Science Fiction Films - Essay Example

SCIENCE FICTION FILM SCIENCE FICTION FILM Insert name: Insert course code: Instructor’s name: 23 January, 2011 Introduction Every time the film-students come into contact with the science fiction type, they more or less find themselves facing a type of contradiction, one connected to the challenging judgment built into the form’s combinatory description – that is, as science and fiction, as fact as well as production. This is because the variety that may seem to be approximately self-evidently itself, have a propensity of slipping away to avoid its own proof or facticity. Most of its literary practitioners argue that it manifests about science as well as the scientific possibility and probability. Science fiction proposes the sort of ‘what if’ game in which scientists are characteristically engaged as they set about designing experimentations and carrying out their research: extrapolating from the known in order to explain the unknown. One of the famous writer as well as a renowned pulp editor John W. Campbell Jr. said that science fiction ought to be an effort to predict the future on the basis of known facts, culled mainly from present day laboratories. In it cinematic form, science fiction in most cases seems to appeal precisely since it lends itself to the greatest imaginative capacities of the film medium: to its ability to - through special effects – give shape and being to the imagination. Thus it is a form that often seems quite difficult to pin down satisfactorily and hence making it hard to define the literary form of science fiction. However, Darko Suvin in Metamorphoses of Science Fiction, a theoretical work mainly for scholarly audience, assumes that science fiction is a readily recognizable form; a full-fledged literary genre that have its own repertory of functions, conventions and devices that are well known. This paper will discuss Science Fiction films as a sort of contest between various aspects of the mise en scene including technology, special effects, action, bugs and aliens (Telotte, 2001 p. 4). Science Fiction as Fantasy Among many other ways, this categorization attempt reminds us of the universal restrictions that movie studies frequently appear to set on how we conservatively reflect in relation to genres. The fantastic exists on a kind of sliding scale with two other forms namely the uncanny and the marvelous. While the uncanny narrative focuses on the unconscious or in general, the mind as a force producing seemingly inexplicable events, and the marvelous on the supernatural or spiritual realm as it intrudes into and challenges our everyday world, the fantastic occupies that point of hesitation between the two: the realm of what might or might not be, where reality itself seems a puzzle, waiting for us to reconstruct it. The Science Fiction film, as an example of a specific cinematic ‘slang’ invariably has its own meanings, which attach to its most identifiable concerns. As we can see from Susan Sontag’s well known essay, “The Imagination of Disaster,” the science fiction film is rooted inn a fundamental triad of reason, science, and technology – in a certain way of thinking - a body of knowledge that derives from that thinking, and an instrumentality produced by and reflective of that knowledge. A great part of the science fiction film’s special character derives from this focus on the concerns of reason or science or even technology. Recently, the science fiction films have proven a popular form mainly since its peculiar argot offers us a most appropriate language for talking about a large dimension of culture and also its elementary themes assist us in making sense of our culture’s quandaries. Science fiction relies heavily on special effects, and this reliance requires that there be a consideration of how the form’s paradigmatic elements are associated with its very creation – that is, how the genre’s concern with the technological engages us in a complex system of reflections on its own technological underpinnings, and thus on its own level of reality. According to Garrett Stewart’s essay, “The `Videology’ of Science Fiction,” “science fiction in the cinema often turns out to be the imaginary or fictive discipline of the movies itself, the potential achievement it may realize scanned in line with the technological accomplishment that envisages them at the moment and in front of our eyes” (Telotte, 2001 p. 25). How science fiction is connected to technology When we watch a science fiction film, we also see a narrative concerning the movies themselves - concerning how our technology can impact on humanity, how our technology and rationality impinges on our world, how our technology might point beyond our normal sense of reality. Thus the science fiction cinema invariably betrays a thoroughly reflexive character. The genre appears to be about the movies precisely because of the ways in which its reliance on special effects implicates both the technology of film and the typical concern of most popular narratives with achieving a transparent realism. Science fiction serves a unique niche in a technological culture, exploring the future relationship between technology and society conditions of rapid change in both areas. Similar to all popular culture forms, science fiction films both reflect and reinforce prevailing belief systems. Here, fears of technology marching out of control, of machines controlling man reach their apex. Furthermore, visions of technological potential rapidly outstrip the boundaries of contemporary scientific