“Los Angeles. November, 2019. Industrial smokestacks belch fire into a polluted atmosphere and aircraft glide through the haze. Architectural curiosities of the city, the Bradbury Building of 1893 and the Ennis-Brown house of 1924, are engulfed by megalithic 21st century structures. Rising from the generic mass of this megalopolis, the twin pyramids of the Tyrell Corporation emulate the pyramids of ancient Egypt. There are Arabian bazaars and Mayan interiors decorated with Bonsai trees, while the populace wear twentieth-century fashions. This civilisation is obsessed with the past. Like the buildings devoured by corrosive rain or obliterated by retrofitting, reality is collapsing as geography and history are swallowed up by the cultural schizophrenia. The presence of energy cannot hide the entropy: bright lights burn in an eternal night. This is a dreamscape where everything is ending and the spectacle of disintegration is rendered in intricate detail. The world is at once realistic and unreal in Blade Runner.

...Eldon Tyrell declares his creations to be 'more human than human', but the perfect simulacra are not without imperfections. Lacking the memories that are so necessary for the construction of self, the Nexus-6 Replicants are afflicted by an identity crisis. This crisis has been resolved in Rachel by simulating history, implanting memories to fabricate a past for her. The Tyrell Corporation has constructed her identity as it has engineered her body. Tyrell describes the process as gifting the past, unaware of the implications for humanity: Rachel is a simulation so perfect that it has made suspect the reality it simulates. At the core of the film is this identity crisis – this reality crisis... ”

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“Alien is a film that, from its very inception, was indebted to the entire history of science fiction monster-movies and pulp science fiction stories that had inspired it. The story is plainly derivative – elements from It! The Terror From Beyond Space, Forbidden Planet and The Thing From Another World appear throughout the film. Before it was exploited in the cinema, the idea of humans discovering extra-terrestrial life was already one of the most common in science fiction writing, and the theme of several seminal works. H. G. Wells had shocked readers with the possibility of Earth being invaded by aliens in The War of The Worlds, A. E. Van Vogt had charted the voyage of a deep space survey ship that discovers a derelict and haunted alien relic in The Voyage of The Space Beagle, and Robert Heinlein had imagined an intergalactic battle for supremacy against an alien species in Starship Troopers.

Says writer Dan O'Bannon "A lot of people speculated as to where I stole it from... the truth is I stole it from everywhere." In fact the speculation was fierce even before the release of the film, as journals Cinefantastique and American Film criticised it for its derivative nature. I would argue that these criticisms have missed the point. Alien is not just another sci-fi monster movie in the tradition of so many before it; this is a text that understands and knowingly employs the conventions of the films it imitates. The catalogue of story elements plundered from so many sources made the film into an amalgam of science fiction narratives and archetypes, evoking particularly the American science fiction cinema of the space race years (1950-1970). "There's a lifetime of movie-going and story reading in Alien", agrees O'Bannon. What is distinctive about Alien is the way its clichéd alien encounter narrative is destabilized by a fusion of provocative themes: high technology and human sexuality.... ”

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“The 'new wave' in science fiction, a collective description for works displaying the new sensibilities and aesthetic that emerged in the genre during the 1980s, was a time of new directions among authors and critics alike. Among the critics, Donna Haraway would introduce some of the most revolutionary and influential alternative thinking with 'A Manifesto for Cyborgs'. In it, she argued that because the figure of the cyborg destroys the traditional Judeo-Christian association of Woman / Nature, it could free women from the gender-constraints imposed by contemporary society... She discusses the new opportunities for disintegration and reconstitution, modification and duplication offered by the technologies of the post-industrial information society, seeking to apply these processes to the human body. Her vision of a cyborg future imagines the disintegration of gender boundaries and the reconstitution of the body as an organic machine. She describes this vision of the future as a post-gender utopia.

Likewise, the Cyberpunk genre has prophesised the disintegration of internal and external boundaries. William Gibson's cyberspace is a world of data populated by computer systems, intelligent viruses, interactive personality recordings and God-like artificial intelligences. When humans "jack in" to cyberspace, their minds reach out to a world beyond, escaping the heavy flesh of their bodies to join the dataflow and roam the network. Every human who jacks in has immediately transformed into a cyborg. This hyperactive information society is a world of flux, in cyberspace and in real life, a world where nothing is certain and everything can be altered, even the human body. Flesh and bone have become just as malleable as data. The individual components of the body can be replaced or upgraded by surgical procedure, just like the components of any other machine... ”

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“By the 1870s cameras and printing presses were being used to disseminate and to discover scientific knowledge that could not be attained any other way. Pioneering motion studies, such as Eadweard Muybridge's Palo Alto horse sequences were sealing the reputation of the camera as an instrument that operated without inflection. The photograph was thought to be the visual analogue of the written factual record ("the camera never lies"). However John Taylor observes in his examination of 1930s documentary realism that this is a common misconception. "Representation is always problematic, no less in photography than in language, film, sculpture or painting. And the fundamental quality of any representation is that it is constructed..."

In his analysis of Sunless, Jon Kear observes that "for Marker, it is an ethical imperative of representation that it declare its means." From the first sequence this is at work. We watch serene silent footage of three children walking in an Icelandic landscape, which has the "artless simplicity and intimacy" of a home movie, after which a length of black leader runs. "He said that it was the image of happiness, and also that he had tried several times to link it to other images, but it never worked" says the narrator, as the black leader is interrupted by acquired footage of an American war plane descending into an aircraft carrier, creating a skilfully constructed association (contrary to the narrator's assertion) between the innocence of childhood and the horror of war that entirely alters our perception of the images. The narrator continues "If they don't see happiness in the picture, at least they'll see the black." Of course, Marker knows that we perceive a lot more than that.”

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