There are two items in Juhani Pallasmaa's essay on the film The Architecture of Image: Existential Space in Cinema regarding the film Nostalghia (Tarkovsky 1983) which I am drawn to and am inspired to incorporate into my own film this semester and that is his discussion of the "memory of matter" (specifically in reference to the notion of home) and "water and time". These are both elements that when expressed poetically in film, can have a strong impact on the viewer.
I strongly agree with Pallasmaa when he says that "it is clear that architecture and cities provide the most important state of collective memory" (82) and quotes Gaston Bachelard that "the house is one of the greatest powers of integration for the thoughts, memories and dreams of mankind." Humanity happens and unfolds within shelter and communities - the image of the architecture of these places become incredibly powerful to us, especially as time passes and our memories enhance that image. Likewise, water holds for us great nostalgic power of a more sensory nature. Our bodies, made mostly of water and developing into humans within the water of the womb, are forever psychologically affected by its image and its touch. Water is where we build our houses and our cities. Being raised in a very arid, lake environment but now living out west, I have become acutely aware of the lack of water in my mew home based on my nostalgic recollection of home.
The following clip of Nostaghia shows a great combination of the two items I discussed above. A river of water is literally flowing through this building, eroding the already ancient building, as if it were eroding canyon walls. The protagonist feels the presence of both the architecture and the running water in combination.
Gone With the Wind is another movie for me which expresses the notion that land and home can instill in us an overwhelming sense of nostalgia; it has a certain terroir with which we identify and are forever affected by. In the final scene of the movie, Scarlett O'Hara finally realizes she loves Rhett Butler and runs home to him. Its early early morning - the sun has not yet come up - and the world is covered in mist, recreating the ambiguous dreams that have plagued her her whole adult life. When she gets "home" to her extremely fancy, expensive mansion, Rhett has decided to leave her and she realizes that this really isn't home anyways. Rhett walks off into the mist, out of her dreams and she realizes the what was behind the mist of her dreams the whole time - Tara, the plantation she was raised on and from which her entire identity is based.
Down By Law (1986) directed by Jim Jarmusch - also know for films such as Coffee & Cigarettes and Broken Flowers - is a combo escape-from-prison/buddy movie filmed in 1986 on location in New Orleans. It stars two musicians, Tom Waits and John Lurie who play sleazy, small-time criminals who are set up and go to jail where they meet as cell mates.
This film is more of a character sketch then a typical plot-driven narrative. Jarmusch said he chose to shoot New Orleans neighborhoods showing shotgun houses, porch life, and poverty as opposed to the iconic images of New Orleans, because he was trying to portray a specific landscape that is only apparent in the details – this helps to put the focus on the characters and how they interact with their environment. The use of black & white places the environment and the characters in high contrast and makes the characters a part of the environment. Also reinforcing this idea is how the camera never focuses specifically on a character or on the environment – both character and architecture are equally represented. This whole world is integrated, one thing is not different from the another.
Throughout the film, there is no fast editing - it has a really slow pace and yet our attention is held by our curiosity of the characters and the quality of the photography. There is time in each shot to really investigate the entire composition. And what we notice in these opening neighborhood shots is that despite our knowledge that New Orleans is an older culture represented by its aging architecture, these images still don’t really represent any specific era, it’s neutral. The characters in this film exist only in the present. When I first watched this film, I didn’t know it was made in 1986 and I couldn't decide if it was from the 70s, 80s, 90s or now.
In order to further discuss the relationship of the film to the built environment, I'm going to discuss a few key scenes, the first one being the scene where Zach (played by Tom Waits) is thrown out by his girlfriend (played by Ellen Barkin). And in it we see the first example of a spatial typology that will be consistently replicated throughout the rest of the film consisting of: bare white walls with writing on them, very high ceilings (so high in fact that you don’t see them in most of the shots), and the foreground frequently established by windows, doors, or bars (and even the lites in these French doors recalls the imagery of prison bars). The purpose of using this same spatial typology throughout the film is to show these characters moving through the events of their life without any relative change. Their station in life remains unaffected. They've always been in prison and they'll never leave it.
