Course Readings - FILM 3280 - Haggett - Library Research Guides at Georgia Gwinnett College

eBooks

The Philosophy of Science Fiction Film by Steven Sanders The science fiction genre maintains a remarkable hold on the imagination and enthusiasm of the filmgoing public, captivating large audiences worldwide and garnering ever-larger profits. Science fiction films entertain the possibility of time travel and extraterrestrial visitation and imaginatively transport us to worlds transformed by modern science and technology. They also provide a medium through which questions about personal identity, moral agency, artificial consciousness, and other categories of experience can be addressed. In The Philosophy of Science Fiction Film, distinguished authors explore the storylines, conflicts, and themes of fifteen science fiction film classics, from Metropolis to The Matrix. Editor Steven M. Sanders and a group of outstanding scholars in philosophy, film studies, and other fields raise science fiction film criticism to a new level by penetrating the surface of the films to expose the underlying philosophical arguments, ethical perspectives, and metaphysical views. Sanders's introduction presents an overview and evaluation of each essay and poses questions for readers to consider as they think about the films under discussion.The first section, "Enigmas of Identity and Agency," deals with the nature of humanity as it is portrayed in Blade Runner, Dark City, Frankenstein, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and Total Recall. In the second section, "Extraterrestrial Visitation, Time Travel, and Artificial Intelligence," contributors discuss 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Terminator, 12 Monkeys, and The Day the Earth Stood Still and analyze the challenges of artificial intelligence, the paradoxes of time travel, and the ethics of war. The final section, "Brave Newer World: Science Fiction Futurism," looks at visions of the future in Metropolis, The Matrix, Alphaville, and screen adaptations of George Orwell's 1984.
Call Number: eBook
ISBN: 9780813172811
Publication Date: 2008
The Structures of the Film Experience Jean-Pierre: Historical Assessments and Phenomenological Expansions by Julian Hanich (Editor); Vivian Sobchack (Contribution by); Daniel Fairfax (Editor); Dudley Andrew (Contribution by); Victor Fan (Contribution by); Christian Ferencz-Flatz (Contribution by); Kate Ince (Contribution by); Guido Kirsten (Contribution by); Marie-Aude Lous Baronian (Contribution by); Robert Sinnerbrink (Contribution by) For the first time this volume makes Jean-Pierre Meunier's insightful thoughts on the film experience available for an English-speaking readership. Introduced and commented by specialists in film studies and philosophy, Meunier's intricate phenomenological descriptions of the spectator's engagement with fiction films, documentaries and home movies can reach the wide audience they have deserved ever since their publication in French in 1969.
Call Number: eBook
ISBN: 9789462986565
Publication Date: 2019-09-15

Arrival

Denis Villeneuve, film theorist; or, cinema’s arrival in a multilingual world The article focuses on film theorist Denis Villeneuve and discusses the science fiction film "Arrival". Topics discussed include linkage between language, visuality and film form, relation between multilingualism and cinema, and efforts of the film maker to embrace not just the utopian, internationalist idea of cinema's purported global accessibility but also the very aesthetics correlated with the universal language thesis.
FIRST CONTACT The Story of Our Lives The article discusses the creation of sets and sceneries of a science fiction motion picture " Arrival" designed by the production designer Patrice Vermette. Topics discussed include designing of an alien spaceship, creation of a new and distinct alien language and design and construction of auditorium classroom.

