Thanks Lars for inviting me to contribute to this course and thank you guys for showing up
It's really weird to be lecturing not so much far a webcam has sat down
I normally prowl around a lecture theatre and wave my arms a lot
So I'm going to try not to do any of that and at least let you see my face a little
I gather last week
Alfredo's lecture gave you quite an internationalist view of the development of cinematic science fiction
And that's good to hear since there is a very strong tendency to confuse
Science fiction cinema with Hollywood science fiction to normalize the way Hollywood does science fiction as if that's necessary
rather than the product of
specific determinants and circumstances
It's also perhaps not unsurprising that people think about
Science fiction cinema in relation to Hollywood given the global media context that's developed particularly since
The neoliberal turn of the 1980s, but really if we think about it right the way back from the silent period
Hollywood's not always produced more films than other national cinemas at the moment for example both India and Nigeria
Are producing more films than Hollywood, but Hollywood has nonetheless attained a kind of global dominance
In it's own the silent period and it's never really been challenged
Part of the reason it's able to do this is that it has a domestic market of the US and Canada
It always includes Canada as part of the US domestic market, which must please Canadians no end
That mark is large enough to allow Hollywood to break even on its films
It produces within its own territory particularly
Because of the nature of the way it organizes the release and distribution of films in the US
That then enables Hollywood to sell those movies overseas at a lower cost than other nations can produce their own films
And that basically is what has led to the global dominance of Hollywood it continues to dominate
globally through controlling the distribution of
Films so for example if you're a British filmmaker and you make a British film in Britain if you want to show it in a British
Cinema you have to sell it to an American distributor because an American distributor controls
American crew contributors sorry distributors control what films get shown on British screens of course there are exceptions and edge cases and so on
So with this in mind today
I want to talk about
Hollywood's production of science fiction, but I want to contextualize it quite a bit in relation to
Industrial and economic contexts that Hollywood works within
I'm going to talk about some films as well. I absolutely promise. I'll do that and hopefully
At several points. I'll be able to branch out beyond Hollywood as well to talk a little bit about
world SF cinema
So we should begin by thinking what do I mean by new Hollywood now new Hollywood is a term
Which is not actually a consensus as to its meaning as you can see from this slide. There are two
dominant meanings
Which sadly contradict each other that new Hollywood?
Refers to the period of the Hollywood Renaissance or the American new wave cinema of 1967 to 75 or
the new Hollywood
Refers to Hollywood after that period from 1975 on going to the present day
As I said, it's really annoying contradiction
So I'm going to pull back from new Hollywood a little bit and actually first of all think about
Post classical Hollywood and classical Hollywood
Classical Hollywood sometimes known as Fordist Hollywood refers to the period of the studio system roughly from the 1920s till about 1960 and
Post classical or post Fordist Hollywood refers to the period since roughly 1960 and thus contains as the slide says both those new Hollywood's
Whichever you decide
Is the way you want to use the term?
Classical Hollywood
Refers as I say to the studio system and these are the studios
Of that period they that the major studios of which there are eight are divided into two groups
We're known as the big five and the little three and the big five are the ones that I want to focus on explaining
How a little bit about how they operated
They were what are known as vertically integrated companies that is they operated within
All three branches of the film business. They made movies. They distributed movies and they exhibited movies
So as well as producing the films they owned or controlled the companies which
Got those films to cinemas organized how those films were shown in cinemas where they were released when they were released how they released
And they also owned a percentage of the cinemas in the US
The big five between them never owned more than 15% of the cinemas in the US
But they were the very very lucrative most profitable cinemas
They were the big metropolitan first-run cinemas where movies were released first
in as a big urban centers where all the
studios spend on
Advertising and promotion would draw crowds for the first week or two of their release
Owning those 15% of cinemas
enabled Hollywood to
Take 70% of the box office receipts
That's where the bulk of the money spent in the US on going to the cinema went that 15% of cinemas now because they also
controlled distribution the other
85% of cinemas who were chasing 30% of the box office receipts also had to pay a chunk of that to the studios
Just to
Just to quickly sketch in the distinction between the other kinds of cinemas the little three
Produced movies and distributed them. I didn't actually own any cinemas. So they weren't involved in exhibition and the miners really only produced
low-budget movies B movies crime movies
Movie serials comedy shorts those kinds of things which are then sold to the majors
What this setup meant was that during the classical period?
