The case of Roscoe Arbuckle, following the death of actress Virginia Rappe in 1921, is the first of what will be called the great Hollywood scandals. The actor and Director Roscoe Arbuckle, at the time at the peak of his fame, is accused of the rape and death of the actress. The press for months is taking on the various facts and gives it such an impact that the American film industry decides to adopt codes of good conduct to moralize the profession and the production of films. Despite his acquittal, Roscoe Arbuckle is forbidden to work and this is the brutal end of his career.

A party that ends badly

For the Labor Day weekend, three friends, Roscoe Arbuckle, Lowell Sherman, and Fred Fischbach are organizing a party on the twelfth floor of the San Francisco Hotel San Francisco. In this period of Prohibition where the sale and transport of alcohol are forbidden, these meetings, which are pretexts for consumption, are frequent. The festivities take place in the suite 1220, the two adjoining rooms (1219 and 1221, Arbuckle and Frischback in the first and Sherman in the second) housing the guests. The three friends, escorted by two show-girl girlfriends, arrive from Los Angeles in Roscoe Arbuckle's custom Pierce-Arrow and settle into their suites on the afternoon of Saturday, September 3, 1921, for a three-day celebration.

Everyone agrees that a lot of alcohol is consumed during these three days. It is more difficult to know who participates and when.

There are two versions explaining the presence of Virginia Rappe at these celebrations on September 5th. The first is that Fred Fischbach meets fortuitously in the lobby of the hotel, Ira Fortlouis. He is accompanied by Virginia Rappe, Al Semnacher, his agent and Maude Delmont. Frischback invites them to join them. The second states that Roscoe Arbuckle knows Virginia Rappe and Ira Fortlouis and himself launches the invitation. This second version is contradicted by Arbuckle's statements at the trial.

All this world comes after 1220 around noon, quickly joined by Alice Blake and Zey Prevon, two showgirls, also acquainted with Fred Fischbach. Mae Taub, a friend of Roscoe Arbuckle whom he must accompany during the afternoon visit, picks up the latter and arrives around 1:30 pm.

According to a first version, around 2 pm, having drunk, Virginia Rappe feels bad (Her autopsy will show moreover that she suffers from a crisis of acute peritonitis followed by intestinal perforation, this inflammation is due to the bursting of her bladder attributed according to the experts either to the syphilis of which the young woman was suffering, or to an attempted abortion or forced and violent sex forced by Roscoe Arbuckle), leaves the suite 1220 and joins one of the adjoining rooms to rest. Roscoe Arbuckle, in turn, leaves after 3 pm to go change before leaving with Mae Taub. Roscoe Arbuckle claims to have found Virginia Rappe lying on the floor of her bathroom. She was obviously under the influence of alcohol and sick and he would have laid her on the bed, returning to the bathroom to change. It was coming out of the latter that he found the actress agitated and that he would have warned the other participants. According to the prosecution, it is Roscoe Arbuckle who allegedly dragged Virginia Rappe into her room with the intent to rape her. Twenty-five witnesses claim to have seen her follow her and that she seemed at first consenting for intercourse. She would later become "hysterical" and would have finally resisted Roscoe Arbuckle without being able to stop her from continuing the forced and violent sexual intercourse.

In the wake of the state of agitation of Virginia Rappe, the participants in the party are convinced that she suffers only from an excess of drink. She screams, pulls off her clothes and rolls to the ground, apparently suffering from severe abdominal pain. They try to calm her, make her take an icy bath, apply ice to her body. Finally, the management of the hotel is warned9, Virginia Rappe is driven to a neighboring room (1227) and the doctor of the hotel is called. The versions diverge to know who gives the alert. For the prosecution, it is at the request of Maude Delmont, worried to hear the cries of the victim through the door, for the defense it is Mae Taub who calls at the request of Arbuckle.

