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Category:    Home > Essays > Science Fiction > Film Theory > Can a feature film have multiple versions and still be a classic? Thoughts on the upcoming BLADE RUNNER releases.

Can a feature film have multiple versions and still be a classic?  Thoughts on the upcoming BLADE RUNNER releases.

 

 

The idea of a classic is one about vision, one that is thoroughly thought out, presented, well-rounded and a masterwork of the medium.  In this case, it is about filmmaking.  As soon as the earliest directors found a voice, they made an impact on the world and became architects of cinema as we know it today.  So is that one vision only restricted to one version and does more than one disqualify it from being any kind of classic?

 

To start with, you have classics going back to the silent era, when filmmakers has less rights and were even less respected.  Film prints were often censored in different ways for different reasons state by state, let alone country by country.  The most famous example of this is Fritz Lang’s 1926 epic classic Metropolis, which has had so many butchered and would-be reconstructions over the years, that it is amazing a copy as complete as the one we covered elsewhere on this site was ever put together as well as it was.  Paramount’s U.S. version was a joke and threw out so much of the story and intent that Lang’s name should have been removed.

 

If you decide that silent films are different than sound films in the realm of “classic” status, skipping works by Erich von Stroheim and other silent greats, then you can look no further than Orson Welles.  Citizen Kane is one of the greatest films ever made, yet the studio was so unhappy with Welles that it had his follow-up feature The Magnificent Ambersons butchered and the missing footage has never been found.  Many consider it a near masterwork, while others defend it as a masterpiece as it is, though Welles influence continued from each film he made that he had majority control of.  The 1958 classic Touch Of Evil was restored as much as possible and despite some footage missing permanently or other key shots never filmed, its status as the last original Film Noir and a classic is inarguable, even when compared to The Third Man, which Welles starred in but was directed by Carol Reed.

 

The point is, if a majority of the vision of the film and its director comes through, it can be a classic no mater what.  If a director goes back and keeps changing a film like George Lucas has done to the first Star Wars from 1977, it does take away from its classic status and the original vision, even if the excuse is that he is trying to make the film “closer” to his intent.  That is a rare case as he owns that film and that is rare for a big film.  Francis Coppola owns Apocalypse Now and recently did the longer Redux cut, reviewed elsewhere on this site.  That film too is a classic and I liked the longer version better, yet that does not take away from the cut issued.

 

So this question resurfaced with a good friend of this site recently when it was announced that the new Warner mega-release of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner would feature FIVE VERSIONS of the film.  Like Metropolis, even more versions exist.  However, the set will settle on a workprint version that is obviously incomplete, the failed 1982 theatrical version that tried to make it a happy film and almost killed it altogether, the European Version with more action and violence that became the most successful release in the original Criterion Collection when they made their name with the 12” LaserDisc format, the so-called Director’s Cut from 1992 that sanitized key points of the film by cutting down badly some of the action, repositioning the Vangelis score to better effect, adding the original darker ending in conjunction with he unicorn sequence/motif and dropping the last-minute voiceovers by Harrison Ford.  A new 2007 version will also be offered as Scott reshot scenes with Joanna Cassidy that were obviously a stunt double (man in a wig?) because in this age of DVD, it is just too noticeable.

 

So through this long soap opera of multiple versions, multiple rights owners and debates about the content, how could Blade Runner be a classic?  Because more than enough of it was highly influential and important to the kind of filmmaking it represented.  For one, it is a mature science fiction film.  There is no fantasy, infantilism, silliness, space opera or formula.  It subverts formula, continues what Scott’s previous hit Alien achieved with bringing the Science Fiction genre into a new realm of post-modernism (the mixing of architectural designs was more complex than the “future look” of a film like Star Wars or Logan’s Run in its clean-lines look that now looks more like the old mall that was just imploded last week for another mall) and it had things to say about real life like the best Science Fiction (and Horror for that matter) that was not compatible with the dangerously “don’t worry, be happy” 1980s that has the U.S. in the mess it is in circa 2007.

