Science Fiction Against the Margins Film Series
UCLA Film & Television Archive
part of
PST: Art & Science Collide
Afrofuturism Film Screenings: “H-E-L-L-O,” “Planet X,” and
“The Last Angeles of History/ Space is the Place”
October 4, 2024 – 7:30 p.m.
Billy Wilder Theater, Hammer Museum
Tickets are free, no RSVP required
Box office opens at 6:30 p.m.
followed by a discussion with
Cauleen Smith, director and professor of art, UCLA School of the Arts & Architecture
and
Shelleen Greene, associate professor; UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television.
H-E-L-L-O (U.S., 2014)
Internationally acclaimed filmmaker, multimedia artist and UCLA Professor Cauleen Smith collaborated with avant-garde jazz guitarist Carl LeBlanc to convene the ensemble of New Orleans musicians who perform in this evocative summoning of creative energies. In 2014, at historic sites around the city, local musicians play the iconic five-tone motif from Close Encounters of the Third Kind on a variety of instruments. As the refrain repeats from scene to scene, Smith transforms a fictional greeting to aliens into a resonant assuagement of the alienation experienced by those residents who saw recovery give way to gentrification in the long wake of Hurricane Katrina.—Paul Malcolm
Planet X (U.S., 2006)
Pioneering media artist Ulysses Jenkins seized on the possibilities of video production technologies in the late 1970s to challenge the white supremacy behind representations of Black people and Blackness across mainstream media. In Planet X, Jenkins mobilizes still images, video effects, local news segments and Sun Ra’s interstellar prophesying in voiceover to rework apocalyptic myths of a mysterious planet-killer meteor. Telescoping across the vast reaches of space down to a few city blocks in New Orleans where human tragedy plays out in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Planet X projects a cosmic vision of Black destiny forged through catastrophe and salvation.—Paul Malcolm
The Last Angel of History/ Space is the Place (Germany/U.K., 1996)
An experimental documentary on the roots of Afrofuturism featuring interviews with some of its key architects, The Last Angel of History also plays like a radical transmission from beyond the stars. Director John Akomfrah, Ghanaian British artist, filmmaker and co-founder of the influential Black Audio Film Collective, evokes the myth of blues guitarist Robert Johnson to frame his exploration of art as a technology for social change. His preeminent evidence is Afrofuturism as conceived and practiced by musicians (Derrick May, George Clinton), novelists (Octavia Butler, Ishmael Reed) and critics (Greg Tate, Kodwo Eshun).—Paul Malcolm
Watch trailers 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