Visions of Science and Technology, Part 2

Just as science and technology have changed the production, styles, and techniques of film, the medium itself has changed the perception of and response to science and technology. Early in the sound era, Arrowsmith (1931) and The Story of Louis Pasteur (1935) celebrated the conquest of disease by modern medicine, and Things to Come (1936) showed a gleaming technological utopia rising from the ruins of a world ravaged by war. Films released after 1945 continued to tell stories about the power of science and technology to change the world for the better—about robot servants in Forbidden Planet (1956), miracle drugs in Awakenings (1990), and communication with benevolent aliens in Contact (1997)—but they were increasingly outnumbered by more pessimistic visions. The transformations wrought by science and technology in postwar films reflected the anxieties of the age: nuclear holocaust in On The Beach (1959), environmental devastation in Silent Running (1970), machines run amuck in Terminator 2 (1991), and the erosion of privacy and freedom in Minority Report (2002).

In this issue of Film & History, the second in our special volume on "Visions of Science and Technology in Film," five articles explore how science and technology, along with the hands and minds that bring them into being, alter—and are altered by—our social, political, and moral worlds. Andrew Huebner, in "Lost in Space: Technology and Turbulence in Futuristic Cinema of the 1950s," looks beyond Cold War fears of nuclear weapons to consider the increasing role of technology in everyday life, asking whether the resulting changes can be reconciled with morality, humanity, and faith. Science-fiction films of the era, populated by unfathomable creatures, fantastic machines, and misguided scientists, dramatized audiences' struggles to reconcile post-war disruptions in the balance between nature, religion, and scientific advancement, as innovations transformed reality.

Jason Eberl, in "I, Clone: How Cloning Is (Mis)Portrayed in Contemporary Cinema," brings questions evoked by cinematic clones into dialogue with philosophical debates on the nature of identity and humanity. Using this framework to illustrate how contemporary films ask audiences to consider what it means to be "human," the article explores whether our moral and ethical frameworks are robust enough to keep pace with changes in our ability to create sentient life through increasingly sophisticated laboratory techniques.

In "Surréalisme Sous-L'Eau: Science and Surrealism in the Early Films of Jean Painlevé," Lauren Fretz describes how Painlevé re-examined our perception of the physical world. Combining a documentary format with Surrealist techniques, the French biologist-turned-filmmaker sought to create intricate studies of marine life that made apparent the secrets of nature, while infusing the everyday with the wonder of the unknown. Painlevé's lens removed the natural world from conventional contexts, asking audiences to reconsider both their received knowledge about nature and their understanding of their place in it.

J. P. Telotte, in "Science Fiction as 'True-Life Adventure': Disney and the Case of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea," examines the textual and promotional interrelationship of Disney Studio's motion-picture adaptation of Jules Verne's novel and the televised program "Operation Undersea," exploring how Disney's blending of forms and texts—the documentary and the fantastic, the cinematic and televisual—created hybrid narratives: tales of wonder that became wonders in and of themselves.

Finally, in "A Natural and Artificial Homeland: East German Science-Fiction Film Responds to Kubrick and Tarkovsky," Sonja Fritzsche looks at how two science-fiction films produced in the German Democratic Republic of the 1970s—Signals – A Space Adventure (1970) and Eolomea (1972)—asked, in a specifically socialist context, what it meant to be "human" in an age dominated by rapidly advancing technology. Both films feature the scientist as a mediator between the State's drive for a technological utopia and the new generation's longing to redefine the relationship between humankind, technology, and the natural world.

We hope you enjoy these five exceptional papers, as well as our film reviews and book reviews—the latter under the management of our new book-reviews editor, Paul Cohen, who replaces our retiring...