A.I. FROM METROPOLIS TO EX MACHINA…, a three-week festival of movies that helped introduce the world to the concept of “artificial intelligence” (a term not coined until the 1950s), will run at Film Forum from Friday, January 3 to Thursday, January 23. The series includes more than 30 films, most of them offering a dystopian view of a society run by A.I., along with profound ethical and existential questions.
Fritz Lang’s 1927 silent masterpiece METROPOLIS (written by his wife Thea von Harbou, who adapted it from her own 1925 novel), broke new ground in science fiction storytelling, with the creation of Maria, a robot designed to look human and control the workers in an underground city. Gort, a massive robot that serves as enforcer for an alien peace mission in Robert Wise’s THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL (1951), provided an early example of a machine with a higher purpose.
Five years later, Robby the Robot of FORBIDDEN PLANET (based on Shakespeare’s The Tempest!) both defined what a “robot” looked like for generations and offered a more benign depiction of what would later be called “artificial intelligence.” Later lovable movie robots include Johnny 5 in SHORT CIRCUIT, R2D2 in the Star Wars movies, and Wall-E in the Pixar movie of that name. The “Emerac” computer in the Tracy-Hepburn comedy DESK SET is also less malevolent, merely threatening to take jobs away from humans – probably the first film to raise that possibility.
But it was Stanley Kubrick with screenwriters Terry Southern and Peter George, who may have first raised the alarm about the even darker implications of A.I. with the “Doomsday Machine” in DR. STRANGELOVE (1964), followed four years later by HAL 9000 in 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968), perhaps the most chilling and memorable depiction of A.I. in the movies. Said the extraordinarily prescient Kubrick in a 1969 interview, “We wanted to convey the reality of a world populated — as ours soon will be — by machine entities that have as much, or more, intelligence as human beings. We wanted to stimulate people to think what it would be like to share a planet with such creatures.” Kubrick would later acquire the rights to Brian Aldiss’ short story Supertoys Last All Summer Long, eventually filmed by Steven Spielberg as A.I. ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE.
2001 began a cycle of movies featuring sentient, anti-human A.I. characters, from COLOSSUS: THE FORBIN PROJECT and WESTWORLD to THE TERMINATOR and BLADE RUNNER. And there’s no end in sight, either in movies or the world.
A.I. FROM METROPOLIS TO EX MACHINA… or, How the Movies Have Been Warning Us for Nearly 100 Years has been programmed by Bruce Goldstein, Film Forum Repertory Artistic Director.
