On Sunday 15 November at 5:45 pm, the LAC Hall will host “Blade Runner. Umani, replicanti e altre forme del futuro”, a lecture by Roy Menarini. The talk will serve as an interlude between the two screenings of Blade Runner, presented in a special version with the soundtrack performed live.
The lecture is part of SciArt, the IBSA Foundation project created to foster cross-pollination between scientific and artistic disciplines.
Roy Menarini, film critic and professor, will guide the audience through the relationship between artificial intelligence and cinema, starting from the themes of Blade Runner, which remain surprisingly relevant more than forty years after the film’s release.
Starting from the cultural context of the early 1980s, Menarini’s lecture will trace the genesis of Ridley Scott’s film, a meeting point between cyberpunk imagery, the crisis of the modern metropolis, advertising aesthetics, postmodern culture and questions about the fate of humankind in the age of technology. The result is a journey that offers the audience a number of interpretive keys to a film that, more than forty years after its release, continues to question our present: artificial intelligence, digital memory, the ecological crisis, surveillance, and the increasingly unstable boundary between biological and artificial life.
The talk will take place on Sunday 15 November at 5:45 pm in the LAC Hall. It will last approximately 45 minutes and will end with a Q&A session open to the audience.
More than forty years after its release, Blade Runner remains one of the most recognisable and influential films in science fiction. Directed by Ridley Scott in 1982 and set in a dystopian Los Angeles, it tells the story of detective Rick Deckard, tasked with tracking down a group of replicants who have escaped to Earth. His encounter with Rachael, an enigmatic figure suspended between human and artificial, leads his mission to confront deeper questions about identity, memory and the very nature of being human.
With Blade Runner Live, LAC offers a new screening experience with live music. Ridley Scott’s celebrated film is presented in its Final Cut version on the big screen in high definition, while Vangelis’s soundtrack, a fundamental part of the work’s identity, is performed in its entirety by The Avex Ensemble, in perfect sync with the images.
Electronic, ambient and orchestral sounds thus accompany the visual universe created by Ridley Scott, conveying the full atmospheric power of a film that has left a profound mark on contemporary cinema.
Roy Menarini is Full Professor at the University of Bologna, where he teaches Cinema and the Cultural Industry. He is senior editor of the academic journal Cinergie – Il cinema e le altre arti and co-director of the international research centre INC (Italian Research Network in Celebrity Studies). He has published numerous essays on contemporary cinema and on topics such as the methodology of film criticism, the theory of cinephilia and film analysis. His most recent books are Il corpo nel cinema. Storie, simboli e immaginari (2015), Il discorso e lo sguardo. Forme della critica e pratiche della cinefilia (2018), La grande illusione. Storie di uno spettatore (2021), Hitchcock: La donna che visse due volte (2023) and Il film nel XXI secolo (2025). He is a consultant for the Fondazione Cineteca di Bologna and for the Sergio Amidei Award in Gorizia.
SciArt is an IBSA Foundation project born to foster cross-pollination between scientific and artistic disciplines and to offer the community new keys for interpreting today's world.
Science and the arts have always coexisted across time and space. Though with different methodologies and aims, artists and scientists alike observe the world around them, opening up new perspectives, interpretations, and meanings.
Through various event formats and digital products, SciArt focuses on artistic creations that have been transformed through interaction with scientists, discoveries, and research institutes. Audiences can engage with these proposals and hear, directly from artists and scientists, how such different realities influence one another.
The project fits perfectly within the Foundation's mission, which since 2012 has been committed to spreading authoritative scientific culture, sharing principles and knowledge in accessible language, and raising awareness on topics related to science, culture, and individual wellbeing.