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Author: Natalia Voinova
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
ISBN: 3656321639
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 43
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Book Description
Bachelor Thesis from the year 2012 in the subject Art - History of Art, grade: 2.1, , language: English, abstract: Science fiction is always political as it has the power to stage contemporary problems through the lens of impossible events, it imagines theoretical futures out of present issues. The essay will compare the use of science fiction in cinema in the USSR and the United States of the late 1950s and 1960s 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 scientific stand-off between the two powers through fiction, it is also a vehicle for dissemination of ideas and propaganda. Post-1956, when the period of de-Stalinisation officially began, science fiction saw a carefully crafted rebirth as a tool to reflect the socialist ideal and quasi-religious faith in science promoted by the Party. Science fiction uniquely demands for an imaginative view of the future, which corresponds with the Marxist- Leninist future-oriented ideology. The fear of external influence from the enemy for both countries results in heavily ideological cinema, especially in the sci-fi genre as an imagined reflection of contemporary issues onto a fictional future. The themes for American science fiction of this period are hyperbolised monsters and invasion, which reflect the fear of the otherness of the Soviet Union and its threat on domestic ideals. Soviet science fiction films 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.
Author: Natalia Voinova
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
ISBN: 3656321639
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 43
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Book Description
Bachelor Thesis from the year 2012 in the subject Art - History of Art, grade: 2.1, , language: English, abstract: Science fiction is always political as it has the power to stage contemporary problems through the lens of impossible events, it imagines theoretical futures out of present issues. The essay will compare the use of science fiction in cinema in the USSR and the United States of the late 1950s and 1960s 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 scientific stand-off between the two powers through fiction, it is also a vehicle for dissemination of ideas and propaganda. Post-1956, when the period of de-Stalinisation officially began, science fiction saw a carefully crafted rebirth as a tool to reflect the socialist ideal and quasi-religious faith in science promoted by the Party. Science fiction uniquely demands for an imaginative view of the future, which corresponds with the Marxist- Leninist future-oriented ideology. The fear of external influence from the enemy for both countries results in heavily ideological cinema, especially in the sci-fi genre as an imagined reflection of contemporary issues onto a fictional future. The themes for American science fiction of this period are hyperbolised monsters and invasion, which reflect the fear of the otherness of the Soviet Union and its threat on domestic ideals. Soviet science fiction films 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.
Author: Natalia Voinova
Publisher: Anchor Academic Publishing (aap_verlag)
ISBN: 3954895587
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 42
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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'.
Author: David Seed
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135953821
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 223
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Book Description
American Science Fiction--in both literature and film--has played a key role in the portrayal of the fears inherent in the Cold War. The end of this era heralds the need for a reassessment of the literary output of the forty-year period since 1945. Working through a series of key texts, American Science Fiction and the Cold War investigates the political inflections put on American narratives in the post-war decades by Cold War cultural circumstances. Nuclear holocaust, Russian invasion, and the perceived rise of totalitarianism in American society are key elements in the author's exploration of science fiction narratives that include Fahrenheit 451, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and Dr. Strangelove.
Author: Kirsten Moana Thompson
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 079148033X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 210
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Book Description
In Apocalyptic Dread, Kirsten Moana Thompson examines how fears and anxieties about the future are reflected in recent American cinema. Through close readings of such films as Cape Fear, Candyman, Dolores Claiborne, Se7en, Signs, and War of the Worlds, Thompson argues that a longstanding American apocalyptic tradition permeates our popular culture, spreading from science-fiction and disaster films into horror, crime, and melodrama. Drawing upon Kierkegaard's notion of dread—that is, a fundamental anxiety and ambivalence about existential choice and the future—Thompson suggests that the apocalyptic dread revealed in these films, and its guiding tropes of violence, retribution, and renewal, also reveal deep-seated anxieties about historical fragmentation and change, anxieties that are in turn displaced onto each film's particular "monster," whether human, demonic, or eschatological.
Author: Mark Bould
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040042953
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 537
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Book Description
The New Routledge Companion to Science Fiction provides an overview of the study of science fiction across multiple academic fields. It offers a new conceptualisation of the field today, marking the significant changes that have taken place in sf studies over the past 15 years. Building on the pioneering research in the first edition, the collection reorganises historical coverage of the genre to emphasise new geographical areas of cultural production and the growing importance of media beyond print. It also updates and expands the range of frameworks that are relevant to the study of science fiction. The periodisation has been reframed to include new chapters focusing on science fiction produced outside the Anglophone context, including South Asian, Latin American, Chinese and African diasporic science fiction. The contributors use both well- established critical and theoretical approaches and embrace a range of new ones, including biopolitics, climate crisis, critical ethnic studies, disability studies, energy humanities, game studies, medical humanities, new materialisms and sonic studies. This book is an invaluable resource for students and established scholars seeking to understand the vast range of engagements with science fiction in scholarship today.