In order to sustain their business each of the major studios had to release roughly a film per week
So production obviously had to be rationalized this is mass production of cinema and it has to be rationalized
And this is what prompts people to call this period Fordist Hollywood
So we get in the production of movies in this period because of these economic determinants standardized production processes
So the studio would either originate or purchase a story a magazine story a novel a play
Whatever adapt it into a standard three-act narrative
The first act the first quarter of the film establishes the characters in the situation the middle two quarters or second act
Introduces all complications and the final quarter the third act
Resolves the narrative creating a new kind of equilibrium
The narratives would be organized around one star or maybe two stars who play the protagonists
the narrative would have an a plot and a B plot so they'd be the main story and
Usually the romance story between the two stars into weaving
You take the story and then you break it down and shoot it out of sequence. So
You shoot all the scenes that are set on one location on one certain one soundstage one set
Regardless of where they appear in the script you shoot them then you take that you're able to take the set down
Each scene that you shoot you shoot in a particular order
You run through the entire scene shooting it in long shot to make sure the scene is covered that is there is footage of it
and then as time permits you do the medium shots and the close-ups and
All this is done using fairly standard lighting patterns camera placements and so on
So that when the editors who've not been involved at all in the production up until this point get all the footage
They're able to use standard continuity editing
to compile a sensible narrative and
This standardization also meant the directors act as other personnel
Went from one project to another often without any sort of input until they arrived on the set to start shooting
So as it's typically the case when you have an industry that is dominated by a small number of vertically integrated
companies all pursuing the same business strategies
They tend not to directly compete with each other, but in fact collaborate with each other to produce
conditions which are favorable to all
In effect, they're form an oligopoly. That is a monopolistic control of the industry
And
It's this monopolistic control of the industry in the US that enabled Hollywood to then undercut
National film production in other countries. However, it was illegal under US law
Under antitrust legislation and in 1948 a court case resulted in what's known as the paramount decision
where the studios were told they had to
Get rid of the cinemas that they owned they can continue making movies
They can see new distributing movies, but they couldn't own cinemas
And it takes them about a decade to comply with this and over that decade what we think of as post-classical Hollywood emerges
We've lost a graph there which was there moments ago when I look through this last time I
Was going to show you how rapidly?
the studio production
Fell off and we're going for something like
450 films a year coming out of Hollywood in the mid-1940s to less than 200 a year by 1960
This reduction in film production
Resulted in a lot of the cinemas going out of business in the US and
Part part of the process of reducing production was to focus much more strongly on
producing movies big-budget movies on a budget of over a million dollars
I'm sorry all the way I'm talking today the box office figures
I'm probably I'm going to give you will be US box office not world box office
And I've not adjusted any of the figures. That's one million dollars in
1950 dollars
So Hollywood moves to creating bigger budget movies turns to more spectacular forms this is a period in the 50s
When widescreen formats become more widespread when production shifts pretty much entirely to color
technical and other forms of color film stock and
This is about creating movies as events that that will draw people in
Partly is to do with competition with television, which is massively expanding in this period also
And and with this move to
Film by film production rather than the mass production of the classical system
Hollywood studios kind of stopped making movies themselves and moved much more increasingly
towards financing or underwriting independent movie production
And they would do things then as well as as financing independent productions
They're then also lease studio space and equipment to the independent companies who they were funding and financing to make the movies
and
What all these changes do is they open up the US marketplace to lots of other kinds of movies rather than?
The studios controlling everything that gets on to screens in the US suddenly
There's the emergence of the drive-in theater
There are a lot of downtown rundown movie theaters that look for other kinds of low budget
Production thinking about the 50s and 60s in terms of science fiction
This is the period in which there's a large increase in very low budget science fiction
slash horror movies the kind of things coming out of American international pictures the kind of movies Roger Corman is shooting and
also, there's a growth of an art house circuit in the post-war period and
A lot more foreign language films begin to get shown in the US particularly if you live in one of the big metropolitan city centers
like New York, Chicago, Los Angeles
Hopefully no more figures will disappear. Yes
The studio finances remain extrude extraordinary volatile during the 1960s is this example sadly none of which is science fiction films
demonstrates in
1965 20th century Fox released The Sound of Music and it's an
Unanticipated massive hit. This is 80 million dollars in
1965 dollars
And this prompted Fox to invest very heavily in converting stage musicals to lavish
Cinematic spectacles and over the course of three years losing 42 million dollars on just three of those films
but then
They in 69 is 70
They release a relatively low budget
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance kid and mash and those films between them take nearly 83 million at the US box office
So you can see some volatility in the studio's financial situation. This is oops
Sorry, that's the wrong button to press. This is
captured as well by this chart
Well, we can see in the mid 60s each studio is annually making about 64 million dollars in 69 71
the studios lose 600 million dollars between them and as I say, this is 600 million dollars when 600 million dollars was a lot of
money and
Then there's a slight recovery
So actually 71 to 73 on that last table there
The studio profits begin to recover but nowhere near as big as that. It had been just a few years earlier
