Life itself may feel a bit on the dystopian side these days, but if we’ve learned anything, it’s that no one knows what will happen next, which makes it a perfect time for the ’s Cinematic Dystopia series, which starts on July 1. The series of films looks at very different futuristic movie dystopias, and it can be fun to see what they got wrong and scary to look at what they were right about. This series follows the premiere of Francis Ford Coppola’s at Cannes, a movie about an architect (Adam Driver) who wants to rebuild the world as a utopia following a disaster.
Megalopolis hasn’t been released here yet, so it isn’t included, but Coppola dreamed of making this movie for decades, and the movies the cinematheque is showing include films that inspired him to create it. Fritz Lang’s classic 1927 German Expressionist silent movie, , opens this program. It portrays a future society sharply divided between the workers, who are the vast majority, and a small, carefree ruling class.
The overlords create a robot double to replace a visionary young woman who preaches social equality. Forget the remake, but see the 1966 version by Francois Truffaut of an adaptation of the novel by Ray Bradbury, which has deservedly become a classic. The title refers to the temperature at which books burn, and Oskar Werner plays a book-burner in a society in which all books are banned, who is lured into a subversive literary life when he meets a beautiful, mysterious woman played by Julie.