Introductory remarks
THIS is essentially a spectacular
film. It shows the world devastated by modern warfare, the fabric of society
shattered, and the world depopulated by a new pestilence, the Wandering Sickness,
of which the peculiar horror is that the sufferer, like a sheep stricken
with the gid, wanders infectiously until death ends the wandering. The pestilence
completes the social disorganisation wars have begun. Mankind, however, is
not exterminated by this sickness; some types are immune and among these
there are many who remember the order and science of their earlier years.
The fall of modern civilisation has been very swift, a matter of a few decades;
the flourishing time, the rich promise, of the opening twentieth century
is still remembered, and so, after an interlude during which most regions
of the earth have fallen under the barbaric sway of warring brigand chiefs,
the men of knowledge and technicians, and more particularly the aviators
and transport engineers, get together, revive the old mechanisms, take control
and build up a new civilisation upon rational lines. This time it is a World
Pax they create, for most of the political landmarks and limitations of our
present time have been washed out by forty years of confusion. And it is
a scientific order of society; for what other alternative to perpetual conflict
can the future hold for us?
The book upon which this story rests, The Shape of Things
to Come, is essentially an imaginative discussion of social and
political forces and possibilities, and a film is no place for argument.
The conclusions of that book therefore are taken for granted in this film,
and a new story has been invented to display them, a story woven first about
the life of one man, John Cabal, who is an aviator, who passes unscathed
through both war and epidemic and becomes the stalwart grey-haired leader
and inspiration of the air men, and then in the second part, about his grandson,
Oswald Cabal, head of the world council, and a living embodiment of the spirit
of human adventure, who finds himself in a new conflict with the conservative
and reactionary elements that are still strong in the human community.
The film moves swiftly through opening scenes of warfare,
destruction and deepening misery, and broadens out to display the grandiose
spectacle of a reconstructed world. Mankind, by a great moral and intellectual
effort, has solved the main economic and social perplexities that distress
us to-day, and lives either upon a cleansed and beautiful countryside or
in great, half-subterranean cities, bedded in the hills, flooded with artificial
light and sweet and clean with perfectly conditioned air. The surplus energies
of the race spend themselves upon constructive and creative art and science.
Incessant exploration is the essential thing in science, and some of the
young and more adventurous spirits have become urgent to reach out to the
moon. On this the drama of the concluding portion turns. Cabal's daughter
and her lover, Maurice Passworthy, have volunteered to be the first human
beings to leave the earth on the moon voyage, they have been accepted on
account of their exceptional fitness, and Cabal is torn between instinctive
tenderness and heroic exaltation. The expedition has roused a widespread
opposition among the more æsthetic types in the community, who resent
the sternness of the rule of the men of science and are in revolt against
what they regard as the wanton exposure of young and beautiful people to
danger, hardship and death. An eloquent poet and artist, Theotocopulos, leads
the people in this new revolt. He clamours for a return to what he calls
"the simple natural life of man." So the film culminates in a conflict, about
a gigantic "Space Gun," between the human conservative instincts and human
courage and adventurousness, and it ends in a note of interrogation among
the stars.
Note to the Reader
THIS was the first film "Treatment" written by the Author for actual production, and he found much more difficulty in making it than he did in any of its successors. He learnt his trade upon it. His previous effort in film writing, a silent film, The King who was a King, was an entirely amateurish effort which never reached the screen. What is before the reader here is the last of several drafts. An earlier treatment was made, discussed, worked upon for a little and discarded. It was a prentice effort and the author owes much to the friendly generosity of Alexander Korda, Lajos Biro, and Cameron Menzies, who put all their experience at his disposal during this revision. They were greatly excited by the general conception , but they found the draft quite impracticable for production. A second treatment was then written. This, with various modifications, was made into a scenario of the old type. This scenario again was set aside for a second version, and this again was revised and put back into the form of the present treatment. Korda and the author had agreed upon an innovation in film technique, to discard the elaborate detailed technical scenario altogether and to produce directly from the descriptive treatment here given. We have found this work very well in practice given a competent director. By this time, however, the author, now almost through the toils of apprenticeship, was in a state of fatigue towards the altered, revised and reconstructed text, and, though he has done his best to get it into tolerable film prose he has an uneasy sense that many oddities and awkwardnesses of expression that crept in during the scenario have become now so familiar to him that he has become blind to them and has been unable to get rid of. them.
The Music
THE music is a part of the
constructive scheme of the film, and the composer, Mr. Arthur Bliss, was
practically a collaborator in its production. In this as in many other respects,
this film, so far at least as its intention goes, is boldly experimental.
Sound sequences and picture sequences were made to be closely interwoven.
This Bliss music is not intended to be tacked on; it is a part of the design.
The spirit of the opening is busy and fretful and into it creeps a deepening
menace. Then come the crashes and confusions of modern war. The second part
is the distressful melody and grim silences of the pestilence period. In
the third, military music and patriotic tunes are invaded by the throbbing
return of the air men. This throbbing passes into the mechanical crescendo
of the period of reconstruction. This becomes more swiftly harmonious and
softer and softer as greater efficiency abolishes that clatter of strenuous
imperfection which was so distinctive of the earlier mechanical civilisation
of the nineteenth century. The music of the new world is gay and spacious.
