A vast and miserable proletariat spends its days in meaningless labor. Society is under the control of ultra-wealthy businessmen. To appease the lower classes, the ruling class is pinning its hopes on a technological solution: artificial intelligence. Welcome to 2026 as imagined in Fritz Lang’s novels big city. When the film was first released not long after 1926, the date would have seemed selfishly futuristic. It’s now, of course, but our world may never look as stylish as the Art Deco dystopia that Lang and his friends spent so much money and unprecedented scale creating. Still, when we look at big city Today, elements that seem visionary stand out more than those that are fanciful.
new short documentary D.W. On top of that We investigate the origin and legacy of big citywith particular attention to its major influence on many subsequent science fiction and dystopian films. 2001: A Space Odyssey, star wars, blade runner, terminator 2Madonna’s “Express Yourself” video: These are just a few of the works that don’t take great pains to hide, and in some cases even emphasize, their debt to Lang’s vision.
Blinding, intensively lit, infrastructure-webbed canyons of skyscrapers and workers simultaneously manipulated and manipulated by oversized clockworks are just the most obvious images that have filtered through decades of popular culture. Look no further than the origin of the wild-haired “mad scientist” surrounded by tubes and coils. big cityRotwang.
Much can be written, and indeed much has already been written, about the legacy of Rotwang’s invention, a robotic woman who resembles a working-class heroine. Beyond the groundbreaking nature of its design, big city It also continues to attract attention almost a century later, thanks to the folklore and even mythological resonance of its story. Imagining large-scale automation and large-scale employment co-existing may be technically impossible, even if the jobs are dire, at least from our perspective, but the age-old narrative undercurrent allows even modern audiences to suspend disbelief (this phenomenon has not been ignored by the makers of recent sci-fi and fantasy blockbusters). We may not be living in that kind of year 2026. big city appears on our screens, but in a sense we live in the world it has created.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Mbemust write and broadcastIt’s about cities, languages ​​and cultures. he is the author of the newsletter books about cities books as well Home page (I won’t summarize Korea) and korean newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter. @Colinbemust.
Source: Open Culture – www.openculture.com
