Art-House Sci-Fi

And it’s doubly fitting that on Friday, Alphaville will open Art-House Sci-Fi, a weeklong series of a dozen films at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. In 2007, Jonathan Romney saw in Alphaville traces of Chris Marker’s La Jetée (1963) in its “visual transformation of the mundane into future dystopia.” Here, another man on a mission, albeit unnamed, is sent through time in a search for a way to salvage humanity in the wake of a world-destroying catastrophe.

La Jetée will screen with John Akomfrah’s The Last Angel of History (1996), which Ashley Clark has called “a tantalizing blend of sci-fi parable and essay film which also happens to be a crucial primer on the aesthetics and dynamics of contemporary Afrofuturism.” Clark had put together a list of five essential Afrofuturist films for the Guardian that naturally included John Coney’s Space Is the Place (1974), featuring Sun Ra in “a brilliant and bizarre melange of comedy, musical performance, and occasionally lurid blaxploitation aesthetics. It also, crucially, has a number of serious points to make about the plight of young urban Blacks in a harsh, post–civil rights climate: ‘Space’ is unambiguously posited by Ra as a utopian refuge for African Americans.”

Space is a refuge for no one in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris (1972), a film “saturated with grief,” as Phillip Lopate wrote in 2011. Before a psychologist (Donatas Banionis) leaves the planet for the space station Solaris, Tarkovsky offers “haunting shots of freeways” and “disdains showing any but contemporary cars, just as Godard did with the buildings in Alphaville: why bother clothing the present world in sci-fi garb when the estranging future has already arrived?”

BAM will also present Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979), which tracks the journey of three men into the Zone, where they hope to have their deepest thirsts quenched. In 2012, Geoff Dyer wrote Zona: A Book About a Film About a Journey to a Room, and five years later, he told Joshua Jelly-Schapiro in Sight and Sound that he was still convinced that “very few films, in the last however-many years, have done more to expand the possibilities of what a film is, what time is in film, than Stalker.”

If Wong Kar Wai has “an inescapable theme aside from failed love,” writes John Powers, “it is time, in its many permutations—minute-by-minute time, historical time, geological time, psychological-experiential time, not to mention the interplay among them. Celebrating evanescent moments in which ordinary reality yields glimpses of magic—few directors are fonder of gestures and grace notes—his work is flush with clocks, chronological leaps, and the workings of time’s teasing paramour, memory. All this comes together in 2046 (2004),” a film that “reworks and refracts” In the Mood for Love (2000) and stars Tony Leung as a writer of science fiction stories interwoven into the four main story arcs.

With Memoria (2021), starring Tilda Swinton as a botanist searching in Colombia for the source of a sound that has rattled her to the core, Apichatpong Weerasethakul reminds us that cinema is “still a young art, one whose properties and possibilities are still in the process of revealing themselves,” wrote Justin Chang in the Los Angeles Times. “A paean to the distant past that unfolds in a rigorous present tense, Memoria finally reveals itself as a vision from the future—a declaration of faith in a medium that hasn’t lost its power to astonish.”

In a 2016 piece for Notebook, Z. W. Lewis recounted the “turbulent production history” of Andrzej Zulawski’s “masterpiece,” On the Silver Globe (1988). Writing for Cinema Scope, Christoph Huber described the film as “a monumental adventure of astronauts marooned on the barren moon (key location: Gobi Desert), but really an immersion in the coming and going of an entire civilization in all its aspects. It is essentially indescribable, but as a heady tour de force it may be the ecstatic epitome of Zulawskian mise en scène.”

David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ (1999) stars Jennifer Jason Leigh and Jude Law as a game designer and a publicist who delve into a virtual world she has created and find it nearly impossible to fight their way back out again. Time’s Richard Corliss wrote that eXistenZ “pulses with a furtive fury that’s pure Cronenberg. Like the virtual game he plays on us, the film is weird, it’s addictive, and Lord, it’s alive!”

Shinya Tsukamoto has name-checked Cronenberg as an inspiration for his cyberpunk body-horror classic Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989). Tsukamoto himself plays a “metal fetishist” who drives rods into his body, runs out into the night, and is run over by a salaryman (Tomoro Taguchi) who hides the body but then discovers metal thorns erupting from his own body. “The film rushes at the viewer as an assault on the senses,” wrote the BFI’s Lou Thomas in 2019.

In Lizzie Borden’s Born in Flames (1983), ten years have passed since a peaceful social-democratic revolution. “With its astute political critique of gendered, racialized, and classed exploitation,” writes Yasmina Price, “untamed punk temperament; electrifying pacing; and heterogeneous assembly of women, the film has few equivalents and remains—chillingly and thrillingly—contemporary. Boldly combining elements of documentary and a renegade reworking of science fiction, Born in Flames dreams a rebellious, pluralistic coalition of women appropriating the means of communication to rally a sweeping vision of liberation for all.”