Abstracts

MONDAY, JUNE 6

Introduction - 10.00-10:30 (LR3)

Panel 1  -    ORIGINS    -   10.30-12.30 (LR3)                                  

Lawrence Ratna (St. Anne’s Hospital London, UK)                                            

“Philip K. Dick - The Psychotic Prophet?”

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Dick’s journey into madness began at birth. A premature twin, he had a traumatic, alienated childhood, plagued by a panoply of physical and mental illnesses necessitating frequent hospitalisations. Some of the roots of Blade Runner can be traced to his childhood. At school he misperceived his teacher as a robot. The psychological questionnaires that were administered to him in hospital inform the opening scene of the film, when a replicant is examined for empathy. Dick despised his mother and it is the question about the mother that triggers the replicant’s violence. By his twenties, he was swallowing large quantities of amphetamines, experiencing schizophrenic symptoms and documenting his transgressive thoughts in a manic stream of words. In 1974, Dick saw a woman’s necklace which instantly flashed a whole Roman cosmology and gnostic knowledge into his brain. In clinical terms, this is called an autochthonous delusion. This psychotic episode lasted a year, leading to a suicide attempt. He was tended and tormented by his five wives; the third was his template for Rachel in Blade Runner. His symptoms worsened with age, leaving him unable to cope with reality and he stopped going out. Distressed by the adaptation but delighted by the visualisation, he died just before Blade Runner opened. Dick distilled his experience of psychotic symptoms into issues of identity, memory and empathy that inform the question: “what constitutes the Human?” in Blade Runner. He was paranoid in the paranoid world of McCarthy, Nixon, and the cold war. His visions have proved to be uncannily accurate – urban sprawl and climate change decimate nature, as in the postapocalyptic world of the film. At a time when AI was a flicker in a filament, Dick accurately prophesised the singularity that it posed as machines replace man. He foresaw its power to surveil people and create false narratives that serve to subjugate. Today, AI algorithms scour our secrets, sway our elections, polarise populations and slaughter millions with disinformation for the profits of the powerful. 
Was he a madman or a prophetic genius?

Timothy Shanahan (Loyola Marymount University, US)                                    

“Fiery the Angels Fell: Assessing Blade Runner's Origins and Legacies”

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Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (1982) has been lauded as a prophetic movie that "anticipated with remarkable prescience the world in which we have lived for the past four decades." From fashion to transhumanism, we are told that "Blade Runner has left an indelible mark on popular culture." Such claims are exciting because they suggest that a mere film (or filmmaker) was able, forty years ago, to divine a future that others could perceive only dimly, if at all. However, for such claims to be more than merely enthusiastic expressions of admiration for a truly remarkable film, the specific elements of the film claimed to be prophetic, and their connections to later real-world developments, need to be clarified and established. There is a difference between, on the one hand, finding suggestive resemblances between elements of the fictional world depicted in a film and the actual world that subsequently came to be and, on the other, establishing that the latter was anticipated in, and perhaps in part brought about (i.e., caused) by, the former. Similar issues concern a film's "origins." Not everything that preceded and resembles elements of a film qualify as part of the film's origin story. Consequently, this essay undertakes a philosophical analysis of Blade Runner's "origins" and "legacies" with a view to identifying criteria for each.

Amanda Potter (Open University, UK) and Hunter Gardner (University of South Carolina, US) )

“‘Let me tell you about my mother’: Patriarchy, pleasure models, and Greco-Roman myth in Blade Runner and Blade Runner 2049” (virtual presentation)

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In Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, the Nexus 6 Replicant Leon responds to a question about his mother during a Voight-Kampff test with the pithy response quoted above and a nearly lethal gunshot. The question and response prompt further inquiry about the lineage of the Replicant as a cyborg figure and the gendered and familial dynamics that shape its on-screen portrayal, both in Scott’s version of P.K. Dick’s novel, and in Villeneuve’s 2017 successor. Scholarship within classical reception has observed significant connections between the contemporary cyborg and ancient automata figures (e.g. the golden mechanical maidens assisting Hephaestus in his workshop, Faraone 1987) as well as ancient manufactured (or “womanufactured,” to use Sharrock’s 1990 term; cf. James 2008) women, such as Pandora and Pygmalion’s animated ivory statue (Liveley 2006; cf. Cifuentes 1998 and Buxton 1998). These ancient manufactured females are all produced to meet the differing needs and wants of their male creators. This paper seeks to explore further the ways that manufactured beings in Greco-Roman myth impact the role of female Replicants in Scott’s original film; “pleasure model” Pris, “beauty and the beast” Zhora, as well as Rachael, who could be read as a synthetic woman created to be the ideal (sexual) partner for Dekker. We also examine the 2017 film, with its dual designations of created woman as highly exploitable asset (Joi, K’s holographic form of AI), loyal servant to the patriarch (Luv) as well as Dr. Ana Stelline, memory maker, creator par excellence, whose own hybrid lineage validates the potential of the cyborg mythos to disrupt hierarchical relationships, especially gendered hierarchies (Haraway 1991). But do the corporate (Tyrell Corporation and Wallace Company) and familial (Deckard as father figure to K) connections that bind the two films neutralize the potential of these post-human hybrids to challenge the “informatics of domination” (Haraway 1991, 32), ultimately affirming rather than disrupting patriarchal norms, inherent in the classical antecedents.

