The Books of My Life: Science Fiction in the Cinema

 

John Baxter's Science Fiction in the Cinema (London: Tantivy and New York: Barnes, International Film Guide series, 1970) is a solid early introduction to the role science fiction has played in film from the last decade of the nineteenth-century to the late 1960s. It reflects that hybrid of history, sensitivity to the workings of cinema including its mise-en-scene, and aesthetic criticism that dominated so much 1950s and 1960s European and North American film criticism.

Baxter traces the roots of science fiction in general, with its apocalypticism and allegories, to the mediaeval era. He traces the roots of film science fiction more specifically to the literary science fiction of ideas and to juvenile comic books. Baxter argues that between the late nineteenth century and the late 1960s two issues have been central to science fiction cinema: the fear of technological change and the fear of a loss of individuality. He explores these themes and the character types that emerged in science fiction cinema (monsters and mad scientists, for instance) in certain highlighted films (for example, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Metropolis, Forbidden Planet, The Day the Earth Caught Fire, and the films of Jack Arnold) and, if briefly, in sci fi serials and television in Germany, the US, France, and Japan.

Some might quibble with Baxter's typology of science fiction themes and characters. Some film critics in the postmodernist West might see Baxter's delineation and characteristics of science fiction cinema as to anemic and too back dated. Others might wonder, since the history of horror and science fiction in cinema has a lot of overlap, if it is possible to clearly delineate these two tones or genres. Still others might bemoan the fact that Baxter's book is somewhat out of date in the twenty-first century. His book and its largely chronological expedition through science fiction cinema and the countries that made it ends several years before Star Wars (1977) when the economic predicament of post-World War II Hollywood and the new marketing demographics of Hollywood films transformed science fiction into one of the pillars of Hollywood blockbusters, Hollywood blockbusters aimed at the teen and tween demographic. While all these may be valid criticisms of Baxter's book, Baxter's book still provides a useful guide for those thinking about science fiction in film and for those wanting to see some of the big names in cinematic science fiction before Star Wars.