Slant评选的影史100佳科幻电影

评语：1. 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968) Central to the profundity of 2001: A Space Odyssey is the notion that few things are more meaningful than a child’s first steps, the emotive impact of this scenario manifest in every one of the film’s dizzying set pieces, albeit multiplied to epic proportions. At its core, the film is a journey, a summarization of those questions that are both the simplest in their inquisition and most profound in their answers: Who are we, where do we come from, and where are we going? The film exists as an exploration of these timeless themes and the existential weight that accompanies them, probing our growth from passive eating machines subject to the unforgiving elements, to conquerors of the world and pioneers of space, awaiting only a helping hand from a superior force to reach the next level of existence. Just as the ape-men in the opening act must learn to use the tools around them to survive, so, too, must man learn to walk again when subjected to zero gravity, captured here with a gravitas that suggests a celestial being waxing philosophical. Humanick

评语：2. Stalker (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1968) Subscribing to the belief that the eyes are the windows to the soul, Andrei Tarkovsky locates Stalker’s spiritual center in his protagonists’ weathered countenances. One of cinema’s greatest portraitists, he offers up a gallery of masterful close-ups: some dipped in sepia-toned bronzes; others cast in the harsh light of a cloudy morning; several obscured by dank, dark shadows. No two alike and all stunning in their formal composition and expressiveness, Tarkovsky’s visages—from the large, sorrowful eyes of Alexander Kaidanovsky and the anguished expressions of Anatoly Solonitsyn to the heart-rending candor of Alisa Freindlikh—form the emotional backbone of his heavily metaphorical tale. In aggregate, the film’s various artifacts, objects, and narrative events ultimately capture something akin to the essence of what man is made of: a tangled knot of memories, fears, fantasies, nightmares, paradoxical impulses, and a yearning for something that’s simultaneously beyond our reach and yet intrinsic to every one of us. Is that thing hope? Faith? Or, as implied by the masterful climactic monologue from Stalker’s wife, is it simply devotion? Perhaps Tarkovsky summed it up best when he wrote about Stalker, “In the end, everything can be reduced to the one simple element which is all a person can count upon in his existence: the capacity to love.” Schager

评语：3. Metropolis (Fritz Lang, 1927) The original sci-fi blockbuster, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis is a high-water mark in the late silent era. Released in 1927, the same year as the first talkie, The Jazz Singer, it’s a parable of class struggle, foregrounding issues that obsessed 1920s audiences and that have persisted through the present: the oppressive scale of modern cities, the exploitation of the lower classes by the powerful, and the allure of technology, which is presented by Lang as something akin to dark magic. Beyond any of that, Metropolis is eye candy, bankrolled by its studio, UFA, in hopes of dazzling audiences the world over, and perhaps giving German film some traction in the coveted U.S. market. Lang, among the most sadistic of movie visionaries, led hundreds of designers and craftspeople and tens of thousands of extras to push analog filmmaking to its conceptual limits, and his insistence on doing dozens of takes of certain scenes pushed his collaborators to their physical limits. Metropolis was the most expensive film made up until that time, but as studio bean counters still say, every penny (or Deutsche Mark) is on the screen. Matt Zoller Seitz

评语：4. La Jetée (Chris Marker, 1962) Cinematic time traveler Chris Marker’s reflection on time and memory and nuclear holocaust recounts (or recalls) the story of “a man marked by an image of his childhood,” a man whose “vision of peacetime happiness” is so obsessive, he’s thought to be the only soul in humanity’s post-apocalyptic underground hideout whose mind can retain the sort of focus necessary to travel back in time without going insane. The specter of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo hangs over the most celebrated shot of the film: the one that moves. Just as James Stewart’s Scotty spends the second half of Vertigo trying to breathe life into a dead woman, Marker conveys the intensity of his protagonist’s memories by literally tearing a hole through his own mise-en-scène. The series of lap dissolves leading up to the shot are comparable to the Bernard Hermann music accompanying Hitchcock’s climactic “Scene D’Amour,” even if the spell of La Jetée is such that afterward you ask yourself if the glance actually happened or if your memory is playing tricks on you. Henderson

