by Emma Fuchs
In the boonies of Umbria, there is a small tobacco farm called Inviolata. The sharecroppers who live here are relieved by small technological wonders: a tractor in addition to their oxen, a few lightbulbs that they carry from room to room, arguing over who gets the light. More than technology, they rely on the loyalty and naiveté of Lazzaro (Adriano Tardiolo), a young man who has never said no to any request or order. Then, one night, a throbbing red light appears in the distance. Gazing over the trees, the farmers rationalize, “I reckon it’s a tractor,” and spin out, “It’s witchcraft.”, “Is it a burning building?”, “Is it a moving building?” Unanswered, it sets an ominous tone, a catalyst to the cracking open of the world as they know it. Lazzaro Felice (Alice Rohrwacher, 2018) is the sort of film that leaves a stronger sense of technological subversion than the film literally represents.
Likewise, Bacurau (Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles, 2019) and Still Life (Jia Zhangke, 2006) introduce small technologies that complement and complicate their intimate ongoing dramas. Bacurau, a village in the Brazilian sertão, is a community brought together by accumulating grievances: the death of Carmelita, their erasure from Google Maps, and the construction of a dam which has cut off the arid town’s natural water supply––now they drive the truck an hour out for potable water. Still Life, set on the lush and ruinous precipice of the Yangtze River, is reminiscent of cinéma verité with its hand-held camera work and washed out palette; pale smoggy sky, crumbling concrete, muted blues of accumulating water, and distant, unreachable greens. Highlighting the destruction of Fengjie for the construction of the Three Gorges dam, modern and modernist architectural structures punctuate the film, balancing shots and guiding the viewer’s eye.
Sci-fi, conventionally, is defined as “fiction dealing principally with the impact of actual or imagined science on society or individuals or having a scientific factor as an essential orienting component.” On IMDB these films are tagged among thrillers, dramas, westerns, and documentaries, yet unsuspectingly, incrementally and briefly, they invoke sci-fi tropes––aliens, AI, technological advancements pitted against societies lacking access to the same tech resources, and of course, space and time travel. Though it often develops an ironic accuracy with age (think Orwell’s 1984), sci-fi conventionally deals with that which hasn’t happened yet. The reason Lazzaro Felice, Still Life and Bacurau are not widely deemed sci-fi films is that though technological advancement is at the core of every conflict, the conflicts are those that have contemporary and quotidian origins––for example, in each film, a dam has disrupted local waterways. As such, these films are examples of the ways slow cinema (films both paced slowly and produced with an environmental consciousness) uses the intrigue of sci-fi and incongruous technology to illustrate the impact of climate change. They are what I classify as “subtle sci-fi,” films that feature a scientific factor as an essential disorienting component.
In contrast to the high-tension, thrilling and often violent Hollywood films that exploit environmental disaster apocalyptically, subtle sci-fi highlights the technological strangeness of the world we actually live in—and through this, potentially brings clarity and consciousness to the ways we consider and engage with our environment. Although there are many cinematic examples of subtle sci-fi, UFOs act as one of the most “obvious” tropes––scenically striking and dynamic––to blast a drama into new realms.
Still Life is built around the framework of Han Sanming (playing a fictionalised version of himself) and his meandering search for his wife (who ran away sixteen years ago). As he wanders from lead to lead, from the dead end road where his neighborhood lies submerged by floodwater, to the demolition sites where men work, there is a harsh contradiction between the geometries of the urban environment and overflow of the natural environment: high waters, fog settling over the mountains, the scrubby greens poking through the river’s surface. Still, there are lingering shots that suggest the potential of harmony, the remnants of what once was. In the background of a field, for example, there is a concrete structure, perhaps an abandoned apartment complex. The bracketed architectural form is abrupt against the skyline. More abrupt is the scene in which rocket engines ignite at the foundation of the structure and the building launches inexplicably into the sky, leaving behind a mushrooming dust cloud which itself mirrors the fluid fog that rolls over the mountains in the next frame. This rupture is consequence-less in the overarching drama and storyline yet effective in driving the ambiance of the film; this subtle spacecraft warps both the passivity of the background and the viewer’s apathy towards the background. It is a demand to pay closer attention, charging every architectural detail with the potential to behave bizarrely, an unnatural addition to the landscape—just like the dam which has displaced so many people.