Author: Cyril Buffet
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317358791
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 152
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Book Description
The film industry was an important propaganda element during the Cold War. As with other conflicts, the Cold War was fought not just with weapons, but with words and images. Throughout the conflict, cinema was a reflection of the societies, the ideologies, and the political climates in which the films were produced. On both sides, great stars, major companies, famous scriptwriters, and filmmakers were enlisted to help the propaganda effort. It was not only propaganda that was created by the cinema of the Cold War – it also articulated criticism, and the movie industries were centres of the fabrication of modern myths. The cinema was undoubtedly a place of Cold War confrontation and rivalry, and yet there were aesthetic, technical, narrative exchanges between West and East. All genres of film contributed to the Cold War: thrillers, westerns, comedies, musicals, espionage films, documentaries, cartoons, science fiction, historical dramas, war films, and many more. These films shaped popular culture and national identities, creating vivid characters like James Bond, Alec Leamas, Harry Palmer, and Rambo. While the United States and the Soviet Union were the two main protagonists in this on-screen duel, other countries, such as Britain, Germany, Poland, Italy, and Czechoslovakia, also played crucially important parts, and their prominent cinematographic contributions to the Cold War are all covered in this volume. This book was originally published as a special issue of Cold War History.
Author: Dennis R. Cutchins
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 1476649278
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 312
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Book Description
Science fiction cinema, once relegated to the undervalued "B" movie slot, has become one of the dominant film genres of the 21st century, with Hollywood alone producing more than 400 science fiction films annually. Many of these owe a great deal of their success to the films of one defining decade: the 1950s. Essays in this book explore how classic '50s science fiction films have been recycled, repurposed, and reused in the decades since their release. Tropes from Don Siegel's Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), for instance, have found surprising new life in Netflix's wildly popular Stranger Things. Interstellar (2014) and Arrival (2016) have clear, though indirect roots in the iconic 1950s science fictions films Rocketship X-M (1950) and The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), and The Shape of Water (2017) openly recalls and reworks the major premises of The Creature From the Black Lagoon (1954). Essays also cover 1950's sci-fi influences on video game franchises like Fallout, Bioshock and Wolfenstein.
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.
Author: Sanja Bahun
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317818717
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 258
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Book Description
This book presents a comprehensive re-examination of the cinemas of the Soviet Union and Central and Eastern Europe during the communist era. It argues that, since the end of communism in these countries, film scholars are able to view these cinemas in a different way, no longer bound by an outlook relying on binary Cold War terms. With the opening of archives in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, much more is known about these states and societies; at the same time, the field has been reinvigorated by its opening up to more contemporary concepts, themes and approaches in film studies and adjacent disciplines. Taking stock of these developments, this book presents a rich, varied tapestry, relating specific films to specific national and transnational circumstances, rather than viewing them as a single, monolithic "Cold War Communist" cinema.
Author: J. G. Ballard
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262048329
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 420
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Book Description
J. G. Ballard’s collected nonfiction from 1962 to 2007, mapping the cultural obsessions, experiences, and insights of one of the most original minds of his generation. J. G. Ballard was a colossal figure in English literature and an imaginative force of the twentieth century. Alongside seminal novels—from the notorious Crash (1973) to the semi-autobiographical Empire of the Sun (1984)—Ballard was a sought-after reviewer and commentator, publishing journalism, memoir, and cultural criticism in a variety of forms. The Selected Nonfiction of J. G. Ballard collects the most significant short nonfiction of Ballard’s fifty-year career, extending the range of the only previous collection of his nonfiction, A User’s Guide to the Millennium (1996), which selected essays and reviews published between 1962 and 1995. A decade on from Ballard’s death in 2009, a new generation of readers needs a new collection. In the period following A User’s Guide, Ballard’s writing addressed 9/11, British politics from New Labour onward, and what he termed “the rise of soft fascism”—a diagnosis that maintains its relevance amid a shift toward right populism in European and US politics. Beautifully edited by Ballard scholar and novelist Mark Blacklock, this volume includes Ballard’s editorials and manifestos; commentaries on his own work; commentaries on the work of others; reviews; and more. Above all, it makes the case for the currency of Ballard’s work at a contemporary juncture at which so many of his diagnoses concerning the media and politics have become apparent.
