"Science fiction is simply a way to practice the future together... It is our right and responsibility to create a new world."

—Adrienne Maree Brown

This college writing course explores how American filmmakers have used film to imagine and create the future. Some questions we will ask include: How have American filmmakers foreshadowed the rise of artificial intelligence, robots & cyborgs, virtual reality, and afrofuturist & postcolonial futures? How does the use of filmmaking in this way connect to the ways in which other mediums (such as literature or art) have been used to imagine the future? What do the dystopian & utopian portrayals of the future in American films tell us about where America is heading as a society? While our focus will be primarily on how American filmmakers have used film to imagine the future, we will also draw on examples from students’ own lives to discuss this trend as a global phenomenon.

Films: Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968); Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982); The Wachowskis’ The Matrix (1999); Spike Jonze’s Her (2013); Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther (2018); Denis Villeneuve’s Dune: Part I (2021)

Note: This is an in-person course that is open to UC Berkeley Summer Session students only. Click here to sign up & register.