SCIENCE-FICTION BETWEEN LETTER AND IMAGE: CONCERNING SOME PROBLEMS OF GENRE WRITING IN LITERATURE AND FILM

Science-fiction writing seems to be considerably less respectable than science-fiction film, but their role in the general cultural canon is actually more complex than it seems at first glance. Many of the SF cinema classics (Lang's Metropolis, Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey and even Tarkovski's Solaris and Truffaut's Fahrenheit) fare much better in the cinematic canon than the literary works they are based on do in the literary canon, but it is important to notice that film in general is still in the general cultural canon placed lower than literature. Studying genre cinema and SF literature, for instance, can be illuminating in understanding this relationship, while the same goes for the study of "America", a mythical and real place from which populism, popular genre and commercialism have emanated, as seems to be the general view from Europe. Basically, as a twentieth-century art form the film is as old as some of the genres (SF, western) important for the American cultural influence in the western world, so that it could be argued that, being still relatively young, the film, genre and America share the same dual role of highly influential but also often suspicious cultural influences.