THE GLASS FORTRESS

'''THE GLASS FORTRESS. Alan B., dir.''' (= Alain Bourret). 2016. Pierre-Antoine Piter (Daniel, Ex-D503), Amélie DeSwarte (Iris, Ex-I330), Julien Prost (The Well Doer), featured players. Fanny Storck: photography, visual effects, film editing. Rémi Orts: music and sound effects. Available subtitled in French, English, Spanish, Russian, and German. On YouTube in English. 28.5 minutes.

Short film based in Yevgeny Zamiatin's We (ca. 1920) and very much in the tradition of Chris Marker's LA JETÉE (1963, 29 minutes) — with perhaps a nod to George Lucas's THX 1138 (1969/1971) in the religious appearance of the Well Doer (although the tradition of the Pietà may be more immediate). Omits Zamiatin's Mephi and only alludes to Taylorism but an excellent work of art relevant here for its vision of what H. Bruce Franklin has called The Wonder City of the Future and for the image of the superimposition of the technological upon the human in "the Great Operation" to remove the imagination (and soul) of D503 — for which definitely compare and contrast Marker's JETTY. For images of Modernist glass buildings as a metonym for dystopia, cf. the montage yielding the architecture for Dr. Haber's eutopia toward the end of the PBS film of Ursula K. Le Guin's The Lathe of Heaven.

Considerations of budget and copyright may have been important here, but note retro look of the spacecraft Integral as Zeppelin (25:19, 25:52 on YouTube op. cit.), and, more so, as Modernist spaceship from fairly early SF film such as Vasili Zhuravylov's 1936 KOSMICHESKIY REYS […] (COSMIC VOYAGE; see YouTube FORTRESS 25:21-44). Note also trope of protagonist's being held down and, in FORTRESS and We not tortured exactly but operated on, in some shots with D503 wrapped in plastic wrap: cf. and contrast image of "disappearing" Harry Tuttle in bureaucratic paper in Terry Gilliam's BRAZIL and the use of plastic wrap to hold down victims in the more horrific parts of such shows as Dexter.

FORTRESS is part of a multimodal project that includes a 2015 concept album, a collaboration of the "Rémi Orts Probject and Alan B" (14 songs). A hyperlink to a discussion on SciFi Lab of the album, with extensive "quotations" is available on the Rémi Orts website, 15 January 2015.

[RDE & AB, 28 & 29 April 2016