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The author presents the thesis that fantastic literature and film, especially in the science fiction variant, is a privileged form of expression in posthumanist discourse. The themes, motifs and protagonists of science fiction are invoked in various contexts by Donna J. Haraway, Rosi Braidotti, Luciana Parisi, and Pramod K. Nayar. The author analyzes various areas of the involvement and usage of science fiction in posthumanist discourse: on the ontological, axiological and epistemological levels.

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The aim of this text is to analyze the cyborg motif in mainstream American science fiction films, as represented by the Terminator and RoboCop film series. The cyborg characters presented in these films are focused mainly on violence and destruction, which emphasizes the technophobic attitude of the culture within which these films were made. The only redemption of their otherness is showing their humanity. For a cyborg, its technological provenance is a burden and results in its sense of guilt. In this manner, American science fiction films support anthropocentrism and the conservative status quo.

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Drawing upon classic works on Kubrick’s 2001, the author ponders various strategies of interpretation which have been adopted to decipher the film’s discourse. The title category of historiosophy indicates one of the possible interpretational paths: the one associated with the Nietzschean notion of humankind stuck in a liminal stage between an animal and the overman. The author claims that such an understanding was typical of the late 1960s, and he pursues his argument with a close analysis of several sequences from the film, focusing on the formal devices which present the human protagonists as weak and lackluster, while the animal, the technological and the extraterrestrial characters are depicted as vital and irrepressible.

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Czechoslovakian film fantasy has its own canon comprised of various works, the successes of which were recorded by press industries around the world. They picked up various threads, but the most interesting one seems to be the theme of time travel, as represented by three films: A Journey to the Beginning of Time (1955), I Killed Einstein, Gentlemen (1969) and Tomorrow I’ll Wake Up and Scald Myself with Tea (1977). They were produced in different production conditions and placed in different genre assumptions, and they referred to the tradition of science fiction developed by popular literature in different ways. The text tries to define their status as part of the achievements of national cinematography, indicate structural components, and briefly discuss their reception, both critical and audience.

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The East German-Polish co-production The Silent Star (1960, Kurt Maetzig) belongs to the group of early postwar Eastern European science fiction films which still remain barely examined by film and genre historians. The article summarizes the existing research on the film and investigates not only the specific formal character of Maetzig’s unprecedented project, but also the numerous ideological and political motivations which stood behind it.

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The article is devoted to the Polish reception of science-fiction cinema; the statements of film critics from 1956–1965 were analysed. During this period, science fiction, previously absent from the screens of Polish cinemas for ideological and censorship reasons, returned to the repertoire and became the subject of press discussions and reviews. The analysis of articles devoted to this genre and published at the time allows reconstruction of the cultural context in which science-fiction productions operated. The article consists of three main parts. In the first of these, the author describes which science fiction films were present in Polish cinemas at the turn of the 1950s and 1960s. In the second part, he analyses press statements devoted to the history and aesthetics of the genre. The subject under consideration in the third part is the reception of two productions, which at the time enjoyed the greatest interest from contemporary critics: Godzilla (Gojira, 1954, dir. Ishirō Honda) and The Silent Star (Der schweigende Stern 1960, dir. Kurt Maetzig).

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David Avidan’s Message from the Future (1981) is one of few Israeli science fiction films ever made. This ambitious project of the well-known avant-garde poet has been forgotten for many years, as a result of a financial and artistic failure of the movie. The paper shows Avidan’s doomed film as an interesting cultural text that can be read as the director’s commentary on the Israeli reality of his time. Contrary to the artist’s claims about the global ambitions of the picture, Message from the Future is immersed in the local, exploring it under the guise of narrative structures borrowed from Hollywood. The text analyzes a precise deconstruction of the plot patterns characteristic for the classic American SF films from the 1950s, which Avidan adjusted to the Israeli sociopolitical landscape at the turn of the seventies and eighties.

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The article focuses on pointing out the functions of using animation technique and elements of the science fiction genre in Ari Folman’s The Congress from 2013. The film, which is loosely based on the short story The Futurological Congress by Stanisław Lem, balances on the edge of various genres, using the techniques of both live action film and computer animation. Folman proposes a glamorous, colorful vision of an (anti)utopian future, in which pharmacologically-modified cyborg-people participate in a collective hallucination, which is an alternative reality to the post-apocalyptic real world. The director makes several significant changes to the original, thanks to which he introduces a universal message and asks questions which seem far more relevant in the context of both contemporary culture and the environmental crisis that can no longer be ignored (although the issue of an impending natural disaster was also important in Lem’s works).

