- published: 12 Mar 2016
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Science fiction film is a film genre that uses science fiction: speculative, science-based depictions of phenomena that are not necessarily accepted by mainstream science, such as extraterrestrial life forms, alien worlds, extrasensory perception, and time travel, often along with futuristic elements such as spacecraft, robots, cyborgs, interstellar space travel or other technologies. Science fiction films have often been used to focus on political or social issues, and to explore philosophical issues like the human condition. In many cases, tropes derived from written science fiction may be used by filmmakers ignorant of or at best indifferent to the standards of scientific plausibility and plot logic to which written science fiction is traditionally held.
The genre has existed since the early years of silent cinema, when Georges Melies' A Trip to the Moon (1902) amazed audiences with its trick photography effects. The next major example in the genre was the 1927 film Metropolis. From the 1930s to the 1950s, the genre consisted mainly of low-budget B-movies. After Stanley Kubrick's 1968 landmark 2001: A Space Odyssey, the science fiction film genre was taken more seriously. In the late 1970s, big-budget science fiction films filled with special effects became popular with audiences after the success of Star Wars and paved the way for the blockbuster hits of subsequent decades.
Fictional film or narrative film is film that tells a fictional story, event or narrative. Narrative cinema is usually contrasted to films that present information, such as a nature documentary, as well as to some experimental films (works such as Wavelength by Michael Snow, Man with a Movie Camera by Dziga Vertov, or films by Chantal Akerman). In some instances pure documentary films, while nonfiction, may nonetheless recount a story. As genres evolve, from fiction film and documentary a hybrid one emerged, docufiction.
Unlike literary fiction, which is typically based on characters, situations and events that are entirely imaginary/fictional/hypothetical, cinema always has a real referent, called the "pro-filmic," which encompasses everything existing and done in front of the camera.
Since the emergence of classical Hollywood style in the early 20th century, narrative, usually in the form of the feature film, has held dominance in commercial cinema and has become popularly synonymous with "the movies." Classical, invisible filmmaking (what is often called realist fiction) is central to this popular definition. This key element of this invisible filmmaking lies in continuity editing. In this style, narrative and characters are foregrounded, helping the audience to lose themselves in the unfolding fiction.
Science fiction is a genre of fiction dealing with imaginary but more or less plausible (or at least non-supernatural) content such as future settings, futuristic science and technology, space travel, aliens, and paranormal abilities. Exploring the consequences of scientific innovations is one purpose of science fiction, making it a "literature of ideas".
Science fiction is largely based on writing rationally about alternative possible worlds or futures. It is similar to, but differs from fantasy in that, within the context of the story, its imaginary elements are largely possible within scientifically established or scientifically postulated laws of nature (though some elements in a story might still be pure imaginative speculation).
The settings for science fiction are often contrary to known reality, but most science fiction relies on a considerable degree of suspension of disbelief, which is facilitated in the reader's mind by potential scientific explanations or solutions to various fictional elements. Science fiction elements include:
Little green men coming out of paint cans,
Phosphate mines and Slaked Lime, 1966, he was sixteen,
it's Central Florida in the era of the dragline,
play it over the pit and dig up more of that green shit,
and trade it with the Russians, who are traditionally hated,
you can imagine that after a few years
that you'd run out of things to say,
and I'll be here every day.
Phospho~Gypsum, Radon-222,
the daughters watch over you,
on a transformer four stories high it walks like a cripple
and turns on its base,
diggin' up that Dicalcium Phosphate.
Travel the blacktop
and you won't have far to go to find an alien civilization,
a creature from a creation that's from outer space.
Sixty foot high for miles around;
one million tons of Phospho~Gypsum tailings rise to the sky.
Nearly half the world's fertilizer once lay beneath the overburden;
it got taken off this sandbar,
and now there's something that's left behind.
Hey, this place is a mess!
'what are you takin' about?
I'll clean it up later.
No, that's not the way it is at all, I'm not a miner I don't care,
man, that's pant of the system, I'm punk,
but who's gonna indict the Wall Street Journal, just me and Bob Ray,
it's just part of the system here on the surface of the planet
and the day has come when there's only work left
There's unlimited sunshine in a bottle of Tropicana,
with his friends and his 'Spooky Tooth' 8-track flipped upside down,
drivin' in his Mercury Monterey down to Lithia Springs,
saying that if we could take the tailings,
and build a building for the New York Stork Exchange,
then we could tell everyone about
how we live in a state that digs Radon by the ton
and you'll be loved by everyone,
and the government will give us a Superfund,