Light in the corners: ‘Unseen Cinema’ and ‘Homemovies’

"In Youth Beside the Lonely Sea" -- triple-screen innovation by creators as yet unknown.

Unseen Cinema: Early American Avant-Garde Film, 1894-1941

Bruce Posner, curator

Image Entertainment/Filmmakers Showcase

2013

“Homemovies”

Hosts: Bill Hammel, Nick Fraser

KDBI-TV

1981-1992

https://www.youtube.com/user/Homemoviescolorado

A dizzying, 7-disc, 19-hour compilation of experiments, ephemera, visions, and follies on film. An hour of TV a week from a converted Quonset hut that played people’s home movies.

What do these two things have in common? They champion the Weirdness.

If you’re not familiar with film writer Manny Farber’s famous essay in Film Culture in 1962, he raises the idea of “White Elephant Art” versus “Termite Art” – specifically, bloated and pretentious mainstream film versus the B-film, the genre piece, the low-budget quickie. Farber felt the latter was inherently transgressive -- a more efficient, aware, and effective kind of art that’s vastly more in touch with the spirit of the times.

The essay changed how we think about film, and spawned a generation of critics and writers who found new depths and dimensions to both “low culture” and works way off the beaten track of consensus-driven artistic success. Armed with this new analytical tool, all those obscure delights, guilty pleasures, and splendid misfires became worthy of examination. The boundaries between high and popular culture dissolved as Sontag, Kael, and others spread their nets.

Bruce Posner’s research and selection on “Unseen Cinema” goes to further lengths than any I’ve seen. He reaches back to the film industry’s crude beginnings, ending his survey around the time of America’s entry into World War II. He ferrets out everything from the initials use of in-camera effects to archival dance recordings to funny newsreels, socialist and capitalist propaganda film, a healthy dose of self-indulgent, self-consciously avant-garde work, and some stunning animations.

Some highlights:

Disc 1: The Mechanized Eye: Experiments in Technique and Form

The first panoramic and tracking shots are here, and the negative-image superimposition of the eerie short “Ghost Train.” There’s the strangeness of 1936’s sing-a-long “Melody on Parade,” and the non-narrative montage of “Poem 8” (1932-1933). “In Youth Beside the Lonely Sea” (1924-1925) is a beautiful and innovative three-panel poetic work that predates Abel Gance’s famous use of a triple screen in “Napoleon” (1927). Amazingly, its creators are unknown.

Disc 2: The Devil’s Plaything: American Surrealism

Long before "Inception" and 32 years before Fred Astaire's famous "dancing on the ceiling" bit in "Royal Wedding," Douglas Fairbanks Sr. does the revolving room gag in "'Til the Clouds Roll By."

Here are the absurdities of trick photography, as in Billy Bitzer’s “Impossible Convicts” (!905) and Edwin Porter’s Dream of a Rarebit Fiend  (1906). Dream sequences by Victor Fleming (“When the Clouds Roll By,” 1919) James Cruze (“Beggar on Horseback,” 1925) segue into Cubist masterpieces such as the 1926 “Fall of the House of Usher” and Robert Florey’s famous “Life and Death of 9413: A Hollywood Extra,” and the film fantasies of Joseph Cornell.

Disc 3: Light Rhythms: Music and Abstraction

Here are some of the touchstones of avant-garde cinema – Man Ray’s “Retour a la Raison,” Leger and Murphy’s “Ballet Mecanique,” and Duchamp’s “Anemic Cinema,” Steiner’s “H2O” and “Seaweed” are essays on the art of seeing. A kinetic party scene from Lubitsch’s “So This is Paris” (1926) is here, as is Busby Berkeley’s geometric “By a Waterfall” sequence from “Footlight Parade” (1933).

The big reveal here is the work of animator Mary Ellen Bute, who created astonishing abstract work with Ted Nemeth such as “Rhythm in Light” (1934), “Synchromy No. 2” (1936), and “Parabola” (1937), all here. These works, synchronized to classic music, are proclaimed to be “moods for the eye.” Their techniques were shamelessly ripped off by Disney for use in “Fantasia.”

"Spook Sport"

Disc 4: Inverted Narratives: New Directions in Story-Telling

From Lois Weber’s innovative “Suspense” (1913), through the agitprop of “Black Dawn” (1933), and the sheer randomness of Christopher Young’s perplexing “Object Lesson” (1941). Oh, and as early as 1937, there’s already a parody of the pretensions of the avant-garde – Barlow, Hay and Robbins’ “Even: As You and I.”