Loraine Haywood (The University of Newcastle, Australia)

“Blade Runner and Blade Runner 2049: Myth, Metaphor, and Mystery, ‘Who Keeps a Dead Tree?’” (virtual presentation)

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Despite the futuristic feel of the Blade Runner films, they have developed from a rich Western tradition in the telling and retelling of ancient myths. In Ridley Scott’s science fiction film, Blade Runner (1982), the Replicants return to Dr Eldon Tyrell (Joe Turkel), the God that made them. Like the Garden of Eden myth, they have metaphorically partaken of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, knowing they will die, and want to partake of the Tree of Life, seeking immortality. Replicants are forbidden from entering earth, the law of their creators. Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford) is tasked with tracking them down and “retiring” them, ending their existence. In his search Deckard encounters Rachael (Sean Young), she is a replicant who is with Tyrell as his assistant. She is singular in her perfection and his most human creation. Deckard and Rachel fall in love and escape so she can be saved. In Blade Runner 2049 (Villeneuve 2017), K (Ryan Gosling), like Deckard, is tasked with taking down replicants that have escaped from the outer worlds. As he closes in on the property of a suspected replicant, a dead tree becomes the centre of a deepening mystery. A box is found containing the remains of a woman. In the box are Rachael’s remains that on examination reveal the secret knowledge of her immaculate conception. Like the biblical King Herod, news of this discovery reaches Niander Wallace (Jared Leto) who sends out emissaries to “find the child”. This paper will demonstrate the influence of ancient origin stories on Blade Runner and Blade Runner 2049. Western storytelling repeatedly falls into myths (Haywood 2016, 2021, 2022). The elements of the Garden of Eden myth, Christ’s miraculous birth, and Hesiod’s myth of Pandora’s Jar or Box are strong metaphors commonly used in the West. In Blade Runner 2049, the metaphor of the dead tree and the box buried near it conflate the myths of Eden, Pandora, and miracle birth into a mystery that K must unravel. For the Replicants, like the Israelites, this miracle birth is the Messianic hope for an enslaved race.

Panel 2     MEMORIES     10.30-12.30 (LR5)                                                        

Lars Schmeink (University of Leeds, UK / Europa-Universität Flensburg, Germany)

“What makes a replicant? Memory, Trauma, Identity in Blade Runner: Black Lotus”

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As Matthew Flisfeder has pointed out, Blade Runner (in all its instances) hinges on the idea of what creates identity. He continues that the franchise reveals our postmodern affliction of “substanceless subjectivity” (n.pag.) . What makes a replicant different from the human – hardly a physical quality, except for the eye branding in Nexus-8 and Nexus-9 models – is the lack of genuine memories, which in turn connects to problematic emotional positions of being. Nexus-6 are without their own memories and emotionally stilted, which the Voight-Kampff-test recognizes. Rachael, as Nexus-7, has implanted memories and does not realize her own difference, which is exploited and problematized in the original film. Realizing the artificiality of her memories stunts her emotionally and negates everything she believes true about her subjectivity. Nexus-8 and Nexus-9, then, are given artificial memories and knowledge of their status as replicants. But as the short film Blade Runner: Black Out 2022 shows, what drives their individual identity is not the artificial memory that keeps them ‘balanced’ but the traumatic memory that they experience themselves, such as Iggy’s wartime memory from Calantha or Trixie’s treatment as a sex-doll. The web animated series Blade Runner: Black Lotus, focuses on the relation between memory and identity. The show explores the impact of both positive and negative memories, artificial and real via the story of Elle, an amnesiac girl with PTSD, who is later in show revealed to be a replicant whose memories have several times been manipulated. Elle’s struggle to find an identity, her relation and reaction to the different kinds of memory manipulation are front and center in the series. In this talk, I want to investigate how the show positions itself in regards to Elle’s posthuman subjectivity and how different kinds of memory construction help or hinder her in gaining an individual identity beyond the functional identity of replicant. 
 

