Sf Films Research Articles

<i>Women Scientists in Fifties Science Fiction Films</i> (review)

Bonnie Noonan, Women Scientists in Fifties Science Fiction Films. Jefferson: McFarland, 2005. vii+225 pp. us$35.00 (pbk).Ximena Gallardo C.Women Scientists in Fifties Science Fiction Films is a somewhat inaccurately titled book since only five of the female protagonists of the ten films discussed can be categorised as 'scientists'. Nevertheless, Noonan's book delivers what she promises in her preface: drawing from a wide variety of theories from Freud to Bakhtin to Jameson, she demonstrates that certain female characters from 1950s American sf films should be considered as protagonists in their own right. The book is at its best when Noonan re-imagines herself as a ten-year-old girl watching in fascination as the female scientist on the screen picks up a rat from its cage without showing any of the stereotypical feminine fear; as she explains, this is a type of image 'you hold to your heart and grow up with' (102). Where the book is less successful is in the use of theory to probe deeply into her subject - a problem complicated by an array of editorial errors.Noonan opens her first chapter, 'Definitions and Histories', by comparing novelist Robert Heinlein's and critic Carl Freedman's definitions of sf. She then reviews the definitions of the sf film offered by scholars Douglas Menville and Vivian Sobchack, and ends with a catalogue of critical views on 1950s B-sf films that includes Menville and Sobchack as well as Richard Hodgens, Bill Warren, Patrick Lucanio, Adam Knee, David J. Skal and Cyndy Hendershot. In chapter two, 'Constructing a Canon of 1950s B Science Fiction Films', Noonan uses the classifications from the previous chapter to explain her film selection and announces the principal objective of her following chapters: 'to redeem the image of woman by foregrounding women's roles to show not only how varied, but also how central, they were to the genre of 1950s B science fiction films' (38). The third chapter, 'Representations of Women Scientists', focuses on Dr Lisa Van Horne (Osa Massen) of Rocketship X-M (Neumann US 1950) and Professor Lesley Joyce (Faith Domergue) of It Came from beneath the Sea (Gordon US 1955). Chapter four, 'Professionalism and Femininity in the Giant Insect Films', discusses Them! (Douglas US 1954), Tarantula (Arnold US 1955) and The Deadly Mantis (Juran US 1957) in terms of their female heroes - Dr Pat Medford (Joan Weldon), Stephanie 'Steve' Clayton (Mara Corday) and Marge Blaine (Alix Talton), respectively - as well as their monstrous insects and spiders. The fifth chapter, 'Cinematically Representing a Heteroglot World', analyses Beginning of the End (Gordon US 1957) and Kronos (Neumann US 1957) as attempts to resolve the characteristic tension in the 1950s between women's contribution to the workforce and patriarchal opposition to their participation. Chapter six, 'Dreaming, Analyzing, and Joking in the Women-in-Power Films', explores Cat-Women of the Moon (Hilton US 1953), World without End (Bernds US 1956) and Queen of Outer Space (Bernds US 1958) using Freudian dream analysis. Finally, the conclusion, 'Where to Go from Here', suggests a plethora of possible research topics for exploring 1950s B-sf films, from 'the expectations placed on the dutiful wife or fiancee of the period' (156) through 'the boundaries that circumscribed masculine identity' (157) to 'the evolution of woman as icon of sexual liberation' (158) and beyond.Besides the usual bibliography, notes and index, Noonan includes a detailed filmography of 114 B-sf films from 1950 to 1966, forty-four entries of which contain excerpts of dialogue that 'illustrate the delicate balance between professionalism and traditional femininity these cinematic women in science needed to maintain as well as the scientific work they performed' (163). Two appendices list nineteen female protagonists of 1950s B-sf films and the men in their lives under the categories 'Female Leads and their Father Figures' and 'Female Leads and their Love Interests', thus transgressing traditional canons of 1950s sf by placing the female character as the focus of the lists and the male protagonist as her adjunct. …