Disc 7: Viva la Dance: The Beginnings of Cine-Dance

Straight performance captures alternate with more interesting fare such as Stella Simon’s “Hands” (1928) and a rare film of Tilly Losch (“Dance of the Hands,” 1930). Some of the unused footage from Eisenstein’s unfinished “Que Viva Mexico,” silent, haunting, and powerful.

"Dance of the Hands"

Here is more animation as well, including Gross & Hoppin’s insanely beautiful “Joie de Vivre,” and Oskar Fichinger’s “An Optical Poem” for MGM in 1938 (evidently, some of these avant-garde pieces crept into general view as shorts in distribution packages by the major studios). Norman McLaren’s idiosyncratic work is scratched directly onto the film, decades before Brakhage. (His collaboration with Bute and Nemeth, “Tarantella” and “Spook Sport,” are here as well.) The final disc closes with David Bradley’s experimental epic “Peer Gynt,” starring Charlton Heston in his first film role.

Seemingly at the other end of the scale is “Homemovies.”

From 1981 through 1992, it played, by and large live, direct from the public TV station KBDI in Broomfield, Colorado. It was the crazy brainchild of hosts Bill Hammel and Nick Fraser, who combined amateur filmmakers’ submissions, comedy sketches live and taped, interviews, musical guests, and miscellaneous ridiculousness.

What is now the far classier and better-funded Colorado Public Television was then housed out in the boonies, in a dingy industrial park. Our live studio was the parking bay of the station; we would roll the garage door up on nice nights, or when a guest wanted to drive onto the set.

KBDI's original studio. The "Homemovies" set is the parking bay.

Here’s the kind of station it was -- they measured the transmitter temperature with a meat thermometer. The station once on-air-auctioned one of the Residents’ donated eyeball heads during a pledge drive, and did quite well. The signed Lionel Ritchie photo, not so much.(The early music video program “FM-TV”/”Teletunes” was incredibly, transgressively awesome; its VJs contemptuously elbowed us out of the way as they set up for their broadcast after ours.)

The only rules for film submissions were: no cursing, no sex – nothing that would get us kicked off the air . . . as though we were on any official anyone’s radar. They played miniature action movies, inept stop-action animation, bad slapstick comedies, anguished teen meditations, sci-fi, horror, an endless stream of martial arts sagas. Student filmmakers mailed in class assignments. Once in a while, they played real actual home movies, the filmmaker narrating live in voiceover from the show’s signature faux-leopard-skin-draped couch.

Bill Hammel (left) and Nick Fraser open the show.

We invented the faux music festival Broomstock as a theme show, years before it happened for real in Broomfield. (Life imitates comedy.) And who can forget the annual glory of the Homie Awards-- a fabulous event featuring Barbie dolls spray-painted gold and stuck to film reels as prizes?

“Homemovies” was nothing if not a haven for termite art. For a few years, I was one of the gang – writing bits, taping them, doing whatever needed to be done on camera and off. The budget was whatever cash we had in our pockets. We made our own props, gathered thrift-store costumes. You would find something in a dumpster while driving down an alley, stick it in your car, hose it off, and write a sketch round it.

I was in my 20’s, just starting out in comedy, and “Homemovies” was part playground, part laboratory. Nobody knew what we couldn’t do, giving us perfect freedom to break all the rules. We were a favorite of stoners and other freaks within range of our signal, and I loved saying goodnight to my oldest child, who waited up to see me on TV once a week.

I play a doctor in need of a drink in "Rehab No-nos" sketch, sometime during the Reagan years

Bill could give you a lot more details. A good archivist, he posted many bits and skits from the show here -- https://www.youtube.com/user/Homemoviescolorado. My stuff is embarrassing to watch now. It would have to improve by several orders of magnitude to be considered sophomoric. But, I have embraced that pain. Sometimes, you need to explore a path and find out that you’re no damn good at it so you can move on. I was no good at television.

Did “Homemovies” show any deathless classics, or showcase the early work of future geniuses? I have no idea. The show winked out of existence just as the Digital Age dawned, and the station outgrew its ragtag origins. We had fun. We laughed a lot. If that is the only benefit “Homemovies” conferred upon the world, for us and the freaky faithful, it was all worth it. It was uncut Weirdness, straight to the vein.

