BFI Film Classics: A brief history

  The BFI Film Classics series grew out of a project initiated by the National Film and Television Archive (NFTVA), a division of the BFI, to build a collection of ‘perfect showprints’ of 360 key films in the history of cinema. These films were to be screened at the Museum of the Moving Image (MOMI) in London in a year-round repertory. The ‘360 list’ of classic films was drawn up by David Meeker of the NFTVA, and the BFI Film Classics books were commissioned to stand alongside the Archive project.

  Distinguished film critics and scholars, film-makers, novelists and poets, historians and writers from other spheres of the arts and academia were approached to write on a film of their choice from the ‘360 list’. Each volume was ‘to present the author’s own insights into the chosen film, together with a brief production history and detailed credits, notes and bibliography.’ In a time before DVDs and screengrabs, the books’ ‘numerous illustrations’ were specially made from the Archive’s own prints and sourced from the BFI’s stills’ collection.

  The series was developed and its first titles commissioned by Edward Buscombe, then Head of Publishing at the BFI. Colin MacCabe and David Meeker acted as series consultants. Rob White was the Series Editor at the BFI from 1996 to 2005.

  The series was launched in May 1992 with four titles: The Wizard of Oz by Salman Rushdie; Double Indemnity by Richard Schickel; Stagecoach by Edward Buscombe and Went the Day Well? by Penelope Houston.

  A sister series, BFI Modern Classics, was launched in 1996 to respond to notable films of modern and contemporary cinema. Over 60 titles were published in this series before it was absorbed within the main Film Classics series in 2007, and the combined series was relaunched with a new cover and text design. There are currently over 160 titles in print in the Film Classics, Modern Classics and combined Film Classics series.

  A BFI Film Classics series advisory board, comprising representatives from the BFI, as well as leading film scholars and critics, was established in 2007. Since 2008 BFI Publishing titles, including the BFI Film Classics series, have been published by Palgrave Macmillan in partnership with the BFI.

  Contents

  Foreword

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction: On Seeing, Science Fiction and Cities

  1 Filming Blade Runner

  2 The Metropolis

  3 Replicants and Mental Life

  Conclusion

  Notes

  Credits

  Bibliography

  Foreword

  It seems appropriate that there should be a new edition of my book on Blade Runner, given the many iterations of the film that are circulating out there. My combo pack includes the work-print used for test screenings, both the American and international versions of the 1982 version, the 1992 ‘Director’s Cut,’ that really wasn’t, and the new ‘Final Cut’ from 2007 (about which more later). It’s a film worth revisiting, and one that has played no small part in the development of my thinking.

  There’s a story that I tell so often that perhaps I should finally put it to paper (or e-ink, or pixels, or whatever). While I was writing my dissertation, which became the book Terminal Identity, I produced an analysis of Blade Runner. It was beautiful: an elegant Althusserian deconstruction that I think involved the commodified image, the reification of the visual, and who knows what else. It was, trust me on this, really good, although it’s lost now (‘like tears in rain’?). But upon rereading it I realized that any reasonable person would believe that I hated the film – which I most certainly did not. Somehow the terms and tenor of my analysis, which centered on the film’s impact on that unnamed – and probably unborn – abstraction of the ‘subject’ slash ‘spectator,’ simply didn’t speak in any meaningful way to my own engagement with the film. Frankly, given my analysis, if you liked Blade Runner then you must have been some kind of ideological chump. I trashed it and began again.

  This marked the first move toward a more phenomenological approach to textual and media analysis, as I tried ever harder to bring my own experience to the table. Suddenly it was okay to respect the film’s dense visuality, its seductive movement, its immersive world-building. Narrative – what the film said – was at least partly displaced by its spectacularity – what it showed. That engagement with Blade Runner marked a turning point in my intellectual life, and it remains a film that gives me a great deal of unalloyed pleasure.

