At the heart of Heike Endter's 2009 dissertation, published in 2011 as Ökonomische Utopien und ihre Bilder in Science-Fiction-Filmen, lies the assumption that art history, as a field and with its unique methodology, can provide an insight into film studies that has not yet been discovered and made accessible. Interestingly, Endter seeks to argue this unique insight as a benefit of art history, a discipline threatened by neoliberal ideals of employability, by analyzing a field of interconnected terms that directly address this threat: “utopias, the economy, the visual and science fiction film” (9; all translations are mine). She is driven by the idea of a “use value,” both morally (“what is good”) and economically (“what it is good for”), that she identifies at the center of the science fiction genre in the form of a utopian imaginary but unusual for utopian studies, not in regards to politics but in...
