Cinema

Abstract

The birth of film as an art form at the end of the late nineteenth century heralded a new and captivating way for creative artists to imagine utopian and dystopian spaces, characters and scenarios. While many films had literary sources, the medium proved itself well-suited to conveying adapted and original utopian and dystopian projections to a global audience experiencing immense and often alarming changes and challenges. This chapter explores how filmmakers since Georges Méliès have created a corpus of utopian and dystopian movies that thrill and warn, captivate and caution. It considers the relative dearth of utopian films in contrast to the flood of dystopian examples, arguing that film has played a crucial role in critically evaluating modern society and in suggesting creative.