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
