This two hour pilot for the new series Caprica surprised me. I certainly was not expecting Battlestar Galactica all over again, but i also was not prepared for such a ‘character-driven’ experience. I use the term loosely here, and mainly to highlight the move away from space as the main narrative background. Intended to gain a wider audience, Caprica may also end up leaving some BSG fans behind…

Caprica takes place on a planet that, aside from a couple of minute differences, looks exactly like our earth. Its main city, Caprica, is any 1950s North American city with a few futuristic skyscrapers added here and there for good measure. I read that the idea of using the 1950s as an influence was to emphasize the fact that all this is taking place in our distant past but to nonetheless convey a sense of excitement towards the future. Personally, i found the production design of Caprica to be one of its weakest points. There is an underwhelming sense of lack of imagination as we stroll through streets and alleys that look like the types we would see in any other TV show. I understand that Caprica takes place in our past, but that knowledge is not enough to overcome the disconnect that one experiences when seeing our present when one is in fact thinking about either the distant future or the distant past. The fact that Caprica and BSG take place millions of years ago is already quite a challenge from a production design standpoint, one that i have discussed already in a couple of BSG posts. But in Caprica, it has become worse. The creators did not even see it fit to show us a game of Pyramid. Instead, we just see a few foamy pads laying around while around 70 extras jump up and down in what looked to be an ice-hockey arena. This is of course intentional, the producers and writers either held up by budgetary constraints or intent on ‘keeping it real’ in an effort to cater to a larger audience than the usual Sci-Fi fare traditionally does. In the end, i see no reason for Caprica to look like 1950s New York or Chicago, as i saw no reason for pens, paper, cancer, cigarettes and many other things to exist in the universe of BSG. One can not have invented interstellar and faster-than-light travel and still be bogged down by so many 20th century human weaknesses and memes. And this applies to design and architecture as well. I also felt uneasy by some of the casting choices, including Eric Stoltz as Daniel Graystone, the driven and selfish scientist who brings about the beginning of the end. Stoltz failed to convince me as a technical genius and as a father, even as a bad one.

A week after having watched Virtuality, it was interesting to see again virtual reality being depicted on TV. Ron Moore has been recycling some of his ideas since in both pilots, a character dies but continues to exist in virtual reality. And in both cases, VR is used pretty much as a recreational tool where a simple headset is enough to transport the ‘user’ into an exact replica of the real world, whatever that real world may be, all five senses included. But Caprica goes much further and attempts to explore some potential societal and moral implications of not only virtual reality but also of immortality, transhumanism, artificial intelligence and genetic engineering. The theme of religion is emphasized from the very start and Dr Graystone’s experiments provide the required foundation for the standard science vs religion debate. Where the debate becomes more interesting than usual is in Dr Graystone’s ideas about merging (mind uploading?) the encoded data of his daughter (drawing on current lifelogging trends - blogs, social networks, data capture…) with an AI-enabled robotic shell. The potential result is immortality for a new a type of being. These concepts are not too far-fetched and many people today in transhumanist circles are working on such ideas. So credit to Ron Moore for keeping it believable. I suppose Mary Shelley did not come up with the idea for Frankenstein. She must have found some old book somewhere telling tales of immortality based on Caprican rather than Summerian or Egyptian mythology.

In spite of what i consider to be weaknesses in the production values and in the casting, the pilot for Caprica had plenty of interesting moments and clearly warrants further viewing. It is hard to imagine that the Cylons were created only 60 years before the fall of Caprica, but i am sure the creators will find a satisfactory way to put it all together.

Georges Melies is considered the father of visual effects, and quite understandably so. Le Voyage a Travers L’Impossible, like Melies’ more famous Le Voyage dans la Lune (1902), is a fascinating use of a medium that was only a few years old at the time.

I can only marvel at Melies’ creativity and courage for taking the moving image out of what must have been a pretty conservative context and for turning it so quickly into a canvas for storytelling, visual experimentation and imaginative ideas. Based on a Jules Verne story, this film may not make much sense by today’s standards and can feel a bit hurried (Melies directed over 500 ‘films’ in his short career) but it deserves our admiration nonetheless.

Alan Weisman is a poet. The World Without Us is no mere environmental investigation into the destructive power human beings hold over nature and their environment. It is a provocative thought experiment about the fate of our planet if humans completely disappeared tomorrow and it is an ode to the strength and resilience with which nature could fight back, if given that chance.

