The Future of Film:
Sci-Fi Is Back Big Time
Words: David Geffner
Vivian Sobchack, a professor in UCLA's Film/TV/Digital Media Department, has authored several books on cinema and modern culture. Screening Space: The American Science Fiction Film and Meta-Morphing: Visual Transformation and the Culture of Quick-Change are two prime reference points.
"Alien and Blade Runner set the tone for today's directors wanting to work in sci-fi," observes Sobchack. "Those films offered dystopic visions of the future, along with incredibly sensuous image design that opened the genre up for visualists. Add to that the proliferation and potential of contemporary digital effects, and you have a cinema that has gone beyond post-modernism into a globalist perspective. Minority Report takes all the themes in Blade Runner -- surveillance, thought-control, society as a commodity -- and draws links to what I would term late-capitalist realism."
Sobchack cites Wong Kar-Wai as the ultimate sci-fi futurist, even though most of his films have been set in present-day Hong Kong. "His films are not about the future, or digital technology," she notes, "but they are a reflection of our global culture. Kar-Wai's work is fragmented, disconnected, yet kinetically exciting. His characters are hooked-up and wired, yet completely alienated, just like our present experiences. They are, no doubt, a reflection of the shape of things to come."
Like Wong Kar-Wai's cinema, even the boundaries of what defines a sci-fi film are fragmenting. Representatives for Francis Ford Coppola said it was "premature" to talk about his long-planned Megalopolis, insisting the film did not even fit into the sci-fi genre. Yet Coppola, in Business Week Online, described Megalopolis' as a "shape-of-things-to-come film in which the characters concerned are artists, businessmen and proletariats all having a stake in the future but very few of them having a hand in what it's going to be like. It's a little bit like an Ayn Rand novel," Coppola said, citing a literary voice critics have often likened to futurist ideals.
While the genre is currently a haven for our era's top-tier directors, it also attracts filmmakers like Peter John Ross, who are attacking sci-fi from the sub-basement of the industry. New World was shot on a Canon GL1 (NTSC) for $1,000 and change. To enhance his miniDV live action footage, prior to creating effects, Ross discovered a simple trick. "The GL1 has a 58mm fixed lens that accepts just about any Tiffen still photography filter," Ross relates. "We used an enhancing filter that made the flat and dull DV look amazing, especially shooting in Ohio in the fall."
All Ross had to create his 214 special effects shots (production lasted 11 days, effects work took another 500!) was a Pentium 3 733 MHz computer with 512 RAM. The former brokerage-firm employee used Adobe Premiere 6, Adobe After Effects 4, and Caligari trueSpace 4 for his 3-D animation. "A lot of people don't think low-budget sci-fi for independents is feasible," Ross concludes. "But, then it's also become cool to criticize Phantom Menace because the story falls short. Sci-fi is a great canvas to work on for any filmmaker. We're only limited by our own imaginations."
Following Ross' lead, epic sci-fi films appear as easy as dialing in a home PC. But will the results, even for indie darlings like Soderbergh and Aronofsky, be future shock or schlock? Concludes Sobchack, who's been charting the genre for more than two decades: "What passes [in cinema] for a realistic representation of our world doesn't seem somehow to get it anymore. The feel of science fiction as a genre, when it's done well, creates this sense that it captures our present moment much better than a 'realist setting.'"
