After wading into the sociopolitical mire of the Middle East and wallowing in the muck of Michael Haneke’s extended bourgeois nightmare, the Austin Film Society’s Essential Cinema Series is wisely shaking the dust of this miserable little planet off its feet for a few months and heading out into the cosmos. On June 5, they’ll raise the curtain on Other Minds, Other Worlds: Global Sci-fi Cinema, an international collection of science-fiction classics and rarities from the last century.
It’s one of those brilliant quirks of film history that sometimes the best way to address concerns of real and lasting human significance onscreen – nuclear war, global warming, the constant threat posed by pod people – is by imagining inhuman worlds: worlds populated by slithering aliens, warlike apes, and killer robots. The reasoning behind this approach is simple enough: No one wants to sit through a cautionary tale about the scientific dangers of nuclear radiation on a Saturday night with a girl in their arms. Make it a movie about an mutant fire-breathing lizard, however, and people will listen, and girls will cozy up tight.
No one understood this social, propagandistic power better than the Soviets. If the Reds didn’t beat us to the moon, they no doubt won the space race on the screen, acknowledging long before we did the power of science-fiction to celebrate the virtues of their own culture and explore the mysterious dangers that awaited them in their march toward progress and ideological dominance. Some of the gems of the Other Minds program come from the Soviet Union, little-seen masterpieces that speak volumes about the state of the Red empire (and the world) at various points during the 20th century. Vasili Zhuravlev’s 1936 silent, Cosmic Voyage, and Pavel Klushantsev’s Planet of Storms in addition to being truly odd space-travel fantasies are also brilliant examples of deluded confidence in Stalin’s Soviet Union and the communist ideals of hard work and self-sacrifice it was supposedly built on. The films’ intrepid space travelers – national heroes all – aren’t just stone-faced scientists struggling toward extraterrestrial understanding but also wide-eyed innocents, naifs, and adventurers delighting in the joys of shared accomplishment. Say what you will about the realities of life under communism: Onscreen, the Russians possessed an optimism rarely seen outside of Gene Kelly musicals.
Our own national science-fiction cinema didn’t really take off until the late Forties. Before that, American sci-fi films tended to be of the matinee-serial variety: puddle-shallow pretty boys like Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers traveling to alien worlds to show off their perfect heads of hair. But when World War II ended in a cataclysm of nuclear fire over Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the Soviet Union began to rise in the East, American audiences began looking to the stars for answers, or at least for an imaginary enemy to stand in for the elusive communists. Before the Cold War, who needed to invent sinister cosmic creatures when memories of breadlines and Buchenwald were still fresh in people’s minds? Take away the Nazis and the threat of deprivation, however, and leave only a vague nuclear specter looming on the other side of the world, and crafty filmmakers will invent extraterrestrial threats to give their audiences something to focus all that anxiety on. Hence the success of Val Guest’s The Day the Earth Caught Fire in 1961 and Philip Kaufman’s 1978 remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, both of which will be showing during the series. These are the movies of an ascendant culture giving faces to unknowable bogeymen and tracing the limits of human imagination and low-budget cinema in the process.
Tuesdays in June, 7pm, Alamo Drafthouse Downtown.
Tuesdays in July, 9:45pm, Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar.
For admission information and more, see www.austinfilm.org.
June 5: The Fantastic Planet
June 12: Cosmic Voyage
June 19: Planet of the Vampires
June 26: The Day the Earth Caught Fire
July 3: Invasion of the Body Snatchers
July 10: Planet of Storms
July 17: The Heavens Call
July 24: Akira
July 31: To the Stars by Hard Ways
This article appears in June 1 • 2007.