REVIEWS
A landmark collaboration between writer H. G. Wells, producer Alexander Korda, and designer and director William Cameron Menzies, Things to Come is a science fiction film like no other, a prescient political work that predicts a century of turmoil and progress. Skipping through time, Things to Come bears witness to world war, disease, dictatorship, and, finally, utopia. “Vincent Korda, the film’s production designer, first approached Fernand Léger to design the sets but was unhappy with the result. His next choice, Le Corbusier, declined to be involved. So Korda (the brother of director Alexander) turned to his fellow Hungarian émigré, László Moholy-Nagy, who was then living in London. The sets feature extraordinary curved atria criss-crossed by sky bridges, with elevators in glass tubes rising through them. It was a remarkable vision, at once abstract but also owing something to Le Corbusier and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Moholy-Nagy’s former colleague at the Bauhaus. (The sets also prefigured the spiralling interior of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim museum in New York.) In this vision of the future, the house has disappeared, the living is communal. This world more closely resembles one of John Portman’s vast Atlanta hotels than a conventional house of the future. It is a common future fantasy, part communitarian dream, part nightmare, in which privacy and ownership have been lost.” — Edwin Heathcote, Financial Times Restoration by the British Film Institute |
FILM SOCIETY SCREENINGS
Palmerston North Monday, 2 April, 6:00pm Dunedin Wednesday, 18 April, 7:30pm Wellington Monday, 30 April, 6:15pm Hamilton Monday, 7 May, 8:00pm Auckland Monday, 21 May, 6:30pm |
