Tuesday 4 December 2007

The Director's Cut

I felt as if I'd been granted a reprieve. Blade Runner — the way the director really wanted it all those years ago — hadn't disappeared from the screen at the Renoir Cinema in Russell Square. So I went to see it.

The last time I saw the film was on the giant screen at La Villette in Paris during the open air summer shows there. That was so long ago I can't remember.

It was altogether cosier in the Renoir on Monday night. But as the credits rolled and I saw the names such as Rutger Hauer and Sean Young, I wondered what had become of them since their halcyon days of 1982.

Daryl Hannah is now a big eco campaigner. I know that as she was featured in one of the British Sunday papers last weekend. Harrison Ford is simply big and Ridley Scott is massive. Indeed the Renoir's programmers can congratulate themselves on harmony. They have Scott's latest work — American Gangster — also showing.

About half way through I began to ask myself why I was sitting there. I don't have the same forensic knowledge of Blade Runner like I do of Star Wars (Episodes 4,5,6) so any extra, extended or deleted scenes would have been lost on me.

I don't even have any of the compromise cuts on DVD. Was I just succumbing to hype?

Well it was entertaining so why not. There's nothing wrong with such intellectual feebleness. This allowed me to take in the Louise Bourgeois at the Tate Modern on Tuesday morning.

This is a big show. Call it a retrospective even. She's 96 and still going strong, experimenting with forms and ideas.

There were so many shapes and concepts to admire but the most salient for me was an etching in ink and pencil from this year entitled: Where my motivation comes from.

And the etching states: "It is not so much where my motivation comes from but rather how it manages to survive."

Go girl.