SF Film: Oscar Schlemmer, Dancing Robots, Fighting Beasts

Per recent posts, I’m teaching “Philo and Film” this semester, with a focus on sf film. Here’s more of that, if you like that sort of thing.

What, if anything, is sf film distinctively and characteristically good at doing (or being)? An obvious concern, from a philosophy perspective, is that sf film will tend not to excel along the idea axis. SF as a ‘literature of ideas’ may seem a more properly literary than filmic phenomenon. Lots of long and short form literary sf is highly philosophical, often in quite explicit ways, often in highly satisfactory ways. (You may disagree, but I don’t.) But what we get from the likes of The Matrix is, as it were, ideas-as-props: superficial atmospherics as of some Big Idea (to do with appearance/reality, whatever) but no serious engagement. Scratch the surface and there’s nothing behind, or not much. So maybe ‘the philosophy of The Matrix‘ doesn’t bear investigation, no more so than does the deep ecology of a forest of plywood prop trees onstage.

One needn’t be categorical about this, so if you disagree you shouldn’t just cite your favorite example of an sf film you think is genuinely smart and sophisticated all the way down. The basic point would be: sf film tends to be ‘speculative’ in an eye-pleasing rather than mind-challenging sense. Philosophy begins in ‘wonder’. But this is ambiguous. There is ‘wondering whether’, a standardly philosophical operation. And there is ‘wondering at’, which can be less inquiring, more innocently child-like (perhaps), more content to rest with surfaces, which are enough to satisfy. No explanations necessary.

Of course, this needn’t be a bad thing. Many would say literature as colorfully packaged ‘Ideas’ is a bad model; so, to the extent that sf film moves away from all that, it’s probably a good thing, artistically. And I don’t really know whether I think it’s even a true thing (that is, I don’t know whether I believe what I just said about sf film tending to ‘contain’ ideas only superficially.)

Let’s try a different angle. What are the ‘speculative’ achievements of sf film, distinct from those of literary sf? Susan Sontag’s classic essay, “The Imagination of Disaster” (1963) says it in the title:

Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art. In science fiction films, disaster is rarely viewed intensively; it is always extensive. It is a matter of quantity and ingenuity. If you will, it is a question of scale. But the scale,particularly in the wide-screen Technicolor films (of which the ones by the Japanese director, Inoshiro Honda, and the American director, George Pal, are technically the most brilliant and convincing, and visually the most exciting), does raise the matter to another level. Thus, the science fiction film (like a very different contemporary genre, the Happening) is concerned with the aesthetics of destruction, with the peculiar beauties to be found in wreaking havoc, making a mess. And it is in the imagery of destruction that the core of a good science fiction film lies.

Thus, in 1965, Sontag deduced the glorious futurity of Spielberg and Lucas and so forth. But, of course, with Metropolis to look back on, it wasn’t hard to be a prophet about the need for big budgets.

I like collecting possible, modernist visual influences on Metropolis, which is then a template for a lot that follows. (It’s an easy game. Far more things look like they might have influenced Fritz Lang than probably did, even though Lang was a sponge for the stuff.)

For example, Frans Masereel’s 1920 woodcut novel, The Idea [amazon] – see a summary and samples here:

The Idea is a good example of pure, visual ‘literature of ideas’. Indeed, it’s meta-literature of Ideas, in that it’s about the Idea of ideas. Without, I think, being the sort of thing that can be faulted as too crudely or simply ‘just about ideas’. Because really the pictures are the thing, and it would be hard to say what ‘the message’ of the novel is. What I like is how much Metropolis – and even Dark City – there is here already. The divine/dangerous female Idea, with her antennae-like halo – who is innocent, yet sexual, mothering and potentially ferocious, strong yet endlessly victimized, a source of uproar in the City, especially when mediated through various forms of technology. She flies along the telegraph wires, dances erotically onscreen and all the rest. There is the Caligari-like scientist, hanging out in front of his dark lab. There are even those Alex Proyas-y spirals and spirals. You can see the seeds of an inherently visual – not really literary, in the word-y sense – sf aesthetic being born here. And it’s definitely ‘about Ideas’. Though how it is, is a bit less easy to say.

Lots of fire and panic and disaster in The Idea, so that fits with Sontag. But that’s only half the story. There is also grace and beauty. Let me switch over to another book I’m reading, Oskar Schlemmer [amazon]. Schlemmer was a Bauhaus-associated modernist: designer, painter, sculptor and – last but not least – choreographer. His most famous work is The Triadic Ballet.