评语：5. Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982) The dying Earth of Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? reeks of pathos, dust, and decay, but it seems functional—beset by entropy, but functional all the same. The grunge and rot of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, by contrast, owes a sizable debt to the legacies of film noir and steampunk: a future defined by overdevelopment, underregulation, hubris, and greed. The film is fueled by iconography: icons that don’t always need to point outside the text but have a self-sustaining power of their own. That’s why Roy (Rutger Hauer) is the titanic antihero, whose sheer magnitude as a synthetic being embarrasses the ineffectual Deckard (Harrison Ford), the ex-flatfoot whose character arc is a slender thread of fuck-ups and accidental victories. Nearly a minor character in the book, almost on the level of some expendable Dragnet hoodlum, Roy is transformed into the film’s evil superhuman, a universal adaptor capable of being fixed with any major philosophical lens (Nietzsche, Kant, Descartes, etc.). No one mourns in the film, except in a stolen moment (when Roy discovers Daryl Hannah’s defeated Pris), and Scott uses a reliable surrogate for tears to pay respects, on our behalf, when Roy’s spirit finally takes flight. Tears in the rain, indeed. Christley

评语：6. Videodrome (David Cronenberg, 1983) This hard, sleazy riff on a famous Marshall McLuhan quote (“the medium is the message”) is one of the great visionary horror movies, and potentially the most prescient. It marries disconcertingly erotic images with Cronenberg’s great theme of misleadingly frivolous technology as an insidious initiator of ambiguous new evolutions. Though TV is the medium under consideration, all of the film’s observations can be adapted, with chilling ease, to suit the ongoing proliferation of laptops, cell phones, the Internet, you name it. Dialogue regularly appears to be piped in from the future, such as an observation—that we will all have special names for our personas on television—that bridges Warhol’s “15 minutes” quotation with the rise of a multiple-username culture that renders specificities of identity and humanity moot. The ghastly, daringly sexualized special effects are, eerily, Videodrome’s one quaint gesture, as they imbue technology with a disgusting yet comforting tactility that’s rapidly disappearing from a culture that’s slipping into a cloud of ever-shifting soft data. Bowen

评语：7. Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979) A film whose shadow looms darkly over subsequent decades of horror and sci-fi, Ridley Scott’s Alien is a master class in the evocation of escalating dread. Made forever distinctive by H.R. Giger’s visual rendering of psychosexual horror and biomechanical hellscapes, not to mention the unusual foregrounding of working-class and female characters, Alien is still—at its core—a prototypical haunted-house picture. It just happens to be one of the most artful, flawlessly executed examples of that type, the rationed-out shocks underscored by groundbreaking creature effects, jarring sound design, and the talents of a magnificent ensemble. It’s the stuff of primordial nightmare, mapping the infinite reaches of human anxiety—about everything from sexuality to technology—into two agonizing hours. Das

评语：8. Solaris (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1971) Andrei Tarkovsky’s adaptation of Stanislaw Lem’s philosophical space romance is striking by virtue of its immanence. Solaris may be set in the future, on a spacecraft far from Earth, but throughout the entirety of its 170 minutes it feels like the setting is right here, right now. Its dreamlike uncanniness is perfect for this story about a widowed cosmonaut, Kris Kelvin (Donatas Banionis), whose dead wife, Hari (Natalya Bondarchuk), materializes out of thin air. This transpires as Kelvin explores the strange, extraterrestrial planet of Solaris, which seems to generate projections from the unconscious of individuals venturing close to it. Kelvin, a scientist, understands as much. And yet, especially when conversing with Hari, it’s not so easy for him to use logic to dismiss the presence of someone he’s loved and lost. The film, whose languorous rhythms feel as if they’re sinking us into our subconscious, becomes a quiet meditation—or prayer even—of longing, and to elude the blankness of reduction. Beleaguered in lonely torpor on earth with his memories of Hari, Kelvin can’t dismiss this phenomenal experience as mere illusion. Tarkovsky invests Solaris with the unbearable heaviness of time passing, the resounding ache of loneliness in the unlimited expanse of space turned inward. Schwartz

评语：9. The Thing (John Carpenter, 1982) For all of the Grand Guignol overload of its special effects, The Thing is first and foremost an atmospheric film, one predicated on the claustrophobia and paranoia generated by its remote Antarctic-base setting. It’s there that a scientific crew discovers, then falls prey to an alien that can assume the form of any living being it touches, forcing the men stationed at the base to question the true identities of those around them. This is fitting material for director John Carpenter, who ironically used his biggest budget to return to the kind of small-scale, inward-looking horror of Assault on Precinct 13 and Halloween. But if the physical scope of the film is narrow, its tone is one of vast, cosmic terror, influenced in no small part by H.P. Lovecraft. Camera movement, with the exception of a few rushing point-of-view shots, is stately and patient, as cold as the base’s frigid surroundings. Carpenter’s clinical atmosphere offers a bedrock of visual calm that only makes the amorphous, reason-defying nature of the alien threat all the more disruptive. Instead of reflecting the mania of the characters, the camera is an objective viewer, which casts a nihilistic pall over The Thing by telegraphing the hopelessness of the characters’ situation. Cole