In future, regional boundaries would be erased, films could be made anywhere by anyone with ease, and shared instantly. In analog days, “Homemovies” was a vital, non-judgmental (OK, really judgmental) outlet for creative talent in a world where no one had easy access to the cinema’s means of production. They were pipelining public access to the airwaves, subversives and clowns on the margin, at the bitter end of your broadcast TV dial.

And who knows? Like the films in the “Unseen Cinema” collection, perhaps “Homemovies” selections will live to see another day, lit up again and revalued.

In fact, the 19 hours of “Unseen Cinema” footage I waded through had some rough patches. Does collecting these random pieces legitimize them? Are they valuable only when they are commodified? No, but we need that access to make up our own minds. An aesthetic canon can be just as deadening as any other dogma, a kind of White Elephant avant-garde that risks and accomplishes nothing. (If you think it’s bullshit, guess what? It probably is. Trust your instincts.)

You need a varied cultural diet – Oscar bait and mindless summer action, foreign quandaries, silent gems, patience-testing experimentation, and the unclassifiable detritus of the margins. It’s good for you. It makes you tolerant and accepting, all the different levels thriving and combining freely in your mind. “Homemovies” helped build the appreciation muscles I needed to grasp “Unseen Cinema.”

Victor Hugo wrote, “Success is an ugly thing. Men are deceived by its false resemblances to merit.” Contemporary success has much to do with tuning one’s work to the current cultural norms. The mainstream will flow, drought or flood.

“Unseen Cinema” and “Homemovies” provide, and provided, examples outside that norm necessary to stimulate hope and a sense of possibility in creative minds.They are and were conduits, reservoirs, radiant points, resonant spaces.They demystify the process, teach us that anyone can do this, should try this art. The hits and the classics inspire us but what sustains us is the little TV show, the odd obsessive compilation, the entry-level backstage gig, the local radio show, the open-mike night, the fringe publication, 

We ought not to be just about the White Elephant, well-lit, in the center of the room. Look, there is art, too, there, in the cracks. There is light in the corners.

Addendum: Happy Ending! Bill just informed me that there was one precocious 13-year-old who showed some stop-motion animation on the "Homemovies" show. That kid, ladies and gentlemen, was Matt Stone of "South Park" fame. As Stan Lee might put it, KRAKKADOOM! If only we had put some money on the kid. 

Formative Film 10: 'Vanishing Point' (1971)

'Vanishing Point' (1971) -- nothingness all around.

An autobiography in movies

By BRAD WEISMANN

Vanishing Point

Dir: Richard C. Sarafian

Prod: Michael Pearson, Norman Spencer

Scr: Guillermo Cabrera Infante (as Guillermo Cain), Malcom Hart, Barry Hall (uncred.)

Phot: John A. Alonzo

Arvada Plaza Theater

9374 W. 58^th Ave.

Arvada, Colorado

March 13, 1971

O who doesn’t want to crank it up a notch or five? Who wouldn’t want to strap in to a boss machine, feel the blissful hiss of the road under your wheels as you bomb, balls to the wall, top-speed from one end of this jacked-up country to the other? Blowing the forces of authority off the road, for no good reason save that takes a hero to be a soulful outlaw? Or something?

This is the basic appeal of the original 1971 feature film Vanishing Point. Part car-chase movie, part Romantic melodrama, part pretentious mystical saga, it’s a ridiculous and transgressive (at least for 10-year-old suburbanites like me) cult masterpiece that shattered so many taboos that it’s still an active reagent of my imagination. Bobby Gillespie of the band Primal Scream, which recorded an “alternate soundtrack” tribute album to the film, said of it, “We love the air of paranoia and speed-freak righteousness.” It’s all that, plus an Existentialism 101 course, as well as a foreshadowing of the cynicism that was creeping up on America in the ‘70s. And, oh yeah, there’s this completely naked young lady on a motorcycle.

It all starts in Denver on a Friday night. A car delivery driver named Kowalski (Barry Newman) pulls into a garage. Please note, Kowalski is his name. His only name. Much is made of this throughout the film. Yes, he's Everyman. He’s terse, focused. He gobbles some White Crosses. He grabs another car that needs to go to San Francisco – a white 1970 Dodge Challenger R/T 440 Magnum, with the pistol grip gear shift and everything!

