BLADE RUNNER

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BLADE RUNNER

• HUMANITY, PERCEPTION, AND CREATION

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• THE APEX OF CREATION
• Blade Runner initiates with words, a view of the
  city, and an eye in a state of perceiving. We are
  told of the present condition of our societys.
  There now exists two distinct beings. Humanity
  and a genetically engineered species
  birthed-forth from our human mind,
• a being virtually identical to a human - known
  as a Replicant.
• The film Blade Runner is an ancient myth brought
  forth into modernity by Ridley Scotts vision it
  is the myth of Zeus and his child Athena
  conceived of and birthed from his own mind.
  Unlike Zeus, a god, we are human. Humanity
  tolerates and takes pride in our achievements
  only as far as we are not replaced by them.
• These Replicants are perfect. Refined perfection
  guided by humanitys perceived emotional,
  intellectual, and physical inadequacies. Similar
  to modernist principles a Replicants physical
  and mental capacities are governed by their
  projected function.  

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• All Replicants are slaves to humanity and their
  individual functions are specific to them
  combat, labour, or pleasure. Humanity has the
  luxury of time to develop their position about
  where they stand in the world - our life is about
  process Perceiving and processing with our mind
  the accumulation of knowledge and experiences.
• Replicants are innately embedded with their
  function and their pasts . Their memories are
  given to them by their creator.
• Whereas Zeus nurtures his warrior daughter
  Athena, human society severs the cord and
  abandons our creations/children to the off-worlds
  to serve our own good.
•  
• Police Chief
• They were designed to copy human beings in every
  way except their emotions, and the designers
  reckon that after a few years they might develop
  their own emotional responses- hate, love, fear,
  anger, envy- so they built in a fail safe device
•  
• Deckard
• Which is what?
•  
• Police Chief
• A four year life-span.

  A basic pleasure model.. The standard item for
military clubs in the off colony. -Police Chief
  REPLICANT DESIGNATION BATTY (ROY) NEXUS 6
N6MAA10816 INCEPT DATE 8 JAN., 2016 FUNC
COMBAT, COLONIZATION DEFENSE PROGRAM PHYS LEV A
MENT LEVEL A
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• Ridley Scott explores several universal
  philosophical questions regarding humanity. He
  concentrates on the specific act of perceiving
  and the relationship of perceiving and memory.
  Memory is defined in the film as a quality that
  is distinctly human, truly human. The film plays
  with the us, plays with the notions of perception
  and what is truthful perception or merely
  aesthetic. The Replicants are also in possession
  of imbedded memories or what is perceived to be
  memories by them. Life experiences are absorbed
  and a memory is generated whereby the Replicants
  begin to display emotions based on life
  experiences- similar to humans. What is left to
  distinguish us from them? Nothing. Humanity
  tempers the Replicants perfection by condemning
  them to a four year life-span. The Replicants
  remain a transient being/memory in the human
  world. Ridley Scott poses/reveals/explores what
  it means to be human and how do we stand as
  humans in the face of rapidly developing
  technologies?
•  
• Commerce is our goal here at Tyrell. More human
  than human is our motto.
• -Tyrell

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• EAST MEETS WEST GLOBALIZATION AND THE COLLECTIVE
  MEMORY
•  
• Ridley Scott seamlessly collects and layers
  diverse and divergent forms of communication
  Art, architecture, music, photography, poetry. He
  generates through film a visual pastiche of our
  western collective memory. Like all societies our
  historical, cultural, and economic development is
  documented in these various forms of
  communication.
•  
• Our experience of architecture has become habit,
  a subconscious part of everyday life. Film has
  likewise become part of our subconscious memory,
  shading our impression of places we have never
  experienced and in many cases never will
  influencing to the point of dictating how we
  should feel, think and operate in a particular
  space.
•  
• When films are set in New York the background is
  so dominant, and so instantly recognizable, that
  it cannot help but become almost an honorary
  member acting to validate the plot. If this is
  true then how do audience members make the
  cognitive leap between what they see and what
  they understand?
• -Natasha Higham

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•  
• Cinematically Ridley Scott assembles these
  seemingly disparate forms of communication that
  act as signifiers and he asks the viewer to
  engage in thoughtful/truthful perception - active
  perception. He links the items together as
  collective signifiers. Their meanings unfold and
  surface relative to our knowledge and perception.
  Our individual knowledge regarding our collective
  societys history acts as a variable to which we
  as a viewer enter into the life of the movie.

