Playlist
Science Fiction Against the Margins reimagines the relationship between science and art by challenging and sometimes finding new inspiration in old cinematic traditions.
October 4, 2024 - December 14, 2024
Science Fiction Against the Margins showcases filmmakers who occupy the “margins” of mainstream cinema in order to challenge and subvert the science fiction genre. Hollywood’s ubiquitous sci-fi story structure functions within the conventions of action-driven melodrama, resolving social issues in private, emotional and moral terms that reinforce the status quo. This series offers an alternative body of media wherein a speculative mode of thinking outside familiar expectations of narrative resolution opens up representations of race and ethnicity, gender politics and cultural identity. While the focus is on the feature film as a global form of mass entertainment, the series also includes documentaries, shorts, video art and television episodes.
Science Fiction Against the Margins reimagines the relationship between science and art by challenging and sometimes finding new inspiration in old cinematic traditions. Works span the history of world cinema, including reflections on colonialism and the moon in Georges Méliès’ A Trip to the Moon (France, 1902), Nuotama Bodomo’s Afronauts (Ghana, 2014) and Yosep Anggi Noen’s A Science of Fictions (Indonesia, 2019). Several films offer speculative visions of societies struggling to overcome dictatorship, whereby the present is explained as either one of collective madness or of a planet under alien invasion, such as Man Facing Southeast (Eliseo Subiela, 1986). In other films, the future presages the total privatization of critical resources supporting human existence, envisioning an endgame brought about by forced labor, political subjugation and environmental collapse, as in Sleep Dealer (Alex Rivera, 2008), Pumzi (Wanuri Kahiu, 2009) and Neptune Frost (Saul Williams, Anisia Uzeyman, 2021). Overall, the series explores an alternative mode of science fiction that raises critical questions rather than offering comforting answers.
—Science Fiction Against the Margins Curatorial Team: Paul Malcolm, Maya Montañez Smukler, Chon Noriega, Nicole Ucedo
Science Fiction Against the Margins is part of this year’s PST ART: Art & Science Collide, presented by Getty. For more information visit pst.art(opens in a new tab).
Series presented in partnership with UCLA Cinema & Media Studies in the School of Theater, Film and Television
<p dir="ltr"><span style="font-size:16px"><span style="font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif"><span style="background-color:transparent; color:#000000">A group of astronomers go on an expedition to the Moon. </span></span></span></p>
<p>16th July 1969: America prepares to launch Apollo 11. Thousands of kilometers away, a ragtag group of Zambian exiles is trying to beat America to the Moon.</p>
<p><span style="font-size:16px"><span style="font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif"><span style="background-color:transparent; color:#000000">Set in 1960s Indonesia, Siman is a quiet man who accidentally discovers a moonlanding shooting by a foreign crew, in a haunted and unpopulated area. Siman is caught by guards and his tongue cut off. Siman goes through life in slow-motion imitating an astronaut in outer space, labeled as crazy.</span></span></span></p>
<p>A man (Harry Belafonte), a woman (Inger Stevens) and a bigot (Mel Ferrer) roam the city of New York, deserted after a nuclear war</p>
<p>A scientist awakens to find himself alone in the world. In a desperate attempt to search for others, he finds only two who have their own agenda.</p>
<p>A writer, Tucker Harding, is hired to cover an article on the hydrogen-bomb test, Nevada, 1952. While there, radiation mutates her code/soul, spawning in her the ability to travel through time by force of will. Not long after she is murdered by a woman from the future, Ofelia, intent on securing her own ability to time travel. However, before her death Tucker travels to the year 1997 where she meets Drew, a failed writer who has been infected with Tuckers original mutation since birth.</p>
<p>La Jetée, is a 1962 French science fiction featurette by Chris Marker. Constructed almost entirely from still photos, it tells the story of a post-nuclear war experiment in time travel. It is 28 minutes long and shot in black and white.</p>
<p>A frustrated man travels back in time in order to change the outcome of the soccer game that forever changed his life.</p>
<p>Multi-hyphenate, multidisciplinary artist Saul Williams brings his unique dynamism to this Afrofuturist vision, a sci-fi punk musical that’s a visually wondrous amalgamation of themes, ideas, and songs that Williams has explored in his work, notably his 2016 album MartyrLoserKing. Co-directed with the Rwandan-born artist and cinematographer Anisia Uzeyman, the film takes place in the hilltops of Burundi, where a group of escaped coltan miners form an anti-colonialist computer hacker collective. From their camp in an otherworldly e-waste dump, they attempt a takeover of the authoritarian regime exploiting the region's natural resources – and its people. When an intersex runaway and an escaped coltan miner find each other through cosmic forces, their connection sparks glitches within the greater divine circuitry. Set between states of being – past and present, dream and waking life, colonized and free, male and female, memory and prescience – Neptune Frost is an invigorating and empowering direct download to the cerebral cortex and a call to reclaim technology for progressive political ends.</p>
<p>Core Dump explores the place of screens in global and localised politics and history, looking specifically at the contradiction between Silicon Valley’s techno-utopianism, and its extractive and exploitative relationship to Africa.</p>
<p>Sleep Dealer, a cyberpunk thriller set on the U.S. / Mexico border, tells the story of Memo Cruz (Luis Fernando Peña), a young man from Mexico who dreams of coming to the United States. However, in this brave new borderland, crossing is impossible, and Memo ‘migrates’ in a new way — over the net. By connecting his body to a global digital network, Memo controls a machine that performs his labor in America, sending his pure work without the body of the worker. </p>