Science Fiction Against the Margins: Moon Landings

Three films — one from France, one from the U.S. and a French-Indonesian-Malaysian coproduction — address moon landings in this UCLA Film & Television Archive Series.

Saturday, October 5, 2024
7:30 PM
Billy Wilder Theater, Hammer Museum

Science Fiction Against the Margins Film Series
UCLA Film & Television Archive

part of
PST: Art & Science Collide

Moon Landings: Screenings of "A Trip to the Moon,"
"Afronauts" and "The Science of Fictions"

October 5, 2024 – 7:30 p.m.
Billy Wilder Theater, Hammer Museum

Tickets are free, no RSVP required
Box office opens at 6:30 p.m.

A Trip to the Moon  (Le voyage dans la lune, France, 1902)
Inspired by Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, French magician-turned-filmmaker Georges Méliès applied his pioneering bag of cinematic tricks to a spoof of scientific pretensions and imperialist hubris and, in the process, brought a new genre to the screen. Often described as the first science fiction film, A Trip to the Moon presents its intrepid lunar explorers as a band of buffoons more enamored with militaristic pomp than anything resembling rational inquiry, as quick to bash each other in the course of debates as they are the aliens they encounter.—Paul Malcolm

Afronauts  (U.S., 2014)
In 1964, the year of Zambia’s independence, Edward Nkoloso, former Zambian resistance fighter and founder of the Zambia National Academy of Science, Space Research and Philosophy, announced his intention for Zambia to beat the United States and the Soviet Union to the moon. His astronauts: a 17-year-old girl named Matha Mwambwa and a pair of cats. This little-known but wildly potent historical fact is the leaping-off point for Ghanaian-born writer-director Nuotama Bodomo’s captivating short that goes well beyond reenactment to capture the complex tangle of intention and emotion at work in the moment a modern myth is born.—Paul Malcolm

The Science of Fictions  (France/Indonesia/Malaysia, 2019)
In The Science of Fictions, Indonesian writer-director Yosep Anggi Noen channels a nation’s trauma through the traumas of a farmer who is witness to and victim of both its horrors and absurdities. An opening reference to Nixon’s gift of a moon rock to the government of Indonesia after the Apollo 11 mission leads into the moment that forever changes Siman (played by noted Indonesian author and theater director Gunawan Maryanto). After stumbling on a film set for a staged lunar landing in the middle of the forest, he is brutalized by soldiers and sent back to the village where he lives with his mother. Rendered mute by the violence inflicted on him, Siman becomes fixated on remaking the forbidden event he witnessed on his own terms. He builds his own makeshift lunar model, designs his own space suit and moves everywhere at a radically slowed pace, as if walking in zero gravity.

Noen intercuts Siman’s story with that of a figure who resembles Indonesia’s longtime dictator Suharto but who himself only seems to be play-acting the role while carrying out a real campaign of terror, everywhere followed by a camera crew. Siman’s own enigmatic efforts to process what happened to him seem to lead him only deeper into forms of performance, first with a traveling theater troupe and then as a tourist attraction. How all this relates to Indonesian history, or even when this story is taking place, is left vague as Noen emphasizes the allegorical over the actual, the constructed over the documented in the maintenance and expression of power.—Paul Malcolm

See previews here

Background

The Science Fiction Against the Margins film series of the UCLA Film & TV Archive is a constituent part of the Getty’s PST: Art & Science Collide, a broad range of art exhibitions and events held throughout Southern California in fall 2024. The films in the festival will be shown free of charge from October 4–December 14, 2024 at the Billy Wilder Theater of the Hammer Museum at UCLA. The series is presented in partnership with Cinema & Media Studies of the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television; the UCLA International Institute is a community partner of the festival.

Filmmakers showcased in Science Fiction Against the Margins 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.

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.

Cost : Free

Sponsor(s): UCLA International Institute, Film and Television Archive, Cinema & Media Studies