I've never been a scifi fan but it interests me as a sort of index of a view of the future. For the most part, early science fiction movies showed us a future that was Raymond Lowey on steroids. By Kubrick's 2001, we saw less streamlining and more a future of corporate Modernism--Otl Aicher or Chermayeff & Geismar’s world. In retrospect, it seemed to be a dying gasp of a positive view of the future
With Blade Runner (I think someone said it was based on an Orwell book but it was Phil Dick's "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?"), the future looked like the present only more so. The future, we learned, was to be early 1980s Los Angeles and Tokyo thrown into a blender.
I find it interesting that even Robert Longo (who directed "Johnny Mnemonic") didn't manage a unique vision but instead continues along Ridley Scott and crew's direction. The cyber punk and Max Headroom contributions junk-tech'd it up but (other than apocalyptic robot war movies) the LA/Tokyo view of the future seems to have stuck.
A consistent error made in cyberpunkery is the depiction of recycled tech. They revert to 1940s-1970s equipment when the outmoded equipment of the near future is the iPad3. The newest, coolest stuff is bad old stuff in a few weeks so nobody needs to add nostalgic element to demonstrate just making do in the future. (The movie "Brazil" and the steam punk aesthetic fetishizes that sort of anachronism.)
A nice variation on the junkyard view of a postmodern future is the late '80s "Robocop." Set in New Detroit, International Style Modernism was the look of the evil corporatists (from their headquarters to the then-stylishly modern Ford Taurus cars (painted flat black) that served as police cars. Modernism had shifted from the style of the future to the style of future bad guys. (I gave a short talk on the meaning of modern architecture [culminating with "Robocop"] for the Society for Utopian Studies conference a couple of years ago. If anyone's interested, email me off list and I'll dig it out for you.)
Gunnar
----------
Gunnar Swanson Design Office
1901 East 6th Street
Greenville NC 27858
USA
[log in to unmask]
+1 252 258 7006
http://www.gunnarswanson.com
|