Blade Runner

Annotation for KRRR! 2023 by Filip Šula

One of the most beloved science fiction films and one of Ridley Scott's best, it won over audiences with both its genre spanning, gritty detective meets Capek-esque motifs and its thoughtful work with mise-en-scene. But the dominant feature that continues to fascinate the film and keep its fans in some sort of social debate to this day, however, is its conflict and ambiguity.

The problematic filming and the differing perspectives of Scott and the film studio on the film's message have resulted in several different versions of the film with different endings and narrative approaches. This is most evident on several levels in the first listed version of the film, also known from the Czech-dubbed video print as Ostré kommando. First and foremost, there is the conflict between the different forms of the film, which render different endings and different interpretations of the main characters. At the same time, there is the necessary conflict in the narrative itself, involving opposing characters with conflicting goals. Contrast is also at work in the very clash between the dehumanised, gloomy big city with austere architecture and lots of neon on the one hand and the characters yearning for a (meaningful) life on the other.

The most significant conflict, however, is the structure of the narrative itself, or rather the conflict between the approaches of the director and the film studio. Scott aspired to make an intellectually challenging work that leaves its viewer groping in the dark, motivating them to discover key information on their own. The studio, by contrast, needed a film that would be comprehensible enough to pay for itself, so it clung to adding elements to aid the viewer's orientation. One of these is the hero's off-screen commentary, at times providing relatively detailed information about the fictional world and its characters. At the same time, proponents of Scott's approach argue that the film sufficiently informs us of the characters' frame of mind and motivations solely through their actions, so that the commentary duplicates or directly alters these messages, negating the enigmatic nature of some characters and situations.

Thus, the main conflict between the imagined different versions of Blade Runner in distributional form can be seen precisely in the way that a certain non-literalism meets a certain literalism, where, according to some, the hero's voice confirms or outright communicates what would be better guessed - or might motivate the viewer to interpret situations and characters. The strange result of this conflict makes the distribution version of Blade Runner, which can be seen in Krnov, an interesting piece of work that speaks of the conflict of different creative ideas.