A Distant Technology: Science Fiction Film and the Machine Age

Telotte, J. P.

ISBN 10: 0819563463 / ISBN 13: 9780819563460

Published by Wesleyan University Press, 1999

About this Item

Good condition. Some edge and corner wear. Light soiling to outside page edges. All intact. No writing or marking. Not Ex-Library.

Seller Inventory # 13232

Bibliographic Details

• Title: A Distant Technology: Science Fiction Film and the Machine Age
• Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
• Publication Date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0819563463
• ISBN 13: 9780819563460
• Binding: Soft cover
• Condition: Good
• Seller catalogs:
  • Film
  • Science Fiction

About this title

Synopsis

Science fiction films celebrate and critique the impact of a burgeoning technology on the world's cultural, political, and social milieu.

The Machine Age, roughly delineated by the two decades between World Wars, was a watershed period during which modern society entered into an ambiguous embrace with technology that continues today. J. P. Telotte carefully blends film, technology, cultural, and genre studies to illuminate this nearly forgotten era in our cinematic history and to show, through analysis of classics like The Invisible Ray, Metropolis, and Things to Come, how technology played a major role as motif, "actor," and producer.

What he also discovers as he ranges among the American, British, Russian, French, and German science fiction cinema ― as well as mainstream films, figures, and cultural products such as the New York World's Fair ― is a fundamental ambivalence, embedded in the films themselves, about the very machine-age ethos they promoted. Even as advances in the technical apparatus of filmmaking elevated it from mere entertainment to a medium of general communication and genuine artistic expression, Machine Age science fiction films remained curiously distant from and often skeptical of the very machines on which their narratives focus.

The resulting tensions, Telotte writes, "thus seem to intersect with those implicit in a Western world that was struggling with its own transition into the modern," rendering the films' task inevitably paradoxical and difficult

About the Author

J. P. TELOTTE is Professor of Literature, Communication, and Culture at Georgia Institute of Technology and editor of The Cult Film Experience (1991). His books include Replications: A Robotic History of the Science Fiction Film (1995), Voices in the Dark: The Narrative Patterns of Film Noir (1989), and Dreams of Darkness: Fantasy and the Films of Val Lewton (1985).