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Special Topics in Film: Weird Science: A History of Science Fiction Film
108 - 002 | CCN: 31657
Date and Time: MW 930-11A, 188 DWINELLE
4 Units
This course provides a history of science fiction film from Mélies and Metropolis to The Martian. Moving chronologically from the silent cinema to today, we will examine how science fiction films have functioned as a site for working through the major ideological problems of the 20th and early 21st centuries: how science fiction problematizes the category of the human by screening encounters with ethnic, species, and technological Others and by using these encounters to dramatize ever-changing discourses on sexuality, gender, race, and class. We will also engage in rigorous formal analysis of these films, which either conserve or challenge classical Hollywood’s aesthetic and narrative boundaries at the same time that they contain or resist ideological norms.