The 1960's Science Fiction Movie Poll

I booted a lot of truly watchable low budget garbage like 'Invasion of the Star Creatures', and I probably was very subjective in what I kept to represent the Japanese monster films -- there are just so many.

I also kicked out things like these:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Countdown_(1968_film)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marooned_(film)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon_Zero_Two

in favor of things like 'Seconds' and 'The Face Of Another', which don't precisely fit the genre but make this list a lot more interesting

http://www.criterion.com/films/828-the-face-of-another

got to thank Geeta for reminding me about this one. I didn't get past the comedy when I saw it a long time ago, but now it's a whole different experience. Andy Warhol's favorite film. Happy ending!

http://www.lightindustry.org/humanoids

No other effort from the golden age of spacesuit melodrama entranced the 60s avant-garde as deeply as Wesley Barry’s The Creation of the Humanoids, a deadpan talkie set after worldwide nuclear war, in which a shrinking population of radiation-infected humans rely on an army of android servants to maintain their idyllic lifestyle. Andy Warhol called it his favorite movie; Mike Kuchar parodied it in his robots-in-love featurette Sins of the Fleshapoids; Susan Sontag used it to explore the theme of dehumanization in her essay “The Imagination of Disaster;” and Robert Smithson dubbed it one of the “landmarks of Sci-fic,” an example of 42nd Street fare that “induces a kind of ‘low-budget’ mysticism,” keeping the viewer “in a perpetual trance.”

Attempting high style on the cheap, Creation employs barebones sets, stilted dramatics, and an unforgettably gaudy, Forbidden Planet inspired design. In the current issue of Artforum, J. Hoberman proposes that the film is “nearly as color-coded as Red Desert and more impoverished than Alphaville.” Despite these shoddy elements, the movie attempts to explore a host of real-world concerns. Barry’s film suggests Cold War nightmares early on, opening with a mushroom-cloud title sequence set to a soundtrack of electronic noodlings. The bulk of the picture, however, offers an allegory for civil rights and class struggle through growing tensions between the humans and the humanoids, the latter marked by their grayish “synthe-skin,” metallic eyes, and Nehru jumpsuits; humans disparagingly refer to their servants as “clickers,” and an extremist faction known as the Order of Flesh and Blood has begun a series of terrorist actions against the robots. The social hierarchy becomes threatened when scraggly-haired scientist Dr. Raven starts implanting the memories of dead humans into humanoid bodies—at which point Creation verges on an Atomic Age ancestor of Blade Runner, with a speculative politics churning beneath its flimsy facade of ray-gun camp.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=678GYWtlONA

I am never NOT going to vote for La Jetee.

could easily vote for any of these:

The Time Machine
La jetée
Quatermass and the Pit
Planet of the Apes

looks like Seconds is duplicated

I agree with the omission of 2001: A Space Odyssey from the poll, but it's fun to think about it in this context

I've seen very few of these, but La jetée. Fantastic Voyage was one of the first non-Disney films I saw as a kid. "Damn you all to hell!" is very useful as an all-purpose joke.

oops! only vote for the first one. god help anyone who wanted to vote for Marooned.

the links here were interesting:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_science_fiction_films_of_the_1960s

this one's next up for me:

http://teleport-city.com/2013/02/26/ikarie-xb-1/

Ikarie XB-1 is based on the writings of Polish science fiction author Stanislaw Lem, in this case his 1955 novel The Magellanic Cloud. The movie tells the story of the Ikaria’s two-and-a-half year expedition to look for life on the planets of Alpha Centauri.

I’ve read some reviews of Ikarie XB-1 that allude, with varying degrees of certainty, to the possibility that Stanley Kubrick was influenced by the film in his making of 2001: A Space Odyssey, though none that I can find provide any kind of facts that would back that up... At the same time, there are similarities that are hard to ignore; especially in terms of Zazvorka’s set designs, and especially when considering the interior of Ikarie‘s spaceship versus that of the Jupiter probe featured in 2001‘s second half.

entire film with subtitles is on youtube

The Earth Dies Screaming probably deserved a slot above some of these, but i wdn't have voted for it. Will vote for one of the French entrants i guess, but there's a few here like X that'll be probably be cruelly overlooked

La Jetée is almost certainly the best here, but I'm voting Year of the Sex Olympics anyway, just to give it a nod.