On Tuesday morning, Arbuckle, Fischbach, and Sherman return to Los Angeles by boat after boarding their car. Virginia Rappe stays at the hotel with Maude Delmont, consulting various doctors. She was finally taken to hospital11 on Thursday and died the following day, Friday, September 9, 1921.

The Characters

- Virginia Rappe

Virginia Rappe was born on September 18, 1895, in New York. Her mother from Chicago moved there when she was pregnant to flee her family and the scandal because her child is conceived out of wedlock and without a declared father. Virginia returns to Chicago when her mother dies in 1906. The young orphan begins an early modeling career.

She began in the movies in secondary roles and meets in 1919 Henry Lehrman, the producer of the film in which she turns and becomes engaged with him in 1920. Lehrman will rotate Virginia Rappe in the five films he produced with his company in 1920 and 1921.

During this trial, the earliness of the young teenager is often put forward to describe the personality of the latter, many abortions practiced as a teenager are supposed to explain his health problems and a life dissolute to light manners.

- Roscoe Arbuckle

Born in 1887, Roscoe Arbuckle is at the height of his glory when the scandal comes. A former vaudeville actor, singer and dancer, he debuted at the cinema in 1909. But it was at the Keystone Company directed by Mack Sennett that Roscoe Arbuckle gained notoriety as an actor in making burlesque comedies. Overweight, he embodies the character of "fatty", plump and resourceful boy, who quickly becomes, in terms of popularity, the equal of Charlot. Director of his own films in 1914, he created his own production company in 1917 and he embodies one of the most spectacular achievements of the film industry of that time.

In late 1919, he signed a one million dollar contract a year with Paramount Pictures to shoot feature films. With seven of them already out when the case breaks out, he managed to be the first actor of popular short films to reach the rank of the star of the rising Hollywood cinema alongside Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford or Charlie Chaplin.

Rich, beloved and famous, nothing seemed to predestine him to play a leading role in a scandal. His image of bonhomie was confused with that of the character he played and the actor had never made headlines.

- Maude Delmont

Maude Delmont, presented as the chaperone of Virginia Rappe even if she only knows it for a few days when the affair broke out, is a troubled person involved in cases of mores, extortion or blackmail and repeatedly condemned by American justice. The accusation is essentially based on his testimony. She changes the latter many times. It is a witness with morality so doubtful that the prosecutor does not call him to call at the bar. Her charge for bigamy at the time of the second trial will be the reason given by the prosecution for not bringing her to court.

The other protagonists

• Mattews Brady. This is the district prosecutor charged with the charge. He has often been criticized for his virulence. The latter intends to use advertising around the Arbuckle trials for his own political career.

• Fred Fischbach. It is a longtime friend and director of Roscoe Arbuckle met at the Keystone Company. Instigator and organizer of the weekend. After the affair, he takes the pseudonym of Fred Hibbard.

The Media Campaign

The Power of the Press in the United States

The American press is inseparable from the concept of the fourth power. The counterweight to the powers of the state (legislature, executive power, and judiciary) the power of the American press is often presented as the expression of the popular voice, a form of direct democracy framing representative democracy. In the Roscoe Arbuckle case, public opinion plays a leading role. The limits of such a counter-power are reached with the manipulation of opinion or the regrouping of the press in the hands of partisan interests. Similarly, lobbies, pressure groups, leagues of virtue and morals, religious powers over civil society are the direct consequences of such power of the press.

The history of the American press is intimately linked to this fourth power. From the nineteenth century appear the major press groups and their magnates Joseph Pulitzer. The power they wield over the US government's policy and executive is well established. A particular type of press is born in this context, which has been nicknamed The Yellow Journalism. More populist than popular, he focuses on the sensational of the event he reports, not hesitating to swell the line, flout privacy and take a lot of freedom with journalistic ethics.

