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The British Film Institute is showing a season of films and TV programmes celebrating sci-fi. Rakesh Ramchurn explores how the genre's set design has anticipated the future and subverted the familiar
Whether it's Sigourney Weaver tussling with acid-spitting aliens, or travelling at 'warp speed' with the Starship Enterprise, some of cinema's most memorable moments come from science-fiction films that take us to exciting new worlds.
And crucial to the success of a sci-fi flick is its set design; the spaceships, dystopian cities and alien landscapes which force us to suspend belief.
The crux of the genre was described by sci-fi theorist Darko Suvin as a 'cognitive estrangement', which took viewers out of the everyday and forced them to experience the world as strange and disjointed. But how do filmmakers and set designers create these disjointed worlds?Metropolis (Fritz Lang, 1927)
One of the earliest sci-fi films is Metropolis, directed by Fritz Lang and released in 1927. Despite coming from the era of silent film, its vision is still jarring today, relating the story of a class of workers who toil in the netherworld while the elite enjoy gardens at the tops of skyscrapers.
Lang was heavily influenced by a trip to the United States in 1924, and although tall buildings may barely raise an eyebrow today, in the early 20th century, for an artist travelling from the Old World to the New, Manhattan Island with its burgeoning towerscape was a glimpse of the future, and Lang brought this experience to his film.Metropolis (Fritz Lang, 1927)
The most famous still images from the movie show towering buildings dwarfing a street swarming with automobiles (the idea of mass car-ownership was also a long way off in the 1920s). Aeroplanes weave between the skyscrapers, and flyovers crisscross the scene, carrying yet more cars and trains apparently hundreds of feet above the ground. Note how these flyovers have little support with no signs of suspension. As Manhattan was showing, the future was a place where the architecturally impossible was slowly becoming real.
Metropolis was a big influence on another classic of urban dystopian cinema, Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (1982). The film sees Harrison Ford playing Rick Deckard, who pounds the dark, rain-strewn streets of a future Los Angeles to kill...