Showing posts with label Solaris. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Solaris. Show all posts

Friday, April 06, 2018

SF Luminaries: Stanislaw Lem



Wojciech Druszcz: Stanisław Lem


What is it about Stanislaw Lem that sets him apart from other SF writers? Because there is something that puts him in a category of his own, somewhere between J. G. Ballard and Philip K. Dick, though with powers of pure intellect quite different from their more sensitive, aesthetic approach to what Lem himself once called (in his essay "Philip K. Dick: A Visionary Among the Charlatans"):
the whole threadbare lot of telepaths, cosmic wars, parallel worlds, and time travel ...


Stanisław Lem: Solaris (1961)


Ever since I first chanced on a copy of Solaris in the local second-hand shop in Mairangi Bay, I've been trying to come to terms with his work. I wasn't even aware then that there was a film - let alone one as beguiling and magical as Tarkovsky's - so the book made its impact on me without any other visual aids.

The long account of the science of "Solaristics" in the middle chapters of Lem's story functions as a satire on Academia in general: its tendency to lurch from one one-sided theory to another, but it also shows a faith in the basic seriousness of his readers which transcended any of the more conventional slam-bang American or British Sci-fi I'd grown up on.



Stanislaw Lem: The Invincible (1964)


The other book of his I read at this time was The Invincible. Wow, what a contrast! This grim story of a thwarted attempt at planetary colonisation would have been almost unimaginable in English-language SF at the time. No boosterism - no Campbell-era "man plus" thinking. Lem was a serious dude, and his books clearly repaid study rather than providing instant gratification.



The Mind's Eye, ed. Douglas R. Hofstadter & Daniel C. Dennett (1981)


It's a little difficult now to account for the excitement surrounding Douglas R. Hofstadter's book Gödel, Escher, Bach in the late 1970s. Everyone I knew - in my own little circle of secondary school 'intellectuals,' that is - made some attempt to read it. I got about halfway through. Perhaps some of the others, cleverer at Maths, were actually able to get to the end. This anthology of pieces, co-edited by him and Daniel C. Dennett, appeared a couple of years later, and introduced me to a whole species of thinking about Artificial Intelligence and other cool subjects I knew virtually (pun intended) nothing about.

I'd already read Borges, but meeting him in this new company made me see that his work was the beginning rather than the end of a particular train of thought. And there were pieces in there by Stanislaw Lem, too: strange, non-naturalistic tales of computer derring-do which called all conventional genre-categories into question. I began to realise that the basically realistic settings of Solaris and The Invincible were only a small part of his work. I started to wonder, in fact, if they were simply intended as cynical strategies to lure the unwary into the seamless web of his "deeper" works.

And so my quest began: to explore the strange galaxies of Stanislaw Lem, to attempt to understand just why he was the "most widely read SF writer in the world" (as all his blurbs proclaimed). Was it simply because he had a virtual monopoly on the field in the entire Eastern bloc, or was there more to it than that? Did he offer something better than those "threadbare" themes, mentioned above?



Stanislaw Lem: Solaris / The Chain of Chance / A Perfect Vacuum (1961, 1975 & 1971)


As so often in those days, Penguin books came to the rescue. These two wonderful King Penguins from 1981 reprinted the two novels I'd already read alongside a series of strange mock-reviews of imaginary books (A Perfect Vacuum); a bizarrely circumstantial account of a particular 'coincidental' set of events (The Chain of Chance); a completely convincing - because almost completely incomprehensible - account of the future world encountered by a returning astronaut (Return from the Stars); as well as some strangely subversive tales of space-travel by the eponymous Pirx the Pilot.



It was, in retrospect, a pretty good sample of Lem's wares: the faux-essays, the off-narratives, the weird attempts at surreal humour - his basic preoccupation with the functional impossibility of human-to-human, let alone human-to-alien, communication.