评语：10. Godzilla (Ishirô Honda, 1954) More than 60 years of sequels, tag-team monster mash-ups, and shitty Hollywood remakes haven’t blunted the sheer cinematographic force, let alone metaphorical heft, of Ishirô Honda’s 1954 classic. Rarely has the open wound of widespread devastation been transposed to celluloid with greater visceral impact. Put another way, Godzilla is the Germany Year Zero of monster movies. The impetus for the film was a series of undeclared H-bomb tests conducted by the U.S. military at Bikini Atoll in March of 1954, into which maelstrom a lone Japanese fishing boat, christened with terrible irony Lucky Dragon 5, sailed unawares. Exposure to clouds of irradiated fallout, dubbed “death ash” by the sailors, led to the swift demise of at least one crewmember. The still-fresh notoriety of that incident, restaged as the opening sequence of Godzilla, would have alerted Japanese audiences from the get-go that they were in for more than just another creature feature. Add to that frequent mention of matters of wartime survival, whether the firebombing of Tokyo, or the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and it becomes something of an open secret that Godzilla represents American military might in all its blind destructiveness. Wilkins

评语：11. Starship Troopers (Paul Verhoeven, 1997) It seems fitting that it took stumbling upon an obscure Soviet-era concept for me to feel like I had the vocabulary to talk about Paul Verhoeven with any degree of accuracy. That concept is stiob, which I’ll crudely define as a form of parody requiring such a degree of over-identification with the subject being parodied that it becomes impossible to tell where the love for that subject ends and the parody begins. And so there, in 32 words, is the Hollywood cinema of Paul Verhoeven. Starship Troopers then has to be a bad movie, insofar as that means that the acting is not dramatically convincing, the story is hopelessly contrived, the special effects are distractingly garish in their limb-ripping and bone-crunching, because the point isn’t to do better than Hollywood (that would run counter to Verhoeven’s obvious love of these cheap popular forms), but to do more of Hollywood, to push every element to its breaking point without caving to the lazy lure of ridicule. The result is a style that embraces a form as fully as possible only to turn it back against the content, and one of the greatest of all anti-imperialist films. Phil Coldiron

评语：12. A.I. Artificial Intelligence (Steven Spieleberg, 2001) A.I. Artificial Intelligence is alien in so many ways to Steven Spielberg’s canon of moral certainty. The film’s deceptive darkness stems from its treatment of childhood trauma, the fear of abandonment, and panic over losing one’s identity. It envisions a futuristic world on the verge of collage, a landscape of blinding hues and smooth textures obsessed with both momentary rejuvenation and collective destruction. A.I. is all about texture, specifically the contrasting surfaces of a technologically advanced world losing its need for emotional connection. Spielberg’s tight compositions reveal characters seemingly trapped by their own reflections, destined to whither under the pressure of artificial happiness. Janusz Kamiński’s fluid camera pins “super toy” David (Haley Joel Osment) and Gigolo Joe (Jude Law) behind obstacles of all kind: the Flesh Fair bars, between Rouge City’s numbing rows of signs, and finally frozen in time under water at Coney Island, mere inches away from the fabled Blue Fairy. Like every essential moment in A.I., the walls are closing in on David, and Spielberg’s hypnotic templates of neon light and shading add up to a stunningly personal nightmare about the way innocence unmasks the hidden doubt in others. Heath

评语：13. The Fly (David Cronenberg, 1986) A beautifully poignant tale of love and heartbreak cocooned in the outré trappings of its maker’s distinctive splatter-punk aesthetic, The Fly represents the apotheosis of David Cronenberg’s early obsessions. The story of scientist Seth Brundle (Jeff Goldblum), who, in a fit of drunken jealousy, tests his new teleporter only to find himself fused with a housefly, the film is a testament to the elastic properties of genre as metaphor. Cronenberg reappropriates the original’s schlocky damsel-in-distress plot as the delivery system for a thoughtful, witty, and literate consideration of his pet preoccupations: sex, death, technology, biology. It’s tragedy pitched at an operatic scale, body horror at its most visceral, pop philosophy at its most insightful. Insect politics for a blockbuster age. Abimanyu Das