And one of the things this financial situation does is open up Hollywood
to
purchase by other companies
There's a wave of conglomeration happens companies that have nothing to do with filmmaking historically
Suddenly start cherry-picking Hollywood Studios kind of as prestige products for vice presidents, you know favored sons and that to run this begins with
Gulf West and the oil company buying Paramount in 1966 and
Because of the legit the antitrust legislation which has made vertical integration
illegal in the US
They these conglomerates form what we tend to get called horizontal
Horizontally integrated companies where you own a lot of diverse interests interest in a lot of diverse industries
But
Then in 1985 Ronald Reagan overturns that antitrust legislation and studios are allowed to own
Cinemas again, which is why nowadays we have Warner Villages
multiplexes all over the world and things like that and
these horizontally integrated conglomerates could then
become vertically integrated within each of the industries that they
Working within where they owned companies
So what does result what this has resulted in is an even more monopolistic situation in terms of film production distribution and exhibition
Not just in the US but also globally as we can see with companies like News Corp and Sony being major players in
Hollywood even though they're not American companies
So within this broader sort of economic industrial context, let's have a look at the two new Hollywood's will begin with
that first definition that coincides with
The period of the Hollywood new wave the Hollywood Renaissance of 1967 to 75
This period is normally dated from the success of Bonnie and Clyde in 1967, which introduced
And a range of techniques really
taken from French new wave cinema
And grafted them onto a Hollywood crime spree road movie kind of film
and
Really connected with countercultural audiences
And the period is then seen as ending with Jaws
the kind of
Spectacular summer blockbuster that stripped in some accounts Hollywood of all interest in formal experimentation and
leftist politics
So this is a period where
There are two generations two close generations of film directors
first those who'd been working in television in the 50s and 60s learning their trade and then those who'd been at film school in the
early 60s
And were heavily under the influence of European Arts cinema of the kind of reverence for
Hollywood B movie aesthetics that comes out of
The coyote cinema circle in France, which had also produced many of the new wave directors
And they bring these influences together and suddenly find themselves both these waves of directors with access to budgets and opportunities
This happens for a variety of reasons because we know the economic background and the industrial background now we can understand
the studios having to deal with
An audience which they no longer understand in various ways classical Hollywood had always made movies for families
But in the post-war period that audience fragments and in the countercultural period that fragmentation becomes even more obvious
The generation gaps become more obvious. So how would you address countercultural youth?
You hire countercultural youthful directors to make movies
But at least that's kind of the logic behind it
The studio is also in this period of conglomeration owned and run by people who know nothing about making films
which obviously opens up some possibilities for people and
with the
loss of that very standardized structured classical production system and the relative
Independence of production companies from the financing companies. There are a lot more opportunities possibilities for formal and narrative
experimentation and
Simultaneously the loss of experience the loss of skills and expertise caused by the collapse of that standardized production system
Means there's a lot more opportunity to do things badly do things the wrong way with you know, good and bad results
So what kind of SF films are being made in this period there are lots of SF films made in this period is actually
a really interesting period where I just want to look at
I'm going to sketch out a few examples through two particular lenses the counterculture and
which we see is a blanket term covering a range of
phenomena a range of different social groups and social movements
There's many distinct distinct strands and through the lens of that kind of formal and narrative experimentation
which is usually
described as being taken primarily from
the French new wave and other European arts cinemas, so
Boardwell Stager and Thompson in their huge and completely unreadable classical Hollywood cinema
Look at Jean-Luc Godard's of Boudesouffle breathless and think about the distinguishing characteristics of that which include things like aimless protagonists
loose causal connections and a relatively open-ended narrative
A hybridization of genre is a point. I really disagree with them on but won't go into that today and an increase in violence and sex and
Boardwell Stager and Thompson describe the ways in which these narrational strategies are borrowed and absorbed within
Hollywood during this period of 67 to 75
And we get some new technologies becoming available as well
Which allow certain new stylistic choices the use of zooms and telephoto lenses becomes
Incredibly common in this period. There's a lot of slow-motion thing with the end of you know, Sam Peckinpah
Gunfight sequence there are split screen sequences in movies and a move to discontinuous editing
away from the continuity editing of the
classical period which would always seem to create a very
Safe and secure space that we always sort of intuitively understood
Whereas the Hollywood renaissance will often play with time and space through discontinuous editing
Prompting the audience to have to work quite hard at times to figure out what's going on
Despite these influences. I think the important thing to remember is that Hollywood absorbed them
so as Robert Ray argues
You'll get moments which are experimental and indeed films which are experimental
But they will be surrounded by much more traditional Hollywood production
So even the example of Bonnie and Clyde retains individual protagonists with clearly defined characters
Linear narrative a relatively high degree of closure they get killed at the end
A strong sense of genre this clearly builds on American crime movies the presence of stars Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway
and then as you go through the 70s less conventionally glamorous and attractive people Jean Hackman Richard Dreyfuss and so on and
Roy Scheider and I'll probably get sued for calling them that and
Very quickly these new wave stylistic choices become commonplace and normalized
