Other Europes

Finally, the chapter by Ada Beliz Özduran and Colleen Kennedy-Karpat, discusses Turkish film G.O.R.A: A Space Film (2024), starring Yılmaz. The authors contextualize the movie inside of an intertextual and parody framework in the Turkish film industry. G.O.R.A. directly refers to and builds on the intertextual history of the national film industry while incorporating signature elements of Yılmaz’s Hollywood-savvy, genre-driven comedy. The authors situate G.O.R.A. as the incontestable peak, if not the sole example of Turkish science fiction in the early twenty-first century.

The following section, “Gendered, Posthuman, and Non-Human Subjectivities” examines how European cinema addresses the reconfiguration of subjectivity that is a main topic in contemporary science fiction. The chapters explore subjectivity in many and complementary different ways. On the one hand, considering how body, biopolitics, gender, and otherness, becomes an essential focus to comprehend contemporary identities. On the other hand, considering how the philosophical and scientific developments and discourses (posthuman and transhuman) influences on cinematic representations of otherness, subjectivity and non-human selves in the context of science fiction. Débora Madrid analyses two European coproductions in the context of 1960s Spanish cinema, The Twelve-Handed Men of Mars and Mission Stardust. By focusing on the female characters, she shows how both films push the boundaries of what the Spanish censors allowed at the time when it came to nudity and female sexuality. She argues two reasons for that. On the one hand, these coproduced film projects demanded scripts that met the expectations and desires of a wider European audience, which required leaving behind some of the strict Catholic norms imposed by the Francoist regime. On the other hand, these are science fiction stories, which contributed to a more relaxed approach on the part of the censors, as the extraterrestrial settings were supposed to establish a wider gap between audiences and characters.

The chapter by María Gil Poisa, delves into two Swedish contemporary speculative fiction films that dive into the idea of the otherness struggling to survive in a world where humanity is a threat for them. In both films, The Unliving (2010), and Borders (2018), science is used to explain the nature of the otherness and to confront a menaced subalternity against a hegemonic majority. However, unlike in other genres, eventually normativity wins, and the otherness is, one more time, relegated to ostracism. Consequently, Poisa’s conclusion points out that the idea of normativity that capitalizes on otherness is present in these two genre films as a strategy to reinforce hegemony, creating mechanisms of exclusion and the perpetuation of the oppressed Other.

In the next essay, Dragoslav Momcilovic argues that Yugoslav and post-Yugoslav science fiction cinema is an expression of shifting socioeconomic, political, and cultural realities for a nation that collapsed in civil war in the 1990s and emerged as a series of successor states with uncertain futures. Momcilovic examines a group of films that reflect the Balkans’ posthuman turn and its engagements with post-war economic, political, military, and cultural realities. The author concludes that balancing difficult pasts and uncertain futures, Balkan science fiction and horror provide the region’s filmmakers with a distinct and globally ubiquitous artistic vocabulary through which to explore the forgotten, unresolved, and unspeakable violences of past decades, and to confront those pasts in ways that transform global tropes of technological and monstrous otherness into stories with vibrant and powerful connections to specific times, places, cultures, and languages.

María José Gutiérrez, in her text, approaches Eva (2011) from a gender perspective. Considering the two temporalities that involve the film (the seventies and the present in which the film was shot), she interrogates how the film speculates the role of women in the society of a near and transnational future. Drawing from Judith Butler and Lee Edelman’s theoretical concepts, in her essay the author argues that Eva, far from being the girl who faces the monsters of the past, as it was the case in the cinema of the seventies Spanish transition, she is the girl monster who haunts the future fears of society toward the present emancipated woman. Finally, Gutiérrez concludes that Eva is a female robot model that is closer to the traditional model of woman, which in twenty-first-century Spain still has traces of the conservative Francoist model, than to the feminist cyborg model proposed by Donna Haraway.

Julia A. Empey examines the troublesome politics of life extension and uncritical posthumanism in science fiction films. Through analyzing Cargo (2009) and Oxygen (2021), she investigates how the films critique posthumanist visions of class and gender. However, as Empey emphasized at the end, while in both films there is a strong ethical critique of technology and the dehumanization, in both female protagonists’ experience, there is no critical or ideological revaluation. In fact, they are dehumanized, and this is presented as something negative, but both films end with the women performing the essential elements of humanness: heterosexuality, supremacy over another planet, and the human placed at the top of the hierarchy.

Finally, Antonio Córdoba focuses on The Skin I Live In (2011) in which Almodóvar explores how the male protagonist chooses to use ground-breaking, futuristic technologies and inventions to do sadistic harm and maintain his position of power. Through sex-reassignment surgery and innovative transgenic bioengineering, Scientist Ledgard turns Vicente into Vera. Instead of looking for ways to work through his trauma, Ledgard crafts a female body that is haunted by his dead wife and daughter. Vera’s body is also an extension of Ledgard’s own self and his sense of loss and patriarchal will to control. Therefore, Córdova concludes that the only thing that the male protagonist can imagine is an impoverished future that is predicated on maintaining a depleted present haunted by the past.

The section “History and Dystopia” reads the films under study for political fears about historical developments in societies haunted by political trauma, genocide, past authoritarian/totalitarian regimes, social atomization, and economic precarity. In the next chapter, Daniele Comberiati focuses on the representations of the factory in the Italian cinema. With the alienation of the workers and their oppressive presence in the urban landscape, factories became a constant element both in the society and in the movies in the sixties. After identifying the corpus of Italian science fiction film that addresses the factory, Comberiati uses Suvin and Braidotti’s references to understand why precisely science fiction is used to represent the factory and what kind of novelty the use of this genre entails. As a conclusion, Comberiati emphasizes that Italian science fiction cinema used an original language to reimagine the genre, building sociological narrative systems, giving space to themes such as madness and alienation—central to Italian society at the time—and resorting to comedy and the grotesque to highlight the main themes. Thus, these films demonstrated how it is possible to produce an “alternative” science fiction cinema, which also serves as a precise and ironic analysis of society’s problems.