评语：14. They Live (John Carpenter, 1988) A streetwise drifter (Roddy Piper) discovers a pair of sunglasses which allow him to see subliminal messages hidden behind every billboard, newspaper, and TV commercial in America, as well as the true faces of the masked aliens walking among us, intent to dominate our world in secret. They Live‘s anti-consumerist message is so apparent in the action on screen that it doesn’t even qualify as subtextual. But this sort of obvious explication functions, cleverly, as a deliberate ideological misdirect, as the ultimate goal of John Carpenter’s as a work of satire isn’t for us to acknowledge that our world is being taken over by nefarious aliens from outer space, but rather that such a fantastic idea of hypnosis and control is credible only because commercial culture is designed to function in exactly that way. The point, in other words, isn’t that we ought to be concerned about aliens, but that we don’t need to be concerned about aliens. Advertising and television and the entire world of corporatized control is already so fucked up that science fiction couldn’t imagine a fate for us any more preposterous or, frankly, any worse. Marsh

评语：15. Under the Skin (Jonathan Glazer, 2013) Under the Skin’s extraterrestrial seductress, Laura (Scarlett Johansson), shrinks in stature as the film progresses, from an indomitable, inviolable man-eating ghoul to an increasingly fragile woman suffering from the psychic trauma wreaked by her own weaponized sexuality. It’s a heartbreaking process to witness, one that flips a sleek, mysterious sci-fi thriller into a singular melodrama focused on the unlikeliest of protagonists. Establishing an atmosphere in which each new intrusion of feeling delivers another blow to the character’s once-steely exterior, director Jonathan Glazer spins out a maelstrom of dread as Laura simultaneously contracts and expands, adapting to the frailty of her assumed human form. Mirroring this development, the film’s polished style comes into sharp conflict with the tangled complexity of empathy and emotion, a clash embodied by the alluring dissonance of Mica Levi’s shrieking score, the stunning gloom of the film’s Scottish landscapes, the strange, wounded beauty of men pickled in their own putrid desire, and the poignant spectacle of a monster barred by circumstance from becoming anything more. Cataldo

评语：16. Alphaville (Jean-Luc Godard, 1965) Alphaville, a dystopian sci-fi noir set in an Orwellian world of omnipresent surveillance run by a malevolent artificial intelligence, sounds at first blush like a large-scale work filled with the sort of macro world-building one typically sees in blockbusters. But Jean-Luc Godard, working with next to no resources, captures the oppressiveness of totalitarian government through the claustrophobic conditions of repressed citizens. Ordinary Parisian streets and buildings are captured as they are, though in inky shadow, so that a certain kind of present-day dilapidation comes to suggest futuristic social decay. In mixing elements of noir and sci-fi, Godard doubles down on the existential horror of both genres, emphasizing their common emotional detachment through a narrative involving a supercomputer, Alpha 60, that rules over a realm, Alphaville, in which human emotions like love are punishable by death. That premise anticipates future tech-noir features like Leos Carax’s Mauvais Sang, and the rapport between Lemmy Caution (Eddie Constantine), so grizzled but still full of longing, and a thoroughly brainwashed, deadpan young woman, Natacha (Anna Karina), has the same kind of mutually dispassionate but compelling quasi-romance that Harrison Ford and Sean Young shared as androids performing love in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner. Cole

评语：17. Mad Max: Fury Road (George Miller, 2015) Pulling off a genuine Trojan-horse maneuver of cinematic subversion within the cloak of a beloved franchise, George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road stands as a statement on how even the most stringently managed of studio properties can be massaged to produce miraculous results. Moving up from the unfocused weirdness of Beyond Thunderdome into new heights of inspired madness, this innovative vision from a familiar apocalyptic wasteland retains the series’s general outlines while also further reducing its titular hero to a mythical supporting character. Yet for all the implicit progressive politics and outsized metaphoric constructions, the film is most successful as a blunt expression of impassioned force, its strident stands on a variety of hot-button issues used as fuel to stoke a cacophonous combustion of energy and noise. Structured around the spectacle of a single extended chase sequence, it spins out a Keaton-esque carnival of dodgy practical effects, ingeniously tactile set pieces, and equivalently creative CG. Subtlety and contemplation have their place, but Fury Road scratches a different sort of atavistic itch, satisfying the compulsion for genuine awe and amazement so often neglected by modern tent poles, exhibiting its ultimate allegiance toward the viewer rather than the monolithic dictates of the brand. Cataldo