Nahida Kibria Choudhury (University of Essex, UK)

“2049: Intertextuality, Memory, and Identity”

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This paper proposes to examine the textured intertextual relationship of memory and identity that emerges within Blade Runner (1992) and Blade Runner 2049 (2017). First, the intertextual relationship the sequel forms to the original film through weaving repetition and difference to engage the audience’s memory will be examined. Secondly, both films’ interrogation of what it means to be human through their exploration of memory and identity, which was initially established within the novel, then adapted in Scott’s Blade Runner, eventually re-adapted in Villeneuve’s sequel will be analysed. Hutcheon’s vision of adaptation as palimpsestic and her deliberation of ‘repetition without replication’ will be employed to appreciate textured repetition and difference that emerges between the films (Hutcheon, 2006:87). I will anlyse Villeneuve’s choice to re-engage the ‘Tears in the Rain’ ending scene, which is repeated as ‘Tears in the Snow’ tied through musical intertext, to echo Batty’s iconic speech. I will also deliberate the repetition of the question “Is it real?” that manifests within all three iterations of the texts. K’s memory of the toy horse, for instance, re-engages the question of whether Scott’s Deckard was ‘real’ (human/replicant) and repeats the question in relation to K. This question also echoes back the novel’s Deckard’s obsession with finding a real animal. Furthermore, Villeneuve’s further questioning of whether the romantic relationships /replicants’ feelings constitute as ‘real’ through his exploration of Joi (a hologram) and K’s relationship will be briefly discussed. The theoretical apparatus of this paper will draw from Bakhtin’s (Bakhtin, 1981) vision of polyphonic dialogue and Kristeva’s (Kristeva, 1980) intertextual ‘mosaic’ to consider how this mosaic stimulates discursive cultural discourse (Culler, 2001). The repetition and difference between human and replicant will also be briefly considered to appreciate the human as what Kamuf (Kamuf, 1991) asserts as the ‘originary’ in comparison to the replicant (the copy). Additionally, Baudrillard’s work on simulacrum and the real will be engaged to analyse the film’s fictional reworking of these ideas (Baudrillard, 1994). This will enable an informed analysis of the film’s intertextual story-telling that repeatedly asks its audience to rethink what it means to be [real/] human.

J. Macgregor Wise (Arizona State University, US)         

“Memory, Trauma, and the Territorialization of Subjectivity in Blade Runner and Blade Runner 2049” (virtual presentation)

The popularity of narratives about the living machine is in part because of the ways they raise questions regarding the nature of humanity and thus help map formations and crises of subjectivity. Blade Runner has been an exemplary case in the literature in this regard (cf. Giuliana Bruno, 1987). This essay looks at memory as a significant aspect of contemporary figurations of the living machine. As Susannah Radstone and Katharine Hodgkin (2003) have pointed out, regimes of memory are linked to regimes of subjectivity. This paper is part of a larger project examining recent narrative figurations of the memory of living machines that foreground traumatic memory as foundational to living machine subjectivity. This essay maps a shift in the representation of living machine subjectivity by comparing the memories of Replicants in Blade Runner with the introduction of a traumatic fetish memory of the Replicant K in Blade Runner 2049. Rather than it being actively collected or curated, such as the photographs in the original film, this memory arises, apparently unbidden, into K’s thought, troubling him. This is the memory of the loss of a small wooden horse. Assuming the memory is an implant, K is confronted by the intrusion of the Real, in this case the discovery of the actual horse. The horse, both a real object and real memory and a false, implanted memory, is a fetish for the loss of the mother and father. Both real and not, the memory brings K into a particular formation of subjectivity we could call a form of Oedipalization. The manufactured replicant is provided autonomy and subjectivity (“real-ness”) through the memory, but at the cost of being interpellated into a family structure. The broader question this essay addresses is: What are the implications of such trauma-centered figuration for our understanding of the production of subjectivity in formations of power marked by societies of control and noopower?

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Neval Turhalli (Galatasaray University, Turkey)              

“Implanted memory: the political, social, and psychological discourses related in the post-truth era” (virtual presentation)

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Blade Runner (1982) directed by Ridley Scott is the most personal work of the director and one of the most influential movies of the last four decades. The purpose of the present study is to understand the use of implanted memory in Blade Runner and point out the political, social, and psychological discourses related in the post-truth era. Post-truth is the age where people face news addressing their strong emotions towards a -political- incident, and are manipulated by the news rather than checking for facts (McIntyre, 2018). Therefore, the use of implanted memories in the movie will be discussed with relation to fake news as well as its implications on the cognitive processes (Gelfert, 2018). For the present study, semiotic analysis of the movie will be applied on narrative elements which are: plot, cinematography, music, mise-en-scene, and editing (Verstraten & Lecq, 2012). Firstly, the audial, visual and textual codes related with the issue of memory will be discussed in terms of their denotative and connotative levels of meaning (Barthes, 1968). Then, these meanings will be analyzed through Greimas’ structural semantics to comprehend their deeper meaning in semiotic square based on modalities of “being” and “seeming” (Peeters, 1987). The relations of implanted memories and fake news will be pointed out in three aspects: Firstly, they are found to blur the lines between truth and lie. In both cases, there seems to be a piece of truth mixed in the context of “fake” which creates confusion and doubt. Secondly, implanted memories become the reality for replicants in the movie. Similarly, in the post-truth era, this could be interpreted as the false memory formation related to exposure to fake news (Polage, 2012). Finally, implanted memories seem to be related to strong emotions which are also found in sensational fake news (Nanath et al, 2022). As a result, the political discourses of the movie will be re-explored in the case of post truth. In addition, cases of “manipulation” and “control” through implanted memories of replicants (Davies, 2015) will be discussed in relation to fake news through issues like voting behavior and manipulation of election results (Edson et al, 2017). 
 

