BBC Radio 3 broadcast: 4th to 8th November 2019
Los Angeles, November 2019. Blade Runner's future is now ours. Ridley Scott's 1982 classic future film of replicants escaping to a retrofitted Earth and meeting their end at the hands of the washed out, titular Blade Runner, Harrison Ford as Rick Deckard, is adapted from Philip K. Dick's equally classic 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep.
Both film and book are meditations on what it is to be human but we have been looking through the eyes of the film ever since it plunged us into its acid rain, neon coated, West Coast nightmare of flaming night skies, commercial ziggurats, flying cars and fake animals. Now its future is our present. We live in a world of mass species die off, environmental crisis, rapidly developing A.I., all powerful corporations and extreme divides between rich and poor.
Film and book have bled into our culture in many different ways and in this series of the Essay, we mark the year of Blade Runner, in the month of Blade Runner.
Producer: Mark Burman
DEYAN SUDJIC - 1. LOS ANGELES, NOVEMBER 2019 (320kbs-m4a/32mb/14mins)
BBC Radio 3 broadcast: 4th November 2019
Five writers explore what it is to be human or a machine, the sonic reaches of the film, the contradictions of sex robots, the cinematic legacy and we begin with Deyan Sudjic, director of the Design Museum, considering the filmic city of Blade Runner's Los Angeles and its bleed out beyond the screen into architecture and design.
"The film offers a deeply ambiguous spectacle. Blade Runner is a vision of a world in which mankind has blotted out the sun, and nature has gone extinct. We know that we are meant to be horrified. And yet at the same time it’s thrilling to look at, like taking in the view at midnight from a bar on the 60th floor of a Shanghai skyscraper, nursing a vodka martini in an iced glass."
FRANCES MORGAN - 2. SOUNDS OF THE FUTURE PAST (320kbs-m4a/31mb/13mins)
BBC Radio 3 broadcast: 5th November 2019
Frances Morgan, writer and researcher into electronic music, pierces the sound barrier of a film that defined the future not only in the way it looked but in the ways we heard tomorrow.
"The first thing I think of is the film’s sonic environment. The main character, the Blade Runner Rick Deckard, moves through the city, from its murky streets up to its corporate penthouses, against a constant backdrop of hissing rain, distant explosions, synthesized voices from billboard-sized screens, bleeping machines, hybrid pop music, multilingual chatter and the buzz of neon. Music ebbs and flows around him: deep drones swelling into gauzy synthetic strings. His apartment pulses with a low hum. Blade Runner is suffused, saturated with sound."
KEN HOLLINGS - 3. MORE HUMAN THAN HUMAN (320kbs-m4a/30mb/13mins)
BBC Radio 3 broadcast: 6th November 2019
The writer Ken Hollings takes the Voight Kampff test as he examines the ethical barriers between us and the machine.
"According to both the novel and its film adaptation, androids are committing a crime simply by not being human. And in the world of 2019, Blade Runner reveals, the punishment is enforced ‘retirement’ – or legal execution. This is the extent to which humanity holds itself responsible for its creations. "
BETH SINGLER - 4. ZHORA AND THE SNAKE (320kbs-m4a/31mb/13mins)
BBC Radio 3 broadcast: 7th November 2019
Dr Beth Singler, Junior Research Fellow in Artificial Intelligence at Homerton College, Cambridge asks what is real and fake in A.I. sex and love.
"Simulation forces us to think about how we can the ‘real’ that we seem so often to be confident about. Confident enough perhaps to reassure ourselves that the use of ‘fake’ humans as slave labour and sexbots is alright to be skimmed over in the dialogue of the human characters in Blade Runner. What does it say about the society in the world of Blade Runner that it is okay with slave replicants who fight our off-world wars and fulfil sexual needs for colonists?
It gets worse. What does it say about a society that is okay with slave replicants who are only two years old?"
DAVID THOMSON - 5. FIERY THE ANGELS FELL (320kbs-m4a/32mb/14mins)
BBC Radio 3 broadcast: 8th November 2019
The legendary writer on film, David Thomson, takes a long hard look back at Ridley Scott's rain soaked mash up of existential noir and artificial souls.
"Maybe you’ve never seen Blade Runner – but you think you have. It’s one of those films in our dreams and feeble memory. I used to think it was what it claimed to be, the story of a sour bounty hunter charged to eliminate or retire some dangerous escapees from the old scheme of how the universe was run."
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