"Structured formally as a kind of duplication of sexual intercourse"

In amongst the mounds of stuff at the - actually quite disappointing, all things considered - Kubrick exhibition at the Cinématheque Francaise, a letter from a fan. Shortly after the release of Dr Strangelove, Kubrick received an admiring letter from a Cornell art historian called LeGrace G. Benson, otherwise notable, it would seem, largely for an essay entitled 'The Washington Scene' about the evolution of the arts in D.C., for a 1969 issue of Art International.

Benson's letter, dated March 20th, 1964 compared Kubrick's film favourably to the then still fairly new Pop Art movement, "In both paintings and movie there is the competent use of a developed artistic vocabulary, and knowledge and undisguised use of commercial techniques and processes, the deliberate manipulation of those cliched images near and dear to the hearts of our countrymen, the apparent use of the ostensible subject matter concealing the actual meaning. It is interesting to see that the paintings and the movie have both been received by some critics as "attacks" on various aspects of "Columbia, Happy Land." Some of us see not an attack but a deliberately detached and sensitive description."

Benson goes on to quote Wittgenstein's, "What is done cannot be said" which he claims the film illustrates, and goes on to compliment the film for "having been structured formally as a kind of duplication of sexual intercourse, which is entirely appropriate to the iconological content."

Kubrick, evidently flattered, replied on April 6th, thanking his correspondent for such an astute and well-thought out analysis, "Seriously, you are the first one who seems to have noticed the sexual framework from intromission to the last splash." And he promptly invites Benson out for a drink, during his forthcoming trip to New York.

It is not, apparently, known - or at least not made clear in the exhibition - whether messers Kubrick and Benson did in fact meet that spring in New York. But we do know why Kubrick was going. Not for that year's World's Fair, at which Raymond Scott's 'Futurama' and 'Space Mystery' will provide the soundtrack for a General Motors-sponsored vision of the future of urbanism. It was in New York that summer, just across town from the World's Fair, that Kubrick met up with Arthur C. Clarke for the first discussions towards what would eventually become 2001: A Space Odyssey, but at that time was still being called "How The Solar System Was Won".

"During one of our frequent impasses, we discussed the possibility of the Soviet Union collapsing and the West sending in robot tanks and androids to save what could be saved. . . After a day or two we retreated from the idea. But let us suppose we had thought events through, and had been able exactly to replicate the true events of 1989, only seven years in the future. . . And if we had put all this on the screen in 1982? No one would have believed it. Even SF is the art of the plausible."

- Brian Aldiss, 'Foreword: Attempting to Please,' on collaborating with Stanley Kubrick on Supertoys Last All Summer Long / AI

If it is true that, today, 'it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism,' as the first chapter title in Mark Fisher's Capitalist Realism would have it, it may be propitious to recall that, less than a decade before it did in fact end, much the same might have been said of communism.

Throughout the middle decades of the twentieth century, science fiction was willing to imagine all manner of extraordinary futures. Rare though was the author willing to forecast the fall of the iron curtain without some extraordinary catastrophe or intergalactic intervention to effectuate it. Rare, but not quite nonexistent.

In his 1953 novel, Childhood's End, Arthur C. Clarke imagines a world society forcibly brought about by the instruction of peaceable alien invaders. Nine years later, in a work of non-fiction, Profiles of the Future, he implies that 'voices from the sky' of rather more terrestrial origin might be capable of bringing about the same result. In a chapter in which Clarke speculates about the possibilities of satellite broadcasting, he compares a still "parochial" radio network to a global television future in which "the great highway of the ether will be thrown open to the whole world,

and all men will become neighbours - whether they like it or not. Any form of censorship, political or otherwise, would be impossible; to jam signals coming down from the heavens is almost as difficult as blocking the light of the stars. The Russians could do nothing to stop their people seeing the American way of life. . . "

Now, I'm far from qualified to speculate about the possible role of satellite broadcasting in the collapse of the Soviet Union (and obviously the idea that every form of censorship is rendered impossible by it - or any particularly accurate picture of American life transmitted by it - must now seem absurd). But from a purely chronological perspective, the rise of one did seem to happen at about the same time as the fall of the other. . .