More Aelita [amazon] than Metropolis, maybe.

There are a few – sadly, not very high quality – YouTube videos that give some sense of what Schlemmer’s ballet is supposed to look like, in motion: here, for example. (I would be curious to see something higher quality, if I could find it.)

Reading the book, I transcribed some bits from Schlemmer’s writings (page numbers to the book I linked):

This materialistic and practical age has in fact lost the genuine feeling for play and for the miraculous. Utilitarianism has gone a long way in killing it. Amazed at the flood of technological advance, we accept these wonders of utility as being already perfected art form, while actually they are only prerequisites for its creation. (137)

Life has become so mechanized, thanks to machines and a technology which our senses cannot possibly ignore, that we are intensely aware of man as a machine and the body as a mechanism. In art, especially in painting we are witnessing a search for the roots and sources of all creativity; this grows out of the bankruptcy brought on by excessive refinement. Modern artists long to recover the original, primordial impulses; on the one hand they woke up to the unconscious, unanalyzable elements in the art forms of … the Africans, peasants, children and madmen; on the other hand, they haver discovered the opposite extreme in the new mathematics of relativity. Both these modes of consciousness – the sense of man as a machine, and insight into the deepest wells of creativity – are symptoms of one and the same yearning. A yearning for synthesis dominates today’s art and calls upon architecture to unite the disparate fields of endeavor. This yearning also reaches out for the theater, because the theater offers the promise of total art. (149)

Thus it is sensible and necessary for the art of a new age to make use of technology and of the newly invented materials of a new age in order to make art serviceable as form and as a vehicle for a substance which is spiritual, abstract, metaphysical and ultimately religious in nature. (150)

Mechanistic cabaret, metaphysical eccentricity, spiritual tightrope walking, ironic varieté …. The recipe the Bauhaus Theater follows is very simple: one should be as free of preconceptions as possible …. One should be simple, but not puritanical … one should start with the fundamentals … with space …. One should start with one’s physical state, with the fact of one’s own life, with standing and walking, leaving leaping and dancing for much later. (153)

Of the artist who isolates himself from the existing theater:

His idea has been demonstrated, and its realization is a question of time, material, and technology. This realization will come with the construction of a new theater of glass, metal, and the inventions of tomorrow. It depends as well upon the inner transformation of the spectator – Man as alpha and omega of every artistic creation which, even in its realization, is doomed to remain Utopia so long as it does not find intellectual and spiritual receptivity and response. (139)

Some of the Schlemmer-designed masks for the Triadic Ballet look like they might have inspired the Metropolis look:

I’m not sure what to make of this: it seems funny to look for the ‘philosophy’ of sf film in what is, in effect, modernist dance theory. But, of course, it is, more generally, theater theory. And, more specifically, theater theory that says the theater must become something quite new and more … technological. And, anyway, everyone knows the fight choreography in The Matrix is the most philosophic part.

One more thing. Schlemmer was evidently highly influenced by Heinrich von Kleist’s essay “On the Marionette Theatre”. It’s short and a good read, whatever your interests. And I think it provides a remarkably full prophecy of a lot of sf film visual motifs, and a kind of explication of their ‘philosophical’ attraction. Only automata (marionettes) and wild beasts (fighting bears) are perfectly graceful. Humans are anxious and ungainly, oscillating between the poles of innocence and experience. But there’s no way back to the beast, so the only way is forward, through the robot and beyond.

“Now, my excellent friend,” said my companion, “you are in possession of all you need to follow my argument. We see that in the organic world, as thought grows dimmer and weaker, grace emerges more brilliantly and decisively. But just as a section drawn through two lines suddenly reappears on the other side after passing through infinity, or as the image in a concave mirror turns up again right in front of us after dwindling into the distance, so grace itself returns when knowledge has as it were gone through an infinity. Grace appears most purely in that human form which either has no consciousness or an infinite consciousness. That is, in the puppet or in the god.”

“Does that mean”, I said in some bewilderment, “that we must eat again of the tree of knowledge in order to return to the state of innocence?”

“Of course”, he said, “but that’s the final chapter in the history of the world.”

Unsurprisingly, Kleist read a lot of Kant, apparently. Anyway, pencil in Heinrich von Kleist – right there beside Plato – as a major pre-theorist of sf cinema. Not that the essay is inapplicable to plain old literary sf, but I think it is a particularly ‘visual’ business, as philosophies goes. Philip Pullman has a nice appreciation of the Kleist essay here.