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This month sees the 20th anniversary of the "BFI Film Classics", and this is marked with 9 new editions and 3 completely new titles. All have specially commissioned covers by artists, painters and designers. "Blade Runner" is a 2nd edition, with a new foreword by the author, and jacket artwork by Paul Pope.
Synopsis
Blade Runner has proved to be one of the most enduring and influential films of the 1980s. This new edition of Bukatman's study of Blade Runner is published in the BFI Film Classics 20th anniversary series of special editions, with a new foreword by the author and a stunning new jacket design by Paul Pope.
Book Details
Publisher:
BFI PUBLISHING
Publication Date:
31-Jul-2012
ISBN:
9781844575220
Guardian review
Blade Runner by Scott Bukatman review
the guardian Tue 28 August 2012
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."
