2021 Architecture & Films Symposium | Proceedings

A+FS

2021 Architecture & Film Symposium

BALL STATE UNIVERSITY PROCEEDINGS

EDITORS James F. Kerestes Vahid Vahdat

Editors James F. Kerestes Vahid Vahdat

Graphic Design Jesse Lindenfeld Samantha Stapleton

Supported by:

©2021 ARCHITECTURE & FILM SYMPOSIUM

Responsibility for the accuracy of all statements in each paper rests entirely with the author(s). Statements are not necessarily representative of nor endorsed by the 2021 Architecture & Film Symposium. Permission is granted to photocopy portions of this publication for personal use and for the use of students, provided credit is given to the Symposium and publication. Permission does not extend to other types of reproduction nor to copying for incorporation into commercial advertising nor for any profit-making purpose.

www.architectureandfilm.org

Editorial Board Submissions to the 2021 Architecture & Film symposium underwent a rigorous peer review process. Paper submissions were blind peer reviewed by a minimum of three scholars. The editorial board is comprised of an interdisciplinary group of scholars from around the world.

Paramita Atmodiwirjo Universitas Indonesia

Maki Iisaka Texas A&M University

Gemma Barton University of Brighton

Jacopo Leveratto Politecnico di Milano

Shannon Bassett Laurentian University

Marian Macken The University of Auckland

Laura Bilek University of California, Berkeley

Michael A. McClure University of Louisiana at Lafayette

Graeme Brooker Royal College of Art

Pablo Meninato Temple University

Stanley Corkin University of Cincinnati

Kevin Moore Auburn University

Lorella DiCintio Ryerson University

Alison Snyder Pratt Institute

Chris Madrid French MILA Entertainment

Olivier Vallerand Arizona State University

Harriet Harriss Pratt Institute

Kevin Walker Coventry University

Susan Hedges Auckland University of Technology

Yandi Andri Yatmo Universitas Indonesia

Acknowledgements The 2021 Architecture & Film Symposium co-chairs acknowledge the notable efforts of several collaborators including Dean David Ferguson, Melissa Wormer, Melanie Smith, and Valerie Morris of the Ball State University R. Wayne Estopinal College of Architecture and Planning. The co-chairs thank session topic moderators Zachary Tate Porter, Maryam Mansoori, Jimenez Lai, Martin Summers, and Janice Shimizu for their service to the symposium. The symposium has been supported financially by a number of institutions; publications have been sponsored by BSU CAP, the screening of Uppland is funded by WSU ADVANCE, and WSU Interior Design program sponsored student registration, for which we are deeply grateful.

Additionally, the co-chairs thank Samantha Stapleton and Jesse Lindenfeld for their generous assistance with the graphic design and production of event materials. Finally, a very special thank you to Graham Harman for providing the Keynote to the symposium and to Edward Lawrenson and Killian Doherty for screening their short film, Uppland.

CONTENTS

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PREFACE 9 of Movement James F. Kerestes Vahid Vahdat

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PAPERS 11 Strategy, Tactics, and, Victories of the Everyday in My Architect, Exhibition and Koolhaas HouseLife Marianna Janowicz 18 Embodied At-homeness Reflections on Dwelling Experiences Framed in Yasujiro Ozu’s Tokyo Story Roohid Novinrooz 31 Suburban Horror Story Occupying the Interstitial Spaces of a Home James F. Kerestes 38 The Cultural Impasse of Past Futures and Future Pasts in Brazil and Westworld Will Fu 45 Fleeting Structures, Vanishing Trajectories Marina Montresor 52 Get Pissed, Destroy Landmarks, City-Spaces, and ‘Punkspectations’ in Alex Cox’s Repo Man and Sid and Nancy Marko Djurdjic 59 Mirrors of Mirror Architecture as the Expanded Picture Elena Rocchi 64 Memoirs of Spaces Cinematic Disposition of Space-Induced Retrospections into Cultural and Spatial Hegemony of Experiences C. Aparnaa and Sparsh Patlan 71 Infrastitial Scenes Doreen Bernath and Sarah Mills 78 Bebop in the Underbelly Race, Space, and Embodiment in Paris Blues (1961) J. English Cook

85 The Crisis of Authenticity Vertigo and the Seagram Building Andrew Gleeson 92 Pedagogical and Epistemological Dialogues in Teaching Architecture as a Means Towards Cinematic Design Katarina Andjelkovic 99 The Eye of the Camera Patrick Till 106 Permanent Sets Harry Oliver and the Introduction of Filmic Grammar to the Built Environment Dave Gottwald

