Blade Runner Notes

Blade Runner

Box office

·         In the blade runner science technology and progress are all being questioned and have been show to be fail

·         One of the key themes is blurring the difference between the real and the artificial (humans and replicas)

·         Blade runner didn’t do amazingly well in the box office however critically the film did very well

·         The film have been re-realised many times with additional thing such as the director cut and final cut addition

Blade runner’s postmodern aesthetic

·         Mixing textual references and images.

·         Voice over f the original realises is juxtaposed with the futuristic

·         Los Angeles in the future is in itself a pastiche of our ideas of the east, west and the future.

·         Images we see give us a mise en scene of decay and decline of this coming to an end of humanity as we know it, and the story of replicants striving ofr an extension of their life span.

Hyperidentities

·         The question that the film poses are to do with the meaning of  humanity in the post modern ages

·         The distinction between human and machine is unclear

·         Postmodernist ask can emotional be programmed, can humanity be manufactured

·         Post modern city – huge advertising images promoting an off world colony and the idea that everyone who can fled the real world for a more attractive virtual equivalent.

Compression of time and space

·         Film is about the time and how there isn’t enough time.

·         We are never sure if the main character (Harrison Ford) is human or not, it remains an enigma

·         A dying replicant in the final scene delivers the line all these moments will be lost in time like tears in the rain, and as in most post modern film we are forced to confront the way in which the modern work is constructed through a set of binary opposites.

·         Deals with racism – extermination of replicants.

·         All science fiction therefore it places a real world concerns in fantasy setting but post modern reading of the film focuses more on the way the classic opposition that have defines our philosophy and undermined or at least exposed as vulnerable.

Blade runner and postmodernism

·         Postmodern film

·         Elements of post modern condition to texture its narrative

·         Ideological centre blade runner explores and utilises the strategies of quotation/pastiche/recycling/hyperreality/identity crisis 

·         Confuses history and mixes up traditions and collapse the difference between the real and the mediated such as supposedly articulates what it is like to live in the post modern world.

·         Textually – quotes of different genres and film movements/periods as well as form visual media and actual historical periods.

·         Consequently, time, history, high /low culture and the relations s and difference between them have been thrown in confusion.

·         Happens in a future but one which is an amalgam of numerous past

·         Recycling in the film refers to both a lack of invention and renewal but also generalised waste. Produced by the architects of this endless city and wasting away of humanity produced by this hyperral city.

·         The media is such an omnipresent force that it becomes the reality indicator – more real than real itself. E.g. we don’t get to see off world colonies sold to us in the film: they appear only as advertising signs therefore without a concrete referent,

·         The world weary Deckard best represents this: his goal driven pursuit of the replicants and his love affair with Rachael are really a journey of his heart. His real quest is a quest to discover his real origins and to find the truth about who he is and where he comes from.

·         Fear that technology and science have to have too much influence and control over people’s everyday life.

·         Also offers us a complex entry point for considering post human defined as new cybernetic creation born of a technological environment in which reality os essentially composed of information patterns. E.g. Deckard often seems to be merely one more electronics circuits plugged into a gigantic info world or virtual merchandising travel advertising and new gathering,

·         The post human throws into confusion human/machines natural/synthetic and mind/body dualisms opening up the self to multiplicities.