J. P. Telotte

"Play it again, Sam" is the motto of cult film enthusiasts, who will watch their favorite movie over and over, "beyond all reason." What is the appeal of cult movies? Why do fans turn up in droves at midnight movies or sit through the same three-hanky classics from Hollywood's golden era? These are some of the questions J. P. Telotte and twelve other noted film scholars consider in this groundbreaking study of the cult film. The book identifies two basic types of cult films—older Hollywood movies, such as Casablanca, that have developed a cult following and "midnight movies," most notably The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Telotte, Bruce Kawin, and Timothy Corrigan offer thought-provoking discussions about why these two types of movies become cult films, the sort of audience they attract, and the needs they fulfill for that audience. Subsequent essays employ a variety of cultural, feminist, ideological, and poststructural strategies for exploring these films. In a section on the classical cult film, the movie Casablanca receives extensive treatment. An essay by T. J. Ross considers Beat the Devil as a send-up of cult films, while another essay by Wade Jennings analyzes the cult star phenomenon as personified in Judy Garland. "Midnight movie madness" is explored in essays on The Rocky Horror Picture Show, movie satires of the 1950s, science fiction double features, and horror thrillers. Illustrated with scenes from favorite movies and written for both fans and scholars, The Cult Film Experience will appeal to a wider audience than the "usual suspects."

Beyond All Reason

The Cult Film Experience

Science Fiction Film examines one of the most enduring and popular genres of Hollywood cinema, suggesting how the science fiction film reflects attitudes toward science, technology, and reason as they have evolved in American culture over the course of the twentieth century. J. P. Telotte provides a survey of science fiction film criticism, emphasizing humanist, psychological, ideological, feminist, and postmodern critiques. He also sketches a history of the genre, from its earliest literary manifestations to the present, while touching on and comparing it to pulp fiction, early television science fiction, and Japanese animé. Telotte offers in-depth readings of three key films: Robocop, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and THX 1138, each of which typifies a particular form of science fiction fantasy. Challenging the boundaries usually seen between high and low culture, literature and film, Science Fiction Film reasserts the central role of fantasy in popular films, even those concerned with reason, science, and technology.

Science Fiction Film

Professor Emeritus of Film and Media Studies J P Telotte

"For the contemporary film audience, science fiction has become a key locus for displaying-and imaginatively addressing-its most pressing concerns. Those concerns increasingly surface not just as displaced subjects, injected into conventional sf narratives, but as inflections in the very nature of the genre. We might describe these issues that bulk so large in our everyday world as angling into the world of science and technology, becoming a kind of slant presence in the genre, and in the process altering the thrust of our sf films and other screen media, resulting in what seems like a proliferation of sub-genre labels that mark off a substantially "new" group of sf cinemas. These cinemas challenge us to view or "read" them differently, from perspectives that are just coming into focus. Through an introductory overview and series of articles on various of these contemporary "slants" and the theories that drive them, this volume offers a guide to both what the new sf cinemas are about and how we have come to think about or "read" them differently. In the process, it also links these fragments of the constantly growing sf supertext to our changing sense of how genres function as a process, marked by consistent growth and evolution, and discussed in ways that reflect contemporary culture's own constant changes"--

The Oxford Handbook of New Science Fiction Cinemas

A historical account of the context, impact, and legacy of one of the most successful series in American television history.

Disney TV

Analyzes the treatment of dreams, fantasy, and the irrational in the horror movies produced by Val Lewton

Fantasy and the Films of Val Lewton

Dreams of Darkness

Science fiction films celebrate and critique the impact of a burgeoning technology on the world's cultural, political, and social milieu. The Machine Age, roughly delineated by the two decades between World Wars, was a watershed period during which modern society entered into an ambiguous embrace with technology that continues today. J. P. Telotte carefully blends film, technology, cultural, and genre studies to illuminate this nearly forgotten era in our cinematic history and to show, through analysis of classics like The Invisible Ray, Metropolis, and Things to Come, how technology played a major role as motif, "actor," and producer. What he also discovers as he ranges among the American, British, Russian, French, and German science fiction cinema — as well as mainstream films, figures, and cultural products such as the New York World's Fair — is a fundamental ambivalence, embedded in the films themselves, about the very machine-age ethos they promoted. Even as advances in the technical apparatus of filmmaking elevated it from mere entertainment to a medium of general communication and genuine artistic expression, Machine Age science fiction films remained curiously distant from and often skeptical of the very machines on which their narratives focus. The resulting tensions, Telotte writes, "thus seem to intersect with those implicit in a Western world that was struggling with its own transition into the modern," rendering the films' task inevitably paradoxical and difficult