knowledge. We find that intelligent computers in science fiction film have personalities, gender as well as free will; they act independently and in their own interests; they often trample on human values (Loukides & Fuller, 1993 p. 207). The relationship between science fiction and special effects The relationship between special effects and science fiction is a key historical figure. This is because the investigation of special effects brings together two different methodological and chronological lines of inquiry: the first, historical and contextual; and the second, critical and futurological. On one hand, it is concerned with identifying, organizing, and interpreting the kind of primary, archival material that might count as evidence of the way that the cultural reception of special effects has been shaped by cultures of connoisseurship, appreciation and fandom. Special effects acquire significance for culture by becoming objects of scientific curiosity, aesthetic appreciation or even vocational inspiration (Pierson, 2002 p. 3). The use of Computer-Generated Imagery (CGI) to generate special effects in films has received a lot of critical attention across a range of perspectives. Cinematic special effects put the display of the digital artifact or CGI at the center of the entertainment experience. Most of the work done today is directed on science fiction cinema, exploring the role of special effects in the construction of imagined futures, like in debates concerning the tension between narrative and special effects in the sci-fi movie, and of the role of effects in producing the experience of sci-fi viewing. Thus sci-fi films are all about CGs, with filmic narrative basically shaped around key effects sequences – producing an experience of ‘marvel at the abilities of the medium itself’ analogous to the experience of technological marvel in cyber-medicine. Thus the CGI in sci-fi plays a double marvel: marvel at the future it depicts, and marvel at the technologies used in that act of depiction. Apart from representing the techno-scientific wonders demanded by science fiction narratives, they are also representations of the techno-scientific achievements of the filmmaking and special effects industries to cinema audiences (Bell, 2002 p. 60). There is a significant tension in the way we consume special effects. A significant dimension of anything considered to be a good special effect is that it enables us to take it for reality of some kind – to suspend disbelief and to enable us to put to the back of our minds for the moment the fact that we are watching a product of special effect. The main function of special effects is top serve the narrative purposes, to make possible the images called for by the narrative. A story set on a fantastic imaginary planet requires effects that can create compelling images of a strange terrain; terrifying or wonderful aliens make similar demands on the special effects department. Better effects, seen this way, make the narrative more effective. They are specifically more important in science fiction, a genre so founded on the realization of things that do not exist or are unknown or impossible at the time. Special effects may claim our attention to a certain extent than being subordinated to the anxiety of story. This is a widespread grievance in the midst of critics of modern science fiction cinema. Special effects are seen as interrupting or drawing our attention away from the story. The appeal of special effects is undoubtedly one of the attractions offered by science fiction cinema, whether as a way of making convincing a fantastic narrative or providing audio-visual sensation for its own sake (King & Krzywinska, 2000 p. 64). The relationship between science fiction and aliens The social and technological thematic of science fiction often go hand in hand with certain iconographies – with dominant visual facts, motifs or symbols in a film’s, or in the genre, overall organization. Prominent in popular imaginings of science fiction are such familiar icons as spaceships, robots and aliens. These are more prominent in science fiction in non-cinematic media, figuring particularly memorably in the science fiction comics as well as pulp literature of the 1940s and 1950s. The science fiction’s characteristic themes are basically twofold, having to do with technologies on one hand and with modes of social organization on the other. The preoccupation with technologies gives the genre its peculiar fluidity, for technologies and the cultural attitudes and competencies that go with them are in constant flux. It is the emphasis on the social which gives science fiction narratives their coolness, in that they display a tendency to eschew the motivations and psychological development of characters in favor of a detached, even Olympian, stance towards the social arrangements governing the fictional worlds they construct and the fictional characters who inhabit these worlds (Kuhn, 1999. P.3). Science fiction stories can create blueprints of social theories. Only within genres of the fantastic is it possible to imagine completely new social orders and ways of being that differ radically from human existence as we know it. An alien construction is a recent intervention in the ongoing debate that examines the relationship of theory to science fiction. It explores how some science fiction engages with feminist thought in a way that enables us to understand oppression and to envision resistance beyond the limits set by much of feminist discourse. An alien construction is aimed at