You must answer
question one or two. Do not answer both. [Course Description] [Schedule and Course Outline][Lessons (Resource Questions)][Mid-Term Exam] [Paper Assignment (and Examples)] [Final Exams]
You must answer
question one or two. Do not answer both.
1. Using a specific scene from Blade Runner as your sole example, explain how Hollywood-style editing functions as a "grammar" capable of ordering film narratives. What two other terms are used to describe this sort of editing? Why do these terms make sense?
2. Ridley Scott is pretty widely recognized director. Do you consider him an auteur? Why or why not?
You must answer one of the next two questions. Do not, however, answer both.
3. For the most part Blade Runner uses objective means to grant viewers access to the psychological states of its characters. Why do you think this choice was made? Identify an exception to this generalization about depth and explain how it alters the story we create in our minds.
4. To discuss range in Blade Runner, make a chart or, if necessary, charts that visualize the viewer's position on the hierarchy of knowledge. Is the film's range primarily restricted or unrestricted? Can you say for sure? What story-telling effects are generated by the film's hierarchy of knowledge?
Answer no more than two of the following three questions.
5. Explain William Labov's concept of evaluation by using the battle between Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford) and Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer) as your primary illustration. How does the evaluation affect the story that viewers generate? Now generalize. Tell how other evaluative moments in the film push forward the narrative and make it compelling.
6. Write an imagined monologue in which you explain to a friend that it's possible to admire Blade Runner not for its story, but solely for its mise-en-scene. Structure this monologue as a way to point out specific choices that created the film's diegesis.
7. An unnamed antagonist (it could be you) doesn't understand the scene where Deckard forces Rachel to "love" him. "It just isn't motivated," she complains. Pretend that you're Ridley Scott and write a statement that defends your decision to stage the scene in this manner.
Everybody must tackle one, and only one, of these final questions. They center on the assumption that nobody enjoys film for purely formal reasons. Content always matters.
8. Argue that Blade Runner is a parable, not of some projected future but of contemporary cinema, a realm where "implanted memories are identical to actual experience."
9. Imagine Blade Runner as a myth: a story with theological overtones that, in compressed form, explains the human condition. What is it declaring? What concerns of our culture does it articulate?
10. Create a chart where you present the referential, explicit, implicit, and symptomatic meanings of Blade Runner. In formulating the film's symptomatic meaning, take into account this statement by J. Hoberman: "First materializing in June 1982, two weekends into the E.T. era, Ridley scott's Blade Runner is the Spielberg film's evil twin--a competing fantasy for the Age of Reagan" (Village Voice, 15 Sept. 1992: 61).