The arts
By James Delson
The eighth International Paris Festival of Science Fiction and Fantasy Films, which convened for ten days this March, was the largest gathering of its kind ever held in Europe. Some 50,000 fans converged on the Rex Cinema, Paris’s largest movie theater, and nearly half of them were turned away. Inside, science fiction and fantasy filled the screen; outside, riots, traffic jams, and defiant devotees filled the streets.
“No one believed there would be an audience for this type of film when I started the festival in 1972,” explained Alan Schlockoff, who created and organized the festival, “but the number of people attracted every year has grown enormously. We’ve had to move to larger and larger theaters over the years, but there still isn’t nearly enough space to accommodate everyone.” Founder and editor of L’Ecran Fantastique, France’s only publication devoted entirely to fantasy and science-fiction films, Schlockoff has been a life-long fan of the genre. His passionate pursuit of fellow fanatics has led him, through the magazine and the festival, almost single-handedly to galvanize the French science-fiction film audience into a recognizable force.
Of course, the organization of such a group is still to come. With neither funds for proper security nor fully subtitled prints of many of the films being shown in the festival, Schlockoff’s problems at this years gathering were manifold. Police were called upon to disperse the angry crowds that had been denied entrance to the overcrowded theater. Their anger was justified, however, because many people had stood in line in the rain for up to five hours to get in. While the traffic jams spread, paralyzing the area for hours, the films rolled on inside - two, three, sometimes four a night - from early evening til 1 A.M. Though there weren’t any real riots inside the theater, the spectators were the most vocal, unsophisticated, and least considerate I have ever seen. Their antics included armies of paper airplanes hurled toward the movie screen and buckets of confetti dumped from the top balcony, as well as yelling jokes, curses and songs any time the screen was not filled with horror, violence, or mayhem of the lowest common denominator. Though Schlockoff’s festival is the biggest in Europe, it is also representative of the wide gap between science-fiction film fans and the readers of “serious” mainstream novels.
“It’s quite simple,” explained Stan Barets, owner of Paris’s largest science-fiction bookshop. “The people who come to the festival are generally kids who have dropped out of high school and who work in unskilled jobs. They don’t come to see imaginative stories or good performances. They come for the blood. Perhaps only twenty percent of the audience has ever read a science-fiction novel. French readers are the opposite. They are generally well educated and have discarded the science-fiction cinema because there is so little that’s worth seeing compared to the riches available in print. There’s almost no crossover.”
Schlockoff has elicited an immense response from the public, but he has found himself caught in a double-bind situation. Since the festival has been unable to attract large numbers of important films (i.e. classy big-budget productions), audiences have grown accustomed to experiencing the event instead of trying to appreciate the pictures. Because the audiences are both demanding and unsophisticated, the major film companies have generally avoided submitting their movies to the potential embarrassment of this ordeal. Moreover, the festival can not really help a good film, because Schlockoff’s awards, like those given by most festivals, carry little weight with the general audience.
This year’s entries were dominated by American-made horror films, unlikely to be released in first-run theaters in the States. These movies, including SUMMER OF FEAR, TOURIST TRAP, DEVIL TIMES FIVE, ALIEN FACTOR, THE BERMUDA DEPTHS, ALIEN ZONE, NOCTURNA, and SANCTUARY FOR EVIL, were supplemented by a sprinkling of better-quality fantasy and SF films from Italy, a smattering of STAR WARS rip-offs, and a few excellent U.S.-made chillers.
The Rex Cinema is a beautiful dinosaur of a theater, smaller than Radio City Music Hall but with the same grandiose feel of the days when movies were more of an event than a national pastime. Both the main lobby and the balcony feature bars where soda, beer, snacks, and sandwhiches of pate and sausage are available, and the seats are plush and comfortable.
Under ordinary circumstances, attending a film festival in such surroundings would have been a treat, but entering the theater on opening night, I was taken aback by the uproar. Used to the staid, sophisticated audiences of New York and Los Angeles film festivals, I was unprepared for the continuous noise and obnoxious conduct of of the crowd. It seemed more like a wrestling match than a film festival.
