Sci-fi Reimagined: the Body as an Alien World — Notes on Contemporary Women Directors’ Sensual Sci-fi
Translated by Zi-ning LIN
With the recent success of Titane and The Substance, from romantic comedy-based Ich bin dein Mensch to the morally challenging The Trouble With Being Born, women directors continue to borrow sci-fi settings to develop narratives, which was the starting point of this program. Through this prism, we can revisit Born in Flames, Strange Days, or Lynn Hershman LEESON and Tilda SWINTON’s underrated venture Teknolust, while beholding films that have garnered spotlights, such as High Life, Little Joe, and Évolution. During the programming process of listing potential film titles, a new focus axis surfaced, breaking away from the original insistence on the definition of sci-fi, doomsday prophecies, and entirely fantastical frameworks: doomsday isn’t just about order reformation or power struggles anymore, but about whether humans become aware of themselves being resource plunderers, existing as one with the environment. From this perspective, we mainly chose films of this decade, straightening out the clues that reveal turning points, and, along with the astonishment brought by Invisible Adversaries, forming the spectrum of women’s sci-fi creations.
The director of H. confessed that though the film was set in sci-fi premises, the fallen comet did not cause mass casualties or escapes, only random high frequency sounds that affect men, especially male drivers, to abandon their cars and flee into the woods. An old woman named Helen obsesses over mother-son interactions with a life-like reborn doll. Another young artist, also named Helen, is pregnant, facing unexplainable power of science and mythology to extract the baby from her womb. Out of obsession or induced unconsciousness, the characters eventually choose between false simulation or entering another layer of reality in the disturbed world. In the end, some check the reality of their whereabouts through the shape of the clouds, and those who accept their calling lie asleep in the snow in neat rows, no longer disturbed by the scientific judgment of the human world.
After nearly a decade, this image of strangers silently lying in the snow has become the setting for The Human Hibernation; freezing cold, humans hibernating like animals, waking up early only to have no means of rescue, animals looking at humans from a “survival of the fittest” perspective. As spring awakens, the humans rouse one another’s bodily consciousness, the house taken over by a goat, a horse, and a crocodile are not a simplified image of doomsday, but a showcase of the order of coexistence between humans and animals in the film. Humans are not the narrative subject, nor are they omniscient, they are but an existence among all beings of the world; the bull’s eyes and the snake’s skin can see the past and the future; humans must also learn from animals to express feelings without vocalization. This film is not just a sci-fi movie; it is closer to a natural response to the evil consequences of human civilization, an ecological fable diverging from technological illusions.
In comparison, Planet A has entirely removed humans from the narrative. SETO Momoko, a Japanese director living in France, put out her first feature film of the year, Planètes, which is set on a post-apocalypse Earth. Before this, the “Planet” series of short films also featured a land without humans; compared to the more intense anthropomorphic narrative of feature films, the first film of the series, Planet A, returns to a planet made of crystallized salt and water, utilizing sound designs to make the communication between crystallized forms and plant forms more like the transmissions of electric waves and cells. Six Knots, though not a sci-fi work, focuses on the conflict between whales’ auditory perception and humans’ sound pollution, revealing human activity’s profound impact on the nonhuman world, calling attention to what most works included in this program are concerned about: colonial history, and sensory violence.
Compared to feature films focused on narrative, It is Night in America, A Demonstration, and My Want of You Partakes of Me are experimental documentaries and essay films, overflowing with sci-fi’s fictionality, their forms and themes a continuation of deep reflection on the relationship between humans and the entire ecological system.
It is Night in America is about human activity’s invasion of animal habitats, consciously thinning down humans’ presence, in turn emphasizing animals’ perspective. The film uses the police receiving a call requesting the removal of stray animals as the narrative, revealing the absurdity of the request. Noise pollutes the broadcasts in the film, deliberately made for their contents impossible to identify or understand through subtitles. As the late-night broadcasts almost seem to reveal the theme of the film, they once again weaken humans as the subject of interpretation.
The proposition of A Demonstration is to dismantle knowledge accumulation that standardizes, demystifies and categorizes nature based mainly on human vision, grouping all things that were originally equal into different classes through dismantling and comparison. In the film, the directors see animals, plants, minerals and monsters as existences that are dismantled and can be controlled by humans. They respond by constructing humans in the film as ghosts, then eliminating the existence of the ghostly human bodies through a reversal process.
My Want of You Partakes of Me further deepens exploration of relationships between humans and the environment, between body and creation. The directors understand literature, historical documents, medicine, and mythology as a “metabolic” narrative, a place for the body to encounter the external world. The film starts with an MRI scan, extending to digestion of food, absorption of language, and change of identity. The film title refers to others, and to a part of “you entering me,” revealing the human desire for blurred boundaries with others’ territories; the film itself deals with the factual existence and anxiety about this desire. Using film as a tool for world building, the directors reflect on how Western science organizes knowledge and controls the body, questioning the legitimacy of its structure.
Through sci-fi elements, VALIE EXPORT’s near 40-year-old film Invisible Adversaries illustrates the invasion of media, ideology, and the patriarchy on human thought. In the film, photographer Anna questions how many people have already been invaded by aliens called Hyksos. Anna breaks down film and audio design, questioning the reality of perception, and combines it with the direct-action art of feminist artists on the streets to respond to the control of war, urban design, and regulatory systems at the time.
Most works in this program do not emphasize technological advances or future scenery; they focus on how the human body interweaves and interpenetrates with the environment, memories, language, and non-human beings. As these women and queer directors’ response to the Anthropocene, these works pull sci-fi back from power struggle imaginations of frontier expansions or doomsday escape in Western films, turning toward the alienation and sensitive perception of the inner world.
KUO Ming-Jung
Programmer and producer. She served as Program Director of Taipei Film Festival (2014-2018) and Artistic Director of the Singapore International Film Festival (2019-2021). She was on the selection panel for Locarno Festival’s Open Doors (2019-2021) and the Taiwan International Human Rights Film Festival (2019-2022). In 2022, she joined Directors’ Fortnight as a consultant covering Southeast Asia and Taiwan, and founded Island X Pictures also in 2022, producing fiction and documentaries with Asian filmmakers.