In terms of science fiction production we can see a number of countercultural SF movies emerging
so our first list here is
Anti-nuclear and anti-war films which begin really in the 1950s
but run a strand through into the 60s and 70s and
Here I've just selected examples, which really are straightforwardly anti-nuclear war. They're not films which are using
Giant mutant ants or reawoken dinosaurs or anything like that warns that born about the dangers of radiation
They're not films which go to Mars and discover Martian civilization was destroyed by a nuclear war. These are straightforwardly
anti-nuclear war movies
Also, there are quite a few films which seem very very sympathetic to counter-cultural youth
That list on the other side of screen there wild in the streets, for example
counter-cultural youth
Take over running the US they they decide the you know grown-ups old folks
You know don't know what the world's like and it should be young people's job to run it
But then the film ends with an even younger generation of children and early teens challenging the 20-somethings
As to the right to run America, so there's a great deal of sympathy for youth going on
There are a lot of films building on both right and left wing
critiques of
dehumanization
The consequences of urban life consumerism the faceless powers of corporations the media and other institutions
I
Such as the both versions of both the first two versions of evasion of the body snatches are particularly strong examples of that
I think and there's an increase in interest in what we'd now think as environmental concerns
films about overpopulation resource depletion pollution the destruction of habitats species extinctions and so on and a number of films in which
Nature takes revenge when animals come back and attack man films like alligator
face four and so on and
In the period we can also find
sort of feminist SF
Out of the ones listed there
I'd say born in flames is the most overtly feminist so the others are certainly very very susceptible to the feminist readings stepford wives is
is
Primarily about you know just how horrible
Bourgeois patriarchy is and it does sympathize with the real stepford wives not their robot replacements
and
If we look at black exploitation and other exploitation movies
That foreground race we can see
the civil rights transition to
black power and black pride
Coming to the fore the end of conquest of the planet of the apes for example in which the ape revolution is clearly signal
African-american revolutionaries the spook who sat by the door which ends in an armed insurrection sweeping the US
Throwing out whitey
So countercultural politics run through a lot of the films in the period now
I'm gonna talk in a bit more detail about three films
that
combine
countercultural
Interests with what can we think of as formal experimentation? I'm gonna begin with two films
I spent some time
Last year earlier this year trying to find science fiction films, which are overtly anti-imperialist and
Unsurprisingly, there aren't many and one of the great iron is in terms of American anti-imperialist SF
Is that the anti-imperialist as the most overtly anti-imperialist SF film made by an American William Klein?
wasn't actually made in America and
the
major example of anti-imperialist SF made in America Peter Watkins punishment Park
Wasn't made by an American
So these the two films are sketching first
Mr. Freedom is is not a terribly well-known film that is now available on DVD again
It features mr. Freedom the superhero who's not very bright. He's a loudmouth a bigot a bully. He works for
Freedom Inc an organization that's headquartered in the same building as Texaco
Shell General Motors standard oil, you know United fruit and so on
He's sent to Paris
Because the super villain red Chinaman has murdered Captain Forma da and is infiltrating communist forces into France
as
His boss Dr. Freedom explains the French and now the white man's burden
During a visit to the American Embassy, which you can see there in the bottom left
It's a supermarket. This isn't a subtle film. I should point out if you haven't worked that out
The US ambassador explains that France could actually be a great nation if only the French properly understood democracy like Americans do
But some of these foolish French people are calling for free elections
How can democracy work if there are free elections and the film ends with Captain freedom?
Sorry, mr. Freedom
Having to destroy half of France in order to save it
Punishment Park Peter Watkins film is a pseudo documentary complete contrast in style and tone to mr. Freedom
It's
Ostensibly shot by BBC film crew who've been invited to the US to observe
The system that's been introduced to address political dissent in a very near future science fiction
You have sorry very near future America
And you have to listen very carefully to some background radio broadcasts to pick up the clues. This is actually set in the future
Under the actually existing McCarran internal security act the president has declared a state of insurrection
Which enables the arrest and detention of people who are considered likely to commit
subversive acts and sabotage
And it allows the creation also of the punishment parks as a kind of as a punitive deterrent
for those who might consider subversion and
The film cuts between two corrective groups corrective group six three eight
You see on the top right there appear before a tribunal to be sentenced either to a length lengthy prison terms or a three-day
period in bare mountain punishment Park
For such terrible crimes as writing anti-establishment songs draft dodging organizing movements against poverty racism and the war
a
Corrective group six three seven have already opted
For the park and they must make their way without water or supplies across 53 miles of desert
Where temperatures vary between 65 degrees Fahrenheit at night and 110 degrees during the day whilst being pursued by National Guardsmen
riot police and federal marshals
Some of group six three seven break away
Killer policemen steal his weapons and turn them on the pursuers and the pursuers in turn become murderously violent and throughout the film
Insists that military aggression overseas and domestic repression of dissent
Inextricably linked part of the same American tradition of violence that includes slavery and genocide
Now the styles in which these films are shot these sort of raucous burlesque of mr
Freedom and the pseudo mock documentary form of punishment Park. I've shown punishment Park to students who
Turned up late missing my introduction and thought it was a genuine documentary remains that persuasive a text
these can be taken as examples of formal experimentation, but I want to
