Beyond the Infinite: Science Fiction After Kubrick

Released in 1968, Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey boldly redefined science-fiction cinema for the coming decade as both established filmmakers—Robert Altman, Saul Bass, John Boorman, Mike Hodges—and promising newcomers—George Lucas, John Carpenter, Douglas Trumbull—pushed the genre into adventurous new directions. Just as Kubrick's film was eventually marketed as "The Ultimate Trip," in no small part due to its mind-bending finale, many of the films in this series conflate the exploratory journeys and experiments found in their plots with the optics of altered consciousness. Along the way, they address head-on modernity’s ever-present concerns: technology’s rapid advancement as well as its encroachment into everyday life, the dissolution of one’s identity in an ever-changing society, and anxieties about our eventual (self-) destruction. 

Programmed by Bernardo Rondeau, Assitant Curator, Film Programs. Notes written by Doug Cummings.

Special support provided by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.