scholarly journals David Avidan’s Message from the Future. Nuclear fantasies of the galactic poet

2021 ◽  
Vol 28 (37) ◽  
pp. 127-139
Author(s):  
Maciej Pietrzak
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Narrative Structures ◽  
The Future ◽  
Science Fiction Films ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Artistic Failure

David Avidan’s Message from the Future (1981) is one of few Israeli science fiction films ever made. This ambitious project of the well-known avant-garde poet has been forgotten for many years, as a result of a financial and artistic failure of the movie. The paper shows Avidan’s doomed film as an interesting cultural text that can be read as the director’s commentary on the Israeli reality of his time. Contrary to the artist’s claims about the global ambitions of the picture, Message from the Future is immersed in the local, exploring it under the guise of narrative structures borrowed from Hollywood. The text analyzes a precise deconstruction of the plot patterns characteristic for the classic American SF films from the 1950s, which Avidan adjusted to the Israeli sociopolitical landscape at the turn of the seventies and eighties.

Epilogue Imagining future cities

2020 ◽  
pp. 115-124
Author(s):  
Carl Abbott
Keyword(s):  
Big Data ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
The Future ◽  
Technological Developments ◽  
Science Fiction Films ◽  
The Ideal ◽  
Future Visions ◽  
City Planners

“Imagining future cities” contrasts the idea of the human city with the robot city, an idea that is never far away from the cities of the future we see in science fiction films. As some of these future visions demonstrate, the ideal city contains elements of both the human and robot city and is powered by big data and technological developments, as well as human connections and recognizable hubs like the bar, bazaar, and branch library. As well as function and commerce, city planners of the future will need to remember the roles of community and interaction in keeping cities alive.

scholarly journals Postcards from the future

2013 ◽  
Vol 3 (4) ◽  
pp. 12-26 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kristin Miller
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Southern California ◽  
Northern California ◽  
Bay Area ◽  
The Future ◽  
Science Fiction Films ◽  
Photo Essay ◽  
The Way

This article contemplates the way Northern and Southern California have been used in science fiction films since the 1970s. Continuing a trend the author traces to the 1940s novels Earth Abides and Ape and Essence, Northern California represents possible utopian futures while Southern California represents dystopia. The article includes a photo essay featuring science fiction film stills held up against their filming locations in Los Angeles and the Bay Area.

Monsters in the Machine

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steffen Hantke
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Social History ◽  
Industrial Complex ◽  
Nuclear War ◽  
Science Fiction Films ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
To Come ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The Military

During the 1950s and early 1960s, the American film industry produced a distinct cycle of films situated on the boundary between horror and science fiction. Using the familiar imagery of science fiction, the vast majority of these films subscribed to the effects and aesthetics of horror film, anticipating the dystopian turn of many science fiction films to come. These films often evinced paranoia, unease, fear, shock, and disgust. Not only did these movies address technophobia and its psychological, social, and cultural corollaries, they also returned persistently to the military as a source of character, setting, and conflict. Commensurate with a state of perpetual mobilization, the US military comes across as an inescapable presence in American life. Regardless of their genre, this book argues that these films have long been understood as allegories of the Cold War. They register anxieties about two major issues of the time: atomic technologies, especially the testing and use of nuclear weapons, as well as communist aggression and/or subversion. Setting out to question, expand, and correct this critical argument, the book follows shifts and adjustments prompted by recent scholarly work into the technological, political, and social history of America in the 1950s. Based on this revised historical understanding, science fiction films appear in a new light as they reflect on the troubled memories of World War II, the emergence of the military-industrial complex, the postwar rewriting of the American landscape, and the relative insignificance of catastrophic nuclear war compared to America's involvement in postcolonial conflicts around the globe.

scholarly journals Robotic surgery: the future is now

2008 ◽  
Vol 90 (9) ◽  
pp. 296-298
Author(s):  
Elaine Towell
Keyword(s):  
Robotic Surgery ◽  
Minimally Invasive ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Cost Effective ◽  
The Future ◽  
Operating Theatres ◽  
Science Fiction Films ◽  
Minimally Invasive Robotic Surgery

Once the stuff of science fiction films, the era of robotic surgery is finally upon us and experts predict it is set to revolutionise treatment for patients having surgery. Enthusiastic doctors and engineers have been collaborating since the mid-80s but only now are we seeing the fruit of their labour as cost-effective, safe, minimally invasive robotic surgery finally arrives in our operating theatres.

A Bright New Future, With Monsters

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steffen Hantke
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Korean War ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
World War ◽  
The Korean War ◽  
Science Fiction Films ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
The Cold War

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book's key themes. This book focuses on American science fiction films of the 1950s, many of which are fondly remembered, yet critically dismissed. It argues that it is through the intersection of past and present, of unresolved trauma superimposed upon present anxieties, that 1950s science fiction films acquire topical relevance within their historical context. Science fiction films from the 1950s are a belated response to the national trauma of World War II and the Korean War projected onto the unsettling experience of the Cold War. With much of the critical work on the Cold War aspects of the films already delivered by other scholars, this book will weigh in on the side of the argument that has, as yet, remained critically neglected—the side of past trauma: on World War II and the Korean War, and their troubling legacy in the first decade of the American Century.

Beyond Eden

2020 ◽  
pp. 95-100
Author(s):  
Jonathan R. Eller
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Space Shuttle ◽  
Human Growth ◽  
Special Effects ◽  
The Future ◽  
Gene Roddenberry ◽  
Science Fiction Films ◽  
Space Age ◽  
New Generation ◽  
Interplanetary Flight

Chapter 13 opens with commentary on Bradbury’s 1980 Omni magazine article “Beyond Eden,” an essay commissioned to support the projected Space Shuttle program. In this essay, Bradbury defined his Space-Age Trinity—God, humanity, and the machines of interplanetary flight. The chapter goes on to document Bradbury’s April 1980 interviews with friends who had achieved prominence in the new generation of science fiction films: producers Gary Kurtz and Gene Roddenberry, director Irvin Kershner, and special effects artist John Dykstra. Bradbury never completed the article on the future of science fiction films that these interviews were intended to support, but he did articulate a maturing sense of Toynbee’s “challenge and response” as a way to focus the kind of human growth required to reach other worlds.

Convenções na direção de arte cinematográfica: um olhar sobre a ficção científica

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Felipe Muanis ◽  
Mariana Schwartz
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Feature Film ◽  
Blade Runner ◽  
The Future ◽  
Science Fiction Films ◽  
Spike Jonze ◽  
Stephen Neale

The elements of cinematographic language can be used in many ways to portray a story. It appears that, over the years, many conventions have been established in different areas of cinematographic making. In this article, we aim to highlight the conventions of the science fiction genre, with a focus on the art direction of movies that portray the future. For this, films such as Ex_Machina (Alex Garland, 2014), Equals (Drake Doremus, 2015) and Blade Runner 2049 (Denis Villeneuve, 2017) are analyzed. Also noteworthy, is the feature film Her (Spike Jonze, 2013) as a work that goes against the others, which presents an approach to the future that stands out among so many other movies with scenarios and costumes similar to each other. As a basis for the research, the study of conventions by sociologist Howard Becker is used, in addition to the work by theorists David Bordwell, Rick Altman, Stephen Neale, Marcel Martin, Vincent Lobrutto, among others. Directors and their artistic departments use colors, shapes, materials, textures, and elements that have become conventions in science fiction films and few are those who dare to produce something aesthetically different.

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