The Montage of Coming Attractions

Abstract

307 BOOKS IN REVIEW better city planning; some even openly criticize existing tendencies in the US and make references to the extra-filmic utopian discourse of city planners such as Ebenezer Howard, Lewis Mumford, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Le Corbusier. But they also deviate from the utopian ideal type, either because of artistic aspirations or because of commercial interests. Spiegel’s last two examples widen the boundaries of the definition of utopia even more. He calls them “postclassical utopias.” On the one hand, there is Demain (2015), a film that is utopian in that it shows aspects of better societies that actually do exist, such as urban gardening, ecological farming, alternative energy production, recycling, and alternative currencies. On the other hand, there is The Marsdreamers (2009), a film that quite unintentionally attains a utopian quality when Kim Stanley Robinson, who is being interviewed, warns that the colonization of Mars will be not as feasible as he describes in his MARS trilogy (1992-1996). Each film that Spiegel discusses is compared to other films, to the utopian literary tradition in general, and to the complex definition of utopia with which he works. Thus Spiegel manages to reconcile the manifold filmic utopias that he discusses and to construct a basis for future research on utopian film. His study is essential reading for anyone trying to come to grips with this almost uncharted field. Alas, it is in German but if you cannot read it, you can at least enjoy the 164 illustrations and still pictures that Spiegel provides. Or you can read the English-language collection Utopia and Reality: Documentary, Activism and Imagined Worlds (ed. Simon Spiegel, Andrea Reiter, Marcy Goldberg [U of Wales P, 2020] that has the same starting point as Bilder einer besseren Welt, but finds different paths through the jungle of utopian films.—Peter Seyferth, Independent Political Philosopher, Munich The Montage of Coming Attractions. J.P. Telotte. Movies, Modernism, and the Science Fiction Pulps. New York: Oxford UP, 2019. 192 pp. $29.95 pbk. For much of the first half of the twentieth century, sf and film seemed to be traveling in separate orbits. Intersecting occasionally, they traced different paths as they tracked their respective courses through modernity. As he follows these two satellites of popular culture in Movies, Modernism, and the Science Fiction Pulps, J.P. Telotte covers territory that he acknowledges has been explored before, but he maps it in fresh and surprising ways. Despite the “felt connections” (2) between two cultural entities that “breathed the same modernist atmosphere” (3), the picture that emerges is of worldviews each facing the future, but facing away from each other. After sketching in some background on the gravitational pull that film and sf exerted on one another in the two decades on either side of World War I, Telotte takes up the story of the unsteady relationship between the sf pulps and cinema in the latter part of the 1920s, at the dawn of talking pictures. It was the advent of sound in movies, he argues, that cemented film as the non-print medium best suited to share and shape an sf consciousness, at the same time bringing film under “more critical examination, as various pulp stories sounded warnings against ... constantly developing film technology” (62). 308 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 47 (2020) Even when it was not employed to warn readers of future dangers, a filmic gaze soon became a recognizable, possibly even a defining, feature of sf pulp fiction. Plots concerning cameras with reality-altering powers and illustrations framed cinematically or with a camera at their focal point contributed to an overall view of film as “another, and especially attractive way of thinking about, depicting and arguing for the importance of science and technology in the shape of things to come” (75). There may have been a very pragmatic reason for this trend, one which Telotte glances at without examining in depth. The concept of cinema as a montage of attractions crops up again and again in Movies, Modernism and the Science Fiction Pulps, with a fleeting nod to its originator Sergei Eisenstein, but there is no further elaboration on how Eisenstein’s theory may have been vital...