Science and Technology Confront Reality

Abstract

and technology, and people associated with them, are seldom depicted in film as benign. Heavy-laden with potential for salvation or destruction, they are nearly always cast as a potent force in shaping of humanity's well-being, and so, of its history. This Janus-faced nature of science is, of necessity, governed by a pact of mutual obligation with society - one that offers support, intellectual autonomy, and substantial cultural authority to practitioners of science and technology in return for greater control over unknown and intervention in ills that plague humankind. Early cinematic narratives of society's relationship with science and technology typically fell into two categories. The first ranged from unabashedly fantastic tales of promise and possibility - Melies brothers' A Trip to Moon (1902) and William Cameron Menzies' Things to Come (1936) - to celebratory biopics like The Story of Louis Pasteur (1936) and earnest documentaries such as Night Mail (1936) and Power and Land (1940). The second category of narratives was cautionary tales, featuring scientists who placed their own hunger for knowledge and power ahead of society's needs. These were cinematic archetypes of misguided and mad science: Dr. Rotwang of Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927); James Whale's Dr. Frankenstein (1931); many incarnations of Dr. Jekyll (notably 1920, 1931, and 1941); and unseen designer of machinery that bedevils Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times (1936). Both visions of relationship of science, technology, and society have remained continuously in play on movie screens through present day, with some films continuing to celebrate engagement of science with society, while others caution about dangers of its disengagement. Beginning in 1950s, horrors of Second World War and fears of Atomic Age spawned a third type of narrative: one that questioned whether long-standing pact between science and society was inherently flawed. Films addressing social and human costs of science began to appear immediately after war: as straightforward dramas (The Beginning or End, 1947), as comedies (The Man in White Suit, 1951), as monster epics (Gojira, 1954), and as detective stories (Kiss Me Deadly, 1955). The skepticism and irony given form in these films defy clearly positive and negative poles of earlier portrayals, creating a range of complex, and often contradictory, cinematic depictions of science and technology in latter half of twentieth century. This issue of Film S^History, Science and Technology Confront Reality, is first of two special issues on Representations of and Technology in Film. The five articles featured here explore how science and technology are variously pressed into service across genres to mitigate society's complexities and fears, from civil-defense films, to rubble films, to classic B-movie horror, and from docu- drama to mock- documentary. In our lead article, Good Germans, Humane Automobiles: Redeeming Technological Modernity - In Those Days, Paul Dobryden examines rubble of humanity, and car entrusted with its salvage. Through memories of a battered automobile found amidst ruins of a German city, film seeks to reconstruct an alternative history of Third Reich - one in which ideal of the humane persisted - in order to give hope, and a useable past, to a war-torn nation. …