Stanislaw Lem: His Master's Voice (1968)


This latter theme comes to a head in His Master's Voice, a book which reads (in part) like a bitter parody of the sunnier visions provided by Carl Sagan's Contact or even the slightly more hardheaded The Black Cloud, by Astronomer Royal Fred Hoyle.

[Warning: plot spoilers ahead]: A book of random numbers is returned to its publishers by various disgruntled users, who point out that it starts to repeat on a certain page. The numbers, it turns out, were generated from the random static produced by a particular frequency band in a radio telescope. They must, therefore (it is reasoned) constitute some kind of message from the stars, given that they do repeat after a certain interval.

The rest of the book is largely consumed by philosophical discussions around the implications of all this. The complete failure of the scientists to decode the message beyond a few basic steps is, finally, reasoned to be proof of the validity of the message. It could only be decoded by civilisations fit to receive it, which ours (manifestly) is not. Our failure constitutes the message's success.
As you can imagine, such austerity of narrative discipline can lead to a certain reduction in one's potential fan base. Luckily, his new books continued to attract enough interest in America to be translated into English there. They became harder and harder to locate in these parts, however.





Agnieszka Gajewska: Zagłada i Gwiazdy (2016)


There is, however, another aspect to the life (and works) of Stanislaw Lem. Philip K. Dick famously proclaimed him to be not so much a man as a communist committee (mainly, it appears, out of pique at not being able to collect royalties on Lem's Polish translation of Ubik - a situation completely beyond Lem's control).

For a long time I was hesitant to learn too much about his background, in fact, lest it have the unfortunate effect of souring me on his work. He did, after all, prosper greatly under the communist regime in Poland. Just what compromises might that fact conceal?

The truth, it appears, is stranger, much stranger than that. A recent article entitled "Stanisław Lem: Did the Holocaust Shape His Sci-Fi World? by Polish critic Mikołaj Gliński reveals a whole hidden world under the slick, space-age surface of Lem's most disturbing fictions:
Perhaps the most direct case of encrypting personal experiences in Lem’s sci-fi work comes in his 1968 novel His Master’s Voice. In it, Hogarth the protagonist ... relates a wartime story of his friend Professor Rappaport ...

The story ... includes terrifying scenes of a street execution taking place in the yard of the prison, in his hometown, in 1942. Rapaport spent a couple of hours lined up against the wall waiting his turn before the unexpected arrival of a film crew saved his life. During this time he witnesses a grotesque scene where a Jewish man tries to persuade Germans that he too is German, only he is saying this in Yiddish, a scene which to Rappaport, in his current state of mind, appears to be infinitely funny. Then awaiting his turn in front of the firing squad, he decides to turn his thoughts to reincarnation.

Only many years later, in a private letter to his American translator Michael Kandel from 1972, did Lem for the first time admit that Rappaport’s story ... is in fact his own.
Lem's Jewish heritage was something he seldom discussed, and in fact claimed to have only discovered during the war as a result of the Nazi Nuremberg laws. In her 2016 book Zagłada i Gwiazdy [Holocaust and Stars] Lem scholar Agnieszka Gajewska argues otherwise.

The "happy, almost idyllic, childhood, surrounded by loving parents and a whole entourage of cousins, aunts and uncles" Lem describes in his memoir Highcastle (1975) is a characteristically selective account of his past:



Almost all the members of his extended family – the anonymous uncles and aunts from Highcastle – died in the Holocaust, murdered in Lviv and Bełżec. The last of Lem’s relatives were killed after the war in the Kielce pogrom.
Far from a communist hireling or a state-sanctioned apologist, then, Lem was a Holocaust survivor, with - as Gliński and Gajewska's analysis of his published work reveals - possibly more than his fair share of survivor's guilt. Like other Jewish writers such as Paul Celan and Georges Perec, Lem shied away from direct representations of the events themselves, instead preferring to code them into the aporia of his increasingly strange stories.

