Well, first of all, I'd like to thank you very much for this invitation.
It's a pleasure to be with you today.
And I'll be talking about science fiction as film genre from 1985 to 1960s.
Let's begin with the awakenings of science fiction cinema.
What I call proto-science fiction film.
Can you hear me there?
It's okay, because there are people working behind me.
The noise is not disturbing you.
It's all right.
Okay, so let's go on.
According to Greg Rickman, as such,
SF scarcely existed before the 19th century.
And as a specific commercially viable genre...
Okay, I got it.
Not until the rise of the SF popes of the 1920s.
Still according to Rickman, quote, movies took longer.
Science fiction was not recognized as a commercial film genre
by the Hollywood film industry until after 1950.
After picking in popularity in the 1950s and declining in the early 60s,
the form reversed creatively in the later 60s and commercially in the later 70s.
For a quarter century since the release of both Star Wars
and Close Encounters of the Third Kind in 1977,
science fiction has been Hollywood's dominant channel,
spinning off blockbuster after blockbuster as showcases,
in particular for the latest special effects, unquote.
Nevertheless, some science fiction elements in an embryonic state
can be seen films dating back as early as the invention of the cinematographer.
Already in the silent era and still in the 19th century,
a proto-science fiction cinema began to appear,
in which we can identify the embryo of a genre
that would later become the science fiction cinema of today.
This prototypical form of science fiction production
was deeply diluted by the broader context of fantasy films,
making it even more difficult to distinguish between the two at the time.
In this sense and retrospectively,
the Lumiere Brothers 1895 film,
the mechanical butcher, La Chacoutérie Mechanique,
could be classified as one of the first proto-science fiction films.
Prototypes, because at least before the 1930s,
the term science fiction had not yet reached the necessary circulation
to rename the literary genre already known as extraordinary voyages,
scientific romance, and later, science fiction.
In the mechanical butcher, a short film made up of only one shot,
a pic is inserted in a machine that automatically provides sausages.
The film was likely exhibited in reverse as well.
According to Mark Bould, quote,
the first 20 years of SF cinema were nominated by similar one real treat movies,
which exploited the basic special effects
made possible by undercranking the camera,
split screens, dissolves, stop motion, and reversed footage.
Such narratives as these films hinged on x-rays, elixirs,
giant insects, flying bicycles, hair restoring tonics,
supper cars, dirigibles, invisibility and the mysterious powers of electricity,
magnetism, and monkey glands, end quote.
As was usual at the time,
La Charcuterie inspired a series of imitations in Europe and the US.
The borders between documentary and proto-science fiction
were rather thin at that moment.
Exhibitors were free to select and organize film roles
to be projected in the order they wished,
and this had an influence on the film's reception.
Documentary, educational or promotional films
could be shown among fiction films,
something that altered the way in which spectators experienced this different genre.
Taking into account the publication of A.J. Wells' Time Machine,
parallel to the premiere of the Lumiere Cinematographer in 1895,
we can see that film and modern science fiction literature
were born around the same period.
Shortly after, in France, the magician-filmmaker Georges Méliès
made Googles and the Robot,
a comedy about an android and the American surgeon,
a comedy about organ transplantation, both in 1897.
In 1901, Ferdinand Zekard directed a la Conquette de l'Air,
in which a railroad inventor pilots a flying machine.
Later,
later, Méliès went on to make films such as A Trip to the Moon
and An Impossible Voyage,
both inspired by Jules Verne and A.J. Wells' books.
Phil Hardie celebrates Méliès as a pioneering filmmaker
and the true father of science fiction cinema.
According to the Brazilian film critic Paulimidos Salis Gomez,
the Spaniard Segundo de Chamon,
one of the most skillful artisans of the early cinema,
could have been a rival for Méliès and Zekard.
With a career in France,
Chamon also directed interesting proto-science fiction films
like El Hotel Electrical,
an eight-minute short produced by Pate,
in which a couple were guests in a fully automated high-tech hotel.
