Science fiction, along with its trans-disciplinary declinations, is notable for the complexity of its temporal constructions. Starting from the present, the genre inscribes itself on a timeline that contemplates a reassessment of the past and a projection of the future. In works of science fiction, the future is given agency, generating tools for transforming the present.

The Day The Earth Stood Still (1951), by Robert Wise, and The New Sun (2017), by Agnieszka Polska, (pre)figure possible futures through a “deep marking” — in both material and representative senses — of the geopolitical and cultural contexts in which they were produced. Wise’s film occupies a precise space and time — the USA just after the war, the Cold War and Macarthyism — as well as a singular moment in the history of cinema — the transformation of the Classical Cinema canon in the 1940s and 1950s. Meanwhile, The New Sun, a work that exemplifies the connections between cinema and contemporary art, exists in the context of a crisis of both the European paradigm and of ecological catastrophe. The dialogue between the two films displays a transversal conception of the history of cinema and gives an account of world affairs, pointing to film as a field that can produce transformative effects.

Produced by 20th Century Fox, The Day The Earth Stood Still is based on the short story Farewell To The Master (1940), by Harry Bates. The plot revolves around the arrival to Washington of an extra-terrestrial — Klaatu, played by Michael Rennie — who tries to save the Earth from the threat of nuclear disaster. With a star-studded cast featuring Patricia Neal (Helen Benson), music by Bernard Herrmann (ever-ready with his theremin) and set design produced in collaboration with Frank Lloyd Wright, the film is a foundational opus in science fiction cinema. In 1949, Wise had received the FIPRESCI Award from Cannes Festival for the film The Set-Up. He had also collaborated with Welles on Citizen Kane (1941) and The Magnificent Ambersons (1942). For the latter film, Wise would end up taking over from Welles — an enfant terrible in the eyes of the Hollywood studios — re-shooting certain scenes and signing off the final edit. In 1973, he directed the musical West Side Story and, six years later, made another work of science fiction in the form of Star Trek: The Motion Picture.

The Day The Earth Stood Still takes place against the backdrop of the Cold War and the proliferation of nuclear weapons, as well as the process of post-war decolonisation, which is referred to in the dialogue. Klaatu’s arrival to Washington could be seen as an allegory for re-colonisation of North American territory by the anthropomorphic alien (unusual when compared to Soviet science fiction), who is well-mannered, speaks perfect English and comes from a more scientifically advanced planet.

However, The Day The Earth Stood Still does not entirely subvert the script. On the contrary, while it warns of the nuclear threat, it remains a vehicle for the ideological perspective of the North American cultural industry. From the very start, we see that the chosen location for the alien spaceship to land is Washington, while the film reaffirms principles of individualism, technological determinism, political hegemony and collective democratic submission to a technocratic elite. To achieve this, The Day The Earth Stood Still relies on a series of dichotomies. The first is the contrast between the representation of North American society — prosperous and harmonious — and the stereotyped portrayal of other countries, among them India and the USSR, in the montage sequences. The Day The Earth Stood Still also draws out the tensions between the individual and the collective, the human and the machine. The character of Klaatu is constructed in opposition to the autonomy-free figure of his companion robot, which is presented as a mere extension of the more developed, human-like alien organism.

The titles and opening sequence (which flow together particularly well) make use of a non-realist aesthetic to attune us to the experience of outer space and crossing over into the terrestrial atmosphere. However, in subsequent sequences the film adopts a “fictional realism”, which, according to Thomas Elsaesser, was Hollywood’s artistic form par excellence for depicting North American society in the early 1950s. The historical dimension of The Day The Earth Stood Still is thus two-fold: first, the film speaks volumes when it comes to the vision studios wanted to push of North American society and its relationship with the world; second, it also speaks to collective ideas of the past (the spectre of the Second World War) and the future (the coming Cold War), as well as the history of cinema itself (the adoption of fictional realism in science fiction and its function as a vehicle for the ideological perspective of the film).

Nevertheless, The Day The Earth Stood Still is not without its formal ruptures. Although less incisive than René Clair’s Paris qui dort (1924), the film problematises the idea of movement as being particular to cinema, with the sequences in which all electrical equipment stops approaching those city symphonies of the 1920s and 1930s. By focussing on the act of seeing, the place of the observer and the processes of representation, it also elicits a self-reflective chain of gazes, a kind of mise en abyme of the viewer’s own positioning.

There are multiple parallels between The Day The Earth Stood Still and The New Sun. The latter zeroes in on the act of observation through a power struggle between “astra” and “mostra”. Portrayed using animation techniques, an anthropomorphic Sun — whose iconography speaks not only to non-European traditions but also to early cinema — observes and holds forth about life on Earth. In The Day The Earth Stood Still, Klaatu is, at first glance, a first-degree observer of daily life in Washington; by contrast, Polska’s film immerses itself in the principle of intermutability between the sphere of the observer and the observed, corresponding to a complex relationship between shot, countershot and out-of-shot. The Sun appeals directly to the viewer due to our complicity in the ecological crisis, among other aspects; but this mechanism generates an interlacing of gazes in representational space, further reinforced in other sequences — somewhere between fabulation and documentary — in which the solar core is taken over by indexical images of life in the city. In the same way that in The Day The Earth Stood Still the activation of the reception sphere — the future of the film — creates a historical, utopian out-of-field, giving agency to possible futures and the transformation of the present.