La humanidad en peligroAlteraciones y suplantaciones del ser humano en el cine español (1992-2014)

Zusammenfassung

Human transformations due to scientific and technological innovation in recent years have had an impact that is still unpredictable in its various manifestations. The present study examines how modern Spanish cinema tackles this topic, as well as the discourse and image that it presents of technical and scientific developments and their consequences. To this end, we take as our framework the rich contributions made by studies on science fiction films, which enjoy a long-standing tradition in the English-speaking world, despite the subject being studied little in Spain. In this way, this thesis focuses on the history of science fiction and the presence of its main concerns in Spanish cinema. At the same time, it looks in detail at the way in Spanish cinema historians have tackled cinematographic genres overall, and science fiction in particular. We will review the context in which films were produced in the nineties and the first decades of the second millennium, allowing us to position the chosen films in an international context. As a result, we adopt a transnational perspective that allows us to take on the references, borrowings and other intertextual exchanges with cinema originating from other places, as a natural meeting-point between what we consider to be both national and international. Finally, we develop a detailed study of a choice of films that, in the period between the years 1992 and 2014, tackle questions related to the possibilities of altering and supplanting human beings allowed by the science and technology of the time: Acción Mutante (Alex de la Iglesia, 1992); Supernova (Juan Miñón, 1993), Abre los ojos (Alejandro Amenábar, 1996), Científicamente perfectos (Francesc Capell, 1997), La mujer más fea del mundo (Miguel Bardem, 1999), Somne (Isidro Ortiz, 2005), La posibilidad de una isla (Michael Houellebecq, 2008), Eva (Kike Maíllo, 2011), La piel que habito (Pedro Almodóvar, 2011) and Autómata (2014). An overview of the history of science fiction shows us how, generally speaking, the message regarding technical and scientific developments is somewhat dystopian in nature. In this way, our analysis of films is undertaken with a view to tackling the scientific and technical developments of the time and, in particular, against the optimistic discourse of the transhumanist utopia that advocates the free technical and scientific transformation of the human being.