On the outskirts of Bacurau, following a lackluster visit from Tony Jr (Thardelly Lima), a mayoral candidate with shallow and self-motivated interests, a local man drives a motorbike along dusty roads. A silver saucer dips in and out of the frame, in and out of the driver’s line of sight, effecting a home-video or found-footage quality—the camera, unable to track with the UFO, feels conspiratorial as the driver’s eyes dart with concern between where he is driving and that which trails him. With jagged flight patterns clean against the sky, the saucer throws the bike’s wear and tear and the isolation of the curving road into sharp relief, highlighting the landscape’s fluidity. The spaceship, in addition to setting an unsettling tone, illuminates the ease of a local person’s navigation of his own land. Later, the saucers are spotted dipping dangerously close to the heads of two brightly clothed bikers from the south of Brazil; they seem annoyed, rather than fearful, and in this scene the saucers serve to highlight also those who are alien to the region.
Emblematic of subtle sci-fi, these spacecrafts are subtle means to disrupt the natural landscape and portray the strangeness of contemporary reality––the slow violence of climate change, urbanization and environmental injustices. The ships manage to contrast both the natural and built local environments––and the bizarreness of these architectural and technological features mirrors the bizarreness of the anthropocentric effect on the landscape (i.e. tourism and dams).
Similarly, the camera takes on an omniscient gaze midway through Lazzaro Felice as it glides above the land, following the thread of an aquamarine river, then dry riddled canyons. Lazzaro looks around, first confused, then up in awe before he tumbles off the cliffside. The camera returns to the dusty mountain ridges, and the landscape absorbs the consequences of Lazzaro’s death. A sense of foreign cartography, the aerial perspective affects an alienation of the land that has been so familiar to the characters throughout—their contained world. Coming up over another raw rock ridge, farmers drop their tools. Releasing the yokes of their oxen as they gaze up, hands shielding their eyes but not obscuring their fear, one man feebly throws a stick against the whipping wind. Finally, the helicopter floats down into the heart of Inviolata, and the carabinieri reveal that sharecropping was outlawed twenty years ago. To the people of Inviolata, a helicopter sent to search for a missing boy in the wilderness is a UFO. It ushers in a new understanding of the world. The community of sharecroppers (sans Lazzaro) are evacuated from life as they know it, riding a coach bus into what is essentially the future, the world of cell phone towers and post-industrial city life.
In Still Life, there are two types of “stories that have officially never happened,” that of domestic rocket power, and that of … “the flipside of the country’s enormous boom: the extreme poverty of parts of the population, the exploitation of the workforce in absolute disregard of their health and safety, the rehousing of people against their will, the frank neglect of everyone who does not belong to the top 1%” (Catching 34-35). Are UFOs real? Well, modernism, abandoned apartment complexes, drone technology, and helicopters are—and contextually, anything with the power to fly in and out of one’s perceived reality is a spacecraft, no matter how subtle or fleeting its presence. In these films and beyond, spacecrafts disrupt our habit of numbly moving through spaces both natural and architectural so as to refocus our attention on our own reality. When the spacecraft is not Battleship Galactica or the USS Enterprise, but a familiar form, the film subverts the necessity of “suspended disbelief.” The leap of faith the film asks us to take instead is, “Can we pay better attention?” In this reframing of landscape, “everyday” technology, and how to watch a movie, slow cinema proposes itself as a tool to narrow the horizon between knowledge and belief. Some people don’t believe in UFOs, and some don’t believe in climate change—others don’t believe in society’s ability to curb our destructive behaviors, displacing both people and nature. Alongside rewriting what is possible in familiar realms, subtle sci-fi’s strongest power is perhaps that of investing potential in unexpected places.
Sources:
Catching, Rebecca. ‘Chinese Slow Cinema—A New Filmic Rhythm and a Cinematic Conscience Exploring Notions of Time, History, Memory, Absence, and Allegory in the Works of Chinese Auteurs’. Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art 19, no. 1 (February 2020): 25–42.
Mendonça Filho, Kleber and Dornelles, Juliano. Bacurau, 2019.
Rohrwacher, Alice. Lazzaro Felice, 2018.
“Science fiction.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/science%20fiction. Accessed 11 May. 2025.
Jia, Zhangke. Still Life, 2006.
Emma Fuchs (rhymes with books) is a poet, essayist and illustrator based in Brooklyn, NY. She has received support from the Fine Arts Work Center, Brooklyn Poets, and Woodward Residency. Her work can be found in Bright Wall/Dark Room, Westerly, Grain, and Cake Zine, among other publications
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