181. 1984

Song - Eye In The Sky (The Alan Parsons Project)

Movie: 1984 (Michael Radford, 1984)

During its ending credits a title card informs us that this film was "photographed in and around London during the period April-June 1984, the exact time and setting imagined by the author." That's a curious statement! Because the London, the actually existing city, in which the film was photographed doesn't bear any resemblance to the setting imagined by George Orwell. More importantly, it doesn't bear any resemblance to the city as it is imagined by the filmmakers. The film looks like it has been filmed on a studio set that is designed to resemble an unspecified dystopian city. The outdoor spaces we get to see are mostly grey disheveled streets filled with equaly disheveled concrete blocks that only seem to exist in relation to themselves. Radford never zooms out of a location to give us even a basic sense of the geography of the place. Where exactly is the pawn shop Winston (John Hurt) and Julia (Suzanna Hamilton) visit to hide their illicit love affair? What is surrounding it? How do they get there from one place to another without being seen? Their visit to the country side is equally disorienting. We never get to see how they actually arrive at that spot, presented in exceptionally bright green colors, giving it a fantastical dreamlike look that clearly distinguishes and disconnects it from the drabness of the city.

The country side is also the only place in the film where Winston and Julia are free from Big Brother. Everywhere else they go they are surrounded by giant screens spouting propaganda about the succesful war efforts of Oceania, or about its expanded production capacity. I am a fan of shots in which a (preferably silhouetted!) human figure is envelopped/dwarfed/overwhelmed by a giant screen in the background and this film got plenty of those. Moreover, they are photographed by Roger Deakins, who was evidently an incredibly accomplished cinematographer from they very start of his career. Similarly. I hope the art directors and costume and production designers working on this film got a wonderful career out of it, because they truly did a fantastic job in creating a totalitarian dystopian city that bears little resemblance to their contemporary society. That is also why I could never really get on board with it. The film often seems more interested in expressing its reverence for Orwell's book, than in expressing its fear of totalitarianism. 

That title card at the end explains a lot. Watching the film you often get the feeling that adapting 1984 in 1984 is the main reason for its existence. It is so smothered in artificiality, and has so little sense of (or connection to) the real world that it plays like a book report by people who want to explain why George Orwell's ideas are so important, but can't ever conceive of living in a totalitarian society. The film distances itself so much from contemporary British society that it can't imagine any aspect of British society ever potentially leading to totalitarainism. It's a bit too safely patriotic and has a holier-than-thou attitude (totalitarianism is something that happens to other people, the Brits are just there to highlight the dangers of it) that I found offputting.