Selected Images
Selected Resources
Beyond Tomorrow: German Science Fiction and Utopian Thought in the 20th and 21st Centuries by 
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ISBN: 9781787449879Date: 2020-09-15This book explores German SF's responses to the question how humanity can match technological advances with social, ethical, and moral progress. It surveys German utopian thought and the German SF tradition-both literary andcinematic-providing close readings of selected works that paradoxically reflect boundless optimism for the possibility of change and increasing pessimism in its likelihood. English translations are provided throughout. Building onits rich tradition but now confidently entering the mainstream, German SF attempts Zukunftsbewältigung: coping with an uncertain but also unwritten future.
Blade Runner 2049: A Philosophical Exploration by - This link opens in a new window
ISBN: 9781138625303Date: 2019-10-01Widely acclaimed upon its release as a future classic, Denis Villeneuve's Blade Runner 2049 is visually stunning, philosophically profound, and a provocative extension of the story in Ridley Scott's Blade Runner. Containing specially commissioned chapters by a roster of international contributors, this fascinating collection explores philosophical questions that abound in Blade Runner 2049. a foreword by Denis Villeneuve, Blade Runner 2049: A Philosophical Exploration is essential reading for anyone interested in philosophy, film studies, philosophy of mind, psychology, gender studies, and conceptual issues in cognitive science and artificial intelligence.
The Blade Runner Experience by ISBN: 9781904764311Date: 2006-02-21Since its release in 1982, Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, based on Philip K. Dick's novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, has remained a cult classic through its depiction of a futuristic Los Angeles; its complex, enigmatic plot; and its underlying questions about the nature of human identity. The Blade Runner Experience: The Legacy of a Science Fiction Classic examines the film in a broad context, examining its relationship to the original novel, the PC game, the series of sequels, and the many films influenced by its style and themes. It investigates Blade Runner online fandom and asks how the film's future city compares to the present-day Los Angeles, and it revisits the film to pose surprising new questions about its characters and their world.
Crime and the Imaginary of Disaster: Post-Apocalyptic Fictions and the Crisis of Social Order by ISBN: 9781137509062Date: 2015-05-05This study explores the 'imaginary of disaster' that appears in popular fictions about the apocalyptic breakdown of society. Focusing on representations of crime, law, violence, vengeance and justice, it argues that an exploration post-apocalyptic story-telling offer us valuable insights into social anxieties.
The Digital Dystopias of Black Mirror and Electric Dreams by ISBN: 9781476678689Date: 2020-01-07This critical examination of two dystopian television series--Black Mirror and Electric Dreams--focuses on pop culture depictions of technology and its impact on human existence.
Dystopia and Dispossession in the Hollywood Science Fiction Film, 1979-2017 by ISBN: 9781802077612Date: 2023-04-01Offering a survey of Hollywood science fiction cinema from 1979 to 2017 (from Ridley Scott's Alien to Denis Villeneuve's Blade Runner 2049), Dystopia and Dispossession in the Hollywood Science Fiction Film argues that the trajectory of Hollywood's dystopianism in that period is inextricable from the phenomenon of the 'new enclosures', the new dispossessions and privatisations sweeping across the United States since the 1970s.
Dystopian States of America: Apocalyptic Visions and Warnings in Literature and Film by ISBN: 1440873380Date: 2022-09-13Dystopian States of America is a crucial resource that studies the impact of dystopian works on American society--including ways in which they reflect our deep and persistent fears about environmental calamities, authoritarian governments, invasive technologies, and human weakness.
Fritz Lang's Metropolis: Cinematic Visions of Technology and Fear by ISBN: 9781571131225Date: 2001-09-15The volume provides a broad range of materials and resources for the study of Fritz Lang's classic 1927 film Metropolis, including both well-known, previously-published critical essays and contributions appearing for the first time here.
Fritz Lang's Metropolis and Its Influence on the American Science Fiction Film Blade Runner, Terminator I + II by ISBN: 9783899241341Date: 2005
The Global Sixties in Sound and Vision by ISBN: 9781137375223Date: 2014-05-01Despite the explosion of interest in the "global 1968," the arts in this period - both popular and avant-garde forms - have too often been neglected. This interdisciplinary volume brings together scholars in history, cultural studies, musicology and other areas to explore the symbiosis of the sonic and the visual in the counterculture of the 1960s. Book chapter titled "Utopia and Dystopia in Science Fiction Films around 1968."