Along with Méliès and Zekard,
Chamon composed what he could call the first tripod
for fantasy film in the silent era.
However, it's also worth mentioning the English filmmakers Walter Booth
and J. Stuart Blakton.
In England, Booth directs the question mark motorist,
or the who motorist.
A 1906 movie in which a high-speed magical car,
which is able to climb buildings and go through the rings of Saturn,
transports a couple into space.
Booth, also the director of the Airship Destroyer,
is also the director of the Airship Destroyer,
a British film produced by Charles Urbain,
and based on the work of Jules Verne.
According to John Baxter,
this film about a future war fought by Bumber Zecklings
is, quote,
probably the first film which deserves to be considered as true science fiction,
unquote.
The success of the Airship Destroyer inspired other British productions,
such as The Area of Anarchists,
and David Adelod and A. E. Colobee's The Pirates of 1920.
In 1910, the passage of Halley's Comet inspired the first science fiction disaster movie,
The Comet,
produced by the American company Callum,
director-in-law.
In the following years,
some serious starring scientific detectives started appearing in the U.S.,
such as the exploits of Elaine,
directed by Louis Gasnier and George Sykes,
and Lady Bothells and Detective Duck,
directed by Alan Curtis.
Since Meliesse,
science fiction cinema has found an inexhaustible source of inspiration in literature.
Mary Shelley's Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus
inspired an uncountable adaptation throughout the history of film,
as well as Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
The first probable film adaptation of Frankenstein was by Etsun Company in 1910,
written and directed by J. Sorendole.
Likewise, the first time Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde came to the silver screen
was probably in 1910,
in August Blonde's Danish short film,
revolving noise in the role of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
Later, in 1920,
Stevenson's novel appeared in the U.S. as a feature film,
John Robertson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,
starring John Barrymore as both the scientist and the monster.
All these adaptations, however,
were more strongly influenced by theatrical adaptations rather than original novels.
It is also important to mention that German cinema exerted the remarkable influence on
science fiction, fantasy, and horror film from the late 1910s onwards.
A good example of German film production in the field during this period
is Otto Rippet's series on Mancoulas.
John Baxter observes that, quote,
experiments in SF film carried on in England,
America, Denmark, and France are only marginally reflected in the SF cinema of today,
but the work that been done in Germany has left an indelible mark on modern film.
Then quote.
Now the 1920s.
Mancoul highlights the emergence of several films and series
we've met scientists during this period.
Films like A Blind Bargain, directed by Wallace Worsley and starring Lon Chaney,
Orangie Galins, or Raun, an adaptation of Hans Rheinz's Advil's novel.
In early 1920s France, René Cleve presented The Paris Frozen in Time in Paris Qui D'Or,
a film about an eccentric scientist and his wonderful invention,
a device capable of stopping the flow of time.
Two years later, Lian Lin presented a melodrama about an extravagant killer
and opera star who is revived by the machines of a scientist admirer.
The film benefited from the talents of painter Phil Noliget
to create a mise-en-scene derived mainly from the geometrical artificiality of cubism.
Soviet cinema produced at least one remarkable science fiction movie in the 1920s.
Yakov Kontazanov's Aieta, based on Alexei Tolstoy's Homonov book.
It's an epic novelization of the Russian revolution,
here exported to Mars with scenery and costumes inspired by the constructivist movement.
Still in the Soviet Union, Lev Kuleshov directed The Death Ray,
a melodrama pamphlet in which the hero employs a kind of laser against a bombing raid by the fascists.
In the 1920s, Germany strengthened its contribution
to the future of science fiction cinema with fundamental experiments.
Hans-Werchmeister's Algol explores the antagonism between the worlds of magic
and technology in his interstellar romance.
The motif of our urban transplant gained momentum with Robert Wien's The Hands of Orlak,
about a piano player who, after an accident, receives hands transplanted from a suspected murderer.
But perhaps the great author for science fiction film in the silent era is Fritz Lang,
director of Metropolis and the Woman in the Moon.
