- 2012-04-27 Mechanical Bride.jpg (158.89 KiB) Viewed 5684 times
An official selection of HotDocs 2012 and Sci Fi London 2012
Official website: http://www.mechanicalbridemovie.com/index.htmlThe Mechanical Bride wrote:The desire to bring the perfect artificial woman to life is as old as Pygmalion, but new technologies are making its realization ever more likely. Limning the border between fantasy and reality, this provocative and eye-opening documentary journeys from the outer limits of science fiction—visiting classic scenes of fembots in film and television—to the state of the art in artificial companions—from life-sized silicone love dolls to humanoid robots.
At its heart are the stories of men who keep the dream of artificial love alive: Davecat, the goth doll owner who likes nothing better than taking his silicone girlfriend to the cemetery; Slade, the “Realdoll Doctor” who runs a “hospital” for broken love dolls; Chris, the robot builder whose business plans include offering replacement spouses to bereft widowers; Michael, the German “Creator,” a self-described mad scientist attempting to build the most advanced sexual android in the world; Sorayama, the well-known Japanese artist whose “sexy robot and gynoid” pin-ups have graced numerous walls and rock album covers; and others, both strange and strangely familiar.
Narrated by screen icon and former television android Julie Newmar, The Mechanical Bride is a smart, funny, and deeply human look at the "cluster image of sex, technology, and death" on which media scholar Marshall McLuhan commented over a half century ago in his book of the same name.
The film will be shown at these locations, beginning this weekend:
Hot Docs International Documentary Festival
Sunday, 4/29 @ 11:30 PM, Bloor Hot Docs Cinema
Monday, 4/30 @ 9:00 PM, Cumberland 3
Sunday, 5/6 @ 9:00 PM, Bloor Hot Docs Cinema
Gisèle Gordon at HotDocs wrote:In a world in which living women are increasingly surgically modified and artificial love dolls become more realistic every year, the age-old fantasy of creating a “perfect” woman drives a thriving industry. The best erotic dolls are manufactured with the same high-tech materials used for corpses in Hollywood film productions. The crème de la crème is the RealDoll, completely customizable for $6,000. To the men who own them, they are more than articulated skeletons and seamless silicone bodies. From the sweet technosexual who unabashedly loves his RealDoll, taking her out on dates and keeping her photo in his wallet, to the widower who bought a “divorcée” on eBay so as not to burden a real woman with his failing health, filmmaker and media scholar Allison de Fren takes a provocative, incisive world tour of the history, culture and future of fabricated female companions, silicone sex dolls and humanoid robots.
- 2012-04-27 Mechanical Bride at HotDocs.jpg (128.48 KiB) Viewed 5684 times
SCI-FI-LONDON/BFI: The London International Festival of Science Fiction and Fantastic Film
Saturday, 5/5 @ 6:10 PM, Apollo Piccadilly Circus Cinema
Sci-Fi-London wrote:The fantasy of creating the ‘ideal’ woman is as old as Pygmalion, but how close is it to becoming a reality?
This provocative documentary reveals the state of the art in artificial companions - from life-sized silicone sex dolls to humanoid robots - and offers a surprisingly human, at times humorous, look at the men who build, animate, and love them.
Allison de Fren is an Assistant Professor of Art History and the Visual Arts at Occidental College in Los Angeles.
She is a film and media scholar, as well as an award-winning media practitioner, whose dissertation on representations of artificial female bodies, from the Renaissance to the present, grew out of making this documentary.
The film explores the ways in which the fantasy of perfection both informs and conflicts with the current-day attempt to create robotic companions.
Part of our 'stranger than fiction' documentary programme.
- 2012-04-27 Mechanical Bride at Sci Fi London.jpg (166.15 KiB) Viewed 5684 times