Lunch          12.30-1.30

Panel 3     2019-2049    1.45-3.15 (LR3)                                                               

Mariana Pintado Zurita (University of Glasgow, UK)                             

“Temporal intertextuality between Blade Runner and Blade Runner 2049”

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Much has been written about Blade Runner (1982), from its narrative (Brooker, 2009) and architectural achievements (Leus, 2004), to its philosophical themes (Dienstag, 2020; Kaylique, 2019) and its critique of capitalism (Taskale, 2020). It also became a canonical cult film with its many different cuts and has had a close following for years. The release of its sequel, thirty-five years later, did nothing less than add to its complexity. This presentation is concerned with the temporal interaction between the two films regarding both their thematic elements and the thirty-five-year interval between their respective productions. Blade Runner, by itself, already explores complex issues about the future and temporality. In 1982 it told the story of a dystopian future set in Los Angeles, November 2019. In 1982 Blade Runner was a film that spoke about a possible future, a future that eventually came in terms of the calendar. Blade Runner 2049 (2017) provided an opportunity to take the themes of futuristic projection and expand on them by reimagining their updated version thirty-five years later. However, the creation of this new updated future also implied a newly updated past, one which was ever-present in the making and narrative of the sequel. This presentation will explore the prominent interplay between past and future between Blade Runner and its sequel. The vision of an imagined future that simultaneously turns its eyes toward the past creates complex temporal tensions through the intertextuality of both films. I will do this by exploring the interaction between nostalgia and the future in the parent film and how these tensions are enhanced and built upon by its sequel. I will draw from Svetlana’s Boym theory of nostalgia as the inevitable companion to progress and the different perspectives of nostalgia as reactionary and progressive from texts such as Katharina Niemeyer's Media and Nostalgia (2014), Michael Pickering and Emily Keightley (2006), Laurajane Smith and Gary Campbell (2017). Finally, I will look at the complex relations between history, memory and nostalgia that follow this dynamic drawing from Pierre Nora (2000), and Niemeyer (2014) showing how these become complex loci of temporal intertextuality.

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Carrie Lynn Evans (Université Laval Québec, Canada)                         

“Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049: Tracing Cyberpunk as a Literature of Resistance”

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In the 1980s, cyberpunk erupted as “SF's avant-garde, its newest, hardest new wave” (Easterbrook), speaking to the decade’s sense of dread at the growing powers of multinational capital and information technology, with aesthetics and themes established in works such as William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984) and Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982). Even though critics were claiming the literary movement was over as early as 1992 (Whalen), the popularity of its neon-futurist aesthetic has never waned, prompting some today to complain that “[t]he future has looked the same for almost four decades” (Walker-Emig). I argue, however, that today’s literary cyberpunk, as exemplified in Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049, neither uncritically engages in mere nostalgia nor participates in a developmentalist assumption of technology’s positive teleology, but instead undertakes constructive social critique; the film addresses contemporary social concerns and transcends cyberpunk’s original context, while remaining faithful to the genre’s defining characteristics. Aside from the style of its surface, cyberpunk is concerned with society’s obsession with consumerism and hyper-commodification of life, inequality and wealth disparity, and the threat of corporate power eclipsing the supposed freedoms promised by modern democracy; its stories demonstrate how these pressures undermine the stability of the subject, which becomes fragmented, disillusioned, cynical, and ultimately anti-social. These are themes that are, if anything, more relevant than ever. In critiquing these social conditions, cyberpunk is a literature of resistance, even as it acknowledges the difficulty of escaping its context. Moreover, where the tone of the original cyberpunk was arguably defeatist, with social ills seen as so inevitable that the only escape was to retreat into the ephemeral world of cyberspace, contemporary iterations, such as Blade Runner 2049, instead signal a new era of possibility. I will argue this goes to explain why near-future, neon-lit, gritty dystopias are today remain persistently one of SF’s most popular modes, despite the extent to which they appear to be bound up with the 1980s.

Jordan Byrne (Architectural Designer, UK)                                             

“Blade Runner 2049: The Architecture of Post-Humanism” (virtual presentation)  

