WHAT IS UTOPIAN FILM? AN INTRODUCTORY TAXONOMY
Introduction.
What is a utopian film? Unlike the musical or the western, or the science fiction film, there is no accepted body of utopian films and no accepted definition. In fact, few films come to mind when the subject is raised. Accordingly I will not concentrate on defining the utopian genre (but see Robert Shelton's in this issue), for definitions are made on the basis of an already existing body of work on the basis of which one could then determine the common features (sematic and syntactical) of the genre. Instead, by analogy with the project of the Society of Utopian Studies, which links scholars and researchers working in such diverse fields as literary studies, political science, history and architecture, I will propose a number of ways and perspectives by which scholars might begin to discuss the issue of utopian film. Without specifically invoking a utopian film genre, I will begin this examination with Lyman Sargent "the three basic forms of utopianism": "utopian literature, communitarianism and utopian social theory." (Sargent 1989, 3) More specifically, the literary utopia, which seems the most fruitful for an investigation of the possibilities of utopian film, (and with which I shall begin) is defined as a "non-existent society described in considerable detail . . ." (Sargent, 4).[1]
Films
1. Utopias.
There are of course utopian films, as everyone who has seen the H.G. Wells/Cameron Menzies/Alex Korda collaboration Things to Come (1936) would agree. However, there are not really any other similar examples of utopian film, except for those films which constitute what should be a distinct category: screen adaptions of utopian novels. The best known of these is Frank Capra's 1937 adaption of James Hilton's Lost Horizon. But this second category is also lacking in examples, for there are almost no films of the classics of the utopian tradition--with the exception of an obscure and apparently unsuccessful Soviet adaption of the classic Russian utopia, Efremov's Andromeda.[2]
Things to Come and Lost Horizon are emblematic of the ambiguous status of the utopian film for several reasons. The first lies in the visual nature of film and its differences from the literary; the second in the historical moment at which films were produced. In terms of the visual, it is significant that these two films devote relatively little space to the representation of the new society. While the spectator does take away strong visual impressions of these utopian communities, there are actually few details of what actually constitutes the future society, unlike what we usually learn from a written utopia. In Things to come details about the society are replaced by a futuristic look which corresponds to the technological utopianism of the era, as manifested in modernist architecture (Frank Lloyd Wright's utopian city of Chandrigar) and the "Streamline style." This vision was summed up in many of the buildings and exhibits of the 1939-40 World's Fair. In Lost Horizon, on the other hand, a description of the utopia is replaced by a number of plot developments, beginning with the mysterious events leading up to the arrival in Shangri-la (followed by their attempts to leave), and most significantly, the presence in the narrative of a secret which sidetracks the viewer, namely the longevity which is granted the inhabitants of this valley.[3] Here the look of utopia owes more to the "lost civilization" tradition, like the many versions of H. Rider Haggard's She (1887), and most especially the many films which portray the lost continent of Atlantis (or the French versions of Atlantis--based on the Pierre Benoit novel L'Atlantide (1919) about a lost civilization in the Sahara).[4] While these films portray non-existent societies, I would tend to exclude them from the utopian category because the societies are not presented as alternatives, as somehow better or worse than contemporary society. But these evocations of lost worlds do call up other utopian possibilities to which I shall return in a moment.
The other clue to explaining the relative scarcity of utopian films follows from the realization that the two major utopian films were both made in the 1930s. As various critics have observed, this was a moment both of heightened utopian activity and of a strong belief in technology's ability to produce a better world. This conviction is perhaps most manifest, at one level, in the emerging genre of science fiction in the 1920s and 30s; and, on another level, in the monumental projects of the great modernist architects. Visually, as I've already mentioned, this technological utopianism is summed up in a "streamline" vision of the future common to both the covers of the SF magazines of the period and to many of the exhibits at the New York World's Fair. Thus this historical moment was not only characterized by a certain utopian optimism, but by a distinctive style which summed up the gleaming promise of the future for decades to come.[5]
The most obvious way to expand the boundaries of utopian film is to look at negative or dystopian reworkings of the themes I have been discussing. There are in fact numerous versions of dystopian classics, from films of 1984 and Brave New World to the adaptions of Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange and Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale (or of William Golding's Lord of the Flies); while under the heading of original dystopian films I would include such masterpieces as Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1926)[6] and Terry Gilliam's Brazil (1985). Such negative visions of future planned societies would also include the collapsing utopias of Logan's Run and Zardoz.
