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.