For as long as we have been on this earth, we Humans have, through our actions, tilted the balance of power in our favour. Influencing the environment around us, altering it to suit our needs is something that we have been doing for millions of years. But it is only recently, with the advent of industrialization and with the ever-increasing growth of technology experienced in the last few decades, that we have begun to fully understand the implications of what it really means to exercise such a control over Nature.

Weisman, using words and prose more reminiscent of classic literature than of journalism, picks his examples carefully and makes his points adroitly, eloquently and beautifully. He never seems to judge, yet leaves us no choice but to feel the urge to do so, and to punish human stupidity for the aberrations that it is capable of. Example after example, we are taken on a journey across the consequences of Man’s never ending thirst for progress at the expense of the world around him.

What would become of our cities? Would they slowly become the kingdom of animals, reserves for new or for endangered species that we were once in the process of exterminating? And what would happen for example to the hundreds of thousands of gallons of water under New York city which every day are barely being held back by some giant machinery that threatens to fail at any moment?

Even if we stopped producing CO2 tomorrow, would it ever disappear from our air, soils and oceans? And if it did, how long would it take and what changes would continue to occur during this period? And what about trapping this CO2 underground, a proposal being made these days to reduce global warming? What would happen to it after thousands of years?

If humans disappeared suddenly, would human evolution start again in a similar fashion as before or have we made too many changes to our ecosystem to sustain such a creation again? Would animals cross back the continents and return to their ancestral habitats (and behaviours), the ones they had occupied before man intervened and started regulating their environment?

What about the myriad of chemicals and materials – PCB, PBD, DDT, EDC, among many others - used in even our smallest and more innocuous creations? Would they all slowly be absorbed back into nature, eaten away by plastic-hungry bacteria, or would they linger forever, a testament to Man’s folly and ingenuity? What fate would await the hundreds of millions of tons of various plastics that are already littering our lands, beaches and oceans, approximately three million of which already form the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a Texas-size area in the Pacific Ocean that is totally covered with plastic bags, Q-tips, sandwich wraps and other unfortunately too-disposable human inventions?

These are some of the questions that Weisman addresses in this wonderful book, a must read for anyone interested in the health of our planet. As with all of my posts on this subject, I will add my disclaimer that I do not interpret this as a call to renounce technology. The message to save and heal our planet is clear and it must be heard. But humans will not disappear tomorrow and they will not renounce, nor should they, their quest for progress. Awareness and action must be taken to ensure that this progress is fully democratic, equitable, fair, clean and responsible. This, I believe, is the right path, rather than to hope for progress to stop or to wish for a return to the past.

It is difficult to dislike films such as La Antena, films that demark themselves so clearly from the mediocrity of the average, films that experiment and push the envelop of the medium. La Antena, an Argentinean film about a dystopic Dark City (1998)-like world where a TV mogul plots total control of the city is so visually arresting and creative that one can only applaud such artistic inclinations.

La Antena has been called an homage to silent cinema since there are indeed no words being spoken, with the exception of the occasional and deliberate sound. The constant music, appropriate but at times trying, also has its roots in the piano accompaniments of the 1920s. And the visual style relies on black and white, intertitles, grainy textures, and other tricks and tools that are more or less reminiscent of a silent film. The eccentricity of the style and the playfulness of the ideas bring Bunuel and Dali to mind rather than Lubitsch or DW Griffith.

Yet, for all of its visual candy and dystopian intrigue, La Antena feels a tad flat. Like Guy Maddin’s Brand Upon the Brain, its lightness of content and the weaknesses of its screenplay become exposed once the initial visual intrigue begins to wear off. At that point, the viewing experience becomes superficial, a mere exercise in visual stimulation, with the content itself bringing little reward.

Still, from an experimental point of view, La Antena is well worth watching.

I recently asked a New Yorker if he had watched I am Legend (2007). His reply was that since 9/11, he has had no desire to watch any film that deals with the destruction of his city. While I am Legend didn’t draw obvious parallels to that fateful day seven years ago, it is however difficult to miss them in Cloverfield and to consequently not feel at times slightly uncomfortable at the sight of people dying and being trapped in situations in which they have absolutely no control over their fate.

Cloverfield is an old-fashioned 1950’s monster flick (see my post on sci-fi/horror and the city) that draws heavily on current filmmaking and social trends, especially in its depiction of a YouTube/Facebook need to document and share everything about one’s self, one’s experiences, even possibly about one’s death (everything leading up to death that is, which is clearly a lot more voyeuristic and contemporary than wanting to document what happens after death, which was the premise of the 80’s film Brainstorm (1983)). The Blair Witch Project (1999) had already caught on to these ‘self-documenting’ trends years ago, and as such, proved to be a groundbreaking film. Cloverfield, on the other hand, can only rehash what has been done before, and puts the documenting so much in the foreground that it often takes away from the believability of some of the scenes. It feels too much that the story is built around the idea of documenting whereas in The Blair Witch Project documenting was more seamlessly integrated into a solid narrative. In addition, the intensity and the wobbliness of the camera movements, while effective for the most part, can sometimes be confusing and even tiring.

