Aliens Dancing at the Crossroads: Science Fiction Interventions in Irish Cinema1
Aliens Dancing at the Crossroads: Science Fiction Interventions in Irish Cinema1
This chapter identifies and explores how Irish film, itself a complex and multifaceted form which often resists Hollywood narrative strategies, has consistently appropriated and invoked science fiction iconography as well as established science fiction tropes. Science fiction iconography is mobilized in selected Irish films to signify modernity and progress as symbolized through seemingly futuristic technology, while narrative tropes centered around notions of otherness are recurrently framed in stories of an alien arrival to a small, isolated rural Irish community. Irish cinema’s on-going invocation of both science fiction iconography and narrative tropes in turn marks how the Irish national imaginary negotiates its own otherness, a cinematic tendency which persists through arguably seismic changes to the country and its forms of cultural production.
Keywords: science fiction iconography, national imaginary, otherness, modernity, Irish film
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