As in the case of Celan's "Todesfuge" [Death Fugue], though, this came after earlier attempts at a more direct approach:
Wartime reality appears quite directly in Lem’s first novel. The Hospital of the Transfiguration is a realist novel set during a war in an unidentified mental institution where doctors prepare for the Nazis' imminent appearance. Lem’s protagonist, Polish doctor Stefan Trzyniecki, is the same age as Lem at the time of writing the novel. One of the recurring themes is that whenever he doesn’t shave, he starts to look Jewish.

... Gajewska argues that in this encrypted way, Lem’s novel becomes not only a depiction of the wartime tragedy of the patients of a mental institution but also a tale of the Jewish inhabitants of Lviv. At the same time, as Gajewska points out, this was also part of the complicated game with the communist-imposed censorship in postwar Poland.
Celan grew to hate "Todesfuge" after he learned that it was being taught in the Secondary School curriculum in Postwar Germany as an exemplar of "forgiveness" for the brutal realities of the Final Solution. His later, more austere work was harder to adapt to such phony, lying ends (or so he hoped).

Lem's battles with censorship may have been more directly influential on the content of his books: Highcastle, for instance, may have taken its present form for reasons quite outside its author's control.

Whether deliberate or unconscious, it seems impossible to deny the presence of these unassimilated memories in the midst of Lem's most cerebral and otherwordly offerings. The result, I would hope, should be to give him a new currency as one of the twentieth century's greatest and most influential writers.

This is my own (partial) list of his works - those available in English translation, that is:





Stanislaw Lem

Stanisław Herman Lem
(1921-2006)

  1. Hospital of the Transfiguration. [‘Czas nieutracony: Szpital przemienienia’, 1955]. Trans. William Brand. A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1988.

  2. The Star Diaries: From the Memoirs of Ijon Tichy (1). [‘Dzienniki gwiazdowe’, 1957-71]. Trans. Michael Kandel. Illustrated by the Author. 1976. An Orbit Book. London: Futura, 1978.

  3. Memoirs of a Space Traveller: Further Reminiscences of Ijon Tichy. [‘Dzienniki gwiazdowe’, 1957-71]. Trans. Joel Stern & Maria Swiecicka-Ziemianek. Illustrated by the Author. 1982. A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982.

  4. Eden. [‘Eden’, 1959]. Trans. Marc E. Heine. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1989.

  5. The Investigation. ['Śledztwo', 1959]. Trans. Adele Milch. New York: The Seabury Press, 1974.

  6. Mortal Engines. [‘Bajki robotów’, 1961]. Trans. Michael Kandel. 1977. A Bard Book. New York: Avon Books, 1982.

  7. Return from the Stars. [‘Powrót z gwiazd’, 1961]. Trans. Barbara Marszal & Frank Simpson. 1980. King Penguin. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981.

  8. Solaris. [‘Solaris’, 1961]. Trans. Joanna Kilmartin & Steve Cox. 1971. London: Arrow Books, 1973.

  9. Memoirs Found in a Bathtub: From the Memoirs of Ijon Tichy (2). [‘Pamiętnik znaleziony w wannie’, 1961]. Trans. Michael Kandel & Christine Rose. 1973. A Harvest / HBJ Book. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986.

  10. The Invincible. [‘Niezwyciężony’, 1964]. Trans. Wendayne Ackerman. 1973. Penguin Science Fiction. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976.

  11. Summa Technologiae (Electronic Mediations). [‘Summa Technologiae’, 1964]. Trans. Joanna Zylinska. Minneapolis: University Of Minnesota Press, 2013.

  12. The Cyberiad: Fables for the Cybernetic Age. [‘Cyberiada’, 1967]. Trans. Michael Kandel. Illustrated by Daniel Mroz. 1974. An Orbit Book. London: Futura, 1977.

  13. His Master's Voice. [‘Głos pana’, 1968]. Trans. Michael Kandel. 1983. London: Mandarin, 1990.

  14. Microworlds: Writings on Science Fiction and Fantasy. [‘Fantastyka i futurologia’, 1970]. Ed. Franz Rottensteiner. 1984. London: Secker & Warburg, 1985.