Others I'd consider as contenders:

The Time Machine
The Face Of Another
Fahrenheit 451
Fantastic Voyage
Seconds
Barbarella

Oops, didn't actually mean to leave Fantastic Voyage in that list, I meant to cut it down more.

The Earth Dies Screaming probably deserved a slot above some of these

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Earth_Dies_Screaming

hadn't heard of it, but it obviously did. someone with a wiki account get this on their 60's list!

Haven't seen this, but I liked Punishment Park, and especially the opening & closing 10 minutes of Privilege, so I guess I know exactly what to expect from this. But it sounds like a film that should get referenced a lot more than it does.

http://www.slantmagazine.com/film/review/the-gladiators

In the near future, governments have decided to stage their wars in the form of televised games depicting 10-man teams of soldiers pitted against each other within a selected location ("staged at various sites in non-aligned countries around the world," in this case Sweden). The irony is that these games are organized by an International Peace Games Commission and involve the players attempting to kill each other, while a computer-controlled monitor constantly changes the rules on them. These battles are presented to an audience of millions, are corporate sponsored, and take the concept of war into the realm of entertainment.

well, it looks a lot less fun than The 10th Victim anyway

Privilege is now on youtube! None of this can last. Posting the link here to watch the opening again later.

Definitely seconds. La jetee is overrated. Vast majority of this list is pretty bad tho.

and the winner is 2001

by a margin so wide it's inclusion was pointless, though this list does remind one what a disgraced genre it had become by the time of its release.

sorry i left off 'the nutty professor' and 'visit to a lonely planet' morbs.

Fahrenheit 451 is way underrated.

Voted Barbarella but i'm probably not qualified/informed enough to make a fair decision. Barbarella is fun though.

It will be difficult for me to vote for anything other than Quatermass and the Pit

http://www.denofgeek.us/movies/18152/celebrating-quatermass-and-the-pit
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xet3jh_quatermass-and-the-pit-movie-versio_shortfilms

Gladiators is pretty great, definitely along the same lines as Punishment Park, though the latter stuck with me longer than the former.

Panic in Year Zero is a feel bad classic, iirc

Ok I watched Year Of The Sex Olympics on amazon instant last night

And I wish I had held off on voting, because I wasn't prepared for just how incredible it was going to be. It's as dystopian & ahead of its time as the best of the 70's films. Anyone who hasn't seen it yet, can't recommend it highly enough.

For those few people perusing this thread, I'm thinking of another poll collecting the classic fiction films that anticipate reality tv / news entertainment - Sex Olympics, Medium Cool, Coming Apart, The Gladiators / Punishment Park, Death Watch, Network (peripherally), Hu-Man (even though no one's seen it for years), even Running Man I guess. If anyone can remind me of other films I may have forgotten, chime in, but Sex Olympics just rocketed to the top of the list - a tv show where people are sent to the island, and we watch them try to survive

nobodies voting for Alphaville?

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

No slot for Robinson Crusoe on Mars?

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

no idea how I missed this poll, bat signal must be on the fritz

la jetee the obv answer tho I would posit that as a short film it doesn't belong here (and yet maybe that makes its win even more deserving and just)

would've agitated for POTA, F451, and prolly pulled the lever for the sorely underrated x: the man w/ the x-ray eyes

loved quatermass & the pit as a young'un but in adulthood have found its ideas far more stimulating than its actuality as a cinematic experience (i.e. yawn)

charly is perhaps better known as flowers for algernon, my bio storage banks seem to recall a childhood viewing but are vague on the quality of this adaptation

loath to confess I still have not seen seconds, this poll surely would've goaded me into it

and as both a godard AND scifi fan, the charms of alphaville are inexplicably lost on me

Voted for La jetée like everybody else but wonder why Village of the Damned didn't get on the ballot.

cliff roberston apparently won best actor oscar for charly, also lol @ 60s innocence

At the 41st Academy Awards, Robertson won the Academy Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role, under some controversy: less than two weeks after the ceremony, Time magazine mentioned the Academy's generalized concerns over "excessive and vulgar solicitation of votes" and said "many members agreed that Robertson's award was based more on promotion than on performance."