The role of the tabloids in the Roscoe Arbuckle affair is unavoidable. William Randolph Hearst, originally from San Francisco, is the counterpart on the West Coast of the United States of Joseph Pulitzer. With the San Francisco Examiner, he is the orchestrator of the press campaign organized around the case and relayed throughout the country. The scandal press has the particularity of serving as a defaulter and repoussoir. More than favor the unhealthy curiosity of the reader, it also represents the means to highlight and denounce a behavior that denounces it in an ambiguous position where moralism and voyeurism mingle.

The first goal remaining of "selling paper", William Randolph Hearst will boast to Joseph M. Schenck to have made more prints with Roscoe Arbuckle, than in the case of Lusitania whose press campaign will lead to entry into the war of the United States in the first world war.

Proponents of the moralization of the film industry will rely on this press that it would be a caricature to reduce to the denunciation of the morals dissolute of Hollywood society. To take into account only the moral and ethical dimension in the attempt of the film profession to change its image without putting it in parallel with the colossal sums involved in the entertainment economy conceals the dimension of the true industry that has taken cinema booming.

Journalism and Cinema

As the film industry develops, the place of cinema and its stars in the American popular press is linked to the phenomenon of stratification. An association between the personality of the actor and the film, beyond the interpretation of a role in the service of work, eventually assimilating the latter to the main performer. We will see a film "of" Rudolph Valentino, obscuring the work of dozens of people. Even if stardom is not an invention of cinema, the extreme popularity of the cinema will amplify this confusion through the press.

Very early movie stars are going to be the best way to sell a movie and, very early, their privacy will be spread in the newspapers. Max Linder, Mary Pickford or Theda Bara also owe much to the press their notoriety and status. A star becomes the insurance of selling a film and downstream the possibility of producing it. The development of cinema in commercial activity brews huge amounts of money, the first consequence of which is the stellar cachet of the stars.

The display of wealth and social success in the newspapers defines these modern fairy tales. There are naturally mixed stories of hearts and episodes more intimate but just as publicity. It's a double-edged sword and it's not just "rose water" that makes "sell paper". The sulfurous reputation of theatrical actresses of the previous century naturally finds its development with the cinema. Close to the Roscoe Arbuckle affair, Olive Thomas' poisoning death or the dissolute life of her husband, Jack Pickford, hit the headlines.

Roscoe Arbuckle is the illustration of this phenomenon. Committed to $ 40 a week in 1913 to play in Mack Sennett's films, he increased his salary by a few months thanks to the success of his character Fatty. In 1917, it is $ 1,000 a day and an incentive to 25% of the profits that are proposed to him in the contract he signs with Joseph M. Schenck. In 1920, he was the first actor to sign a contract reaching the symbolic sum of $ 1,000,000 a year. Coming from a very modest background, he embodies this dream in the popular press where his lifestyle often appears. Her physique has so far preserved some manners and her marriage to Minta Durfee is a good facade. He is presented as a facetious good man, but the good nature of the character he embodies on the screen protects him.

The Arbuckle case and public opinion

The trials

On September 28, Judge Sylvain J. Lazarus, finding that the evidence against Roscoe Arbuckle is insufficient, turns the charge of homicide into manslaughter and Roscoe Arbuckle is released on 29th bail. He appears free at the hearing of the first trial which begins Monday, November 14, 1921.

The first trial

The charges against him are based on evidence emanating either from celebrities who or not participated in the party or from members of the police. None are conclusive and the statements of the police investigators amount to "Arbuckle fingerprints with the blood of the victim" on one of the doors of the room and are swept away by the testimony of the hotel staff who made cleaning between the day of the holiday and the inquiry. Some witnesses return to their statement, others disappear and the only main prosecution witness remains Maude Delmont. Its implications in stories of blackmail and extortion in previous cases discredit it. The medical experts quoted conclude that Virginia Rappe died as a result of a bladder rupture. Signs of acute peritonitis suggest that it is well before the party and according to medical experts, bladder rupture was not caused by an external source. The jury could not agree on its verdict (10 votes for acquittal and two votes for guilt) of December 4, 1921, the case must be retried.

