[T]he work of a Cumbrian academic will be featured among over 100 films at a science fiction film festival in New York.
Now in its fifth year the Philip K Dick Science Fiction Film Festival offers talks, virtual reality demonstrations alongside feature and short length films at venues in Manhattan and Queens. Named after the prolific late American sci-fi writer, the event is highly regarded as a showcase of science fiction work.
University of Cumbria fine art lecturer Jane Topping’s film Peter is being shown on Monday at the Soho Playhouse in Manhattan. The Brampton Road-based academic is delighted her work is to be featured alongside several world premieres at the cult event.
Peter (Dir. Jane Topping, 2014) seeks to re-frame what is considered a classic of dystopian cinema (Blade Runner, 1982, dir. Ridley Scott) with the intention of positioning the artist within the text and so implying that such radical gestures are not only warranted and necessary, but also implicit in the contemporary viewer’s experience of watching film.
Peter manipulates found footage and narrative voice in order to reveal difficulties of viewer identification when watching Blade Runner. Peter makes use of wholesale appropriation of ‘facts’, both visual and textual, personal and public, in order to create a new reality around the film. The use of personal biography and the trope of the unreliable narrator are key elements in the discussion of the illusive nature of truth at the core of Peter.
