Television schedulers know more than any of us about cinematic tone. Imagine that you worked in programme acquisition at BBC2 and were planning to screen The Towering Inferno on a dull Wednesday night in September 2001. Then 9/11 happens. You cancel the screening in a heartbeat. Its Hollywood pathos, its movie-star versions of real lives, its artifice, are suddenly plain to see.
The same applies to the 1968 movie Krakatoa, East of Java, a juicy depiction of the 1883 volcanic eruption that caused a massive tsunami and killed thousands. I saw it as a boy and was thrilled by it, but remember little now except actor Sal Mineo's face. Doubtless some television station somewhere in the world scheduled it for the week after Boxing day—and quickly pulled it. But why is Krakatoa, East of Java (it is actually west of Java) unshowable at the moment? And for how long?
The first question is easy to answer. Krakatoa, East of Java's purpose was to deliver pleasure to people long after the grief caused by the real disaster had faded. Eighty-five years on, aware that audiences like to experience horror vicariously (the poster's tag line was "You are Engulfed by a Terrible Tidal Wave"), Hollywood could step in, dress history in production design, throw in movie stars and serve up the result. Our television scheduler knows that actual human pain abhors such dressing-up. Only when it subsides can the aesthetes tiptoe in with their costumes and squibs and rehash what happened as fantasy.
The second question, about the duration of a disaster movie's unshowability, takes us into more interesting territory. Can we reschedule Krakatoa, East of Java in a few months, at Easter perhaps, when the kids are on holiday? Or, when we look into Mineo's big eyes, will we just think of the recent news footage and feel the shock of kitsch? Maybe summer or autumn would be better. But certainly not next Christmas.
The more you follow this line of thought, the more the apparently harmless idea of the disaster movie unravels. If we are honest about the nature of human fantasy we must accept the principle that storytelling will always involve vicarious jeopardy. Yet the cycle of late 1960s and 1970s films like The Towering Inferno and Krakatoa, East of Java are different from modern disaster movies. They have none of the seriousness of Titanic or the ecological drive of The Day After Tomorrow. Their movie stars—Paul Newman and Faye Dunaway in The Towering Inferno; Sal Mineo and Diane Baker in the Krakatoa film—are more clearly used like baubles on a Christmas tree, to glitter and catch our eye. Their lack of immersion in the world of the story gives these films a smooth surface, a Warholian blankness. But there is something else. They were made at a time before live, rolling television broadcasts from disaster sites. We hadn't seen "rough" imagery of skyscrapers falling or tsunamis hitting, as we have now. 9/11 television footage will be in our heads for the rest of our lives, and so will the Indian Ocean footage. Its ability to move us will wane, of course, but it is locked in. Contemporary Hollywood cinema acknowledges this inescapable visual recall. If our inner eye has been permanently changed by 9/11 and Aceh, aren't we close to concluding that The Towering Inferno and Krakatoa, East of Java are permanently unshowable?
So a world disaster renders some film aesthetics less valid—perhaps invalid. But it may also do the opposite. Take the films of Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami. In 1987, he made Where is My Friend's House?, about a boy who mistakenly takes home his friend's school jotter and tries to return it to him. Soon afterwards, an earthquake hit the region in which the film was shot, ruining the boy's village. Kiarostami returned to the location to see if he could find the boy, and, in 1991, made a film about his return in which real villagers were asked about the real boy. And Life Goes On is set mostly in the director's car as he (played by an actor) drives along damaged roads, asking for directions from displaced people, exploring temporary settlements, talking to his own son about what they are seeing. I watched the film again last week, and, in the wake of the tsunami, its argument was electrifying. Human life flows unstoppably, it says—it is observable in tiny details. Though the earthquake killed thousands of people, the process of milking goats, of carrying food between villages, of noticing girls out of the corner of your eye, of seeing in nature the answers to human problems, continues. In And Life Goes On, a maze of journeys evokes the life of the village with unforgettable optimism.
Kiarostami went on to make a third film, Through the Olive Trees, about a director making a movie after an earthquake. One of the great trilogies of film history, it will be the centrepiece of the National Film Theatre's Kiarostami retrospective in the spring. How has an impoverished, censored national cinema such as Iran's made work so relevant to our times? By contrast, it seems that a western inclination to wish-fulfilment has squandered cinema's power to depict life as it really is. If the evolution of imagery has made Krakatoa, East of Java unwatchable, then maybe it is because American producers' ambitions have been too low; they don't know what magic they have in their hands.