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• THE OBVIOUS ABOUT FILM GENRE AND ITS CONSCIOUS
  SUBVERSION BY SIGNIFIERS-
• CINEMATOGRAPHY
•  
• Film provides architecture with an outlet for
  realizing visions that can never exist and
  conjures up experience that in reality have not.
  As a two dimensional form, the freedom of
  expression is limitless because the economics,
  logistical, and legal constraints are no longer a
  burden. The creative process and hence cinema
  becomes an ideal medium created for utopian
  visions and different approaches to architectural
  design.
• -Natasha Higham
•  
• The narratives physical landscape is set within
  the science fiction genre while the characters
  come alive within the genre of film noir. Ridley
  Scott vacillates between the two genres by his
  use of cinematography and the collection of
  signifiers. By juxtaposing the genres and
  signifiers he generates a tapestry of modern and
  post modern iconography. Our emotional
  attachments to/with the film and characters are
  heightened by these signifiers.
•  
• Cinematically each scene is presented as a series
  of focusing, similar to the operation of a human
  eye. Ridley Scott also plays between the
  collective i.e. the city- represented in the
  sci-fi landscapes to the relationship of the
  protagonist the individual within this
  collective and his mission that is set in the
  film noir genre.

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• AN EXAMPLE
•  
• INDIVIDUAL TO COLLECTIVE
• Deckard is on his way to the Tyrell
  Co-corporation in the Spinner police car. We fly
  across this horizontal landscape of Los Angeles
  2019 towards the monolithic deconstructed Mayan
  temple that houses the Tyrell Corporation. The
  only aspect of Los Angeles that we understand
  from the present day city is the horizontality
  and the abstracted idea of the free way by the
  signified flying vehicles. Ridley Scott then
  focuses in and juxtaposes Deckards facial
  expressions- his perceiving of this
  science-fiction landscape we are not sure if he
  is in wonder or utter detachment, if he is
  hesitant about the landscape or about his
  mission. We do recognize that he is a man and we
  empathize with him as a viewer as we are aware
  that he is reluctant to be on this mission.
•  

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• COLLECTIVE TO INDIVIDUAL
• The viewer is focused closer.
•  
• We are now within the heavy walls of the Tyrell
  Corporation. Repetitious stamped concrete
  patterns which symbolize infinity are imbedded
  into the walls.The stamps are from a house
  designed by Frank Lloyd Wright for Ennis-Brown
  in southern California. The house adapted
  concrete to the surrounding rugged topography. He
  designed the house for a client who shared his
  affinity for Mayan art and architecture drawing
  upon the inspiration of the culture's highly
  ornamented and organized buildings. The
  iconography is there, but this certainly is not
  Los Angeles.
• Rachael a Replicant a product of this highly
  organized and specialized company emerges from
  the cavernous womb of the room between several
  classically positioned signifiers. The
  signifiers all indicate power. Several of the
  signifiers relate to past conquests of nations
  against one another. Nations that had dabbled in
  genetic engineering experiments. The Tyrell
  Corporation is the apex of organic reproduction.
  Man as God. The power of man to control nature
  and so signifiers such as the bonsai located on
  the board room table and the owl are not
  coincidental.

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• Ridley Scott engages the viewer with the
  exquisite Replicant Rachael who wears 40s
  clothing of the film noir era. She is a woman of
  the time. Visually he makes us believe that she
  is the classic femme fatale.
• She captivates and seduces the viewer along with
  Deckard. Unlike the typical film noir, she
  becomes the metaphor for his spiritual awakening.
  Deckard rediscovers his humanity through the
  other through a machine Eventually he realizes
  that regardless of their beginnings they both
  desire and possess the same needs in life.
• Tyrell emerges with thick spectacles, he is the
  father of creation. Ridley Scott moves in
  further. We are a direct witness into the eyes
  of the Replicant. We watch as Rachael is examined
  by the Voight Kampff test and indirectly we too
  are subject to the same emotional test as the
  Replicant. By the end of the scene we are sitting
  at the table with the characters.
• We empathize with Rachael who is unaware of her
  un-humanness and we empathize with Deckard who
  not only was reluctant to retire the Replicants
  but has now become visibly taken, emotionally
  taken, with Rachael. Deckard undergoes a
  spiritual crisis. He understands that she is
  unaware of not being truly human, biologically
  human. He struggles to remain detached from this
  finding. Disturbingly, she reacts very humanly
  she is visibly upset, confused, and ashamed
  particularly when she is asked to leave the
  table. Who is more human at this point? Deckard,
  Rachael, Tyrell?