The Blade Runner universe is one that has changed the face of science-fiction forever. Gritty, dreary and a downright dystopic view of a future world, where humanity is clinging on to its survival, in the neon-lit abyss that is now Earth. A defensive world born out of war, where the brutalist structures span into an endless reach. A world torn between the real and the artificial. The human and the humane. Real and Replicant. The architectural environment portrayed in Blade Runner 2049 is an important narrative tool in the thematically portraying the inner persona of the on-screen characters, as well as connecting the audience to changes in social construct, morality and order. The three cities of Los Angeles, San Diego Mesa and Las Vegas are the key studies within this narrative, and the ones in which I will be interrogating. These three cities reflect the three stages of human evolution that exist within this world - Human, Transitional-Human and Post-Human, and are used to allow the audience to question the meaning of humanity in this context. Blade Runner asks the question “what does it mean to be human?”. Blade Runner 2049 asks the question “what happens when humans lose their humanity?”. The aim of my paper is show that Denis Villeneuve uses the architectural environment as the basis for the entire narrative, with changes in scenery having a direct impact on the persona, morality and social construct of this world. Roger Deakins’ cinematography, mis-en-scene and colour palette highlights the internal character persona throughout, and plays a key part in highlighting the changes in the built environment. The landscapes presented in Blade Runner 2049 indicates the socioeconomic climate in this fiction and adds a level of legitimacy in the critiquing of our own society, somewhat returning this fiction back to the very origins of Science-Fiction:- By removing the audience from their surroundings ,and allowing them to actively criticise the images on screen, thus creating the basis for them to question the society around them.

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Panel 4      HABITATS  1.45-3.15 (LR5)                                                               

Ray Lucas (Manchester School of Architecture, UK)                                                     

“Replicants, Thresholds and Transgressions: a study of Blade Runner’s embodied architectonics”

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This paper proposes to examine the finalé of Blade Runner (Dir. Ridley Scott, 1982) through the lens of Filmic Architecture. This method, which has been under development through academic discourse and teaching practice in the Filmic Architecture workshop at Manchester School of Architecture since 2014 (Lucas, 2002; Lucas in Ingold, 2022). Filmic Architecture considers the long-discussed cross-disciplinary potential of film and architecture. A number of key contributions in the field have considered instances such as the works of Alfred Hitchcock and the house plan as psychological states made manifest in Steven Jacobs’ The Wrong House (2013) or establishing the rules of a particular genre such in Lehnerer, Macken, Kelley & Steiger’s study of The Western Town (2014). David Fortin’s work explores the cinema generated by Philip K. Dick’s literature with a focus on the subversion of the suburban ideal in much of his work (2011). All of this affirms a strong interest in the narratives of Dick’s science fiction and the films Blade Runner and its sequel Blade Runner 2049. Working with drawings, diagrams and notations, I will demonstrate the ways in which characterisation is determined through the ways thresholds are used or even created. Having described sequences from Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai in Laban movement notation (Lucas, 2006), I will develop and elaborate this to include further diagramming and architectural drawings to explore the fundamental architectural act of passing from one room to another, from outside to inside as a mode for deeper embodied characterisation where the conformity of a character such as Rick Deckard is contrasted with the radical spatial habitus of Roy Batty. Architecture brings several important innovations to the study of cinema, in particular our skills in inscriptive practices beyond the textual interpretation. As visual thinkers, the graphic representation of space extends towards characterisation and narratives, embodiment and materiality, fundamentally expanding the scope of the discourse.

David Charles Reat (University of Strathclyde, UK)                                           

“Do they keep you in a little box? Cells. Interlinked” (virtual presentation)

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In Dystopian SF, the built-environment often emphasises isolationism, typically represented through the characters’ domiciles. In Blade Runner 2049 (BR2049), the loneliness of the characters is expressed through their homes. The film’s main protagonist, Officer KD6-3.7 (Ryan Gosling) is an LAPD ‘Blade Runner’ who uncovers a secret that threatens to instigate a war between humans and Replicants (bioengineered humans). Throughout his investigation he encounters other isolated characters, whose habitats also reflect their own insulated lives. The film posits a scenario, whereby society is compromised and the ecosystem has collapsed. Environmental mismanagement has left the planet decimated, demonstrated through various architectural typologies. Denis Villeneuve (Director) has mentioned that the climate is a core component of the film; the planet, having also been subjected to famine, terrorism and mass migration, is far more toxic and congested than it was in the 2019 of Blade Runner. The Earth's atmosphere has severely deteriorated and the climate is now out-of-control. Post-Apocalyptic SF proselytises a desolate future. Resultantly, the urban environments we witness reinforce an unbearably bleak vision of the future. The use of spectacular backdrops in BR2049, whilst establishing a language of brutality, are mostly devoid of people. The pervading feeling of isolation, loneliness and societal breakdown is ultimately demonstrated through the main protagonists’ residences and how they have re-purposed various building typologies in this catastrophic environment. This populace at large is also somewhat lost, abandoned and shunned; their disposition is a direct quote on present-day global issues of mass slums and resultant class segregation. SF is a mirror on us as a global society; as a species we seek the solace of others and enjoy being part of a community. 2019 bore witness to the eventual global pandemic which shocked the world, disintegrating society into enforced isolation and limiting communication to digital networks. It should serve as a timely reminder that if we don’t seriously address our attitude towards the planet soon, it could present horrific scenarios where humanity might possibly end up. This is why we must ensure it never actually happens.

