Forbidden Planet

1956, Fred M. Wilcox, USA, 98 min.

Introduced by artist and Rubin Museum Fellow Chitra Ganesh

With a nod to both Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Sigmund Freud’s The Superego and the Id, this classic intergalactic morality tale teaches that if humans want to control technology, they better control themselves first. In the year 2200—when humans can travel faster than the speed of light—a spacecraft travels to the distant planet Altair IV to discover the fate of a group of scientists sent there decades earlier. When Commander John J. Adams (Leslie Nielsen) and his crew arrive, they discover only two people: the Prospero of this planet, Dr. Morbius (Walter Pidgeon), and his naive daughter, Altaira (Anne Francis). What exactly happened on Altair IV? The mystery unravels in this 1956 sci-fi classic.

“Imaginative gadgets galore, plus plenty of suspense and thrills, make the production a top offering in the space travel category. Best of all the gadgets is Robby, the Robot.”

—Variety

About Cabaret Cinema:Face of the Future

Curated by Rubin Museum fellow and artist Chitra Ganesh, Cabaret Cinema takes its cue from the exhibition Face of the Future, in which emerging artists reimagine how the visual languages of science fiction and fantasy take shape and proliferate around the world through cinema. Each film will be introduced by an artist whose work expands and redefines the aesthetics of science fiction, explored in posters that can be viewed in the Art Lounge gallery just outside the theater.

Chitra Ganesh: Face of the Future is made possible by Rasika and Girish Reddy, Manoj and Rita Singh, Akhoury Foundation, and contributors to the 2018 Exhibitions Fund.

About the Introducer

In her drawing-based practice, Chitra Ganesh brings to light narrative representations of femininity, sexuality, and power that are typically absent from canons of literature and art. Her wall installations, comics, charcoal drawings, and mixed-media works often take historical and mythic texts as inspiration and points of departure to complicate received ideas of iconic female forms. Her vocabulary pulls from surrealism, expressionism, Hindu and Buddhist iconography, and traditional South Asian pictorial forms, connecting these sources with contemporary mass-mediated visual languages.

Ganesh graduated magna cum laude from Brown University with a BA in comparative literature and art-semiotics, and received her MFA from Columbia University in 2002. For over a decade, Ganesh’s work has been widely exhibited both locally and internationally, including at the Queens Museum, Museum of San Diego La Jolla, Berkeley Art Museum, Bronx Museum, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, and Baltimore Museum. Her works are held in prominent public collections such as the Philadelphia Museum of Art, San Jose Museum of Art, Baltimore Museum, Whitney Museum, and Museum of Modern Art.