Sleeping/waking: Politicizing the sublime in science fiction film special effects
- Submitting institution
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Canterbury Christ Church University
- Unit of assessment
- 34 - Communication, Cultural and Media Studies, Library and Information Management
- Output identifier
- U34.030
- Type
- C - Chapter in book
- DOI
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- Book title
- Endangering Science Fiction Film
- Publisher
- Routledge
- ISBN
- 9781138792630
- Open access status
- Out of scope for open access requirements
- Month of publication
- -
- Year of publication
- 2015
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- Yes
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
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-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- This chapter was invited as a contribution to the edited collection Endangering Science Fiction Film which argues that science fiction's cinematic power rests in its ability to imagine ‘Other’ worlds that challenge and disturb the lived conditions of the ‘real’ world. Central to science fiction’s mise en scène is the special effect, which can be used as a means of presenting imagined and even impossible locations and events. Butler’s textual analysis of seven films, largely made within a Hollywood context, builds upon Darko Suvin’s definition of sf as the literature of cognitive estrangement, a process of thinking rationally about the real and imagined world of simultaneous being aware of the difference of the imagined world from the real one and a revised way of viewing the real world having seem the imagined one, itself indebted to Brecht’s manifesto for theatre. This experience, especially as mediated by the special effect, can be part of the mechanisms of the sublime. Scott Bukatman, in a key article about Douglas Trumbull’s work on films released between 1968 and 1983, had already discussed the sublime within the filmic mise en scène and Butler’s chapter expands this into an examination of the rhetorical, natural and technological sublime in more recent films. Whilst on some levels, the films depict normative and even conservative ideologies, these can be disrupted by the irruption of the sublime which may wake up from their estranged/alienated characters (in a Marxist sense). The viewers, engaged in the processes of cognitive estrangement and identifying with these characters, may begin to perceive their own environment and their own exploitation in a new way, which offers a dangerous challenge to the status quo. However, the viewer might also be lulled into another kind of false consciousness, seduced by the beauty of the imagery.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -