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MOVING IMAGES 115 Posthuman Cartographies Farzam Yazdanseta and Eva Perez de Vega 116 On Reading Wet Dreams Karen Lange, Nathanael Ramos, Renata Galan Hoffman, Fernando Astiazaran, Michael Jablonski, James Nguyen, Serena Guo, Ames Han, Elizabeth Evangelista, Ishita Gupta, Monica Mendoza, Gabriela Molina, Logan Gillis, Vivian Pham, Lucy Zhu, Mackenzie Bailey, Brian Chan, Ariq Chowdhury, Barnabas Luke, Jerrod Dockan 118 Pedagogy of the Fourth Wall Kevin Marblestone and Emily Whitbeck 119 Foundation Design Video Thomas Forget and William Philemon, Noushin Radnia, Arturo Lujan 121 This is a Sick City JP Maruszczak and Roger Connah 122 Intricate Irritations Gonzalo Vaillo and Gabriel Esquivel, Finn Rattana, Manuel Alvarado, Joey Reik 124 Mech[Animal]Sitelessness Beta Branden Hudak and Ebrahim Poustinchi

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PECHA KUCHA 127 Tenebrous Poetics of Cityscapes C. Aparnaa and Sparsh Patlan 128 The Gravity of Perception Unearthing the Subterranean Films of Gordon Matta-Clark Alan Webb 129 Cultural Narratives Unfolded Sarah Ra 131 A lot more than just Picturesque Exploring Functions of Landscapes in Films Prachi Nadkarni 132 Representation, Symbols, and Dreams From Modern Architecture to the Modern City Isabella Leite Trindade 133 From Object to Building Space, Form, and Movement Jason Scroggin 134 Shelter Shift Jessica Colangelo and Charles Sharpless 136 Kinetoscopic Vision George Themistokleous

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AUTHORS

PREFACE

Of Movement Film is a dynamic representational medium offering the ability to collapse time and compose visual narratives frame-by-frame. Like cinematography, architecture and film maintain a symbiotic relationship that requires a constant state of adaptation. These two mediums reveal, reflect, critique, and re-present critical issues of our time through the production of visual and spatial performances. The symposium’s theme, Of Movement, reflected the changing paradigms of these disciplines as they move, transition, and respond to dynamic issues of social and environmental justice, the advent of emerging technologies, and the oversaturation of media in contemporary society.

For the 2019 symposium, Of Performance, explored ideas that intersect at the development of concept, context, and making in the overlapping domains of film and architecture. This year’s theme, Of Movement, continues this conversation by exploring how the performative aspects of architecture and film transition between each other at various scales and intervals.

The symposium initiates inquiry into how cinematic representations bring forth theoretical positions about the built environment and how architecture challenges the cinematic narrative. Of Movement focuses on the parallel and complimentary relationships between architecture and film to generate the visualization of images and space. It offers a critical forum for presenting creative practices and scholarship of historical, theoretical, realized, and speculative work involving film, architecture, and design. More specifically, it endeavors to promote innovation in design theory, pedagogy, and practice.

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PAPERS

Strategy, Tactics, and Victories of the Everyday in My Architect , Exhibition, and Koolhaas HouseLife MARIANNA JANOWICZ University College London

"To the ordinary man. To a common hero, an ubiquitous character, walking in countless thousands on the streets." de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life.

This paper explores moving image representations of the built environment through the lens of Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life in order to interrogate ways in which architecture has the capacity to carry meanings as written by bodies or physical acts. User’s relationships with spaces are portrayed in the following examples: childish, subversive reappropriation in My Architect; an intimate and intense relationship with domestic spaces in Exhibition; and a housekeeper’s unusual and resourceful approach to an architectural icon in Koolhaas HouseLife. Michel de Certeau’s theory of strategy and tactics is used as a way to open up the interpretation of the aforementioned practices. In Nathaniel Kahn’s film My Architect, the son writes his own memories of his father by following in his footsteps and visiting buildings designed by him.

Exhibition amplifies the everyday life by portraying a couple of artists, their processes, and the power dynamics between them. In Koolhaas HouseLife, the use of tactics offers an alternative way of viewing high architecture, from the position of the "weak" against the "proper". The selected films share the portrayal of idiosyncratic practices inside spaces that belong to the imposed order of the architectural canon. Architecture, as seen through these movies and via a corporeal experience, is something Marianna Janowicz

temporal, dynamic, and subject to transitions. De Certeau’s "practices that invent spaces" help shift the focus from who makes architecture to who uses it, providing an outlook that disrupts the status quo.

