1903 – 1983 (2018 TV Mini Series)

spacetime coordinates: set in an alternate timeline in which the fall of the communist Polish People’s Republic never happened, and the Iron Curtain is still in place. / set in 2003; a coordinated terrorist attack on multiple sites took place in Poland in 1983 which altered the course of history and the Cold War did not end.

1983 was particularly appreciated by critics for its photography and atmosphere. The directors create a gloomy and cold Warsaw, where old Soviet-style apartment blocks stand side by side with futuristic and imposing government and police buildings, equipped with the most modern instruments of control. The secret services of the SB now use computer surveillance mechanisms, tracking cell phones and digitizing citizens’ data (classified according to their “level of danger”).

Society is run by the “Party”, a privileged elite who enjoy a good education and excellent economic status. The rest of the population is disinterested in politics and devote themselves to consumerism, at least as regards those goods that are not censored or prohibited. Opposing this system is the “Brigade of Light”, a group of young people who carry out resistance to the dictatorship in clandestinity.

Poland is then imagined to have seen massive immigration from Indochina, and in particular from the socialist republic of Vietnam. Some night scenes – set in overcrowded Asian neighborhoods – seem like a reference to the Blade Runner movie.

It is curious that there are very few explicit references to communism in the series (no statue of Lenin in the streets, no red star or revolutionary chant). The regime appears to have created an Orwellian state, whose sole ideological goal is the suppression of dissent and the control of individuals.

In this sense, it seems that directors are making a more general criticism of any form of totalitarianism, police regime and society-induced conformism. Agnieszka Holland herself underlines how the contents of 1983 are also current in Western countries, in contingency with the current crisis of democracy and the emergence of what the director describes as “a conservative counter-revolution”. She says in the same interview with The Guardian: “But the real questions are: maybe these people are happy? Maybe freedom is overrated?” (wiki)

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1983 is a Polish crime drama streaming television series created and written by Joshua Long and based on an original idea by Long and Maciej Musiał, produced for and released by Netflix on 30 November 2018. A second season is being considered.

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1902 – The First (2018 TV series)

spacetime coordinates: New Orleans, Louisiana 2033 – 2035

The First is a drama television series portraying a team of astronauts who prepare to become the first humans to visit Mars, created by Beau Willimon and starring an ensemble cast including Sean Penn, Natascha McElhone, Anna Jacoby-Heron, LisaGay Hamilton, Hannah Ware, Keiko Agena, Rey Lucas, James Ransone, Brian Lee Franklin, Oded Fehr, Norbert Leo Butz, Annie Parisse, Melissa George, Jeannie Berlin, and Bill Camp. The series, a co-production between American streaming service Hulu and British television network Channel 4, debuted on September 14, 2018 in the United States and on November 1, 2018 in the United Kingdom. On January 18, 2019, Hulu canceled the series after one season. (wiki)

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1901 – How It Ends (2021)

spacetime coordinates: 2020, LA

How It Ends is a 2021 American comedy-drama film written, directed, and produced by Zoe Lister-Jones and her husband Daryl Wein. It stars Lister-Jones, Cailee Spaeny, Olivia Wilde, Fred Armisen, Helen Hunt, Lamorne Morris and Nick Kroll. Filmed during the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 (wiki)

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1899 – La Révolution (TV Series 2020)

spacetime coordinates: 1787. Amid the decadence of the Ancien Régime, Joseph Ignace Guillotin is responsible for investigating mysterious murders. He then discovers the existence of “blue blood”. This unknown virus spreads within the aristocracy. The virus has devastating effects: the infected nobles attack the “little people“, upsetting the established hierarchy. The revolt spreads and is the prelude to the French Revolution.

La Révolution is a 2020 French-language supernatural drama series produced by Netflix starring Doudou Masta, Julien Sarazin and Ian Turiak. In January 2021, the series was canceled after one season. (wiki)

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1898 – The Fear Street Trilogy (2021)

spacetime coordinates: 1994 Shadyside / 1978 Camp Nightwing / 1666 Union

The Fear Street Trilogy is an American horror film series, with varying sub-genres of horror. Directed by Leigh Janiak, from scripts and stories she co-wrote with other contributors, the films are based on R. L. Stine‘s book series of the same name.

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Fear Street Part One: 1994

Fear Street Part One: 1994 is a 2021 American teen slasher film directed by Leigh Janiak. It is the first installment in the Fear Street trilogy and stars Kiana Madeira, Olivia Scott Welch, Benjamin Flores Jr., Julia Rehwald, Fred Hechinger, Ashley Zukerman, Darrell Britt-Gibson and Maya Hawke. The film follows a group of teenagers in Shadyside who are terrorized by an ancient evil responsible for a series of brutal murders that have plagued the town for centuries. imdb

Fear Street Part Two: 1978

Fear Street Part Two: 1978 is a 2021 American teen slasher film directed by Leigh Janiak. It is the second installment in the Fear Street trilogy, and a sequel to Part One: 1994. Starring Sadie Sink, Emily Rudd, Ryan Simpkins, McCabe Slye, Ted Sutherland, Gillian Jacobs, Kiana Madeira, Benjamin Flores Jr. and Olivia Scott Welch, the film centers on a group of teenagers in Camp Nightwing who must come together to survive a possessed counselor’s murder spree. imdb

Fear Street Part Three: 1666

Fear Street Part Three: 1666 is a 2021 American supernatural horror film, and the final installment of the Fear Street trilogy after Part One: 1994 and Part Two: 1978. The film follows the origins of Shadyside’s curse in the mid-17th century, Sarah Fier’s witch trial, and the survivors in 1994 who try to put an end to it. imdb

1894 – I blame Society (2020)

Actress/Director/Writer Gillian Wallace Horvat is starring as herself. I just felt that nothing escapes this movie – a movie made to kill all indie cinema pretense of the horror boom (Shudder production galore or the revival of Italo-horror). One can still make pitch black funny nihilist slashers without being impelled to quote Wes Craven quoting himself.

