Key Elements: Mise-en-scene
Riley Scott uses mise-en-scene to create a futuristic picture of Los Angeles in the first 11 minutes of Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982)
It opens with a wide shot of a futuristic Los Angeles, it’s a dark night but is lit up by the lights of the city. We see industrial flames coming out of structures, indicating to us a dystopian future. A flying car comes soaring past, flames coming out from all angles. This sequence plays out slowly giving us as the audience a lot of time to take it all in.
As we start to push in over LA, we see a wide shot of a massive futuristic building and it has cold colours lighting it up. We cut to the interior where we can see futuristic equipment and alien like machinery. The aesthetic seems to be unfamiliar. Everything seems to be branded, from chairs to pens, indicating a really commercial, money dominated future.
Even though we are in America, it seems Asian dominated by commercials and food. It’s a very different place from the America we know now. Everywhere you look there’s advertisements in an Asian lunguage, the street food also Asian dominated. There’s a heavy rainfall, really showing us the overall mood of LA in the time period the film is set.
We cut to a man, he is surrounded by the city’s neon lights however he sticks out, he’s reading an English news paper and wearing clothes we would accociate with Americans in the 1980’s. He’s surrounded by people speaking a foreign language and it’s clearly showing us that he’s in the wrong surroundings. Throughout all of this we still see smoke rising and bright lights reminding us that we are in the future.
The police cars and taxis also can fly, however they look slightly familiar, there base is what we would associate with the modern version of both, however the flames and smoke allowing it to fly don’t let us forget that they are also futurised.