 

As a matter of fact, the film was one of several films purposely targeted for being mature, adult, smart and advanced when Rollback types wanted to dumb-down everything.  The first target at the time was Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate, which finally arrived in 1980.  The epic revisionist Western was almost a response to Sergio Leone’s A Fistful Of Dynamite aka Duck, You Sucker, aka Once Upon A Time, Revolution (1972) as the final word on the genre in its original form.  It bombed big time, but is now seen as a classic for so many reasons, we’d need a separate essay.  The same happened with Terry Gilliam’s Brazil (1984) about a futuristic police state, part of a famous battle between Reagan-friendly MCA/Universal and Gilliam.  They wanted to make it into a happy love story of some kind they said, but evidence shows otherwise as demonstrated by Criterion’s remarkable multi-DVD box with all of its extras and three versions.

 

While Cimino’s excesses did in his film and Gilliam’s resilience saved his, both are recognized as classics and both made more classic films afterwards.  Scott has even been more commercially and critically successful than the two combined, even without the support of his brother Tony, a big success on his own.  So what else made Blade Runner so exceptional?

 

Besides the production design and reconfigured future that finished what Alien began, there is the cinematography which was like nothing anyone had seen before.  At first, some people though it was too dark with no color or depth, but between bad prints projected wrongly in some theaters, bad VHS & Beta copies and bad broadcast copies (with bad editing just one of the issues), the film was being judged under second-rate circumstances and only its early supporters saved it from being buried by those trying to kill it.  The Criterion edition still had the voiceovers, but with its then better than VHS/Beta image, then-new widescreen letterboxing, proper color/depth combo for the format and then-impressive sound mix (the 6-tracks from the 70mm blow-up version were expanded to 24 tracks, then mixed down for Pro Logic surrounds), you suddenly had an eye-opening experience that showed much of the film did work and it became hugely influential since.

 

Even if there were one version, the film has mystery surrounding it, Neo Noir aspirations that actually work in this one of few rare cases and the fact that it has Harrison Ford and was not initially a big hit has always made it a curio to mainstream viewers who would have never given it a second look otherwise.  The other questions included the origins of the replicants, why did some go wild, who was really behind them, why is Deckard so ineffectual in killing them if he was the best of the hinters of the film’s title, where did the world’s population go, is Deckard a replicant, how did the world get so wrecked and what is it to be human?

 

Of course, as with Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and other smart Sci-Fi, many trying to answer those and other questions go way off track in finding the answers, showing the resilience of the films in any form.  Both films also tell their stories through their visuals like the very best classics do.  The one thing I can say in defense of those skeptical of a film like Blade Runner being a classic is that the more versions you get of any (eventually) popular film, the more awful imitators and rip-offs you get that think pretentiously that they are any good.  Along with David Fincher’s Se7en (1995), the idea of dark cinematography caught on, but (along with the advent of digital shoots) has become a big joke where color and film-illiterate would-be filmmakers shoot with gutted color and create unwatchable works they think are filled with meaning and mean nothing.

 

Se7en distinguishes itself from this trend from a particular skill in the way the slightly overexposed shooting was darkened with silver retention, something HD cannot duplicate and hardly anyone could do with film unless they have that rare visual talent.  Blade Runner has all its darkness from its unique lighting, as it portrays a world where the sun can barely penetrate the polluted skies and in the background is plenty of neon, fiber optic light and flashy advertisements of all kinds that try to be the new mini-suns of this nightmare world.  It looks as colorful as a musical as compared to junk like the Underworld films among those representing the pointless nadir of the movement.

 

So it is no accident Blade Runner is a classic and against many odds, but like any true work of art, pulls through in the end.  In the first two editions of Robin Wood’s vital film text Hollywood – From Vietnam To Reagan (… and Beyond, added to the second edition’s title and reviewed elsewhere on this site) does a through analysis of the film that holds up well for all the many versions through the years, with the new second edition adding a paragraph about the 1992 version showing that he was likely only so impressed with it.  Now a final version will arrive in late 2007 as the film remains ahead of its time and its audience and this is likely the last time Scott to anyone else will shoot new footage for the film.  Though it was not bad with its extra footage from the vault added, Scott was not totally satisfied with the “director’s cut” of Alien theatrically released a few years ago.  The 1992 Blade Runner seems to follow that dissatisfaction, so we expect the 2007 cut to be superior and hopefully be the version to end all versions, though the European Version still looms large in its honesty and edge over the many other cuts.  But yes, you can have multiple versions of a film and it still be a classic and Blade Runner is the epitome of how and why.

 

 

-   Nicholas Sheffo


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