Abstract
By the beginning of the 1960s, the blind faith in technological and economic progress that had evolved since the end of World War II had begun to fade; a key role in this shift was played by the escalating confrontation between East and West—with its attendant risk of nuclear war—as well as by the first indices of environmental damage exacerbated by an ever-expanding consumer culture. By the end of the decade, youth protests in Western countries helped foster a general cultural shift in the climate of postindustrial societies, with rebellious young people embracing skeptical and sometimes pessimistic attitudes toward reigning ideas of ever-evolving technological and economic progress. At the same time, youth culture embraced utopian alternatives, even as the specters of nuclear war and ecological dystopia continued to loom. These utopian and dystopian visions are mirrored with startling clarity in the films of the era, above all in the science fiction film, a genre that reflected, in a striking fashion, ambiguous attitudes toward civilization in general, and the utopian possibilities of technology in particular.
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Notes
Vivian Sobchack, Screening Space. The American Science Fiction Film. (New York: Rutgers University Press, 1997), 145.
Kathrin Fahlenbrach, “Emotions in Sound. Audiovisual Metaphors in the Sound Design of Narrative Films.” Projections. Journal for Movies & Mind 2, no.2 (2008): 85–103;
ZZ Fahlenbrach, Audiovisuelle Metaphern. Zur Körper- und Affektästhetik in Film und Fernsehen (Marburg: Schüren-Verlag, 2010).
Ronald Inglehart, The Silent Revolution: Changing Values and Political Styles among Western Publics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977).
In contrast to the traditional Left, represented by Western worker movements and Marxist ideologies since the nineteenth century and the socialist countries, the New Left was characterized by its antiauthoritarian use of Marxist ideas. Influenced by the Situationist International and by antiauthoritarian philosophers such as Herbert Marcuse, the New Left disclaimed any form of authoritarian system in politics, society, and in private lifes. Cf. Martin Klimke, The Other Alliance. Student Protest in West Germany and the United States in the Global Sixties (Princeton, NJ/Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2010).
Guy Debord, La Société du Spectacle (Paris: Buchet/Chastel, 1967);
cf. Ingrid Gilcher-Holtey, “Guy Debord und die Situationistische Internationale.” In Kunst—Macht— Gewalt. Der ästhetische Ort der Aggressivität, ed., Rolf Grimminger (München: Wilhelm Fink, 2000), 87–104.;
Thomas Hecken, and Agata Grzenia, “Situationism.” In 1968 in Europe. A History of Protest and Activism 1956–1977, ed., Martin Klimke and Joachim Scharloth (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 23–33.
Marcuse, quoted in Douglas Kellner, “Introduction to the Second Edition,” in The One-Dimensional Man, ed. Herbert Marcuse, (London/New York: Routledge, 2002), xi–xxxix, xii.
Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer. Dialectic of Enlightment: Philosophical Fragments (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1947/2002), 95.
Cf. Todd Gitlin, The Whole World Is Watching: Mass Media and the Making and Unmaking of the New Left. (Berkely: University of California Press, 2003);
Kathrin Fahlenbrach, Protestinszenierungen: Visuelle Kommunikation und kollektive Identitäten in Protestbewegungen (Wiesbaden: Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2002);
Meike Vogel, Unruhe im Fernsehen: Protestbewegung und öffentlich-rechtliche Berichterstattung in den 1960er Jahren (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2010).
Brian Stableford, The Sociology of Science Fiction (Wilbraham: Borgo Press, 1987), 155.
A philosophical perspective on the idea of machines being “extensions of man” was formulated at roughly the same time by Marshall McLuhan. Although he recognized the relevant role of media technology for modern societies and for individuality, he also claimed that mass media technologies serve more and more as a substitution for our senses. As “extensions of man,” he argued, they paralyze our bodies and make us dependent on them as artificial protheses that guide our communication as well as our perception and cognition. Cf. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1965).
Cf. Peter Garner, “The Space Age: Science Fact and Science Fiction.” In The Sixties Design (Köln/London: Taschen, 1996), 98: “Her space is a fantasy world of sensual, tactile surfaces, an organic dream bubble of plastics, fur and techno-sensual stimulation.”
Chris Darke, Alphaville (London: I.B. Tauris, 2005), 25.
Peter Stockwell, The Poetics of Science Fiction (Harlow: Longman, 2000), 169.
For science fiction films, Patrick Parrinder, “Revisiting Suvin’s Poetics of SF,” in Learning from Other Worlds: Estrangement, Cognition and the Politics of Science Fiction and Utopia, ed. Patrick Parrinder (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), 36–51,
discusses the relevance of poetic or “novel metaphors” in the sense of Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor: Multi-Disciplinary Studies of Meaning in Language (London: Routledge, 1978). Contrarily I will concentrate on conventionalized metaphors, which Ricoeur calls “dead metaphors,” being all the more effective in communicating embodied knowledge and thought on future worlds.
George Lakoff, Woman, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1987).
Mark Johnson, The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).
Sound designer Tomlinson Holeman, for example, advises students in his handbook of sound design in film and television to explicitly make use of metaphoric images that are anchored in our minds. Cf. Tomlinson Holeman, Sound for Film and Television. 2nd ed. (Boston: K. G. Saur, 2002).
As this short excursus might have shown, the symbolic and the cognitive aspects of metaphors in films are closely related. Consequently, the cognitive approach, presented here, does not deny semiotic and literary studies that have been made on metaphors in literature and in film (cf. Christian Metz, Le Signifiant Imaginaire: Psychoanalyse et Cinéma. (Paris: Union Générale d’Editions, 1977);
Trevor Whittock, Metaphor and Film (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
Contrarily, it might help to analyze more closely the embodied gestalts of symbolic metaphors being analyzed in semiotic and literary discourses. Yet, in contrast to semiotic approaches that mostly concentrate on “original” and “new” metaphors in art house films and in the avantgarde, the focus of this approach lies on “conventional” and, speaking with Ricoeur, “dead metaphors” that are part of commonsense imagery (Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor: Multi-Disciplinary Studies of Meaning in Language (London: Routledge, 1978)).
cf. Zoltán Kövecses, Metaphor and Emotion: Language, Culture, and Body in Human Feeling (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 26.
This has also been observed by Rasmussen: “(…) Pursuing the same general topic of human creativity from the first technological innovation to the sophisticated endeavours of the foreseeable future, Kubrick throws his dramatic aperture wide open. Beauty and irony mix on more or less even terms.” Randy Rasmussen, Stanley Kubrick. Seven Films Analysed (North Carolina: McFarland, 2001), 53.
Volker Fischer, “Designing the Future: Zur pragmatischen Prognostik in 2001: A Space Odyssee,” in Stanley Kubrick, ed. Deutsches Filmmuseum (Frankfurt: Deutsches Filmmuseum, 2004), 111.
Bernard Beck, “The Overdeveloped Society. THX 1138,” in Film in Society, ed. Arthur Asa Berger (New Brunswick: Transaction Books, 1980), 65.
Films Cited
2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, USA 1968)
Barbarella (Roger Vadim, F/I 1968)
Alphaville. Une Étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution (Jean-Luc Godard, F 1965)
THX 1138 (George Lukas, USA 1971)
Fahrenheit 451 (Francois Truffaut, UK 1966)
Playtime (Jacques Tati, F 1967)
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© 2014 Timothy Scott Brown and Andrew Lison
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Fahlenbrach, K. (2014). Utopia and Dystopia in Science Fiction Films around 1968. In: Brown, T.S., Lison, A. (eds) The Global Sixties in Sound and Vision. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137375230_6
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