Global Science Fiction Film

3 Credits · Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

“Science fiction is a genre whose necessary and sufficient conditions are the presence and interaction of estrangement and cognition, and whose main formal device is an imaginative framework alternative to the author’s empirical environment.” – Darko Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1979) pp. 7-8. This course examines science fiction cinema as it depicts a range of concerns about the relation of technology to contemporary human life. The genre of science fiction historically has been a medium through which authors organize their comments about human life in fantastic imaginative contexts. Science fiction has served allegorically to provide readers and spectators the opportunity to consider topics of social life and subjectivity, politics and power, identity, eros and sexuality, language and communication, the nature of historical change, the environment, etc. Science fiction does this by anchoring its fantasies to science and, more particularly, to technology. Indeed, the expressive medium of film can itself be understood as a newer technology--one now almost 125 years old--through which modern societies have considered the utopian and dystopian possibilities for human life and related technologies in individual and social contexts. Organized around three themes—Bodies and Monsters, Memory, and Machines--the course considers science fiction film produced in different regional and national spaces, and it does so in order to reconsider assumptions about science fiction film and the varying kinds of artists who embrace the genre for their expressive purposes. For the spring 2024 semester, the special theme for the seminar will be on artificial intelligence, and the screenings will include: 2001: A Space Odyssey, Colossus: The Forbin Project, Dark Star, Zardoz, Demon Seed, Electric Dreams, Making Mr. Right, Johnny Mnemonic, Teknolust, Computer Chess, 2046, After Yang, and Ex Machina.