The second trial

The second trial, which took place on January 9, 1922, gave a verdict opposite the first (ten votes for guilt and two for acquittal). It also ends with a blocked situation, lack of unanimity of the jury.

The third trial

The dissolute life of Virginia is exposed during the third trial and its peritonitis attributed to chronic cystitis, a degenerating condition with the ingestion of alcohol. The jurors of the third hearing give their verdict in six minutes, April 12, 1922. It is without appeal and accompanied by the following statement: "The acquittal is not enough for Roscoe Arbuckle. We believe that a great injustice has been committed. We also believe that it is our duty to give him this exemption, by virtue of the evidence, because there is not the slightest charge to be held against him, nor in any way to detain a crime. He was brave throughout the affair and told the witness a simple story that we all believed. What happened at the hotel is an unfortunate affair for which Arbuckle, as the evidence shows, was in no way responsible. We wish him every success and hope that the American people will pay full attention to the judgment of fourteen men and women who have sat for 31 days and concluded that Roscoe Arbuckle is completely innocent and free from blame. "

Roscoe Arbuckle is just fined $ 500 for violating the Volstead Act (alcohol consumption in Prohibition Time). He is further ruined by the three lawsuits.

The "lawsuit" of Hollywood

On April 18, 1922, Roscoe Arbuckle became the first actor to be blacklisted. William Hays states, "After consulting extensively with Mr. Nicholas Schenck, representing Mr. Joseph Schenck, the producers, and Mr. Adolph Zukor and Mr. Jesse L. Lasky of the Famous Players-Lasky Corporation, the distributors, at my request, canceled all screenings and all bookings of Arbuckle's films.

"WilliamHays is a Republican senator, Postmaster lorsqu'éclate the Arbuckle / Rappe case. President of the National Party Bureau from 1918 to 1921 and Campaign Director of United States President Warren G. Harding in 1920, he is heavily involved in American politics. In the case, he will often take a stand alongside the supporters of order and morality. He is actively involved in the creation of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA) which will try to give a new image of the film industry. It is a censorship committee responsible for overseeing the content of films in order to replace censorship committees specific to each state. Created in the wake of the Arbuckle / Rappe affair, it is a non-governmental organization that intends to show that the profession is able to "clean the house".

On January 14, 1922, William Hays announced his resignation from his ministerial position to take over the presidency of the MPPDA. Roscoe Arbuckle's ban is the first decision that explains (but does not justify) the rigidity and stubbornness of William Hays and the MPPDA to try to establish their credibility. It shows if it was necessary that it is the manners of the artists who are put in the pillory and that Roscoe Arbuckle serves as a scapegoat.

The need for "moralization" within the film industry is prior. Adolph Zukor enacted in 1920 a "list of imperative recommendations" and "the prohibition of unseemly situations, the triumph of virtue over vice, the assertion that a useless nude exhibition is dangerous". He fights to impose morality in the production of Paramount putting pressure on the people he leads. Above all, he is the employer of Roscoe Arbuckle and is at odds between the scandal and the image of his stars, the display of their alleged escapades in the press and his moralizing speech.

On the morning of February 2, 1922, the body of William Desmond Taylor was found shot in the back. Taylor is a popular actor and director also working for Paramount. The sensation press in which the "Arbuckle scandal" begins to run out of steam can once again ride on this news item. The murder is never solved and keeps the readers looking for months. Many of the many suspects are close to Paramount. Mary Miles Minter, the young star of the moment and mistress of Taylor, but especially Mabel Normand close friend of the victim whose name is closely associated with Roscoe Arbuckle. The MPPDA's decision comes as this second big Hollywood scandal hits the headlines and is another reason to explain the rigor and unfairness of Roscoe Arbuckle's ban.

Although William Hays officially lifted the ban on December 20, 1922, Roscoe Arbuckle is not allowed to play in movies for the next ten years.