Blade Runner

"Blade Runner and Cyberpunk Visions of Humanity" The article explores the concept of humanity in the cyberpunk film "Blade Runner," directed by Ridley Scott. According to the author, "Blade Runner" establishes no apodictic criteria for humanity, rather it introduces a wide range of constantly metamorphosing humanities from the regressive street rats to the superhuman replicants. Replicants were built to be human in almost every way, yet they are denied human status, like many of the others who cannot qualify for off-world placement. "Blade Runner" is in essence about the desperate struggle to survive, whether one is a genetic human or a genetically produced human.
Blade Runner and Genre: Film Noir and Science Fiction Analyzes the film 'Blade Runner' as a combination of film noir and science fiction. Summary of the film; Discussion of its style and relationship to film noir; Signifiers of the film.
Cyberpunk Women: Blade Runner 2049 and Its Contemporaries. With Blade Runner 2049 (2017), viewers had high expectations for the sequel to Ridley Scott’s original. For many fans, this new release was highly anticipated, yet controversial. While die-hard fans of the original release objected to the possibility of change to the futuristic noir format, others hoped for a new representation of women in this sequel to the 1982 original film...
Do Androids Dream of Proto-Indo-Europeans Fables About Sheep? The article presents criticism on the film "Prometheus," directed by Ridley Scott. The use of proto-Indo-European language is found early in the film. It notes that the language presented in the movie is entirely different from any other mainstream science-fiction (sci-fi) productions such as "Star Trek," "Firefly," and "The Fourth Kind." It is also found an aspect of the film that shows that the sci-fi genre serves as an essential measure of social values.
I’ve heard things you people wouldn’t imagine”: Blade Runner’s aural lives. Sf film has often been framed as negotiating the opposites of spectacle and narrative, with the former frequently taking precedence, much to many critics’ chagrin. But some genre films are more visual than others – and Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (US 1982) is one of them. Starting almost immediately after its release, a broad range of both journalistic and academic texts have addressed the film’s inspirations and its production process, as well as its meandering distribution and commercial circulation, narrative preoccupations, visual tropes and vistas, and, finally, the movie’s politics. Blade Runner has also been a favoured example in critical conversations concerning the phenomenon of cult creativity, fandom dynamics and adaptive remediations, both official and unsanctioned...
Race in the Blade Runner cycle and demographic dystopia This article surveys the existing scholarship that treats racial representation in the original Blade Runner (1982) in order to trace its continuation into Blade Runner 2049 (2017) as well as the three short film intertexts: Blade Runner: Black Out 2022 (directed by Shinichiro Watanabe), 2036: Nexus Dawn (Luke Scott) and 2048: Nowhere to Run (Luke Scott). While the shorts Black Out 2022 and 2036: Nexus Dawn feature black and Asian characters, the dominant racial logic of Hollywood continues the focus on whiteness in Blade Runner 2049. At the same time, the newer films seem to show a response – however muted – to criticisms of the original in relation to race with an attempt to at least show that black people do in fact exist in its future, and half-Filipino and Latina actors (Dave Bautista and Ana de Armas, respectively) are featured in Blade Runner 2049. Nevertheless, I argue that the overriding racial sentiment of the series thus far is the imagination of what Steven Gardiner identifies as a fear of 'demographic dystopia', a core logic of white supremacy; indeed, it is precisely the imagination of dystopia as whiteness being overwhelmed by non-whiteness that pervades the Blade Runner diegetic universe. My own argument about the Blade Runner series will focus on it as an exemplar of Hollywood's racial logic and its attempts to fit its vision of the future of race into both the fears and aspirations of racial multiculturalism in the US.

Blade Runner 2049

Dystopia fatigue doesn’t cut it, or, Blade Runner 2049’s utopian longings A short symposium piece on Blade Runner 2049 (Villeneuve US/UK/Hungary/ Canada/Spain 2017) is hardly the place to rehash the question that concerns many in sf studies, utopian studies and political activism – what is utopia? – and yet here we are. We have arrived here because 2049 and its predecessor, Blade Runner (Scott US 1982), not to mention that film’s literary progenitor, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, are all overwhelmingly seen as expressions of a neoliberal dystopianism that symptomatises itself through seudocyberpunk aesthetics: gritty urban esign, bleak lighting, bleaker narrative trajectories and a noir sense of futility in the face of humanity’s injustices against those it oppresses (minus the women, who are not really people in either Blade Runner or its sequel).
Seven inquiries on the antediluvian labour market of cinematic ‘sf auteurs’ and Blade Runner 2049 This essay tackles the antediluvian labor market of cinematic science fiction auteurs and "Blade Runner 2049." Topics discussed are designation of industry powerbrokers and unionized Hollywood artists as special auteur to refer only to middle- and upper class, comparison of science fiction cinema to printed literary genre, recruitment of directorial talents in science fiction film and television production, and diversity and inclusion in science fiction cinematic authorship.
A symposium on the legacies of Blade Runner: Cyberpunk's masculinist legacy: Puppetry, labour and menage a trois in Blade Runner 2049 Critical essay.
We, the people of Blade Runner 2049 use of ending; treatment of nationalism; dehumanization; immigrants; racial politics; relationship to melancholy; failure; to change