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•  COLLECTIVE TO INDIVIDUAL
•  
• The scene ends and we again travel across the
  city - over the horizontal landscape Ridley
  Scott recycles three diverse shots of the city
  throughout the film- The Coca-cola electronic
  board dominates an entire façade of a building.
  Architecture is replaced with commerce. The
  signage is similar to Times Square in New York
  except here there is no evidence of small
  businesses. The individual is no longer visible.
  Only large global corporations flourish
  coca-cola, pharmaceuticals. The city is
  familiar, we know coca-cola, but the scales and
  method of marketing are out of proportion to the
  signage we have today. The world of Blade Runner
  is accelerated signage finds the viewer and the
  city dwellers even when they are still.
•   Ridley Scott maintains the series of signifiers
  at all cinematic scales and within each genre.
  What initially seems as a blurring is actually a
  method to clarify the narrative to the viewer.

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• Another example of signifiers that remain at a
  very small scale is illustrated within the
  collection of Lyons photographs that Deckard
  finds in the Yukon Hotel. One particular
  photographs pulls together several other
  signifiers to visually convey the Replicants
  emotional desire for domesticity.

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• Lyons photographs eventually get mixed in with
  Deckards own unclear history.
• On a piano within his apartment Deckard pins up
  Lyons photos. Lyons photos lie across Deckards
  photographs of his own ancestry. Up until this
  point his apartment had no indication of domestic
  living. The piano humanizes Deckard. We are
  visually signified that he once had emotions. The
  film replaces the standard hearth with a piano.
  The piano metaphorically signifies the marriage
  of the individual and the collective within a
  finite
• space A collective memory of family and
  gathering, A place of joy , A place of intimacy.
• It is in this metaphoric space where Deckard
  intuitively observes the same level of
  domesticity within one of Lyons photographs. He
  places the photo into the Esper scientific eye
  viewing machine which makes a very particular
  sound similar to a camera shutter not the
  futuristic sound one might anticipate with new
  technology. The Esper has the ability to
  interpret vocal commands and to respond using
  emissions of high frequency sounds. The Esper
  provides tri-dimensional analysis of high
  resolution photographs. It has the capacity to
  detect hidden physical planes that are not
  visible on the photographic surface.
• The overall photo is a mish-mash of paintings
  by Vermeer and Jacques Louis David. Vermeer is a
  Dutch painter re-known for his interior
  landscapes of the daily lives of Dutch people.
  Everyday scenes where the smallest tasks of
  everyday life are glorified and revered painted
  with softness and intimacy. They depict the
  absolute universal joy of life in the most
  mundane of moments. Vermeer also used a pin-hole
  camera to frame compositions to paint. Images
  recorded with the camera often showed
  discrepancies in scale similar to the ones found
  in his paintings. His fluid, painterly treatment
  can be compared to the unfocused appearance of an
  image seen through such an optical device. His
  method was unconventional, painters of the time
  relied on live models. What the viewer perceives
  to be direct representations are in fact indirect
  - Vermeer is a perceptual forge. The paintings
  are subtle and full of signifiers that people
  would readily relate to during the 17th and 18th
  centuries.
• Ironically it is the Replicants who are found
  in these photos, they have posited themselves in
  historical depictions of humanity. To be caught
  on film in such intimate settings is indicative
  of the sophistication of their own emotions. The
  photo documents offer proof that the Replicants
  have tasted domesticity the mundane repetition
  of daily life.

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• As with any race that has lived under tyranny and
  slavery, eventually they rebel this is the
  human spirit.
• Like any lost or abandoned child, they return to
  search for their roots, their beginnings, the
  meaning of their life.