  15. A Perfect Vacuum. [‘Doskonała próżnia’, 1971]. Trans. Michael Kandel. 1979. King Penguin. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981.

  16. The Futurological Congress: From the Memoirs of Ijon Tichy (3). [‘Ze wspomnień Ijona Tichego; Kongres futurologiczny’, 1971]. Trans. Michael Kandel. 1974. An Orbit Book. London: Futura, 1977.

  17. Tales of Pirx the Pilot. [‘Opowieści o pilocie Pirxie’, 1973]. Trans. Louis Iribarne. 1979. King Penguin. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981.

  18. More Tales of Pirx the Pilot. [‘Opowieści o pilocie Pirxie’, 1973]. Trans. Louis Iribarne with Magdalena Majcherczyk & Michael Kandel. 1982. London: Mandarin, 1990.

  19. Imaginary Magnitude. [‘Wielkość urojona’, 1973]. Trans. Marc E. Heine. 1984. London: Mandarin, 1991.

  20. The Chain of Chance. [‘Katar’, 1975]. Trans. Louis Iribarne. 1978. King Penguin. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981.

  21. Highcastle: A Remembrance. ['Wysoki zamek', 1975]. Trans. Michael Kandel. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1995.

  22. The Cosmic Carnival of Stanisław Lem: An Anthology of Entertaining Stories by the Modern Master of Science Fiction. Ed. Michael Kandel. New York: Continuum, 1981.

  23. One Human Minute. ['Biblioteka XXI wieku', 1986]. Trans. Catherine S. Leach. 1986. London: Mandarin, 1991.

  24. Fiasco. [‘Fiasko’, 1986]. Trans. Michael Kandel. 1987. London: Futura, 1989.

  25. Peace on Earth: From the Memoirs of Ijon Tichy (4). ['Pokój na Ziemi', 1987]. Trans. Michael Kandel & Elinor Ford. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994.

  26. A Stanislaw Lem Reader (Rethinking Theory). Ed. Peter Swirsky. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1997.

  27. Lemistry: A Celebration of the Work of Stanisław Lem. Ed. Magda Raczynska & Ra Page. Manchester: Comma Press, 2011.

  28. The Truth and Other Stories. 1956-1993. Trans. Antonia Lloyd-Jones. Foreword by Kim Stanley Robinson. Cambridge, MA & London: The MIT Press, 2021.

  29. Dialogues. ['Dialogi', 1957 / 1971]. Trans. Frank Prengel. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2021.





Stanisław Lem: A Bibod


Sunday, October 16, 2016

10 Greatest Sci-Fi Movies of All Time



I was thinking about this the other day, and it occurred to me that there were only a very few movies which have reached critical mass in this genre: movies every detail of which is significant not only to scholars but in popular culture as well.

It's hard to rank them in order of importance, given that it's their individuality which constitutes their distinctiveness, in every case. The first few pretty much select themselves, of course. Some of the later ones may inspire a bit more controversy, along with my decision to include two each by Andrei Tarkovsky and Ridley Scott:


  1. Metropolis, dir. Fritz Lang, writ. Fritz Lang & Thea von Harbou - with Alfred Abel, Gustav Fröhlich, Rudolf Klein-Rogge & Brigitte Helm - (Germany, 1927)

  2. I recently rewatched Metropolis in the new, 2010, version, which includes a lot of original footage from a version found in film archive in Argentina. It was quite a revelation! For the first time the plot really seemed to make sense, and all the subsidiary characters were able to take their proper place in the drama.

    Mind you, I don't think I can ever recover the thrill I felt when I first watched Giorgio Moroder's disco version at the Auckland Film Festival in 1984. The completely over-the-top nature of the music seemed to fit perfectly with the exaggerated gestures of the actors, and the clever use of tinted prints didn't hurt, either.