The perfect panopticon: Rainer Werner Fassbinder'sWelt am Draht

Immersion and paranoiaIn her seminal definition, Janet Murray characterises immersion as 'the sensation of being surrounded by a completely other reality that takes over all of our attention, our whole perceptual apparatus' (98-9). While it is often considered a desired aesthetic effect of media such as cinema or video games, immersion has a paranoid downside: the fear that it could be too perfect, that the other reality might become indistinguishable from the true world. Films like eXistenZ (Cronenberg Canada/UK 1999), The Matrix (Wachowski brothers US/Australia 1999) and The Thirteenth Floor (Rusnak Germany/US 1999) illustrate this anxiety. Released in the same year as The Sixth Sense (Shyamalan US 1999) and Fight Club (Fincher US/Germany 1999), they too can be considered examples of what Thomas Elsaesser calls 'mind game movies' since the ontological status of their filmic realities is, to a certain degree, unclear. This is because the characters are not always capable of distinguishing between the real and the artificial. They believe themselves to be in the true world while they are in fact immersed in a virtual reality created by computers. Consequently, the last year of the old millennium was not merely the year of mind games but also of immersion paranoia.However, fear of immersion was being articulated much earlier than this. It is evident in stories such as Frederik Pohl's 'Tunnel under the World' (1955) and novels such as Philip K. Dick's Time Out of Joint (1959). Stanislaw Lem described it in 1964 in the sixth chapter of his Summa technologiae, in which he predicted a society in which advanced immersive technologies - and the resulting anxieties - have become common. In the same year, the US sf writer Daniel F. Galouye published the novel Simulacron-3, also known as Counterfeit World, whose hero discovers that his whole life is and has always been a computer simulation. The Thirteenth Floor is, in fact, an adaptation of Galouye's novel, but not the first one. Produced by a group of Germans working in Hollywood (among them Roland Emmerich, director of several big-budget sf movies),1 it is also a remake of a 1973 West German television movie based on the novel. The title of the TV movie was Welt am Draht (World on a Wire),2 one of its cinematographers was The Thirteenth Floor's executive producer, Michael Ballhaus,3 and it was directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who is widely considered the most important German filmmaker of the second half of the twentieth century.Welt am Draht is one of Fassbinder's forgotten works. Due in part to legal issues, it is still not available in domestic viewing formats, although the Rainer Werner Fassbinder Foundation is planning a DVD edition to be released in, probably, 2010. In the major literature about Fassbinder, Welt am Draht only receives minor attention. His only contribution to the sf genre, it is considered marginal to his work. However, Welt am Draht is more complex than it may seem at first. It not only introduces immersion paranoia into sf film long before the Wachowski brothers could even think of The Matrix, but does so through visual strategies which are rather different to those of the 1999 films mentioned above and which address some crucial political questions of the video and postvideo society. This article will highlight these aspects by showing how Welt am Draht creates an aesthetics of disappearance within an aesthetics of the hyperreal and thus depicts the dialectics to which the body is subject in the age of electronic surveillance.Stiller's detection and salvationAlthough it is an sf movie, Welt am Draht is located in a setting quite similar to West Germany at the time it was produced. In fact, there is only one major difference: the world of Fassbinder's film is far more advanced than the 1970s in terms of digital technology. The Institut fur Kybernetik und Zukunftsforschung (Institute for Cybernetics and Futurology) has developed a computer program called Simulacron, which in today's terminology would be called a virtual reality system. …

Of Disembodied Mind Sparks and Speakers of Klingon: A New Model of Science Fiction