They set the production taking nearly two years to complete.
Metropolis is a true synthesis of modernity,
marking a period in which proto-science fiction film began to discover its own specific identity.
In 1929, Lang directed The Woman in the Moon,
a mixture of melodrama and documentary prophecy,
which had valuable advice from the specialists in astronautics,
Hermann Albert and Willy Lee.
However, in spite of all its technical advisory,
the film was criticized for some scientific flaws.
An example of Fritz Lang's concern with realism,
The Woman in the Moon anticipated typical situations of space exploration,
such as zero gravity and the countdown procedure.
And now, the 1930s.
Met scientists and comic book heroes seem to give the tone for science fiction film in the 1930s.
The Lost World motif inspired film productions such as G.W. Pabst's Splatling Teeth,
an adaptation of the novel by Pierre Benoit,
which was, in turn, inspired by H. Heider and Haggard's She.
Disastered that devastated planets appear in films like
Abel Gons's La Fan du Monde or Felix Feist's American Deluge.
According to Mark Booth,
the dominant form taken in the 1930s was the Met Scientist movie.
In this sense, it's not surprising that even in Argentina, already in 1932,
one of the first photo science fiction films was C.C. Sopranis,
The Beastman or The Adventures of Captain Richard.
In this film, this film is available on the web.
You can have a look at this.
In this film, Captain Richard's aircraft crashes in a forest.
He survives and becomes a kind of savage until falling into the hands of a Met Scientist
who turns him into a sexually violent monster.
Still in the Latin American context, the first Mexican film capable of association
with the universe of science fiction debuts, in 1935, Gabriel Suria's Dead Men Speak
about a scientist who steals corpses and uses them in experiments.
The most famous adaptation of Mary Shelley's novel
was released by Universal Studios in the U.S. in 1931.
Partially influenced by Friedland's Metropolis,
James Wales Frankenstein established some
energetic references that would later become deeply associated with the original story.
Boris Karloff's performance was perhaps the film's most effective contribution.
In 1931, Frankenstein combines elements which are missing from the original novel
and influenced many subsequent productions.
These elements include the expressionist, inspired visual style,
the character of the assistant, the paraphernalia of the laboratory,
explicit references to electricity and the motif of an abnormal brain.
Wales continued to direct science fiction or monster movies at Universal Studios,
such as The Invisible Man, adapted from the novel by A.J. Wells and The Bride of Frankenstein,
a sequel to 1931 Frankenstein and largely taught to all do the original.
Meanwhile, Harvard Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
had its most famous adaptation released in 1932, directed by Ruben Mamoulin.
Frederick March won an Oscar for his portrayal of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
in this technically sophisticated film.
In 1933, Earl Canton's Island of Lost Souls adapted A.J. Wells' The Island of Dr. Murrow.
Also in 1933, RKO launched the ancestor of the super-monster film,
Marion Cooper and Ernest Shozak's King Kong,
which displays a wonderful special effects job by Willis O'Brien and a team of experts.
It has become commonplace among film critics and even the general public
to relate special effects to the commodified character of sci-fi.
However, according to Scott Bookatman, as an aesthetic element,
special effects need to be problematized as a privileged locus of meaning.
In the Soviet Union, science fiction experiments continued with films like Alexey Andriyevsky's
Lost of Feeling, an adaptation of the famous play Rossum's Universal Robots
by the Czech writer Karel Cheknik.
One of the most famous productions from the 1930s,
Science Fiction Cinema, for some the Wellsian decay for science fiction film,
is Certainly Things to Come, an adaptation of A.J. Wells' novel
The Shape of Things to Come, directed by William Cameron Menzies.
The horror of war and technological utopia are central themes in this 1936 British production
written by Mr. Wells himself, who also intensely participated in the making of the movie.
For Wells, everything in the film was to be exactly the opposite of what Fritz Lang did in Metropolis.