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Film theorists have sought to develop concepts and to study cinema as an art. Derived from modern technology and being one of the symptoms and causes of this modernity, its principles, such as technique, editing, or shooting, have upset modes of representation in the figurative arts and literature. To form and understand each other as art, the cinema needed theories. In Matter and Memory, in 1896, the French philosopher Henri Bergson anticipated the development of the theory at a time when the cinema had just appeared as a visionary. He also expresses the need to reflect on the idea of ​​movement, and invents the terms "image-movement" and "image-time".

However, in 1907, in his essay L'Illusion cinématographique, taken from L'Évolution créatrice, he rejects cinema as an example of what he has in mind. Nevertheless, much later, in Cinema I and Cinema II, the philosopher Gilles Deleuze takes Matter and Memory as the basis of his own philosophy of cinema and re-examines Bergson's concepts by joining them to the semiotics of Charles Peirce.

It was in 1911 in The Birth of the Sixth Art that Ricciotto Canudo sketched out the first theories that rose up in the era of silence and focused on defining crucial elements. The works and innovations of the directors drained more reflections. Louis Delluc, with the idea of ​​photogeny, Germaine Dulac and Jean Epstein, who see the film as both a way of going beyond and meeting body and mind, are the main actors of a French avant-garde closely followed by German theories which, influenced by expressionism, turn more to the image. At the same time, there is the Gestalt, which was born between the nineteenth century and the twentieth century under the aegis of Ernst Mach.

On the Soviet side, theoreticians and cinematographers hold editing for the essence of cinema. The favorite theme of Sergei Eisenstein will be created in all its aspects, that is all that allows envisaging the creation of a "language" of image-concept and a general theory of the assembly, revealing one and the other identical laws of reality and thought. On his side, Dziga Vertov will be a mouthpiece of novelty and futurism. His theory, corresponding to the assembly of fragments with small units of meaning, wishes the destruction of the whole tradition to replace it by a "factory of the facts", radical conception of the cinema if it is of it. The "honestly narrative" American montage, put in theory by Pudovkin, will, however, prevail in world cinema.

The theory of formal cinema, led by Rudolf Arnheim, Béla Balázs, and Siegfried Kracauer, emphasizes the fact that cinema differs from reality, and that in this it is a real art. Lev Kuleshov and Paul Rotha also highlighted the difference between cinema and reality and support the idea that cinema should be considered as a form of art in its own right. After the Second World War, the French film critic and theorist André Bazin reacts against this approach of the cinema by explaining that the essence of the cinema resides in his ability to reproduce mechanically the reality and not in its difference compared to reality. Bazin turns more towards an ontological approach to cinema and thus shapes a theory of realistic cinema. The cinematographic image would pursue the objectivity of the photographic image whose power is to capture as the essence of a moment. This conception will be repeated several times and in different versions, as in A. Tarkovski's The Sealed Time or in combination with Gadamer's phenomenology in Dubost's The Pornographic Temptation. Against Bazin and his disciples, Jean Mitry develops the first theory of sign and meaning in cinema, without wanting to assimilate, even by analogy, the visual image and film structures with verbal language, as it will be the temptation of semiology. when, in the 1960s and 1970s, cinema theory invaded the academic world, importing concepts from established disciplines such as psychoanalysis, gender studies, anthropology, the theory of literature, semiotics and linguistics. The semiology of cinema will take various forms: psychoanalysis, Russian formalism, deconstructive philosophy, narratology, history, etc. Its importance lies in the "textual analysis", the search in detail of the operating structures of the films.

From the 1960s, there is a cleavage between the theory and practice of cinema. This desired autonomy will remain quite relative: when, with his "great syntagmatic narrative film", Christian Metz proposes, in 1966, to formalize the codes implicit in the functioning of the cinema, Jean-Luc Godard deconstructs such codes within her works. The 1980s will end a fertile era of theories. Then will be born other reflections, in particular, those oriented towards the narratology as well as a certain number of theories aiming at the rediscovery of the cinema of the first times. As such, the works of the Quebec theorist André Gaudreault and the American theoretician Tom Gunning are particularly exemplary.

