modernity
15 films tagged with “modernity”
WALL-E
The first thirty minutes of WALL-E contain almost no dialogue and constitute one of the most precise depictions of work ever put on film. A small robot wakes up, charges his solar panels, puts on his treads, and goes to…
A.I. Artificial Intelligence
Kubrick developed A.I. for decades before passing it to Spielberg, and the film bears the marks of two incompatible sensibilities trying to share a single argument. That tension is, accidentally, its greatest asset for t…
eXistenZ
Cronenberg's speculative technology is not digital but biological. The game pods in eXistenZ are grown from synthetic amphibian eggs, they connect to the player's spinal cord through an umbilical cord plugged into a surg…
Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade
Jin-Roh is structured around a question that never gets asked aloud: who is using whom? Kazuki Fuse, the elite trooper at the film's centre, believes himself to be acting from feeling — guilt over a girl's death, attachm…
Perfect Blue
The mechanism that destroys Mima Kirigoe is not the stalker, and not the murders. It is the fan website. Early in the film, Mima discovers a site called 'Mima's Room' — a first-person diary written in her voice, by someo…
Wings of Desire
Damiel and Cassiel drift through Berlin in 1987. The Wall is still standing. The city is full of people thinking — not talking, thinking — and the two angels can hear every one of them. They sit in the Staatsbibliothek a…
Videodrome
Brian O'Blivion is the first character in cinema to understand that a medium is not a delivery mechanism but an environment, and to draw the conclusion that an environment, given enough time and exposure, does not merely…
Being There
The first thing to understand about Being There is that Chance the Gardener does not deceive anyone. He never claims expertise. He never adjusts his language to his audience. He says what he knows — that gardens have sea…
Playtime
To film a city that does not work for the people inside it, Tati built one. Tativille rose on waste ground outside Paris: glass office blocks on rails so they could be repositioned between shots, streets, traffic lights,…
Fahrenheit 451
The firemen in Truffaut's film are not thugs, and that is the point that makes the whole thing land. Captain Beatty speaks clearly, reasons well, and explains his work with the patient authority of a man who has thought…
Alphaville
The most unsettling science fiction film ever made about a computer contains no special effects, no futuristic sets, no technology that did not already exist when the camera rolled. Godard shot Alphaville in 1965 Paris —…
Mon Oncle
The Villa Arpel is a machine for demonstrating status. Every element of it — the fish-shaped fountain activated only when guests arrive, the garage door that opens before the car has stopped, the kitchen that runs itself…
Stray Dog
Kurosawa made Stray Dog in 1949, four years into the American occupation, and the film is saturated with the specific texture of that moment: a city still half-rubble, a generation of young men who came back from the war…
Modern Times
The opening title of Modern Times announces a story of industry, of individual enterprise, humanity crusading in the pursuit of happiness, and then cuts to sheep being herded through a gate and workers emerging from a su…
Metropolis
Metropolis is the first film to take a management theory and build it as architecture. The city is stacked: intellect on top, hands underneath, and a hundred metres of rock in between so that neither has to look at the o…