30 Aug 2012 10:55:02
To celebrate the 20th anniversary of the excellent BFI Film Classics series, 12 of them have been reissued with striking new cover designs and forewords. Bukatman's brilliantly succinct yet wide-ranging analysis of Blade Runner was published in 1997 and its reissue is timely: this year marks the 30th anniversary of Ridley Scott's immensely influential SF film based on a Philip K Dick novel. He explores the role of vision ("seeing is everything in Blade Runner, but it guarantees absolutely nothing"), the sci-fi metropolis (this is "the quintessential city film"), the movie's influence on cyberpunk, and the way simulations are used to subvert reality, from synthetic animals and faked photos to uncannily human replicants (the word was apparently coined by the microbiologist daughter of one of the scriptwriters). In his foreword, Bukatman regrets the way subsequent versions of the film (1992, 2007) have reduced the ambiguity as to whether Rick Deckard (or is it René Descartes?) is a human or a replicant: "the state of radical doubt is central."