Imperfect Worlds and Dystopian Narratives in Contemporary Cinema by ISBN: 9783631614891Date: 2011-07-05This is a collection of studies on filmic dystopias. Employing a variety of theoretical perspectives (from cultural semiotics to post-structuralist approach), the authors analyse films from different cultural, linguistic and political contexts, demonstrating the interplay between the formulaic dystopian facade and narratological inventiveness, heightened intertextuality, and generic hybridity.
The Last Midnight: Essays on Apocalyptic Narratives in Millennial Media by ISBN: 9781476663234Date: 2016-10-12This collection of new essays explores apocalyptic themes in a variety of post-millennial media, including film, television, video games, webisodes and smartphone apps.
Planet of the Apes As American Myth: Race and Politics in the Films and Television Series by ISBN: 9780786426638Date: 2006-03-31How do political conflicts shape popular culture? This book explores that question by analyzing how the Planet of the Apes films functioned both as entertaining adventures and as apocalyptic political commentary.
Reading "Black Mirror": Insights into Technology and the Post-Media Condition by - This link opens in a new window
ISBN: 9783839452325Date: 2021-01-20Very few contemporary television programs provoke spirited responses quite like the dystopian series Black Mirror. This provocative program, infamous for its myriad apocalyptic portrayals of humankind's relationship with an array of electronic and digital technologies, has proven quite adept at offering insightful commentary on a number of issues contemporary society is facing. This timely collection draws on innovative and interdisciplinary theoretical frameworks to provide unique perspectives about how confrontations with such issues should be considered and understood through the contemporary post-media condition that drives technology use.
Robo Sacer: Necroliberalism and Cyborg Resistance in Mexican and Chicanx Dystopias by - This link opens in a new window
ISBN: 9780826505378Date: 2023-05-15Robo Sacer engages the digital humanities, critical race theory, border studies, biopolitical theory, and necropolitical theory to interrogate how technology has been used to oppress people of Mexican descent--both within Mexico and in the United States--since the advent of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994. As the book argues, robo-sacer identity emerges as transnational flows of bodies, capital, and technology become an institutionalized state of exception that relegates people from marginalized communities to the periphery. And yet the same technology can be utilized by the oppressed in the service of resistance. The texts studied here represent speculative stories about this technological empowerment. These texts theorize different means of techno-resistance to key realities that have emerged within Mexican and Chicano/a/x communities under the rise and reign of neoliberalism.
Science Fiction, Imperialism and the Third World: Essays on Postcolonial Literature and Film by ISBN: 9780786447893Date: 2010-09-07Though science fiction is often thought of as a Western phenomenon, the genre has long had a foothold in countries as diverse as India and Mexico. These fourteen critical essays examine both the role of science fiction in the third world and the role of the third world in science fiction. Topics covered include science fiction in Bengal, the genre's portrayal of Native Americans, Mexican cyberpunk fiction, and the undercurrents of colonialism and Empire in traditional science fiction. The intersections of science fiction theory and postcolonial theory are explored, as well as science fiction's contesting of imperialism and how the third world uses the genre to recreate itself.
Science Fiction Theatre by ISBN: 0814350291Date: 2024-01-30In the wake of the juvenile space operas of the early 1950s, a groundbreaking series debuted and paved the way for one of viewers' favorite genres today: adult-oriented science fiction. Science Fiction Theatre aired with a fresh anthology-style narrative from the vision of veteran producer Ivan Tors and with compelling narration by Truman Bradley. Created by industry-leading syndicator Ziv Television Programs, the show pioneered a scientifically based approach to aliens, telepathy, and the mysteries of the universe that provided a model for Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone (1959-64) and a myriad of acclaimed programs that followed.
