'Blade Runner' as reflexive film and the primacy of the image

Guided by the concept of an archaeology of knowledge by Michel Foucault, the problems of interpretation by Paul Ricoeur, and by contemporary film scholars, this dissertation takes Ridley Scott's science-fiction/film noir Blade Runner (1982) as a point of reference for tracing a shift in modern film theory that takes place between the film's theatrical release dates in 1982 and 1992.;The dissertation begins with a study of the 1987 essay by Kiyoshi Takeda, "Self-Reflexive Cinema: Some Methodological Problems," a semio-psychoanalytic theory of reflexivity in cinema, or the effect of all films that reflect on cinema itself. I elucidate Takeda's innovation against the backdrop of the 1988 work by David Rodowick, The Crisis of Political Modernism, which studies the origins and development of ideas from French film journals beginning around 1968.;Once I establish that the film's reflexive traits are patterned after those of classic 1940s film noirs, the electronic screen, the photograph and the mirror lend themselves to a reflexive metareading of the film. This close reading benefits from the 1990 study of the mirror in Renaissance painting and philosophy by Agnes Minazzoli, La premiere ombre, and from Nietzsche's concept of the eternal return of the same. To address the problem of History that Takeda poses, and to reconcile the American origins and themes of the film with Renaissance painting, so important to modern film theory, I interpret the mythical patterns in the film's narrative as echoes of the sixteenth-century conquest of America, of which structuralist scholar Tzvetan Todorov, novelist Fernando del Paso, and historian Serge Gruzinski provide different versions between 1982 and 1990. The dissertation concludes, in agreement with Andre Bazin, that the primacy of the image requires the interpretation of film rather than its submission to linguistic theories of meaning.