Scott, Ridley

   b. 1939

   Film director

   An art graduate, Scott worked as an award-winning director of television advertisements before embarking on television and then film work with The Duellists (1977). He achieved commercial success with his Hollywood vehicles, the science fictionhorror Allen (1979) and the futuristic film noir Blade Runner (1982). Scott employs raise en scène techniques in films with meticulously observed sets, often sacrificing narrative content for a visually spectacular style, for example in Legend (1985) and 1492: Conquest of Paradise (1992). A later proclivity for strong female characters (as in the female road movie Thelma and Louise (1991) and G.I.Jane (1997)) is undermined by simplistically subverted gendered stereotypes, yet Scott’s revisionism of conventional film genres and indeterminate symbolism render his work ideal for feminist and postmodernist analysis.

   SATINDER CHOHAN