Mémoires d'une survivante

Saw this dud in London when I was heading East in '82. It was the worst kind of cinematic torture. One of the most pretentious and boring things I've seen. The radiant Julie Christie looking as drab as your auntie Eyesore. She had just turned down a million bucks to star in "The Greek Tycoon". Then she comes up with this piece of aimless drivel. To my mind it marked the downward turn in her career. Instead of showing the film world she was still a player (post Beatty), she drops out and bombs doing it. Can't understand how this tripe has made it to DVD. There are a bunch of good Christie films that warrant the medium: "Darling", "Far From The Madding Crowd", "Petulia", "The Go-Between", "McCabe & Mrs. Miller", "Don't Look Now", or her personal triumph in "Afterglow". Want obscure? What about the underrated "Return of The Soldier", "Heat and Dust" or "The Railway Station Man". Talk about getting it wrong! I expect the next one out of her's will be "In Search of Gregory". At least Criterion is offering "Billy Liar". It's good - check it out. Avoid "Memoirs of a Survivor".

I saw this film on TV in the early eighties. Looking back I remember very little of the detail but it was one of those rare films that made you feel cheated when it finished because you wanted it to continue. Strange yes, but still maintained a credibility throughout. I was totally engrossed.

This film was my introduction to Doris Lessing and shortly after seeing the film I bought the book. Now, having read all her books, Lessing is one of my favourite authors. Would like to see the film again - anyone know if it's likely to be re-released?

'Memoirs of a Survivor' is a film that really can't be recommended. It's slow, obscure and poorly directed. One suspects that it would be a lot more interesting for people who've read the source novel but a film needs to exist on its own and the filmmaking isn't good enough to do it.

But despite it being largely tedious and dreary, in another way I found it mildly admirable. It makes no attempts to be a 'commercial' sci-fi film and wants to tell its odd story in its own way. While it isn't successful on that score, it maintains a sense of integrity.

I have similar feelings about Julie Christie and her performance. On one hand she plays such a passive, inert character that her significant talents are wasted. But in another way it's admirable that she decided to take such an unusual role in an ambitious film when she could've easily coasted along in Hollywood in bland big-budget blockbusters.

Overall, 'Memoirs of a Survivor' is a failure as a film, but its effort and ambition are to be admired.

I found the film immensely interesting. You see the decay of urbanity from the eyes of a woman ('D') hiding in her bastion of civilisation, a council flat. Her impregnable retreat is suddenly breached by the intrusion of two factors, the imposition on her by an unnamed authority of an orphan called Emily, and her sudden realisation that beyond the wall lies the past? the future? or perhaps an alternative world told through the various incarnations of a house she visits as an unseen entity.

While the brutalised orphans of the streets outside seem to be beginning to supplant the authorities and are accelerating the end of the world. D realises through her wall, that the condition of her society is not new. Society grows from strict disciplinarian routes, and when achieved embarks on a decaying relaxation of morals which inevitably ends in the collapse of society. Those that are necessary to rebuild society are not necessarily nice people, merely essential, thus we arrive at the Gerald character. Eventually Emily and Gerald rescue the savage (troglodyte) children of the subways, and with the help of D and the wall, take them to a new Eden, where the children will be able to begin a new society starting from caveman.

It is obvious because of the cannibalistic nature of the children that Gerald, Emily and D will not survive this process, but their action is essential to build anew, and the children will begin without the memory of their former civilisation's decay. Thus we are brought from the end of the world, to the beginning of a new world for the orphans of the old. Most people believed that the collapse of D's world was a prediction of the collapse of our own, but perhaps our world is actually the one behind the wall. That is up to you.

This is an intensely moving novel produced by a woman of feeling who had witnessed the brutalisation and savagery of war at close hand and understood the nature of the fall of society. Not an action film, but a masterpiece that many will not understand because of its intensely philosophical nature.

I see from the last few reviews (at least one of which is one viewer's opinion of Christie's career more than of this particular film) that they didn't like the movie. OK. (And for the record, the fact that some have access to working helicopters doesn't mean most people would, and an extensive, working infrastructure isn't needed to maintain relatively few of them.) I've got the DVD of this film, and the transfer certainly leaves something to be desired. But if that, or the "helicopter issue", or a "tacky" film score, will negate any enjoyment you might have, then this film (and this type of film) is not for you. But it definitely is worth watching. Maybe a different director, or the same director taking a different approach would have made this a better film, and one that would have pleased its' critics.