readers interested in feminist discourses as well as genre readers (Melzer, 2006 p. 3). The relationship between science fiction and bugs Within the sub-category of science fiction films based on expansion and reduction, a whole treatment can be made of the central place of ‘the bug’ that becomes the size of a human, starting with George Melie’s 1898 film Un bon lit and continuing through to The Fly (1958 and 1986). In the former, giant bugs transformed into monsters roam the earth’s surface, while in the latter a human merges with an insect. In both films the bug is enlarged while humans remain the same size under the threat from a species we normally dominate (Marchessault & Sawchuk, 2000. P. 21). The perception of dimension is linked to shots. Since it is the camera that directs the viewer’s eyes, the filmmaker manipulates the dimensions and proportions of people, places, and things for creative purposes. Thus, small scale models, suitably constructed and photographed, may substitute for actual people or objects. In science fiction films, individuals can appear in contrast as giants or as small insects (Manchel, 1990 p. 97). Conclusion The science fiction film is more than an element in some super-text, more than a series of semantic and syntactic devices, calculated to produce a certain meaning. It is, for its entire often rather cold and technological context, a very seductive form, one that we might well see as the deep unconscious of popular cinema. Its capability to generate what might be, to synthesize a new realty, is a powerful lure, one closely allied to the attraction bound up in the very technology that makes it possible. The pulp aspects of science fiction potentially endow the genre with certain folk energies, while allowing the lowly genre to explore certain themes in ways that would never be possible in more respectable venues. References: Bell D. 2002. An Introduction to Cybercultures. UK, Routledge. From http://books.google.com/books?id=MRNlLK6ZlMYC&pg=PA60&dq=the+role+of+special+effect+in+Science+Fiction+films&hl=en&ei=y4g9TcPfH8Ss8gOe2b29CA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=2&ved=0CCoQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=the%20role%20of%20special%20effect%20in%20Science%20Fiction%20films&f=false (accessed January 23, 2011) King G. & Krzywinska T. 2000. Science fiction cinema: from outer-space to cyberspace. London, Wallflower Press. From http://books.google.com/books?id=rME0VjOIUD4C&pg=PA64&dq=the+role+of+special+effect+in+Science+Fiction+films&hl=en&ei=y4g9TcPfH8Ss8gOe2b29CA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=3&ved=0CC8Q6AEwAg#v=onepage&q&f=false (accessed January 23, 2011) Kuhn A. 1999. “Alien zone II: the spaces of science-fiction cinema”. London, Verso. From http://books.google.com/books?id=PGzJxbZovkAC&pg=PA4&dq=the+role+of+aliens+in+Science+Fiction+films&hl=en&ei=B8U9TaXaEsKx8gOC5r37CA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=9&ved=0CFEQ6AEwCA#v=onepage&q&f=false (accessed January 23, 2011) Loukides P. & Fuller L.K. 1993. Beyond the Stars 3: The Material World in American Popular Film Popular Press. From http://books.google.com/books?id=sSPILzc9rkcC&pg=PA207&dq=the+relationship+between+Science+Fiction+films+and+technology&hl=en&ei=7Xk9TebRHoOg8QO3toGbCA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=3&ved=0CDMQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&q=the%20relationship%20between%20Science%20Fiction%20films%20and%20technology&f=false (accessed January 23, 2011) Manchel F. 1990. Film study: an analytical bibliography. Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press. From http://books.google.com/books?id=BebEAji_wH4C&pg=PA97&dq=the+concept+of+bugs+in+Science+Fiction+films&hl=en&ei=P1ETeO8Lcm94Abl6oXbDw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=10&ved=0CFMQ6AEwCQ#v=onepage&q&f=false (accessed January 23, 2011) Marchessault J. & Sawchuk K. 2000. Wild science: reading feminism, medicine, and the media. UK, Routledge. From http://books.google.com/books?id=skTkq9R5LscC&pg=PA22&dq=the+role+of+bugs+in+Science+Fiction+films&hl=en&ei=_t09TZ_DE8SY8QP0MzdCA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=8&ved=0CEcQ6AEwBzgK#v=onepage&q&f=false (accessed January 23, 2011) Melzer P. 2006. Alien constructions: science fiction and feminist thought. University of Texas Press. From http://books.google.com/books?id=E6PXfcb1UC&printsec=frontcover&dq=the+role+of+aliens+in+Science+Fiction+films&hl=en&ei=B8U9TaXaEsKx8gOC5r37CA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=3&ved=0CDAQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&q=the%20role%20of%20aliens%20in%20Science%20Fiction%20films&f=false (accessed January 23, 2011) Pierson M. 2002. Special effects: still in search of wonder. New York, Columbia University Press. From http://books.google.com/books?id=0WxJU5riHi4C&pg=PP15&dq=the+relationship+between+Science+Fiction+films+and+special+effects&hl=en&ei=b4c9Tb_1B4Gr8AP5hNy5CA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=3&ved=0CC8Q6AEwAg#v=onepage&q=the%20relationship%20between%20Science%20Fiction%20films%20and%20special%20effects&f=false (accessed January 23, 2011) Telotte J. P. 2001. Science fiction film. Cambridge University Press. From http://books.google.com/books?id=izKtL3IFBXcC&printsec=frontcover&dq=aspects+of+Science+Fiction+films&hl=en&ei=rQk9TZe6DtKq8QO6m6nNCA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CCkQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=aspects%20of%20Science%20Fiction%20films&f=false (accessed January 23, 2011) Read More

