Abstract:This article analyses the representation of the female android in Alex Garland’s Ex Machina (2014), suggesting that the film draws an unexpected parallel between the android and its inventor. Unlike in similarly themed modern films, the android is used to explore the creative potential of artificial intelligence, which becomes its similarity to human intelligence. The film establishes a hierarchy of creativity in which the android’s ability is much greater than that of the human characters. Through this, it revisits a key idea of earlier female android texts such as Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s novel L’Eve future (1886) and Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927): the knowledge gap stretching between technology developers and users. Ex Machina’s exploration of strong artificial intelligence is used also to problematise modern technophilia by reflecting concerns over the exploitation of users’ lack of understanding of trusted technologies pervasive in their daily lives.
{"title":"Mind the knowledge gap","authors":"Ana Oancea","doi":"10.3828/sfftv.2020.12","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3828/sfftv.2020.12","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article analyses the representation of the female android in Alex Garland’s Ex Machina (2014), suggesting that the film draws an unexpected parallel between the android and its inventor. Unlike in similarly themed modern films, the android is used to explore the creative potential of artificial intelligence, which becomes its similarity to human intelligence. The film establishes a hierarchy of creativity in which the android’s ability is much greater than that of the human characters. Through this, it revisits a key idea of earlier female android texts such as Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s novel L’Eve future (1886) and Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927): the knowledge gap stretching between technology developers and users. Ex Machina’s exploration of strong artificial intelligence is used also to problematise modern technophilia by reflecting concerns over the exploitation of users’ lack of understanding of trusted technologies pervasive in their daily lives.","PeriodicalId":42550,"journal":{"name":"Science Fiction Film and Television","volume":"13 1","pages":"223-246"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2020-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.3828/sfftv.2020.12","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47848774","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:Motivated by Arrival’s articulation of past colonial histories and memories with sf images of fixed futurity, I here undertake an Afrofuturism-inspired investigation into the expressive form and content of a deeply felt scene that appears to erect a Manichean black/white racial ‘montage of history’, before being provoked by the wider narrative to zoom out and expand the range of ethnic considerations to include black people of non-African descent, as well as a range of other ethnicities and geopolitical actors including contemporary China. This critical focus on race initially appears to unmask commonalities with troubling colonial attitudes pervading the sf megatext – including Arrival’s negotiation of the past and future through an implicit web of racial and ethnic hierarchies, and a celebration of ‘advanced’ alien technologies and teleologies. However, while undertaking a critical focusing zoom on race issues within the film, I also enact a telescoping backtrack – as if enacting a virtual form of the Vertigo effect – that draws into relief the Hollywood product’s contemporary production context. This ultimately allows us to perceive the film indexing zeitgeist perceptions of the (white) West (con)ceding geopolitical control of the future to the Chinese.
{"title":"Race and world memory in Arrival","authors":"D. H. Fleming","doi":"10.3828/SFFTV.2020.13","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3828/SFFTV.2020.13","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Motivated by Arrival’s articulation of past colonial histories and memories with sf images of fixed futurity, I here undertake an Afrofuturism-inspired investigation into the expressive form and content of a deeply felt scene that appears to erect a Manichean black/white racial ‘montage of history’, before being provoked by the wider narrative to zoom out and expand the range of ethnic considerations to include black people of non-African descent, as well as a range of other ethnicities and geopolitical actors including contemporary China. This critical focus on race initially appears to unmask commonalities with troubling colonial attitudes pervading the sf megatext – including Arrival’s negotiation of the past and future through an implicit web of racial and ethnic hierarchies, and a celebration of ‘advanced’ alien technologies and teleologies. However, while undertaking a critical focusing zoom on race issues within the film, I also enact a telescoping backtrack – as if enacting a virtual form of the Vertigo effect – that draws into relief the Hollywood product’s contemporary production context. This ultimately allows us to perceive the film indexing zeitgeist perceptions of the (white) West (con)ceding geopolitical control of the future to the Chinese.","PeriodicalId":42550,"journal":{"name":"Science Fiction Film and Television","volume":"13 1","pages":"247 - 267"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2020-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.3828/SFFTV.2020.13","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44186434","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Bonnie McLean, Andrew Hoffmann, C. Coker, Justice Hagan
{"title":"DVD reviews","authors":"Bonnie McLean, Andrew Hoffmann, C. Coker, Justice Hagan","doi":"10.3828/sfftv.2020.16","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3828/sfftv.2020.16","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42550,"journal":{"name":"Science Fiction Film and Television","volume":"58 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2020-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84011942","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-07-01DOI: 10.3828/sfftv.2020.13.issue-2
{"title":"Science Fiction Film & Television: Volume 13, Issue 2","authors":"","doi":"10.3828/sfftv.2020.13.issue-2","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3828/sfftv.2020.13.issue-2","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42550,"journal":{"name":"Science Fiction Film and Television","volume":"46 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2020-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90983609","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:This essay reflects on the twenty-first-century media phenomenon of franchise revivals, designated by the term ‘nostalgia industry’. Approaching nostalgia as a term that unites affect with politics and ideology, two different aspects of nostalgia are related to divergent ideological positions, which are in turn historicised in relation to specific historical, media-industrial and socio-economic structures of feeling. An analysis of Stranger Things (US 2016–) illustrates what Svetlana Boym defines as restorative nostalgia: a politically reactionary mode that romanticises the past by refusing to critique or even acknowledge this earlier period’s negative aspects, and presenting it as an alluring retreat from an implicitly less desirable present. By contrast, the dialectical organisation of Twin Peaks: The Return (US 2017) expresses nostalgia’s political and ideological mirror image, as reflective nostalgia is employed to stage an encounter with the past as residual trauma.
{"title":"‘When you get there, you will already be there’ Stranger Things, Twin Peaks and the nostalgia industry","authors":"D. Hassler-Forest","doi":"10.3828/sfftv.2020.10","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3828/sfftv.2020.10","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay reflects on the twenty-first-century media phenomenon of franchise revivals, designated by the term ‘nostalgia industry’. Approaching nostalgia as a term that unites affect with politics and ideology, two different aspects of nostalgia are related to divergent ideological positions, which are in turn historicised in relation to specific historical, media-industrial and socio-economic structures of feeling. An analysis of Stranger Things (US 2016–) illustrates what Svetlana Boym defines as restorative nostalgia: a politically reactionary mode that romanticises the past by refusing to critique or even acknowledge this earlier period’s negative aspects, and presenting it as an alluring retreat from an implicitly less desirable present. By contrast, the dialectical organisation of Twin Peaks: The Return (US 2017) expresses nostalgia’s political and ideological mirror image, as reflective nostalgia is employed to stage an encounter with the past as residual trauma.","PeriodicalId":42550,"journal":{"name":"Science Fiction Film and Television","volume":"13 1","pages":"175 - 197"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2020-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.3828/sfftv.2020.10","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42247680","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The director's cut: Denis Villeneuve before Blade Runner 2049","authors":"Amy J. Ransom","doi":"10.3828/sfftv.2020.6c","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3828/sfftv.2020.6c","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42550,"journal":{"name":"Science Fiction Film and Television","volume":"13 1","pages":"119 - 127"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2020-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48736790","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Legacies ofBlade Runner","authors":"Sarah Hamblin, H. O’Connell","doi":"10.3828/sfftv.2020.1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3828/sfftv.2020.1","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42550,"journal":{"name":"Science Fiction Film and Television","volume":"13 1","pages":"1-14"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2020-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43009636","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"'I've heard things you people wouldn't imagine': Blade Runner's aural lives","authors":"P. Frelik","doi":"10.3828/sfftv.2020.6b","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3828/sfftv.2020.6b","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42550,"journal":{"name":"Science Fiction Film and Television","volume":"13 1","pages":"113 - 118"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2020-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48364590","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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