And that smoke was perfect for the setting of this film: this future was polluted, ghetto, urban, and ridden with crime. Smoke was used as the medium that light was shown off with. One of the most important and prevalent tools used in the photography by Jordan was the use of shaft lighting. Naturally, the set designs for a post-modern film like this called for a heavy use of neon lights- lights like the ones in nighttime Tokyo, except amped up to achieve the cyberpunk look that Blade Runner ultimately helped inspire. Along with the goal of maintaining classic elements within the film itself came the goal of creating a futuristic city that audiences could believe in. That future was envisioned through painstaking set development. With how well the film achieved its goals of emulating classic noir imagery, it made me completely forget that it was set in the future in the first place. To me it’s The Maltese Falcon with a Ghost in the Shell-style future set as its background. In other words: I’ve always considered Blade Runner to be a noir before a science fiction film. When you examine it closely, you’ll realize that pretty much all of it was filmed to mimic a classic manner it didn’t just stop at black-and-white. David Dryer, a photographic effects supervisor for Blade Runner, even stated once of how he almost wishes the film could be released in black and white. This is one of the biggest highlights of black-and-white cinema in general, and considering it was all Hollywood used up until around the 1960s, it’s a medium that’s still going strong in popularity today because of its timeless style. If you’ve read about Digital Bolex’s newly announced D16M, you’ll remember the advantages that were given for black and white sensors: the strong presence of texture, contrasting, and light, with little detail being sacrificed at all in low light. Or you can take a look at some of the facial contrast that Cronenweth implemented. You’ll see the backlighting come up quite a bit in the film. Photographically, we kept them rather colorless.” – Jordan Cronenweth (ASC, Mar 1999) It was like going in circles- like going nowhere. They were all the same in the sense that they were all part of the flow. So we made them appear like ants - all the same. We had street scenes just packed with people. The streets were depicted as terribly overcrowded, giving the audience a future time-frame to relate to. “We used contrast, backlight, smoke, rain and lightning to give the film its personality and moods. That’s something black-and-white cinematography is well recognized for, and that’s something intentionally brought over to this film by Jeff Cronenweth and implemented into color. So when you watch Blade Runner, you’ll notice how it utilizes strong backlighting and light shafts. Blade Runner was a noir and just as the film took its cues from classic noir narratives in Hollywood cinema, so did the ways in how it was filmed.ĭirector Ridley Scott wanted the film to mimic the cinematography of the 1937 classic Citizen Kane. It’s not a Star Wars by any stretch of the imagination at all. That’s because Blade Runner isn’t just a science fiction film. It’s needless as well to say that this film’s cinematography influenced not only science fiction films, but movies of all genres up to today. In 1993, Blade Runner was even chosen for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress. Its cinematography is now considered a milestone in the progression of film, winning awards from the British Society of Cinematographers, the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, and BAFTA. This is a film that I consider to be in my all-time favorites list.
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