Reaching for the Stars

Catalog description

How do speculative genres speak to their own times, even as they imagine faraway futures? This course considers the metaphors and parables science fiction films create about present societies and the future of the human condition to explore such works negotiate the anxieties and fears of the present in imagined space and/or time. It focuses specifically on film - an art form that has had dramatic reach across global audiences, with technological advances allowing us to visualize increasingly complex alternative worlds. Drawing on films and television from the USA, Germany, India, Korea, the Middle East and elsewhere, many inspired by literature, the course allows students to consider what universal values these filmic narratives project and what solutions they offer to social, psychological, and environmental dilemmas. The course puts film in context with earlier forms of speculation about the future. Through the course, students will also consider what the science fiction of the future may look like by creating short narratives from which they will develop a podcast episode, short story or a treatment for a science fiction film or series.