week 11 BLADE RUNNER'S ARCHITECTURAL LEGACY

In reviewing Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (1982), a movie which I love and have seen many times, I found myself frustrated at not being able to see more in each scene.  I noticed that the tight camera shots purposely remove from view that which is above the characters heads and evade revealing too much detail - everything is obscured by an overabundance of light or darkness.  The pastiche, postmodern aesthetic within the film creates slightly blurry scenes in which the eye does not have a place to focus. What we're left with are impressions - almost like memories, yet they are memories of the future.

These observations support the idea put forth by my instructor David Fortin in the chapter on Blade Runner from his book "Architecture and Science-Fiction Film: Philip K. Dick and the Spectacle of Home" in which he asserts that the film's imagery is used to kill the notion of the home.  I think Scott's deliberately vague and dis-composed shots leave the audience unsettled due to its recognition of place yet rejection of that place's domesticity.

This type of filming technique is almost like the antithesis of Tarkovsky's slow pans and intent observation.  Tarkovsky's goal was to illuminate the sentiment of nostaglia for domestic life, for the home. What Scott does dwell on in great detail is the moment of Roy's death, perhaps as a juxtaposition to the composition he has employed throughout the rest of the film, and consequently humanizing him. This is one of the least unsettling shots of the film as the audience finally makes a connection to Roy's quest to find authentic inhabitation.