The Dark Mountain Blog
Towards an Uncivilised filmography
posted by Paul Kingsnorth
14th December, 2009
In the second of our guest posts, film-maker Dan Walwin suggests some starting points for building up an Uncivilised filmography. As ever, we would like to hear your thoughts on how the list could be extended.
Lifeboat (1944, Alfred Hitchcock)
Echoes of this can also be found at the conclusion of Shame (Ingmar Bergman, 1968). Chiefly Second World War propaganda, but also illustrates a narrative that James Lovelocks taps into when he writes: ‘Make no mistake, the lifeboat simile is apt; the same problem has faced the shipwrecked: a lifeboat will sink or become impossible to sail if too laden.’
Wages of Fear (1953, Henri-Georges Clouzot)
Features a fairly horrific scene where one of the drivers of the explosive-laden trucks is wading into a pool formed by oil gushing from a severed pipe (caused by another truck exploding), only to fall under its surface and have a leg crushed as the other driver accelerates through the pool in fear of being stuck. Very tense, desperate, and unsentimental.
Woman of the Dunes (1964, Hiroshi Teshigahara)
A man gets tricked into staying overnight with a woman who lives down a pit in the sand dunes, only to find next morning that there is no way of climbing out again, and that to survive they must perpetually dig the sand out of the pit.
The War Game (1965, Peter Watkins)
Filmed as if it were a documentary covering events during and following a nuclear attack on England, this is a harrowing look at the realities of nuclear war and the accompanying breakdown that would follow. Comparable with Threads of 1984.
Stalker (1979, Andrei Tarkovsky)
Seeming to pre-empt the Chernobyl disaster in its myth of ‘the Zone’: ‘Our moods, our thoughts, our emotions, our feelings can bring about change here. (…) But in fact, at any moment it is exactly as we devise it, in our consciousness … everything that happens here depends on us, not on the Zone.’ Three desperate individuals meditate on existence while deeply enveloped in a landscape which is both threatening and offering the hope of salvation.
Time of the Wolf (2004, Michael Haneke)
Unflinching in its dissection of a generic European country following collapse. Disturbing and almost totally grim but, of course, nothing less than to be expected. ‘I believe that the catastrophe story, whoever may tell it, represents a constructive and positive act by the imagination rather than a negative one, an attempt to confront the terrifying void of a patently meaningless universe by challenging it at its own game, to remake zero by provoking it in every conceivable way’ – J.G. Ballard
Dan Walwin is a film-maker who will be curating the cinema space at the forthcoming Dark Mountain Festival
Posted by Paul Kingsnorth on 14 December, 09
Comments: 9 comments - Read them and respond
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I´d suggest the list to be extended by Mike Hoolboom’s “Imitations of life (in ten parts)”
I spent two hours of my life watching ‘Terminator Salvation’ the other night, and while it wasn’t a good film by any stretch of the imagination, it offered a familiar dystopia: a post-nuclear world, in which a war is raging between humans and machines. Tellingly, there is little or nothing in this world that lives, apart from people. It is a post-nature world. Grim in the extreme. And the war against the machines must surely tap into both an archetypal fear and a very real possibility in terms of the direction civilisation may take us. I might therefore add Terminator 2, which is a classic of its kind, to my Uncivilised filmography.
I’d like to add an unlikely candidate, the original Poseidon Adventure. It captures, better than any other film I know, the dynamics of a world “turned upside down.” The way Gene Hackman’s character leads his intrepid band of misfits, out by going up/down, while others attempt to deny there is a problem or follow narrowly focused, linear, ideological or “faith based” strategies. It comes to mind often and it has gained utility as an exemplar, it has gained in resonance as time has passed. That the “world” they escape is a high tech “dream” run by technocratic experts so its inhabitants can focus on desire and chase after superficial pleasures in perennial, infantile dependence only adds to its relevance and appeal.
a really interesting filmography. tarkovsky’s ‘stalker’ and haneke’s ‘time of the wolf’ being excellent choices. ‘terminator 2′ is an interesting candidate: its vision of a technological horror close to extinguishing the human race (and, and paul says, its depiction of a “post-nature world”) is really quite scary. on that note, could ‘blade runner’ and ‘total recall’ be included? despite the hollywood production values, they share interesting visions of a future worlds.
i’m not sure if the following suggestions would fit the description of an Uncivilised Filmography but here are some titles for consideration:
// ‘Werckmeister Harmonies’ – Béla Tarr
// ‘Chain’ – Jem Cohen
// ‘La Jetée’ – Chris Marker
cheers
p
Antonio – thanks for that. A very interesting point. Phil – yes, Bladerunner would be another similar effort. I remember that being a world inhabited entirely by humans and machines; yet the android’s dreams and memories of the world beyond Earth are very much like our dreams and memories of arcadias and wild places. And the replicants’ rebellion against their slavery has an Animal Farm-like resonance; it speaks of the next phase of the human empire. And what a great dying speech, too.
‘I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. All those moments will be lost in time… like tears in rain… Time to die. ‘
paul – glad you agree on ‘blade runner’. although suspect in many places, it’s very evocative and visually stunning. funny how two of the greatest dying speeches in traditional narrative films are made by “robots”! the other being hal’s final moments in ’2001′.
A good list unfolding here – belatedly; I’d nominate ‘Koyaanisqatsi’ and ‘Soylent Green’. The former, by far the strongest of the Qatsi films, remains an potent evocation of mass technological society looking great but spiralling out of control, and I’m often struck by the number of people whose thinking about ecology had been shaped by it.
I’d like to add ‘La Belle Verte’ to the list. So much of the list above seems to be about the end of civilization. ‘La Belle Verte’ gives a glimpse of what might rise next.
You’ll now have to add ‘Beasts of the Southern Wild’- community, survival and wildness just past the levee in a future flooded Louisiana not to far away.