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"The Menace comes from Outer Space"
60th anniversary
Birth of a master-work
It all began in 1947,
when the director became friend with Raymond Aron,
a French economist, sociologist and philosopher, a new recruit of the newspaper "Le Figaro".
Opposed to Sartre, he shared many ideas with Raymond Aron
and got angry of the French intelligentsia of the time's "Marxist conformism".
The French learned man is separated
from the economic and social environment he misreads.
He lives in a catholic country
and catholic countries are probably more exposed to marxist's universalism
than protestant countries.
And there is a part of conformism
"The author shares the US's McCarthyism idea
considering the american cinema is "ahead of its time",
both are related.
He wants, with this movie, bring new ideas
and new ways of working in the cinema at this period.
In 1948, he learn from a friend that George Orwell,
which he had enjoyed the previous novel "Animal Farm",
is writing a new novel,
entitled "1984",
which gave a part of the idea of his movie.
1949is the key year, a lot of things happened.
On April 4, NATO was created. On 23 April in China,
the civil war in China is at a turning point, Mao Tze Tung's People's Liberation Army (communists)
take the city of Nanjing and win over the nationalists.
1949 is also 60 years after the discovery of conditional reflex by Ivan Petrovich Pavlov
which the film refers to.
Pavlovian conditionnal reflex experiment (Reconstitution)
The intellectuals of the time greet Mao and Stalin,
which gets him mad. He wants to denounce this marxist ideas,
this universalism, he thinks it will become dangerous eventually.
on an evening, he meets Claude Autant-Lara (french famous movie director of the time),
and they mention the "Roswell" case, which took place 2 years before in the US.
Roswell, american desert, 1947 discovery of an UFO
They notice there has not been any science-fiction movie in France since the silent films of Méliès.
And this raised an idea to his mind:
Jules Verne wrote Science Fiction,
Méliès brought it to the screen,
Then France is the mother of Science Fiction
and it must stay this way!
Therefore he decides to realize the very first French science fiction movie,
based upon the model of American movies and making a promotion at the American way.
He put his ideas in the screenplay
and pays tribute to his friend Raymond Aron,
by giving to a character who dies at the beginning of the movie a very similar name,
"Raymond Arnont",
killed for having fought for his ideas.
"The Menace comes from Outer Space" is born that day,
and the author never thought it would inspire a lot of people within the next 60 years.
Subtitles by: Silence Willacomb Bellows