week 15 KOYAANISQATSI

Koyaanisqatsi is a film by Reggio Godfrey released in 1982. He began filming it in 1975. He didn't set out to make this film with a predetermined script but began to compile and edit the images he acquired as he went. A thesis and formal quality to the film emerged from a pile of footage - I think I found this knowledge a little bit comforting in that it justifies to a certain extent, my own approach to thinking about how to make a film. He created this film with the intention of provoking audiences by providing an experience for them rather than a story. This experience comes from looking at common, everyday images in a new light by enhancing them with editing and varying cadences. Godfrey illuminates how we have moved away from the four primal elements of nature - earth, air, water, fire - by focusing on human technology and how we not only use it but how we now live in it. Technology has replaced the natural elements. To make this comparison he focuses on life in the city and shows a lot of images of tall skyscrapers including a particularly dramatic sequence that shows the Pruitt Igoe housing development just prior to and during its demolition.


This particular clip of the film starts off a long sequence which is called 'The Grid.' It emphasizes the grid-like aesthetic of a city and how our own human interaction with it becomes automated.

Architecturally, I think this film is important because, as Godfrey discusses in the bonus features, he chose to move what is typically considered the foreground of film - characters, narrative, dialogue - to the back and what is typically considered the background of film - place, architecture, the city, climate, thesis - into the front, making that the main focus of the film. Space becomes personified. The terms he uses to discuss this idea - foreground and background - reveal a space-oriented conceptual framework for how he set up the movie.

I have been a big fan of Koyaanisqatsi ever since I first saw it in 2002 due to the power it has in presenting a thesis, which is partly due to Philip Glass's brilliant score. The style of this film has been a big influence on my perception of documentary film making,

week 14 MEDIA AND MCLUHAN'S 'REEL' WORLD

Marshall McLuhan, author of  Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964) asserts that the content, or the products created by a certain medium, blind us from the character of that medium, or the over-arching by-product of the contents which is really the important part.  This is where the now famous phrase "the medium is the message" is derived from. The prime example of his concept involves electricity - electricity produces telephones, telegraphs, televisions, computers, etc - but the novelty of these amazing products blind us from the most important aspect - their ability to communicate. Certain successful companies such as Apple, Inc have fulling grasped McLuhan's concepts and have embarked on wildly successful ad campaigns which sell the message. They are not selling you extremely well-designed computers and entertainment devices, they are selling you a lifestyle and positive experiences. They utilize a "point of view" which encourages involvement with the basic notion of the medium.

McLuhan also talks about how the "paradox of mechanization is that although it is itself the cause of maximal growth and change, the principle of mechanization excludes the very possibility of growth or the understanding of change." Similarly, electricity and instant sequencing in which action and reaction occurs at almost the exact same time has arrived without the preconception of electricity's potential.  What comes next?  What is faster than instant sequencing? The most touted answer would probably have something to do with artificial intelligence and the concept of technological singularity. The Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Inc defines singularity as "the technological creation of smarter-than-human intelligence" and is based on the predilection that we are currently at unique point in time in which the human brain has reached its current computing capacity the simultaneous explosion of exponential technological computing capacity. This idea originates from science fiction writer Vernor Vinge and subsequent proponents of the concept are referred to as futurists. A couple of months ago, I was watching Colbert Nation and saw the futurist Ray Kurzweil interviewed on the show. He is the feature of a new documentary about him and the concept of technological singularity called Transcendental Man.

McLuhan's writing focuses specifically on media and film but there is a very palpable connection to architecture and that lies in the idea of architects as master builders - masters of systems, patterns, and over-arching themes.  The 2010 film Inception by Christopher Nolan makes use of this connection by making architects the designers of dream worlds that can be explored lucidly to extract secrets from other dreamers. (Aesthetically, they support the idea that these architects are the master builders of the future by surrounding themselves with everything-Frank Lloyd Wright. Yet interestingly, this exaggerated reference does not extend beyond private spaces - the actual cities of the future in Inception are nothing like Wright's Broadacre City.) A sub plot involving the main character Dom Cobb and his deceased wife Mal highlights the psychic and social consequences that may potentially arise within such complex technological systems, which McLuhan alludes to when he talks about how we live in the "Age of Anxiety" and the "century of the psychiatrist's couch." Singularity tells us that humans have not and possibly will not be able to make the next big jump of comprehension and we will need to rely on machines to continue growing information. Inception posits that architects can be the ones to transcend this barrier...or at least as master builders, they will be the ones to wield the machines.

Christopher Nolan - finally bringing back the long lost art of the dressed-in-white-action-ski-sequence.

week 13 THE CITY IN FILM

The city as portrayed on film has one of the most important relationships to architecture. Specifically the city walk - a definitive aspect of neorealism - allows viewers to transcend the role of voyeur and become a voyageur, engaging the city in a psycho-geographic landscape, according to film historian Giuliana Bruno.  The physicality of architectural texture within the city engages us as voyageurs in an emotive sense. Bruno asserts that the city walk is "haptically driven" and that our "sensory spatiality of film...occurs through an engagement with touch and movement."  Filmic city walks are the idea of the flaneur incarnate.