The on-screen dissonance between the mundanity of everyday life and what is considered "high architecture" is not only curious, delightful, and sometimes humorous, but also a powerful tool to reveal and construct new narratives on buildings and spaces. In this study, I attempt to connect Michel de Certeau’s work in The Practice of Everyday Life with three separate cinematic works in order to investigate the interpretative capacity of everyday practices to construct new meanings. In Nathaniel Kahn’s My Architect, I will look at purposeless, childish, subversive practices; Joanna Hogg’s Exhibition will provide an example of everyday life amplified through art. In the last section, looking at Koolhaas HouseLife, the focus will be on overlooked, hidden activities of care and maintenance. These practices will be examined against de Certeau’s theories of "place" versus "space" as well as "strategy" and "tactics," to demonstrate how the practice of everyday life can alter the meaning and perception of iconic architecture, playing on the theme of the improvised versus the institutional.

Whilst de Certeau describes "place" as "an instantaneous configuration of positions"1 and something that "implies indication of stability,"2 "space," on the other hand is seen as something much more dynamic, something "actuated by the ensemble of movements deployed within it." "Space occurs as the effect produced by the operations that orient it, situate it, temporalize it and make it function in a polyvalent unity of conflictual programs or contractual proximities."3 Space is practiced, dependent on time and context, and caught in the ambiguity of transformations.

De Certeau’s "strategy" represents the institutions of power, the established order, and the producers. It is "the calculus of force-relationships which becomes possible when a subject of will and power […] can be isolated from an 'environment.'"4 2021 ARCHITECTURE & FILM SYMPOSIUM

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Tactics on the other hand are used by consumers and "poachers", they are opportunistic ways of momentarily adapting and transforming spaces by the practice of everyday life. De Certeau defines tactic as "a calculus which cannot count on a "proper", it is something that "depends on time - it is always on the watch for opportunities that must be seized <on the wing>. Whatever it wins, it doesn’t keep."5 De Certeau sees consumers and their tactics as a productive force and their practices are interpretative.

Gaston Bachelard conveys similar sentiments in "The Poetics of Space" where he writes that we can "write a room, read a room or read a house."6 He describes the memories of a childhood house, draws comparisons between the act of reading and experiencing space, classifying both as interpretative practices. Professor of Architecture and the Moving Image at Cambridge University, Francois Penz, is also interested in the potentials of cinema to depict "lived and practised spaces."7 In Cinematic Aided Design, An Everyday Life Approach to Architecture, Penz poses a theory that cinema provides architects with an unparalleled wealth of post-occupancy studies.8 In chapter one, titled "The Case for Everydayness" the author sets out the academic background of everyday life studies, mentioning key authors such as Lefebvre, Barthes, Perec, Certeau. De Certeau’s literary angle and his particular interest in consumption studies and everyday people as "producers" of spaces makes him particularly relevant to this study. The movie examples discussed here also revolve around the "everyday hero" figures, the underdog "producers" set against the background of high architecture, connecting to de Certeau’s theory of strategy and tactics. Anthropologist Shannon Mattern in her article titled Maintenance and Care touches on the power relations between innovation and maintenance, advocating that the latter is especially needed in our breaking-down world.9 Her emphasis on the often overlooked and subversive nature of this necessary work echoes de Certeau’s ideas about tactics. Particularly useful for this study are Mattern’s insights into Koolhaas HouseLife where she highlights the juxtaposition between the architect’s vision and the practice of daily maintenance.

With these references, spaces can be seen as something which only comes to life through practices, architecture as something dynamic and potent, capable of taking on meanings which can be altered, destroyed, or written upon.

The physical act, the presence of body in a place and the memory of motion constitutes our memories of a space.

MY ARCHITECT AND THE JOURNEY OF FILIAL DISCOVER In Nathaniel Kahn’s movie My Architect, the director writes a story by travelling to buildings designed by his father. It is crucial that he places himself inside those spaces and talks to their users and inhabitants rather than studying 12

them from a distance. As De Certeau put it, travel produces "an exploration of the deserted places of my memory."10 According to De Certeau, it is the activity of walking that is capable of producing "the body of legends that is currently lacking in one’s own vicinity."11 There are two sequences which are particularly helpful in explaining the body’s writing of meaning. Firstly, the moment when the author "goes roller-blading in languid, effortless loops across the sublime courtyard of the Salk Institute, hanging over the lip of the Pacific, water trickling across, like a small boy showing off a new skill to his father."12 The image (or rather, a sequence of images) is striking in its playfulness and sense of juxtaposition.