Rendezvous With Elia: Cronhammar at Herning

Ingvar Cronhammar has implied that his life's work has been an attempt to get over the trauma of existential angst that struck him upon sneaking into a screening of Bergman's The Silence as an adolescent. There is a kind of opaque muteness to all his work, none more so, perhaps, than Elia, the enormous creation (60 metres in diameter, 32 metres high, weighing in at 380 tons) that dominates the far end of Birk Centerpark, just outside Herning, Denmark.

Cronhammar's work seems to have been becoming more and more inhuman, more and more inorganic ever since his earliest work from the late sixties to the early eighties. Most of the early stuff tended to involve the bodies of animals, whether living - as in the live chickens with flashing lights on their backs in Concert for Member of the Home Guard (1969) - or dead - as in the taxidermied pigs heads, mounted and tagged with the logos of prominent local institutions, of Those Pigs (1976), or the stuffed swan perched at the top of Time is On Our Side (1983).

The elliptically titled Time is On Our Side was followed by the even more mysterious The Gate (1988), the work which Cronhammar admits opened the door to artistic life for him, as well as pointing the way towards the monumentalism of his more recent work. The Gate resembled a great industrial machine, like something wrenched from the bowels of a ship. Only it would seem that the only conceivable purpose of this engine is the raising and lowering of a whale skull in a tank of water.

Since The Gate, Cronhammar's art has increasingly developed a kind of forbidding sheen, as though refusing to tell tales on its own manufacture. And, whether the scale has been domestic - Torben Weirup, in his book on Cronhammar, speaks of "memories of furniture... or furniture for other beings" - or landscape, they have never lacked a certain sublime, impenetrable mightiness, and metaphysical wonder. In fact, there may be less distance between his animal bodies and industrial edifices than you might at first think. He grew up in Kristianstad, Sweden - just next to a slaughterhouse.

I came across Elia (2001), earlier this month, when I was in Herning for the opening of the Socle du Monde Biennale at Herning Kunstmuseum. The day after the private view, we were given a brief tour of the Birk Centerpark area, the final stop of which was here. Immediately upon seeing it I was dumbstruck, confounded. It is common to compare Elia to the monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey, but to me it more resembles another Arthur C. Clarke creation from just a few years later.

In Rendezvous with Rama (1972), what is first mistaken for an asteroid turns out to be an enormous alien space craft, 20 kilometres in diameter and 54 kilometres long, that, whether by accident or design, has drifted into our solar system. When the crew of a the space ship Endeavour, go in to investigate the alien vessel, they discover it to be completely uninhabited, empty but for a few dormant machines, the size of cities.

Like Rama, Elia is built on a scale not quite human, but not so far off. You can climb the staircases that lead to its summit - but it's slightly uncomfortable, each step being just a bit too big. Similarly, Elia gives the distinct impression of being both brand spanking new (“everything looked absolutely new; there was no sign of wear and tear”), and a million years old. But what is perhaps most disturbing to the crew of the Endeavour upon exploring the insides of Rama is its silence, and much the same could be said of Elia.

“During the first 'nights' on Rama, it had not been easy to sleep. The darkness and the mysteries it concealed were oppressive, but even more unsettling was the silence. Absence of noise is not a natural condition; all human senses require some input.”

But like Rama, Elia is constantly threatening to 'wake up'. The tops of its towers contain red lights and lightning conductors, and the steel and concrete base has been designed for maximum resonance. Engineers have estimated that a clap of thunder would be returned and amplified for about forty seconds. Also, twice in every nineteen day period, providing weather conditions are favourable, the dome - which is connected to a natural gas pipeline - will shoot a nine metre high flame into the sky for half a minute.

“One might speculate endlessly, but the nature and purpose of the Ramans was still utterly unknown.”

On the day of its unveiling, on the 28th of September, 2001, a television journalist asked the artist what the monument was for. 'Nothing,' replied Cronhammer. Six months on site, 'scanning it in' to develop the idea, followed by twelve years to build the thing at a cost of twenty-three million Danish Kroner. The journalist repeated the question, what is it for? It is a place, Kronhammer replied testily, where people go to be quiet, to shut up!

