ABSTRACT
While the history of sf cinema practically coincides with that of the cinema itself, most commentary on the genre begins with its spectacular explosion of popularity in the 1950s. It then tracks through the development of specific themes and concerns, particularly in the last decades of the twentieth century, that have a particularly cinematic resonance – concerns with the reproducible being (robots, androids), with the construction of reality (virtual worlds, virtual selves), with spectacular threats to our fragile world (an environment on the brink). Susan Sontag staked out this critical perspective, suggesting that cinematic sf was born out of those films of alien invasion and threatened apocalypse that dominated the 1950s and early 1960s, films that fashioned, as their narrative core, elaborate visions of disaster, that capitalized on the visual potential of such spectacles, and that claimed such elements as a kind of generic essence. Indeed, Sontag claimed that sf films “are not about science” but “disaster” (Sontag 1966: 213). However, sf’s earlier history, leading up to that apocalyptic upwelling, attests that it has been very much about science, along with the technology it produces and the reason that drives both – which sometimes, through humanity’s missteps, generate the ruinous consequences she observes. In sketching a history of sf film, then, we need to account for those elements that emphasize our potential for conception, construction, and projection, as well as those that confront us with the cautionary, even frightening, images that flow from this same spring. In fact, the flexibility to speak both positively and negatively about science and technology is one of the genre’s most telling characteristics.