Of Disembodied Mind Sparks and Speakers of Klingon A New Model of Science Fiction Stephen Burt (bio) Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr., The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2008. x + 324 pp. $35.00. These are fine times, in some ways, for science fiction. Outside the academy, readers and reviewers of literary novels encounter, and welcome, the devices of SF. Consider not only Jonathan Lethem (who began by writing SF, labeled as such) but Kazuo Ishiguro (who did not); consider Doris Lessing's Nobel Prize. And yet these are troubling times for the genre, too: changes in publishing make it harder for new SF writers to earn a living, even as niche presses and Web-based journals make it easier for them to distribute their work. 1We hear claims that SF has lost its reason for being, because "mainstream" authors appropriate its techniques, or because the pace of real technological change has made SF obsolete. 2 Within the academy, times are both good and bad too. SF has never seemed more important to critics and scholars from other fields: [End Page 599] PMLAdevoted a special issue to it in 2004. Yet when we turn from teaching SF, or from writing about its individual authors, to available theories and overviews, offerings seem limited. Standard histories and anatomies stop in the 1980s, if not earlier: the best of these present not models of science fiction so much as a story about how it grew. 3Marxist and post-Marxist thinkers have emphasized (some still emphasize) SF as a repository of utopias and dystopias, showing how a society may change in drastic, and yet explicable, ways. Darko Suvin, the most important such thinker, defined SF as "the literature of cognitive estrangement" (4); for him, SF properly so-called presents a world set apart from our own by some new thing in science, technology, or nonhuman nature—the invention of teleportation, for example, or contact with space-faring species. That new thing—the "novum"—must be integral to the world or the plot of the fiction, and it must be imagined as subject to rational inquiry (so as to let us imagine that real life might change, too); otherwise we are reading fantasy, for Suvin almost by definition a conservative, regressive, bad thing. 4 This argument had precedents, and problems—one was Clarke's Law, coined by the SF writer Arthur C. Clarke: "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." 5Take that [End Page 600]claim seriously and the general distinction between SF (rational, critical, or at least amenable to critique) and fantasy (backward-looking, mystifying) becomes a tough nut. Indeed, most SF proved susceptible to attack (as insufficiently rational or critical) under Suvin's criteria. And yet the working methods Suvin and his intellectual allies developed provided SF's most fruitful research program. To it we owe the journal Science Fiction Studies, now in its thirty-seventh year, one of the few consistent venues (though never the only one) for academic work in the field; nearly four decades of essays on SF by Fredric Jameson, now collected in his Archaeologies of the Future; any number of later monographs, only some of which take "Marx as a theorist of science fiction avant la lettre"; 6and the intellectual underpinnings for at least one major work of SF, the Mars trilogy ( Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars) by Jameson's former student Kim Stanley Robinson. Most later academic approaches to print SF (film is another matter) took on not the whole universe of novels and stories but particular quadrants: nineteenth-century proto-SF; cyborgs, "posthumans," and androids; "hard SF," with its component of science education; the subgenre called cyberpunk; feminist SF. 7Even as SF became an established academic field, overviews of SF could attack it as reactionary, pathologically technophile, symptomatic of a West gone wrong. 8Critics outside academia propounded views more [End Page 601]sensitive to the varied pleasures in reading science fiction, and to the varied world-views its authors assumed: John Clute's hundreds of book reviews (collected in two volumes) work not only as stores of data but as repositories of well...

Darwin's soldiers: Gender, evolution and warfare in Them! and Forbidden Planet

The classic 1950s sf films Them! (1954) and Forbidden Planet (1956) draw on Darwinist plots of future warfare and sexual selection to represent men as natural soldiers and masters of technology, limiting the roles of women to romantic interests for the military men. However, they differ from other contemporary films in their representation of the roles women should play in the military and in their attitudes toward violent evolutionary masculinity.

American Myth and the Spectatorship of SF Films: Reviewing Star Wars and "Deep Space Homer" of The Simpsons

American Myth and the Spectatorship of SF Films: Reviewing Star Wars and "Deep Space Homer" of The Simpsons

Anisotropic growth of hydroxyapatite on the silk fibroin films

Bombyx mori silk fibroin is of practical interest for its excellent intrinsic properties utilizable in the biotechnological and biomedical fields. Here, the silk fibroin films were pretreated with different methods and then used as the template for the hydroxyapatite (HA) crystal growth. To study the effect of silk films’ surface structure on the protein biomineralization, the films were immersed into 1.5 times simulated body fluid (1.5 × SBF) to induce the HA deposition at 37 °C. The results showed that an anisotropic growth of HA crystals was observed on the different films as judging from XRD, TEM and HRTEM data. This was thought that the positions and density of carboxyl groups, C O and amino groups on the surface of SF films may be different, which play the key effect on HA crystal growth.