  Revisiting Blade Runner in order to think about this preface, I was relieved to say that it holds up well, some 30 years after its initial release. Its astonishing visual complexity translates well to the world of blu-ray and plasma screens, technologies unimagined by the film itself. The ‘retro-fitted’ world of Los Angeles, in which the old and new are cobbled together in restless juxtapositions has kept the film from dating too badly – this still looks like a future that could happen (though perhaps not in the next seven years, which is all that separates us from the film’s 2019 dateline). The style of the film is retrofitted too, and the noir trappings now lend the film a timeless classicism that is wearing quite well. Heck, even the fashions still look plausible.

  What’s also striking about Blade Runner is that it hails from that annus mirabilis for science fiction films, 1982, which also gave the world Videodrome, John Carpenter’s remake of The Thing, and Tron. Tron pointed the way toward the future of filmic effects, with its digitally generated vehicles and landscapes, but Blade Runner is a film on the cusp. Its ravishing visuals still involve the compositing of physical elements: miniature sets, matte paintings, models of vehicles. Blade Runner’s world, then, is still ontologically our world, in a way that the digital environments of Avatar (2009) and even Zodiac (2007), are not. I offer this not as nostalgia (well, maybe a little), but as a simple fact. Digital effects are no longer, to a great extent, special effects, seamlessly integrated as they are into the physical spaces occupied by actors or whatever portion of the setting is available in the pro-filmic world. The integration of actors and the effects shots of the pre-digital era posed special challenges, and so many of those special effects are depopulated. As the camera tracks over Los Angeles, circa 2019, the viewer is free to contemplate the space as well as the majestic special effects that are simply and straightforwardly on display. Or again, in that most gorgeous of sequences, as Gaff brings Deckard to police headquarters. The narrative pauses here, as the screen is filled with the intriguing geometries and panoramic movements of both the future Los Angeles and the film that is present, here and now, to the viewer.

  The final version cleans up some of the messier moments: wires are no longer visible hoisting hovercars in the air, and the special effects mesh together more cleanly. It also ups the violence, bringing in the more gruesome moments from the 1982 international cut. Most disturbingly, though, it removes the ambiguity of Deckard’s status as either human or replicant. Yes, I’m referring to the new treatment of the unicorn scene, discussed in some detail near the end of this book.

  The 1992 version gave us Rick Deckard, drowsily picking out some notes on the piano. There is a mysterious cut to a galloping unicorn moving in slow motion through a forest (what my wife calls the ‘My Little Pony’ scene), then back to Deckard, seen from behind. The new (I hesitate to call it the ‘final’) version gives us an extreme close-up of Deckard, his eyes wide open, then a more beautiful and more extended visit to the land of unicorns, then back to Deckard’s face. What might have been a dream (or an editing mistake) in the earlier version is now unmistakably some sort of vision, and when Gaff leaves the tell-tale origami unicorn at Deckard’s apartment at film’s end, it is hard to avoid coming to the conclusion that the unicorn was an implanted memory, and that, therefore, Rick Deckard is first, last, and always, a replicant.

  If you’ve already read this book, you’ll understand why this change bothers me so. I think it’s urgently important that Deckard’s status remains an open question, rather than settled doctrine. Rick Deckard’s name may or may not be a play on ‘René Descartes,’ but in any case, the state of radical doubt is central to the film. It’s not just a state of mind experienced by Deckard, as his certainties crumble around him, but by the attentive viewer, who might realize that this visually dazzling film is predicated upon the unreliability of vision.

  The film-maker and theorist Jean Epstein once wrote that cinema could train our minds to ‘move from established absolutes to unstable conditionals,’ and Blade Runner fulfills that modernist mandate wonderfully. One could also say that science fiction, at least some strains of it, works along the same lines, and surely the science fiction of Philip K. Dick (whose book was adapted to become Blade Runner) is again exemplary. The ontological crises suffered by Dick’s protagonists became ever more profound as his career moved forward – in the early works, there is a ‘real’ reality lurking behind the false front of another, but the later writings produce more of a mise-en-abyme as the shadow realities multiply. To map this onto Blade Runner is again to note the irrelevance of Deckard’s actual status – how much more radical, more modernist, it is to move away from the ground of the real and the given, towards an acceptance of uncertainty.

