Rid­ley Scott is 83, and good on him for not slow­ing down. The Last Duel came and went, but it actu­al­ly exist­ed and was an orig­i­nal idea, based on a true his­tor­i­cal event, and with a script from Nicole Holofcener, and fea­tured a re-team­ing up of Ben Affleck and Matt Damon. And as of this writ­ing, House of Guc­ci is set to open and give us some sala­cious scan­dal and mur­der among the hoity and toit, just in time for Oscar sea­son. He’s even recent­ly dropped some hot takes against the super­hero movie fac­to­ry of Hol­ly­wood. So Scott’s doing well. Then why does this lat­est announce­ment feel so under­whelm­ing?

Accord­ing to a BBC inter­view on Mon­day, Scott is also devel­op­ing a 10-episode lim­it­ed series based on Blade Run­ner *and* a lim­it­ed series based on Alien, this time set on earth.

It’s not total­ly clear how much Scott is active­ly involved.

“We [have already] writ­ten the pilot for ‘Blade Run­ner’ and the bible,” he says, refer­ring to the mas­ter plan of the 10 episodes. “So, we’re already pre­sent­ing ‘Blade Run­ner’ as a TV show, the first 10 hours.” But who his co-cre­ators are, we don’t know right now. And there are sim­i­lar ques­tions in the upcom­ing Alien series, which has been rumored since 2020. Noah Haw­ley, who turned the Coen Bros. Far­go into some­thing like a jazz riff on the Coen’s films spread across sev­er­al decades, is set to be the showrun­ner.

The Blade Run­ner announce­ment has sent the pop media press into a tizzy, try­ing to guess where and when the new series will be set. After all, the 1982 film was set in a bleak, dystopi­an 2019, and the Denis Vil­leneuve sequel was set in a bleak, dystopi­an 2049. And it was only because of this announce­ment that I even knew of the Adult Swim ani­mat­ed series, Blade Run­ner: Black Lotus, which is set in a bleak, dystopi­an 2032. Times have changed, but the Los Ange­les of the future sure hasn’t. So when will it take place? Who knows?

Look, the two new series might be good, they might be meh, but Scott’s sud­den promi­nence at the end of 2021 feels like an encap­su­la­tion of media’s diver­gent paths. On one hand you have his two films, both orig­i­nal con­tent, one that might have a sec­ond life on stream­ing on and anoth­er that feels like it will have some buzz and lead peo­ple back to the cin­e­ma. Either way, they tell sto­ries with begin­nings, mid­dles, and ends. On the oth­er hand you have the con­tin­u­al fran­chise-ment of cul­ture, revis­it­ing and rehash­ing two excel­lent films from the ear­ly ‘80s that exist per­fect­ly well as stand­alone sto­ries. Do we real­ly need more sto­ries about the xenomorph? Do we need more sto­ries about a very damp Los Ange­les and its repli­cants? Is cul­ture at a stand­still? Are we doomed to recy­cle every­thing from the 1980s onward?

How­ev­er, if any­body should be mak­ing mon­ey off of Rid­ley Scott’s lega­cy it’s Scott him­self. Leave your thoughts in the com­ments below, while I put on this Van­ge­lis sound­track.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Expe­ri­ence Blade Run­ner Like You Nev­er Have Before Through a Fea­ture-Length Remas­tered Sound­track

The Sounds of Blade Run­ner: How Music & Sound Effects Became Part of the DNA of Rid­ley Scott’s Futur­is­tic World

Three Blade Run­ner Pre­quels: Watch Them Online

What is a Blade Run­ner? How Rid­ley Scott’s Movie Has Ori­gins in William S. Bur­roughs’ Novel­la, Blade Run­ner: A Movie

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the Notes from the Shed pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, and/or watch his films here.

Expres­sion­ism was an art move­ment that set out to take the internal—emotions, the human con­di­tion itself—and make it exter­nal, with paint­ings that made no attempt to recre­ate real­i­ty. It was a break with the clas­si­cal schools of art that had come before. It was mod­ern, very mod­ern, very col­or­ful, and excit­ing as hell. And it was soon to run head­long into that most mod­ern of art forms, film­mak­ing, in the 1920s.

In the above mini-doc on the Dutch Angle, that cant­ed fram­ing so beloved of film noir, and appar­ent­ly every shot in the first Thor movie, Vox traces its roots back to Expres­sion­ism, and par­tic­u­lar­ly back to Ger­many of the 1910s where schools like Die Brücke and Der Blaue Reit­er were assault­ing real­ism with bru­tal paint­ings. They sensed some­thing was chang­ing in the sub­con­scious of peo­ple and in the coun­try itself. And the movie The Cab­i­net of Dr. Cali­gari was the cul­mi­na­tion of that hor­rif­ic vibe.

Three expres­sion­ist painters, Her­mann Warm, Wal­ter Reimann, and Wal­ter Rohrig designed the crooked, bizarre, and night­mar­ish sets for that film. They look like the paint­ings of Ernst Lud­wig Kirch­n­er or Fritz Bleyl, but denud­ed of col­or. Expres­sion­ism had entered film. (Warm, Reimann, and Rohring had worked on, and con­tin­ued to work as set designers/art direc­tors for many films at that time, but most are lost or destroyed.) Ger­many being cut off from the Hol­ly­wood film indus­try at the time had led to this strange new direc­tion, but once Hitler rose to pow­er, many artists came to Hol­ly­wood, and expres­sion­ist tech­niques infect­ed Hol­ly­wood.

