Alfredo Suppia - Böcker

In Red Alert: Marxist Approaches to Science Fiction Cinema, editors Ewa Mazierska and Alfredo Suppia argue that Marxist philosophy, science fiction, and filmshare important connections concerning imaginings of the future. Contributors look at themes across a wide variety of films, including many international co-productions to explore individualism versus collectivism, technological obstacles to travel through time and space, the accumulation of capital and colonization, struggles of oppressed groups, the dangers of false ideologies, and the extension of the concept of labor due to technological advances.Red Alert considers a wide swath of contemporary international films, from the rarely studied to mainstream science fiction blockbusters like The Matrix. Contributors explore early Czechoslovak science fiction, the Polish-Estonian co-productions of director Marek Piestrak, and science fiction elements in 1970s American blaxploitation films. The collection includes analyses of recent films like Transfer (Damir Lukacevic), Avalon (Mamoru Oshii), Gamer (Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor), and District 9 and Elysium (Neill Blomkamp), along with more obscure films like Alex Rivera’s materialist science fiction works and the Latin American zombie films of Pablo Parés, Hernán Sáez, and Alejandro Brugués. Contributors show that the ambivalence and inner contradictions highlighted by the films illustrate both the richness of Marx’s legacy and the heterogeneity and complexity of the science fiction genre.This collection challenges the perception that science fiction cinema is a Western or specifically American genre, showing that a broader, transnational approach is necessary to fully understand its scope. Scholars and students of film, sciencefiction, and Marxist culture will enjoy Red Alert.

The first book-length account of Brazilian science fiction cinema.This book offers a pioneering critical history of Brazilian science fiction (SF) cinema, from its first appearances in the mid-twentieth century to the present. Though frequently overlooked by scholars, SF cinema from the Global South has reinvigorated the genre in recent decades. In this comprehensive study-the first of its kind in either English or Portuguese-Alfredo Suppia draws out the unique features and universal resonance of SF film in Brazil, a country that has fittingly been called "the land of the future." In Suppia's analysis, Brazilian SF stems from and responds to a long history of inequality in which everyday reality has often resembled a movie-like dystopia. Analyzing both short and feature films in the context of social, political, and economic transformations, Suppia rethinks SF film in general from a southern perspective.