    One might argue, in fact, that the mark of a great SF movie is that one has to own it in various different versions. I now have the beautifully restored 2002 version, the 2010 version, and (for nostalgia's sake) the Giorgio Moroder version. I have to say that for me it works on almost every level: visually, emotionally, and ideologically.



  3. 2001: A Space Odyssey, dir. Stanley Kubrick, writ. Stanley Kubrick & Arthur C. Clarke - with Keir Dullea & Gary Lockwood - (USA, 1968)

  4. I recently rewatched 2001, too. This is possibly only the third time I've seen it. The first time, when I was still a small child, was absolutely awe-inspiring. The sheer realism of the space-stations and spaceships enthralled me, and the philosophical complexity of the action went far beyond anything I'd ever seen on the screen before. It immediately became my benchmark for Science Fiction in general, and I pored eagerly over both Arthur C. Clarke's novel and his short-story collection The Lost Worlds of 2001 till I felt I in some way understood it.

    The second time was in the 1980s, in a Kubrick retrospective at the Filmhouse in Edinburgh. It seemed a lot weirder the second time round, and the ape men looked more obviously staged in front of a painted backdrop. It was a bit of a disappointment, actually.

    This latest time was, I must say, very enjoyable. Of course it shows its age, but almost fifty years on it has the distinct patina of a classic. It looks far better to me now than it did in the eighties. The fact that it still remains unsurpassed in so many ways allows one to explore its conundrums with more pleasure and less anxiety. It stands, I suppose, as the War and Peace of SF cinema.






    Solaris


  5. Solaris, dir. Andrei Tarkovsky, writ. Fridrikh Gorenshtein & Andrei Tarkovsky (Based on the novel by Stanisław Lem) - with Donatas Banionis, Natalya Bondarchuk, Jüri Järvet, Vladislav Dvorzhetsky, Nikolai Grinko & Anatoly Solonitsyn - (Russia, 1972)

  6. Tarkovsky films can be a bit demanding on an audience's patience, which is one reason why watching them at home on your own TV can be an advantage. Taken in instalments, even experiencing Andrei Rublev seems far less of an ordeal.

    Solaris has always been one of my favourites among his movies - and not just because I've read Stanislaw Lem's novel so many times. The two are so profoundly different that it's easier to think of them as entirely separate works. Lem's novel is more obviously satirical of Academic thinking in general, but with a zest and inventiveness which make it probably his most humane and approachable fiction. Tarkovsky's film, by contrast, is all about spirituality and soulfulness.

    Suffice it to say, if you don't like long scenes of water moving over waterweed, and cameras tracking over paintings with the music of Bach's St. Matthew Passion in the background, then Solaris is not for you. You'll be missing a lot, though. This is possibly the single greatest exploration of the (so-called) "Android theme" in the history of SF cinema - its only possible rival in that respect is Blade Runner.



  7. Star Wars, dir. George Lucas, writ. George Lucas - with Mark Hamill, Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher, Peter Cushing & Alec Guinness - (USA, 1977)

  8. This one really caused me some soul-searching. I just didn't like it when it first appeared - it seemed such a cheesy piece of space opera in comparison with the genuine awe produced by 2001. Over time I have, however, learned to admire certain aspects of it: the scenes on the desert planet are particularly effective, I feel.

    One can't deny the influence it's had (though I'm not sure I'd see that as an unmixed blessing). Its successor, The Empire Strikes Back, was probably the most interesting and dramatic in the series to date, but since then it's mostly been downhill: the embarrassing Ewoks were succeeded by the nonsensical foolishness of the prequel trilogy, and it's hard to see the latest film in the franchise as much more than a clone of the first.

    I felt that it would be unreasonable to exclude it altogether, though: even with the silly tinkering George Lucas has done to it since its first release, it remains a very watchable and entertaining movie, as long as you don't expect too much (and don't get caught up in poor Joseph Campbell's senile maunderings about how perfectly it embodies the Hero's Journey).






