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and Thomas Warren, 1638), pp. 22–5. 55 William Poole, ‘Kepler’s Somnium and Francis Godwin’s The Man in the Moone : Births of Science-Fiction 1593–1638’, in Chloë Houston (ed.), New Worlds Reflected: Travel and Utopia in the Early Modern Period (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), pp. 57–69, p
Midsummer Night’s Dream (2016), David Kerr utilises the science fantasy/fiction genre, to inform his representations of the fairies and their supernatural powers. While the film is not a science fiction/fantasy, it harnesses some of the genre's tropes and pays homage to notable films. 45 Kerr's Athenian court is a totalitarian regime with a brutal and tyrannical Theseus, complete with stormtroopers and sets adorned with iconography that combines 1940's fascism and George Lucas's original Star Wars
’s Pygmalion and Galatea of 1871 in mind, though there had been many prior retellings in English, and by Rousseau in French. 21 In an article on The Tempest and science fiction, I missed the Pygmalion references completely. See Ruth Morse, ‘Monsters, magicians, movies: The Tempest and
’s Shakespeare as contemporary by pitching it somewhere between Carnaby Street and the shiny plastic milieu of 1960s science fiction. This was a world in which, but for the odd fetishistic flash of leather, little was not ersatz or synthetic: Koltai’s chicly minimalist settings were based on plain, geometrically angled surfaces, ‘a transparent plexiglass wall’ upstage, ‘a few geometrical
Discoveries in his Travels; such as Nations of Giants and Pigmies, Flying Islands , and Territories inhabited by Horses , that for good Polity and Manners vied with the most civilized People in Europe.’ 118 Note how the elements of science fiction are predicated upon ‘good Polity and Manners’. Houyhnhnm government is clearly on a par – if not better than – that of ‘the most civilized People in
of Contract’, in Montaigne After Theory: Theory After Montaigne ’, ed. Zahi Zalloua (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2009), p. 173. 5 Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (London: Verso, 2007), p. 1
Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy’s Westworld , the spectrality of cultural ventriloquism is foregrounded. In reference to a quote from Romeo and Juliet , ‘these violent delights have violent ends,’ the pathos formula re-surfacing most prominently in my reading encapsulates the enmeshment of violence and creation. Yet the string of Shakespeare quotes, uttered by a malfunctioning host, not only suggests a collision between this science-fiction western and Shakespeare’s romantic tragedy. It also affords a serial interconnection between the TV series and two further plays, The
combine horror with elements of science-fiction cinema: ‘In particular, the Blade films, Underworld (2003), Van Helsing (2004), and Underworld: Evolution (2006) have contributed to a reconception of generic conventions and iconography that undermines the laws of religion and folklore in favor of the laws of science and technology.’ 13 The Underworld films feature several dark and doomed love plots, which is the single thematic element actually reminiscent of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet , but this connection is regularly mentioned by reviewers and fans
adaptations on an unparalleled scale, in practically all known cinematic genres. Examples range from science fiction to the western, the gangster film and film noir , animations and teen flicks, romantic comedies and melodramas, epic costume dramas, fantasy films and musicals, to name but a few of the long and rapidly growing list. We may thus safely claim that Shakespeare-inspired movies perfectly exemplify the colourful palette of the practically endless variety of genre adaptation. This variety of genres is all the more interesting as these clearly have had greater
contemporary visual narratives ranging from teen television series to dystopian science-fiction films continue to display melodramatic elements. The characteristic cinematography of the melodrama includes an often excessive focus on the representation of emotions, through the use of close-ups, slow-motion photography, blurred images implying a nostalgic recollection of the past and the preponderance of musical accompaniment, many of which can be traced back to the visuality already characterising the woman’s film as far back as the 1930s. To illustrate how the