A World That Never Was: Science Fictional Aesthetics in 'La obra del siglo'

• In Event: The Aesthetics of Latin American Science Fiction 1: Constructing Visual and Digital Futures

Abstract

More than a genre, science fiction has been described as a mode of language, a kind of “high-intensity realism,” as Seo-Young Chu puts it, that can be used to describe what has not yet happened. While science fiction can be a commentary on the past or present, it relies on a futuristic aesthetics, a casting of alternative realities. What happens, however, when this mode is used not to envision a future but to engage with what did not happen, to illuminate the ways in which failed dreams haunt our current reality? This paper explores the use of a science fictional aesthetics in Cuban director Carlos Machado Quintela’s film La obra del siglo (The Project of the Century, 2014). Set near the never-completed Soviet nuclear reactor near Cienfuegos, the film deals with three generations of the same family who share an apartment in Jaragua, the “nuclear city” built to house workers on the reactor. The men’s lives are, in different ways, at a standstill, a stasis that Machado Quintela explores allegorically through the visual aesthetics of the reactor itself. Combining promotional footage of the reactor’s construction with footage of its current ruined state, he casts the past as the future, revealing the intimate ways in which utopian fantasies have shaped everyday dystopias.

Author

• Emily A Maguire, Northwestern University