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We do get the INGSOC slogans, examples of Newspeak and references to the critical work of Emmanuel Goldstein. This version closely follows the book though some sections are elided, as for example with the exterior sequences in the ‘prole’ area. The dominance of close-ups and fairly bare television sets works to generate a real sense of paranoia appropriate to the book. The production was recorded in a studio with filmed inserts. It was directed by Rudolph Cartier who was a seminal figure in early British television drama.
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The BBC production was written by Nigel Kneale, a key figure in television science fiction.
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The BBC broadcast an adaption in 1954: CBS had already broadcast a US Network version in 1953. Predictably there are also television and film feature length versions: some attempt a literal translation others involve influence or reformulation. The book has been adapted into plays, radio plays, for television into an opera and even a ballet the last impressed me more than I expected. Whilst it offers some version of socialism it also appears to operate under a system of commodity production and exchange. And as is common with that concept he elides the political economy of his society. He subscribes to the notion of a totalitarian state. Orwell’s vision is bleak and pessimistic. There are many plot cross-overs though Yevgeny’s novel is set farther in the future in an advanced technological society. A stronger influence would be the Soviet novel We ( Мы) a dystopian story by Yevgeny Zamyatin completed in 1921. There is also the influence of the earlier novel by Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (1931), though this book relies on hedonistic addiction rather than brutal surveillance. Orwell’s novel reflected a host of influences: his early life and preparatory school: his experience of the depression in the 1930s: his experience of sectarianism, the suppression of anarcho-syndicalist organisations in Barcelona in 1937: his experience of the destruction and scarcity of the war years: his time at the BBC and his experience of its bureaucracy: his readings and knowledge of events both in the Soviet Union of the 1930s, including Arthur Koestler’s ‘Darkness at Noon’ (1940), and of the Fascist dictatorships in the 1920s and 1930s: and writing the novel in the post-war world of rationing and the ‘cold war’. Even though, thirty years further on from the titular date, we still have not suffered the dystopia he envisaged, the book remains a potent and influential text. The grim futurist vision in Orwell’s famous novel would seem not to have come to pass. ‘From Méliès to New Media’: the problem of the facsimiles in the digital age.Saudha International Satyajit Ray Congress.Happy End (France-Austria-Germany 2017).