Finally, Mark Boot observes that the only genuinely modern films in the period
were probably British avant-garde short films like The Birth of a Robot by Len Lye
and The Equation X plus X equals zero by Robert Fedor and Brian Saul.
Boot also recalls the remarkable momentum in the 1930s towards the production of film series.
In this regard, it's worth noting Frederick Stephanie's Flash Gordon,
an adaptation of Alex Raymond's famous comic, and four B.B. and Saul Goodkin's Buck Rogers,
originating from Dick Culkin's comic Hero.
These two movie series are notable examples of the popular view of space operas and the
increasing intersection between film and comics articulated by science fiction.
And now the forties. A few hardies suggest that science fiction was somehow eclipsed
in the cinema of the 1940s. Hence, this decade was not seen for major science fiction film
productions, possibly because of World War II and its outcomes. Few hardly observed that,
quote, the horror cycle of the 30s, which had annexed many science fiction elements,
turned to parody. Indeed, in the U.S., it climaxed in the broad farce of Abbott and
Costello meet Frankenstein, end quote. Meanwhile, Giant Reptiles were the stars of
Hal Roach and Hal Roach Juniors, one million years BC.
In countries like Brazil and Mexico, science fiction started appearing on the silver screen
via comedic films, notably in the 1940s. The first Brazilian comedy framed by science fiction
was probably Silvera Sampaños, an adventure at 40. Released in 1947, this film tells the
life story of a professor honored by a TV show in 1975. In this future television, interactivity is
a full-fledged technology. The spectator can talk directly to the TV presenter.
In Mexico, Jaime Salvador's 1946 film, The Modern Bluebird, El Moderno Barbazul, had already
combined science fiction and comedy with Buster Keaton playing the main character who gets involved
in multiple mix-ups, only to end up boarding a rocket bound for the moon. Another example of
Mexican science fiction comedy is Miguel Delgado's The Super Weissman, El Super Sable, starring Mario
Moreno as the assistant of a brilliant scientist, the inventor of a valuable elixir.
Now, 1950s. Science fiction cinema is reborn in the 1950s. According to Phil Hardy, quote,
the 50s was a decade in which anxiety, paranoia, and complacency marked hand in hand.
On the threshold of space, men had discovered and used a force so frightening that it could mean
the extinction of the species. The world only so recently saved for democracy was once
identified, this time by an iron curtain and in America subversion from within became a prevalent
fear. These anxieties, expressed and explored in a variety of ways, created the science fiction
film genre. Few of the movies were masterpieces, yet a surprising number of 50s, science fiction
films retained their power and resonance to this day, however banal they stand revealed in retrospect.
The 1950s set the stage for the famous science fiction film Boom in the US,
sparked by films like Kurt Neumann's rocket ship exam, but especially Irving Pichot's Destination
Moon, an ambitious production by George Paul based on Herbert Hyland's novel rocket ship Galileo.
Both were released in America in 1950. Describing a space adventure to conquer Earth's natural
satellite, Destination Moon re-added Switzerland's formula for the woman in the moon, but now within
the explicit ideological framework of American liberalism. A notably pedagogical movie in terms
of narrative, Destination is one of the most scientifically detailed science fiction films
of its time, largely due to the scientific advice of V.B. Lay and the work of Chesley Bonsdale.
Released in 1955, Byron Haskins' Comcast of Space, a colorful combination of pseudo-documentary and
Mars exploration flick, was producer George Paul's uneven attempt to rework his highly successful
Destination Moon formula. In the wake of destination, Cold War, alien invasion, and nuclear
all-acoust motifs became dominance in the American science fiction cinema of the period.
This can be seen in titles like The Thing from Another World, Howard Hawk's production which
was inspired by John Campbell Jr.'s short story Who Goes There, Howard Weiss's The Day the Earth
Stood Still, and its aliens given automatic to mankind, and Don Siegel's The Invasion of the
Body's Natures. A movie about a silent alien invasion that can be read both as an anti-communist
allegory and the criticism of placid conformity to American cold war ideology.
