Courtesy of Impawards.com
Michael Berube is the sleek, black buttoned-up and navy sport coated director of Penn State’s Institute for the Arts and Humanities. He is also one of the glorious masterminds behind State College’s Bad Futures Film Festival held at the State Theatre, 130 W. College Ave, from October 15 – 18. The other organizers included Dorn Hetzel and Kevin Hagopian from Penn State’s Film Department, as well as Mike Negra, the executive director of the State Theatre. When I met with Berube just after the opening of the festival on Friday the 15th, Berube took me up to “yon dream room” on the second floor of the State Theatre to discuss the 14 dystopian films that make up the festival.
The second floor room – with its clean vaulted ceiling, glossy wood floor, and trademark circular window on the architrave – was the perfect visual foil to all the films imagining the ultimate fall of man. Walking in with his white wine and Smart Water, Berube pointed at the oriental rug sprawling in the center of the room and joked, “When we asked for the room as a discussion space after the festival they asked us if we wanted it with or without carpet, so we said with!” The room, with rug, was even homier than usual with tables and chairs being set up as we entered.
But Berube is quick to take you out of that constructed utopia, “It’s only in the last couple hundred years,” he explained, “that people living in the present think of themselves distinctively as modern, as opposed to classical antiquity or 18th century antiquity or whatever, and so this idea of being modern itself has a history. And we may be worse. We may be the first couple generations to view themselves as modern and therefore doomed.”
All of the Bad Futures films understand that doom with an intense visualness. You can see for yourself with the schedule of the Bad Futures films: Blade Runner (1982), Fahrenheit 451 (1966), Children of Men (2006), Brazil (1985), and A Clockwork Orange (1971) on Friday; Sleeper (1973), Gattaca (1997), District 9 (2009), Code 46 (2003), and The Matrix (1999) on Saturday; and Fail Safe (1964), 28 Days Later (2002), Metropolis (1927), and 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) on Sunday.
With this layout of films, the Bad Futures organizers were really looking for a variety of apocalypses from nuclear to biological. The only regret was that they couldn’t get an animated film in on the mix. The Japanese animated film Akira, about a post-war Neo-Tokyo, was the dream film to fill this role, as it is completely “mind-exploding”. Unfortunately, the rights could not be obtained to show the film. With the live action films that remain, some of the futures that the dystopian directors imagine are not very plausible.
Berube described, “These are not predictable movies. In Children of Men there is a global infertility crisis. No. That’s not going to happen. Trust me. Gattaca is pretty plausible, or at least tries to be with how babies are born in that world. And District 9, there’s really going to be giant aliens landing on our world? No. But it doesn’t matter. They’re not predicting the future. They’re imagining a world. They give you implausible premises in totally believable worlds, and they do that visually. You can only get that kind of richness with a film.”
The way that the films are ordered in the festival pays tribute to the power of seeing our doom. The first film, Ridley Scott’s 1982 science fiction drama Blade Runner, has an interesting production story. At the last second, the production team put narration into the film because they thought the story would be unintelligible without it. Interestingly, if you get the director’s cut of Blade Runner, the voiceover is removed again showing a change in attitudes over the power of the visual in conveying a dystopian downfall. But the version of Blade Runner included as a part of the Bad Futures festival has the voiceover in it as a contrast to the final film, Stanley Kubrik’s 1968 mind bender 2001: A Space Odyssey. In Kubrik’s case, he started with narration over his filmed material but took it out at the last second. 2001 then became the first movie that he did without voiceover. In a 160 minute movie (premiere cut), only about 40 minutes is dialogue. For the rest of the time 2001 is basically a silent movie showing a whole deconstructed world.
Here is the first, and probably only, time that many people will be able to see these films on the big screen, which was part of the appeal of the festival in the first place. But a more pressing goal of Bad Futures was to actually create an event for a film culture in State College.
“The State Theatre is a beautiful venue,” Berube said, “The acoustics are great, the entire feel of the place is great. And I’d love there to be more of a film culture here. They book a lot of really great indie films and I’ve seen a number of them here with, you know, eight other people. So if we could double that, if we can expand, and if the State Theatre wants to do [the festival] again, if this goes well this year, and we could make it an annual thing, I know it will pick up momentum.”
Berube’s enthusiasm is catching, even in a town that as recently as 2001 only had 11 screens. So far, the response to the festival has been overwhelmingly positive. Berube did say that he had hoped to fill the house at the 1pm festival opening with Blade Runner, since it was free to everyone while the rest of the festival is only free to Penn State students with their IDs, but he was pleased with the increased turnout for Fahrenheit 451. He thought 451 would be the weak link in the festival because it’s not as visual as the other films. The shocking turnout only evidences the growing energy around the event, which concludes finally on Monday Oct. 18 with a “Post-Mortem” discussion, if you’re not too exhausted by bad futures by then.
