Stalker

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jon Hoel
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Science Fiction Films ◽  
Literary Influences ◽  
The Many ◽  
Film Viewing

This book examines Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Stalker, one of the most powerful science-fiction films ever made, with the goal of unraveling the film’s many intricacies, from its difficult production and inspecting its many cinematic elements. Included are examinations of composition and cinematography, the many philosophies, poetic and literary influences, and the enormity of its influence across the following generations. The film juxtaposes its speculative elements with a gripping tale of human fragility and introspection. It is as much a movie about the complexity of the human as it is the mysteriousness of the film’s labyrinthine landscape: the ambiguous Zone and its epicenter, the Room of Desire. Stalker challenges us to engage with film in a different way: taking the sensuous and the analytical viewers to task and presenting a narrative that is both deeply pessimistic and yet profoundly hopeful and embedded in a framework of the deepest and most sincere form of faith. The resulting experience is a film viewing unlike any the viewer has experienced before, irrevocably altering cinema forever.

scholarly journals David's Need for Mutual Recognition: A Social Personhood Defense of Steven Spielberg's A. I. Artificial Intelligence

2016 ◽  
Vol 20 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 339-356
Author(s):  
Tuomas William Manninen ◽  
Bertha Alvarez Manninen
Keyword(s):  
Artificial Intelligence ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Mutual Recognition ◽  
Social Recognition ◽  
Human Needs ◽  
Desire To Have Children ◽  
Science Fiction Films ◽  
The Many ◽  
A Company

In Steven Spielberg's A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001) a company called Cybertronics is responsible for creating, building, and disseminating a large number of ‘mechas’ – androids built specifically to address a multitude of human needs, including the desire to have children. David, an android mecha-child, has the capacity to genuinely love on whomever he ‘imprints.’ The first of this kind of mecha, he is ultimately abandoned by his ‘mother’ Monica, and David spends the rest of the film searching for Pinocchio's Blue Fairy so that he can be made into a ‘real boy’ and gain Monica's love. Their reunion finally occurs at the end of the film, after hundreds of years. Typically, the ending in A.I. is panned by critics, and written off as an egregrious example of Spielberg's sentimentalism. However, we argue that the ending is essential in order to portray a certain conception of the nature of human personhood. While many science fiction films about artificial intelligence are centered on the issue of what constitutes personhood, A.I. is one of the very few films that does not regard personhood as something purely intrinsic to the biological (or, in this case, mechanical) construction of the organism. We contend that one of the many the messages of this film is that the journey to complete personhood requires social recognition.

Military Stock Footage

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steffen Hantke
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Public Domain ◽  
The Public ◽  
Standard Device ◽  
The Common ◽  
Science Fiction Films ◽  
The Military

This chapter focuses on the recruitment of the audience into the “military metaphysics” that C. Wright Mills decries as a symptom of America's Cold War mentality. More specifically, it reads attempts at recruitment made by science fiction films of the period through the use of military stock footage. Pilfering the public domain for footage to be inserted into one's own film was a standard device of inexpensive filmmaking that found one of its most extreme expressions in Alfred E. Green's Invasion U.S.A. (1952). Generally dismissed as a hack job and mercilessly lampooned by Mystery Science Theater 3000, Invasion U.S.A. is a prime example of a politically engaged film using one of the common stylistic devices of 1950s low-budget filmmaking.

Close Encounters: Genre and Context

2016 ◽  
pp. 17-24
Author(s):  
Jon Towlson
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
State Of The Art ◽  
Greek Mythology ◽  
Art Cinema ◽  
Special Effects ◽  
Star Wars ◽  
The Third ◽  
Close Encounters ◽  
Human Need ◽  
Science Fiction Films

This chapter discusses the genre and context of Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). It begins by tracing the emergence of science fiction in literature and in cinema. The chapter then looks at how film serials popularised pulp science-fiction cinema in the form of rocketships, ray guns, alien invaders, evil intergalactic emperors, and damsels in distress. One can see them as the inspiration for the likes of Star Wars and the myriad superhero blockbuster movies that continue to dominate Hollywood today. In 1968, Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey returned science fiction to its origins in Greek mythology. It is perhaps the first example of ‘transcendent’ science-fiction cinema, exploring the human need to place trust in a force larger than ourselves. In the early 1970s, science-fiction films were more overtly concerned with identity and environment, and how both were increasingly shaped or misshapen by technology. Meanwhile, post-9/11 has seen a move towards intelligent science fiction as a bankable commodity within Hollywood. Part of the genre's continuing appeal is, of course, the showcasing of state-of-the-art cinema technology within the sci-fi narrative. Special-effects technology has evolved in line with cinema's own development.

‘I’ll hurt you if you stay.’ The Fly scene-by-scene: Act Two

The Fly ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 87-96
Author(s):  
Emma Westwood
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Old Age ◽  
Cellular Level ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
The Real ◽  
Natural Processes ◽  
Science Fiction Films ◽  
Emotional Resonance

This chapter describes the scenes of Act Two of David Cronenberg's The Fly (1986). In Act Two, Seth Brundle makes the transition from amiable and reclusive scientist to predatory and misogynistic Brundlefly — a seamless character transition that creeps up on the audience through Cronenberg's screenplay and direction, and Jeff Goldblum's subtle yet defined performance. As the Brundlefly persona comes to the fore, the audience still sympathises with the overtly animalistic, egregious person he has become. They know this is not the real Seth; it is the corruption of Seth at a cellular level. Cronenberg's patented brand of body horror is coming into its own right here with Seth finally admitting to himself that something is wrong. He questions whether he is dying, and if this is what dying is like, which directly references Cronenberg's own explanation of the film: that it is an allegory for our mortality as human beings and the natural processes that lead to old age and death. It is by way of the computer that he discovers his DNA has fused with a fly — the vital ‘reveal’ — in a cinematic moment common to many great science-fiction films where pivotal information of emotional resonance is not communicated between human beings but between human and machine.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
J. P. Telotte
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Visual Impact ◽  
Film Viewing ◽  
Viewing Practices

Abstract: This chapter explores the nature of the science fiction (SF) pulp magazine in the 1910s–1940 period, with a special emphasis on the influence of the most influential editor of the period, Hugo Gernsback. It outlines how the subjects and aims of SF in this period paralleled the larger modernist agenda that was also shaping the development of film, with a special emphasis on the visual impact of early film and early film-viewing practices. The chapter especially emphasizes how cinema’s emphasis on “attractions” or “astonishments,” as film historian Tom Gunning labels them, finds a corollary in the new genre of SF’s concern with “wonders.”

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.

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