BLADE RUNNERAll those memories will be lost in time. Like tears in rain.

PHOTOGRAPHY

A sort of umbilical cord links the body of the photographed thing to my gaze.

Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, trans. by Richard Howard, 1981 (cited by Kaja Silverman in ‘Back to the Future’, Camera Obscura no. 27, 1991)

MEMORY

Memory as a function of the living personality can be understood only as a capacity for the organisation and reconstruction of past experiences and impressions in the service of present needs, fears and interests… Just as there is no such thing as impersonal perception and impersonal experience, there is also no impersonal memory.

Ernest G. Schachtel, ‘On Memory and Childhood Amnesia’ 1956 (cited by Oliver Sacks in ‘The Landscape of His Dreams’, from An Anthropologist on Mars, 1995)

The ultimate in paranoia is not when everyone is against you but when everything is against you.

Philip K. Dick

The femme fatale who does not know she is one

JOAN CRAWFORD AS THE EPONYMOUS MILDRED PIERCE (1945)

SEAN YOUNG AS THE REPLICANT RACHEL IN BLADE RUNNER (1982)

The femme fatale who does not know she is one

‘How can it not know what it is?’ (Deckard)

[W]e might say the whole film struggles to ‘place’

Rachel, that the text itself does not know what ‘she is’; a

highly eroticised femme fatale who in fact reveals herself

to be sexually inexperienced and who saves the life of

the hero rather than destroy him. … [T]hese

narrative/thematic inconsistencies destabilise the

construction of the femme fatale and resist the efforts of

both audience and male protagonist to easily categorise

her.▪ Deborah Jermyn, “The Rachel Papers: in search of Blade Runner’s femme fatale”

The femme fatale who does not know she is one

The femme fatale who does not know she is one

OLYMPIA, THE WIND-UP DOLL IN OFFENBACH'S OPERA THE TALES OF HOFFMAN DELIBES’ BALLET COPPEL IA

DARYL HANNAH AS THE REPLICANT PRIS IN BLADE RUNNER (1982)

Evil scientist / God / father

ELDON TYRELL JOSEPH MENGELE