In the 1990s the male heteronormative serial killer was postmodern and making a career in cinema. Hollywood serial killers were making a living (or dying) out of franchising other infamous serial killers histories and organizing their own disaster detours. We always were dragged along a US of A, complicit in tracing out its topography of murder and mayhem (see Domiingnic Sena’s Kalifornia). Either this or triggering like David Fincher’s 7 – elaborate (scholastic even) domino effects, twisted moral plays, able to transfigure the meta criminal into the ultimate American symptom of procedural thinking turned inside out, decapitated and boxed. Like the last Mindhunter TV series – data gathering and profiling takes precedence, when it is not bogged down by its own particular attraction towards horrific details that is slow at allowing insights provided by newly recruited feminist and gender studies. New times are coming, yet FBI stale methodologies drag on. Finally there’s a hint that zooming in on patterns of misogyny, patriarchal & sexual abuse accompanies the rise of the serial killer in pop cultural mind. While everybody’s mind is on the oil crisis, the mind is the new nearly limitless resource, the ultimate frontier of both neuropolitics and neurobollocks. We see the psy ops for what it is – underfunded and then suddenly transformed into the posterchild of the new FBI reshufflings. Previous FBI COINTELPRO histories of infiltrating and destabilizing black liberation 1950s – 1970s movements and militant organizations such as the Black Panters is being pasted over. Hate against women and femicide cannot extricate itself from 1970s high weirdness that makes counterculture sociologists bedfellows with FBi agents, surfers of societal shifts, rapid & unsuspected technoscientific & economic upheavals that reverberate (Nixon shock for one). The beginning of the neoliberal turn is punctuated by events that cannot be put on hold or get closed down as solved cases, aberrant individuals or sensationalist fodder. One of the most important quips (that does not get developed) from Mindhunters is how profoundly germane are the captains of industry, the new CEOs, even Nixon himself (and other career politicians in general) to the caged sociopaths, in their contingency & non-empathy profiles vying with serial killers. They are no more monstrous – than your average HR layoff expert. Instead of being a scourge, such talents are put to use in capitalism and under specific (class) economic circumstance where they seem to thrive and go unpunished, by being constantly rewarded. Intelligence & smartness is being constantly re-defined after 1970s as impunity, because it became an ability to evade suspicion, face up to the direct consequences of your actions (smartness= an ability to evade taxes, or externalising risks etc); a skill set and job description of both hedge fund managers, entrepreneurs & corporate raiders.

With almost deadpan humour, something remniscening of Buster Keaton or a lot of early silent era comedy or even the beggings of cinema as avant-garde vaudeville medium, “I blame society” does not just offer relief, although nowadays relief is essential, but also full-on splatter spiralling (up or down, depending). A splatter run amok in front of the new wannabe audience, of thinly dressed bourgeois political correctness of the new bro mansplainers man-agers, the only good (if brutal) response to a society’s tolerance towards same old same old prejudice, arrogance, dismissive smirks, condescendence and self-entitlement of a barley camouflaged male-streaming.

It takes real courage to refuse the usual porn revenge male fantasies or even serial snuff stereotypes, by becoming both candid camera, selfie and stick killer and unsparing directors cut insider. Feel like it is impossible to disentangle the female protagonist from its milieu and not to subscribe to the way BF, hapless lovers or ex lovers, homeless people, celebs, even complete strangers are being poisoned, stalked, meticulously questioned and employed to assist and finally offered a helping (if poisoned) hand.

One can never decide if Gillian Wallace Horvat is really the same material as all these other nasty characters, but at least she trains herself, putting herself and us trough systematic even morbidly funny & increasingly ‘deviant’ behaviours, a majestic mockup of method acting and of finally using GOPRO cinema as a way to finally do things, not just talk about them! There is definitly a big step there, and there is also this incredible pull, when pretending one is on a vacuous outside, call it fiction, script etc is the perfect way, seemingly, to respond to the callousness of others in the movie or life.

Do not miss this movie!

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1893 – Katla (2021– TV series)

spacetime coordinates: a year after an eruption of the Katla volcano began, the nearby village of Vík,  Iceland

Katla (stylized as KATLA) is an Icelandic drama/mystery/sci-fi television series created and directed by Baltasar Kormákur and Sigurjón Kjartansson, and written by Baltasar Kormákur, Sigurjón Kjartansson, Davíð Már Stefánsson and Lilja Sigurðardóttir. It premiered June 17, 2021 on Netflix. (wiki)

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