Friendship's Death

I saw this on tv many years ago,I might have seen it at the cinema.

The British Film Institute,who backed the film,have released it on blu ray.

I just watched the blu ray.

I give no plot spolilers.

A dialogue heavy film with 2 actors in every scene.

This film is a real nostalgia piece for me.

In the 1980s I spent many hours in the Filmhouse Edinburgh which was/is the art house cinema for the city.

I saw all sort of BFI sponsored films with strange plots and locations and scripts.

Like in a film I was fascinated by a young women who seemed to be at all the films I went to back then.

I wonder was she a film professional,a critic,was she Tilda Swinton one of the stars of this film.

One oddity of the film,there are many,is that Swinton is listed as the star but Bill Patterson was much better known than she was then.

I suppose the people involved felt too superior to talk to some SF writers or SF fans and not make howlers in their science.

Procyon is a star, not a galaxy. People in the USA seem to keep confusing stars and galaxies, even in some SF series like The Invaders.

It is also not explained how they have the latest news of Earth, being more than 11 light-years away.

And a nuclear winter would kill most people but not everyone. The classic book On The Beach correctly has that as done by Cobalt Bombs, as does Doctor Strangelove.

Since Friendship could easily prove her non-human nature, and even drinks impossible amounts of alcohol to prove it, why not contact the US Embassy and be taken to MIT or the UN?

It is absurd to think that she would be mistreated. She represents an entire alien civilisation with superior technology.

All the talk about Palestinians and Israel misses the basic point - a widespread Jewish view that the whole land should be Jewish. Plus a failure by Palestinians to agree to something like the Oslo Agreement when they still have the Soviet Union there to balance the USA.

There area few comic remarks about machines. But on wider matters, the dialogue is banal, saying nothing new.

Set in Amman, Jordan during Black September, when the PLO attempted to take over the kingdom by force, this odd little movie features an ongoing dialog between a British journalist and an android in the form of an attractive woman. She's the survivor of a contact mission to Earth. The political dimension of their dialog largely falls flat, but the ideas about robots that the movie explores are fascinating. Look for the discussion of the typewriter - she complains that his pounding of the keys was 'hurting it' and of the vacuum cleaner, which she likens to a rat.

There is a kind of subtle trilogy of cult classics and subtle fantasy; Man facing Southeast (1986) The Man from Earth (2007) and Fiendship's Death (1987) I have to confess that I've seen them recently and I loved them very much because of what they have in common: the way in which the movie deals with that which has about science fiction. They base their speech on the dialogues and avoid making use of any super-special-effect to reinforce the plot, the meaning itself. They do not pretend that the story needs more technology than the mere word. All the aesthetics, the first and main sense of the film, rests solely on the story explained by the main character. This protagonist has a message for us and wants to make us think. It's a common premise in all three films and, frankly, it works. Even so, these films do not forget style and are elegant because of their restrained form. I celebrate that they don't want to embarrass me with empty spectacularity and that the magic holds on the words.

What I love about SF is the focus on the question: What is a human?

This question does not each sifi-movie ask. But this one does. For today it may be a bit boring, because there is not much new in the dialogue. This didnt bother me at all, because I like repeat. You can hear one sentence from 100 people and you get 100 sentences, because they said it diffrently. It is intresting what they say in the movie but it is mostly intresting how they say it and who. Tilda Swinton makes an atmosphere that drinks you in this hotelroom, where the conversation is placed.

I just saw it. And tomorrow I want to watch it again.