STAR TREK OF THE HUMANKIND (THE SPACE IN THE CINEMA)

Abstract

The space appeared on the screen at the beginning of the 20th century – “A Trip to the Moon” (1902) and “The Impossible Voyage” (1904) by Georges Méliès. However, the French film director used methods of science fiction, first of all, for realizing various cinema tricks and widening artistic possibilities of the cinema. “Aelita” (1924), the film by Yakov Protazanov is deemed to be the first Soviet science fiction movie created after the homonymous novel by O. Tolstoy. “Woman in the Moon” (1928) by Fritz Lang, the famous filmmaker, was the first science fiction movie in the Western cinema. In general, the world cinematography of the twenties and thirties was not interested in space topics. However, the Soviet film “The Space Voyage” (1936, directed by V. Zhuravlyov), developed with participation of Konstantyn Tsiolkovsky, the founder of Soviet rocket engineering, is the one that deserves attention. The end of the World War II brought a surge of interest to space topics. It was that very time when the topic grew little by little to a problem. Exploration of the space was not only represented as a number of triumphs and famous discoveries but as a hard way of learning with bitter disappointments and fatal losses as well. “2001: A Space Odissey” (1968), the work by the English filmmaker Stanley Kubrick, directed after a narrative by Arthur C. Clarke, famous science-fiction writer, was a fundamental step on this way. Leaving for distant worlds of the universe, the human will never be able to break the navel string connecting it to the native planet, - this idea is not only dominant in the film by S. Kubrick, but also in “Solaris” (1972), the film by A. Tarkovsky who raised the problem of human being as existence in the space. And the space, as a creation of the supreme intelligence, requires sympathy, love and understanding from the human. In fact, it should be noted that the world cinematography could reach that depth of philosophic and psychological comprehension of the space topic neither before Tarkovskiy nor after him. The period of 1970s in the Western science-fiction cinema is marked with a number of interesting movies surely led by George Lucas’s “Star Wars” (1977). The film provided the closest compliance with the idea of new consciousness paradigm – the cosmic consciousness. “Star Wars” opened a fundamentally new age  in  the artistic understanding of problems of the human existence extrapolated for the mass consumer of high-tech times. Based on scientific knowledge and using the advanced technology, Lucas created a fairy tale full of marvelous adventures and eternal feelings, the philosophic sense of which was extracted from Manichean ideals, medieval notions of chivalrous ethics and contemporary opinions as for the cosmic mission of the human. “Avatar” (2009), the movie by James Cameron, is supposed to be the most significant sample of cinematography at the beginning of the 21st  century.  The simple and desired philosophic idea of unity and complete harmony where everyone feels like a careless child but loved and protected by the great Mother Nature – is it not the dream of every intelligent person now? It is very hard for the human to see himself from outside and to find individual and unique features in common circumstances and situations. We need an uncommon mirror – a nonstandard, nonterrestrial environment, meeting something fundamentally new and unknown that would allow looking at the unique human nature, its merits and demerits, strong and weak points of its existence in the universe. The Space can be such a mirror, to open us the Unknown and thus to approach the Truth.