the third film want to talk about is one which is much better known than these two and
It's funded by Hollywood Studios. It's an MGM United artists production
And it does a very very good job of bringing countercultural concerns and formal experimentation together
And that film is of course Stanley Kubrick's
2001 a Space Odyssey
Which
I'll just quickly sketch in the plot such as it can be described
In case you're not familiar with it. This mysterious black monolith appears on a prehistoric and prehistoric African plane
And apparently teaches pre-human apes how to use
bones as tools
four million years later
Humans discover a similar monolith on the moon and when sunlight strikes its surface because it's been uncovered by the humans
It beams a powerful sick radio signal towards Jupiter
Another temporal skip this time only 18 months and the spaceship discovery is on its way to Jupiter
When it's supposedly infallible computer the Hal 9000 suffers a psychological breakdown and murders all but one of the crew
Dave Bowman the surviving astronaut ventures out towards a giant monolith. That's orbiting Jupiter
He falls into a tunnel of lights races over these mysterious alien landscapes
And eventually it seems is he dies and is reborn as this hyper evolved post-human star child
Who returns to Earth? It's the reasons unknown
The future cubic presents in this film satirizes bureaucratic corporate America
It's banal human in humanities emphasized in the film by very stilted conversations between
absolutely depth its characters
many of these exchanges are constrained by political and corporate agendas by
Checklists and scripts and predetermined procedures people have to go to the dialogue in this film is
incredibly flat and deliberately so
It's a future that's simultaneously or inspiring and
Remorselessly bland Kubrick's wide-angle cinematography makes the immaculate built environments even more unhomely
This is a great spaces that characters pass through rather than inhabit
and
One of the stylistic ticks the Kubrick introduces in this film is to break conventional
Continuity editing there are no
Conventional shot reverse shot exchanges between human characters
occasional computer will talk to a
Screen or Hal's electronic eye and get a shot reverse shot, but characters never talk to each other like that
So they're all
isolated and alienated from each other
So despite but despite this kind of
countercultural critique the film's
Countercultural credentials really seem to lie with the trippy psychedelic stargate sequence at the end of the film as Bowman races through this mysterious tunnel of light
It's the film significance for the development of cinematic science fiction though lies I think in its formal and technical
achievements formal achievements will include things like
Kubrick's decision to match images of spaceships docking to classical music in in that case
Strauss's blue Danube Waltz
And by doing so he reopens
The possibilities in the relationship between the image and the soundtrack
Conventionally the soundtrack underpins the image it gives voices and noises which create a realistic space and
Music gives emotional cues so audiences know how to respond to what they're seeing and hearing
Kubrick sections the soundtrack so the dialogue scenes never have music and
So even as the characters are inhabiting these vast and homey spaces and are alienated from each other
The audience isn't given the cues to know how to respond to what the characters are saying and doing so we also
alienated from them and
In opening up that gap, perhaps we are encouraged to invest
Cognitively to a greater extent in the film to think more. That's questionable. It might also just bore people and make them leave
Half of the shots in the film a special effects shots over half the budget of the film went on the development
An invention of new techniques and equipment to do the special effects and this might be Kubrick's greatest influence on the genre
That he he through this film. He fueled the desire to produce
science fiction as a spectacular cinema of attractions, and I think this is certainly amongst the lessons filmmakers and
Money men of the second New Hollywood seems to have taken from 2001
So let's have a look at the second New Hollywood
This is Hollywood after 1975 this other sort of contradictory meaning
If this New Hollywood is inaugurated with Jaws
It's soon joined by films like Star Wars from 1977 and Close Encounters of the Third Kind from 1977 both
massive box office hits
In both films we can discern the last remnants of the counterculture
Star Wars is about a young hot-rodding kid who wants to go off to university and
Then join a rebellion overthrow a military bureaucratic state
In that respect, it's not that different a film from Lucas's earlier American graffiti
Close Encounters of the Third Kind is about the discontents of lower middle-class life
in the suburbs both films reach for
magical solutions the mystical force in Star Wars the childlike aliens in Close Encounters, which
seemed to understand
the spectacle of
2001 but evacuated of
meaning so rather than kind of cosmic sublime we instead get pop psychology and
Some kind of nonsensical justification of an infantile disengagement from the world
Both films are also quite consciously made up of
endless cinematic illusions references quotes reworkings
from other films
Probably most famously in Star Wars when Luke returns and finds his uncle and aunt dead
That's a replay of a sequence of John Ford's The Searchers the Attack on the Death Star obviously replays
The war movie Dan Busters and so on and so forth
And
So these films can be seen as pioneering a kind of mainstream post-modernism
Through this remorseless regurgitation of popular cultural fragments, and I gather you're talking about
Blade Runner later today
So although people would rarely lump Blade Runner in with Star Wars into place encounters
We can see in I think you'll see in Blade Runner's aesthetics this desire to
Quote and allude and refer and I think these films in the late 70s
Lay some of the groundwork for that
Both of these films also confirmed the potential profitability of this new style of effects driven
cross-marketed heavily merchandised
saturation booked blockbuster and
Confirm the ability of fundamentally juvenile narratives to appeal to a global audience
It's important you understand when I say things like regurgitate and juvenile
I'm sometimes misquoted when I say things like that or misunderstood when I say things like that that I mean those as negative terms
I genuinely intend them as neutral critical terms
I don't intend them to have negative connotations
One of the consequences of the success of these films is an increase in Hollywood's emphasis on big budget spectacle
Which typically produces?