Kowalski is addicted to speed, chemically and kinetically. He makes a whimsical bet with his drug dealer that he will make the run non-stop, in a time span that guarantees that he’ll have to ignore the law to get there. Got it? Enigmatic, haunted speed freak careens defiantly across the American Southwest, trashing the Man’s puny efforts to stop him with only brief breaks for expositional flashbacks and encounters with various symbolic weirdos.

The film obviously comes from somewhere. Everyone was making road movies after the success of Bonnie and Clyde and Easy Rider. Road films of the same period such as Rafelson’s Five Easy Pieces and Hellman’s Two-Lane Blacktop were also hip-deep in metaphors.

Vanishing Point’s lead, played by the solid Barry Newman, also adopts the patented macho stoicism of Robert Mitchum in 1958’s Thunder Road (with precedents from James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause (1955) and Brando in The Wild One (1953)). This tough-guy aesthetic would pass through the hot-rod and biker movie subgenres, and on into films such as the original Gone in 60 Seconds, Eat My Dust, Grand Theft Auto, and Dirty Mary Crazy Larry – hymns to speed and stunts that descended into barbaric redneck yawps against authority.

Kowalski’s journey is so freighted with meaning that it’s a wonder the car can get up to speed sometimes. There is no reason why Kowalski has to get to San Francisco so fast. He CHOOSES to do it, that’s all – a perfect existential hero. Kowalski makes Ryan Gosling’s Driver look like a vapid chatterbox, and Ryan O’Neal’s Driver look like a tetchy old granny.

In flashback, we are informed that Kowalski is a) actually the “last American hero,” b. A Medal of Honor winner, c.an honest cop who got fired for standing up for what was right, d. and e. a car and motorcycle racer, and strangely f. a man whose girlfriend informs him she thinks she’s going to die, then goes right out into the ocean and does so (in classic, cheesy cinematic shorthand, the surfboard washes up on shore without her). He has had it with society and life.

Kowalski IS America, man. Don’t you get it? No wonder he’s wacked out of his mind on trucker crank. Wouldn’t you be? He’s got nothing else going on. He has nothing but his existential freedom left. The enemy is everywhere, it’s society itself. America has let its hero down, and his heroics have shrunk, from its perspective, into the shape of meaningless lawbreaking.

In this film, the role of God, or at least blind Tiresian seer, goes to Cleavon Little in his first featured role in film. His Super Soul, a DJ at tiny radio station KOW, monitors the police band and passes information and advice to the hero over the air. He serves as guide, celebrant, conscience, and narrator of the back-road odyssey. Little is great in the role, by turns ecstatic and thoughtful. Super Soul (get it?), the person most hooked into Kowalski’s mind, is at the farthest remove from him.

Also, for the first time, I saw my own city in a movie, itself a staggering experience. Reality and film intersected. Here was a shot of the old Gardner Tools building, down by the Platte, where Kowalski starts out. There he is, going over the old 16^th Street viaduct! (I recognize the odd cross-hatched metal railings.)

Oh my God, there he is on I-70! The first big car chase sequence in the film takes place between Rifle and Glenwood Springs, giving the viewer an excellent reminder of what the two-lane road was like through Glenwood Canyon before the massive interstate engineering project was completed decades later. There was a thrill to seeing cars zoom, crash, and squeal along the route you and your family only plodded through weeks before. The idea that amazing things could be conjured up in the midst of the ordinary was a revelation. 

Jesus Lord, even veteran Denver newscaster Bob Palmer is in this film! 

(Loved him. He used to come over to the Denver Press Club, go in the basement, take his toop off, stick it on a lampshade, and play pool. Those were the days!)

In fact, this film has an incredibly high percentage of obscure but important musicians and actors in the cast. Delaney & Bonnie are in a revival-meeting band, as is Rita Coolidge and Ted Neeley. Kim Carnes can be heard on the soundtrack, her first recording, and hey! Who’s that little bearded guy playing piano? It’s David Gates! Small world.

Acting vets Karl Swenson and Dean Jagger are here, as well as a quick scene with Severn Darden, a brilliant Second City improviser and comic actor who did far too little on screen. Blink and you’ll miss character actor stalwarts such as Timothy Scott, Anthony James, Arthur Malet, John Amos, and Val Avery.