A slight enlargement of the utopian net would also accommodate a host of SF films which offer glimpses of a utopia, or which use a utopian or dystopian setting, although as might be expected the dystopian setting predominates in many popular science fiction films of the past few decades, from Soylent Green and Escape from New York to the "Mad Max" films and the already classic Blade Runner. (Some of these dystopian films are discussed in the articles by John Erickson and Regine-Mihal Friedman in this issue).[7]
While so many of these dystopian visions are formulated as critiques of the utopian ideal of the planned society, the escape from that society, framed as a new beginning, is often an escape to some more "natural" existence. The tranquil valley of Shangri-la (in Lost Horizon) is a society whose origins are explained (and which was thus to some extent planned), but its primary appeal seems to lie in the evocation of a simpler and happier existence away from the struggles and turmoil of modern life.
The representation of other, older, simpler and happier communities as societal models or alternatives should include another subset, that of the ethnographic film, or at least those films which portray lost or vanishing cultures in positive terms. This could be seen as one of the organizing principles in the British "Disappearing World" television series which has produced more than fifty one-hour documentaries since 1970. Each film is made in collaboration with an anthropologist who specializes in the group being recorded, and documents the daily lives and folk ways of a specific community. This type of documentary was pioneered by Robert Flaherty in his celebrated Nanook of the North (1922).[8] As in the lost civilization films just mentioned, the satisfaction and contentment depicted often seem to follow from lives lived in harmony with the rhythms of the natural world rather than from the community's social arrangements; these communities appear (or are presented as) having evolved "naturally" rather than as the result of specific choices and decisions. Another version of this development lies in Hollywood's own revision of its portrayal of North America's Native peoples, as in recent popular films like Black Robe and Dances with Wolves.
Once we have raised the possibility of the documentary as a category of the utopian film, there are several other types which immediately come to mind, including documentaries which look not to a lost golden age but to the glowing technological future evoked in Things to Come. One can certainly find such an explicitly technological utopianism in some of the more than 500 short films and documentaries which were shown at the New York World's Fair of 1939-40. More modern examples of this type of utopian documentary would include many of the films shown at Disneyworld's Epcot.
Still with the documentary, finally, there are of course filmic records of actual utopian experiments and communities, and many intentional communities have made films introducing their own communities.[9] As well there are fictional films about real (and imaginary) utopian experiments, like J.-L. Comolli's La Cecilia (1974) about an Italian anarchist commune established in Brazil in the late 19th century.
The appeal of some simpler time also characterizes nostalgic evocations of moments in our own historical past which are then portrayed as a lost Golden Age. Such a nostalgia might be said to characterize some of Frank Capra's other films, or the many films set in Camelot (as well as the powerful resonance of the image as it came to be applied to the Kennedy years.) But I think that the most familiar use of the past as a happier time can be seen in various television series from and about the 1950s, from "The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriett" through the nostalgic recreation of the decade in "Happy Days." In these televisions series the atmosphere of peace and tranquillity is achieved through the substitution of the family for society at large; by obscuring societal conflict and rewriting it in terms of the comforting image of a nuclear family in which "father knows best"--to name another of the more successful family series of the period. ("My Three Sons," "Leave it to Beaver," etc).
The image of the family as utopia does have a more progressive dimension, however, in films which, particularly in the wake of the second wave of feminism, attempt to imagine new domestic arrangements other than the nuclear family, as well as alternatives to interpersonal relationships based on the subordination of women. I will return to the question of feminism and utopian film in a moment. Even if we limit the utopian to images of a community, as opposed to a couple or nuclear family,[10]there are films which portray such alternatives, as in Alain Tanner's Jonah who will be 20 in the year 2000; and there are numerous glimpses of such alternatives, from the commune in Easy Rider to the entire community of The Milagro Beanfield War.
2. The Utopian Politics of the 1960s
"[There was a] widely shared feeling that in the 60s, for a time, everything was possible" (Jameson "Periodizing the 60s," 207).
Another approach to the question of identifying utopian films might be to draw a parallel with the revival of utopian writing in the 1970s. If this revival of utopianism is seen as an outgrowth of the social and political upheavals of the 1960s, it is then relevant to ask what films are associated with that moment. Posed this way, we think first of those films which depicted real or imaginary revolutions in ways which depicted those moments as filled with hope for a new world which would emerge from the ruins of the old. The most celebrated example of these revolutionary films of the 1960s is Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers (1966). If we can call filmic depictions of a revolutionary moment utopian, this substantially widens the scope of possible utopias, for there are a number of important films which have depicted earlier moments of revolutionary upheaval in positive terms, like Eisenstein's 1928 October/Ten Days That Shook the World, Jean Renoir's 1937 La Marseillaise, or Paul Leduc's Reed: Insurgent Mexico (1971). (This category might also include strike movies: Salt of the Earth, Harlan County and Matewan.) On the fictional level this category might also include some of the youth-rebellion movies of the late 1960s, like Lindsay Anderson's If or Peter Watkins's Privilege. The `60s also include more metaphorical or whimsical utopian rebellions which--following from the radical psychology movement--focused on schizophrenia and insanity as a form of revolt and escape, like King of Hearts or Morgan. The negative version of these revolutionary moments of transition refers us back to some of dystopian films I mentioned above, bleak visions which portray an escape from the dystopia, as at the end of Logan's Run, THX 1138 or The Handmaid's Tale.