During the 1990s, the digital revolution in image technologies has had various impacts in cinematographic theory. From a psychoanalytic point of view, after Jacques Lacan's notion of reality, Slavoj Žižek offered new aspects of the view that are extremely used in the analysis of contemporary cinema.

In modern cinema, the body is filmed at length before it is put into action, filmed as a body that resists. In some filmmakers, it is the brain that is staged. Through this movement, called mental cinema, we find extreme violence, always controlled by the brain. For example, the first films of Benoît Jacquot are strongly impregnated by this movement: the characters are folded on themselves, without clarification on their psychology. Jacquot will declare in 1990, about La Désenchantée: "I make films to be close to those who make the films: the actors. Sometimes young directors would like to erect actors as a sign of their world. I do not try to show my own world. I am more interested in working in the film world. It's stupid to say that the actor gets into the skin of his character. These are the characters who have the skin of the actor. Several other filmmakers, such as André Téchiné, Alain Resnais, Nanni Moretti, Takeshi Kitano and Tim Burton were influenced by the mental cinema.

The Desperate Housewives actress, like other prominent parents, wanted to give her daughter access to an elite U.S. university. She has now pleaded guilty in court, she faces a jail term.

Remorseful court appearance: In the high-college bribery scandal in the US, actress Felicity Huffman officially pleaded guilty on Monday. According to the notice from the public prosecutor's office in Boston, Massachusetts, a female judge is scheduled to announce the sentence on September 13. According to the will of the prosecution, the Desperate Housewives star is to receive at least four months in prison as well as a suspended sentence and serve a $20,000 fine.

Huffman, who has two daughters from her marriage to actor William H. Macy, had already admitted her guilt in April. She allegedly paid $15,000 in bribes to ensure her eldest daughter's responses were subsequently amended in the nationwide placement test SAT.

Accompanied by her brother, Huffman appeared in court on Monday, US magazine People reported. She had tearfully stood in front of the judge and again asserted that her daughter was unaware of the scam. With "deep regret and shame" for her actions, she would take full responsibility for her actions, Huffman had explained back in April.

The college bribery scandal had drawn wide circles in previous months. Among the dozens of defendants are actress Lori Loughlin from the sitcom "Full House" and her husband, fashion designer Mossimo Giannulli. They allegedly paid $500,000 to falsely pass on their two daughters as rowers and accommodate them through the sports team at USC in California.

The couple pleaded ' not guilty ' to charges of fraud and money laundering in April, with a trial now coming. In the event of a guilty verdict, longer prison sentences and sensitive fines are looming.

Festival which will take place from May 14th to 25th.

He will have the difficult task of succeeding the Australian actress Cate Blanchett: the Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu (The Revenant) will be the president of the jury of the next Cannes Film Festival. This 72nd edition will take place from May 14 to 25, 2019. The filmmaker is a regular on the Croisette since he had presented his first film, Amours asch, in 2000, On this occasion, he won the Grand Prix of the Week of criticism. He won the staging award in 2006 for Babel.

⋙ Birdman (Canal +): How was Alejandro González Iñárritu's film shot?

In a press release issued by the Festival, Alejandro González Iñárritu says he is honored with this designation: "From the beginning of my career, the Cannes Film Festival has been important to me, and I am honored and delighted to be back again this year, and immensely proud to preside over the Jury, the cinema flows through the veins of the planet and this Festival is the heart of it. With the jury, we will have the privilege of being the first spectators of the new films of our fellow filmmakers from all over the world. is a true pleasure and a great responsibility, that we will assume with passion and dedication. " The composition of its jury will be known in the coming weeks. As for the selected films, it will be necessary to wait until mid-April to discover the list

Sci-fi is a genre of films that are associated with fiction and scientific achievements and their possible implications for the future.

