After the end of all botanical life on Earth, ecologist Freeman Lowell (Bruce Dern) maintains a greenhouse on a space station near Saturn in order to preserve various plants for future generations. Assisted by three robots and a small human crew, Lowell and his robots are forced to do anything necessary to keep their invaluable greenery alive.

Happily the outer-planetary pop-up gardens so mournfully depicted by Trumball have not come to pass. And what of the human race that cares so little for anything natural? This too is hard to conceive. Although, anticipating the development of sophisticated AI systems, the little robots that become Lowell’s sole companions have as much empathy for each other as the ecologist has for his beloved foliage (and certainly much more so than HAL-900 in the aforementioned space epic by Stanley Kubrick). Eminent astronomer Carl Sagan called out the film for its failure to reckon with the inverse-square law, in depicting its geodesic domes filled with dying flora as it hurtles towards Saturn. Still, the heart and concern (if not the scientific education) of Trumbull the artist cannot be ignored. Dystopian to its core, Silent Running palpably sounded the alarm about the fatal dangers of a future without life-giving greenery.

Past Futures curatorial notes —
What futures were past filmmakers imagining for our present world? And did those sci fi prophesies come true? All dreamers and designers start from a place of deep imagining.

In Past Futures we look at imagined dystopias and utopias that made their way into the collective conscious – into the design of now – and consider what might be in the making to come.

Presented by The Capitol as part of Melbourne Design Week 2021, an initiative of the Victorian Government in collaboration with the NGV.