Shh!
My plan is to try and watch an sf film a day for as long as I can - with a mix of 1950s films for teaching, and 1970s for research. At half eleven I will need to break off and watch the last half hour of the film which foirms day two of the resolution. Write-ups, where appropriate, at Solar Flares, with spoiler free comment here. I will also be blogging them for work if I get the Blackboard blog working.
Already I am struck by how little criticism there is on sf film in my usual sources, leaving aside 2001, Alien, Blade Runner, Star Wars, The Matrix. There is a job to be done - oh dearie me, yes. Time to take it seriously. We have a couple of general histories (Sobchack, Brosnan, Hardy, Telotte) and a couple of encyclopedias (Clute and Nicholls, Westfahl), a few essay collections of varying quality (Kuhn, Kuhn II, Redmond, Rickman) but it feels like surprisingly little. Neither James and Mendlesohn (essential one chapter) nor Seed (a rather arbitrary section) out of the existing companions really do justice to film - the half dozenish chapters in Bould, Butler, Roberts and Vint are the tip of a smallish iceberg as the theoretical chapters invoke film as well.
Oh, and it turns out I have one of the (apparently) two pieces written on Soylent Green - and remarkably found it immediately when opening the collection in question at random.
Already I am struck by how little criticism there is on sf film in my usual sources, leaving aside 2001, Alien, Blade Runner, Star Wars, The Matrix. There is a job to be done - oh dearie me, yes. Time to take it seriously. We have a couple of general histories (Sobchack, Brosnan, Hardy, Telotte) and a couple of encyclopedias (Clute and Nicholls, Westfahl), a few essay collections of varying quality (Kuhn, Kuhn II, Redmond, Rickman) but it feels like surprisingly little. Neither James and Mendlesohn (essential one chapter) nor Seed (a rather arbitrary section) out of the existing companions really do justice to film - the half dozenish chapters in Bould, Butler, Roberts and Vint are the tip of a smallish iceberg as the theoretical chapters invoke film as well.
Oh, and it turns out I have one of the (apparently) two pieces written on Soylent Green - and remarkably found it immediately when opening the collection in question at random.