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The subject of the analysis in this article are three films by Bong Joon-ho: The Host (2006), Snowpiercer (2013) and Okja (2017), considered from the posthumanist perspective. A starting point is Donna Haraway’s suggestion that science-fiction stories should be treated as a tool for speculative thinking. Then, I point to the way the Korean film director demonstrates his critical reflection on the effects of climate change, deepening economic inequalities, the impact of global capitalism and the biopolitical model of the governance. The main aim is to seek out the possible strategies of resistance which enable humans to change their attitude to other species (Okja) and to ask a question about the scope of human freedom, the effects of our interference in the functioning of the biosphere (Snowpiercer) and the results of genetic modifications of animals.

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This paper examines the various ways in which contemporary Latin American science fiction films contest the neocolonial and neoliberal narratives, dominant in the region since the 20th century. I identify and examine strategies that filmmakers employ to challenge the common understanding of such notions as time, modernity and technological progress. I outline the visions of dystopias presented in the examined films, while also analyzing the counter-narratives introduced by filmmakers, which are mostly focused on creating a new, hybrid identity for a future citizen.

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The essay aims to reveal the role of music in the movie Interstellar by Christopher Nolan and its significance in creating an artistic message that relates to the love myths characteristic of European culture and art. The orientation point is the Tristanic myth and the project of musical dramaturgy by Richard Wagner, the founder of the concept of music being the significant layer in a Gesamtkunstwerk, a synthesis of the arts, which strongly inspires i.a. cinema. The article ponders possible messages to be decoded from the music in Nolan’s movie: as a “form of a lover’s discourse” (R. Barthes), “significant form” (Suzanne K. Langer), “symbolic form” (E. Cassirer), responsible for shaping the ambience that constitutes an inherent structural part of the movie in the metaphysical cinema genre. The musical solutions applied by Hans Zimmer in the soundtrack to Nolan’s movie do more than merely imply inspiration from Wagner. They also allow for recognition of the polyphonic way of constructing formal and thematic relations between musical themes and the verbal-visual layer of the movie. This refined artistic project aims at a subtly directed confrontation with the nihilistic picture of love that is representative of melancholic-pessimistic images of the condition of human relationships in the modern culture. The analysed main musical theme, called the “à rebours chord” (i.e. anti-Tristan chord), turns out to be an overt musical manifestation of such a counterpunch and becomes a starting point to telling a story that refers to the concept of love which assumes taking action and fighting for the good of your loved ones, as well as the concept of Caritas and unconditional love. The way that the music and sound of the movie are orchestrated is therefore tightly coupled with its semantic and symbolic message, which allows for perceiving the music as a specific “libration point” of the movie structure. Its function might also be interpreted as a semantic attribute of “a spiritual intelligence”, referring to that which is binding and crucial for the axiological and metaphysical message of the movie.

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The article shows the growing interest of science fiction cinema in the human brain and related concepts, such as mind or consciousness. Nowadays, when distant space travel seems unreachable, artists find the exploration potential of the brain very promising. Thus, the main thesis of this analysis says that the brain has become for science fiction cinema the new universe. An excellent example of this paradigm shift is Inception (dir. Christopher Nolan, 2010). In the movie, the mind is depicted as a physical and accessible place, where we can find a lot of mysteries to solve. The characters travel to the deepest parts of subconsciousness because the processes inside the brain are the key to understanding and changing the real world. The article also shows how the director uses the achievements of science fiction cinema and, at the same time, that he postulates a new way of considering the issues relevant to modern neuroscience.

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The article deals with the narrative structure of Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival. Using the concept of a skeptical viewer as a starting point, the author follows the processes of unveiling meanings, both when it comes to the understanding of the plot of the story, as well as the senses and morals stemming out of it. The viewer’s activity appears to be engaged with the activity of a character who is determined to discover the generic science fiction mystery, i.e. to learn the secret of the aliens’ language. The language, in turn, leads to revealing the time reliances in the film, as well as to formulating the thesis on a specific kind of storytelling: not as a “narrative about time,” but rather a “narrative by time.”

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The article reflects on how characters with the features of the mythological Cassandra function in science fiction films. Such references are part of the rich tradition of building fictional depictions of the near or distant future on the foundation of mythical stories. The study aimed to examine the considerable and complex meaning which Cassandra conveys through the ages and to determine its usefulness in constructing pop culture ideas about the current condition of humanity. In contemporary fiction, Cassandra is brought to the fore more often than in ancient sources, and her fullest portrait is drawn in those films that both consider her a figure of the powerlessness of the prophets and take into account her personal drama. In Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) by James Cameron, 12 Monkeys (1995) by Terry Gilliam, Minority Report (2002) by Steven Spielberg, and Arrival (2016) by Denis Villeneuve, the figure of Cassandra is examined through her prophetic gift, the alleged madness of the seer and the fearfulness of the prophetism itself.