According to Warren Buckland, quote, the science fiction film of the 1950s shares some of the
paranoia and insecurities of the film noir, unquote. Buckland cites Robert Aldrich's Kiss Me Deadly,
the film that combines attributes from both the noir and the science fiction genre.
Buckland also mentions Gord Dugan's Dam and Hood of Matisse when words collide as good examples
of the 1950s science fiction films fear that for the first time in history mankind is able to
destroy itself by being of its own science and technology. Such films can therefore be read as
reflecting the anxieties of the American public in the 1950s, the fear of extinction brought on
by a nuclear fallout. For many writers and science fiction fans, the greatest American 1950s science
fiction film premiered in 1956. Fred and Wilcox Forbidden Planet, a loose adaptation of William
Shakespeare's Play the Tempest. This thought-provoking film brings psychoanalysis into
science fiction cinema, exploring subjects from Freud's theories about the unconscious.
According to Mark Wood, the science fiction film Boom in the early 1950s would have run out quickly
if there had not been the revival of monster movies driven by the re-release of King Kong,
paving the way for productions like Eugène Bourier, The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms,
based on Ray Bradbury's short story The Fogborn.
But among many names, perhaps the most important filmmaker of the 1950s, Boom, was Jack Arnold,
the prolific director of some of the most representative films of the period,
such as It Came from Outer Space, Creature from the Black Lagoon, Revenge of the Creature,
Tarantula, The Incredible Shrinking Man, and The Space Children.
Some of these titles can be considered masterpieces of the genre.
According to Mark Wood, Arnold's evocations of the possibilities inherent in a landscape without
figures brought lyricism to a frequently band-looking genre. After the films of Jack Arnold,
The Strand, The Desert, and even the American middle-class home had not been seen in the same way.
In Great Breeding, there was also an interesting science fiction filmography in the same period,
which, according to authors such as IQ Hunter, covered both low-budget productions,
the famous B-movies, and films that tried to emulate American science fiction flicks.
Coming from television, the Quartermaster series is representative of the alien paranoia in British
cinema, starting the 1950s with the Quartermaster experiment and lasting until the fourth episode
in the late 70s. The famous British sense of humor also contributed to science fiction in
Alexander McKendrix's The Man in the White Suit, a clever science fiction comedy starring Alec
Guinness. Also, in 1951, Argentines Cinema presented a daring adaptation of Stevenson's
Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, El Estrémio Caso de Lombre y la Bestia, directed by Mario Sophisi.
Japan also produced a significant crop of science fiction cinema in the 50s,
especially the radioactive monster films inaugurated by Ishiro Honda's Godzilla,
the first appearance of the giant dinosaur awakened by alarming American nuclear tests.
Honda, also the director of the space opera The Mysterians,
was the great name of the Japanese science fiction cinema at the time.
In Mexican science fiction cinema, Ita la Schmeos, Vanya Lopez, and Hector Orozco
note that, quote, in the mid-1950s, the humorous potential of fantastic adventures
was discovered and the comedians are launched one after another in large intergalactic adventures,
unquote. By the end of the 1950s, Mexican cinema offered titles such as the Aztec Mummy series,
beginning with Rafael Potillo's Aztec Mummy versus the Human Robot, about a scientist
who built a robot to steal the treasure guarded by an Aztec mummy. In the late 1950s, American
science fiction cinema survived with low-budget productions aimed at a youthful audience.
