Blade Runner

Ridley's Scott Blade Runner has proved to be one of the most enduring and influential films of the 1980s. An adaptation of Philip K Dick's novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the film combines noir with science fiction to create a ground-breaking cyberpunk vision of urban life in next millennium. With replicants on the run, the rain-drenched Los Angeles which Blade Runner imagines is a city of opression and enclosure, but a city in which transgression and disorder can always erupt. Graced by stunning sets, lighting, effects, costume and photography, Blade Runner succeeds brilliantly in depicting a world at once uncannily familiar and startingly new.
In his innovative and nuanced reading, Scott Bukatman details the making of Blade Runner and its steadily improving fortunes after its release in 1982. He situates the film in terms of the debates about postmodernism which have informed the large body criticism devoted to it. Although Blade Runner explores the tensions fundamental to a postmodern era of bewildering technological change, Bukatman argues, it derives from the quintessentially twentieth-century, modernist experience of the city - the experience of a space both imprisioning and liberating.
Scott Bukatman is Assistant Professor of Films Studies at Stanford University. He is the author of Terminal Identity : The Virtual Subject Postmodern Science Fiction.