The two men meet in prison and it's through the set design that we are given clues about the status of their relationship. When we first see these two men in the same shot, they have not yet begun to talk to each other and are suspicious of one another. They are filmed from outside the prison cell with the bars in the foreground, dominating our attention. Once they begin talking with one another, albeit disrespectfully, they are filmed from inside the prison cell but the bars are still in the background. When they finally begin to reveal information about themselves to each other establishing a friendship, they are filmed next to each other without the bars in the frame. Later on they fight and as they start to get physically aggressive the camera again shows the bars in the frame. The built environment throughout this whole film is used to tell the story of the characters
Also in this scene Zach says “The walls don’t exist, the floor doesn’t exist, this prison’s not here, these bunks aren’t here, the bars aren’t here, none of this is really here…none of this is really here at all.” Zach exists in the present irregardless of his current environment.
The repetition of the same spatial typology continues when, after escaping from jail, they find a shack that looks identical to their prison cell. Jarmusch also exploits a lot of prison bar imagery as they run through the swamps and are surrounded by tall trees highly contrasted in black & white. Eventually they find their way out of the swamp to a restaurant which become the final iteration of the same prison cell typology. This restaurant is their salvation from the swamp yet it still looks like a prison cell and this is because, regardless of their "being free," nothing has really changed in their life. They are still the same small-time criminals they were at the beginning of the movie. This movie is an example of how to film architecture in a way that sets up and defines the characters or culture of the narrative.
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.
Donald Albrecht's Designing Dreams: Modern Architecture in the Movies discusses the evolution of cinema as the seventh art. At first merely a Parisian experiment considered not much more than an interesting spectacle, film eventually allied itself with the other "high arts" namely the architectural component of modernism, and became an accepted art form. What is most fascinating about this alliance is its mutal dependency. It was a complete coincidence that the science of cinema was born on the eve of modernism's debut but it was not an accident that their rise in public artistic prominence occurred simultaneously.
The art direction of L'Inhumaine (1924, Director: Marcel L'Herbier), the first film to use modern architecture, was tackled by a team of set directors and the combination of their input produced an overt, almost "pretentious attempt at promoting modern architecture." (Albrecht 45) However, it was received by critics as "a striking example of what a synthesis of the arts can accomplish when enlisted in the service of the modern cinema." (Albrecht 50) This early, avant-garde portrayal of modernism became propaganda in the name of art. Although it did not do well with the pubic, the critical success of the film encouraged the production of more, similarly styled films and eventually the glamor of modern architecture became accepted by the public. It was at this point that film was able to abandon the use of propaganda and modernism as a true and pure art form could exist in film.
À Nous la Liberté (1931, René Clair) was designed by Lazare Meerson and is considered one of the best examples of the use of modernism within a film that is "neither partisan or propagandist for the modern movement" fulfilling the essential tenant of Le Corbusier's aesthetic ideal by presenting a world of "plastic facts, clear and limpid, giving rest to our eyes and to the mind the pleasure of geometric forms."(Albrecht 60) In this film we see modernism presented as the environment in which the plots unfolds - it is where regular life can now take place.
Propaganda in film today is almost exclusively associated with the documentary format, specifically for political gain via the salacious presentation of information or power. The most obvious example being Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will (1934).
In this format, a specific style is used to promote a new political agenda by reinforcing specific sentiments such as strength, solidity and mass-appeal. It is fascinating to think that before this, film propaganda was used merely to encourage the acceptance of an aesthetic ideal. Architectural history does not often identify film as an influence on the emergence of modernism as prominent architectural style of the last century when in fact film was one of the critical components of the movement.
Karl Swingle (MFA Film @ Columbia University, directer, screenwriter) stopped by our class today to help us get a handle on a few basic shooting and editing techniques. He showed us some clips from a few films including Nobody's Fool, Sling Blade, and The Shining which highlighted the importance of distance, height, level, and angle of the camera when setting up and framing a shot. We also discussed the 180 Degree rule, Point of View shots, and the difference between subjective and objective shots. I was especially interested in how he showed us that sometimes its better to crop a portion of your subject instead of trying to get the whole thing in the shot, that widening the lens or moving back to capture more sometimes distorts the composition.
