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.