Ahem. Best Story in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume One, 1929–1964 (Unabridged Version)

the story's far more well-known than the movie afaik

was in one of my high school english textbooks in fact

fun results

shoutout to the agent who voted for Creation of the Humanoids

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=678GYWtlONA

who knows their Finnish techno dystopias? A Time of Roses

https://www.moma.org/calendar/events/3319?locale=en

see also

http://worldscinema.org/2012/06/risto-jarva-ruusujen-aika-aka-a-time-of-roses-1969/1346882232000/

Probably would have voted for The Day the Earth Caught Fire. SEE THIS MOVIE!

this one's next up for me:

http://teleport-city.com/2013/02/26/ikarie-xb-1/

Ikarie XB-1 is based on the writings of Polish science fiction author Stanislaw Lem, in this case his 1955 novel The Magellanic Cloud. The movie tells the story of the Ikaria’s two-and-a-half year expedition to look for life on the planets of Alpha Centauri.

I’ve read some reviews of Ikarie XB-1 that allude, with varying degrees of certainty, to the possibility that Stanley Kubrick was influenced by the film in his making of 2001: A Space Odyssey, though none that I can find provide any kind of facts that would back that up... At the same time, there are similarities that are hard to ignore; especially in terms of Zazvorka’s set designs, and especially when considering the interior of Ikarie‘s spaceship versus that of the Jupiter probe featured in 2001‘s second half.

entire film with subtitles is on youtube

― Milton Parker, Tuesday, July 30, 2013 7:23 PM

screening in NYC tonight, opening a Lem On Film series

https://criticafterdark.blogspot.com/2015/07/ikarie-xb-1-jindrich-polak-1963.html

Rewatched The Day the Earth Caught Fire last night. Only sci fi/doomsday film to center on a newsroom?

well

https://www.slantmagazine.com/features/the-100-best-science-fiction-films-of-all-time/

(there was never an all-time poll here?)

I could've sworn Carpenter's The Thing won both a sci-fi poll and a horror poll (or was it the Shining that won the Horror poll? argh)

huh actually I guess I am thinking of the action poll, where it also placed really high

we should def do a sci fi poll, how come this hasn't happened yet

83. Dead Man’s Letters (Konstantin Lopushansky, 1989)
Even in a subgenre as noted for its gloom and severity as the post-apocalyptic film, Konstantin Lopushansky’s Dead Man’s Letters stands out for its complete and utter grimness.

Want to see!
Sci-fi poll sounds like a fine idea, other than the endless, inevitable bickering over what constitutes the boundaries of the genre.

well, I don't want to run it...

Thanks for that link, Morbs. Solid list, comprised mostly of stuff I've seen (for a change) and stuff I've never heard of. Glad to see Incredible Shrinking Man place so high; Day the Earth Stood Still is (challops) overrated.

I've been thinking for a while of filling the '50s gaps in the year-by-year horror polls with sci-fi/horror hybrids (given that horror kinda took an extended smoke break that decade). It's an era I'm mildly obsessed with but I don't know if anyone else really GAF.

the ILX poll would replicate 80-90% of the Slant list, hence let's not bother

As much as I usually like polls, I agree.

http://worldscinema.org/2018/07/risto-jarva-ruusujen-aika-aka-a-time-of-roses-1969/

thanks for recommending, Morbs! some good parts, especially the opening's official government 1962-2012 historyfilm.

Slant list downplays 70's dystopias and there's way too much blockbuster fluff in it, but enough surprises / unknown placements to shut me up. Happy On The Silver Globe placed high.