This year’s Dundee’s Festival of the Future featured a multi-disciplinary panel of University colleagues, following a special public screening of Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival (2016) on Wednesday, 9 October, at Dundee Contemporary Arts.
Arrival is one of the most unusual science fiction films of this century so far, in terms of its depiction of ‘first contact’ through cinematic temporality and questions of non-human consciousness and language. Starring Amy Adams as professor of linguistics, Louise Banks, Arrival has a clear theme of the nature of language, and the threat of human (self-)extinction. But more prominently, it’s a story about how communication happens under the most difficult and potentially dangerous circumstances, the nature of human fear and trust, and the way language shapes thought and understanding of the world.
The event was organised by festival director, Emma Preston, and chaired by Dr Senga Robertson from Dundee’s School of Health Sciences. The other speakers were Dr Susan Mains from Geography and Environmental Science, Dr Hannah Loret, also from Health Sciences, and Dr Keith Williams from English and Film
The speakers discussed the following themes, drawing on their various disciplinary backgrounds and expertise, before taking very lively Q&A from an audience which filled the smaller of the two DCA screens:
• What are your initial impressions of the film and the message it is trying to convey?
• Have you been able to communicate with someone without speaking a word? If so, how did you convey your message?
• Why is it difficult to communicate with those that are different from ourselves, such as those from a different culture or who speak a different language?
• The film’s central question is: ‘If you could see your whole life from start to finish, would you change things?’ Would you?
• Would you change things if you knew some of your joys in life that would occur would also be lost?
• Why does the ‘unknown’ scare us so much?
• Would you say that Arrival is less about communicating with the aliens than with each other – internationally but also individually
One of the languages considered was cinema itself. As Arrival exemplifies, this can show a space-time fluidity that shuffles past, present and future, moving backwards and forwards between them. It seems to give viewers a kind of vicarious experience of the protagonist’s consciousness under alien influence, as she begins to decipher their language and experiences paradoxical ‘memories of the future.’ The theme and form of the film seem very reflexive in this sense.
Cinema has often been thought of as a kind of visual ‘time machine’. Arguably, modern science fiction and cinema were born in the same year from a shared set of cultural and technological factors. H.G. Wells’s novel The Time Machine was first published in 1895, the same year the Lumière brother invented their cinematograph. Their nearest British rival, Robert William Paul even approached Wells after reading it. Paul proposed a joint patent for a kind of simulator that would give spectators a kind of virtual ride into the future and past by using moving image projection technology.
First Contact of a Very Different Kind: HG Wells’s Martians in 1953
Keith Williams also features in the latest episode of Ayesha Khan’s award-winning podcast series on science fiction film adaptations. The series has won the 2024 Ear Worthy Indie Podcast Award for Film History. This episode focused on Byron Haskin’s 1953 ‘Cold War’ adaptation of Wells’s The War of the Worlds, a text which seems to be remediated at critical moments in world history since first serialised in 1897:
Listen | Every Sci-Fi Film (everyscififilm.com)
Or, if you prefer it with visuals:
The War of the Worlds: HG Wells’ Martians in 1953 (youtube.com)