SUNDAY JULY 18
21:30
FAHRENHEIT 451 (1966)
Directed by François Truffaut
108 minutes
in English with English subtitles
To make a science fiction film based on a novel by Ray Bradbury was a
surprising choice for one of the leading directors of the French New
Wave, François Truffaut. But from the opening credits onward, Truffaut
takes Bradbury’s fascinating premise and makes it his own. The
futuristic society depicted in Fahrenheit 451 is a culture where books
are illegal. Firemen race around in red trucks and wear helmets, but
they don’t put out fires (everything is now fireproof)…their job
rather is to make public bonfires of forbidden stashes of books. By
the way, to help you understand the title of the film, fahrenheit 451
is the temperature that paper burns.
Oskar Werner, the star of Truffaut’s Jules and Jim, plays a fireman
named Montag, whose exposure to an illegal copy of David Copperfield
wakens an instinct toward reading and individual thought. In an great
casting choice actress Julie Christie plays two roles: Montag’s bored,
drugged-up wife, but also the woman who helps kindle the spark of
rebellion. (Rebellion…does anyone even remember what that word means
these days?). The great Bernard Herrmann (composer of Psycho) wrote
the hard-driving music, and Nicolas Roeg (director of Walkabout, The
Man who Fell to Earth) provided the cinematography.
The film does have an outdated veneer (a retro-vision of the future) -
the sets and the costumes are very 60ish -but for me that’s part of
the charm, and it does nothing to deter from the ideas being
expressed. After all, its depiction of a narcissistic, alienated,
superficial, mass media lobotomized culture might ring true for more
than a few of us. The movie also shows the fireman’s wife as being
addicted to medication to neutralize her emotions. All of the “normal”
human relations that are shown in the movie appear to be detached and
lacking emotion…. people just don’t care that much anymore except
about their own pleasure and are more interested in their wall-sized
interactive flat screens than anything else. The film doesn’t end in
bleakness, but leaves us with an ending which is sublime.
