimensional and space travel, interplanetary wars, invasions from outer space and/or encounters with aliens, and environmental salvation or destruction. However, Telotte recognises the principal and defining theme of the science fiction genre in (American) cinema in dealing with the precarious boundary between human and non-human.
Interestingly, Telotte's argument lends itself easily to readings of American-Australian productions, such as Dark City (a story about a man struggling with disturbing and somehow unfamiliar memories of his past in a world controlled by non-human beings with telekinetic powers, who are gradually taking possession of the souls of humans) and The Matrix (a story about a man learning that the world around him is a computer simulation created by superior artificial intelligence beings, who exploit humans and are able to take on the human form whenever required). When taken up in discussion of Australian films screened at this year's festival, Telotte's account, while no doubt still legitimate, appears less helpful. The three films do stage an encounter with a non-human living form, yet there seems to be no uncertainty with regard to the boundary between human and non-human. The uncertainty is rather projected onto man's [sic] encounter with his environment, with landscape. Film reviewers usually observe that landscape takes on an ambivalent role in Australian cinema in general: breathtakingly beautiful and vast, yet also wild, untamed and hostile. In my view, its role in science fiction is even more significant: often, the footage of landscape all but completely supplants the effects achieved by special effects in big budget American and international sci-fi productions. Substituting artificially created settings, props and characters, this employment of landscape also confirms Sobchack's argument that sci-fi iconography "evoke[s] the genre, but [is] -- specifically and physically -- not essential to it" (op. cit., 65).
Of the three remaining films, Neophytes and Neon Lights is perhaps least supportive of this argument, since the entire plot of the film takes place indoors, at Sydney's Teleport Station located on an island. When a group of opportunists steal a stranger's suitcase and the police put psychokinetic transfer on hold, thus leaving everyone stranded at the teleport, the crooks have to resort to old-fashioned ways of leaving the scene. The film features no shots of landscape whatsoever, yet, its plot -- through the characters' desire to flee the confined space of the teleport -- strongly evokes the usual connotations of Australian landscape: its vastness, tamelessness, affinity with outcasts; in short, its otherness.
Zone 39 and Epsilon are more straightforward, though quite different manifestations of the use of landscape in Australian science fiction. Andrew L. Urban stated about Zone 39 that "the science fiction tag is a tad misleading" (Urban, n.yr.), while Jayne Margetts described the film as "a nightmarish Orwellian tale that is not at the mercy of special effects" (Margetts, 1997). Both reviewers felt that the film's claim to classification as science fiction is highly questionable, and preferred to call it a political or psychological thriller. While certainly displaying strong undertones of the two subgenres, I believe Zone 39, with its dystopian vision of the near future as our scientific development might shape it, still requires consideration within science fiction. More importantly, anxiety about this not-yet-known future is conveyed less through visions created by special effects than by means of the film's representation of Australian landscape as deserted, isolated and utterly threatening.
Epsilon is perhaps an even better example of the tendency to render the land a prominent feature in Australian science fiction cinema. Jim Gay, whose overall critique of the film is less than flattering, observes that "the Australian landscape has seldom looked so beautiful" (Gay, n. yr.). More significantly, I believe the setting in Epsilon is more than just an eye-catching backdrop to the film's fairly uncomplicated plot. In the course of the development of the relationship between the "gregarious every-Aussie and Earth's representative" the Man and the beautiful and intellectually superior alien She, the landscape -- in contrast to Zone 39 -- acquires the status of a silent, helpless, vulnerable and ultimately invaluable protagonist.
One of the possible ways of interpreting science fiction is to view it as a genre that gives expression to human anxiety about the enigma with which the future presents us, an expression articulated largely through discourses of science and pseudoscience. From this perspective, Australian science fiction certainly seems to inscribe this anxiety (along with its optimistic, utopian and dystopian manifestations) in what the country most obviously abounds with, namely its vast and mostly unpopulated territory, which responds to human technological advances either by slowly fading away or by natural disasters that humans tend to interpret as nature's hostility.
The first Australian science fiction festival was indeed primarily a celebration of this prolific and diverse genre, and a great opportunity to see older classics again on the big screen and a handful of more recent films that did not receive a nation-wide release in Australia. Viewed from another perspective, the festival also highlighted the fact that science fiction might not be the strongest line of development in Australian filmmaking, yet an interesting and quite specific one. Hopefully, this event will bring about a steady new addition to Melbourne's rich film festival scene, as well as be appreciated as a much welcome initiative for a comprehensive study of Australian science fiction cinema.
References:
Baudrillard, Jean (1983) Simulations. New York: Semiotext(e).
Baxter, John (1998) Cinema, in Paul Collins (ed.), The MUP encyclopaedia of Australian science fiction & fantasy. Carlton, VIC: Melbourne University Press, pp. 30-34.
Creed, Barbara (1993) The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. London and New York: Routledge.
Gay, Jim (n. yr.) Amazon.com Reviews of Epsilon http://us.imdb.com/Amazon (accessed 25 October 2002).
Margetts, Jayne (1997) Zone 39 Review http://www.rottentomatoes.com (accessed 25 October 2002).
Seed, David (1999) American science fiction and the Cold War: literature and film. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Sobchack, Vivian Carol (1999) Screening Space. The American Science Fiction Film. New Brunswick, New Jersey and London: Rutgers University Press.
Sontag, Susan (2001) The Imagination of Disaster, in Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation. New York: Picador, pp. 209-225.
Telotte, J. P. (1995) Replications: A robotic history of the science fiction film. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press.
Urban, Andrew L. (n. yr) Urban Cinefile Reviews of Zone 39 http://www.urbancinefile.com.au (accessed 25 October 2002).