Blade Runner
By (Author) Scott Bukatman
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
BFI Publishing
31st July 2012
2nd edition
United Kingdom
General
Non Fiction
791.4372
Paperback
112
Width 134mm, Height 188mm, Spine 12mm
180g
Ridley Scott's dystopian classic Blade Runner, an adaptation of Philip K. Dick's novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, combines noir with science fiction to create a groundbreaking cyberpunk vision of urban life in the twenty-first century. With replicants on the run, the rain-drenched Los Angeles which Blade Runner imagines is a city of oppression and enclosure, but a city in which transgression and disorder can always erupt. Graced by stunning sets, lighting, effects, costumes and photography, Blade Runner succeeds brilliantly in depicting a world at once uncannily familiar and startlingly new. In his innovative and nuanced reading, Scott Bukatman details the making of Blade Runner and its steadily improving fortunes following its release in 1982. He situates the film in terms of debates about postmodernism, which have informed much of the criticism devoted to it, but argues that its tensions derive also from the quintessentially twentieth-century, modernist experience of the city as a space both imprisoning and liberating.
In his foreword to this special edition, published to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the BFI Film Classics series, Bukatman suggests that Blade Runner 's visual complexity allows it to translate successfully to the world of high definition and on-demand home cinema. He looks back to the science fiction tradition of the early 1980s, and on to the key changes in the 'final' version of the film in 2007, which risk diminishing the sense of instability created in the original.
SCOTT BUKATMANis a cultural theorist and Professor of Film and Media Studies at Stanford University. His research explores how popular media such as film, comics and animation mediate between new technologies and human perceptual and bodily experience.