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• FILM NOIR, LOVE AND LOVE
•  
• Ridley Scott skews an already known film typology
  in order to frame the known against the unknown.
  Philosophical problems are amplified when human
  emotions are involved. Emotions and passion are
  always generated with romance. He is aware that
  the viewer is familiar with this genre and so we
  are unconsciously guided to question what is
  love.
• The narrative and host of characters within the
  film are typical of film noir with the
  hard-boiled gritty private eye, the wealthy
  ruler, the deviants of society, and the femme
  fatale.
• Right and wrong, bad guy and good guy are
  typically clear in film noir The criminal
  deserves it for doing wrong and the protagonist
  has no problem in intervening as it serves the
  common good. Good and bad in Blade Runner is
  totally blurred. The introduction of ethics set
  against the continuous eternal question of What
  it means to be human complicates Deckards
  mission. As the Replicants continuously
  demonstrate their capacity for human emotion
  primarily because of Rachael his ability to
  retire the skin jobs is compromised.
• Romance emotionally calls upon the viewer to
  perceive and believe that the Replicants are
  human despite the foreign world they inhabit.
  Ridley Scott is clever in seducing and appealing
  to the emotions of the viewer in this subversive
  way.

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• Ridley signifies the Marlows, the Bogarts, even
  the expressionism of Dr. Caligari as a means of
  mediation between the viewer and the
  protagonists inner world.

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• Deckard is quite cold and emotionless. He remains
  distant from life. His detachment is emphasized
  with his close affiliation with booze. His
  apartment is an inanimate extension of his
  spiritual psyche, specifically his dislike of
  society. In opposition to him stands Roy Batty, a
  Replicant, who is the emotional tenor throughout
  the film. Roy actively and persistently wills
  for life, a longer life.
• As a result of Roys commitment to willing, his
  actions may not have always been good. He
  understands that his actions did not conform to
  human civil societies laws and customs.
• Roy reveals a conscience by his spoken
  confession. A conscience understands what society
  considers to be right and wrong. He states that
  during his life he has done questionable things
  but he also understands that he has been treated
  inhumanely despite being created as more human
  than human. Philosophically, he is the authentic
  being and Nietzsches mad man His sense of
  self preservation, His love for Pris, His seeking
  out of Tyrell his father are all demonstrative
  of his humanity.
•  
•  

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• At the end of his life Roy displays the most
  enlightened and transcendent of all human
  emotions, compassion . He raises Deckard using
  the hand he had speared to prolong its use.
  Through this act of forgiveness Roy is
  transformed into a Christ-like figure. Roy
  professes his sadness regarding the temporality
  of his perceptions, experiences, memory, and
  life. His absolute love for life allows him to
  experience death so profoundly. His final words
  to Deckard are given in the highest form of human
  prose - poetry.

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• LOS ANGELES NOVEMBER 2019
•  
• The city of Los Angeles 2019 now supports a
  population of 90 million. The urban landscape is
  totally synthetic and has suffered urban decay
  through the economic pitfalls of globalization.
  The rich have moved completely out of the city or
  to off-worlds. Ridley Scott takes a familiar
  place, the city of Los Angeles, and
  hypothetically subjects it to the economic,
  social, and cultural implications of
  globalization. What ever we know of present day
  Los Angeles is buried under a global lens. The
  city of 2019 is a city of contradiction. Visual
  layering of architectural typologies and
  artifacts from various cultural histories create
  the contradictory future-memory of a globalized
  world.
• During the 1980s the United States suffered
  considerable economic paranoia with the rise of
  the Japanese economy. The bill boards signify
  this paranoia and is doubly amplified with the
  futuristic Japanese models consuming
  pharmaceuticals with a smile.
• The Los Angeles 2019 he depicts has no evidence
  of decaying bungalows, sandy beaches, or the
  green hills that we know it for today. The
  middle-class suburbs have been overtaken by the
  city. The ethnicity of the inhabitants generate
  a sub-commentary regarding the American dream.
  