Yet, Cloverfield also manages to keep us on the edge of our seat and to deliver an overall intense, and at times, frightening experience. The first half of the movie is the most effective since we are left guessing as to what exactly is terrorizing the city. One of the many things that Alien (1979) taught us (its impact on the horror/sci-fi genre has been inestimable) is that one can probably create more tension and suspense by showing less and by letting the potent powers of the imagination do the visualizing, which is most often based on one’s worst fears. Once we have become acquainted with the monster(s) of Cloverfied, the film starts to lose some of its pace and power, a fact reinforced by the increasing silliness of the protagonists’ decision-making. But a nice twist in the last ten minutes saves us from the unexpected dreadful and predictable ending.

In the end, running at a short 85 minutes, Cloverfield turns out to be a decently enjoyable viewing experience that is clearly in a higher league than recent monster films and remakes such as the dreadful Godzilla (1998).

Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451, based on Bradburry’s novel of the same name, seems to exist outside of the standard city space. More reminiscent of a modern city’s inner suburbs, the architecture on display is eclectic and often cold and lacking humanity.

As with Godard’s Alphaville, the low budget of Fahrenheit 451 meant that all exterior scenes were shot on location (Maidenhead, UK). Truffaut evidently selected buildings that epitomized 1950s and 1960s urban planning gone wrong. The apartment block or tower no longer carries hope of an urban renaissance and as a solver of society’s problems.

Instead, it is portrayed as lacking beauty and humanity, a vertical cage in which to house the less privileged, and, in the context of the film, the non-conformists and dissidents.

Excerpt from Architectural Representations of the City in Science Fiction Cinema.

Godard’s Alphaville, shot on a very low budget in 1965 Paris, is the director’s take on Orwell’s 1984, capitalism, modernism and the eradication of free will through rationality and efficiency.

The city, beautifully shot by Raoul Coultard, is turned into a cold, modernist island where buildings of glass and concrete stand as an effigy to science and dehumanization. Most of the scenes are shot in modernist interiors and exteriors, which could have been designed by Le Corbusier himself. But Godard’s vision turns the modernist dream upside down and associates the architecture with the end of free will and the disappearance of non-conformity.

Unlike Lang’s vision of an ultra-modernist city of the future, with its skyscrapers reaching for the sky, Godard’s Alphaville is more spread out and few very tall buildings emerge. The elite continues to live in different areas of the city from the ‘little’ people, but the boundaries are less clearly defined and the sense of height as an association of power seems to dominate less than in Metropolis or even Things to Come. A man of his time, Godard seems to have been able to anticipate post-modernist concerns towards architecture and the city.

Excerpt from Architectural Representations of the City in Science Fiction Cinema.

Just Imagine, strongly influenced by Hugh Ferriss’s book, Metropolis of Tomorrow (1929), takes the archetype vision of the future city as defined by a Manhattan-like skyline, and portrays it in all its beauty and majesty. Ferris was America’s most celebrated architectural conjurer of ideal cities of the future and saw in the skyscraper city the ideal form of utopic betterment.

As with High Treason, the city of Just Imagine is buzzing with activity, lights and motion. Cars are everywhere and walkways and bridges saturate the entire skyline. Celluloid Skyline: New York and the Movies states that ‘where Metropolis seems inspired by lower Manhattan, with its angular streets and closely packed towers, Just Imagine’s city suggests midtown, its layout of buildings and avenues more regular and widely spaced’ . Indeed, while its skyscrapers, some of which seem to grow on top of existing structures and buildings, reach high in the sky, the space and airy feel that exists inside the city reminds us that this film (also inspired by the work of the Italian Futurist Antonio Sant’Elia) is overall quite positive and optimistic in its outlook.

Excerpt from Architectural Representations of the City in Science Fiction Cinema.

In Code 46, Michael Winterbottom sends mixed messages about the city of the very near future. On the one hand, the effective cinematography captures beautiful images of Shanghai, London and Dubai to create a post-modernist and exotic view of the city that blends concerns for overpopulation and the impact of technology on individual freedom with a sense of acceptance and beauty towards the alienation created by the modern city. And on the other hand, the lead protagonists are shown to escape to a more ‘rural’ and primitive lifestyle, filling the narrative with a sense of nostalgia for a past when less was available but men were more free.

