Science Fiction Film (Genres in American Cinema)

Science fiction film examines one of the most enduring and popular genres of Hollywood cinema, suggesting how the science fiction film reflects attitudes toward science, technology, and reason as they have evolved in American culture over the course of the twentieth century. J.P. Telotte provides a survey of science fiction film criticism, emphasizing humanist, psychological, ideological, feminist, and postmodern critiques. He also sketches a history of the genre, from its earliest literary manifestations to the present, while touching on and comparing it to pulp fiction, early television science fiction, and Japanese anime. Telotte offers in-depth readings of three key films: Robocop, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and THX 1138, each of which typifies a particular form of science fiction fantasy. Challenging the boundaries usually seen between high and low culture, literature and film, Science fiction film reasserts the central role of fantasy in popular films, even those concerned with reason, science, and technology.

First sentence: Whenever students of film approach the science fiction genre, it appears they immediately find themselves facing a kind of paradox, one akin to the problematic logic built into the form's combinatory designation - that is, as science and fiction, as fact and fabrication.

Year

2001

Language

English

Publisher

Cambridge University Press

Editions

2

Pages

268

ISBN

9780521593724

Data source: Wikidata