Directing lean and resourceful films such as Teenage Caveman, Roger Corman became the big name
at the time, paving the way for a more explicit reconciliation between science fiction and the
horror movie. Menaces from other space, in the spirit of the Cold War era, continued to appear
in films like William Cameron Mancy's Invaders from Mars, and Irving Ewart Jr. and Russell
Dalton's The Block. The lineage of alien invaders, as well as monsters created by radioactive
mutation, multiplied in the late 1950s. Edgar G. Ohmer's Demand from Plan Attacks revisited the
alien invasion motif, while Edward Kent's It, the Terror from Beyond Space, adapted an insightful
story by Jerome Bixby. Kurt Neumann's The Fly provide one of the weirdest and most
top-provoking monsters from cinema, Dr. Andrea de Lomp as the flyman. By the end of the 50s,
Jean Van Oghre continued inspiring lavish productions such as Henry Leving's
Journey to the Center of the Earth. An interesting American film of the period is Ronald McDougall's
The World, The Flash, and the Devil, a post-apocalyptic drama involving racial and sexual
issues about the coexistence of the three sole survivors of the human race. Finally, Stanley
Cramer's On the Beach, adapted from Niveu Shoot's novel and shot on location in Australia and the US,
is a remarkable sample of pacifist science fiction from the 1950s. A melancholic warning about the
dangers of nuclear warfare and the kind of audio-visual documentary of its time.
In Eastern Europe, during the transition from the 1950s to the 1960s,
it's worth mentioning Kurt Metzick's The Silent Star, a space adventure based on Stanley's lab
limbs, The astronauts. According to Phil Hardy, quote, this film inaugurated a series of Eastern
European space operas, no doubt following the flight of Stutnik and Gagarin, end quote.
Hardy remarks that, quote, outside America, countries which subsequently became major
producers of science fiction films like Britain, Japan, Italy, and Mexico,
turn to the to the genre in their own distinctive ways. Similarly, when Eastern European filmmakers
turned to the genre, their films were, for the most part, remarkably free of the paranoia that
infected American films, end quote. Now, the 60s. Phil Hardy considers the 60s the decades in which
science fiction becomes respectable. In 1960, the most famous adaptation of A.G. Wells' The Time
Machine was directed by George Paul, while Fritz Lang's The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabu's
sparked off a revival of Mabu's trailers. In Italy, Antonio Margherite's Spaceman introduced
the series of visually exciting mainstream science fiction films. In Latin America,
Jesus Franco's Cries in the Night, or The Awful Doctor of Love, initiated a stream of medical
inclined science fiction horror films. The transplant motif gained some essential titles
like George Flungeau's Eyes Without a Face, Hiroshi Teshigahara's The Face of Another,
and John Franklin Hymer's Seconds. Curtis Harrington's Queen of Blue transposed the vampire
theme into space, like Mario Bava's Planet of Vampires. Also in Italy, Hugo Gregoretti directed
Omicron, a science fiction comedy released in 1963 about a creature from another planet
who reanimates the corpse of an Italian worker played by Renato Salvatore.
Jean-Claude Forret's sexy comic book Herrine arrived on the big screen with Barbarella,
an Italian-French production directed by Roger Vadim and starring Jane Fonda.
Another Italian-French production, Mario Bava's Diablo League, chronicles the adventures of a
super-criminal. In the UK, it's worth noting the adaptations of John Wyndham's works, such as
Wolf Reeler's Village of the Damned and Steve Sackley's The Day of the Triffics.
While speculations about the atomic threat continue to appear in films such as August's
The Day the Earth Caught Fire and Joseph Loosie's The Damned. Inoverrated by The War Game,
a series of documentaries of the future directed by Peter Watkins is also worth mentioning.
Watkins' The War Game uses simulated newsreels and street interviews to focus on the appalling
results of a nuclear attack on a small British town. In Japanese cinema, radioactive monsters,
monster movies, multiplying in parallel to warnings about a nuclear holocaust,
such as Shigeyaki, Idaka, and William Ross' The Final War. While gigantic monsters confronted
each other in such productions as Ishiro Honda's King Kong vs Godzilla.
In the Soviet Union, Pavel Tushantsev's Planet Bur is a resourceful space exploration film,
a kind of Soviet response to Destination Moon. In Planet Bur, communist ideology underpins the
narrative accordingly. In films like Road to the Stars, Luna or Planet Bur, Tushantsev was
already using techniques considered to be pioneering special effects in Stanley Kubrick's
2001 A Space Odyssey. Planet Bur was later recut, dubbed and released in the US as Kurti Harrington's
voyage to the prehistoric planet, and served as the basis for Peter Bogdanovich's
voyage to the planet of prehistoric meaning.