Love machines: boy toys, toy boys and the oxymorons of A.I.: Artificial Intelligence

Bruno Schulz has written: 'Matter never makes jokes; it is always full of the tragically serious. Who dares to think that you can play with matter, that you can shape it for a joke, that the joke will not be built in, will not eat into it like fate, like destiny?' This article explores both the joke and the tragic fate of two culturally significant robots—one a 'boy toy' and the other a 'toy boy' - jointly conceived to matter by Stanley Kubrick and Steven Spielberg in A.I.: Artificial Intelligence (2001). These 'love machines' are designed to enact male performative desire for a woman but dramatize two quite contradictory masculine visions of our displaced technological existence: one a hard-bodied 'sex machine', the other vulnerable and impotent. Bringing their seeming op- position into complementary conjunction, A.I. says something important (and sad) about the limits of the contemporary technological (masculine) imagination. In Bruno Schulz's extraordinary little book, The Street of Crocodiles (1934), the narrator's father (who believes that tailors' dummies should be treated as people) warns his children (64): Matter never makes jokes; it is always full of the tragically serious. Who dares to think that you can play with matter, that you can shape it for a joke, that the joke will not be built in, will not eat into it like fate, like destiny? Can you imagine the pain, the dull imprisoned suf- fering, hewn into the matter of that dummy which does not know why it must be what it is, why it must remain in that forcibly imposed form which is no more than a parody? Do you understand the power of form, of expression, of pretense, the arbitrary tyranny imposed on a helpless block, and ruling it like its own, tyrannical, despotic soul? In what follows, I want to explore both the joke and the tragic seriousness of two culturally significant dummies, jointly tailored by two major American film- makers in the sf film, A.I.: Artificial Intelligence (US 2001). The filmmakers are, of course, Stanley Kubrick, who worked on pre-production of the film for many years before his death in 1999, and Steven Spielberg, who ultimately wrote and directed the final screenplay. The dummies at issue are two male robots whose forcibly imposed form is human, and both are programmed as what I shall call here - as a joke and in tragic seriousness - 'love machines'. However, like the two filmmakers' respective cinematic oeuvres and cosmologies, these love machines could not be more contradictory in form and function. Yet, also like the filmmakers, the robots' seeming binary opposition comes into complemen- tary conjunction and confusion in A.I. - and says something important (and

