The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema, March 29-April 4
Directed by Ridley Scott
When Edgar G. Ulmer pumped smoke into the backlot where he shot his noir Detour, it was to hide the fact that he de didn’t have the money to dress the set; when Ridley Scott filled Blade Runner’s Los Angeles circa 2019 with smoke and rain and John Alton-esque baroque play of light and shadow, he’s making sure that every inch of the set is art-decorated in the noir style. Blade Runner’s future mixes in pyramids and Deco home furnishings and “Oriental” noodle stalls and rickshaws and huge digital advertisements—Pauline Kael called it “2019 back lot,” but more than prop-department exotica Blade Runner’s Los Angeles is the natural extension of the architecture of the movie that colony worshipped itself at Grauman’s Chinese and Egyptian Theaters, inventing its own past.
Blade Runner is influential not just in its use of artificial intelligence, implanted memories and planned obsolescence as metaphor for mortal human consciousness (“Too bad she won’t live… but then…”), but for setting such a story in a world assembled entirely out of images from the spiritus mundi of classic Hollywood, amplified and elongated as in a dream (or a commercial): Dark City, The Thirteen Floor and The Matrix are among its heirs. Blade Runner is far more nostalgic than futuristic, rendering the forthcoming sequel both inevitable and potentially superfluous. Mark Asch (April 1, 2pm; April 2, 9:30pm at Metrograph’s “The Singularity”)