cutriver

So I'm settling into my apartment in Paris and relaxing into the rhythm of the city. 'Relaxing', I suppose, is not at all the appropriate word, since the rhythm of the city essentially consists of rushing around being very busy, spending an awful lot of money and a lot of time in the metro. Oh, and going to the cinema a lot...

So, apologies, but what I have to eport today is of a cinematic nature and has little to do specifically with Paris (Thora warned me about this...)

First film I went to see in Paris was I, Robot. There would appear to be a certain amount of Micosoft bashing to this film (gags about ' a robot in every home' etc), which is fine but, given that there are two obscene examples of product placement within the first five minutes, I doubt the film's progressive corporate politics extend very far. Also, the future cars in I, Robot are essentially Audi TTs fitted with a sort of cheap plastic armour plating. Why is it that, in science fiction movies, cars of the future are always made to look like this? Surely there is not now, nor has there ever been any indication that car design is heading this way?

Despite these minor quibbles, though, I, Robot is in the best tradition of American science fiction, appropriating popular forms in order to explore serious philosophical questions. As no less an authority than (ahem) Germaine Greer intimated on British TV last week, the three fundamental laws of the robotics code serve to remind us of the aporia of Diodore that lies of the root of the philosophical problem of free will and agency. To wit: if any two of the following statements are true, the third must be false:-
1) a situation cannot exist and not exist at the same time
2) not everything that is possible will be realised
3) the possible cannot logically follow from the impossible

I can't remember the detail of this argument, so will leave you to get your heads around it. To sum up the ambition of I, Robot, however, suffice it to say that its concluding image offers, quietly but powerfully, a vision of the surpassing of humanity.


It is difficult to imagine a more complete contrast with I, Robot than Andrew Kotting's This Filthy Earth. A free adaptation of Emile Zola's La Terre, it is uncertainly situated, in terms of geography and time, but only unrecognisable if you've never spent any time around the English working classes. Most importantly, Kotting's jittery, out-of-focus, hand-held close-ups of animals and mud and skin and violence are an appropriate expression of the unrelenting ugliness and vicious Darwinism that Zola saw around him and described in his novels. I myself have fantasised about remaking a film of La Bete humaine that, unlike the versions of Jean Renoir and Fritz Lang, constrained respectively by 1930s French cinema and 1950s Hollywood, would be as upfront as Zola himself about the murderous sexual instincts and unredeemed unpleasantness that reign across the narrative.

And I wonder whether the simultaneous release of these two such different films in Paris isn't in itself significant: as though an attempt to get to grips with technologies that we have invented but don't understand must go hand in hand with a confrontation of our unreconstructed bestiality.