It doesn't necessarily but typically does produce far more conservative cinema
Because
big budget movies cost a lot of money you have to be able to reach as wide an audience as possible and
Thus it's important to remain as simple straightforward and inoffensive as possible though that inoffensiveness
often is quite offensive
Or I find it so
There's a
Retreat from the kind of formal experimentation that Kubrick
exemplifies so what we could think of as technological innovation the kind of James Cameron's cinema
From the abyss, which is the first film. It's what 1989 the first film to intrude
CGI into the analog
Diagesis not just have CGI playing on screens in the background on the title sequence of the title sequences and things like that
But when the watery pseudopod
Alien pseudopod encounters the humans the CGI is is presented as part of the diegetic world
Through to avatar this kind of attempt to produce a completely immersive
cinema
That is intriguing on technological in technological ways, but formally
Is really as uninteresting as the terrible old-fashioned colonial adventure narrative it tells the kind of smart innovation
That Cameron Cameron does around technology is evident there. So one of the problems with
The new version of 3d is the low luminosity level. So 3d movies are very very dark
James Cameron gets around this by designing the planet of Pandora with a lot of bioluminescence. It's a technological solution
It's not a formal experiment
But it's interesting in its way
Also, there's a tendency to rely very heavily on double coding movies so any kind of
Liberal critique that a film might include is interwoven with a narrative, which is often quite reactionary
I think Paul Verhoeven is really interesting example of this certainly in terms of Robocop with his anti-corporate satire, but this ridiculous
a
Phallic cop Robocop and Starship Troopers
Saturizing American imperialism, but so effectively or at least the
Popular myth is so effectively that Americans didn't realize
They were being satirized and took the film straight. Obviously that story is nonsensical
It tells us a lot about what we like to believe about our own sophisticated European ways and about Americans
I
Just want to sketch in as well some other industry trends that emerged from this period
We'll begin with the question of sequels and reissues
Oops, that's the one I want if we look at the bottom of this slide. We've got a chart here that maps the
Pattern of releases and reissues of Star Wars Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi and so we can see from
1977 through to
1985
There's not a year in which audiences do not have access to Star Wars movies
The in contrast the relatively uninspired box office of
This year's reissue of Phantom Menace the first of the Star Wars prequels indicates extent to which since
That period domestic media technologies DVD blu-ray home cinema, etc
The extent to which those technologies have given audiences more points of contact more ways to access
Films about which they care and thus making the pattern of reissuing less important
to
filmmakers
But if we think about the question of sequels and remakes and franchises and franchise reboots
We just need to look at this year's release slates at the multiplexes
Avengers Assemble the total recall remake Men in Black 3 Prometheus the alien sort of prequel
The reboot of spider-man franchise with amazing spider-man the last
Of Christopher Nolan's Batman movies Batman persists or whatever. It's called Dark Knight Rises
So some of these patterns which emerge in the 70s and 80s obviously remain very very important through to the present day others adjust and
change over time
We can also have a quick look at the importance of these first four trends
saturation advertising
This really starts in the mid 70s with the trial of Billy Jack and with Jaws
Where rather than just doing advertising on the local and regional radio and television?
