The use of colour in the depiction of dystopic culture:

More than fifty years after Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, Ridley Scott and Terri Gilliam created the dystopic twenty-first century metropoles of Blade Runner and Brazil using colour lights.  Since the invention of colour films in 1950, the complexity of lighting techniques exploded. Light as cultural signature became widely explored.  It was apparent to filmmakers that the difference between the blue-green light of fluorescents and the warm amber of candles or sunlight was as dramatic as the contrast between light and dark in the representation of fear, discomfort or social hierarchy in noir films.  Thus, colour lights and filters were use to overlay dominating hues on entire scenes.  The beginning of “Blade Runner” was a fine example of how colour light can represent the intricacies of an urban environment.  The audience was first introduced to an aerial view of Los Angeles 2019, which was shrouded in smog and glowed in amber light as if the city was burning.  This technique of diffusion where light is filtered through an atmospheric texture added movement and also elaborated on the concept of weather as part of the cultural signature of this cityscape.  Then, from the city above, the movie cuts to a scene of the city below.  At the street level, it is dark, wet, and full of grime.  The only sources of illumination were different kinds of artificial lights: the fluorescent street lights, the garishly colourful neon and the bright plasma screens of commercials along an entire side of buildings.  The microclimate at the street level is very much emphasized, again, with the diffusion of light through layers of rain and also the reflection off of wet surfaces.  From the street, the audience followed Deckard to the interior space of the police station.  Bright indirect light illuminated the building.  One might first have mistaken the white bluish light as the sun, but the movement of the strong white beams quickly confirmed that they are artificial.  The indirect illumination probably originated from the exterior planes of advertisements and commercials.