- Addressing the Future with Data Visualization in Science Fiction Films: Dystopia or Utopia
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- Darker Cities: Urban Dystopia and Science Fiction Cinema
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- Dystopia fatigue doesn’t cut it, or, Blade Runner 2049’s utopian longings
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- Dystopia in the Science Fiction Film: Blade Runner and Adorno's Critique of Modern Society
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- From stressed utopias to pervasive anxiety: Post-catastrophic dystopia in 1970s West German television
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- Health Policy in Dystopia
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- Indigenous science (fiction) for the Anthropocene: Ancestral dystopias and fantasies of climate change crises
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- Is It Progress Or Dystopia? Attitudes Toward Genetic Engineering In Contemporary Film
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- Race in the Blade Runner cycle and demographic dystopia
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- Retro dystopia in Turkish cinema: A mouthless girl in the shadows speaks through the antenna
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- Semiotic representations of neoliberal dystopia in Black Mirror
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- Urban Dystopia on Screen: The City, Architecture and Power in the Contemporary Science Fiction Film
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- Utopia in dystopia: Cloud Atlas
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- ‘How can it not know what it is?’: Blade Runner as an ambiguous dystopia
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- The aesthetics of enclosure : dystopia and dispossession in the 1980s hollywood science-fiction film
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- Cities of Dreams and Despair: Utopia and Dystopia in Contemporary Brazilian Film and Literature
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- Dystopia in Contemporary Post-Apocalyptic Films
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- The Female Nature: Representations of Motherhood and Nature in Dystopian Films
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- Film as a Mirror of Evolving Consciousness: The Politics of Representation, the Power of Social Media, and Shifting Landscapes
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- Ideology and dystopia: political discourse in contemporary fiction cinema
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- Queer Dystopias in Latin America
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- Reproducing Patriarchy: Dystopian (In)fertility Onscreen Hinders
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- The present is the form of all life: A textual analysis of Alphaville and THX 1138
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Selected Films on Kanopy
Metropolis (dir. Fritz Lang, 1927)
"METROPOLIS takes place in 2026, when the populace is divided between workers who must live in the dark underground and the rich who enjoy a futuristic city of splendor. The tense balance of these two societies is realized through images that are among the most famous of the 20th century. "
UCLA students, staff, and faculty access through Kanopy. Log into the campus VPN or proxy server to view video.
Alphaville (dir. Jean-Luc Godard, 1965)
"In ALPHAVILLE, Jean-Luc Godard fuses a hardboiled detective story with science fiction. Lemmy Caution (Eddie Constantine), a hero Godard borrowed from a series of French adventure films, comes to ALPHAVILLE, the capital of a totalitarian state, in order to destroy its leader, an almost-human computer called Alpha 60.
While on his mission, Lemmy meets and falls in love with Natacha (Anna Karina), the daughter of the scientist who designed Alpha 60. Their love becomes the most profound challenge to the computer's control. Void of any flashy special effects, ALPHAVILLE uses 1960s Paris to depict the city of the future."
UCLA students, staff, and faculty access through Kanopy. Log into the campus VPN or proxy server to view video.
A Time of Roses (dir. Risto Jarva, 1969)
"Set in a dystopian world of gleaming white towers, Sony video monitors and inflatable furniture, where the beautiful inhabitants all dress as Edie Sedgwick-like pixie sprites or medieval page boys out of Logan's Run, the film follows a historian of late 20th century culture (played by Arto Tuominen) researching the mysterious death many years earlier of a free-spirited erotic model."
UCLA students, staff, and faculty access through Kanopy. Log into the campus VPN or proxy server to view video.
Stalker (dir. Andrei Tarkovsky, 1979)
"Andrei Tarkovsky’s final Soviet feature is a metaphysical journey through an enigmatic postapocalyptic landscape, and a rarefied cinematic experience like no other. A hired guide—the Stalker—leads a writer and a professor into the heart of the Zone, the restricted site of a long-ago disaster, where the three men eventually zero in on the Room, a place rumored to fulfill one’s most deeply held desires.
Adapting a science-fiction novel by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, Tarkovsky created an immersive world with a wealth of material detail and a sense of organic atmosphere. A religious allegory, a reflection of contemporaneous political anxieties, a meditation on film itself—STALKER envelops the viewer by opening up a multitude of possible meanings."
UCLA students, staff, and faculty access through Kanopy. Log into the campus VPN or proxy server to view video.
Kamikaze '89 (dir. Wolf Gremm, 1982)
"In his final acting role, legendary auteur Rainer Werner Fassbinder (clad in an iconic leopard skin suit) stars as hardboiled detective Jansen. In a neon-drenched futuristic dystopia ruled by a multimedia conglomerate called The Combine, Jansen is sent on a labyrinthine investigation when their headquarters is threatened with mass destruction by a phantom bomber."
UCLA students, staff, and faculty access through Kanopy. Log into the campus VPN or proxy server to view video.
The Lobster (dir. Yorgos Lanthimos, 2015)
"A darkly comic fable from Yorgos Lanthimos (Killing of a Sacred Deer, The Favourite), this acclaimed film centers on recently-divorced David (Colin Farrell) as he searches for a new love within 45 days—at which point, if he’s still single, he will be turned into a lobster."
UCLA students, staff, and faculty access through Kanopy. Log into the campus VPN or proxy server to view video.