Memoirs of a Survivor (1981)

Strong and Moving!

Excellent, Without a doubt!!

Don't listen to the negative reviews

It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional

Let me preface this by saying it is 2016, I have no knowledge/read the book from which this odd movie comes from.Latenight TV & I miss the first few moments of the screening, but first thing I see is a magical portal, so I decide to record & view the following morning.Character 'D', is supplied by an official with a new young girl/person to look after, well, because. Along with her comes her pet, increasing the mouths to feed.Gangs of youth roam the streets, BBQ ing animals & not doing much else. The magic wall, leads to a room which changes at the whim of the director.Like Alice in Wonderland, I guess the 2nd reality is supposed to mean something, but this failed on me.Cave-children are seen once & are there for effect only it seems.The future might in fact be bleak, but certainly will be more exciting than this movie.

It's easy to take shots at 50s horror flicks featuring people you'd never heard of before, nor will ever hear from again. But that such a comparatively modern film, featuring name stars such as Nigel Hawthorne and Julie Christie could be so mind-numbingly bad beggars description.The opening screen reads "When Things Stopped". It's puzzlingly inaccurate as we know officials have working helicopters. Could the film makers be unawares of the complex infrastructure needed to keep those delicate machines flying? Hardly something you'd expect after societal collapse. The opener is accurate in one sense, though as much of the film left me feeling the plot - what there was of it - had stopped.Christie? She practically send a surface mail letter in to stand for her performance. Much of the film has her so listless that one wonders if the character (or actress) has been shot with an elephant tranq dart.The bit with the wall that's a gateway to another reality? Excuse me? What possible reason would Christie's character have for wanting to return to her dismal reality after her first time through? The whole concept made absolutely no sense whatsoever. And the kids dancing around the giant egg? Just what drugs did someone slip in the writers' drinking water? A memorable passage from Ayn Rand's book THE FOUNTAINHEAD has a character reading something which is essentially gibberish and thinking it "...must be profound because he didn't understand it." Wanting to be sure about that here, I showed it to a friend who, at the time, was working on her psych doctorate (with a Lit minor). The film over I asked her if there was something, some deep, subtle meaning I was missing. She replied by pointing out that some non-conforming stories are trying to tie into (she spewed forth psych-babble-double-talk) and make reference to literary (more jargon). Pausing, she looked at the now turned off TV screen, then back to me and went on ..."And then there's films such as this which are just garbage, plain and simple."

The sets, lighting design and foreboding music score all match the gloominess of the material here well, and the atmosphere that these combined elements achieve is what keeps the film relatively intriguing. The first third definitely works better than the final third of the film though, as in the beginning one is trying to decipher what it is all about, and towards the end it just drags, and it looks like it is building up to some revelation, yet at the end nothing new is revealed. The plot is really strange, with many different elements of science fiction worked in, ranging from portholes to the notion of a dire dystopia. It seems somewhat messy, but even so, some have been able to find their own meanings in it, so the film is probably worth a look if it sounds interesting. I would not call it a brilliant film myself, but it definitely does have some elements that will be of interest to certain viewers.

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.