Do Tread on My Dreams: The Perception of Cityscape in Science Fiction Films

Year 2007, Issue: 25, 45 - 66, 01.04.2007

Cem Kılıçarslan

Abstract

The city, the urban landscape with its idiosyncratic skyline and bird’s eye presentations, has been one of the most dominant and recurring images of the cinematic representations of the science fiction genre. This preoccupation with the city and its visual depictions is hardly coincidental. An analysis of science fiction films with regards to their utilization of the cityscape and individual works of architecture reveals that there is a correlation between the meaning created by the science fiction film and the works of architecture shown on the screen. The architectural elements used in science fiction films are primarily compelling representatives of the modernist architecture and urban planning. Therefore, they make a visual commentary on the meaning created by the film in parallel with the ideology and mentality of the modernist thinking. Nevertheless, a survey of prominent examples of the science fiction genre reveals that these films make use of modernist architecture and urban planning to depict an inhuman, oppressive and totalitarian world; a view remarkably in contradiction with the basic tenets of the modernist ideal.

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