Announcing: BBBG Dystopian Fortnight

Welcome to a whole new level of foresight on my part, three weeks worth of planning has gone in to this post rather than the usual three minutes.

The Blahblahblahgay Dystopian Fortnight is two weeks of posts on dystopias in movies and dystopias in fiction. Thanks in part to Suzanne Collins writing The Hunger Games, dystopias are en vogue right now, children and middle aged women are reading those books and want more dystopias to read, this is a fact that cannot be denied. Cormac McCarthy's The Road and the subsequent adaptation with Viggo Mortensen marked a recent high point in the genre for the darker more literary side of things and even the Booker Prize got involved when Kazuo Ishiguro was shortlisted for one of literatures most prestigious prizes for his dystopian novel Never Let Me Go.

I don't think there has been such public affection for the genre since the height of the Cold War when we were treated to such classic movies as Logan's Run, Planet of The Apes and Soylent Green (all based on novels.) In the coming months we shall be seeing Logan's Run remade by the Drive pairing of Refn and Gosling and with three books in the series this is one that can sustain itself for as long as the demand for dystopian movies is there (not forgetting the re-issues of the long out of print novels to cross promote with.) Plus the sequel to the rebooted Apes movie, naturally, and countless other movies we haven't thought about yet I'm sure.

The classics of the 60s were written as obvious warnings about nuclear weapons and reflecting the fears of the people at the time but what are our current fears? Global Warming must be in there, dwindling natural resources too, post 9/11 fears perhaps, reality TV most defintiely. Largely I get the feeling that there isn't really a message in these new fictions and remakes with the focus on pure entertainment and making money as quickly and in as large a quantity as possible. But then again I can't back that up with examples as yet.

But what is a dystopia? The basic definitions is something like this: Dystopian societies feature different kinds of repressive social control systems, various forms of active and passive coercion. Works about dystopian societies often explore the concept of humans abusing technology and humans individually and collectively coping, or not being able to properly cope with technology that has progressed far more rapidly than humanity's spiritual evolution. Not to be confused with a heterotopia which is neither a utopia or a distopia merely a world different from ours.

The last part of the definition is very important. For example some might say that Ridley Scott's Blade Runner is a dystopian world but as Scott never really discusses the feelings of the masses (and infact the masses seem happy enough to me) it is merely a futuristic story, the people are not just surviving they appear to be thriving, wheras the Philip K. Dick novel that it is based upon is definitely a dystopian society filled with people looking to flee the planet.

If you analyse the genre you notice that there are several different types of dystopias; most notably post apocalyptic in which people learn to survive in an environment destroyed by war or famine or pollution (The Road, Wall-E, Mad Max,) societal in which a powerful few attempt to control or enslave the masses (1984, Demolition Man, Total Recall,) and corporate in which society is dominated and run by big business (the basis for a lot of cyberpunk novels and movies such as Gamer or Rollerball.) Some novels and movies will fit in to more than one category but at least one of these three aspects will be present in every dystopian movie.

Andy at Fandango Groovers put together a really nice article back in June taking a look at Contemporary Dystopias and so my first link of this series is to him. The point is raised in the opening paragraph that right now in 2012 we are living in a dystopia, the kind of horror scenario envisioned by white America of the 1950s. Perhaps that revelation accounts for the sudden uptake in interest in dystopian worlds?

Coming up in the next two weeks: book and movie reviews by yours truly, lists, some guest posts, a little help from my friends and something a little different.

Russian Resurrection Perth Film Festival 2011

I might complain a lot about Perth being the middle of nowhere and nothing ever happening but we do seem to get a fair go (that's Australian slang, I'm quite proud of that) when it comes to interesting film events. They're not the biggest or the best but there's certainly a lot more than I ever got to experience in Stevenage. Last year there was Italian and Mexican film festivals showing at my local Luna cinema which meant I got to see Bicycle Thieves at the cinema with a bunch of old Italians talking through it. Now I have received the program for the Russian Resurrection Film Festival that is coming to Perth in September.

The full program can be found at russianresurrection.com but here in Perth they are screening 15 films from the new Russian cinema and 4 classics from the Soviet era.

I've been through the program and shortlisted a few films that I might drag Leah and/or others along to:

Dark World AKA Temny Mir
A supernatural fantasy based on Russian folktales. Good vs Evil. That kind of thing.




Elena
Winner of The Special Jury Prize at Cannes, this is the one with the highest pedigree. A family drama orbitting around the looming death of the rich patriarch.



Who Am I? AKA Kto Ya?
A mystery thriller about death and lost memory that leaves you guessing until the very end apparently.



Stoker AKA Kochegar
War hero working as a furnace stoker clashes with Russian mafia after being forced to dispose of corpses.



Brest Fortress AKA Fortress of War AKA Brestskaya Krepost
Wartime drama set during the 1941 Nazi invasion of the USSR.



I'll hopefully get along to most of these if I can fit them in around work. Fingers crossed I will be sharing some reviews of the best new Russian cinema in the next few weeks.

Announcing: The blahblahblahgay Noir-a-Thon

Announcing the new Tuesday feature here at blahblahblahgay, Noir-a-Thon.

This has been months in the making, research, planning, ordering DVD's, organising our thoughts, booking time off of work etc. and now it is finally here. The history of Film Noir blogged week by week by myself and Leah from What Indie Nights?