评语：18. RoboCop (Paul Verhoeven, 1987) RoboCop set the tone for much of Dutch auteur Paul Verhoeven’s career in America, and not just because of Kurtwood Smith’s curt command “Bitches leave!” It was a relatively low-budget, high-concept satire in the guise of a relatively high-budget, low-concept trash-a-thon. Corporate backstabbing and a remarkably strong-willed newbie cop combine in the right place at the wrong time to allow the creation of a secret human-robot hybrid. Verhoeven juxtaposes RoboCop’s (Peter Weller) faint pulse of self-recognition against the backdrop of a dehumanizing socio-economic nightmare. But he also couples his skilled filmmaking vulgarity with a very literal vulgarity. When RoboCop comes to the assistance of a poodle-headed woman about to be sexually assaulted in a back alleyway, his keen trigger finger manages to take out the would-be rapist’s crotch by carefully shooting the bullet through the victim’s skirt—right between her thighs. Never has a gesture of chivalry seemed more…icky. Verhoeven’s best and most vulgar American work was still in front of him, but RoboCop still stands as one of the most rude-tempered, rollicking gobs of spit in the face of 1980s politics this side of John Carpenter’s They Live. Henderson

评语：19. Hard to Be a God (Aleksei German, 2013) Aleksei German’s Hard to Be a God proceeds from an immediately incongruous setup: a science-fiction film set in the murky recesses of a Dark Ages nightmare, its apocalyptic vision of the future looking backward instead of forward. It’s within this seemingly counterintuitive concept that German, whose death toward the end of the film’s production confirms this as his capstone opus, finds the most perfect expression of a career-long fascination with the contact points between civilization and chaos. The film’s imperious protagonist is an astronaut with an unorthodox mission, sent to a planet on the cusp of a renaissance to nurture the growth of a more equitable world. But as so many leaders embarking on the forcible democratization of unprepared societies have recently learned, the conceit that guidance from one advanced culture will foster another easily falls apart under scrutiny. Our sophisticated hero is thus reduced to one warlord among many, his habitual bloody noses tapping him into the collective stream of nasty fluids that flows throughout this amazingly grotesque film, cementing him as just another corrupt figure in the pitch-black Rabelaisian saturnalia that results. Cataldo

评语：20. Je T’aime, Je T’aime (Alain Resnais, 1968) A literal attempt to physicalize the past is the subject of Alain Resnais’s early, often overlooked fantasy, Je T’aime, Je T’aime. In their fascination with emotional tactility, Resnais and novelist turned screenwriter Jacques Sternberg, both formalist radicals who’re often too ambitious to settle for ordinary linear narratives casually pioneered a way in which the fantastic and the banal intermingle. Like Billy Pilgrim, Claude (Claude Rich) becomes unstuck in time, in the tradition of heroes metaphorically obsessed with themselves and their lost opportunities. The narrative, which concerns an experiment in time travel, is emotionally involving, staged with Resnais’s customary resistance to flatulent sentiment—often misconstrued as a “cold” sensibility when showed it actually represents a passion so great as to resist platitude. But the film’s soul truly emerges through its incredible editing syntax, which anticipates the formal grammar of mysteries such as Don’t Look Now and Mulholland Drive. Moments are layered in fashions that never entirely reveal themselves. Truth is allowed to be simultaneously plain and porous, subject to impenetrability—a conscious result of Resnais’s mixing of the otherworldly and the ordinary. Bowen

评语：21. Brazil (Terry Gilliam, 1985) Through its wildly comic, furiously creative, and intensely moving façade, Terry Gilliam’s Brazil ponders a future made to sustain a draconian past molded by inequality. Overrun by communicative ducts, coated wires, cement and metals, and magnified, miniature computer screens, the future conjured up by Gilliam averts the familiar prophecy of an anaesthetized, plastic world overrun by rampantly advancing technology. Besides the obvious Orwellian elements, the filmic pedigree of Brazil is richly layered, potently evoking The Third Man, the Marx brothers, Battleship Potemkin, Star Wars, Kurosawa, Casablanca, 8 ½, Modern Times, and, most vibrantly, Metropolis, among others. Such tremendous artists and films depicted both the harshness and necessity of reality, as well as the enveloping power and ultimate intangibility of imagination and expression, and Brazil is a glorious ode to that essential dichotomy. Gilliam presents an utterly singular vision of a world where the cold, exacting actions of an all-powerful plutocracy are at once fighting against and employing fantasy, where the individual can be eaten alive and erased by pieces of paper. Chris Cabin