L.A. Plays Itself (2003) is a fascinating 3 hour documentary made by film critic and professor Thom Andersen which discusses the role of the most photographed city in the world - Los Angeles -  as a hazy world "where the relation between representation and reality gets muddled."  He discusses over 200 films that were filmed in Los Angeles - some films actually being set in the city and many utilizing Los Angeles to portray another place.

Out of all those films, one movie that Andersen didn't mention, which I think is important, was Antoine Fuqua's Training Day (2001), a movie shot in Los Angeles which to me represents the quintessential perception of late-90's gang-riddled Los Angeles and the historic conflicts those gangs have had with the L.A.P.D. The most important aspect of the film is that the two main characters' "office" is in Alonzo Harris's souped up Monte Carlo - so we see sprawling Los Angeles and its integral suburbs from the seat of a car, exactly as everyone who lives there see's it. This is a "city walk" in a car through a city that is historically defined by car travel. The film travels from the empty, posh restaurants in downtown Los Angeles where corrupt lawmen meet to the excruciatingly poor, overcrowded neighborhoods such as the Imperials Courts housing project in Watts where resident gangs provide vigilante protection against intruders. The films strives to achieve a realistic depiction of gang violence and class struggle within Los Angeles but some of that realism is lost on the casting of supporting roles and bit parts with actual West Coast rappers and hip hop artists such as Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, and Macy Gray which are too recognizable.  However, this being L.A. - maybe recognizable celebrities in the cast are appropriate.

Andersen claims that he dislikes most movies that are based in Los Angeles because they lack the respect to acknowledge where it came from or what the real history is. To him, Los Angeles is "a series of villages that grew together. The villages became neighborhoods and their boundaries blurred, joined together by a mutual disdain for the city's historic center - maybe that's why the movies turn their backs on the their city of origin - they claim to come from Hollywood, not from Los Angeles."  This movie could be considered the exception to that sentiment, as the story, the imagery are most definitely from Los Angeles and not Hollywood. A great interview with Thom Andersen can be found here.

week 12 FILMS ABOUT ARCHITECTS

Nancy Levinson, in the chapter "Tall Buildings, Tall Tales: on Architects in the Movies" from her book Architecture and Film, discusses the portrayal of fictional American architects in film and illuminates how our perceptions of architects as people and of the profession itself have been shaped by the medium of film.  In this very enjoyable reading - I found particular lines to be exceedingly funny - Levinson analyzes a hodge-podge of films from the 1940s thru the late 1990s which include Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House (1948), The Fountainhead (1949), Twelve Angry Men (1958), Strangers When We Meet (1960), Two for the Road (1966), The Towering Inferno (1974), Deathwish (1974), Hannah and Her Sisters (1987), The Belly of an Architect (1987), Three Men and a Baby (1987), Mystic Pizza (1988), Jungle Fever (1991), Housesitter (1992), Fearless (1993), Indecent Proposal (1993), Sleepless in Seattle (1993), Intersection (1994), The River Wild (1994), The Brady Bunch Movie (1995),  Losing Isaiah (1995), and One Fine Day (1996).  The resulting conclusions are that most of these films portray architects with an element of "silliness" in that the architects in the film do not reflect in their speech, their lifestyle, or their practice, that which most real architects would consider to be accurate.  Instead, these films present a dream reality which "capture the mystique of architecture, that heady mix of high-minded purpose and glamorous lifestyle, of the social weight of business and the romantic aura of art." (p 26)  They dwell on themes of the architect-as-messiah and the libidinous architect - the idea of the ego-driven architect who needs to constantly be producing their own creations.

As a contrast to the portrayal of fictional architects, we also watched a couple of documentaries that focus on real (albeit famous, and thus not the norm) architects. These films were My Architect: A Son's Journey (2003), Sketches of Frank Gehry (2005), and Citizen Architect (2010).

