week 8 FILM THESIS

“TO BUILD A HOME”

The film I am proposing is an allegory that is meant to illuminate our relationship with the natural environment, specifically water, and even more specifically, water in the west.  By using the built environment to represent both the notion of Progress in our culture as well as a natural, indigenous approach to living, I am showing how we as a society affect the land we live on and the natural resources we consume.

The central concept I am trying to underline is the idea of abandoning an old system once it can no longer be saved –sometimes it’s better to wipe the slate clean and start over.  In architecture school, we’re encouraged to keep drafting, keep making iterations, to do something than throw it away and start over – every new iteration can be an improvement from the last.  In the built environment our approach is the opposite – once a system is in place, we go to the greatest limit in order to keep that system in place, by fixing it, repairing it.  It is a system perpetually in motion, linear instead of in circular.  I am proposing to break the machine – the current system, and that the only way to feasibly do it, is violently through force.

The storyline occurs as such (without any dialogue): A man, who represents the individual man, small settlements or indigenous cultures (and our best intentions as part of mankind), is seen trekking across an uninhabited, de-saturated (possibly snowy) western American landscape. Establishing shots of this landscape will convey the complexity of systems within it.  He comes to a river which represents all water as well as the female counterpoint to The Man, nurturing his existence.  The Man looks at The River and falls in love with her.  He drinks from her, washes his hair and lies down beside her to sleep.  The Man is happy and The River still rushes on.  The River sends floating white rectangles down the water as a present to the man.  The Man pulls the rectangles out of the water and stacks them up.  Then he builds a box with the white rectangles.  This is his house, The Home.  The Home represents the comfort and desire to settle that is genetically intrinsic within all of us.  He looks at it and he is happy.  It is white because it is a pure gift from The River to be utilized only for the humblest of purposes, a simple shelter.  He sleeps between The Home and The River – his two loves.  A day passes signifying the passage of time.

In the morning The Man, drinking water between The Home and The River, hears a sound and stands up to get a better understanding.  There he sees two men on the western side of the River, whacking at the river bank, digging ditches perpendicular to the flow of the water.  The Men represent the whole of society, specifically Western Culture and the notion of Progress.   The Men don’t notice the Man as he watches quietly from the eastern side of The River.  Almost instantly we see two red boxes appear, The Houses.  We now see all the elements in spatial relation to one other from West to East, we see The Men, The House, The River, the Man, and The Home.  The River is the great separation between the two ways of living.  The Man on the east exists between The River and his house.  The Men place The Houses between them and The River.  The Men walk into (behind) The Houses and stay there, where we don’t see them again for quite a while.  The Man stares at the red boxes, not quite knowing what to make of them.  Another day passes, again signifying the passage of time.

The next morning The Man gets up to take a drink of water from The River like he does every morning.  As he bends down to The River he notices something strange across from him.  A few red balloons are bobbing in the water next to one of the red boxes – a little cluster of them.  They are a curiosity to him and he can’t stop staring.  After a while, more balloons start to appear in the River.  Most of them don’t move, they just sit there bobbing and sort of attaching to each other in clusters.   The clusters start to get bigger.  The Man is kind of delighted at the novelty of their beauty.  The balloons are representative of the changing effect that the Men (Society, Progress) have on the built environment.  It is a very visible difference but they really aren’t a nuisance and are actually kind of beautiful and interesting, much like the Hoover or Glen Canyon Dams which are also beautiful in their simplicity and their defiance of the force of gravity.  Another day has passed.

The following morning, The Man wakes up to see that there are so many red balloons in The River that they almost completely obscure the water.  He bends down to take a drink of water but his hands cannot touch the water any longer due to the balloon.  The Man is befuddled; he looks again at The River filled with red balloons.  He remembers it like it was and is suddenly filled with grief over his loss.  His grief turns to anger at The Houses.  He takes one of the shovels that was used to dig a ditch for The Houses and he raises it high over his head, bringing it smashing down on top of The House.  He smashes it again and again, building materials and snow flying, until it lies in a heap of rubble.  Dead.  He is symbolically killing the system of destruction which he started.  As he stands over his rubble pile, The Men appear once again, standing by their houses and finally noticing The Man.  For the first time, we see a close up of one of The Men.  He looks unnervingly familiar to The Man.  He has a moment of anagnorisis, realizing the impact he’s had on something else.

The Man walks away from The House, the same way he originally came from.  We don’t know where he’s going but we infer that he is either going back or starting over somewhere else.

The beginning half of the film will utilize static camera shots in which movement only occurs within the frame or coming into and out of the frame.  Once The Men are introduced, the camera will begin to utilize tilting and panning techniques to convey the idea that Men are concerned with progress.  But the panning and tilting will be very slow, emulating Andrei Tarkovsky’s slow pans and trying to create a sense of nostalgia.  I will also utilize split framing, or tri-framing techniques to show the process of something building quickly (since is only occurring over the course of a day in this film).  This would include the relationship between The Man and The River and the building of The House and The Houses.  I will probably use a little bit of animation, possibly to represent the red houses and the majority of red balloons when they fill up The River.  High angle shots will be used when the primary subject is The Man or The Home, especially when River is also in the frame, showing that they are a part of and dependent on their surroundings.  Low angle shots will be used when showing The Men and the Houses to show less of the land within the frame enforcing their lack of consideration and general ambivalence for the land.  Jump cuts and choppy editing along with slow motion and fast motion will be used in the scene when The Man destroys The Home to help convey the how emotional The Man is as he commits this act.  An example of the style I am trying to achieve in this scene is the opening Battle scene from Gladiator (2000).  As the battle wears on, it starts to snow, the color becomes less saturated and the movement becomes more frenzied.

I hope to be able to do the majority of my filming in the snow which will help to create a stark world of high contrast in which the effect of The Men is obvious and dramatic.  Most of the film will be partially de-saturated keeping the color scheme fairly monochromatic besides the red elements.  During the scene in which The Man destroys The Home, the film will become less de-saturated to show his participation in the world of The Men and the affect they’ve had on him.  The following clip from Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) is an example of a highly contrasted, de-saturated world in which the characters are shown in stark relation to their environment.

Besides portraying my thesis in the truest possible way, the goal of this film is to create a true world of cineplastics “in which film would transcend plot, and architecture would be more than static object,” as described by Mitchell Schwarzer in “Zoomscape: Archicture in Motion and Media.”  The role of the built environment in this film is to be both representative of ideas and also to create sensual connections to our psyches, to engender emotional reactions based on the places that architectural elements play in our everyday lives such as our homes, our places of work, our schools, our neighborhood grocery store, etc.  Juhani Pallasmaa describes Tarkovsky’s work as “evok[ing] an experience of pure existence, the metaphysical poetry of being” through imagery, light and time.  This is one of the reasons I decided to include actual actors within the film, to highlight the reciprocal relationship between humans and their built environment.