The foundation for the science-fiction genre was laid by literature: technology-loving authors such as Jules Verne and Wells expanded the travel and adventure literature of the 19th century with the science fiction component and significantly influenced the first science fiction films. Early on film pioneers had placed technical processes and their susceptibility at the center of their films, such as Louis Lumière and Ferdinand Zecca. Georges Méliès, who had already explored the subject in 1897 with Les Rayon's x-ray, created the Jules Verne-inspired film The Journey to the Moon in1902, which caused a worldwide sensation. James Searle Dawley turned in 1910 with Frankenstein the first film adaptation of the novel by Mary Shelley.

The first German SF film was The Tunnel by William Wauer from 1915; a utopia about a tunnel project between Europe and the USA. Another early German production was the six-part series Homunculus in 1916; shot by Otto Rippert, with a total length of over 400 minutes, which is only partially preserved. Other milestones of the early science fiction film were Holger-Madsen's The Sky Ship (1918), Yakov Protasanov's Aelita (1924) (after a science fiction novel by Alexei Tolstoy ) and Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927) and Woman in the Moon (1929) ). In 1936 Cosmic Journey was performed in the Soviet Union, which was created with the collaboration of Konstantin Ziolkowski; However, the film was sold for cultural-political reasons in the same year and performed again in the 1980s. In 1937, the film project began spacecraft 18, which was canceled due to the war.

The Rise of US Cinema 

The emergence of classic fantastic cinema was based on technical and political progress. The increase in productivity has produced energies focused on the conquest, discovery, and domination of "wild" lands. At the same time, the global economic crisis prevailed. Anxiety and nightmares took shape on the screen. As a result, so-called " mad scientist " films such as Frankenstein (1931) dominated. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931) or The Invisible (1933). The belief in progress, which ignores all concerns, presents itself in King Kong and the white woman (1933). The archetypes of science fiction, horror and fantasy were created at this time and influence the science fiction film until today.

Better than any "socially critical" film, these terrifying narratives represent the imagination of an America undergoing an acute anxiety neurosis. These films respond to the fears of the time and increase them into hysteria. They form a kind of expropriation ritual in which the spectators participate in order to free themselves from their worries about everyday life - work, money, health, maintenance. In the 1950s, the American science-fiction cinema boomed with many films that reflected these fears, but also the paranoia of the McCarthy era. A few years later the first color films were made. In Metaluna 4 does not answer, Fight of the Worlds or Alert in Space, the filmmakers use the new possibilities to show magnificent, imaginative films.

With the serials came fast and cheap sequential films for the Saturday morning performances on the screen. The Phantom Empire (1935) was the first series to feature clear science fiction elements. Then began the triumphant advance of comic film films, their superheroes formed an ideal base for adventure stories. It all started in 1936 with Flash Gordon'ssequels. Other series acted by Buck Rogers, Captain Marvel and led in 1948 to the "superheroes of all superheroes", the series to Superman. Only the spread of television led to the end of the series. Because the series was straightforward stories of the eternal struggle (and victory) of good versus evil, and an adaptation of comics popular with children, science fiction drew more and more children and opened up a new audience. This was not disturbed by the continuous succession of successful ideas, so there were only invisible followers like The Invisible Returns, The Invisible Woman, The Invisible Agent and The Invisible takes revenge. At the latest after films like Frankenstein meets the wolf people and the comedy Abbott and Costello meets Frankenstein became a crisis. Films that had responded to the outbreak of World War II and kept a mirror up to the world did not exist.