Science Fiction Film and the Machine Age

A Distant Technology

"Cinematic influence shaped the experience and cultural understanding of science fiction during the formative pre-World War II period. Each chapter focuses on representations of film in pulp magazines -film-related advertisements; a film-related rhetoric that surfaced in science fiction stories; fans' and editors' discussions of film; and the covers and story illustrations for which the pulps were infamously known. The book's final chapter considers how, during the war and the decade immediately following, that cinematic influence shifted due to the recession of the modernist agenda and an array of new technologies, including television. By looking at those pulps during the key period in the development of science fiction, this book lays out film's early imprint on the genre and suggests the extent of its influence--an influence that would culminate in both SciFi film and literature coming into separate but equally impressive cultural prominence at approximately the same moment during the 1950s"--

Movies, Modernism, and the Science Fiction Pulps

A haunting fascination fuels our interest in the robot, the android, the cyborg, the replicant. Born in science fiction literature, the artificial human has come into its own in films, lurching to life, holding a mirror to humanity's soul. Beginning with a pre-history of the filmic robot, J. P. Telotte traces its development through early sci-fi landmarks such as Metropolis (1926), the alien films of the 1950s (including Forbidden Planet), and recent explorations of the artificial human in Blade Runner, Robocop, and the Terminator films. Replications also considers the tension between the technological wonders that science fiction depicts and the human values it champions. Film-makers employ the latest developments in technology to fashion ever more realistic human doubles, and then use them to explore what it means to be human. Telotte shows us how the sci-fi genre has always addressed changing cultural attitudes toward technology, the body, gender roles, human intelligence, reality, and even film itself.

A Robotic History of the Science Fiction Film

Replications

'Animating Space' explores how animation has evolved in line with changing cultural attitudes, as well as examining the innovations that have helped raise the medium from a novelty to a fully-fledged art form.

From Mickey to Wall-E

Animating Space

¿Quién no ha visto películas como Encuentros en la tercera fase, Robocop o La mosca? La ciencia ficción siempre ha sido para Hollywood uno de sus géneros más populares porque refleja las actitudes que se desarrollaron en la cultura americana a lo largo del siglo XX hacia la ciencia, la tecnología y la razón. Este nuevo título que Cambridge University Press presenta en su colección de Cine proporciona una visión general sobre la historia cinematográfica del género, así como un recorrido desde sus primeras manifestaciones literarias hasta la actualidad, comparándolo con las novelas baratas (pulp fiction), la ciencia-ficción de la primera televisión y el anime japonés. Asimismo, realiza un minucioso estudio de cuatro películas clave del género: Robocop, Encuentros en la tercera fase, THX 1138 y La mosca, que ilustran una forma concreta de ciencia-ficción.

El cine de ciencia ficción

This book offers the first specific application in film studies of what is generally known as ecology theory, shifting attention from history to the (in this case media) environment. It takes the robot as its subject because it has attained a status that resonates not only with some of the key concerns of contemporary culture over the last century, but also with the very nature of film. While the robot has given us a vehicle for exploring issues of gender, race, and a variety of forms of otherness, and increasingly for asking questions about the very nature and meaning of life, this image of an artificial being, typically anthropomorphic, also invariably implicates the cinema’s own and quite fundamental artificing of the human. Looking across genres, across specific media forms, and across closely linked conceptualizations, Telotte sketches a context of interwoven influences and meanings. The result is that this study of the cinematic robot, while mainly focused on science fiction film, also incorporates its appearance in, for example, musicals, cartoons, television, advertising, toys, and literature.

Robot Ecology and the Science Fiction Film

Gerald Duchovnay

Critical discussion of cult cinema has often noted its tendency to straddle or ignore boundaries, to pull together different sets of conventions, narrative formulas, or character types for the almost surreal pleasure to be found in their sudden juxtapositions or narrative combination. With its own boundary-blurring nature - as both science and fiction, reality and fantasy - science fiction has played a key role in such cinematic cult formation. This volume examines that largely unexplored relationship, looking at how the sf film's own double nature neatly matches up with a persistent double vision common to the cult film. It does so by bringing together an international array of scholars to address key questions about the intersections of sf and cult cinema: how different genre elements, directors, and stars contribute to cult formation; what role fan activities, including "con" participation, play in cult development; and how the occulted or "bad" sf cult film works. The volume pursues these questions by addressing a variety of such sf cult works, including Robot Monster (1953), Zardoz (1974), A Boy and His Dog (1975), Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989), Space Truckers (1996), Ghost in the Shell 2 (2004), and Iron Sky (2012). What these essays afford is a revealing vision of both the sf aspects of much cult film activity and the cultish aspects of the whole sf genre.

The Science Fiction Film as Cult Text

Science Fiction Double Feature

J. Telotte

The American film noir, the popular genre that focused on urban crime and corruption in the 1940s and 1950s, exhibits the greatest amount of narrative experimentation in the modern American cinema. Spurred by postwar disillusionment, cold war anxieties, and changing social circumstances, these films revealed the dark side of American life and, in doing so, created unique narrative structures in order to speak of that darkness. J.P. Telotte's in-depth discussion of classic films noir--including The Lady from Shanghai, The Lady in the Lake, Dark Passage, Double Indemnity, Kiss Me Deadly, and Murder, My Sweet--draws on the work of Michel Foucault to examine four dominant noir narrative strategies.

J. P. Telotte

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