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Prace w oryginalnej (kolorowej) wersji dostępne są pod adresem: https://www.behance.net/gallery/68541945/chaos

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In this text, I analyze Krzysztof Ptak’s contribution to such films as Kornblumenblau and Cynga by Leszek Wosiewicz, and 300 miles to heaven by Maciej Dejczera. These films belong to a time that can be characterized as a period of “hot times”, when Krzysztof Ptak was interested in using cinematographic methods to the limits of their possibilities. As far as the history of Polish cinema is concerned, it was then that Polish directors were looking for a new language to talk about the Polish past. Wosiewicz and Dejczer avoided the accusation of “americanization” of Polish cinema, which was charged to Władysław Pasikowski. This may be because Krzysztof Ptak was the cinematographer of their films.

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This study investigates how the directors of two selected case study films criticise the real-life remnants of patriarchy in the family sphere, in nominally gender-equal Yugoslavia. I argue that they do this by transposing their stories from socialist Yugoslavia to the pre-socialist times: during Ottoman rule and monarchist Yugoslavia. The selected period films Breza/The Birch Tree (Ante Babaja, 1967, Yugoslavia) and Roj/The Beehive aka The Swarm (Miodrag ‘Mića’ Popović, 1966, Yugoslavia), both belonging to the Yugoslav novi film (New Film) movement (1961-1972), refract the workings of the vestiges of patriarchy in a family domain of Yugoslav socialist society. In these two costume dramas, patriarchy is portrayed to its fullest extent, due to their stories being set in the past, ostensibly unrelated to contemporary Yugoslav society and thus uninhibited by the drive to cater to the official discourse of female emancipation.

Applying a critical film feminist perspective, by formal analysis via close readings of these two selected films, this article examines the iconography linked to fictional depictions of heroines and delves into the representation of victimisation of women. I investigate whether the depiction of the female sorceress(es) embody the primitiveness, ignorance, and/or poverty of economically disadvantaged and historically oppressed pre-socialist village. In order to peruse not only the individual portrayal of female protagonists but the dynamics of their interaction, the Bechdel test is applied and complemented with concepts such as the ‘reversed masquerade’ and ‘cryptomatriarchy’, which sheds light on the relationship between women and the presence or absence of female solidarity.

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The article offers a broad overview of Nam-June Paik’s ideas of the expansion of video arts interpreted in the light of Zen Buddhism. His works recognized as the most significant examples of his marriage between the art theory and practice are marked by a thought-provoking vision of participatory culture, communicated in-between the networks in the post-industrial society. Our purpose is to reexamine his attitude to TV culture in the oscillation between Western and Eastern gaze considered in connection to the problems of emptiness and meditation drawn from Zen religious beliefs. In discussing his installations there is special stress to reconstruct his inner-insight into the subject of seeing and watching inscribed in a closed-circuit of the communication network.

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The paper aims to outline features of video games’ sounds. In order to do that, the author presents the main thesis of ludomusicology and a theory of film music. The first part of the paper deals with a brief introduction concerning the characteristic of two important aspects of video games’ sounds: reactive and anticipating sounds. In the second part of the paper, the author explores the issue of facultative dialogues and adaptive sounds, as well as diegetic and non-diegetic sources of sound. The author examines the hypothesis that using sounds in video games determines gameplay and impacts players immersion.

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The article aims to analyse the phenomenon of a Norwegian Internet-TV show for teenage audiences, Skam (2015–2017). The transmedia storytelling used in this production resulted in unforeseen international acclaim, subsequently leading to the creation of local remakes of the series. The article will outline the main issues that the show has dealt with, as well as the immersion-building narrative solutions used by the creators. Moreover, it will discuss Skam’s reception by Norwegian and international audiences, and suggest potential directions for the future development of this format.

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This article is an attempt to consider superhero movies as a developing genre of popular cinema. The theory is based on Rick Altman’s “Semantic/Syntactic/Pragmatic” approach to genre. It tries to capture features of superhero blockbusters and their main themes – the most distinctive trait of this genre, according to the author of the text, is supposed to be the relationship between an individual, their “power” and society. The text is both an extension of and a counter-proposal to conclusions made by Tomasz Żaglewski in Kinowe uniwersum superbohaterów.

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The article comprises a study of the creative work of the Polish director Radosław Piwowarski, represented by his most characteristic films. The author points out the merger of stylized realism and of the nostalgic (or to be more precise – the realism stylized by means of nostalgia) as constitutive for the film style of this film artist. As a result of film analyses, the narrative structures of Piwowarski’s films appear to be memory structures, as they re-create the reality remembered by the filmmaker, who usually chooses the topos of a trip down memory lane to express his personal and subjective point of view. The film’s story becomes the image of the subjective reality, since it is a product of personal memory, consciousness and imagination. Piwowarski refers to the motif of the Valley of Childhood and Youth, vivid and active in the Polish literature and cinema, as an universum closed up in the past and lost forever, which, however, is accessible through the activity of recalling. The director, by the act of re-creation of a world personally remembered, actualizes the collective memory and therefore creates a community of memory with viewers of his films. The screen image of the past reality therefore gains double reliability – as a personal confession and as a record of the past; in consequence, we achieve the esthetical category of realism of memory.