Embodied texts, embodied subjects: an overview of N. Katherine Hayles

Working on the intersections of science and literature, N. Katherine Hayles, who has postgraduate degrees in both chemistry and literature, has always been concerned with combining the two cultures of the sciences and the humanities. Her work engages with literary and scientific texts with equal rigour, understanding both as struggling with the representational medium of language to create the world they see. Her early work focused on the implications of relativity theory for the relationship between observer and world; more recently, she has considered the future of narrative and reading in a digital age. Throughout, she has explored the importance of medium to our understanding of narrative form and to our conceptualisations of the human subject. She is important to sf studies because of her emphasis on the mutual co-evolution of humans and machines: we engineer machines but our interactions with them simultaneously re-engineer what it means to be human. Her work on the posthuman could be usefully extended to the many robots, cyborgs, AIs and transgenic subjects found in sf film and television, and her work on the media-specific analysis required for electronic narratives suggests provocative ways for thinking about the increasing use of digital technologies in film and television.In The Cosmic Web: Scientific Field Models and Literary Strategies in the 20th Century (1984), Hayles considers relativity theory and modernist narrative, applying 'field theory' to fiction by Robert Pirsig, D. H. Lawrence, Vladimir Nabokov, Jorge Luis Borges and Thomas Pynchon. Field theory attempts to grasp the dynamic relationship between parts and the whole. It requires us to take seriously the Einsteinian principle that the laws of physics can be observed only relative to the position of the observer, and thus the observer is necessarily a part of the system observed rather than an abstract and universally neutral position. Hayles struggles with metaphors to convey a notion of field theory (the 'cosmic web', a 'cosmic dance', a 'network of events', an 'energy field'), each of which implies a reality with no detachable, enduring or unchanging parts. Composed not of particles but of events constantly in motion, the field is rendered dynamic by interactions that are simultaneously affecting each other. The observer is an integral participant in its harmonious, rhythmic patterns. Hayles uses the 'field' as a way to approach what in other contexts would be called poststructuralist semiotics. For her, it helps us to see that language is necessarily a part of the system (the world) it describes, and its refusal to separate subject from object thus enables us to recognise that language constructs rather than describes reality.Hayles encourages us to see her chosen writers' experiments with narrative (and the entanglement of reader and writer, text and world) as part of a larger cultural shift that was also shaping the sciences' understanding of our relationship to the world. She does not argue for causal connections between the similar ideas emerging in physics and in structuralist and poststructuralist linguists. Rather, these parallels are evidence of a cultural moment in which new ways of thinking about the relationship between the observer and the observed transformed both disciplines. Hayles' discussion finds in both post-Newtonian science and postmodern criticism a move beyond the Cartesian mind-body dichotomy and an acknowledgement of the self-referentiality of language. While the modern novel explores 'the relation between the teller and the tale', contemporary physics explores 'the relation between the observer and the observed system' (41). By positing such parallels, Hayles pushes science toward recognising that language, too, is part of the observed system and hence the insights of literary analysis are relevant to our understanding of how science operates in the world; simultaneously, she pushes literary studies toward a greater engagement with the material ways that science and technology shape conceptions of the world and hence our interactions with it and our selves. …

South of the future: an overview of Latin American science fiction cinema

This article introduces the main trends in Latin American science fiction cinema. Focusing on the films produced in Mexico, Brazil and Argentina (the countries with the largest film industries in the region), it offers a descriptive analysis of the central characteristics of these works and argues that Latin American sf films make use of the narrative and iconographic conventions of American sf, articulating them with local and regional cultural elements and traditions. It concludes by offering some notes toward how the concept of hybridity might be useful for further the study of this cinema.

Attachment and growth of human bone marrow derived mesenchymal stem cells on regenerated antheraea pernyi silk fibroin films

Silk fibroin of the silkworm Bombyx mori has been studied extensively, while the research on Antheraea pernyi silk fibroin (A. pernyi SF) in biomaterials is only at an early stage. In this study, the attachment, morphology, growth and phenotype of human bone marrow derived mesenchymal stem cells (hBMSCs) cultured on the regenerated A. pernyi SF films were studied in vitro. The results indicated that the attachment of hBMSCs on the regenerated A. pernyi SF films was almost the same as that on the collagen films. MTT and cell counting analyses demonstrated that the growth of hBMSCs on the regenerated A. pernyi SF films was better than that on controls. Moreover, electron scanning microscopy and fluorescence-activated cell sorting assays showed that the regenerated A. pernyi SF supported hBMSCs growth and functional maintenance compared with the controls. These data suggest that the regenerated A. pernyi SF, like Bombyx mori silk fibroin (B. mori SF) and collagen, can support hBMSCs attachment, growth and phenotypic maintenance, and has better biocompatibilities for hBMSCs in vitro culture.

Teach phenomenology the bomb: Starship Troopers, the technologized body, and humanitarian warfare

Paul Verhoeven's SF films are often concerned with how the future body will be reshaped as a technological device. Starship Troopers strangely departs from Verhoeven's own work, other SF films, and current directions in cultural theory by seeing the future body as one that is more organic than mechanical. Drawing upon and challenging ideas developed by Paul Virilio, this article argues that Starship Troopers' departure from the notion of the post-human mechanized body needs to be understood not as a nostalgic reassertion of de-technologized subjectivity. Rather, Verhoeven's film sees the idea of the pure body as a dangerous anachronism. And, this article further argues, Starship Troopers suggests that narratives of human salvation - such as those that arose during Nato's interventions in the Balkans - often conceal an appetite for territorial conquest.

