Classic Literature and Cinema on Sky Arts - Dystopia

 

This was the third in the series of films from classic novels courtesy of 3DD Productions on Sky Arts. I had to look up what dystopia meant: an imagined state or society. So not primarily science fiction but more about a dramatised future. Or as presenter Mariella Frostrup says "the potential to become tomorrow's reality". She begins with Sir Thomas More's "Island of Utopia" from 1516. But then straight to HG Wells and 1895's The Time Machine and 1899's When the Sleeper Wakes. We even see an interview with the great man. In 1932 he published The Shape of Things to Come and the film three years later. A prediction of a never ending world war. There are mentions for Mary Shelley's The Last Man and Paris in the Twentieth Century by Jules Verne.

Maybe the most famous of all these films is George Orwell's' Nineteen Eighty-Four from that year. We see a young John Hurt in some extended clips. The Russian novel We was first published in English in 1924 amongst some more known novels of the twenties and thirties such as Kafka's The Trial, It Can't Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis and Brave New World from Aldous Huxley. We again see the author talking about his book. When we reach the nuclear age, I found that I had seen all the next movies, most of which are among my favourite films of all time. Fahrenheit 451 from the Ray Bradbury novel became that classic film in 1966. We see more clips and the author speaking about how it came about. 

We reach Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange  and Stanley Kubrick's film from 1971. "The terrifying technique of behaviour modification". But nothing about how the film was banned at one time in the UK. The book Make Room, Make Room by Harry Harrison was turned into the film Soylent Green in 1973, and 1976's Logan's Run came from the novel by George Clayton Johnson and William F. Nolan. In 1982 Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep was made into Blade Runner, and then in 2005 came the film version of Alan Moore's marvellous V for Vendetta. It was Harold Pinter who adapted Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale for the 1990 movie, then  P.D. James'   Children of Men that became the 2006 movie and Steven King's The Running Man for the 1987 film. Those extracts we saw are all so familiar.

A Japanese book and film came next. Battle Royale from 2000 was highly controversial due to it's subject matter and violence. But the 2008 novel The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins became the blockbuster of 2012. Her interview of how it all began was very interesting. Cormack McCarthy's Pulitzer prizewinning  The Road  became a hit movie in 2009. Mariella summed up with some words about how these "authors were seeing into the future". And a lot was not at all nice.