Georges-Henry Laffont (Saint-Etienne National School of Architecture, France)                         

“The legacy of Blade Runner: Reloading our future's perspective; awakening our imaginaries; reconsidering our hegemonic narratives” (virtual presentation)

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A long time ago - in the first half of the last century - Mars was dreamed of as a suburb of Los Angeles. This constructed vision, illustrated and promoted especially in literature and illustration, highlighted the triumphant urban and the infinite progress of modern civilization. Los Angeles became the gate of the solar system. Gradually, the dream turned into a nightmare, making Blade Runner the archetype of a dystopian vision of the urban and modern civilization. Since its release in 1982, Ridley Scott's movie is a central material in urban, gender, cultural studies, etc., by analyzing urban forms and organization, social class and gender relations, role of technology, as Blade Runner mobilizes and articulates them. Nowadays, Blade Runner 2049, a sequel to the first film, a contemporary reinterpretation of Philipp K. Dick's work, or a tribute to the universe and questions of Blade Runner, is the privileged material for Anthropocene studies. Indeed, Denis Villeneuve's film renews the questions concerning resource, dwelling and human condition. And so, this "sequel" continues the process begun in 1982: Re-configuring our perspective of today's world; re-awakening and renewing our imaginaries; re-thinking the hegemonic narratives that found our world. These two films, being only one, will be analyzed here according to several sets (matter vs. abstraction, ruins vs. worksite, humanization vs. mechanization, etc.) allowing to approach social, urban or even contemporary aesthetic challenges. In this symposium, different elements of reflection will be proposed to discuss the legacy and the role of Blade Runner in our society.

Break          3.15-3.30

Panel 5    BIPOLITICS    3.30-5.30 (LR3)                                                           

Joe Street (Northumbria University, UK)                                                 

“Reagan’s Replicants: Race and the unconscious in Blade Runner”

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Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep is fruitfully read as a coded commentary on race relations in the United States during the 1960s. As I argue elsewhere, the novel presents its android characters as escaped slaves. Subtle pointers in the text present the androids’ leader, Roy Baty, with dark skin. More important, politically speaking, the androids are Black. This racial subtext enables readers to consider the book’s representation of race relations in the San Francisco of the 1960s and its relationship with colonialization and anticolonial activism. Yet Blade Runner almost completely elides this issue. This paper argues that in excluding African American characters, Ridley Scott's adaptation deracinates the novel (if you'll excuse the pun). The film’s geographical shift from San Francisco to Los Angeles, coupled with its presentation of race relations through incidental characters suggests that its America is a post-integration society, where various races and ethnicities rub alongside each other relatively well (notwithstanding the film’s presentation of the race-class intersection). Building on these observations, the paper outlines how the absence of African American characters reflects a neoliberal outlook that consigns racial conflict to the past and insists that racial equality no longer deserves prioritization. This it relates specifically to the racial politics of President Ronald Reagan, rendering the film a Reaganite artifact itself. This also complictes the whiteness of Roy Batty and Rachael. Their bleaching, the paper argues, renders the film a less troubling inquisition into the nature of humanity and empathy while also reminding viewers of the centrality of race to American political and cultural discourse.

Blake Wilson (California State University, US)                                        

“Rogue Cops: Policing the Future in the Blade Runner Films”

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In the two Blade Runner films, Rick Deckard and K defy their superiors and “go rogue” by protecting the replicants they were previously tasked to destroy, learning deeper truths about humanity through their jobs by empathizing with those they are supposed to apprehend and punish—human or otherwise. Despite their job, Deckard and K–as law enforcement officers–become surprisingly sympathetic protagonists whose characters explore the larger nonfictional institution of criminal justice and its persistent problem of police violence. Like the Western genre, which frequently uses the lawlessness of newfound lands to explore human behavior and morality, science fiction’s outerlands (the locales of its space operas such as Mars or the future) as well as its innerlands (its psychological or philosophical spaces, such as robot minds and the moral questions they inspire) are also anarchic and ungoverned: as a result, the role of the police officer as principled peacekeeper is up for grabs. Utopias, of course, have no need for law enforcement, and science fiction’s grim dystopian visions of blade runners and replicants frequently situates the police as evil cogs in an even more evil corporate police state—after all, you can’t have a police state without police. In particular, the Blade Runner films utilize police officers and police states to provide not only the kind of action expected by science fiction film audiences, but also an exploration of police violence, the paradoxes of law enforcement, and the pursuit of criminal justice in an imperfect present, and what is sure to be an imperfect future. 

