Earthly Visions: The Tree House

The UCLA Film & Television Archive and Los Angeles Filmforum present

Science Fiction Against the Margins:

Earthly Visions: The Tree House

Friday December 6, 2024, 7:30pm

At the Billy Wilder Theater at the Hammer Museum

More info at: https://www.cinema.ucla.edu/events/2024/12/06/tree-house

Admission is free. No advance reservations. Your seat will be assigned to you when you pick up your ticket at the box office. Seats are assigned on a first come, first served basis. The box office opens one hour before the event.

Special thanks to our community partners: Los Angeles Filmforum.

Part of Science Fiction Against the Margins.

Earth: the dreary backdrop for countless science fiction stories about future civilizations surviving through destruction, with no place left to go. On present-day Earth, humans are already struggling with the alarming effects of a warming climate. Increasing floods, hurricanes and fires are all too common and signs that worse is yet to come. This program’s films are documents of the Earth at its current stage mixed with dystopian speculations on the future. Moving through green spaces, caves and mountains, they remind us of the fragile rock that houses us, and that we must tend to in order to avoid catastrophic consequences.

Notes by Nicole Ucedo

Science Fiction Against the Margins showcases filmmakers who occupy the “margins” of mainstream cinema in order to challenge and subvert the science fiction genre. Hollywood’s ubiquitous sci-fi story structure functions within the conventions of action-driven melodrama, resolving social issues in private, emotional and moral terms that reinforce the status quo. This series offers an alternative body of media wherein a speculative mode of thinking outside familiar expectations of narrative resolution opens up representations of race and ethnicity, gender politics and cultural identity. While the focus is on the feature film as a global form of mass entertainment, the series also includes documentaries, shorts, video art and television episodes.

The titles selected reflect a global scope, including films from various regions of the world as well as those by minority and Indigenous cultures. Central to the program is investigating how different independent and international cinemas utilize speculative fiction as a means of exposing inequality — the rationalization of authoritarian rule, capitalist exploitation of racialized labor and environmental imperialism. The series rejects the notion of an underlying “sameness” across cultures and social protests, instead bringing attention to the divergent ways in which social identity, cultural context and material relations are represented by media artists.

Science Fiction Against the Margins reimagines the relationship between science and art by challenging and sometimes finding new inspiration in old cinematic traditions. Works span the history of world cinema, including reflections on colonialism and the moon in Georges Méliès’ A Trip to the Moon (France, 1902), Nuotama Bodomo’s Afronauts (Ghana, 2014) and Yosep Anggi Noen’s The Science of Fictions (Indonesia, 2019). Several films offer speculative visions of societies struggling to overcome dictatorship, whereby the present is explained as either one of collective madness or of a planet under alien invasion, such as Man Facing Southeast (Eliseo Subiela, 1986). In other films, the future presages the total privatization of critical resources supporting human existence, envisioning an endgame brought about by forced labor, political subjugation and environmental collapse, as in Sleep Dealer (Alex Rivera, 2008), Pumzi (Wanuri Kahiu, 2009) and Neptune Frost (Saul Williams, Anisia Uzeyman, 2021). Overall, the series explores an alternative mode of science fiction that raises critical questions rather than offering comforting answers.

—Science Fiction Against the Margins Curatorial Team: Paul Malcolm, Maya Montañez Smukler, Chon Noriega, Nicole Ucedo

Science Fiction Against the Margins is part of this year’s PST ART: Art & Science Collide, presented by Getty. For more information visit pst.art.

https://cinema.ucla.edu/events/2024/science-fiction-against-the-margins