Against this plays the motif of the reactionary revolt; ending in the stormy
victory of the new ideas as the Space Gun fires and the moon cylinder starts
on its momentous journey. The music ends with anticipations of a human triumph
in the heroic finale amidst the stars.
It cannot be pretended that in actual production it was possible
to blend the picture and music so closely as Bliss and I had hoped at the
beginning. The incorporation of original music in film production is still
in many respects an unsolved problem. But Bliss's admirable music has also
been separately performed and gramophone records of it are obtainable.
Memorandum
Circulated during production to everyone concerned in designing
and making the costumes, decoration, etc., for the concluding
phase (A.D. 2055) of "Things to Come."
THERE are certain principles
in this undertaking to be observed, which as yet do not seem to be as clearly
grasped as they must be. I make no apology therefore for reiterating these
principles now as emphatically as possible.
The first is this, that in the final scenes we are presenting
a higher phase of civilisation than the present, where there is greater wealth,
finer order, higher efficiency. Human affairs in that more organised world
will not be hurried, they will not be crowded, there will be more leisure,
more dignity. The rush and jumble and strain of contemporary life due to
the uncontrolled effects of mechanism, are not to be raised to the nth power.
On the contrary they are to be eliminated. Things, structures, in general,
will be great, yes, but they will not be monstrous. Men will not be reduced
to servitude and uniformity, they will be released to freedom and variety.
All the balderdash one finds in such a film as Fritz Lange's
Metropolis about "robot workers" and ultra skyscrapers, etc., etc.,
should be cleared out of your minds before you work on this film. As a general
rule you may take it that whatever Lange did in Metropolis is the
exact contrary of what we want done here. Soldiers in the phalanx or in the
Zulu impi or in the infantry fighting of the eighteenth century, plantation
labourers, galley slaves, early factory workers, peasants, "common people"
generally in the past, were infinitely more uniform and "mechanical" than
any people of the future will be. Machinery has superseded the subjugation
and "mechanisation" of human beings. Please keep that in mind. The
workers to be shown are individualised workers doing responsible co-operative
team work. And work will be unobtrusive in the coming civilisation.
So will working costumes. Function will not obtrude. You will
not see people rushing about in a monstrous rig, all goggles and padding
and gadgets like the early aviators. People will not be plastered over with
gadgets as though they had recently looted Mr. Gamage's well-known notion
stores. Men and women of the future will carry the equivalents of the purse,
pocket book, fountain pen, watch, etc., etc., of to-day, but these things
will be unobtrusive and subservient in a graceful decorative scheme. Just
as when we were discussing the music for this film we decided that in the
reconstruction Part the early phase should be full of effort and mechanical
clangour and that this should merge in harmony and almost noiseless running,
as the machinery increased in smooth efficiency, so the costumes also must
not be noisy. People in the future will not be rigged up like telephone
poles or as if they had just escaped from some sort of electrical operating
room. They will not wear costumes of cellophane illuminated by neon lights
or anything extravagant of that sort. Do bear in mind that the most extravagant
costumes known in the world are those made by savages for ceremonial dances
and the like.
For reasons that I have given again and again--the fact that
in the future various light apparatus such as a portable radio, electric
torch, notebook, will have to be carried on the person and that this will
probably necessitate a widening of those broadly padded shoulders which are
already necessary in the costume of contemporary men because of their wallets
and fountain pens--I anticipate a costume, broad on the shoulders and fine
about the legs and feet, with a fairly simple coiffure, more reminiscent
of "Tudor" (Renaissance) style than anything else the world has seen. Fine
materials we want but not extraordinary materials. For such a man as Cabal
I want a white or silver costume of very pure material. I want him to look
a fine gentleman, not a padded lunatic or an armoured gladiator. There will
be a radio telephone arrangement on his chest no more obtrusive than a modern
breast pocket, and he will wear a long fine gauntlet on one wrist, in which
various small conveniences, the equivalent of the contemporary fountain pen,
etc., and an identification disk-- his introduction card so to speak--will
be carried. The identification disk I make a general feature. There may be
beautiful embroidery or patterning on his silky clothing.
The released energy of the future is sure to find a considerable
outlet in detailed decoration. Passworthy's costume should be highly decorative.
Morden Mitani likes the effectiveness of black, Theotocopulos borders on
extravagance--a vast cloak, a rich body costume. Clothing will have a
style, but within the limits of that style it will be very varied.
Some women, especially the younger and shapelier, will dress like youths,
but there are invincible æsthetic reasons why a certain number of them
should have considerable skirts. In a clean indoor city, there will be no
hygienic objections to quite long skirts. And the broad shoulders that will
rule masculine and (either by contrast or imitation) feminine costume, call
aloud for cloaks, the most dramatic of garments.
There we have the guiding rules to observe. These marked out
limitations and state a style, but within these limitations and style I would
say to our designers: "For God's sake let yourselves go." But remember,
fine clothes, please; not nightmare stuff, not jazz. People are not going
about in glass jars or aluminium boilers or armour or cellophane. They are
not going to dress like super-sandwich men. Nor are they going to encumber
themselves with big wigs and stays. Nor be "nudists"--neither Adamites nor
angels. Being inventive and original is not being extravagant and silly.
Fine clothes and dignified clothes, please, for the new world.
Return to Things to Come - The "Film Story"
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