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  • Red Alert: Marxist Approaches to Science Fiction Cinema eds. by Ewa Mazierska and Alfredo Suppia
  • Carl Freedman (bio)
Ewa Mazierska and Alfredo Suppia, eds, Red Alert: Marxist Approaches to Science Fiction Cinema. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 2016. 263 + vi pp. US$34.99 (pbk).

'This book', write Ewa Mazierska and Alfredo Suppia in the editorial introduction to their valuable anthology, 'attempts to bring together three entities: Marxist philosophy, science fiction (SF), and cinema' (1). There is nothing random about this collocation. Marxism and sf enjoy an especially close affinity. Not only are both motivated by attempts to imagine a world radically different from the mundane reality around us, but much – probably the majority – of the best sf criticism is Marxist in orientation, and it is no accident that many of the most important sf authors at work today, such as Ken MacLeod, China Miéville and Kim Stanley Robinson, are themselves Marxists. The connection between Marxism and cinema is not quite so close, but Marxists have long been actively interested in filmmaking and film criticism, and many of the founding theorists of film studies, like Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer, have written from an overtly Marxist standpoint. As to sf and film, sf cinema is very nearly as old as cinema itself – Georges Méliès's A Trip to the Moon (France 1902) is generally reckoned to be the first work in the genre – and, at least since the 1970s, has been one of the major modes of filmmaking in Hollywood and beyond.

The three terms announced in the subtitle to this volume thus describe a large conceptual and discursive terrain; it is no surprise to find the contributors tackling a considerable diversity of topics. Most readers of this volume will probably find some of the films analysed to be quite familiar – The Matrix (Wachowski siblings US 1999) and District 9 (Blomkamp South Africa/US/New Zealand/Canada 2009) are examples – but will likely be introduced to others for the first time. Hollywood, still the real homeland of cinema in general and of sf cinema in particular, is not neglected, but the contributors range quite widely in geographic scope, tackling films from Africa, Asia, Latin America and Europe as well. One commonality that does somewhat bind the volume together is that most of the films considered in detail are either comparatively recent or largely neglected in the critical literature. Established classics of sf cinema, from Metropolis (Lang Germany 1927) to Alphaville (Godard France 1965) to Blade Runner (Scott US/UK/Hong Kong 1982), are mentioned en passant, but the volume devotes most of its attention to movies that have not (yet) attained that status. [End Page 413]

As is inevitably the case with any anthology by various hands, Red Alert is somewhat uneven in quality. But the general level of the contributions is high, and, indeed, none of the essays fails to be intelligent, engaging and useful. I will discuss in a little detail a few of the chapters that have struck me as particularly interesting.

Scanning the volume's table of contents, one might be most surprised by the title of Mark Bould's essay, 'Paying Freedom Dues: Marxism, Black Radicalism, and Blaxploitation Science Fiction'; sf and the cycle of Blaxploitation films are rarely associated with one another. But Bould's aim is considerably larger than simply to establish that sf – like crime cinema, horror, fantasy and the Western – was indeed one of the genres in which the Blaxploitation filmmakers worked. To begin with, he traces the historic relationship between Marxism and radical African-American politics. Though the relationship has not always been untroubled – especially insofar as some currents in American Marxism have tended to regard racial oppression as a mere epiphenomenon of capitalist property relations – it has long been a close and productive one. Interestingly, Bould shows that some of the most important figures at the intersection of Marxism and black radicalism – such as W.E.B. DuBois, Paul Robeson and Richard Wright – sometimes employ motifs from sf in order to describe the agony of race in America. Bould then situates Blaxploitation within African-American culture. Though these films were widely attacked, notably by representatives...

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