Femmes Futures: one hundred years of female representation in sf cinema

State of the art

In It Came From Outer Space (Arnold US 1953), Kathleen Hughes appears as Jane in a single scene, delivering just a few lines; however, she features in most of the film's publicity material — including posters (Wright 104), the cover of the 2003 Universal Pictures DVD release and the studio shot of her in a tight sweater, by which the film is most often recognised. She even appears, somewhat incongruously, in a swimsuit in the film's closing credits. The fact that she features at all remains baffling, until one remembers that the film was originally released in 3-D, a fact highlighted by a number of the film's taglines, including 'Fantastic sights leap at you!' It then becomes clear that the beautiful, blonde, perky-breasted Hughes was intended to demonstrate and exploit this technology.

The axiom that a film says as much about the time of its production as about the time of its setting has particular relevance for sf, and nowhere is the genre's function as a barometer for contemporary attitudes better reflected than in the changing roles for women and representations of the female. Comparisons made between sf projects across the years add weight to this observation. When Yvette Mimieux appeared in The Time Machine (Pal US 1960), the most prominent female role was her innocent Eloi slave, Weena. By the time of The Black Hole (Nelson US 1979), space had been made for Mimieux as female astronaut and scientist, Dr Kate McCrae. Weena herself has disappeared from the remake of The Time Machine (Wells US 2002), replaced by the more feisty, mixed-race Mara (Samantha Mumba). In Lost in Space (Hopkins US 1998), Maureen Robinson (Mimi Rogers), the wife and mother of the original television series (US 1965-8), has acquired a PhD; Nurse Chapel (Majel Barrett) from the Star Trek television series (US 1966-9) has been promoted to MD by Star Trek: The Motion Picture (Wise US 1979); and secretary Helen Benson (Patricia Neal) in The Day The Earth Stood Still (Wise US 1951) is transformed into Princeton professor Helen Benson (Jennifer Connelly) in The Day the Earth Stood Still (Derrickson US/Canada 2008).

While female roles in sf cinema have developed considerably since the 1950s, the last decade or so has seen a fall in the number of major roles for women. They have remained visible — even prominent — but their importance to individual narratives has reverted to an earlier state. With the success of Avatar (Cameron US/UK 2009), 3-D is back on sf 's agenda, and with characters such as Neytiri (Zoe Saldana) in mind, this essay aims to establish the extent to which the genre today relies on representations of the female gleaned from a century of sf cinema.

Mothers and queens: traditional imperatives

Given sf 's allegorical potential, it is unsurprising that its earliest narrative films draw on pre-cinematic metaphoric uses of women. For example, the Queen of the Polar Regions and the Fairy of the Oceans in, respectively, The Adventurous Voyage of 'The Arctic' (Booth UK 1903) and Deux Cent Milles Lieues sous les mers (Under the Seas; Méliès France 1907) make overt use of Mother Nature figures. Such characters rarely appear after the 1910s, although their influence can be discerned in later parthenogenetic aliens and occasional invocations of a Gaia-esque notion of a Mother Earth. The worldly queen, in contrast, survives to the present day. Evoking images of Cleopatra, especially as re-cast in H. Rider Haggard's She: A History of Adventure (1886-7), and characters from fairy tales and fantasy, the queen often doubles as a glamorous temptress, articulated in various ways with the eponymous Queen of Mars played by Yuliya Solntseva in Aelita (Protazanov USSR 1924), Talleah (Zsa Zsa Gabor) in Queen of Outer Space (Bernds US 1958), the Great Tyrant (Anita Pallenberg) in Barbarella (Vadim France/Italy 1967) and Queen Amidala (Natalie Portman) in Star Wars: Episode I — The Phantom Menace (Lucas US 1999).

Much of the sf inspired by the commercial success of Star Wars...