District 9

The repugnant appeal of the abject: cityscape and cinematic corporality in District 9 treatment of alien beings; urban space; in Johannesburg; embodiment; abjection; postapartheid
What languages do aliens speak? Multilingual ‘Otherness’ of diasporic dystopia in District 9 District 9 (Blomkamp, 2009), a South African science-fiction film, is noted for its dystopian vision. It is mostly set in a dilapidated township of Johannesburg called 'District 9', where 'abject' refugee aliens and Nigerian gangs reside. Moreover, the district in the end becomes a chaotic battlefield where the South African mercenaries hired by neo-liberal Multi-National United and the Nigerians mercilessly hunt Wikus van de Merwe, an MNU employee, whose mutating body holds a key to operating alien weaponry. These temporary dwellers of District 9 are informed by many levels of displacement and marginalization and are presented as the 'Other' to the residents of the 'human' world and this 'Other' worldliness is intensified by the way in which the director forges the 'South African' multilingual condition in the film. This article discusses the colonial and segregationist world-view on the post-apartheid South Africa in the representation of the 'Other' multilingual and diasporic landscape.

ESOTSM (Eternal Sunishine of the Spotless Mind)

Blessed are the Forgetful: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind Film review.
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and the Morality of Memory
Mainstream Mulvey: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and (500) Days of Summer as Alternatives to the Feminist Avant-Garde The article reviews the films"Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," directed by Michel Gondry and "(500) Days of Summer," directed by Marc Webb.
Not Your Average Love Story: FILM TECHNIQUES IN ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND The article discusses the motion picture "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," directed by Michel Gondry. The author discusses how the film, which presents the story of a couple who erase their memories of each other after their relationship ends, utilizes a nonlinear structure and its mise en scène to depict the value of memory. The use of different cinematographic and editing techniques to represent the characters' emotions is noted.

Gender

Space Sirens: The Portrayal of Women in French New Wave Sci-Fi The article discusses how French New Wave is known for giving birth to a subversive style of filmmaking. It mentions that concept of subversion can be extended to the portrayal of women in French New Wave films, particularly in the science fiction genre. It reveals that in French New Wave science fiction films, women trade the role of the femme fatale and the tragic love interest.
The Feminine “Nature” of Masculine Desire in the Age of Cinematic Techno-Transcendence The author examines key films from the millennium's end: 12 Monkeys (1995), Dark City (1998), Fight Club (1999), and The Matrix (1999). Although these films cover the gamut in terms of genre from science fiction and cyberpunk to urban drama, they all converge on anxieties of identity that result from technological hypermediations of self and reality. These cinematic lamentations for a secure and stable masculinity lost in the wake of a postindustrial capitalist society mark a reversal in the fantasy constructions of nature. Played out in these films is the shift from a masculinity that transcends the natural-maternal realm into the cultural-social realm to a masculinity constructed via (the illusion of) unmediated access to the natural-maternal world. This shift points to an increasing anxiety over the disappearance of, and a desire to (re)connect with, the natural world.

Genre

The Dark Side of the Force : Star Wars and the Science Fiction Tradition
The Frontiers of Genre: Science-Fiction Westerns
On desire, failure and fear: Utopia and dystopia in contemporary cinema This article discusses different concepts of utopia and dystopia and their diverse fates in contemporary film, analysing their typical representations, popular themes and tropes. It argues that in the new cinema, utopia has practically disappeared, preserved in works nostalgically or ironically commenting on its demise, its place being appropriated by dystopias that tend to dominate the cultural imagination and that gradually evolve from politically driven narratives towards dystopian adventure movies. Referring briefly to The Mission (Joffé, 1986) and The Beach (Boyle, 2000), it shows the withdrawal of utopias from contemporary cinema and their residual presence in nostalgic or ironic returns, while the evolution of dystopias is illustrated with the presentation of The Hunger Games (Ross, 2012) and Elysium (Blomkamp, 2013). The dual shift, then, first from utopia to dystopia, and then from hard-boiled politics towards individual subjectivity and entertainment marks one of the most characteristic tendencies observable in contemporary dystopian cinema. Its increasingly individualist orientation and the character-driven rather than political focus lead in turn back to the reconsideration of the meaning, value and future of the very concepts of utopia and dystopia in contemporary culture and film
Reducing the Dystopian Distance: Pseudo-Documentary Framing in Near-Future Fiction

FILM 3280 - Haggett

eBooks

Arrival

Blade Runner

Blade Runner 2049

District 9

ESOTSM (Eternal Sunishine of the Spotless Mind)

Gender

Genre

her

Horror

Marketing & Movie Trailers

Meilies and Early Cinema

Representation

Zombie