Sick Puppies and Other Unbecoming Things

This paper looks at John Carpenter's film The Thing in the context of why it so shocked audiences during its initial run in 1982. These reactions are considered alongside the AIDS phenomenon, although the film is not viewed as simply an AIDS analogue, especially since it was made before AIDS was first publicised. Using the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, I suggest that Carpenter's film captures in a biohorror genre frame the processes that Deleuze and Guattari call becoming and intensity.

Machine

Machine

This may Look like Science Fiction, But...

This may Look like Science Fiction, But...

It's a Scream

It's a Scream

Reconstructing human-centred technology: Lessons from the Hollywood dream factory

A post-modernist analysis of human-centred technology (HCT) suggests the ideology which informs the theoretical and practical development of HCT resonates with ideological representations of machine intelligence portrayed in science fiction (sf) films. It is argued that such an ideology reflects and reinforces ontological dualisms which constrain our ability to imagine and realise our future relations with technology. This paper invites proponents of HCT to meet their shadows, to transgress, the cultural and discursive borders constructed in the name of modernism, and to reflect on what is taken-for-granted and peripheralised within their own work.

Androids, humanoids, and other science fiction monsters: science and soul in science fiction films

Science fiction films, from the original Frankenstein and The Fly to Blade Runner and The Terminator, traditionally have been filled with aliens, spaceships, androids, cyborgs, and all sorts of robotic creatures along with their various creators. The popular appeal of these characters is undeniable, but what is the meaning of this generation of creatures? What is the relationship of mad scientist to subject, of human to android, of creature to creator? Androids, Humanoids, and Other Folklore Monsters is a profound investigation of this popular cultural form. Starting his discussion with the possible source of these creatures, anthropologist and writer Per Schelde identifies the origin of these critters in the folklore of past generations. Continuing in the tradition of ancient folklore, contends Schelde, science fiction film is a fictional account of the ongoing battle between nature and culture. With the advance of science, the trolls, dwarves, pixies, nixies, and huldres that represented the unknown natural forces of the world were virtually killed off by ever-increasing knowledge and technology. The natural forces of the past that provided a threat to humans were replaced by the danger of unknown scientific experiments and disasters, as represented by their offspring: science fiction monsters. As the development of genetics, biomedical engineering, and artificial intelligence blur the lines between human and machine in the real world, thus invading the natural landscape with the products of man's techno-culture, the representation of this development poses interesting questions. As Per Schelde shows, it becomes increasingly difficult in science fiction film to define the humans from their creations, and thus increasingly difficult to identify the monster. Unlike science fiction literature, science fiction film has until now been largely neglected as a genre worthy of study and scholarship. Androids, Humanoids, and Other Folklore Monsters explores science fiction (sf) film as the modern incarnation of folklore, emblematic of the struggle between nature and culture--but with a new twist. Schelde explains how, as science conquered the forests and mountains of the wild, the mythic creatures of these realms--trolls, elves, and ogres--were relegated to cartoons and children's stories. Technology and outer space came to represent the modern wild, and this new unknown came alive in the popular imagination with the embodiments of our fears of that unknown: androids, cyborgs, genetics, and artificial intelligence gone awry. Implicit in all of these is a fear, and an indictment, of the power of science to invade our minds and bodies, replacing the individual soul with a mechanical, machine-made one. Focusing his analysis on sixty-five popular films, from Frankenstein and Metropolis to Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Terminator, and Blade Runner, Per Schelde brings his command of traditional folklore to this serious but eminently readable look at SF movies, decoding their curious and often terrifying images as expressions of modern man's angst in the face of a rapidly advancing culture he cannot control. Anyone with an interest in popular culture, folklore, film studies, or science fiction will enjoy this original and comprehensive study.