In France, a new wave of science fiction films began with Chris-Marqueur Lagerty,
an impressive dystopian love story about a temporal paradox made of still photographs.
Later on, Francois Truffaut's Firehine 451 presented an adaptation of Ray Bradbury's
online most novel, while Alain Rene-Gitem-Gitem brought us a love story immersed in a time paradox
similar to Lagerty. In Alfa Ville, Jean-Luc Godard put forth an ironic reflection upon
Cartesianism, societies of control, and film genre. Godard ventured into science fiction once again
with the short The New World, an excerpt of Robopat, a French Italian production from 1963.
The Italian-American production The Last Man on Earth, directed by Ubaudu Haguana,
adapted Richard Matheson's impressive and influential novel I Am Legend about a
post-apocalyptic world dominated by vampire mutants in which there is only one man left.
According to Phil Hardy, quote,
more significant than the internationalization of the genre was the newfound respectability of
science fiction in Europe. Films like The War Game, Alfa Ville, Fahrenheit 451, and Jitem-Gitem
used the speculative possibilities of science fiction to intriguing purposes.
Similarly in Japan, the once simple movies about radiation-induced monsters had become
a fascinating mirror of post-war Japanese political history, end quote.
In the same period, American low-budget films continued appearing,
both forgettable B-movies and clever, resourceful, independent films.
Examples are Roger Corman's The Wasp Woman and George Romero's Night of the Living Dead.
Somewhat in the style of Matheson's I Am Legend, Night of the Living Dead
science fictionalized the zombie motif in a modestly budgeted film
that relies mainly on ingenious makeup, dramatic atmosphere, and editing.
Finding a continuum in the late 1950s with the 1960s, Phil Hardy observes that, quote,
the success of On the Beach encouraged established stars and directors to turn to science fiction.
The bigger budgets they brought with them resulted in films as diverse as The Birds,
Doctor Strange Love, and Seconds. The culmination of this trend came in 1968
with the release of 2001, A Space Odyssey, and Planet of the Apes. Planet of the Apes,
which generated four sequels and a telly series, gave added weight to the question and tendency
of big-budget science fiction, while 2001 transformed both the look and the budgets
of science fiction films. Equally influential, though not as celebrated at the time,
was George Romero's Night of the Living Dead, which created a sub-genre which would be mined
throughout the 70s in countless exploitation pictures by Romero as well as others, end quote.
In Brazil, one of the most genuine science fiction films appears in 1962.
Alberto Piedadis' The Fifth Power, produced and written by Carlos Pedregal.
The Fifth Power is about an international conspiracy that aims to dominate Brazilian
natural resources. In the same year, science fiction and comedy reappeared together in The
Cosmonauts, directed by Victor Lima. In The Cosmonauts, a visionary Brazilian scientist
leads the national space program and sends two astronauts into space involuntarily.
The film was released approximately in the same period of the missile crisis in Cuba. Its pacifist
political discourse is followed by the usual array of troubles in comedies, such as mistaken
identity, treasure hunts, etc., culminating with an alien encounter that resembles the
day Earth stood still. Throughout the 1960s, Brazilian science fiction films seemed instrumental
for political expression criticism, from The Fifth Power to Walter Lima Jr.'s Brazil Year 2000.
