Landscape and Science-Fiction Film

This article argues that 1950s American science-fiction films reproduce elements of landscape paintings to evoke the aesthetic experience of the sublime. For example, the arrangement of shots in which monsters dwarf humans is taken directly from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century landscape painting, with monsters replacing vistas. I discuss the philosophical underpinnings in these images and tie them to the atomic bomb. This reading provides an aesthetic analysis of such films, whereas previous scholars have mostly been concerned with reading these images as metaphors.