Based on Philip K Dick’s novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, Blade Runner was released in 1982 to mixed reviews. It’s dark and brooding vision of a dystopian future and noir-inflected narrative drew a stark contrast with science fiction blockbusters of the era like Star Wars, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T the Extra-Terrestrial. Despite its initial modest success at the box office, the film has become one of the masterpieces of science fiction cinema, inspiring a wide range of films, television shows, anime, graphic novels, video games and music, as well as a lengthy bibliography of critical and scholarly texts.
This course will track the ways that subsequent generations of filmmakers, artists, writers and scholars have continued to draw inspiration from the film’s cinematic meditation on a range of issues including ecology, biotechnology, surveillance, race, gender and identity. Beginning with the original release, we will wend our way through a labyrinth of work, including the significantly altered 1992 Director’s Cut and the 2017 sequel, Blade Runner 2049. Along the way, we will explore graphic and literary texts and other media inspired by the film. Through our engagement with these works as well as critical reviews and scholarly articles, we will examine the ways that this singular classic of the genre continues to resonate, provoking viewers with its unique vision of a future that is now part of our past.
This course will track the ways that subsequent generations of filmmakers, artists, writers and scholars have continued to draw inspiration from the film’s cinematic meditation on a range of issues including ecology, biotechnology, surveillance, race, gender and identity. Beginning with the original release, we will wend our way through a labyrinth of work, including the significantly altered 1992 Director’s Cut and the 2017 sequel, Blade Runner 2049. Along the way, we will explore graphic and literary texts and other media inspired by the film. Through our engagement with these works as well as critical reviews and scholarly articles, we will examine the ways that this singular classic of the genre continues to resonate, provoking viewers with its unique vision of a future that is now part of our past.
- Instructor of record: Matthew Feliz