Dr.

Pawel Frelik Maria Curie-Sklodowska University, Lublin, Poland University of California, Riverside, 2011-12 Fulbright Senior Fellow Email: pawel.frelik@umcs.edu.pl

Visions of the Future: Global SF Cinema

University of Iowa April 2012 Paper proposal:

Famous for 15 Minutes Permutations of Science-Fiction Short Film

There is no consensus concerning the definition of a short film although the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences describes it as a motion picture of a running time of 40 minutes or less, including credits. While Le Voyage dans la lune (1902), arguably the first sf film, was technically a short at its 14 minutes, it can hardly be considered such as few pre-1920s films ran longer. In the following decades, in certain niches of mainstream and avant-garde cinema, shorts have become a separate art form but science fiction cinema as a genre clearly favored full-length narratives with very few exceptions such as Chris Markers La Jetee (1962), which clearly gestured towards experimental cinema. This has started to change in the last few decades the 1990s and 2000s marked the emergence of what I will call the science fiction short film, a development confirmed by, among others, the existence of the Science Fiction Short Film Festival since 2008. In my presentation I would like to do three things. First, I will demarcate the territory of this complex and multi-faceted phenomenon. It is truly global with such productions as Ausgestorben (Germany, 1995), Das sin luz (Spain, 1995), Marehito (Japan, 1995), Pumzi (Kenya, 2009), or Ataque de Panico (Uruguay, 2009) as well as diverse with sf shorts functioning as stand-alone narratives (2081 [2009]), seeds for later full-length productions (Alive in Joburg [2005]), promotional tools (Halo: Landfall [2009]), or paratextual elements in larger narrative networks (Watchmen. Tales Of The Black Freighter [2009]). Secondly, I would like to consider how, from the narrative perspective, sf shorts function within visual science fiction, which privileges extensive expository arcs, and how they illustrate the changing character of science fiction as a genre. Thirdly, I would like to discuss how sf shorts reflect contemporary transformations of both cinema in general (availability of film-making technologies, emergence of such forms as machinima, evolution of marketing and distribution channels) and sf cinema in particular (rise of arthouse sf, internationalization of the previously largely Anglophone field).