Cut from their place in time

All new, improved, and better? Maybe, maybe not. GRAHAM REID considers what it means when directors revisit their classic films and make changes


Dunno know about you, but I quite liked the original Blade Runner. That was the one with the 50s film-noir voice-over by Harrison Ford ("They don't advertise for killers in a newspaper," was the opening line, if I recall) and the ending which some say is happy but I consider neatly ambiguous.

A few years ago Ridley Scott released his "director's cut" and that is now the official version, the one you buy on video and DVD. The original is out of print and probably only available on shonky secondhand video through ebay.

Now this raises some problems. In some circles it is called revisionism, round my way it is just annoying.

The issue of directors tickling their original films has come up again with the new edition of the Star Wars trilogy (A New Hope, The Empire Strikes Back, Return of the Jedi) in which George Lucas has added scenes, changed or deleted some of the sound effects, brought in other characters to add more continuity, completely re-animating Jabba the Hutt and so on. Tem Morrison has been brought in to voice Boba Fett's four lines. Small changes some say, but changes nonetheless.

You can argue that it is George's film and he can do what he likes with it. In this case he says he's improved it, made it more coherent, and used technology he didn't have previously to spruce it up.

Fair enough and okay, yes, it is George's film. But from the time I took my kids to the Civic to see Star Wars: A New Hope and that bloody great cruiser flew across our heads in the opening scene it became our film.

Like the original of Blade Runner which was my film.

What these directors are doing is denying us our original experience and, as Dave Kehr said in the New York Times of the Star Wars trilogy, they are "no longer rooted in late 1970s America, the films have become timeless in a banal sense, kicked outside the historical moment that produced them".

Yes, the original versions of these Star Wars are still available if you want them. But only briefly (so hang on to them) as this will be the official version - until Lucas has another tickle?

When the notorious colourising rolled along - taking black'n'white classics like The Maltese Falcon and adding colour to them - there was at least the defence that if you wanted the originals they were always going to be available.

Peter Jackson's original cinema versions of the Rings trilogy are out there if you want them. If you want the expanded editions they are available, too. That's called choice. Ridley Scott didn't give us that option.

But changes like Lucas, Scott, Jackson and others are making raise some interesting questions.

Like a couple of years ago when politically correct American poster companies airbrushed the cigarette out of Paul McCartney's hand on the cover of Abbey Road.

Now that's revisionism.