week 6 FILM IN THE ARCHITECTURAL STUDIO

Architecture is related to film in that they are both concerned with representing imagined space - creating dimensionality, texture, and narrative.  In his essay "Cinema and Architecture" Francois Penz, calls this "the world of the illusions."  The big glaring difference between the architectural world of illusions and the cinematic world of illusions is that cinema unlike architecture, hasn't set out on this grand agenda of saving the world.  Architecture is a solution-oriented profession, our tendency is to fix things, to show you a corrected vision of the world, its optimism incarnate.  Cinema's main goal is to show you its art (maybe documentaries are the exception) and for that reason, it isn't afraid to show you a dystopian world where innovation has failed and society struggles to survive.

Michael Dear (in an article Between Architecture and Film, 1994) makes reference to Denzin's critique of the cinematic representation of Post-Modernism in film endings which are frequently ambiguous or cynical (he specifically mentions the end of Ridley Scott's Thelma and Louise which I can't deny, sits high on my list of favorites - I've been thinking about even more lately since its "ambiguous" ending occurs at the Grand Canyon, the location of my studio project this semester.)  What is the point of these endings?  They don't provide a resolution to the plot and they probably leave us feeling pessimistic about our future.  Part of it is the filmmaker's desire to provide authenticity - real life doesn't always have happy endings and we don't always know the answers.  But Dear argues more importantly that the power of these endings is to allow "the spectator to experience a film critically," to let our thinking take  place in the subconscious.  It also places the prospect of failure right in our face.

At the Bartlett School of Architecture in London, the professor's Nic Clear is teaching a class called Crash: Architecture of the Near Future and is focused on the work of J.G. Ballard, an author whose work presents a vision of a dystopian future in which society has endured the psychological effects of technological, architectural, and environmental developments that were meant to create a better world but have instead brought it down around us.  Clear's attraction to Ballard's way of thinking is that he is addressing a topic traditionally avoided within the architectural discourse which is "how people actually operate within a social context where things are either falling or have fallen apart.  Architecture always seem to present this impossibly rosy view of the future and seems unable to deal with the possibility of failure, even though all architecture in some way fails."  This is an aspect of architecture that I am interested in showing in my film.  More on Nic Clear's class can be found here:  http://www.ballardian.com/near-future-nic-clear-interview

In watching the Bartlett students' films, a big thing I noticed was that they all moved at a very slow, methodical pace - the anti-MTV.  I'm not sure if this was a directive from Nic Clear or if this was a byproduct of studying Ballard, but they were all definitely similar in that manner.  The other generalization, is that many of them didn't deal with people.  Its the classic architectural critique, but architecture only exists for and by people.  I think its important to the show this relationship, that it can enhance our perspective and acceptance of a failed future to see ourselves in it.  Its one of my goals to show this relationship in my own film that we're making this semester.

Of all the Bartlett films we watched, I found this one "London After the Rain" by Ben Olszyna-Marzys to be the most engaging:

Cinema and film have a lot of overlap in which the two borrow from one another for artistic or logistical purpose.  One area that could be exploited much further is in films that architecture firms are creating to enter competitions or to show clients.  Employing as the main strategy, the tried and true fly-by, usually created within 3D modeling software - it shows a vision of a building that is usually partly realistic looking but remains abstracted form its site and from the people who will use it.  I don't like the fly-by even though I have used it in presentations, mainly because it is so quick to produce.  The aim of these films is to show a picture of what reality will look like in the future with these buildings but maybe in order to achieve some innovation, we could borrow a few lessons from Post-Modernist cinema and dare to perceive a future that is not necessarily as optimistically realistic as we'd like it to be.