Marinetti's Hero

Rating: Null/10 (21 September 2012)

A few way cool things to talk about:
Every time a machine works right down to a wheelbarrow, it changes everything. It deeply alters and affects experience, and in time the new experience dictates its own logic and vision. You simply cannot fail to appreciate, for instance, the tremendous opening up of vision enabled by the automobile invention: new borders to the world, radically new impressions of seeing (in-car), the new span for knowledge, experience and time, and how that reprograms everything, like how far you can travel to court a woman and spread your genes. We are all being rewired these days by this internet thingamajig.
One of these new roads paved (in part) by the automobile was an Italian movement called Futurism. Those guys took to rapturous, often combative appreciation of everything new about technology in the 1910's, fascinated by mechanics, speed, industrial noise, the precision of gears (which they hoped to express in art). Incidental to that was their fervent support of war, in their view nature's machinery for cleansing itself. Ideas from there seeped to the newly formed Soviet Union, and melded with Marxism found cinematic expression in guys like Dziga Vertov: if you don't know, he was up to some pretty radical things, looking for machine-like precision in the gears of vision.
Flash forward - sixty years later. Roger Corman's factory is one of few places where film is an actual assembly-line. Sets, shots, effects, they're all interchangeable parts cheaply recycled from one b-film to the next. A young James Cameron is tutoring there. His focus is strictly on making devices work, function above art. This is nothing like the computer-generated effects we have now, those days it was a job you did with your hands and KY jello. He's one of few talented guys working for Corman, a real workhorse. He's so driven, the story goes that he flew all the way to Italy to fight producers over control of the dreadful Piranha gig.
So here's Cameron's start in the business, the first time he was in control of both mechanical parts and the overall machinery of camera and vision. The idea reportedly came to him while in Rome, a single image: a metallic endoskeleton emerges from flames. This could be his way of denying the Harlan Ellison influence, but either way. You can imagine the incredible , primeval allure of that vision to a practical man like him; it must have been high pleasure of the scope of a naval engineer caressing with his mind the steel hull of a new submarine.
And this is what the film is about, a craftsman's vision of what he does. Mechanism.
Oh, there is a story of nuclear wars and time travel from a bleak future. There is a love interest and actual scene of lovemaking. But, all of it is mechanical on the human end, simple cogs. It's sketched quite clearly in the film; the film flags when we stop to have story explained to us, until we return to the exciting precision of function of the Terminator plot. The function is strictly violence, Marinetti's exhilarating futuristic war meant to cleanse the world of rotten humanity, and all the other Futurist tropes, the obsession with cars and speed, with gears.
Central among the gear is of course a machine that is spliced into the world to bare its mechanism: rods, gears, voice emulator, repair skills, ruptured silicon skin reveals electronic -camera- eye. The accompanying Terminator-vision might as well have given video games their start in first perspective.
Everything else is only incidental to the machine, only skin dressing for it to be presented in the world of humans and storytelling, to cross into our world from Cameron's workshop.
Cameron does well, except one thing. I lament that he wasn't introduced by someone to Texas Chainsaw the way Scott was in preparation for Alien. It is not the roughly same genre of the two films. It's learning from Hooper's accomplishment of violent energy purely channeled and sustained in the fabric of the film, no stories asked.
And everything we learn about that future is simply nonsense - my favorite bit is that machines have marshaled men in forced labor of disposing their own!
Imagine the same film without a story of explanations, a bit like the first Alien. Two men have come back from god knows where, one a machine. The rest is tension, darkness, gears, heavy metal.
The machine is only defeated by another machine, human-operated.
Instead of going Vertov's way, Cameron would go on to attach despotic overambition to those clumsy storytelling skills - a mechanistic approach to narrative and 'message'. His cinematic machine worked, years of dedicated Corman practice made sure. And it changed everything, further tunneling our vision.