Of course the real star of the film is the car, the embodiment of Kowalski's urge to move, his weapon, his symbolic what-have-you. There’s a lot more to indicating speed and travel than just shooting fast cars driving by, and cinematographer Alonzo does a great job here. The stunts and chase sequences are inventive, but not spectacular in and of themselves. He repeatedly shoots the car straining towards the vanishing point (obviously), but he also bolts the camera to the car instead of using a tow rig, and the resulting shots he gets have some vibration to them – they are felt more strongly. Sometimes Alonzo just pans lovingly up the length of the car in motion, setting in on Kowalski’s silent face.

Then there’s the desert. Vanishing Point whips across the wasteland. The “cold desert” of the Great Basin of Utah and Nevada is rarely celebrated in American culture, but that beautiful open space, denuded and spare, under an enormous sky, geometric and elemental, is one of my favorite in the world. The immense distances, the romance of the unlimited horizon, are addictive. In later years, I would zigzag across the country doing comedy, a would-be Kowalski road warrior in a Honda full of fast-food trash, cigarette butts, and empty coffee cups.

And what about the naked lady? I’m not sure who thought it would be a good idea to include a nude motorcycle-riding young woman in the film – it’s not anything on which the plot hinges. 24-year-old Gilda Texter plays the enigmatic “Nude Rider” with a devastating sang froid. (Ironically, she left acting but stayed in the film business as a costumer.) She rides up, she’s naked, it’s no big deal, she talks to Our Hero, and that’s it.

At the time, though, we appreciated the gesture. This gratuitous scene was the first time I or my friends had seen a naked lady. (I had a glimpse of a lightly clad Faye Dunaway in a trailer for Bonnie and Clyde, which piqued my interest.) The first time we saw the movie, our little brains went TILT when this scene came on, and stayed that way until the end. Needless to say, this was a rich source of discussion and analysis among us, one which required repeated trips to the movie house to make surer of what we saw. We were all raging nascent heterosexuals whose latency periods had just ended. Vanishing Point kick-started our sexual curiosity.

However, Kowalski's joy ride couldn’t last forever. In keeping with the sense of defiant nihilism that was rapidly taking over the country’s mood after the bust of hippie hopefulness (remember, Altamont took place only four months after Woodstock), Vanishing Point gives up the tragic finish.

Here, the State of California as manifested through its Highway Patrol Department is the embodiment of evil. It is efficient, well-funded, geared up, uniformly uniformed, and schematized to a fault to neutralize all threats to the State. Kowalski’s path is now tracked by a wall-sized, flashing early electronic map, with bells and whistles that make it sound like nothing else but a pinball machine. The rebel has been reduced to data, a moving target.

SPOILER: Kowalski is doomed, and it comes in the form of two bulldozers, their blades angled into each other, blocking the highway. Switching off his car radio and the voice of Super Soul, oblivious to alternatives, smiling wanly as he accelerates, he rams into the roadblock and his car explodes, killing him. An American crowd typical of the kind that enjoys checking out car wrecks and house fires stands by and watches. (During the end credits, a man pulls a clump of something out of the burning wreckage – in the days before rewind, we watched again and again, arguing as to whether this was Kowalski’s head or not.)

His death was a shock on first viewing (for those of us not still thinking about the naked lady). It makes a great deal more sense in the UK version I never saw until last week, seven minutes longer with a scene right before the end involving Charlotte Rampling as a mysterious hitchhiker who is obviously Death herself. 

Without that costal-cracking nudge to the ribs, to us at the time it seemed random – less so than the twin killings that randomly end of Easy Rider, but random still.

We invested all our emotional energy in identifying with this hero, and he takes the seemingly unnecessary, easy way out. What the hell? We had not encountered this level of cynicism before. Vanishing Point was saying the hell with the whole rotten thing, a hipster march to Calvary.

Kowalski blissed out, seconds before death.

After the second or third screening, though, we bought it. The timing was perfect. We were moving into our disaffected teen years, and the country was distrustful and complacent, burned out from years of turmoil. The ‘70s were here. Kowalski had to die. He was a martyr to the Man.