Cancerous Growths : Technological Darwinisms

For over a century, the question of tomorrow has largely been a question of evolution. Under the influence more, perhaps, of Herbert Spencer than Charles Darwin, the future path of the human race is conceived now as one of a directed evolution through technology, and in this respect the theorems of futurologists have themselves evolved somewhat less over the course of the capitalist period than has the peppered moth.

The term Techno-Darwinism has entered a certain vogue over the past few years thanks to the work of entrepreneur and 'angel' investor, Benjamin Joffe. For Joffe the term refers to what he calls a "survival of the fittest" amongst tech start-ups in the rapidly expanding Chinese market. Nevermind, that the term "survival of the fittest" is Spencer's and not Darwin's, Joffe is hardly the first capitalist to stretch a scientistic metaphor in order to justify and naturalise his own profiteering.

Nor - though he may be credited with the hyphenation - is he the first to import purportedly Darwinist models and notions into the sphere of human technological 'progress' - in order, principally, to legitimise the use of the very word 'progress' and frame it as a kind of naturally occurring and practically inevitable process.

For Ray Kurzweil, evolution through technology represents an exponential growth in human advancement towards what he refers to as the Singularity, a point in the near future (2045) when the combination of advance in genetics, nanotechnology, robotics and artificial intelligence will allow an expansion in machine-human intelligence and technological development beyond our wildest imaginations.

Similarly, as Marina Banjamin has pointed out, the Space Age was full of evolutionary metaphors, with everyone from Werner von Braun to Arthur C. Clarke to Buckminster Fuller referring to Apollo 11 as the natural sequel, equal in importance, to the moment primitive life first left the oceans for the land.

All of which amounts to little more than a stretched metaphor put in the service of valorising some favoured project. Consensus amongst developmental biologists and palaeontologists seems to be that human evolution has remained fairly static for a good hundred thousand years or so. That's not to say that we are not witnessing evolution - and rapid evolution at that- in the present day. Only it's an evolution to which we are but the hosts. To talk of the evolution through natural selection of metastasising cancer cells is not just a metaphor. Puts a somewhat less positive spin on Joffe's notion of capital as techno-Darwinism though....

Two Late Expressionist Utopias: Frau im Mond and Tabu

At the turn of 1930s, two of German expressionist cinema's leading lights left the dark shadows of the catacombs and the back alleys in search of other worlds. Both Fritz Lang and F.W. Murnau had featured utopian imagery in their films before: think of the fairground scene in Sunrise, or most famously, Lang's city of the future in Metropolis. But both of these films feature distinctly urban utopias, whereas Tabu (1931) and Frau im Mond (1929) each take flight from the modernist city. The former looks back to the traveller's tales of exotic lands that inspired early utopias such as Francis Bacon's New Atlantis, while the latter looks forward to the 'hard' science-fiction of Arthur C. Clarke et al and the Apollo moon landings.

While the bare bones of Frau im Mond's plot, about a rocket trip to the moon and the happy couple that choose to stay there, may recall the late Victorian scientific romance of H.G. Wells, it is the little details that make it so prophetic – and the story behind the story that make it so historic. Advertised as “The first utopian film based on scientific fact,” Frau im Mond's rocket trip contain a number of features that put it closer to the Apollo landings of forty years later. Firstly, and most conspicuously, there is the countdown to lift-off, never before featured in fiction (let alone fact), and apparently invented by Lang on something of a whim for the purely dramatic reasons of building up tension (Alfred Hitchcock, who had only recently returned to England after a spell working at UFA studios in Berlin, may well have been taking notes).

Rather more profoundly – from a scientific point of view at least - Lang's film showed the world its first depiction of a liquid fuel rocket composed of two stages, jettisoning its first stage after take-off – just as the American space rockets of the sixties would. Such an extraordinary prophecy is made only slightly less incredible by certain details surrounding the film's production. The story, by Lang's wife and frequent collaborator, Thea von Harbou, was inspired by a small book written by Hermann Oberth, entitled 'By Rocket Into Planetary Space'. Originally intended to be Oberth's doctoral dissertation but rejected as too “utopian,” the book detailed the theories Oberth had been working on since a childhood exposure to Jules Verne. Oberth, along with his colleague, Willy Ley, from the Verein für Raumschiffahrt, a German amateur rocket enthusiasts club, would ultimately serve as technical advisors on Lang's film.