In the process, the film distorts space completely by mixing shots of various cities to give the impression of another (Hong Kong is Seattle) and by inserting spaces of desert where there should be none, portraying Shanghai as an overcrowded, fenced-in island surrounding by a sea of waste lands. The end result, which feels at times like a music video, portrays the city in a fragmented and ephemeral way, but with enough respect that the problems discussed in the film and the blame associated seem to somehow be shifted away from the city. The city is no longer responsible, simply the place where man’s experiments and the inevitable journey of progress occur.

Excerpt from Architectural Representations of the City in Science Fiction Cinema.

This is a series of answers by various thinkers from all around the globe who were invited to The Table of Free Voices, a dropping knowledge (the NGO i work for) initiative that took place in Berlin, Germany on September 9th, 2006.

Mohammed Arkoun

It’s a scary future if you think about cities like Mexico City or Cairo, which are approaching 17 million habitants or more. But the infrastructures of these very old cities, especially Cairo, Bombay, Karachi or Jakarta, etc. are still the same as they were at the beginning of the 20th century in some districts. And the actual city policy is far from considering the new problems of urban areas and the pressures on urban areas. The cities are becoming a place of confrontation, a place where the collective memory disintegrates, a place of social ruptures, a place where frustration accumulates, where people backtrack to their individual level or to the level of a group what we fearfully call communitarianism which becomes more and more important in urban areas, and not only in rural areas as it was before.

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Film architecture and design has existed almost as long as cinema itself. In 1976, Leon Barsacq argued in Caligari’s Cabinet And Other Grand Illusions that the fantasist sets developed by Georges Melies at the beginning of the 20th century were a considerable improvement over anything that had been done previously in that they created a deeper reality and gave the image a more substantial meaning. He further added that cinema escaped its primitive phase once it moved away from simple backdrops to three-dimensional sets, thereby creating an architectural space within cinema[1]. Post World War I, the German Expressionists fully explored this new architectural space through the creation of sets that attempted to reflect the inner emotions of the characters in the films. And David O. Selznik’s use of the term ‘production design’ in reference to the work of the American director and set designer William Cameron Menzies on Gone with the Wind (1939), finally helped film design and architecture gain the official recognition and visibility that has since become an integral part of the cinematic experience and of the output of most film industries.

Following fairly closely the emergence of production values in the history of cinema has been the rise and acceptance of science fiction cinema. It is indisputable that the two are interconnected and that a process exists where both feed off from one another. Cinema learns from architecture and architecture learns from cinema. As far back as 1926, many architects were said to have been impressed and influenced by Metropolis (1926). Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 (1968) also apparently became a source of inspiration for the world of architecture, with the director himself having sourced a lot of his inspiration from several existing architectural and design trends and concepts. Today, terms like ‘science fiction architecture’, ‘high-tech architecture’ or ‘cyber architecture’ are commonly used to refer to a new and ‘modern’ style of architecture that draws heavily on science fiction and new technologies. For many architects, ‘science fiction is an imaginative form of design’[2], making its visualizations worth studying.

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As expected, this is typical Hollywood fare, a special effect ridden roller coaster ride, high on cliches and very low on plot, character development and narrative.

Over the past few weeks, the debate has raged on regarding the plausibility of the events depicted in the film, the opinions of scientists across the globe only adding to the publicity of an already heavily marketed product. The consensus seems to be that, naturally, almost everything in the film is over the top, exaggerated, blown up out of proportions, and laden with stereotypes to cater to a target audience that, otherwise, probably wouldn’t be interested in the movie.

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Things to Come is a masterpiece of British Cinema. Based on H.G Wells’ story The Shape of Things to Come, it offers a utopian vision of the future filled with ideas and concepts that, in spite of the fact that we now know that some of these propositions were naive, are staggering in their seriousness and realization.

Often to the dismay and irritation of the cast and crew, Wells was involved in all aspects of the production of Things to Come. This is a project that was very close to his heart and he was keen on making sure that the result would be an appropriate visualization of his ideas and values. Previous screen adaptations of his work had left him unimpressed (First Men in the Moon 1919, The Island of Lost Souls 1932 and The Invisible Man 1933, among others), branding them as amateurish works. Yet, he maintained an admiration and respect for the cinematic medium and saw Things to Come as the opportunity of a lifetime (especially that he was nearing 70 at that time).