Released during the military dictatorship, Brazil Year 2000 can be regarded as a kind of
tropicalist sci-fi allegory. Meanwhile, science fiction center in Czechoslovakia presented at
least three noteworthy titles. In Dixie Pollack's Ikari XB1, an ingenious film about an expedition
in search of intelligent life in the universe, a prelude to Solaris in 2001. Who Killed Jesse,
a meta-linguistic comedy by Vaclav Volitek, and Diane Schmitt's The End of August at the Hotel
Lausanne, a melancholic post-apocalyptic dystopia. In Mexico, science fiction became even more popular
through films starring the famous wrestler Santo, like Alfredo Credena's Santo vs. the
Martian invasion, or Rene Cardona's Santo in the Treasure of Dracula, and titles such as Rogelio
Gonzalez's The Ship of Monsters, about alien women seeking for male specimens to be taken to their
planet, or Planet of the Female Invaders, directed by Alfredo Credena. Released in 1965, the American
and Argentine production stayed tuned for terror, directed by Emilio Vieira, featured television
spectators turned zombies by exposure to sinister TV signals. Later, Argentine cinema was driven
to a more experimental, brash-tian science fiction with Hugo Santiago's Impatient.
Written by Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Pioicasares, Invasion premiered in 1969, and soon became a cult movie.
Santiago's film is about events in Aquileia, a fictional city that is being harassed by mysterious
agents in 1957. After Alfredo Pieda this is the 50 power in Brazil, Invasion is a science fiction
movie that anticipates the military dictatorship that would befall Argentina. In the late 1960s,
American cinema attempted a more in-depth and philosophical science fiction. Released soon after
Stanley Kubrick's Doctor Strangelove, which is maybe the most insightful reflection of encoder
paranoia, Sidney Lumet's Fail Safe tells the story of an accidental nuclear attack waged on Russia
by the USA. Human cognition, improved by scientific experiments, was the main motive
in Half Nelson's Charlie, a film based on Daniel Cai's short story and later novel Flowers for
Algernon. Franklin J. Cheffner's aforementioned Planet of the Apes revisited the formula already
explored in an episode of The Twilight Zone, as well as in the Mexican film The Modern Blueback.
Or Mistaken as Another Planet. Also in 1968, a watershed of science fiction cinema appeared
with the premiere of Stanley Kubrick's 2001 A Space Odyssey, a loose adaptation of Arthur C. Clark's
short story The Sentinel. 2001 undoubtedly impaled science fiction film to a new level
from the late 1960s onwards. Mark Boot includes among the principal 1960s science fiction
filmmakers John Franklin Hymer, director of the Manchurian Candidates, and Peter Watkins with
Privy Ledge. Boot remarks, however, that neither of these directors would be called Stanley Kubrick.
According to Boot, quote, Dr. Strangelove, a clockwork orange and especially 2001 A Space Odyssey,
demonstrated darkly comic fiction and the suspicion of technology counterpointed by
determination to explore the formal limits of filmmaking and its apparatuses.
Although directors such as Ridley Scott, Terry Gilliam, Lech de Sain, and Jean-Pierre Jeanet
would bring as distinctive visual styles to asset movie making, only Andrei Tarkovsky,
in Solaris, Stalker, and The Sacrifice, has treated Dijon with comparable wit and rigor, unquote.
Well, this brief panel of science fiction cinema from 1895 to the 1960s suggests that Dijon began
in a prototypical form marked by transnationalism and a certain embryonic universalist location.
Regardless of the colonial or imperialist ideologies affecting early cinema as a whole.
Shortly after, in the 1920s, science fiction cinema starts finding its identity through
politically engaged utopian dystopian fiction in parallel to the expansion of Hollywood cinema.
In the 1950s, science fiction cinema consolidates as a genre, notably in America.
This American science fiction cinema somehow eclipsed transnational science fiction film
production for years to come. However, in the 1960s, the rise of science fiction cinema in
Europe and Latin America, made possible especially through the work of Boot, the filmmakers,
contributed to a new wave of internationalization for Dijon.
We would like to conclude by stating that throughout the first 75 years of cinema,
science fiction sets its roots, expands, and eventually consolidated to become one of the
most profitable and thought-provoking cinematic genre, configuring the true mythology of our times.
Everything that has appeared from the 1970s onwards,
based on film, TV, or games, has a connection with this foundational era.