Lionel Lehva, a young French critic who has attended all eight Paris festivals, offered this analysis: “people wait all year for this event. It’s a tradition. They don’t just want to sit and watch the films when they get here. They come in order to shout and sing and throw things. It’s like a rock-music festival, where the experience is more important than the music. Of course, in the years when the films have been better there has been less noise, but when all the films are bad, what else is there to do?”
This proved true throughout the festival. When a good movie was screened, the audience behaved fairly normally. But since that was rarely the case, the experience of the event was one of constantly coping with trouble instead of judging the films. Even when the films were of superior quality, one thing never ceased: the throwing of paper planes toward the screen. Perhaps a thousand or more were launched every night, though only a few actually reached their goal. “That’s the big game here,” Lehva said. “It is a great thing to have your plane reach the screen. Few of the films receive as much applause as any of the planes that manage to fly all the way in.”
Of the 10 shorts and 23 features shown, several merit particular attention: The most laughable films screened were MESSAGE FROM SPACE (Japan) and STAR CRASH (Italy), two STAR WARS derivations that featured souped-up space ships, laser weaponry, galactic empires, damsels in distress, robots and outer-space “dogfights.” Though neither would satisfy an American audience, they were, respectively, the opening-night and closing-night selections of the festival. STAR CRASH was awarded the public’s prize as the most popular film.
Two Italian films proved the most interesting of the non-American pictures at the gathering. THE HOUSE OF LAUGHING WINDOWS, directed by Pupi Avati, was a haunting mystery with supernatural overtones. A cross between DON’T LOOK NOW, BAD DAY AT BLACK ROCK, and HIGH NOON, the story told of a village’s collusion in the cover-up of a series of grisly murders. The only serious non-English-language film at the festival, it was voted the critic’s prize as best picture.
Tobe Hooper’s THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE, touted last month in this column by Dan O’Bannon as the state of the art in horror films before ALIEN, was awaited with the greatest anticipation of any entry. Record crowds, estimated at 5,000 or more, were turned away, causing the first riot outside. When the movie was shown, it turned out to be a heavily censored version, sorely disappointing the audience and almost provoking a second riot.
The unqualified hits of the festival were both American fantasy/SF/horror films. George Romero’s ZOMBIE (U.S. title: DAWN OF THE DEAD), the grimly stunning sequel to his 1968 classic, NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, is only the second part of a DEAD trilogy. A chilling vision of a future where living corpses are gradually taking over the world, ZOMBIE nearly got a standing ovation, prompting one critic to quip, “Well, the audience finally has all the blood it wanted.”
The most important film shown at the festival, winner of it’s grand prize and the best acting award (Jamie Lee Curtis, daughter of Janet Leigh and Tony Curtis), was John Carpenter’s HALLOWEEN. It was chosen earlier this year as best film at France’s Avoriaz Festival of Science Fiction. Its story of a mad killer on the loose kept every viewer on the edge of his seat for two hours. Carpenter, codirector, cowriter, and composer of the music for DARK STAR (also mentioned here last month), has directed only three features. HALLOWEEN demonstrates his potential to become one of the leading American dirctors of the 1980s.
Unlike other international film conclaves, the Paris Festival of Science Fiction and Fantasy Films has always been intended as an audience event instead of as a journalistic convention to drum up publicity for the pictures being screened. This is its strength, but also its weakness. Strength, because Schlockoff is responsible only to his audience, but weakness, because an event of this size could influence the genre instead of merely living off it.
Other SF festivals, in Avoriaz; Stiges, Spain; Trieste, Yugoslavia; and elsewhere, do not attract audiences in such numbers. Schlockoff is already planning on the ninth festival, scheduling it for this coming November instead of next winter. The fall is a better time for films that are due to be released. With Christmas ahead, Schlockoff will have a better chance at a wider selection, including more studio pictures.
This will be the first step toward making his event not only the biggest but the best festival in Europe. Now that he has found his audience, he needs publicity and prestige to raise the affair from a reunion of paper-plane hurlers to a viable survey of the current possibilities of the genre. Science-fiction films continue to proliferate, and this could be the showcase they need to gain recognition in the world market.