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• The overall city presented has modern elements
  of Le Corbusiers radiant city. He then
  interjects the formality with the complexity of
  post modernist ideals, specifically, the ideas of
  Venturi. A particular idea is the understanding
  of the complexity of a city. That individual
  structures can remain autonomous within the
  complexity of an organic urban city scape. Ridley
  Scott interjects The Bradbury hotel, Union
  Station, and the Yukon hotel which are New York
  city icons into his vision of Los Angeles. The
  city blocks of living towers seem to be part of a
  functional and rigorous city plan, but as one
  descends into the streets we find that they are
  not the efficient channels for automobile traffic
  that Le Corbusier envisioned but a densely
  populated pedestrian core that seethes with
  post-capitalist vendors, restaurants, and ethnic
  markets. This street level is very similar to New
  York, not Los Angeles.
• This future city has adopted to the transactions
  of a populus whose cultures extend beyond the
  bounds of architecture. The futurist city can not
  accommodate the rigidity of modernism, instead it
  folds and unfolds with the meeting of east and
  west.
•   
• I took the two world trade towers in New York
  City and the New York street proportions as a
  today model, and expanded everything vertically
  about two and a half times. This inspired me to
  make the bases of the buildings sloping to cover
  about six city blocks, on the premise that you
  needed more ground access to the building mass.
• -Syd Mead

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• PHYSICAL AND META-PHYSICAL RECYCLING
•  
• Literature and economics inform the cyclical
  imagery, sound, and text.
• Blade Runner is loosely affiliated with the novel
  Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip K.
  Dick. His theories regarding temporality and
  cyclical states are to be found in several other
  of his other writings. In this novel he speaks
  about the repetition of escaping the city for new
  land that this generates an endless cycle within
  the human psyche and city.
• Economics is stated in the directors own words
•  
• Were in a city which is in a state of overkill,
  of snarled up energy, where you can no longer
  remove a building because it costs far more than
  constructing one in place. So the whole economic
  process is slowed down.
• -Ridley Scott
•  
• The imagery, sound, and text recycle throughout
  the film. There are several ideas and associative
  theories that are derived from the film The idea
  of recurrence, Serendipity, Quantum physics, The
  cycling of time, Recycling.

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• The production of the movie adopted recycling to
  reduce cost. The director was forced to use the
  Bradbury buildings. The cost was lower to use an
  existing building that was to undergo renovation
  that constructing a set within a city. Ridley
  Scott recycled several elements from his and
  other films also. Recycling is a factor of
  economics. The film itself is recycled cinema.
  The futuristic buildings within the film which
  are actually existing are covered in external
  piping and systems as a means of re-use for the
  large futuristic city. The ironic return to the
  foundings of architecture, Mayan civilizations,
  in a futuristic society
• Post-Ford industries and economics are foreseen
  and represented as production business. The
  farming out of Replicant industries to ethnic
  vendors as a means of reducing cost. Similar to
  after-market industries today, they recycle parts
  from the Tyrell corporation or generate parts for
  existing products.
• Living amongst and creating out of the refuse we
  find characters who not only depend on the waste,
  they are as much a product of it such as J.F.
  Sebastian. His accelerated death is a result of
  the post-modern condition.
• Cinematically Ridley re-hashes the scenes of the
  electronic blimp and electronic building façade
  as a means of retaining the viewer in a
  visual/temporal cyclical limbo, for it would
  seem impossible that after being presented with
  the enormous landscape in the first scene we
  would find ourselves repositioned in front of the
  same icons?

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• The themes of recycling also find themselves in
  the smaller scale ideas of serendipity or déjà
  vu that the viewer perceives yet does not fully
  comprehend
• Deckards newspaper he reads prior to
  confronting Zhora is Lyons drawer liner at the
  Yukon hotel A 17th century camera oscura that
  captures the Replicants who are then divulged
  from a tri-dimensional lens. Pictures that are
  within pictures.
• The film ends with the recycling and
  questioning of Deckards own authenticity. The
  police chiefs assistant recycles discarded items
  to into sculptural origami pieces, iconographic
  images of each scene. Initially, the chief of
  police validates Deckards position in the global
  hierarchy by referring to him as a little man.
  After Deckard completes his mission, we view the
  chiefs assistant who congratulates Deckard by
  telling him he has done a mans job.
•  
• Is this statement a conscious repetition or a
  distortion of the statement through a temporal
  cycle?
•