Film Ramble: Phase IV

Phase IV was the feature debut of famed title sequence director Saul Bass - and since there aren't many people in the history of the human race who could justify being described as "famed title sequence director," it's worth adding that Bass, in his day job, was responsible for some of the most iconic imagery in film history.  What springs to mind when you think of Vertigo?  If it's the legendary title sequence or that inspired poster then it's Bass's work you're remembering, not Hitchcock's.  And as well as Hitchcock, Bass was the designer of choice for directors like Preminger, Wilder, Kubrick and Scorsese. 

But he only ever directed one feature film himself, and for that, he chose to make ... well, what is Phase IV exactly?  In its crudest terms, it's the story of a tiny handful of humans - two at first and then three - battling super-intelligent ants in the American desert.  Which makes it sound like THEM! or possibly Tremors, two films it has almost nothing in common with.  It most certainly isn't a horror movie, though it has horror elements, and though it is a science-fiction movie, it's one far more absorbed with scientific process than technology or big ideas.  In fact, through it's three distinct chapters it skips genre quite unapologetically, as the scale of the threat metamorphoses from "gee, these ants sure are getting feisty", through "gee, these ants are putting up a much better fight than you'd expect from, you know, ants," to ... well, that would be a spoiler, and to spoil Phase IV would be a shame, because amongst its many virtues are that it absolutely isn't like the film you're imaging if you haven't seen it and that it resolutely refuses to go to the places you're expecting even while you watch it.

None of which makes it any easier to describe, or to explain why it is absolutely one of the best and most under-rated science fiction films of the seventies, which as anyone who knows anything knows was the undisputed heyday for smart, ideas-based sci-fi.  But perhaps the problem in describing it is Phase IV's greatest virtue; I can't think of another film where every single element is so subtly off-kilter, or where that perpetual, muted strangeness serves the film's ends so perfectly.

Watching it for perhaps the sixth time, though, what struck me even more forcefully is the film's lack of bias: we spend as much time with the ants - courtesy of some astonishing, how-the-hell-did-they-do-that? miniature shots and model work - as we do with the humans, watching their plans, their organization, all the minutiae of their minute existence.  Some critics have suggested that a problem with the film is that we're never quite convinced of the ant threat, (they are, after all, just plain old normal-sized ants), but returning to it I can't help thinking that that's entirely deliberate.  Phase IV is not an invasion movie.  It's something closer to a faux-documentary, an aliens-eye view of a conflict in which humanity is but one side and - as personified by Nigel Davenport's fun portrayal of unbounded scientific hubris - not necessarily the one we should be rooting for.

In fact all of the film's immediate flaws - a wide-eyed performance from Lynne Frederick, the methodical pace, the fact that much of the filming was clearly sound stage-bound - become virtues by the end, when we come to appreciate just what it is we've been watching, and that it was never merely a tale of heroic scientists battling eeeeevil super-intelligent bugs.  And the rest of its virtues are plain to see from the beginning: the unique, unsettling score, mixing guitar and electronica in a way that still feels current, the superlative insect photography, Bass's gloriously stylized direction and design aesthetic, and Mayo Simon's sparse script, which gives us exactly the information we need and not one word more.

So what is Phase IV?  It's the absolutely definitive super-intelligent-ants-against-humanity pseudo-documentary art-house sci-fi movie, that's what ... and if that really isn't enough to make you want to see it then here's the trailer:
 

You can pick up the region 1 DVD (sadly there's never been a region 2 release) on Amazon here, at a currently very reasonable price.  And lastly, for those who've already seen it, a couple of treats I discovered today: a link to the book adaptation and the original - very trippy, much less ambiguous - ending, cut after baffled test audiences ran screaming indifferently from the cinema:

2013: Or, Phase IV

I've been a little troubled at the prospect of putting together my end-of-the-year round up, truth be told.  I try to be positive here at Writing on the Moon, because I fervently believe that writing is a thing to be positive about, but the flip side of that is that I've always intended this blog to be an honest account of my career and there are some things that are just very difficult to put a positive spin on.  For me, for the most part, 2013 has been one of those things.

