Bleak Technology. Science Fiction and Melancholia, 1968-1983

A cooperation by the Austrian Film Museum with the Az W

As an overture to the films in the series “Bleak Technology” by the Austrian Film Museum, the Az W is hosting a lecture and a panel discussion on the significance of the film Blade Runner by Ridley Scott (1982) for the altering perception of architecture and the urban setting of the time.

Welcome address: Dietmar Steiner, Director of the Az W
Introduction to the cooperation and the film programme: Katherina T. Zakravsky, curator of the film series

Lecture Katherina T. Zakravsky, curator:

“Blade Runner Or Dystopia as School of Morals and Taste”
Dystopia is following the great utopias of Modernity like a dirty shadow. It warns of the unthought and unthinkable consequences of the rationalist and functionalist megalomania of all urban and social planning. Hardly any single work of art does so with more elegance and complexity than Ridley Scott’s masterpiece “Blade Runner” (1982). The lecture will honour the film and its rich history of reception as a training for a planetary civil society.

Panel discussion with:

Alexandra Maringer, architect and scenographer, Amiens
Belinda Rukschcio, architect and filmmaker, Berlin
Dietmar Steiner, Director Az W
Moderation: Katherina T. Zakravsky

Film series at the Austrian Film Museum: 01.12.2016 – 05.01.2017

The report The Limits to Growth, published by the Club of Rome in 1972, is only one of the historical indicators of the shift from the technological optimism of the postwar years to the social, economic and intellectual crises of the 1970s and ’80s. In cinemas, alongside the disaster film boom, it is above all the dystopian science fiction that tells of the era’s collective “cold turkey”. The series at the Film Museum pursues this mood on the basis of 21 works that herald a “failure of the modern project” in popular culture, too.

More informationen available at
www.filmmuseum.at, T 01 533 70 54