The 1960s and 1970s: the race into space 

In the 1960s, science fiction returned to the public eye. The race to the moon between the USSR and the USA dominated the news, cinematically processed u. a. in The First Journey to the Moon (GB 1964, Director: Nathan Juran ) and Countdown: Start to the Moon (USA 1968, Director: Robert Altman ). The technical progress had an impact. The SF no longer played on distant planets but had to have some credibility. Almost only the Italian SF cinema, which flourished in the 1960s, was represented with a mixture of horror and SF: Planet of the Vampires (Italy / Spain 1965, directed by Mario Bava ), Orion-3000 - space of horror ( Italy 1966, directed by Antonio Margheriti ), demons from space (Italy 1967, directed by Antonio Margheriti) and others. Instead, many films tackled the latent threat of nuclear war ( Dr. Strange or: How I Learned to Love the Bomb, Target Moscow, Seven Days in May ), which had become highly relevant after the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, the Cuban missile crisis, and Kennedy's death, The fantastic journey leads into the interior of the body and 2001: Odyssey in space into the inside of the mind. The comic adaptation Barbarella (France / Italy 1968, directed by Roger Vadim ) played with the emerging in the 1960s sexual vivacity.

After the landing on the moon in 1969, a hitherto popular topic in SF film had become uninteresting. Once again, reality had caught up with the SF film. At the same time, the crisis of the studio system came through completely: New Hollywood was born. Expensive space adventures are no longer interesting, only " Planet of the Apes " became a typical Hollywood product with its four sequels, a TV-Realserie and a cartoon series.

Clockwork Orange is a shocking dystopia about rape and brutality. Andromeda - Deadly Dust from Space accurately traces the work of scientists, and Solaris focuses on human psychology. Silent in space and Soylent Green addressed the ongoing environmental destruction. Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope changed that in 1977 and became a huge success.

The 1980s 

The SF films of the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan called the SDI Space Defense Space Star Wars, produced few truly innovative films. One of the exceptions is Blade Runner, which today is regarded as a milestone and as a tribute often stylistically and visually quoted in other films. The studios were often limited to continuations of known motifs. Action movies became Hollywood's most important money machine; That's how the action and horror series Predator and Alien came into being.

Most genre films were directed at a youthful audience that wanted and got effects and (cynical) humor. The films played on the Earth of the future, original space movies were rare. But they were science fiction movies in the true sense, the horror aspect came back 

A beginning tendency of the 1980er years is film series (continuations, less often also Prequels ). Starting with Star Wars (since 1977), these include, for example, the Star Trek films (from 1979), the Superman films (from 1978), the Terminator films (from 1984) and Back to the Future (1985, directed by Robert Zemeckis ) and his two sequels.

Films for an adult audience also emerged, though off the mainstream, but with serious disputes with issues that challenged the audience. The Day After, Letters of a Dead, Threads, The Rattlesnake, and the English Cartoon When the wind blows, the fictitious Third World War or the post-apocalyptic world was the subject of concern.

There was also Terry Gilliam, who made a film with Brazil, which dealt with known motifs of dystopia.

The 1990s 

The 1990s were dominated in SciFi mainly by blockbuster movies. With the advent of new trick techniques and realistic CGI effects, the genre has been given a new lease of life. Bold films like Independence Day (1996), Mars Attacks! (1996) or Men in Black (1997) present classic motifs of science fiction in a new guise, even partially parodying them. The trend towards sci-fi films for the whole family, triggered by Star Wars as early as the 1970s, gained widespread acceptance and is more the norm towards the end of the decade.

Due to the high prevalence of computers and the increasing digitization in the population, the representation and explanations of the sci-fi elements adapted more closely to real role models. For example, the film Jurassic Park uses scientifically accurate derivations to explain dinosaurs in our time. Ghost in the Shell (1995) and Matrix (1999) show a representation of artificial intelligence with a high relation to our computerized reality.

The genre is becoming increasingly action-heavy. Films such as Terminator 2 (1991), The Fifth Element (1997) or Lost in Space (1998) provide easy-to-digest sci-fi content in a variety of action movies for a broad audience.

There is a tendency in the filming of classic sci-fi literature by important authors. Total Recall (1990) and Starship Troopers (1997) are among the most important films. Also, video game adaptations such as Wing Commander (1999) appeared in SciFi in the 1990s for the first time.