    Space


  9. Alien, dir. Ridley Scott, writ. Dan O'Bannon - with Tom Skerritt, Sigourney Weaver, Veronica Cartwright, Harry Dean Stanton, John Hurt, Ian Holm & Yaphet Kotto - (UK / USA, 1979)

  10. No doubts about this one, though. It's still bloody frightening after all these years: more to the point, though, it has that air of existential menace, of a hostile and incomprehensible universe intruding on our little lives which is one of the marks of a genuine SF masterpiece.

    Stephen King was very critical of the fact that, after scoring by choosing a gung-ho female protagonist for an action movie, this act of feminist empowerment is let down at the last minute by having her go back to save her cat, dressed only in skimpy underwear. I can see his point, but as a rabid cat-lover myself, I can't see anything unreasonable in her desire to save some other living creature from their wreck.

    And as for the underwear, lighten up, dude! Who the hell cares? Maybe no-one wants to see you (or me) in our underwear, but that hardly applies to the young Sigourney Weaver. I suspect that Tabby might have been breathing down Big Steve's neck when he wrote that review, anyway. it sounds a little forced. The H. R. Giger sets are fantastic.






    Stalker


  11. Stalker, dir. Andrei Tarkovsky, writ. Arkadi & Boris Strugatsky (Based on their novel Roadside Picnic)- with Alexander Kaidanovsky, Anatoli Solonitsyn, Nikolai Grinko & Alisa Freindlich - (Russia, 1979)

  12. Again, you do need a bit of patience to watch this one. It actually runs for only 161 minutes (2 and a half hours), but it seems like a lot more.

    It's a profoundly beautiful and atmospheric work, however - for me, unquestionably Tarkovsky's masterpiece. Much as I love Solaris, there's a certain tinniness to those few special effects he had to put in here and there to persuade us - however tepidly - that the action was actually happening in space, and that can be a little distracting at times.

    The advantage of Stalker is that Tarkovsky can use his favourite pieces of Russian countryside, but with the subtle alien dread of the unexpected. Anything can mean anything in this film, and the fastest way between two points is never a straight line.



  13. Blade Runner, dir. Ridley Scott, writ. Hampton Fancher & David Peoples (Based on the novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick) - with Harrison Ford, Rutger Hauer, Sean Young & Edward James Olmos - (USA, 1982)

  14. So how many versions of this film are there? Well, there's the first-release version, with the voice-over which I liked at the time, but which I'm now prepared to accept is not really necessary to sustain Scott's final vision of the film. Then there's the (so-called) Director's Cut, without the voice-over, and with the strange little scene of the unicorn which leads us to question whether Deckard himself might not be a replicant. Then there's the real, restored Director's cut, with complex corrections of various perceived "flaws" in the original footage (such as the blue sky breaking through at the end of Roy Batty's final monologue). Then there's the pre-release version, without the happy ending or the voice-over, the one which was shown at a film festival in teh late eighties and thus inspired the re-release of the movie in the early nineties.

    Phew! Actually, the only thing for it is to fork out for that collector's box-set, with all of them included. The unfortunate fact is that I still feel torn between the first two versions (I liked that happy ending), even though I gradually came to feel that the Director's cut was better. The new restored cut adds little of substance, I feel. The blue sky did break the frame, in a sense, but in a good way. it was as if, for a moment, there was relief from the oppressive world of the film. That relief is now denied us by a bunch of officious lab technicians.

    What's certain is that this film - in any of its versions - is a masterpiece. It's up there with Metropolis and 2001 and may indeed be greater than either. It's the Citizen Kane of SF cinema, in fact.






    Dune


  15. Dune, dir. David Lynch, writ. David Lynch (Based on the novel by Frank Herbert) - with Francesca Annis, Linda Hunt, Kyle MacLachlan, Everett McGill, Kenneth McMillan, Siân Phillips, Jürgen Prochnow, Patrick Stewart, Sting, Max von Sydow & Sean Young - (USA, 1984)

  16. I loved this film when I first saw it, though it did seem almost embarrassingly over the top in parts. I suppose the problem was that most of us knew that Ridley Scott had been fired from the project, and were resentful that we'd thus been denied another masterpiece like Alien or Blade Runner.

