June 14, 2026
Jerry Goldsmith and the Broken Ear of Planet of the Apes
An anthropological reading of Jerry Goldsmith's score for Planet of the Apes, an impure, modern and displaced music for a civilization after man.
HISTORY · FILM · ANTHROPOLOGY
Cinetropo
A tribe gathered around the screen
Cinetropo reads cinema as collective memory: a screen where each age projects its fears, myths, desires and ideas of the human.
“Alien stories are the reflection of our humanity before a mirror. And the vision that appears is often what we have forgotten to be, or the terrifying image of what we have become.”
Book
What are aliens for?: An Essay on Cinema and the Extraterrestrial Imagination
An essay on science-fiction cinema and the alien as one of modern culture’s most revealing mirrors.
Buy on AmazonA magazine for reading cinema
Cinetropo continues the essay What are aliens for?: An Essay on Cinema and the Extraterrestrial Imagination through articles, thematic routes and archive notes on film, collective imagination and audiovisual memory.
The alien as mirror
Readings on otherness, the desire for contact and figures that return an uneasy image of the human.
Invasion and collective fear
A path through threat narratives, social paranoia, the Cold War and catastrophe as public spectacle.
Monsters, abjection and body
Essays on impossible bodies, cosmic horror, mutation and creatures that disturb the familiar.
Archive by topic
Ways into the archive
On screen
Featured article
A first route into the archive of symbols, fears and shared fictions.
Living archive
Recent articles
May 20, 2026
2001, Solaris and the Cinema of Impossible Contact
Two films suggest that extraterrestrial contact is not chiefly a technical problem but a philosophical one: how do we speak to what resists understanding?
May 4, 2026
Why Do We Still Need Extraterrestrials?
The alien as a cultural figure in a polarized world where denialism and the far right coexist with cinematic narratives of progress.
April 13, 2026
Star Trek: Humanism for the Galaxy
How Star Trek reshaped the screen alien through humanism, diplomacy and a utopian idea of the future.
March 16, 2026
Invasion as Global Spectacle
Independence Day and Mars Attacks! approach the same subgenre from opposite positions: nationalist grandeur in one case, corrosive satire in the other.
February 9, 2026
The Messianic Extraterrestrial
The extraterrestrial as messiah is one of science-fiction cinema's persistent motifs: an outside agent who arrives to redeem us from ourselves.
January 12, 2026
The Other Has Always Been Here
Long before cinema imagined alien life, our species lived alongside beings not entirely like us: Neanderthals, Denisovans and other hominins.