How science fiction is connected to technology When we watch a science fiction film, we also see a narrative concerning the movies themselves - concerning how our technology can impact on humanity, how our technology and rationality impinges on our world, how our technology might point beyond our normal sense of reality. Thus the science fiction cinema invariably betrays a thoroughly reflexive character. The genre appears to be about the movies precisely because of the ways in which its reliance on special effects implicates both the technology of film and the typical concern of most popular narratives with achieving a transparent realism.

Science fiction serves a unique niche in a technological culture, exploring the future relationship between technology and society conditions of rapid change in both areas. Similar to all popular culture forms, science fiction films both reflect and reinforce prevailing belief systems. Here, fears of technology marching out of control, of machines controlling man reach their apex. Furthermore, visions of technological potential rapidly outstrip the boundaries of contemporary scientific knowledge.

We find that intelligent computers in science fiction film have personalities, gender as well as free will; they act independently and in their own interests; they often trample on human values (Loukides & Fuller, 1993 p. 207). The relationship between science fiction and special effects The relationship between special effects and science fiction is a key historical figure. This is because the investigation of special effects brings together two different methodological and chronological lines of inquiry: the first, historical and contextual; and the second, critical and futurological.

On one hand, it is concerned with identifying, organizing, and interpreting the kind of primary, archival material that might count as evidence of the way that the cultural reception of special effects has been shaped by cultures of connoisseurship, appreciation and fandom. Special effects acquire significance for culture by becoming objects of scientific curiosity, aesthetic appreciation or even vocational inspiration (Pierson, 2002 p. 3). The use of Computer-Generated Imagery (CGI) to generate special effects in films has received a lot of critical attention across a range of perspectives.

Cinematic special effects put the display of the digital artifact or CGI at the center of the entertainment experience. Most of the work done today is directed on science fiction cinema, exploring the role of special effects in the construction of imagined futures, like in debates concerning the tension between narrative and special effects in the sci-fi movie, and of the role of effects in producing the experience of sci-fi viewing. Thus sci-fi films are all about CGs, with filmic narrative basically shaped around key effects sequences – producing an experience of ‘marvel at the abilities of the medium itself’ analogous to the experience of technological marvel in cyber-medicine.

Thus the CGI in sci-fi plays a double marvel: marvel at the future it depicts, and marvel at the technologies used in that act of depiction. Apart from representing the techno-scientific wonders demanded by science fiction narratives, they are also representations of the techno-scientific achievements of the filmmaking and special effects industries to cinema audiences (Bell, 2002 p. 60). There is a significant tension in the way we consume special effects. A significant dimension of anything considered to be a good special effect is that it enables us to take it for reality of some kind – to suspend disbelief and to enable us to put to the back of our minds for the moment the fact that we are watching a product of special effect.

The main function of special effects is top serve the narrative purposes, to make possible the images called for by the narrative. A story set on a fantastic imaginary planet requires effects that can create compelling images of a strange terrain; terrifying or wonderful aliens make similar demands on the special effects department.

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