Soviet Science Fiction Cinema and the Space Age

Soviet Science Fiction Cinema and the Space Age PDF Author: Natalija Majsova
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1793609322
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
This book interrogates the relations between nostalgias of today and past utopias in the context of the space age of the 20th century and its cinematic representations in the USSR and in post-Soviet Russia. Once an enthusiastic projection, then a promising and uncanny present, and eventually an assemblage of nostalgic signifiers, in the history of world cinema, this space age has been linked primarily to the genre of science fiction. Here, aspects of the space age such as humanity’s imminent expansion to space, interplanetary travel, contact with extraterrestrial intelligence, and intergalactic governance and economy were both celebrated and critically interrogated as cosmopolitan ideals and nation-branding strategies. This book presents the contemporary relevance of this genre as heritage and legacy, archive and canon, and a nest of forgotten ideals and warnings, as well as nostalgic anchoring points. The author analyzes over 30 Soviet science fiction films, foregrounding their structures of utopia and their evolution over time, in order to trace both their transnational positionalities, transmedial resonance, and impact on post-Soviet Russian films about the space age. Concepts, crucial to the understanding of space futures of the past, such as utopianism, otherness, liminality, and no(w)stalgia are activated to draw out the fictional tenants of the memory of the Soviet space age, and to establish the limits and potentialities of Soviet (exra)terraformative ambitions.

Soviet Science Fiction Cinema and the Space Age

Soviet Science Fiction Cinema and the Space Age PDF Author: Natalija Majsova
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1793609322
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
This book interrogates the relations between nostalgias of today and past utopias in the context of the space age of the 20th century and its cinematic representations in the USSR and in post-Soviet Russia. Once an enthusiastic projection, then a promising and uncanny present, and eventually an assemblage of nostalgic signifiers, in the history of world cinema, this space age has been linked primarily to the genre of science fiction. Here, aspects of the space age such as humanity’s imminent expansion to space, interplanetary travel, contact with extraterrestrial intelligence, and intergalactic governance and economy were both celebrated and critically interrogated as cosmopolitan ideals and nation-branding strategies. This book presents the contemporary relevance of this genre as heritage and legacy, archive and canon, and a nest of forgotten ideals and warnings, as well as nostalgic anchoring points. The author analyzes over 30 Soviet science fiction films, foregrounding their structures of utopia and their evolution over time, in order to trace both their transnational positionalities, transmedial resonance, and impact on post-Soviet Russian films about the space age. Concepts, crucial to the understanding of space futures of the past, such as utopianism, otherness, liminality, and no(w)stalgia are activated to draw out the fictional tenants of the memory of the Soviet space age, and to establish the limits and potentialities of Soviet (exra)terraformative ambitions.

Remembering the Space Age

Remembering the Space Age PDF Author: Steven J. Dick
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Astronautics
Languages : en
Pages : 486

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Book Description
From the Publisher: Proceedings of October 2007 conference, sponsored by the NASA History Division and the National Air and Space Museum, to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Sputnik 1 launch in October 1957 and the dawn of the space age.

Remembering the space age: Proceedings of the 50th Anniversary Conference

Remembering the space age: Proceedings of the 50th Anniversary Conference PDF Author:
Publisher: Government Printing Office
ISBN: 9780160867118
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 488

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Book Description


Cinema and the Environment in Eastern Europe

Cinema and the Environment in Eastern Europe PDF Author: Masha Shpolberg
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 1805391062
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
The annexation of Eastern Europe to the Soviet sphere after World War II dramatically reshaped popular understandings of the natural environment. With an eco-critical approach, Cinema and the Environment in Eastern Europe breaks new ground in documenting how filmmakers increasingly saw cinema as a tool to critique the social and environmental damage of large-scale projects from socialist regimes and newly forming capitalist presences. New and established scholars with backgrounds across Europe, the United States, and Australia come together to reflect on how the cultural sphere has, and can still, play a role in redefining our relationship to nature.

Cosmonaut

Cosmonaut PDF Author: Cathleen S. Lewis
Publisher: University Press of Florida
ISBN: 1683403940
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 254

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Book Description
How the public image of the Soviet cosmonaut was designed and reimagined over time In this book, Cathleen Lewis discusses how the public image of the Soviet cosmonaut developed beginning in the 1950s and the ways this icon has been reinterpreted throughout the years and in contemporary Russia. Compiling material and cultural representations of the cosmonaut program, Lewis provides a new perspective on the story of Soviet spaceflight, highlighting how the government has celebrated figures such as Yuri Gagarin and Valentina Tereshkova through newspapers, radio, parades, monuments, museums, films, and even postage stamps and lapel pins. Lewis’s analysis shows that during the Space Race, Nikita Khrushchev mobilized cosmonaut stories and images to symbolize the forward-looking Soviet state and distract from the costs of the Cold War. Public perceptions shifted after the first Soviet spaceflight fatality and failure to reach the Moon, yet cosmonaut imagery was still effective propaganda, evolving through the USSR’s collapse in 1991 and seen today in Vladimir Putin’s government cooperation for a film on the 1985 rescue of the Salyut 7 space station. Looking closely at the process through which Russians continue to reexamine their past, Lewis argues that the cultural memory of spaceflight remains especially potent among other collective Soviet memories.