Petra Krpan and Jelena Vojković (University of Zagreb, Croatia)       

“Transmediality and Corporeality in Blade Runner: Construction of the 'Clothed Body'”

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Fashion and film have had a long-standing relationship, but Stella Bruzzi's significant book Undressing Cinema: Clothing and Identity in the Movies: Clothes, Identities and Films (1997) has sparked the interest of the academic and research community. This article is investigating the construction of the male superhero within the methodological framework by the German author Enno Patalas and deals with terms such as trans-mediality and corporeality in Blade Runner. Corporeality, a term explored by Maurice Merleau-Ponty is of great significance in fashion and cinema studies, since it deals with body movement, constant change and fluid identities. Corporeality and new media, or to be precise cinematic tools within this film, create new ways of transmedial corporeality in the post-apocalyptical world of Rick Deckard and shape new bodily constructs. Experimental processes of contemporary fashion are indispensable for researching cinema. Body and corporeality radically change their meaning and significance within theories of fashion through photography and film. Therefore, this paper on fashion and film is an effort to open a new field of research for fashion theories, but also in the field of filmology, since we need more scientific research that includes the relationships of fashion, film, body and physicality. Ridley's Los Angeles is in hyper-reality and simulation - it represents a machine that delivers imitations, reproductions and serial products - replicants. Those products are fiction. A replicant is a perfect dimension of Simulacra: unreal - real - hyper-real. The three phases of the costume represent a gradual transformation of the original human Body in motion into an artificial form of existence. That kind of unnatural form rules the Body and works as a type of dual armour: it protects the genuine Body, repairs it, upgrades it, but at the same time alienates it, alters and limits its physical usage.

Aman Agah (Oregon State University, US)                                 

“Retiring the Other - Blade Runner, Eugenics, and Replicants as Other” (virtual presentation)

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This paper explores the replicants of Ridley Scott’s 1982 film Blade Runner as representation of the Other in terms of race, gender, disability, etc, and in relation to violent practices such as eugenics - which seek to “perfect” humanity by using the literal bodies of those deemed unhuman. I will connect this analysis to Philip K. Dick’s 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep upon which the film is based, and Denis Villeneuve’s 2017 sequel Blade Runner 2049, as points of introduction and continuation of the conversation and specifically within their time and space of creation. Each iteration of the story, while set in the future, reflects existing anxieties at the times they were created, while the films expand on ideas introduced in the previous narratives. The 2019 Los Angeles depicted in Scott’s film is not far from the 2019 world of three years ago - tensions exist in response to shifts in technologies, mixing of races and ethnicities, and new languages merging together the “foreign”. Replicants, or androids, who were created to serve humanity, and in the image of humans, are seen as a threat due to their supposed instability and imperfections. The killing, or retiring, of replicants serves as a sort of cathartic response to the ever growing “Other” taking over Los Angeles. Replicants become a stand-in for violent reactions to the Other because of the ability of those who made them, and those who hunt them, to position the replicants as completely lacking in humanity. Scott’s adaptation challenges us further in this examination by centering two replicants, Pris (Daryl Hannah) and Roy (Rutger Hauer), who are the embodiment of the “norm” regarding race, ability, and what is perceived as sexuality and gender. In casting these supposedly “perfect” humanoids, we can press deeper into analysis of the Other by engaging with a framing that systemic oppressions such as racism, sexism, and ableism ultimately are violent and harmful for everyone; and that capitalist systems of oppression (in this case, the Tyrell Corporation and policing) are incapable of recognizing humanity across the board.
 

Panel 6   SPACES     3.30-5.30 (LR5)                                                                  

Louis D’Arcy-Reed (York St John University, UK)                                  

“Fake Empire - Lefebvre's logic of visualisation and architecture”

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Blade Runner’s entry into cinema in 1982 afforded a new vision of dystopia firmly entrenched within ideas of corporate globalisation, technological hybridity, and extreme architectural cityscapes. With Denis Villeneuve’s 2017 sequel, Blade Runner 2049, these ideas have been expanded, layered by rich environmental aesthetics courtesy of Richard Deakins’ cinematography. The audience is left unaware how this dystopia emerged; environmental collapse, corporate takeover, or capitalist stagnation. However, we as the audience, are at once unfamiliar, but still familiar to the divide between what is present, but also hidden. Inhabitants of the future Los Angeles live at street-level, facing extremes of weather, off-world promises of glamour, disassociated relationships, technologically augmented humanoids, and cramped living conditions, whilst the institutions of power own the space above to sell their visions and take ownership of progress. This paper situates its focus within Lefebvre’s logic of visualisation to examine the architectural extremes which take place, allowing corporations to not only promise the new, but also divide one’s sense of identity. The subjective relationship between Lefebvre’s visualisation and the objective dimension of the architecture within Blade Runner serves as a fertile environment to examine the psychological and power relations present to those who engaged in this dystopia.