He was given almost unlimited powers (plus a substantial sum of money) by Alexander Korda, the Hungarian-born head of London Films who in the 30’s and 40’s would be responsible for many British classics. Fascinated by Wells’ mind, Korda agreed to finance the most expensive British film to date, with a budget close to £300,000.00 and a shooting schedule of one year. The film was marketed as Britain’s answer to Hollywood, a proof that the British film industry could compete with its American counterpart. It was also portrayed as a boost to the economy, bringing hundreds of new jobs for the building of the sets and for some of the scenes in the film.A remarkable aspect of this production, and a substantial contributor to its success (in the context of film history only since it achieved relatively poor commercial success), is the number of personalities and ‘experts’ who contributed to the film. William Cameron Menzies was brought on board to direct. A master visualizer, the recipient of the first Academy Award for ‘Interior Decoration’ and practically the father of the storyboard, Menzies had become famous in Hollywood for his abilities to translate scripts into powerful visual realizations. Menzies would go on to become Hollywood’s first ‘Production Designer’. Vincent Korda, Alexander’s brother, was hired as set designer, and is responsible for the majority of the visual language of the film. A major aspect of his strength as set designer was his ability to collect and compile design and architectural styles and influences and merge them together to create an outstanding final product. As such, one can detect in the many facets of the design of Things to Come various influences, and in some cases, direct contributions, from several masters of that time: Bel Geddes’ streamline concepts influenced the designs of the bombers and tanks as well as various shapes in the interior decoration, Fernand Leger provided ideas for some of the costumes and concepts, Le Corbusier’s work inspired the design of the city of the future with its suspended gardens, much of the furniture design came from Oliver Hill and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy brought his skills to the design of some of the machinery and various objects.

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British Science Fiction cinema has always lived in the shadow of its American counterpart, either as a result of a direct effort to emulate an American style to enable the films to reach broader markets or as an indirect consequence of the fact that, since the 50’s, Science Fiction cinema has been associated with America, drawing on its rich heritage of comics and magazines.

But British Science Fiction cinema has in fact a much greater legacy than is often given credit to. Since the beginning of the 20th century, various British directors and producers have explored the genre, often taking it into new directions, pushing its boundaries, and drawing on the wealth of ideas and masterful works which British Science Fiction writers like H.G Wells, George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, Arthur C. Clarke, John Wyndham and Michael Moorcock have produced over the years.

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I love everything that is Japanese. Well, almost everything. Ever since I was a kid, I have been fascinated by the country and by the myriad of products and beautiful concepts that have come from it. This led me to write my first master thesis on the link between business practices and Japanese culture and history. Japan is a land of extremes, a land of peace and beauty, of pornography and sadism. This paradox is at the core of the Japanese artistic creation. Everything is about balance, about reaching harmony through contrast and opposing forces. Purity and decadence, beauty and ugliness, Zen monks and businessmen, traditionalism and modernism, form and function. But whether it is in modern architecture, interior design, gardening, food, fashion, or animations, Japan continues to be the place to turn to to get a glimpse of the future. And as William Gibson wrote in the September 2001 issue of Wired, “In a world of technologically driven exponential change, the Japanese have an acquired edge: they know how to live with it.”

Did the world ever design anything more beautiful than what was created in the US between 1930 and 1955? I tend to think not, at least not as part of a well-defined style as was the case with the Streamline Style of that period. The Streamline Style stood for mobility, speed, efficiency, luxury and hygiene, concepts that were all identified with modernity. It was also the symbol of mass consumption, which Americans were ready to embrace at the beginning of the 30s and after World War II. Once again, what fascinates me here is this embrace of a dream, this thirst to create the perfect city of the future, this belief that all will be well and that the times ahead will only bring prosperity and happiness. In addition, of course, to a design philosophy which appeals completely to my sense of aesthetics. People like Bell Geddes, Teague, Mendelsohn, Dreyfuss and Loewy tried to create a society where form and function would merge to create the most inspiring experiences.

I am extremely fond of the Russian Avant-Garde movement that took place in Russia at the beginning of the 20th century, especially between 1905 and 1920. This was a period of great upheaval and changes. And change usually leads to the creation of rich and interesting experiences. Painters of that time such as Kandinsky, Rodchenko, Malevich, Goncharova, Shevchenko, Chagall, Exter, Rozanova created a mix of French Cubism and Italian Futurism which reflected their desire to blend folk culture with modernism and the pursuit of abstraction. It is beautiful to see how the architects and designers of that time came up with the most amazing visions and representations of the future, most of which would unfortunately remain at the concept stage. But ultimately, what interests me the most in this movement is the artists’ thirst for the future, their desire to reach and give their Utopia a meaning.