Without sci-fi, there would be no cinema

Do you know what’s hateful? The snobbery that film fans have to contend with. There’s the ‘it’s only a movie’ snobbery, by which cinema is suitable only for wastrels and dogs. And there’s the ‘if it ain’t Danish and silent, then it ain’t no good’ snobbery. Proponents of both should spend less time blowing conjecture through their Sobranie smoke, and more time watching the Hollywood films of John Ford, Nicholas Ray and William A. Wellman.

Now that’s off my chest, here’s one way in which cinema is relatively free from snobbery. For decades, novelists and literary types have wrangled over whether science fiction books are anything more than — to use Margaret Atwood’s snooty description — ‘talking squids in outer space’. But filmgoers and filmmakers seem to have accepted sci-fi movies far more readily. The genre is not seen as something bad in itself, otherwise why would directors such as Fritz Lang and Stanley Kubrick have given it a go? There are simply good sci-fi movies and rubbish sci-fi movies. And plenty of average ones in between.

The British Film Institute’s special science fiction season contains examples of all three — although, thankfully, there is far more good than bad. It is, like last year’s season devoted to Gothic cinema, a vast spread of delights. There are dozens of movies screening in dozens of locations over the next three months. Tickets are still available for a new digital transfer of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) in Leeds Town Hall, for instance. Sadly, it’s already too late to get in on the screening of Alien (1979) at the Jodrell Bank Observatory.