We have selected 125 (at the current time) movies ranging from the proto-noir of 1930's The Blue Angel through to 2010 and Christopher Nolan's neo-noir Inception.

I am still a student of film at heart and I got a little carried away in writing a brief introduction to what film noir is for me but for those of you wanting a little background on what we shall be looking at please feel free to continue reading.

Film noir is more a style of film rather than a genre, noir being the French word for black and black being very much the order of the day in these movies; not just being full of shadows and dark imagery but also of mood. The prevailing mood of the film noir canon is that of despair, heroes go in to battle against an irrational universe with the existential knowledge that death is on their back and maybe not this time, but soon, they won't be coming out of it alive. Nobody lives forever, everybody dies.

Taking their cues from German expressionist cinema, directors working in film noir created a distinct visual style; oddly angled shots, moving cameras, location shooting, a specific use of shadow and light, using these tools to add meaning to almost every shot.

The heroes are almost all alienated from society in one way or another, those unspoken horrors of the past; the long dark teatime of the soul is what binds the narrative together. It's not just the P.I.'s who have the dark past and who place self preservation above all else - every noir hero is running on empty, dead inside or on the verge of becoming that way, suspecting everyone, never fully trusting anyone. And it's a good thing too because those femme fatales would have taken all the men for a ride.

Obsession could be said to drive these alienated heroes onwards; every P.I. won't quit until he's solved the case, there's no time for love when you think the wrong guy has taken the fall, when the great whatsit is still out there, all these men on their knees so desperate to feel again that they cross the line and enter the underworld, rob a bank, kill a man, then blame it on a woman.

Classic noir is most definitely an American style of film, only a few non-US productions have made the list during the period 1941 - 1958 and there was only a slight increase in numbers after that date as we move in to neo-noir, film makers such as Kurosawa and Melville making similar stylistic and thematic choices out of respect for the American movies they loved watching.

We'll be using, amongst others, Dugnant's major noir themes from his 1970 essay Paint It Black and Ebert's list of noir identifiers.

Dugnant suggested that all noir films will include at least one of the following motifs:
Crime as social criticism (miscarriage of justice, bent cops, etc.)
Gangsters (organisational, cops vs robbers, etc.)
On the run (innocents or dangerous criminals looking to escape their fate.)
Private eyes and adventurers (down these mean streets must a man go who is himself not mean.)
Middle class murder (murder taken lightly, men led astray by sex, women as executioner and victim.)
Portraits and doubles (claustraphobia and paranoia, in the dark rainy nights it's hard to tell one character from another.)
Sexual pathology (sadism, doomed love, love-hate relationships.)
Psycopaths (morally bankrupt, spirit of society, tragic confusion.)
Hostages to fortune (largely domestic violence.)
Blacks and reds (political, gangsters as nazis and commies.)

And Ebert has a (slightly) tongue-in-cheek list of noir identifiers:
1. A French term meaning "black film," or film of the night, inspired by the Series Noir, a line of cheap paperbacks that translated hard-boiled American crime authors and found a popular audience in France.
2. A movie which at no time misleads you into thinking there is going to be a happy ending.
3. Locations that reek of the night, of shadows, of alleys, of the back doors of fancy places, of apartment buildings with a high turnover rate, of taxi drivers and bartenders who have seen it all.
4. Cigarettes. Everybody in film noir is always smoking, as if to say, "On top of everything else, I've been assigned to get through three packs today." The best smoking movie of all time is "Out of the Past," in which Robert Mitchum and Kirk Douglas smoke furiously at each other. At one point, Mitchum enters a room, Douglas extends a pack and says, "Cigarette?" and Mitchum, holding up his hand, says, "Smoking."
5. Women who would just as soon kill you as love you, and vice versa.
6. For women: low necklines, floppy hats, mascara, lipstick, dressing rooms, boudoirs, calling the doorman by his first name, high heels, red dresses, elbowlength gloves, mixing drinks, having gangsters as boyfriends, having soft spots for alcoholic private eyes, wanting a lot of someone else's women, sprawling dead on the floor with every limb meticulously arranged and every hair in place.
7. For men: fedoras, suits and ties, shabby residential hotels with a neon sign blinking through the window, buying yourself a drink out of the office bottle, cars with running boards, all-night diners, protecting kids who shouldn't be playing with the big guys, being on first-name terms with homicide cops, knowing a lot of people whose descriptions end in "ies," such as bookies, newsies, junkies, alkys, jockeys and cabbies.
8. Movies either shot in black and white, or feeling like they were.
9. Relationships in which love is only the final flop card in the poker game of death.
10. The most American film genre, because no society could have created a world so filled with doom, fate, fear and betrayal, unless it were essentially naive and optimistic.

We're really excited by the prospect of viewing 80 years of film history and we hope you'll come along for the ride. Feel free to watch along with us, the full list of films can be found at the brand spanking new Noir-a-Thon page located all over the blog and here and we'll be viewing in chronological order.

Edit: We've left some films out for various reasons, some such as the James Cagney movies I am not fond of, some such as Blood Simple I've seen many times and didn't feel like buying at the time of making the list and others just weren't readily available on DVD at reasonable prices or at all. Phew. I knew I'd left something important out.