My Architect is the story of Louis Kahn's son, Nathaniel, and his search to discover the true nature of his father since Kahn died when Nathaniel was only eleven years old. Since all he has left of Kahn are the buildings he made, he embarks on this investigation with actually a very simple formula for making a film.  In a chronological order, he began to film his father's buildings while simultaneously collecting interviews from people who have been impacted by the buildings and/or have been impacted by relationships with Kahn personally.  The end result of this simple formula is a complex and fair portrayal of Kahn's life and the motives that drove him to be such a revered master within architecture. The other major result of the film is a beautiful picture of architecture itself. Kahn's buildings, with their stringent geometry and monolithic nature, are extremely photographic and Nathaniel eloquently captures their dynamic power with still shots, slow interior pans and time lapses which highlight the element of the timelessness that Kahn's buildings are so famous for. Vincent Scully (incidentally referenced in Levinson's book for his "exasperated" musings on the merits and influences of Ayn Rand's novel The Fountainhead during his participation in a 1992 discussion panel of distinguished architectural critics) was Nathaniel's Art History Professor at Yale and colleague of Kahn's.  He commented that Kahn, "from the very beginning he was after symmetry, order, geometric clarity, primitive power, enormous weight - as much as he could get...enduring monuments...materials that will last which is an enduring work in the world - that's what he's after." At the end of the film an architect, Doshi, who assisted Kahn on his final project in Bangladesh says that "if you go into silence, you will hear him."  I think the true gem of this film is that is that it shows how as a medium, film is particularly adept at producing a space of silence and focus in which viewers can realize an intangible, emotional relationship with the primitive power that architecture has.


Sketches of Frank Gehry was directed by Sydney Pollack a filmmaker and personal friend of Gehry's.  I actually love quite a few of Sydney Pollack's films - Out of Africa, The Firm, the remake of the Audrey Hepburn classic Sabrina, and Tootsie. As a narrative filmmaker, Pollack is very skillful at creating multi-dimensional and loveable characters.  Sketches - Pollack's one and only documentary - can be criticized for showing Gehry and by deduction, all architects in a fairly one-dimensional and disconnected context. Gehry's relationship to architecture is almost purely aesthetic and sculptural. We see him designing in a very whimsical and un-academic way that almost seems to over-simplify the job of architect.  Maybe documentaries are not Pollack's forte but I do however, enjoy certain aspects of the film. I always find it illuminating to gain better understanding of an architect's process. Gehry's process - whimsical and un-academic as it may be - is still very interesting as we see him producing ideas from artistic impulses. Also, Gehry's buildings are really loved by a great many people and the film does a good job of capturing the attraction people have to them. In contrast to how Kahn's very orthogonal masterpieces were shown in My Architect, Pollack shows Gehry's curvilinear work with abstract shots and more frenetic editing, maybe trying to capture the looseness of Gehry's process as well as trying to show the montage of experience that occurs when interacting with a Gehry building.

So far we have seen that both fictional movies about architects and documentaries about famous architects paint a pretty unrealistic and disconnected picture about how the profession actually functions and how it can serve the public.

Citizen Architect is the story of Samuel Mockbee's creation of the idea of Rural Studio at Auburn University and the lasting effect that idea has had even after Mockbee's death in 2001. I saw the film screened at the Museum of the Rockies with a Q & A session afterwards with the filmmaker Samuel Wainwright Douglas, Mockbee's daughter Sarah Ann who is deputy director at the Austin Film Society and was a producer on the film, and a member of the first Rural Studio, Ashley Sullivan who is now the partner at local firm in Bozeman. The great thing about this film was that it shows a side of architecture that historically has not had much public presence but is increasingly gaining steam, partly as an impact of Mockbee's work and of this film. Mockbee's idea of building structures for members of the public who desperately need them is an attempt to break the public disconnect that plagues the profession and establish a new perception of the role that architects can have in our society. Despite Mockbee's down- to-earth approach and successful connection with the public, this film still isn't an accurate representation of what everyday architects do since his strategy is so unique. It would be interesting to make a documentary that specifically shows what it is like to work as an average architect with the goal of demystifying the public perception and hopefully revealing the role of an architect within a community in a positive light.

week 11 BLADE RUNNER'S ARCHITECTURAL LEGACY

In reviewing Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (1982), a movie which I love and have seen many times, I found myself frustrated at not being able to see more in each scene.  I noticed that the tight camera shots purposely remove from view that which is above the characters heads and evade revealing too much detail - everything is obscured by an overabundance of light or darkness.  The pastiche, postmodern aesthetic within the film creates slightly blurry scenes in which the eye does not have a place to focus. What we're left with are impressions - almost like memories, yet they are memories of the future.

These observations support the idea put forth by my instructor David Fortin in the chapter on Blade Runner from his book "Architecture and Science-Fiction Film: Philip K. Dick and the Spectacle of Home" in which he asserts that the film's imagery is used to kill the notion of the home.  I think Scott's deliberately vague and dis-composed shots leave the audience unsettled due to its recognition of place yet rejection of that place's domesticity.

This type of filming technique is almost like the antithesis of Tarkovsky's slow pans and intent observation.  Tarkovsky's goal was to illuminate the sentiment of nostaglia for domestic life, for the home. What Scott does dwell on in great detail is the moment of Roy's death, perhaps as a juxtaposition to the composition he has employed throughout the rest of the film, and consequently humanizing him. This is one of the least unsettling shots of the film as the audience finally makes a connection to Roy's quest to find authentic inhabitation.

week 10 BEHIND THE SCREEN: ARCHITECTURE + SET DESIGN

In thinking about set designs which have become iconic in and of themselves and whose images remain with us today, one of the first designs I thought of was the war room from Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.

