The Limits of Infinity: The American Science Fiction Film, 1950-75

Barnes, 1980. First Edition. Hardcover. Very Good. 9x6x1. 1980 First Edition hardcover with dust jacket, published by A.S. Barnes. UNREAD COPY with minor shelf wear/minor edge wear only to the jacket. Very small amount of faint smudging at page edges. Overall, a nice copy. 246 pages, includes index. "This is an aesthetic study focusing on the American science fiction film from its birth as a critically recognized genre in the early 1950s through 1975 and the genre's current renaissance in popularity. Looking first at traditional definitions of science fiction in both its literary and film forms, the book attempts to reevaluate and rework such definitions so as to accommodate those elements of the genre which are constant and those which are in flux -- temporally responsive to societal pressures and spatially responsive to the limits of a production budget. This first part of the book also investigates the relationship between the science fiction film and the horror film and pays special attention to that often critically embarrassing hybrid -- the Creature film. The second section of the book deals with science fiction film imagery. Going against the grain of current iconographic analyses of film genres, this section argues that such a discussion of iconography is inappropriate to a genre in which there are no visual constants, no given temporal or spatial parameters. Because of its plastic and malleable imagery, the science fiction film depends less on specific objects and settings than on the familiar and repeated visual functions of specific kinds of images. These images are used to cause wonder in the viewer, a wonder that may be either optimistic or pessimistic or neutral in tone. In all cases, however, those wondrous images -- their logical extension is into the world of avant-garde film -- are tempered by an equal impulse to ground the films in a comfortable, comprehensible, and familiar context. The last section of the book similarly explores a hitherto neglected area of the genre: the sounds of the science fiction film. Dialogue, music, sound effects -- all are examined for their specific generic contributions. Whereas the majority of science fiction images tend toward an alien and wondrous quality that must be carefully grounded and reduced to commercial comprehensibility, the majority of science fiction dialogue tends inherently toward the banal and reductive, qualities that the genre attempts to transform through various measures into something more wondrous. Thus, the genre is full of talking machines and animals, attempts at alien language, language turned to ritual and liturgy and framed by public events, and the spoken word turned into print imagery that has a kinetic life of its own on the screen. THE LIMITS OF INFINITY -- with over 140 movie stills -- attempts not only to look at science fiction films in new way, but also attempts to approach the genre in a new way, suggesting a methodology that will prove useful to future genre analysis.