Sci-Fi festival

Utopiales is an international festival dedicated to all aspects of Science Fiction. It is organised anually towards the end of October in the French city of Nantes. This year more than 60.ooo people attended. Here is a review in Le Monde.

 

Electronic sound and Sci-Fi

There exists a strange attraction between the Sci-Fi genre and electronic music and sound as well as 20th Century avantgarde music. Forbidden Planet (1956) is the most famous example, which had the first complete electronic soundtrack, apart from speech and ambient sound.

Synthesisers like the EMS VCS3 (by Peter Zinovieff) shaped the sound world of the films below:

• Quatermass and the Pit (1958-59, BBC TV series; music by Tristram Carey) remade into a feature film Five Million Years to  Earth (1967)
• Doctor Who (1963-89, 2005 – present, BBC TV series)

Texts:

• Hayward, Phillip. Off the Planet: Music, Sound and Science Fiction Cinema. John Libbey Cinema and Animation, 2004.
• Heimerdinger, Julia. Neue Musik Im Spielfilm. Saarbrücken: Pfau, 2007. Print.
• Heimerdinger, Julia. “”I Have Been Compromised. I Am Now Fighting against It”: Ligeti Vs. Kubrick and the Music for “2001: A Space Odyssey”.” The Journal of Film Music 3.2 (2010): 127-43. Print.
• McCartney, Andra. “Alien Intimacies: Hearing Science Fiction Narratives in Hildegard Westerkamp’s Cricket Voice (or ).” Organised Sound 7.01 (2002): 45-49.
• Whittington, William. Sound Design & Science Fiction. . Austin, Tex: University of Texas Press, 2007.
• Wierzbicki, James. Louis and Bebe Barron’s Forbidden Planet: A Film Score Guide. Rowman & Littlefield, 2005.
• Wierzbicki, J. “Shrieks, Flutters, and Vocal Curtains: Electronic Sound/Electronic Music in Hitchcock’s the Birds.” Music and the Moving Image 1.2 (2008): p27-53. Print.

Fassbinder

Rainer Werner Fassbinder focused in some of his films on the emerging media world.

• World on Wire (Die Welt am Draht, 1973)
• The Third Generation (Die Dritte Generation, 1979)

From a sound perspective these films are particularly interesting anticipating our current media torrent. World on Wire has been restored in 2010. See a review in The New Yorker by Richard Brody.

 

Sci-Fi Films

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
Alien (1979)
Back to the Future (1985)
Blade Runner (1982)
E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982)
Forbidden Planet (1956)
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)
Metropolis (1927)
Planet of the Apes (1968)
Solyaris (1972)
Star Wars: Episode V – The Empire Strikes Back (1980)
Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)
The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951)
The Invisible Man (1933)
The Matrix (1999)
The Thing (1982)
The Truman Show (1998)
WALL·E (2008)