The Cinema of Surfaces
On the Aesthetics of Film in the Eighties, by Jürgen Müller & Steffen Haubner. Excerpt of the book 'Movies of the 80s', by Jürgen Müller
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A city spews fire. The black sky above Los Angeles is rocked by countless explosions. Fireballs erupt from factory smokestacks, the air itself seems to shudder and groan; futuristic flying machines swoop through the city, and a bolt of lightning slashes the horizon. So much light... and yet the darkness seems immune, unscathed, impenetrable. Very close up, the next explosion; and then we see a single human eye, the city lights glittering on its shiny surface. This eye itself is in turn a kind of screen, or mirror, impassively reflecting the fireballs that loom above the city. Ridley Scott's opening sequence in Blade Runner articulates-indeed, realizes-one of the central aspirations of Eighties cinema: that a film be more than a mere image; that it create its own aesthetic reality and follow its own laws. Despite the film's tangible desire to overwhelm the audience with images, this imaginary journey to the city of tomorrow also has its philosophical ambitions. Critics did not fail to notice that the protagonist's name-Deckard-evokes that of the French philosopher René Descartes, who claimed to have proved with certainty that human beings can know they exist. Later, the leader of the replicants, Roy (Rutger Hauer), is granted a closing monolog in which he quotes a poem by Nietzsche that invokes the grandeur and beauty of an infinite universe.
These philosophical allusions have a common point of departure. Behind the ideas of self-knowledge and the superman, there is an implicit understanding that humanity's ultimate goal and true destiny is to achieve perfection. In the final moments of his life, Roy rejects all this, voicing his willingness to eschew immortality and embrace death. Though all the wonders he has seen will disappear with him "like tears in the rain," he can still justify his existence in aesthetic terms.
In its underlying fatalism, Blade Runner is clearly inspired by film noir. The mood of the "dark films" which characterized the Forties is an ideal vehicle for the film's epistemological skepticism, the notion that the future will hold no natural or verifiable truths. In the year 2019, Los Angeles is either too bright or too dark. Instead of illuminating, the light blinds. This stylistic technique, so typical of Ridley Scott, creates some tremendously potent images, whose very effectiveness supports the film's fundamental skepticism regarding any kind of knowledge or self-knowledge.
Page [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]
Page [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]
A city spews fire. The black sky above Los Angeles is rocked by countless explosions. Fireballs erupt from factory smokestacks, the air itself seems to shudder and groan; futuristic flying machines swoop through the city, and a bolt of lightning slashes the horizon. So much light... and yet the darkness seems immune, unscathed, impenetrable. Very close up, the next explosion; and then we see a single human eye, the city lights glittering on its shiny surface. This eye itself is in turn a kind of screen, or mirror, impassively reflecting the fireballs that loom above the city. Ridley Scott's opening sequence in Blade Runner articulates-indeed, realizes-one of the central aspirations of Eighties cinema: that a film be more than a mere image; that it create its own aesthetic reality and follow its own laws. Despite the film's tangible desire to overwhelm the audience with images, this imaginary journey to the city of tomorrow also has its philosophical ambitions. Critics did not fail to notice that the protagonist's name-Deckard-evokes that of the French philosopher René Descartes, who claimed to have proved with certainty that human beings can know they exist. Later, the leader of the replicants, Roy (Rutger Hauer), is granted a closing monolog in which he quotes a poem by Nietzsche that invokes the grandeur and beauty of an infinite universe.
These philosophical allusions have a common point of departure. Behind the ideas of self-knowledge and the superman, there is an implicit understanding that humanity's ultimate goal and true destiny is to achieve perfection. In the final moments of his life, Roy rejects all this, voicing his willingness to eschew immortality and embrace death. Though all the wonders he has seen will disappear with him "like tears in the rain," he can still justify his existence in aesthetic terms.
In its underlying fatalism, Blade Runner is clearly inspired by film noir. The mood of the "dark films" which characterized the Forties is an ideal vehicle for the film's epistemological skepticism, the notion that the future will hold no natural or verifiable truths. In the year 2019, Los Angeles is either too bright or too dark. Instead of illuminating, the light blinds. This stylistic technique, so typical of Ridley Scott, creates some tremendously potent images, whose very effectiveness supports the film's fundamental skepticism regarding any kind of knowledge or self-knowledge.
Page [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]
Movies of the 80s
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Stills from 'Blade Runner', USA, 1982