评语：22. The Terminator (James Cameron, 1985) James Cameron’s influences include all manner of science fiction, from 2001: A Space Odyssey to Ray Bradbury to Star Wars, but the film’s true creative counterpart might be Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Religious, if not outright spiritual, The Terminator is, at its core, a meditation on mankind’s thirst for progress and the likely fallout that results from a lack of self-regulation, extinction being the ultimate punishment for the sin of creation without moral consideration. As in its thematic successor, The Matrix, the man-versus-machine dynamic might be too outwardly dramatic to be truly prescient (in reality, we’ll probably get something closer to a WALL-E/Road Warrior dystopia when the shit hits the fan), but the film’s pulp trappings—or rather, here, tech noir—reach a modestly operatic intensity that more than justifies the metaphorical frankness of the proceedings. The film’s understated, workmanlike artistry suggests both the quotidian and the extraordinary, particularly when paired with the robotic emotion of Brad Fiedel’s synth score. It erupts in your consciousness and takes flight like a dream. Humanick

评语：23. Total Recall (Paul Verhoeven, 1990) An imaginative expansion of the brisk Philip K. Dick short story, “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale,” this film about fake memories and a real interplanetary crisis now stands redolent with nostalgia, both for its time, as well as for itself. Beneath its show of smoke and mirrors, mercenary babes, and treacherous holograms, Total Recall is a story about a man who must choose between two possible, contradictory realities. In one timeline, he’s an earthbound schmuck; in the far less likely one, he’s a hero who must save an oppressed people on a faraway planet. He can’t afford to waver, but it’s our privilege to do so. As viewers, we’re welcome to consider the persistent motif of walls collapsing, subterfuges dissolving, and rugs being pulled out from still more rugs. The film now exists in a twilight of an era in which factory-produced entertainment could still serve as a keyhole into a dimension of weird, through which we might glimpse the otherworldly, and contemplate fondling the third breast. Christley

评语：24. The Man Who Fell to Earth (Nicolas Roeg, 1976) Adapted from the novel by Walter Tevis, Nicolas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth finds the alien in alienation. The novel and film are melancholy studies in social estrangement and the depredations of alcoholism, loosely attired in the trappings of science fiction, that recount the disastrous attempts at earthly assimilation by an ambitious visitor from another planet. If anything, Roeg and screenwriter Paul Mayersberg enlarge upon the tragedy of ersatz human and eventual billionaire Thomas Jerome Newton (David Bowie, perfectly cast as the ungainly space oddity), playing up the desperate plight of his extraterrestrial family, slowly dying on a planet devoid of water. The film is exceptionally allusive, replete with references to painting, literature, and cinema. Like its source material, The Man Who Fell to Earth invokes the myth of Icarus in ways subtle and overt—from its very title to a prominently displayed coffee-table book that pairs W.H. Auden’s poem “Museé des Beaux Art” and Breughel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus. Roeg weaves snippets of imagery and dialogue (first glimpsed on Newton’s proliferating bank of TV sets) taken from Billy Wilder’s Love in the Afternoon and Carol Reed’s The Third Man into scenes where they provide thematic, albeit ironic, counterpoint, knowingly foreshadowing acts of infidelity and betrayal. Wilkins

评语：25. On the Silver Globe (Andrzej Żuławski, 1988) Started in 1976 as an epic adaptation of a turn-of-a-century philosophical sci-fi trilogy by the director’s great uncle, production on Andrzej Żuławski’s On the Silver Globe was abruptly stopped by Poland’s communist ministry of culture in 1977. Officially too expensive to continue, the film was in fact too politically incorrect to handle. It wasn’t until 1987 that Żuławski was allowed to tinker with the incomplete footage and assemble it into what it currently is: “a stump of a movie,” per his off-screen opening remark. The film presents itself both as a narrative and an essay upon its own making. The literal plot, having to do with a group of space travelers discovering a new planet and building a civilization from scratch, is juxtaposed with documentary footage of the crumbling failed experiment that was communist Poland. On the Silver Globe is immensely rich as an act of philosophical inquiry. Its dialogue full of expertly disguised nuggets borrowed from the likes of Norman Mailer and Karl Marx, the film is a desperate meditation on the human hunger for religion, as well as our shared need of submitting ourselves to figures of authority. As such, it’s probably the bravest Polish film ever made. Michał Oleszczyk