http://www.criticalcommons.org/Members/ ... toH264.mov
A machine is used to enhance a photograph. At first this enhancement seems rather ordinary. Panning, zooming, sharpening - all of which maintains the ordinary variations possible within a single point of view perspective. The mirror on the back wall, if we're up on our art history, refers to this painting:
Here is a closeup of such. Note the glass beads, hanging on the wall, to the left of the mirror.
In the mirror we see the original scene we had first apprehended, but from a point of view other than that of our first apprehension. This acts as a way of prefiguring what then occurs in the Blade Runner scene, where the machine is able to reconstruct a point of view other than that originally conceived.
But it goes further. Not only can it see behind the original viewpoint, by means of the mirror, but can do what even a painting or still photograph can't do, and that is to move the point of view. And at the moment it does this we can almost apprehend, in the foreground, the same glass beads in the Arnolfini painting.
This is the quasi-surreal moment. It is but a fleeting moment in the film and the character played by Harrison Ford treats it as entirely ordinary. For us, of course, it is extraordinary. How on Earth can that be possible? Whether it is possible or not doesn't really matter. We don't care and we shouldn't care. This is cinema.
In Bazin's realism, contrary to popular assumption, this is also not an issue. Realism is never about some ideal truth, or sincere fidelity to some preconception of reality, be it technical, cultural or political. Realism is about expressing an idea as any other method might be, but it does so from a place or plane outside of the idea.
In this 1956 film:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DiGFcVf34PM
a red balloon takes on a power of it's own, to follow a child around. How is this possible? It isn't. But this film is given to us, by Bazin, as a good example of what he means by "realism". It is not about fidelity to preconceptions of reality. Unless, of course, we thought balloons could follow us around. Rather it is about how an otherwise emperical image (as distinct from a special effect in the lab) can also express fantastic ideas.
Now in Blade Runner we could argue that what we are seeing isn't like the Red Balloon insofar as the moving point of view is put together using compositing, and unlike Surrealism (which Bazin celebrates) it is towards the construction of an idea, ie. rather than the deconstruction of such. So in what way might we regard the Blade Runner scene as realist? We can't really. But there is an exception.
The exception is that what we are seeing is not this navigation occuring within the film as such, but by means of a machine within the film, so to speak. It is this machine performing this special effect rather than the film per se. The machine takes on a role similar to that of the Red Balloon. The machine is assigned this power rather than the film as such. What is intriguing is that almost papable sense in which it could be possible - that a powerful enough computer might be able to reconstruct a signal otherwise encrypted within an ordinary image. The reconstruction by means of reflections is not that fantastic, (an idea as old as painting) and if extended further - every surface is a reflection - one can imagine, in principle, a powerful enough computer capable of reconstructing any number of alternative points of view, from a single photograph.
Now, of course, much of Blade Runner does use special effects and they operate at the level of the film's reality, rather than embedded within it. But in this particular scene there is something different occuring - a powerful idea born of the emperical image (a photograph) and back towards such, it assigns a capacity which ordinary rationalism would deny it, but which the science fiction version of rationalism reassigns it - a kind of Bazinian super-realism.
There is an interlocking logic here. The idea of a super-rationalism (computer), implemented through compositing (special effects), that throws us back to the emperical image: the power of which interlocks with the power that Bazian realism identifies.
As a final note, Roland Barthes, in Camera Lucidia, recounts how he wished he could enlarge a particular photograph he enjoys, to see more details in it, and the lament he has, that it's not possible.