  Revisiting Blade Runner raises the further question of what it is to re-view a film. Despite how much I love to read, I find that I rarely re-read a novel. But a film worth watching seems, to me, to be worth watching over and over. Clearly it isn’t the teleological drive of the narrative that sustains my interest: Roy will still die (unless there’s yet another version out there). Clearly it’s the extra-narrative ele

ments that encourage the re-engagement: the way it moves, the beauty of the visuals, the satisfactions of the score, the nuances of performance, the immersion in its world. The pleasure of re-viewing suggests that the act of watching films may be more akin to listening to music than reading a book. Here, perhaps, the technologies of home video have played their part, producing the ability to, say, jump to a favourite musical number, or replay a subtle bit of business between Cary Grant and Jean Arthur – to ‘play’ a film as one played a record (or CD, or MP3, or whatever). Once, such control was the province of the film-makers alone, with their Moviolas and Steenbecks, but this power has been thoroughly democratized. In many cases the result is that the film comes to have less power over us – they begin when we want, rather than when scheduled, and we watch in conditions that lend themselves more to multi-tasking than rapt cathection onto the large screen – but it can also lead to a greater intimacy with a film, the ability to live with it, to make it a part of one’s environment. And it also allows for the pleasures of instant repetition. If the Surrealists claimed to value only about five minutes of even the best films, now they could concentrate their full attentions on those five minutes. In most cases, the result might be disappointment and disenchantment, but not in every case.

  There are many moments in Blade Runner that are worth revisiting as often as possible – any of the panoramic shots of the city, the sequence in which Deckard ‘investigates’ a single image, the scene at the eyebank. Some of the moments are brief, ephemeral: the photograph that briefly flickers to cinematic life, the blood that languidly seeps from Deckard’s mouth to tint his drink. And, of course, there is the now iconic speech – the last words in the film – which Roy delivers to the human whose life he has just, unexpectedly, saved: ‘I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched c-beams glitter in the dark near the Tanhauser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.’ He pauses. ‘Time to die.’ It’s this scene that Paul Pope has chosen to illustrate in his wonderful cover for this edition.

  Confronting Tyrell, his maker, in the final version of 2007, Roy says, threateningly, ‘I want more life, father,’ a cleaned up version of the original line, filmed long ago for inclusion for broadcast television screenings. Perhaps the change also imparts to Roy some Christ-like undertones. But I miss Rutger Hauer’s vehemence, and the raging entitlement of the original line. In fact, I used it as the epigraph to the book you’re about to read, and I’m not changing it. Some things are better left alone.

  Retro-fitted Los Angeles

  Acknowledgments

  Dana Polan suggested that I try to find ‘another way’ to approach a film that has been written about ad nauseam; these and other suggestions lodged themselves somewhere in my brain. My editor at the BFI, Rob White, was a careful and thoughtful reader, and his contribution is greater than he knows. Thanks to Edward Buscombe and Toby Miller for getting me involved with the BFI Modern Classics series. I stole some valuable ideas from Geoffrey Batchen and Stephanie Kessler. A course on Cinema and the City which I co-taught with Carla Yanni at the University of New Mexico in 1996 was a wonderful counterpoint to the preparation of this text, and I am indebted to those students who participated. In many ways, this project has its genesis in the 1994 Getty Center event, ‘Cine City: Film and Perceptions of Urban Space 1895–1995’; Annette Michelson invited me to participate (I am always in her debt). Syd Mead and Douglas Trumbull were enthusiastic participants, and watching the film while sitting between the two of them was a remarkable treat (even if they did keep talking). Thanks to Erica Lynn Day for bibliographic assistance.

  Introduction: On Seeing, Science Fiction and Cities

  ‘I began to like New York, the racy, adventurous feel of it at night and the satisfaction that the constant flicker of men and women and machines gives to the restless eye.’

