Sci-Fi in the City

Yesterday was another all-dayer in Melbourne. We went to see the Star Voyager: Exploring Space on Screen exhibition at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, billed as combining scientific and documentary footage with feature films and video artwork, the Star Voyager exhibition celebrates an enduring fascination with space travel through the imaginations of artists, scientists and astronauts. What with it being the holidays, we took our time peering at the NASA artefacts, pondering the hi tech installation art, marvelling over early recordings of the Transit of Venus which included Captain Cook’s diary entry of the event (what exquisite handwriting! We lost something beautiful there when we took up ballpoints, keyboards and rushing around) donned spectacles and went on a 3D “journey” to Mars where we watched a very cute rover make its lonely way across the vast plains, and laughed at the letters exchanged by Arthur C. Clark and Stanley Kubrick as they inched towards their famous collaboration.

There's nothing like watching old science fiction movies and spotting things that have influenced modern film makers (or they've posssibly blatantly ripped off these old/foreign/obscure sources) My favourites were: Yakov Protazanov’s 1924 film ‘Aelita, Queen of Mars’, based on the novel by Alexei Tolstoy and starring Yuliya Solntseva in the title role, because of its great sets and costumes – I mean, just look at that headdress - and the stunning way many of the scenes were shot; Pavel Vladimirovich Klushantsev’s famous 1957 science fact - science fiction documentary hybrid The Road to the Stars because of its amazing special effects, and the fact that it charmingly wears its scientific heart on its sleeve; and as a sentimental third, I’ll include the Danish SF silent movie from 1918 called ‘Himmleskibet’ or 'The Heaven Ship', despite the overwrought acting of the main characters and the embarrassingly Grecian neophytes madly swanning about on the red planet.



As you can see, the good ship Excelsior is indeed a wonder of futuristic engineering. If you want a peek at the movie, there are plenty of scenes from it at this great site.

Afterwards, we headed for a modern cinema and saw Lars Von Trier’s movie Melancholia. I always enjoy a good colliding worlds story, and it made for a nice change that Melancholia didn’t deal with panicked mobs, overwrought generals and cowardly politicians, but pared the scenario down to two sisters dealing with the all consuming effects of living with a mental illness and the poetically-wrought truth that the universe doesn’t give a hoot about our insignificant lives and problems. It also illustrates a trend currently prevalent in television and literary fiction, namely incorporating the trappings and tropes of genre fiction into so-called (don’t get me started) mainstream works. Personally I’m all for cross-pollination and the vigour it produces, but eavesdropping of a few of our fellow viewers revealed that it’s not everyone’s cup of tea. As SF goes, the idea of colliding of worlds is a straightforward and quite serious premise/metaphor, but many in our audience boorishly voiced their confusion and opined that it was all a bit silly.

Poor them. They need to vary their intellectual intake, and expand their somewhat limited and exceedingly unimaginative horizons, methinks.