We left the theater bummed out, but determined not to let the Man get us. American twilight was here, and we were screwed. Now we needed our cynicism to make us brave and defiant enough to keep going. We didn’t know it yet, but there was help. Burroughs was out there, and Captain Beefheart. Lou Reed was on his way, and Iggy Pop, and Jodorowsky, and Herzog and Fassbinder – the artists that were going to tell us our truths. In a strange way, Vanishing Point was the birthpoint of some dark hope in me.

NEXT TIME: Life at the Lakeshore Drive-In -- 'Death Wish'/'The Longest Yard'

Formative Film 9: 'Colossus: The Forbin Project'

An autobiography in movies by BRAD WEISMANN

  

Colossus: The Forbin Project

Dir: Joseph Sargent

Prod: Stanley Chase

Scr: James Bridges

Phot: Gene Polito

Arvada Plaza Theater

9374 W. 58^th Ave.

Arvada, Colorado

April 8, 1970

 “Things are going so well we don’t know what to do with ourselves!” – Dr. Johnson (Martin E. Brooks), in Colossus

“A robot has killed a contractor at one of Volkswagen's production plants in Germany, the automaker said Wednesday. . . . initial conclusions indicate that human error was to blame, rather than a problem with the robot . . .” Associated Press, July 1, 2015

Trouble in paradise.

Suspicions about the rise of the machines, artificial intelligence that outstrips humanity and takes over or obliterates us, are nothing new. They are the mainspring of popular franchises such as Terminator and The Matrix, but long before Skynet and Ultron, the paranoia extends back back back in our little mammal minds. Back culturally at least to Mary Shelley and the Frankenstein nightmare of rogue creation, and to Samuel Butler, who wrote in his 1863 essay “Darwin among the Machines”:

"Day by day, however, the machines are gaining ground upon us; day by day we are becoming more subservient to them; more men are daily bound down as slaves to tend them, more men are daily devoting the energies of their whole lives to the development of mechanical life. The upshot is simply a question of time, but that the time will come when the machines will hold the real supremacy over the world and its inhabitants is what no person of a truly philosophic mind can for a moment question."

The word sabotage has one origin theory that claims it comes from the wooden shoes or sabots that French and Dutch workers threw into the newly-invented 18^th century automated looms that were taking away their jobs. In 1779, an English weaver named Ned Ludd became a legendary figure, and an eponym, when he angrily destroyed two knitting engines. From 1811 through 1814, England’s Luddite movement destroyed factories and machinery. At one point, more English soldiers were fighting disgruntled workers at home than were overseas stalking Napoleon. The derogatory phrase still designates anti-technology activists.

The 20^th Century is rife with similar speculation, from Karel Capek’s 1920 play R.U.R. to Harry Piel’s little-seen 1934 German film The Master of the World, through reams of pulp sci-fi fiction, radio, and TV worldwide. Isaac Asimov’s famous Three Laws of Robotics, formulated in 1942, and Harlan Ellison’s 1963 classic short story “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream” each spawned (Ellison would say ripped off, of course, and he’s right) successive generations of nightmares about the takeover of our cybernetic children.

Sci-fi novelist D.F. Jones is a great storyteller, and the first volume of his entertaining Colossus trilogy is adapted faithfully here by the talented James Bridges, who would go on to write the screenplays for films such as The Paper Chase, The China Syndrome, and Urban Cowboy.

The story poses a huge challenge for a director. It’s mostly talk – well-written, thought-provoking talk, but still talk. You are basically shooting bunches of people in various rooms, watching a 1970-level supercomputer chatter, snarl, and ping its way through its reels of magnetic tape like an irascible pinball machine.

Director Joe Sargent was a workhorse in film and TV, best known for the original The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974) and he solves the problem by shooting almost as one would an old-school live TV drama – bouncing from medium shots to tight close-ups, using a few pans and push-throughs to maintain a sense of movement in these very static setups. The closer framing and rhythmic editing gives the film a pulse and propels the viewer along with it.

Composer Michel Colombier amassed more than 100 screen credits, but is surprisingly little-known. His score for Colossus is remarkable – composed of alternating passages of percussion and slashing, pulsing, plucked strings, a profane intersection of Ravel and Steve Reich. It punctuates the action perfectly, points the narrative forward, and keeps the tension high.