Milan Hain (Palacký University, Czech Republic)                                   

“Architecture as Movie Star: Blade Runner, the Bradbury Building, and the Legacy of Film Noir”

Ridley Scott's Blade Runner is famous for, among other things, its singular vision of Los Angeles as a multi-ethnic globalized metropolis of 2019, which relied on a fusion of futuristic elements with retro styling that referenced the traditions in architecture and design of the late 19th and first half of the 20th century. The use of the iconic Bradbury Building located in Downtown LA, which in the film represents the residence of genetic engineer J.F. Sebastian, played a prominent role in this. The spacious skylit atrium, consisting of cascading staircases and a combination of marble floors, wrought iron railings and wooden elements, makes it a perfect location for filming. Aside from the fact that the use of the Bradbury Building contributes significantly to the specific production design of Blade Runner, it is also one of the aspects that creates an explicit link between Scott's film and the film noir tradition from which it draws heavily. The Bradbury Building appears as a setting in a number of classic noirs of the 1940s and 1950s, as well as neo-noirs from the following two decades, either on its own or as a visually attractive location representing fictional places. Among the films in which it can be recognized are The Unfaithful (1947), Shockproof (1949), D.O.A. (1950), The Killer That Stalked New York (1950), M (1951), I, The Jury (1953), Marlowe (1969), and Chinatown (1974). It is not an exaggeration, then, to say that it has become part of noir iconography like, for instance, Venetian blinds. In this paper I will focus on the use of the Bradbury Building in Blade Runner, tracing its origins all the way back to studio-era Hollywood, when it made its first screen appearances, and arguing along the way that it plays almost a fetishistic role in the film, reinforcing its noir inflections.

Christophe Gelly (Université Clermont Auvergne / Université Paul Valéry, France)

“Cinematic Space and Subjectivity in Blade Runner 2049”

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Blade Runner 2049 articulates a vision of cinematographic space that is obviously referred to the film by Ridley Scott, which famously mingled a stress on verticality (inspired by Fritz Lang’s Metropolis) with generic influence from neo-noir, resulting in a hybrid form which critics labelled retro-futurism. This influence from the 1982 opus appears to be rehashed into a very different treatment of space, since Denis Villeneuve’s film focuses on interior locales rather than on exteriors, and concentrates on the boundaries between geographical spaces, as in the final showdown scene, which takes place outside the city. Innovation is also manifest through the choices made by the director, which result in attributing specific, different tints to various spaces, such as the inside of the Wallace corporation, the Las Vegas casino, or the main character’s apartment. Each space is attributed its own chromatic identity, and this identity clearly distinguishes interior from exterior spaces. Exterior spaces are also characterized by a limited depth of field, especially when compared to interior spaces, and to the way exteriors were dealt with in the original film. The purpose of this presentation will be to interpret and to examine this binary division between interior and exterior spaces and to show how it bears part of the meaning of spatial configuration in the film, but also how it is deconstructed through various scenes. For instance, the introduction of virtual reality elements in specific sequences seems to determine an extended depth of field — as when the main character K meets a giant hologram of his virtual girlfriend Joi, or when Ana Stelline builds virtual memory implants for the Wallace Corporation in her own sterile, glassed-in environment. The meaning of this differential treatment of space will eventually be approached as part of the narrative discourse bearing on the place were subjectivity is located — a place that is more virtual than real.

Tonguc Sezen (University of Teesside, UK)                                              

“Verticality and the lack of vertical movement in the urban vision of Blade Runner and its sequels” (virtual presentation)
 
From flying spinners to rooftop garages to house them, and from street level diners to towering steel pyramids, verticality plays a key role in symbolizing the urban, social, and economic vision of the now alternate future of Blade Runner and its sequels on multiple media. A sharp contrast divides the masses on the streets from the upper or governing classes living and working in high, arcology-like super-structures. Any movement between them is controlled and limited as it would be at any horizontal border. Thus, despite its verticality, Blade Runner’s dominant worldbuilding neglects what Stephen Graham (2016) calls “the three-dimensional politics of the worlds above, below and around borders”. Yet, the 1982 Blade Runner sketchbook describes a relatively more permeable vertical vision, partially based on the production restrictions of the film. Instead of being separated, the poor and rich districts of the future LA are shown to be stacked onto each other with additional levels between them, a vision also present in the set decoration of the Warner Bros. backlot. Some of these sketches show a Metropolis (1927) like leveled city, with upper, mid, and lower street levels and rooftop areas connected with bridges, enabling vertical and horizontal movement between them. While elements of these production design sketches are visible in both Blade Runner and Blade Runner 2049, especially in scenes featuring balconies and rooftops, the vision of a multi-layered, three-dimensional city is much more visible in later iterations of the Blade Runner world on other media: The 1997 video game allows players to explore the undercity, movement between levels is a key story point in Titan Books’ comic book series, and the recent Black Lotus anime series shows rooftop villas imitating ground-level structures. In this regard, this paper will investigate the representation of urban verticality and vertical movement in the franchise and discuss their social, economic, and environmental implications in terms of critical worldbuilding. Connections and comparisons will also be drawn to media inspired by the urban vision of Blade Runner such as the long-running Italian comic book series Nathan Never, classical anime OVA Bubblegum Crisis, and recent VRPG Cyberpunk 2077.

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Supper        5.30-7.00 (Teras)

Q&A with Ivor Powell   7.00-8.00 (Pontio Cinema)         

Screening of Blade Runner: The Final Cut   8.15  (Pontio Cinema)

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