film starts film companies start to
Advertise nationally on television and on radio, which means they need the films to be released nationally
Which means they need to strike a lot more prints get them into as many cinemas as quickly as possible if possible in the same
Weekend right across the US and Canada
So they saturate book the cinemas and this this creates kind of front-loading of the movie
So there's a lot more hype and publicity becomes a part of the process of releasing a movie
So everyone wants to see the movie on the opening weekend if at all possible
And that's opening weekend box office figures become very very important to the industry
Okay, sorry. I keep pressing the wrong button there
we can see how that happens with the chart at the top here and just comparing the figures of the
First of these are weekend box office figures for the first 10 weeks of the releases of ET
and Batman in 1982 and 1989 in the US and what we can see with ET is
It's it's actual best weekend as its third weekend
And it doesn't drop
below
23 million doesn't get back down below. Sorry the opening weekends box office until week seven
So it's a face and then remains fairly steady and stable through to the end of the 10th weekend there
Batman on the other hand
massively expensive movie hugely important to time Warner they released lots of merchandise and tie-in products like I think three different soundtrack albums
Really really important to them that this movie makes a lot of money quickly
And it does massive opening weekend about a 50% drop off the second week
Which is what one would expect nowadays 50 to 70 percent drop off the second weekend
But then it tails off very quickly. It doesn't have long legs at the box office
But this pattern that Batman exemplifies is very much the pattern that Hollywood aims for now
In
The 1990s
The number of films being produced by the majors
Halves per year and there's great emphasis on star vehicles and blockbusters and these massive opening weekends
The major studios set themselves the aim of grossing a billion dollars per year what this means is though
That when they make lower budget movies for niche markets
There's a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy that those films won't be successful because they have to be kept off cinema screens
So that the more expensive movies can stay on cinema screens for longer to increase their profitability
So we have a this kind of a movie that costs 10 million dollars in the 90s
Wouldn't open on more than 350 screens at the maximum whereas Men in Black costing 90 million open on
5,400 screens and took over 250 million dollars in the US alone
And on the one hand this emphasis sorry this emphasis on the
Opening weekend this sorry
I just wanted to quickly there's been a more recent wrinkle in in this as well in just the last couple of years
Which is the overseas release of big movies the week before the US release. We've seen it this summer with Avengers assemble
This is an attempt to generate massive positive word of mouth
So that the US opening weekend will be even bigger
all those envious
Americans who you know
Being endlessly teased by their friends in Europe or the Far East who knew exactly what happened in Avengers assemble
I want to get to the screen see as quickly as possible
I want to get to see it before they know to before they've encountered too many spoilers and so on
The opening weekend in the US as well sometimes now starts on a Wednesday evening
You know Wednesday the traditional start of a weekend
But the late night screening on a Wednesday is where the figures often run from
This emphasis on the opening weekend
Is because it's a large extent because the US trade papers reporting on the industry report opening weekend grosses in the US
And then those numbers go in the headlines and it's only further down if you can bother reading through the column inches you'll get
the global box office figures
This is kind of nonsensical because Hollywood movies make half to two-thirds of their money overseas
But it makes sense in other ways for the US industry partly because
The funding patterns the financing patterns for block really expensive movies have a series of deadlines for paying back
The money that was borrowed to make the movie which incur heavy financial penalties if they're missed
So getting as much money in as quickly as possible helps ensure you're not incurring financial penalties
They're a result of the way the funding is set up
So in the last week there have been decisions to delay the release of World War Z
Or World War Z as Americans will undoubtedly call it the Brad Pitt zombie movie
Post pocket zombie movie to rewrite the third act of the movie and presumably reshoot part of it
There's also been a decision to delay the release of GI Joe retaliation the second GI Joe movie
in order to do some post to convert it post-production into 3d a decision presumably prompted by the massive business Avengers assembled it
in 3d, but before making those decisions there have been some really serious number crunching going on to see whether the
hypothesized increase in profitability
Will be sufficient to overcome those financial penalties and refinancing packages that have to be taken on
But enough about money I want to end
There are two more things
I very quickly want to talk about one of them is to return to the question of technical
technological innovation and the impact of digital technologies on Hollywood and on science fiction film production and
Also to point to ways in which the new Hollywood isn't the whole story of contemporary science fiction
So when we think about digital technologies, we primarily tend to think of computer-generated imagery
But there are other technologies used in filmmaking
films now Hollywood films now almost exclusively shot on digital cameras and
All Hollywood films since really the mid 90s have been edited digitally which
Has certain consequences
nonlinear editing
Has had real real impact in the pace and the narrative structure of movies
It's because it's done on computer
It brings
It's very very different to old-style analog
Editing in various ways. The editor no longer has to know
Every frame that was shot and have made copious notes on every frame of the film that was shot every inch of footage
The editor no longer has to physically handle the reels of developed film or physically cut the film
Doesn't have to physically splice the film together to see how a sequence work would work edited
And what in this particular way don't have to be restricted by the physical fragility of the film
And they need to undo splices and re-splice footage and things like that
Editors in interview typically talk about these things as advantages
They don't have to worry about remembering the whole film
They no longer have to worry about making a decision that becomes irreversible because they run out of time or the film is too fragile
Physical film is too fragile to be recut and respliced
And it removes a lot of the laborious physical processes from editing and producers like it too because of the
automation of editing
This reduces post-production schedule and post-production costs
It also gets you to appear to have been able to release the movie sooner and pay off the money you've borrowed sooner
But Michelle Pearson and others
Michelle Pearson her book in search of wonder and others have argued that because
Technology reduces the need for the editor to hold the entire film in their memory or their notebooks
And in editing decisions are much more likely to be made in the context of a particular scene or sequence in a film
Rather than in relation to the entire narrative of the film
And one of the effects of this is to propel the protagonist
Not so much through a narrative as through a desired runtime or a desired number of set pieces
Often at the expense of character and thematic complexity
sort of a
Good example of this would be Spielberg's minority report from 2002
It's an interesting film for all kinds of ways not least that
It has some very self-conscious use of technology, which seems to be talking about digital editing
In the film John Anderton Tom Cruise's character works for the experimental pre-crime unit the pre-crime system
Involves mutant children who are able to predict when murders will occur
Which then enables the police to intervene to arrest murderers before they've actually committed any crime
Inevitably the pre-crime system
predicts Anderton who's going to murder someone and so the film then becomes
Mostly about his flight from arrest and the investigation is able to conduct whilst running
So he runs he pauses, he runs he pauses, he runs he pauses
He goes through one set piece rests, through another set piece rests, through another set piece rests
Reducing the narrative to this really sort of negligible armature
That is really about showing set piece special effects sequences and set piece action sequences
This is about demonstrating technological prowess and what cinematic technologies can do
Alongside these kinds of shifts that come really come from digital editing
We do have the development of CGI and when that's taken with the growth in importance of series and franchises
particularly
In science fiction cinema. This developed a kind of filmmaking sometimes called database narratives
Which seems much more oriented towards creating universes rather than stories
And the Star Wars prequels are probably the primary primary example of this
I challenge anyone to remember let alone be able to
Pray see the the narratives of any of those prequels to even make sense of them what we get
two hour long
immersions
in
successions of
digitally created environments and spaces
Meeting lots and lots of characters who can then be sold to us as action figures
Different worldscapes which are marvelous to look at but their relationships to each other
narratively remain relatively obscure relatively unimportant
and
I think Star Wars the primary example of where this is happening and this is where the the commercial drive behind this
Is that it's most apparent?