The following is the opening credit sequence from the movie Hud (1963) by Martin Ritt. Almost every single establishing shot is filmed straight-on at eye level with the horizon in the center creating a very dead, flat impression of the town. This was most likely Ritt's intention as the plot of the film focuses on the disintegration of a pre-pretroleum era. Karl taught us that in trying to create a more favorable impression of a place we should shoot subjects at an angle and either above or below eye level...basically the opposite of what is shown here.
In this clip we can see how Hud's car is the subject of the shot but Ritt has chosen not include the entire car in the frame and yet the composition of the shot is uncompromised. This is also the first shot of the movie that is filmed at an angle so we are finally starting to see some depth to the town, creating interest in the people that are inside the house beyond the car.
I just recently re-watched this film and I was surprised at how the majority of the film is shot at eye level or perpendicular to the subject, giving the overall style of the film a very flat look. It is only during key moments that Ritt changes the angle of the shot, making that particular scene much more dramatic as a contrast to the rest of the film.
Overall, I think the most valuable contribution of Karl's lecture was how important it is to choose the shot you want, not just shoot randomly and hope you can edit your pile of footage down into something usable...make artistic choices.
This past week my studio traveled to Grand Canyon National Park in Arizona to investigation our site for this semester's project - an historical boat museum celebrating the rich history of boating technology on the Colorado River over the last 150 years. We had quite an adventurous time including a couple of plane rides, a helicopter ride into the canyon and a couple of days boating down the Colorado followed by three nights of camping along the South Rim to finalize our site analysis. I had been devouring information on the art of river running in the weeks previous to our trip so it was a great moment to finally confront the subject of my absorption.
During my research, I encountered the story of Ellsworth and Emery Kolb, enterprising young brothers who traveled to the the South Rim of the Grand Canyon to establish a photography business in 1903. They made their money taking pictures of tourists as they traveled on the Bright Angel Trail by mule. They also enjoyed a certain amount of canyon dare-devilry.
The Kolb Brothers taking it to the extreme to get the ultimate shot.
In 1911 they rowed the Colorado River from Wyoming to Mexico with their film cameras in tow, pioneering the documentary film genre with moving pictures that astounded the nation. The following consists of clips from the film Emery Kolb showed to tourists at Grand Canyon National Park for over 50 years. The video is courtesy of Cline Library at Northern Arizona University.
The brothers built a studio perched on the edge of the Grand Canyon which Emery Kolb used to show his classic 1911 film until his death in 1976. The studio is still there today and is used to commemorate the contribution of the Kolb brothers' photography (and, of course, as a souvenir shop/bookstore).
Original Kolb Studo at the South Rim
View of the Grand Canyon form the front porch of the Kolb Studio
One of Emery Kolb's film cameras from the early Twentieth Century.
In reading Mitchell Schwarzer's Zoomscape, I became interested in his discussion on the film Last Year at Marienbad (1961) and how the film was able to heighten the architectural mise en scene, thereby presenting "filmgoers with an engrossing view of architecture and landscape." This got me thinking about another film in which the architecture itself was a dominating, dramatic presence. The Court Martial Scene of Paths of Glory (1957) by Stanley Kubrick was filmed in the Great Hall of Schleissheim Palace in Munich. Kubrick chose to shoot this scene here because the ornate, baroque styling of the hall was at one time, thought to be the height of civilization. He uses this to contrast the incivility of what is occurring to the men being court martialed - the building itself poses the irony of the situation. Kubrick stages the actors as if they are pawns on a chessboard in the Great Hall.
Schwarzer is so correct in his statement that in "film, the camera does the moving for us; architecture moves while we remain stationary." In Paths of Glory, we must make the physical effort to notice the architecture in the scene and what it's implied references are, giving deeper meaning to its use.
