Screening Space: The American Science Fiction Film Review

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Screening Space: The American Science Fiction Film ReviewVivian Sobchack's survey of the Sci-fi film from its beginnings in the silent era through the 1970s remains a standard reference work on the genre. It was originally published in 1980 though later revised and expanded in 1987. Unfortunately, rather than attempt to rewrite the book, she left the 1980 text largely unchanged and instead added a long, new chapter that was different both in methodology and orientation than the three original chapters. The result is a book in which the new chapter has the feel of a not completely successful graft. The final chapter has a "stuck on" feel to it and doesn't really feel compatible with what went on before.
When the original edition of this book was published, it was important for two reasons. First, the genre studies approach to film, which is far more appropriate the evaluation of many films than the auteur criticism that had dominated from the 1950s even to the present, was still in its relative infancy. My own take on matters is that for certain directors with strong personalities, auteur criticism carries a great deal of validity, but that the weaker the director or the less predominant the director, the less help it is. Many film genres require less on the vision of a particular director than the dependence of the director and writer and producer on the history of that genre. Other films in the genre shape and mold and limit what can happen in other examples of the genre. Whether one considers the Western, the Mafia film, film noir, or Sci-fi, a discussion of the genre as a whole can provide considerable insight into any individual example of the genre. This was one of the first academic discussions of Sci-fi within that context. Second, the book was important for being one of the first academic studies that took the Sci-fi film seriously. In the late 1970s, when the original edition of the book was being prepared, Sci-fi was among the least respected genres in the movies. Though 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, STAR WARS, and CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND was beginning to change things, Sci-fi was neither critically nor economically successful. Today we are used to the box office dominance of Sci-fi films, but with only two or three major exceptions in the late seventies, this was not the case then. Sobchack's book played a small but definite role in making the Sci-fi film more relevant to film studies.
The first three chapters of the book remain exceptionally helpful in analyzing the crucial nature of Sci-fi films before their emergence as big box office in the eighties and beyond. Many of the films she discusses were staples of Saturday afternoon TV movie slots, which is where I first saw many of them. THE THING, THEM!, THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL, IT CAME FROM OUTER SPACE, DESTINATION MOON, WHEN WORLDS COLLIDE, INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS, and a host of other classics get extensive coverage in the book and she spends a great deal of time not only analyzing their essential characteristics but contrasting them with and comparing them to the creature films that were showing at the same time. In doing this Sobchack did her part in helping to establish a canon of Sci-fi films. The discussion takes her in the three original chapters through other classics such as WESTWORLD, A CLOCKWORK ORANGE, PLANET OF THE APES, 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, SILENT RUNNING, and THX 1138. I had only one quibble with these original three chapters: an artificial decision to discuss only American made films. A number of significant and influential (and their influentiality along made their exclusion arbitrary) British films were left out, including the Quatermass films, VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED, THE DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS, THE DAY THE EARTH CAUGHT FIRE, and others, as well as Jean Luc Goddard's ALPHAVILLE. It also meant that Andrei Tarkovsky's great 1972 Soviet masterpiece, SOLARIS, received no discussion. It also left the very low quality but exceptionally large body of Japanese films out of consideration.
The chapter added in the late 1980s is simply odd. For one thing, she seems to have read and not completely digested the work of Fredric Jameson. I have no complaints with her interest in Jameson, who is perhaps the most important academic of the past thirty years to have shown a sustained interest in Sci-fi. Both THE POLITICAL UNCONSCIOUS and POSTMODERNISM OR, THE CULTURAL LOGIC OF LATE CAPITALISM are well-thumbed volumes on my bookshelf. The problem is how dissonant this chapter is with the earlier chapters. It almost feels like the work of an entirely different author. Marxist ideas were completely absent from the first chapter, but predominant in the final one. Moreover, it is as if she hadn't completely interiorized Jameson and Mandel's ideas, but was instead almost parroting Jameson. Another problem here is that the first three chapters were models of clarity. Jameson is not an especially easy to read writer, and is very much a product of the European tradition of writing in which authors tend to encrust their ideas in difficult to decade jargon (a tradition opposed to other writers who strove for clarity of expression and lack of academic jargon and included writers such as David Hume, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and Wittgenstein, as opposed to Kant, Hegel, Heidegger, Marx [who could write beautifully and simply when he wanted to], and Derrida who cannot be read so much as interpreted). This seems to have infected Sobchack and the final chapter is a chore to read. A number of additional films are discussed, including the STAR WAR films, E.T., BLADE RUNNER, and REPO MAN. I do not, however, believe that this was a successful chapter. It attempts to apply Jameson to the most recent changes in Sci-fi film in an effort to capture the movement of history. As a whole, I felt that this chapter significantly weakened the book as a whole.
Nonetheless, this is a must read book for anyone wishing to study the Sci-fi film. It definitely has its weaknesses, but it just as surely has its strengths. I would perhaps caution readers to focus mainly on the first three chapters and to consider skipping the last one.Screening Space: The American Science Fiction Film Overview

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