    Over time, though, I learned to apologise for it less and celebrate it more. It's an intensely operatic movie, melodramatic and larger than life, with repeated leit-motifs like a Wagnerian score.

    It may seem shocking to some to include it in this list, but I do feel that time has vindicated it. It remains just as vivid, strange and deeply - almost sentimentally - emotional as it did when it first appeared. The miniseries is good, too, but in a quite different way. At all costs avoid the extended, three-hour version of Lynch's film, however: most of the new footage would have been better left on the cutting-room floor. Far better to see it as it was first released, complete with the Brian Eno / Toto score!



  17. Naked Lunch, dir. David Cronenberg, writ. David Cronenberg & Bill Strait (Based on the novel by William S. Burroughs) - with Peter Weller, Judy Davis, Ian Holm, Julian Sands & Roy Scheider - (Canada / UK / USA, 1991)

  18. Again, I imagine this might be a controversial choice for some. Perhaps I am just a child of the 80s, unable to extricate myself stylistically (or ideologically) from that decade. I have mixed feelings about Cronenberg's films: some I like, some not. This one, however, entranced me when I first saw it, and has fascinated me ever since.

    It's fair to say that it's in no way a dramatisation of Burroughs' book. Instead, it's a fantasia based on Burroughs' life, with various motifs from the book woven in. What can I say? It's just an incredibly clever film, which makes a low budget and tinny sets into an intrinsic part of the drama. If this doesn't scare you, nothing will.

    It's not really a horror film, though. Burroughs' world is almost as bleak as Beckett's, but - like Beckett - a strange zany humour and unquenchable interest in things is still visible at the back of his devastated worlds.



  19. Inception, dir. Christopher Nolan, writ. Christopher Nolan - with Leonardo DiCaprio, Ken Watanabe, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Marion Cotillard & Ellen Page - (USA, 2010)

  20. Christopher Nolan is (for me) one of the greatest of contemporary film-makers: up there with Lars von Trier and Hayao Miyazaki.

    True, some of his films are better than others, but that's probably a promising sign. Interstellar didn't really work, I felt, but when you start listing films such as Memento, The Prestige, and the Batman trilogy, you begin to realise the sheer scale of his achievement.

    Inception is so infernally good that it takes some time to disentangle the fascination of the story from the spectacular nature of the cinematography. In a sense, it looks too good for one to realise at first how good it really is. In any case, it seems a good place to stop the list, though no doubt one could go on and on ad infinitum.





So there you go. I'm conscious of some massive omissions. None of the Star Trek films, for instance, even though the first of them is really quite an ambitious and interesting movie, and the second, The Wrath of Khan (1982), is a great piece of melodrama: "From Hell's heart I strike at thee, Kirk!" I actually think the first two remakes, with the new cast of Chris Pine, Zoe Saldana et al. are better films than any of the originals. It was with a certain pang of nostalgia that I left all of them out, however.

Another couple of favourites I would have loved to have included (and would have on a longer list, less dominated by the obvious classics) were Pitch Black (2000) - a lot more than just another Vin Diesel vehicle - and Serenity (2005), the film of the innovative SF TV series Firefly. They both look great, have fantastic casts, and a real slam-bang energy to them.

I'd have liked to put in The Quiet Earth (1985), too, and not just for patriotic reasons. It's still a great film, brilliantly adapted by Geoff Murphy from Craig Harrison's novel, and with a show-stopping performance by the late great Bruno Lawrence.

I'd also have liked to put in Lars von Trier's wonderfully moving Melancholia (2011), along with Duncan Jones' Moon (2009), Alfonso Cuarón's Gravity (2013), and one of Ridley Scott's most entertaining films to date, The Martian (2015).

You can't include everything, though, and time must have a stop. Which other masterworks do you think I've missed?



Paul Verhoeven, dir. Starship Troopers (1997)