A pretty friendly city — as far as authoritarian places go.
That was the take on the setting for the book New Haven’s reading this year, Fahrenheit 451, as the Arts & Ideas festival got underway this weekend.
The comment came during a panel moderated by The New York Times’s astute film critic, A.O. Scott. Scott was head movie maven for Arts & Ideas’ and the Big Read’s sci-fi film festival this weekend. More than 100 cineasts came out to hear him at the Whitney Humanities Center Saturday.
Guess what dystopian novel made into film by Francois Truffaut in 1966 and starring Julie Christie and Oskar Werner was the centerpiece of the talk?
In a break between the screening of, yes, Fahrenheit 451, and Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report, the festival featured a half hour of questions to Scott and co-panelists sci-fi novelist Jack Womack and journalist Suzanne O’Malley, who’s currently teaching film studies at Yale.
Afterwards, Scott said he thought the questions excellent. Here’s a sampling, along with some spirited answers offered by Scott and his co-panelists:
Business New Haven reporter Liese Klein (pictured) asked: Why it is in both these films and movies in general that cities are portrayed as the headquarters of oppression, the place from which you need to break free?
Scott answered: You’re absolutely right there is an anti-urban bias, which likely goes way back into the city mouse/country mouse pastoral traditions from Athens to London during the industrial revolution. Then he pointed out that the city has two nightmares going on in at the same time: breakdown and control. “The place also has to be big enough for the resistance to develop as well.”
On the other hand, Womack added that the city portrayed in the Bradbury dystopia was a pretty friendly place as authoritarian places go. And then the country, where the saviors of literature go to escape and memorize the books of their choice (“Hello, I’m The Jewish Question by Jean Paul Sartre, how do you do?”) appears to be little farther than a Metro North train ride-distance away.
Another questioner was eager to know how many echoes of the Nazis might be intentional in the film – the book burnings, the humiliation through a forced public haircut of a potential non-conformist – and with particular reference to Oskar Werner’s choice as star, with German accent and all?
Scott said he wouldn’t lean too far in that direction, that one of the reasons we go back to certain sci-fi films (all films) and not others is that they are open to a range of interpretations. Having done his homework, Scott added that Werner was not the producers’ first choice. “Actually,” he said, “I think they were hoping to get the English actor Terence Stamp, but his schedule didn’t permit. So it’s more or less just one of those Hollywood things, an accident that he’s German.”
And Julie Christie, why her? And why is it that she plays two big roles in the film, Montag the fireman’s (Werner’s) anti-book zombified wife (she has long hair for this role) and the short haired woman who recruits Montag to be among the book-devouring rebels?
There too Scott’s research illuminated (no pun intended) that one man’s basis for intriguing interpretation can often just be Hollywood’s nuts and bolts.
“The movie was very low budget, but charming too,” Scott said. “They needed a star to make it happen. Since neither of the female roles was big enough for the necessary big star, Julie Christie, whom Truffaut had worked well with in Jules and Jim, took them both and made the project possible.”
What part of the movie did Scott find most gripping?
It turned out not to be the pages of Don Quixote, the first book we see burned, curling and turning to black or the pursuit of Montag. Or the mind control of his wife and the society through pills and TV. (Author Ray Bradbury, the panelists said, of late insists that his interpretation of the film is that it’s less dystopian distant future than a cautionary tale about having too many cable channels and too large an HD entertainment system in your bedroom.)
“Rather,” Scott said, “to me the most chilling moment is when Montag’s captain in the fire-burning crew [played with scary earnestness by Cyril Cusack] lays out the rationale for the book burning: ‘The real danger of books is that they will make some people feel better than others.”’
“This anti-intellectualism in the name of egalitarianism,” Scott added, “is hard to oppose.”
It’s also hard to oppose the charm. This dystopia is full of charming old- fashioned, almost child-like fire engines, in lush reds that Truffaut apparently was experimenting with, racing across the screen. It’s hard to resist the charm of two twins whom we meet when Montag finally escapes to the colony of memorizers.
“Hello,” they say, their smiling faces filling up the screen. “We’re Pride and Prejudice,“ they say. “I’m Pride, Volume One, and he’s Prejudice, Volume Two.” Then the twins go off reciting in the forest, joining the meandering and memorizing saviors of literature, returning us to our pre-print, Homeric origins.
Scott pointed out that in a person’s nearly becoming a book, they seem to lose themselves entirely, and have no life that we would truly value, being limited to their memorized text.
And, if so, is this not also a kind of prooftext for what the captain says to Montag earlier in the scene Scott evoked: “Look at these books! Novels make people so unhappy, and philosophy is even worse.”
On Sunday, the second day of the sci-fi film festival, Scott served on a panel discussing bioethics raised by two more films: Gattaca (Andrew Niccol, 1997) and Code 46 (Michael Winterbottom, 2003).
When a reporter asked Scott to give him the gist or briefly to describe Code 46, he paused and then said, “No words do justice to that movie.” That’s a movie critic.
The sci-fi festival was co-sponsored, along with the International Festival of Arts & Ideas, by the Yale Summer Film Institute.