The Dutch Angle (real­ly, the Deutsche Angle, before being Ger­man became prob­lem­at­ic) was a way of turn­ing ver­ti­cal and hor­i­zon­tal lines in a scene into diag­o­nals. They sug­gest some­thing had gone wrong, that real­i­ty has been knocked off its axis. It became part of the vocab­u­lary of film noir, which was also filled with expres­sion­is­tic light­ing, high con­trast black and white, light and shad­ows.

Those direct emo­tion­al par­al­lels have been leached from the Dutch angle from its overuse. It’s been used in many a film as a way to jazz up a scene, or some­times just as a way to get sev­er­al ele­ments into a tight frame. It’s ubiq­ui­ty in music videos and com­mer­cials has made it almost invis­i­ble.

But when the Dutch angle is used the right way by tal­ent­ed direc­tors, from Hitch­cock to Spike Lee and Quentin Taran­ti­no, the effect still works. The angle makes a shot stand out, it can jar us, it can show inte­ri­or con­fu­sion and moral may­hem. And when that hap­pens it can take us back to the Expressionist’s orig­i­nal goal. It can reveal our inner truths, and remind us of the times when we have felt off cen­ter, when the world was not on the lev­el.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

60 Free Film Noir Movies

10 Great Ger­man Expres­sion­ist Films: From Nos­fer­atu to The Cab­i­net of Dr. Cali­gari

From Cali­gari to Hitler: A Look at How Cin­e­ma Laid the Foun­da­tion for Tyran­ny in Weimar Ger­many

How Ger­man Expres­sion­ism Influ­enced Tim Bur­ton: A Video Essay

Watch The Cab­i­net of Dr. Cali­gari, the Influ­en­tial Ger­man Expres­sion­ist Film (1920)

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the Notes from the Shed pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, and/or watch his films here.

Andrei Tarkovsky had a rather low opin­ion of Stan­ley Kubrick­’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. “Pho­ny on many points,” he once called it, built on “a life­less schema with only pre­ten­sions to truth.” His pro­fes­sion­al response was 1972’s Solaris, by most esti­mates anoth­er high point in the sci­ence-fic­tion cin­e­ma of that peri­od. Yet today it isn’t wide­ly regard­ed as Tarkovsky’s best work; cer­tain­ly it has­n’t become as much of an object of wor­ship as, say, Stalk­er. That pic­ture — arguably anoth­er work of sci-fi, though one sui gener­is in prac­ti­cal­ly its every facet — con­tin­ues to inspire such trib­utes and exege­ses as the video essay on its mak­ing we fea­tured ear­li­er this year here on Open Cul­ture.

That video essay came from the chan­nel of Youtu­ber Cin­e­maTyler, who like many auteur-ori­ent­ed cinephiles exhibits appre­ci­a­tion for Tarkovsky and Kubrick alike. He’s cre­at­ed numer­ous exam­i­na­tions on the work that went into Kubrick­’s pic­tures, includ­ing A Clock­work Orange, Bar­ry Lyn­don, and Full Met­al Jack­et.

The ambi­tion of 2001, out­sized even by Kubrick­’s stan­dard, is reflect­ed in what it spurred Cin­e­maTyler on to cre­ate: a sev­en-part series of video essays on its pro­duc­tion, with three-hour total run­time that far exceeds that of the film itself. It takes at least that long to explain the achieve­ments Kubrick pulled off, espe­cial­ly with mid-1960s film­mak­ing tech­nol­o­gy, which gave us the rare vision of the future that has held up for more than half a cen­tu­ry.

Some of the qual­i­ties that have made 2001 endure came into being almost by acci­dent. Take the use of Strauss’ “The Blue Danube” to intro­duce the space sta­tion, a stroke of scor­ing genius inspired by the records Kubrick and com­pa­ny hap­pened to be lis­ten­ing to while view­ing their footage. That and oth­er clas­si­cal pieces replaced an orig­i­nal score by the com­pos­er who’d worked on Kubrick­’s Spar­ta­cus, which would have struck a dif­fer­ent mood alto­geth­er. So would the por­ten­tous nar­ra­tion includ­ed in ear­li­er ver­sions of the script, hard­ly imag­in­able in the con­text of such pow­er­ful­ly word­less scenes as the famous four-mil­lion-year cut from tossed bone to space­craft, which turns out to have been orig­i­nal­ly con­ceived an Earth-orbit­ing nuclear-weapon plat­form. That’s one of the many lit­tle-known facts Cin­e­maTyler fits into this series, and a view­ing of which even the biggest Kubrick buffs will have rea­son to admire 2001 more intense­ly than ever.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

1966 Film Explores the Mak­ing of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (and Our High-Tech Future)

James Cameron Revis­its the Mak­ing of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey

Stan­ley Kubrick Explains the Mys­te­ri­ous End­ing of 2001: A Space Odyssey in a New­ly Unearthed Inter­view

What’s the Dif­fer­ence Between Stan­ley Kubrick’s & Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (A Side-by-Side Com­par­i­son)

The Sto­ry of Stalk­er, Andrei Tarkovsky’s Trou­bled (and Even Dead­ly) Sci-Fi Mas­ter­piece

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.