Militarizing Outer Space

Militarizing Outer Space PDF Author: Alexander C.T. Geppert
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 1349958514
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 454

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Book Description
Militarizing Outer Space explores the dystopian and destructive dimensions of the Space Age and challenges conventional narratives of a bipolar Cold War rivalry. Concentrating on weapons, warfare and vio​lence, this provocative volume examines real and imagined endeavors of arming the skies and conquering the heavens. The third and final volume in the groundbreaking ​European Astroculture trilogy, ​Militarizing Outer Space zooms in on the interplay between security, technopolitics and knowledge from the 1920s through the 1980s. Often hailed as the site of heavenly utopias and otherworldly salvation, outer space transformed from a promised sanctuary to a present threat, where the battles of the future were to be waged. Astroculture proved instrumental in fathoming forms and functions of warfare’s futures past, both on earth and in space. The allure of dominating outer space, the book shows, was neither limited to the early twenty-first century nor to current American space force rhetorics.

Russian Science Fiction Literature and Cinema

Russian Science Fiction Literature and Cinema PDF Author: Anindita Banerjee
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781618117229
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 520

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Book Description
The first collection of essays devoted to the rich tradition of Russian science fiction on the page and the screen from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. A resource for classroom instruction as well as research, it provides a comprehensive overview of science fiction's important role in Russian society, politics, technology, and culture.

Science Fiction Cinema and 1950s Britain

Science Fiction Cinema and 1950s Britain PDF Author: Matthew Jones
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1501352512
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 239

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Book Description
For the last sixty years discussion of 1950s science fiction cinema has been dominated by claims that the genre reflected US paranoia about Soviet brainwashing and the nuclear bomb. However, classic films, such as Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) and It Came from Outer Space (1953), and less familiar productions, such as It! The Terror from Beyond Space (1958), were regularly exported to countries across the world. The histories of their encounters with foreign audiences have not yet been told. Science Fiction Cinema and 1950s Britain begins this task by recounting the story of 1950s British cinema-goers and the aliens and monsters they watched on the silver screen. Drawing on extensive archival research, Matthew Jones makes an exciting and important intervention by locating American science fiction films alongside their domestic counterparts in their British contexts of release and reception. He offers a radical reassessment of the genre, demonstrating for the first time that in Britain, which was a significant market for and producer of science fiction, these films gave voice to different fears than they did in America. While Americans experienced an economic boom, low immigration and the conferring of statehood on Alaska and Hawaii, Britons worried about economic uncertainty, mass immigration and the dissolution of the Empire. Science Fiction Cinema and 1950s Britain uses these and other differences between the British and American experiences of the 1950s to tell a new history of the decade's science fiction cinema, exploring for the first time the ways in which the genre came to mean something unique to Britons.

Space-age Aesthetics

Space-age Aesthetics PDF Author: Stephen Petersen
Publisher: Penn State University Press
ISBN:
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
Explores an international network of artists, artist groups, and critics linked by their aesthetic and theoretical responses to science, science fiction, and new media. Focuses on the Italian Spatial Artist Lucio Fontana and French Painter of Space Yves Klein.

The Cold War in Science Fiction: Soviet and American Science Fiction Films in the 1950s

The Cold War in Science Fiction: Soviet and American Science Fiction Films in the 1950s PDF Author: Natalia Voinova
Publisher: Anchor Academic Publishing (aap_verlag)
ISBN: 3954895587
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 43

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Book Description
This study will compare the USSR and the United States according to their cinematic use of science fiction in the late 1950s and 1960s in order to coincide with the period of de-Stalinisation and thaw in the USSR, and late McCarthyism in the United States. The genre provides an opportunity to express the two powers' scientific stand-off through fiction, and serves as a vehicle for the dissemination of ideas and propaganda. Post-1956 marks the time when the period of de-Stalinisation officially began and science fiction saw a carefully crafted rebirth for it served as a tool that could reflect the socialist ideal and quasi-religious faith in science that was promoted by the party. Science fiction uniquely demands for an imaginative view of the future, and therefore, corresponds with the Marxist- Leninist future-oriented ideology. For this period, the themes for American science fiction are hyperbolised monsters and invasion, and reflect the fear of the otherness of the Soviet Union, and its threat on domestic ideals. These themes are reflected in movies as 'Angry Red Planet', and 'Them!'. On the other hand, Soviet science fiction movies focus on the heroic Soviet man who frequently receives calls for help from outer space, and overcomes great trials to save those not living in utopia. This storyline is represented in 'Towards a Dream', and 'The Sky is calling'. The author gives special attention to the Soviet movie 'The Sky is calling' and the subsequent redubbed American version 'Battle beyond the Sun'. Further, she addresses alterations or plot, and subtle propaganda messages in the Soviet movies 'Planet of Storms', and the Hollywood remake 'Journey to the Prehistoric Planet'.