3. The Political Film
At the same time, the issue of the `60s and the relationship to the utopian revival of the `70s raises more generally the question of the utopian potential or dimension of the political film itself--a genre which seems more substantial than its literary equivalent. I have already mentioned films which portray moments of revolutionary upheaval, but in another way - for which there is not really an equivalent situation for written utopias (except of course in the utopian manifesto itself) - it might be said that some of these films were made as part of a larger project of utopian social transformation. This is evident, first of all, in various national cinemas where, following a revolution, we can see conscious attempts to develop a new collective vision, as in the Soviet Union of the 1920s and 30s, China during the Cultural Revolution or in Cuba after 1959. Soviet examples would include many of the films of Eisenstein while the most accessible film about the Cultural Revolution in China is Joris Ivens's 12 hour documentary How Yukong moved mountains. And there are a number of Cuban films from the 1960s which strive to develop an alternative vision of its past and future, from the political documentaries of Santiago Alvarez, to fiction films like Gutierrez Alea's Memories of Underdevelopment, Manuel Gomez's First Charge of the Machete, and Humberto Solas's Lucia. These films might be characterized as utopian for both extrinsic and intrinsic reasons: in terms of their function in some larger project of social transformation; and in terms of their portrayal, as with revolutionary films, of historical moments out of which a new society will be born.
At the same time, particularly in Latin and South America, the 1960s saw an outpouring of political and revolutionary films made to serve as weapons to challenge and overthrow existing governments. Perhaps the most famous of these was Fernando Solanas's Hour of the Furnaces (1967), a four-and-one-half-hour examination of the situation in Argentina which combines documentary with the techniques of agit prop theatre. The best known of these directors was the Brazilian Glauber Rocha and I will have more to say about both Solanas and Rocha in a moment. There were of course equivalent developments in African and Asian cinema and, more generally, in the emergence of what is sometimes called "Third Cinema."[11]
Because of film's visual power and its ability to reach a mass audience, governments often attempt to set and control film policies; and while I began by mentioning situations which followed a revolution in which there was, at least for a time, an attempt to imagine a different and better society, this category should perhaps include as well all attempts to move the spectator to support a government or political ideal, including the most infamous of such films--the Nazi propaganda of Leni Riefenstahl--Triumph of the Will.[12]This category might also include more straightforward films which seek to portray a particular society in glowing positive terms, and one might mention as well the visual rhetoric of films made for political campaigns and the like, although this does take us far away from our starting point. Finally such a category might even include travel films, although the focus on the social would be a crucial factor in deciding whether it was utopian.
While it is hard to think of examples of an explicitly utopian cinema to match the revival of utopian fiction which followed the upheavals of the 1960s, there were numerous calls at the time for the cinema to realize its transformative and political potential as part of a larger revolutionary struggle. Solanas's Hour of the Furnaces moved beyond the representation of events to break with the conventions of cinema in ways which reflected developments in the political avant garde in Europe and, more importantly, which pointed back to the Russian avant garde following the October revolution. While the challenging of the newly emerging dominance of representation can be seen in the expressionism of Eisenstein's first film, Strike (1925), it was Dziga Vertov's writing and most particularly his path breaking The Man with a Movie Camera (1929) which sums up and realizes this alternative aesthetic, an influence marked 40 years later when the most important figure of the New Wave of European film makers (Jean Luc Godard) turned his back on a successful career and the institutions of cinema to set up (in 1969) the Dziga Vertov group to collectively make and distribute political films.
In the 1960s and `70s political film seemed to divide along such lines--realism versus challenges to the conventions of realistic film narrative, and this division, often described as an opposition between first and third world, was pictured in a famous sequence in the 1970 Godard/ Dziga Vertov film Vent d'est in which the Brazilian director Glauber Rocha is shown at a crossroads. Here is James MacBean's description of that scene from his book Film and Revolution.