At the same time perhaps though despite this increase in spectacle and amazing images special effects themselves might have lost something of their specialness
when you go and see a science fiction movie, that's pretty much all special effects or
Doesn't have a single scene in it that doesn't contain digital effects. I'm thinking of things like Peter Jackson's King Kong remake
Avatar John Carter if anyone bothered seeing that
I cannot think of a single scene in those films. It does not contain digital effects
So with this kind of totalized digital spectacular environment special effects
Don't register anymore perhaps and I think this might explain a tick in Michael Bay's
Transformer movies most notable in the first one where during the big slug fest between Decepticons and Autobots
When you can't tell which robots punching which one and frankly, it's difficult to care every so often
The action will go into slow motion into really really slow motion
And I think that's a way of trying to reintroduce the specialness into special effects
Okay, very quickly in conclusion. I think I've overrun a little new Hollywood is not the only story out there in America itself
There's a very strong and thriving
independent low-budget science fiction production
These are these are just five of the titles I happen to find interesting and amusing
There's a lot of short film production as well hundreds of films every year science fiction films produced every year
It's less than an hour long less than 10 minutes long
Also really interestingly the last few years have seen the emergence of African science fiction cinema
District 9 is the most famous and the most racist of these examples
But we can see films from Cameroon Benin and Nigeria emerging India is going through is an amazing
cycle of
Film production big budget by Bollywood Bollywood standards spectacular
often imitating
Moments from Spielberg or other American blockbuster
movies and including Bollywood song-and-dance numbers as well
The exception on that list would be Metro Boomi a nation without women and a really interesting feminist science fiction movie
And two other really interesting cycles
There's a large sorry. There's a small group of Russian science fiction movies for the last few years all of which really
about
the consequences of
The collapse of the Soviet Union the what's being suffered in Russia by
the dominance of free market capitalism or gangster capitalism or the shock doctrine capitalism of neoliberalism and
There is a kind of nostalgic trend in some of these in first on the moon and dust in particular
But also a nostalgia for what was lost with the Soviet Union, but not an illusion that the Soviet Union was
necessarily unproblematic itself
South Korean science fiction is a little bit more varied. So just a couple of examples from that list save the green planets a
hilarious film
Really really funny film actually
Quite shocking in its imagery in places is a film that's trying very hard to think about
The military dictatorship that governed Korea
during the period
In which the director was growing up and studying film that's made after the end of the dictatorship and also reflecting on
free market capitalism and its consequences for Korea in contrast
2009 lost memories
is an alternative history movie in which
Because a certain assassination didn't happen in the 19 teens Korea remained part of the Japanese Empire and it's an interracial copper buddy movie
in which there's a Japanese cop and
They looked down upon because his Korean buddy, but the buddy discovers
This is there's this alternate history where this assassination did happen and Korea broke with the Japanese Empire
So it becomes a struggle between the cop the cop buddies and the interracial cop buddies to determine the nature of
Korea and just very quickly in contrast that we have a film like D war
Or Dragon war, I think it's known as in the States Korean film
Which tries desperately hard not to admit that it's Korean in the hope that it will look like an American film
And make lots of money a hope in which it rather failed
So that's a kind of overview of the different varieties of new Hollywood a lot of economic and industrial context and hopefully
some cultural political context as well that will inform
The kind of things you're going to be talking about and inform your discussion of blade running
You'll get to see hopefully a sense of quite where blade runner fits in this long narrative, but that's me done
So I'll hand back to you lies