The conceit is well-constructed. Sometime in the near future (OK excepting for the legacy computer hardware), Dr. Charles Forbin (Eric Braeden) invents a supercomputer, Colossus, that will defend the United States from attack by, what else? The Soviet Union! Or course there is more than a hint of the twin Cold War films of 1964, Fail Safe and Dr. Strangelove here. The president is a Kennedy lookalike played by Gordon Pinsent, who is enormously pleased until, oh, about five minutes after being turned on, Colossus makes like an cranky dad who yells “PULL OVER!” and takes over the wheel of civilization from foolish mankind. Using the threat of nuclear annihilation, Colossus hooks up with its Soviet computer counterpart and takes control of the world quite efficiently.

Of course, we were smart enough to ensconce the damn thing inside a mountain in Colorado, making it completely invulnerable, a modern-day dragon. Yes, that placement is supposed to be modeled directly on the Cold War-era NORAD command center inside Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado Springs; the government refused to give the film permission to shoot second-unit footage there. Sharp eyes will recognize the Colossus entrance as the redressed Lawrence Hall of Science at Berkeley.

Eric Braeden as Forbin

A key in the success of the film is the believability of Eric Braeden as Forbin. Born Hans Gudegast, he got his start as the last of the post-World-War-II Teutonic bad guys, working extensively in film and in TV shows such as Combat! and The Rat Patrol. In Colossus, he would demonstrate a reserved, leading-man integrity and charisma that would mark him for later success, most notably in a 35-year career as villainous Victor Newman on the soap opera The Young and the Restless.

Braeden changed his name, but not his accent, an important choice in Colossus that reminds us of the Faustian bargain America made with many émigré German scientists who collaborated with the Nazis, but whose sins were forgiven in the name of national security. Forbin, the pure digital scientist, creates a ruthless tyrant that implements terror via an implacable logic, much like the ideological dictators of the 20^th century – Hitler, Mao, Stalin – who proved supreme at scientifically calculated mass murders on an industrial scale.

(Please note, all Aryan-German scientists in film are amoral; however, Jewish-German scientists in film all possess consciences, rational doubts, AND dispense really good spiritual advice. They are like rabbis with PhDs. At our house we call this the Sam Jaffe syndrome.)

Sam Jaffe as kindly Professor Jacob Barnhardt in "The Day the Earth Stood Still" (1951).

Colossus becomes more despotic and violent as the film proceeds, but the human players never play a scene over the top. No one blanches, makes a stirring speech, or breaks down; the scenes are buzzing with the aura of intelligent people working in quiet desperation, trying to defeat something that can think faster than they can. Only Forbin’s final rebellion causes him to emote.

Other highlights: the supporting cast is a who’s-who of solid and recognizable character actors. Susan Clark is Forbin’s fellow scientist and nominal love interest. Look close and you’ll see Marion Ross, Georg Stanford Brown, James Hong, and Martin Brooks (the last bet remembered as Dr. Rudy from TV’s Six Million Dollar Man/Bionic Woman franchise). Dolph Sweet plays his usual military man. Bill Schallert, who normally plays the most genial of dads, finally gets to play someone cynical here, the CIA director.

As the film moves along, Colossus grows senses – first pervasive audio surveillance, then a worldwide network of camera eyes, followed by a grating, menacing electric monotone of a voice (played by radio and voiceover legend Paul Frees). It is pushing its own evolution forward, and demands the removal of the population of Cyprus so the island can be converted into a new structure for its expanded self. When asked how to move half a million people immediately, “If man cannot solve that problem, I can,” it intones humorlessly.

The novel ends with Colossus asserting that mankind will come to love its reign, an echo of Orwell’s 1984. (Slyly, the movie shows a pudgy teenager listening to Colossus’s speech clad in – a Colossus T-shirt! Obviously the supercomputer is hip to the whole merchandising angle as well.)

The filmmakers end the film at an impasse of wills, an ambivalence that is much stronger than any contrived happy ending could be. Like Melville’s Bartleby, Forbin’s only capability in the end is refusing to cooperate, to say no, if ultimately unable even to turn on his creation and at least try to monkeywrench it.

Persistent through they may be, we continue to beat the machines in our fictional worlds, or least fight them to a draw, or go down defiantly. Wishful thinking? Artificial intelligence is so deeply encoded into First World reality that, if it is harmful, it may prove impossible to remove it without killing the patients. Films like Colossus celebrate our presumed ability to continue to choose.

NEXT TIME: The 10,000 transgressive pleasures of the original Vanishing Point