Morel's Invention (Emidio Greco, 1974)

If one didn’t know Emidio Greco’s L’invenzione di Morel was based on a novel, it might easily be taken as a response to Tarkovsky’s then-recent Solaris – although not set in space, its isolated island setting amounts to much the same thing, and the plotlines are similar in their blurring of the line between humanity and illusion, and in the related capacity for cinematic metaphor. With tweaking and a much-souped-up visual style, Greco’s film could also feel like the forerunner of a Black Mirror installment. A man is washed up on the island, his boat wrecked beyond repair (there’s little backstory beyond a passing reference to political problems) – the island holds a large structure that’s part museum shell and part industrial complex but initially seems uninhabited, but then he starts to see people, dancing and conversing with little attention paid to their challenged surroundings, and with none at all paid to him (the most striking among them is played by Anna Karina, who even more than in most of her post-Godard work is utilized here as pure image). The film is strikingly composed and edited, often wordless for long stretches, at others dense with exposition and self-interpretation as the title’s Morel, gradually revealed as dominant among these dispossessed individuals, reveals his invention, and the place of the others within it. As noted, the film draws on a classic cinematic proposition, of the screen and the spectator’s submission to it as a rewriting of and usurpation of reality – in this respect, it necessarily belongs to a time of cinema as physical destination, long predating the tyranny of tiny screens. It’s not the most galvanizing of works – there’s no respect really in which Greco is as interesting as Tarkovsky, and the film does skirt turgidity at times – but it has an elemental enigmatic power, and deserves better than its substantially forgotten status (an ironic fate perhaps, given its premise).