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Cinema offers glimpse of future
LONDON, England (CNN) -- Whether on a stage, a movie set or a TV screen, fantasy brings escapism, excitement and maybe even inspiration into our daily lives. But when cinema starts taking guesses at the future, viewers may find it offers more than light entertainment. Through their celluloid cityscapes, set designers have sometimes tried to offer a glimpse into a society that may be looming ahead -- and it is not always pretty. An influential set design was the city in Fritz Lang's "Metropolis," first screened in 1927. The movie, 75 years old, has recently been restored in Germany and retains its popularity. The 1980s cult film "Blade Runner" pays homage to Lang's vision. Set designer Lawrence Paul still shows "Metropolis" to his film students at the Los Angeles American Film Institute, "There are films that are done where the design is what I call seamless. And then there are what I call 'look at me' production design films, such as 'Blade Runner' where the design of the movie becomes another one of the strong supporting characters of the film." Paul created a set that "was always smoky, and dismal and dark." The movie reflects a time in 1982 when concerns were growing about pollution and city development, said associate professor Dietrich Neumann from the architecture department at Brown University. Paul remembers getting a negative response when talking to architectural groups about his set for "Blade Runner." "They were incensed by what we depicted design-wise. They said, 'this could never happen, our cities would never look like this'. "They were really very, very upset with what we said visually, what we showed them visually." Current anxieties may have become more subtle but remain just as disturbing, as seen in last year's "Minority Report" by Steven Spielberg. Set designer Alex McDowell had to create a set based on Spielberg's idea of a city and a society from which there was no place to hide. "Our mantra was that the film was really future reality, instead of science fiction. Everything we design had to have a basis in a contemporary scientific or social truth and we had to extrapolate from the present into the future." As Neumann says, architecture in films "can foreshadow the future, it can show us dark visions, warning visions of the future, which of course normal architecture can't do."
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