Blade Runner has proved to be one of the most enduring and influential films of the 1980s. This new edition of Bukatman's study of Blade Runner is published in the BFI Film Classics 20th anniversary series of special editions, with a new foreword by the author and a stunning new jacket design by Paul Pope.
Hellboy, Mike Mignola’s famed comic book demon hunter, wanders through a haunting and horrific world steeped in the history of weird fictions and wide-ranging folklores. Hellboy's World shows how our engagement with Hellboy's world is a highly aestheticized encounter with comics and their materiality. Scott Bukatman’s dynamic study explores how comics produce a heightened “adventure of reading” in which syntheses of image and word, image sequences, and serial narratives create compelling worlds for the reader’s imagination to inhabit. Drawing upon other media—including children’s books, sculpture, pulp fiction, cinema, graphic design, painting, and illuminated manuscripts—Bukatman reveals the mechanics of creating a world on the page. He also demonstrates the pleasurable and multiple complexities of the reader’s experience, invoking the riotous colors of comics that elude rationality and control and delving into shared fictional universes and occult detection, the horror genre and the evocation of the sublime, and the place of abstraction in Mignola’s art. Monsters populate the world of Hellboy comics, but Bukatman argues that comics are themselves little monsters, unruly sites of sensory and cognitive pleasures that exist, happily, on the margins. The book is not only a treat for Hellboy fans, but it will entice anyone interested in the medium of comics and the art of reading.
The Bristish artist duo Anderson & Low has created a highly original art project based on the brilliant artifice of the spectacular sets from the latest James Bond movie, Spectre. Shooting entirely at Pinewood Studios, UK, the artist duo highlights a head-on collision of fantasy and reality by photographing the sets' massive scale and extraordinary detail. Allowing the bare soundstage to intrude on the images would normally shatter the illusion of the sets. In this case, however, it has the reverse effect and enhances the sense of illusion, artifice and wonder. Through a poetic and painterly eye, the beautifully designed and magnificently photographed images bring to life these detailed and massive tableaux, creating a poetry and narrative fantasy that mirrors the movie. This book represents a unique study in movie-making and constructed narratives in photography. Exhibition: Camera Work, Berlin 24.6.-27.8.2016