Museum Summer Cinema Brings Six Nights of Sci-Fi

By day, the courtyard at Skenderbegova 51 is just a passage to the permanent exhibit. For six nights in August, it turns into an open-air cinema. The Museum Summer Cinema at the Museum of Science and Technology runs from August 18 to 23, and this year’s edition is built entirely around science fiction. Admission to every screening is free.

The schedule is the same on all six days, with two time slots. At 5 pm, matinee screenings of animated films for children run in the Toy Gallery, indoors. At 8 pm, feature films screen in the courtyard, with entry from Dobracina 51. The Museum of Science and Technology described the lineup as “a selection of older science fiction films,” and that description is not an understatement here: no evening title is newer than 1998.

Six nights, six ideas about what comes next

The evening program in the courtyard looks like this:

• August 18, “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea” (1954)
• August 19, “Westworld” (1973)
• August 20, “The Secret of Jupiter’s Moon” (1981)
• August 21, “Dune” (1984)
• August 22, “Contact” (1997)
• August 23, “Dark City” (1998)

Forty four years of film history separate the first title from the last. The oldest film in the selection is 72 years old, the newest is 12, and that span is really the whole arc of the program. Each of the six evenings carries its own idea of what the future would look like, and none of them still needs to be convincing to be worth watching.

Matinees in the Toy Gallery

The daytime slot is for children and sticks to animation and family adventure:

• August 18, “Meet the Robinsons” (2007)
• August 19, “Honey, I Shrunk the Kids” (1989)
• August 20, “Treasure Planet” (2002)
• August 21, “Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs” (2009)
• August 22, “Zathura: A Space Adventure” (2005)
• August 23, “Big Hero 6” (2014)

The daytime selection spans a wider range than the evening one, running from “Honey, I Shrunk the Kids” in 1989 to “Big Hero 6” in 2014, the youngest title in the whole program. Anyone who shows up at 5 pm and stays through the evening screening covers, in a single day, the distance between an animated comedy for eight year olds and a genre their kids have long since outgrown.

Why a retrospective with no new films?

Because older science fiction does not age the way other genres do. Along with the story, it always shows the shelf life of the imagination that produced it: how much people trusted technology at the time, what scared them, and what counted as unbelievable enough to put on screen. David Lynch’s “Dune” from 1984 now plays as two films at once, an adaptation and a record of what a production could pull off at that moment, and the second reading is often the more interesting one.

That is why the choice of venue is not incidental. Films that guessed at the future are screening in the courtyard of an institution whose job is to preserve what was actually built from that future, a few steps from the exhibits themselves.

A house that remembers the other side of the story

The Museum of Science and Technology holds a fact from its own collection that pairs well with a week of science fiction. Rajko Tomovic and Miodrag Rakic, professors at the University of Belgrade School of Electrical Engineering, began work on an artificial hand in 1963, the same year the Mihajlo Pupin Institute built the world’s first model of a prosthetic robotic hand with an external power source. That work grew into a Robotics Laboratory in 1967, the first of its kind in Southeast Europe.

So while one version of the future was unfolding on screen, the same building held proof that a different, far more concrete one had already been built here. That is the difference between a science fiction retrospective at a multiplex and the same retrospective at a museum of science.

The museum is at Skenderbegova 51, open Tuesday through Sunday, from 11 am to 6 pm, closed Mondays. Six nights, twelve screenings, not a single ticket.