It certainly got off to a difficult start.  Of the three Damasco books, the writing of Prince Thief had been by far the hardest; I've no doubt it's possible to write a book in a year around a regular job without suffering any serious ill-effects, but when that day job involves things like twelve hour night shifts and inordinate amounts of travel it becomes, frankly, pretty tough.  And when you live like that for month after month, working up to seventy hours a week, doing little else and not sleeping anything like enough, after a while your health starts to suffer.  Hell, everything starts to suffer.

What made the experience just shy of impossible, though, was that I had a fair idea of what was in store for Prince Thief.  Giant Thief had performed moderately well, but not well enough for Crown Thief to receive much publisher support or attention from bloggers and reviewers, because sequels don't attract anything like the sort of interest that debuts do.  By the time I started Prince Thief, I'd been reliably informed that I should expect proportionately less again.

Looking back, that's seems a lot more like common sense than it did at the time: you'll always be preaching to the converted with the third book in a trilogy.  But at the time, the cost seemed just too much; I knew I was making myself unwell and causing distress to the people close to me to write a book that couldn't hope to achieve the sort of things you hope a book will achieve, and it broke my heart a little.

All of that was more of less done with by the end of March, but it cast a long shadow.  Even with my writing efforts dialed down I was still doing at least one and a half jobs, the exhaustion never quite went away, and things continued to be a struggle.  In retrospect, I might have done better to slacken the pace a little more; as it was, I spent the next few months feeling like I was doing far less than I should have been.  I'd have liked to have worked much more to promote the launch of Endangered Weapon B;  I enjoyed coming up with my first novella, insane sci-fantasy oddity Patchwerk, but it cost more in time and effort than I'd been expecting.  It was really only when I put the day job once and for all behind me in October that things began to settle down, and only in the past month that I've felt like everything was more or less back under control.

-oOo-

For all that I've sure as hell done it in this post, I don't like moaning.  I still remember with perfect clarity what it's like to be an unpublished author, as I imagine some of the people who'll read this will be, and I know that I've been very, very fortunate to make it as far as I have, in the ways that I have.  I wanted more than anything to have a book published and now I have five out there, in various shapes and sizes and - regardless of how hard I worked for it, regardless of anything - that is a thing of utter awesomeness.  As is the fact that I've finally achieved my other lifetime goal this year, to make writing my day job.

So, for all of those reasons, and because sometimes it's nice to remind yourself of all the good stuff, here's a list of the things that happened in 2013 that were actually pretty amazing:

• I sold a story to Clarkesworld and, with the year nearly out, to Interzone, two markets I've been chasing ever since I started writing seriously.  It was, in fact, a pretty great year for short fiction sales, all told.

• In the end, I finished one novel, two graphic novels, one novella, a novelette and three short stories. Under the circumstances, that doesn't feel like a bad haul.

• I completed my first trilogy.  The Tales of Easie Damasco are out there now, and I'm very proud of them.  They have stunning Angelo Rinaldi covers.  They're read wonderfully by James Langton in the superb Brilliance Audio audiobook adaptations.  They exist in the world, they're finding readers and listeners, and the more time goes by, the more I appreciate that fact.

• Endangered Weapon B is out there too, after some five or so years of trying to make it a reality, and I love it to pieces.  Of the many things I have to be thankful for, high on the list is that I've been able to work with Bob Molesworth, a great artist who I have no doubt is going to become an extraordinary artist over the next few years.

• I'm now writing full time. It's impossible to exaggerate just how much even typing those words feels like a gigantic weight coming off.  2014 is the year when I get to start writing the way I want, instead of the way I can somehow manage to fit around my day job.  2014 is the year when producing a book a year is suddenly the absolute least I can do, and when I get to put together some of the projects I've had to tread water on these last couple of years.  And, since this is the stage of my career that I've long been referring to as phase 4 in my Stalinesque ten year mental plan, 2014 is also, quite possibly, the year when ants take over the world.

         If that's not something to look forward to then I don't know what is.