What I love about the design of the war room is that it has both the power to inspire awe as well as set the stage for visual puns and hilarious interaction between the characters.  When I did a little investigating, I found a great story about the set designer for this film.  Ken Adam was a Jewish boy born as Klaus Adam in 1921 and grew up in Berlin alongside the Bauhaus movement.  When his family immigrated to England at the beginning of World War II,  he enrolled in the military and became a Typhoon pilot, conducting daring missions in what was very modern technology at the time.  When the war was over, he studied architecture at the Bartlett and eventually began producing the set designs on very high profile films including many from the James Bond empire such as Dr. No, Goldfinger, Thunderball, and Moonraker.  His early childhood Nazi (and Bauhaus) exposure, military experience with cutting edge defense technology, and architectural education at the Bartlett probably made Ken Adam the best possible person in the world to design the sets for this film, which is why they are still so relevant and fantastic almost 50 years later.  Much more information and photos of Ken Adam and his sets from Dr. Strangelove can be found here.

This week we also read a 1992 interview by Vincent Lobrutto from his book By Design: Interviews with Film Production  Designers" with the set designer Norman Garwood who has a notable body of work including Brazil, The Princess Bride, Glory, and Hook.  The key element I pulled out of this interview was the concept of letting the style evolve, letting it undergo the actual benefits of an extended creative process.  In Brazil, Garwood started out with some sketching but let the style evolve as the set crew collected props and clothing that Garwood would either approve or disapprove and hone their sensitibilities about what he was looking for. In the end the evolution of his orignal idea was much greater than what he started out.  But this only worked becuase his internal sense about what was correct for the film made him very definitive in what he wanted.  The set designer has to be a decisive leader in knowing the look that he wants.  Garwood said "I tend not to dither around. I tend to know what I want aqnd that's not being conceited.  It's best to always be institinctive when it gets into the question time about the size, the feel, the look, and you deal with it there and then." (Lobrutto, 212)  Understanding the balance of knowing exactly what you want but still allowing a certain amount of variables to guide the direction of your vision is an important balance to strive for.

Compared to the traditional practice of Architecture, designing sets for films can be considered a lesser form of the practice, in that it is it ulitizing architectural skills to produce space that will not be inhabited in a meaningful way.  But in many ways, at least in the few examples I am aware of, it seems that set designers actually have more freedom to explore true artistic instinct. Oftentimes in Architecture, the limits of your imagination are kept in check by the whims of your client.  The impermanence of film enables creativity to dominate the process.

week 9 MONTAGE AND ARCHITECTURE

With this week's reading of Sergei Eisenstein's essay "Montage and Architecture" and Giuliana Bruno's chapter "A Geography of the Moving Image" from her book Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture and Film combined with Juhani Pallasmaa's essay on Andrei Tarkovky's film Nostalghia, I feel like we're really starting to get into the meat of where my interest in a film and architecture lies.

Eisenstein describes montage as "the path followed by the mind across a multiplicity of phenomena, far apart in time and space, gathering a certain sequence into a single meaningful concept."  The juxtaposition and combination of different shots merges together in our minds to form a singular idea.  In this clip we see an example of Eisenstein's use of intellectual montage in his film October, to alter our concept of a divine ruling class.

Why do our minds make these kinds of connections and what role does architecture play here?  Giulana Bruno examines passages in Eisenstein's essay in which he discusses the role of architectural interiors and she determines that the critical component in the montage path is that it reveals a pilgrimage of various sites that provide narrative linkage which has meaning due to to our own bodily inhabitation and connection to space, as described by Henri Lefebvre: "Space - my space - ...is first of all my body ...it is the shifting intersection between that which touches, penetrates, threatens or benefits my body on the one hand, and all the other bodies on the other."  Bruno asks the question, "Is this corporeal process, at work in the cinema, the nature of the architectural bond?"  She (and I) feel that yes, the critical component is the connection of "corpus and space" which links the narratives of life and becomes emotive - architecture in film becomes the "site of emotions."

This connection ties together a whole cast of thinkers and architects including Walter Benjamin and the concept of flaneur, Guy Debord's theory of the derive and his situationist maps and, among many others, Bernard Tschumi's use of narrative montage, or storyboarding to not only explain his projects but to design them - specifically in this case, Le Fresnoy National Studio for the Contemporary Arts.

The corporeal-space connection is where it all starts to come together for me - my interest in film and architecture as separate and combined entities can be attributed to this narrative map-making process.


This week's reading has given me an entirely new idea for making my own film which would require abandoning last week's previous writing on my film thesis which I intend to explore as a viable option.