  F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

  ‘I want more life, fucker …’

  Roy Batty, Blade Runner

  ‘You Nexus, hah?’ asks the wizened Asian technician at Eye Works. ‘I designed your eyes.’ Roy Batty, the android/replicant, briefly purses his lips in ironic amusement. ‘Well, if only you could see what I’ve seen with your eyes.’ Blade Runner is all about vision. Vision somehow both makes and unmakes the self in the film, creating a dynamic between a centred and autonomous subjectivity (eye/I) and the self as a manufactured, commodified object (Eye Works). The city is also known through vision. Vision actively makes the metropolitan world in a sustained encounter with delirious detail, yet because Blade Runner under-determines the lessons of that encounter, it effectively undermines interpretative certitudes. This science fiction adventure of urban perception produces an enhanced self-mastery, but also, at the same time, a dispossession, almost an erasure, of self.

  A spinner

  Science fiction was always predicated upon continuous, perceptible change; it narrated a world that would become noticeably different over the course of a single lifetime. Those changes were part of the profound philosophical and political shifts of the nineteenth century, but they were most clearly connected to the rapid pace of technological development. The genre has been an essential part of technological culture for over a century. Through the language, iconography and narration of science fiction, the shock of the new is aestheticised and examined. Science fiction constructs a space of accommodation to an intensely technological existence, and this has continued through to the present electronic era.

  It has also served as a vehicle for satire, social criticism and aesthetic estrangement. In its most radical aspect, science fiction narrates the dissolution of the most fundamental structures of human existence. By positing a world that behaves differently – whether physically or socially – from this one, our world is denaturalised. Science fiction even denaturalises language by emphasising processes of making meaning. The distance between the language of the text and the reader’s lived experience represents the genre’s ultimate subject. What science fiction offers, in Jameson’s words, is ‘the estrangement and renewal of our own reading present’.1

  The brilliance of Blade Runner, like Alien (1979) before it, is located in its visual density. Scott’s ‘layering’ effect produces an inexhaustible complexity, an infinity of surfaces to be encountered and explored, and unlike many contemporary films, Blade Runner refuses to explain itself. Even with the over-explicit narration of the original release, central issues were left un- or under-explained. Where are the ‘off-world colonies’? Who goes there, and for what reason? Why does the city seem simultaneously crowded and empty? When and why were replicants created? When were they outlawed on Earth, and why? How does that ‘Voight-Kampff test’ work? The viewer of Blade Runner is forced to make constant inferences in order to understand the detailed world that the film presents.

  This is how science fiction works, when it’s working. Science fiction writer and literary theorist Samuel Delany argues that the distinctiveness of the genre comes from its unique demands on the reader. It demands inferential activity: sentences like ‘The door dilated’ (Robert Heinlein, Starship Troopers) or ‘Daddy married, a man this time, and much more happily’ (Thomas Disch, 334) continually, and somewhat subtly, demonstrate the distance between the world of the reader and the world of the story, novel or film. Language alludes to the complexity of the world.2

  Science fiction film also uses a complex ‘language’, but represents a special case because of its mainstream positioning and big-budget commodity status. Science fiction novels or comics need to sell only a few thousand copies to recoup their costs, so experimentalism is not discouraged, but the Hollywood blockbuster must find (or forge) a mass audience. Science fiction cinema’s mode of production has committed it to proven, profitable structures, and so it is also more conservative. Yet although the narratives can be reactionary – and they often are – the delirious technological excesses of these films and their spectacular effects may ‘speak’ some other meaning entirely. The most significant ‘meanings’ of science fiction films are often found in their visual organisation and their emphasis on perception and ‘perceptual selves’. Science fiction films continually thrust their spectators into new spaces that are alien and technologically determined. Cinematic movement becomes an essential mode of comprehension: the camera often takes on a subjective, first-person point of view when encountering such strange environments. Films as diverse as 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957), Star Wars (1977) and Blade Runner depend upon their dynamic visual complexity. In other words, they build worlds.

 

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