Also, in Oberth and Ley's circle at the time, was a young man named Werner von Braun. In the 1930s, as a member of the SS, von Braun would design the V-2 rocket, which bore the insignia of the woman in the moon at its base. The Nazis apparently considered, Lang's film so close to the scientific truth of their weapon that they had the film suppressed and all its models destroyed. Despite the destruction wrought by von Braun's invention on Western cities, and the use of concentration camp inmates as slave labour (resulting in more deaths in the rocket's construction than as a result of its firepower), within just a few years of the World War Two ending, von Braun's name would turn up in the American mainstream, advocating space travel in the pages of Collier's magazine, and even designing (with Willy Ley and Disney imagineer John Hench), the TWA Moonliner, a rocket bearing a distinct similarity to the V-2 that stood as the tallest structure in Disneyland's Tomorrowland.

----------------------------------------------------------

Coming two years after the Jazz Singer, Frau im Mond was probably the last great silent science fiction film. In the year of its release, F.W. Murnau, dejected by the failure of his first talking picture, the now lost Four Devils, left his adopted Hollywood home for the South Pacific. Schooled in the romantic theatre of Max Reinhardt, it may have been the orientalist tendencies in so much nineteenth century music - from Schumann's Das Paradies und die Peri to Bizet's les Pecheurs de Perles - that led Murnau to seek his own escapist exotica.

Murnau's Tabu is a film whose images teem with music. We see its characters singing, drumming, playing the guitar, and, frequently dancing. Despite Murnau's embeddedness in the film's habitat (he was by that time living on Bora Bora) and the realist intentions behind the choice of real locations and native actors, the dancing we see was in fact tightly choreographed by Murnau and his collaborator Walter Spies to fit into their conception of 'architectural cinema' (and the real locations and natural light certainly do not seemed to have stemmed Murnau's love for suggestive use of shadows). Likewise, the music composed to be performed in theatres alongside screenings of Tabu bares about as much relation to the authentic music of the South Seas as does The 101 Strings in a Hawaiian Paradise.

Composer Hugo Reisenfeld, whose first work on film was as a music arranger on film adaptations of the operas Carmen and Siegfried (for Raoul Walsh and Fritz Lang, respectively) initially proposed using themes by Bizet, Massenet, and Mendelssohn, and, although these were ultimately not to be used in the film it nonetheless gives you an indication of the way he was thinking. Though the music is often in sync to images of the islanders playing their own instruments, the soundtrack gives us, somewhat incongruously, a symphony orchestra throughout, frequently reprising themes from his earlier Murnau collaboration, Sunrise (along with a bit of Smetana's Má Vlast).

Tabu had begun life as a collaboration with the ethnographic film-maker Robert J. Flaherty (Nanook of the North, Man of Aran), who had intended to make a political documentary about white exploitation of the islands' natural resources. Apparently the hard-drinking, heavy smoker Flaherty soon fell out with the ascetic Murnau over the latter's preciousness concerning the waxed floors of his yacht. As the story of Murnau's film moved further away from political critique towards exotic fantasy, celebrating the idyllic lifestyle and 'primitive' rituals of the islanders, Flaherty was ultimately banned from the film unit, left to stalk the production like a jealous lover.

One week before Tabu's American premier, Murnau was killed in a car accident, while work on the music was still underway. On a documentary featured on the Eureka Masters of Cinema DVD, his grand-daughter recalls him as a great lover of music who knew many operas by heart ("from Beethoven to Bach"). Shortly before his death, he had signed a contract with Paramount to produce five new sound pictures, all of which were to be shot on the South Sea Islands. Alas, we will never know whether the resources of sound film might have led Murnau to find more sonic sympathy with the islands where he had chosen to live out his final years.