A child’s activity is located in a place known from stern and curated architectural photographs. By performing this action, the narrator reappropriates the place and makes new memories of it. Perhaps he seeks to understand it by experiencing it. Most importantly though, he writes his own story directly onto the palimpsest of his father’s story, trying to become closer to him. This is further exemplified in the last part of the movie, when he visits Dhaka, Bangladesh and looks up towards the masterfully lit ceiling of the capitol building.

"He never saw it finished", he says, and carries on looking up.

The eyes of the son want to make up for it. It is difficult not to sense a strange feeling of spirituality and transcendence.

The son and the father become very close in that moment, by spatial experience. The effect is amplified by a previous scene, in which Nathaniel Kahn is in the square in front of the capitol building and talks to a group of elderly men who praise the place created by his father. Having found out their interlocutor is the son of the architect, they exclaim in joy: "Very pleased to welcome you back!". The director is a continuation of his father’s story and their closeness becomes tangible.

In Nathaniel Kahn’s movie, making memories or regaining memories of his father requires following the journey of his life’s work.

The rollerblading sequence strikes with a sense of purposelessness. The action performed by Nathaniel Kahn is not an adult, rational movement, he is not getting from A to B, instead he is exploring the place in a carefree, childish way, which brings to mind what de Certeau wrote about spatial practice: "To practice space is thus to repeat the joyful and silent experience of childhood; it is, in a place, to be other and to move towards the other."13 The director throws himself into testing "the other" by immersing himself in the spatial experience. For him, experiencing spaces created by his father is the closest to getting a first-hand experience of him. He does as well talk to various people who knew Louis Kahn in the movie but it is only through physical experience of his father’s work that he can write his own memories of him, not relying entirely on the accounts of others.

In fact, the whole journey is a way of building a relationship through movement and presence. Nathaniel Kahn has to

Strategy, tactics and victories of the everyday in My Architect, Exhibition and Koolhaas HouseLife

Figure 1: Nathaniel Kahn rollerblading in Salk Institute. Image credit: My Architect (dir. Nathaniel Kahn) - film still collage by the author.

place himself against particular places which bear his father’s presence and move towards the other. It is a child-like experience in the same way as children phenomenologically explore the world around them, touch, see, smell things for the first time, testing them. A space becomes a palimpsest saturated with meaning (only triggered by the presence of a body).

AMPLIFIED DOMESTICITY IN JOANNA HOGG’S EXHIBITION Joanna Hogg’s Exhibition’s main characters, D and H, are a middle-aged couple, both artists, living in a spectacular modernist villa in what looks like a well-off West London neighborhood. The vast majority of the movie is shot inside the house or in its perimeter and it is evident that the building plays a very important part and that D’s relationship with it is intense and intimate. The director explores the house as a performance stage and canvas for the couple’s conflict. Bar one shot at the kitchen sink, the scenes we observe are not of care, maintenance, or mundane activities that tend to take place inside people’s homes. Instead, the director offers a glimpse of an amplified everyday through observing a couple of artists, their power dynamics and creative processes.

D uses the house not only as a stage for her performance art but also as a respite, although the boundary between life and art is very blurred in Exhibition. In scenes with a characteristic, static camera, the viewer witnesses D taking a nap on a window sill, perching in nooks and crannies, and embracing architectural elements. These gestures are unusual and one movie review likens D’s behavior to that of a cat,14 suggesting a heightened intuitiveness and sensuality of those interactions.

On the other hand, scenes that describe D & H’s relationship Marianna Janowicz

are characterized by physical separation. Each artist is working in their own studio; they communicate via an intercom system and are on separate levels. H’s office is above D’s and the loud sound of his desk chair rolling on the floor testifies to his presence and adds to the strange tension of the scenes.

In a video conversation with a friend, D talks about the architect who designed the house and the fact that he lived in it for many years with his wife, in what was a "very happy marriage". She says "it’s all in the walls, you know?" and that statement explains her actions: she believes the walls can carry energy or memory and so in her intimate encounters with the house she seeks to either unearth the previous happy memories or create her own, by imbuing the walls with her bodily presence.

Similarly to "My Architect", in "Exhibition" the protagonist’s actions are deliberate and subversive, she spends time lingering in spaces. The camera centers on the heroine’s body wrapped around a corner of the house. Stripped of movement (of the actor or the camera), these scenes rely on duration to build the meaning and the drama. Sound is used to unfold these shots in time, as well as micro movements of the background - the only two parameters differentiating these scenes from stills. In that sense, D’s actions tread on the territory of tactics because of their unrecognized character: "[…] unrecognized producers, poets of their own acts, silent discoverers of their own paths in the jungle of functionalist rationality, […] consumers produce through their signifying practices […] “indirect” or “errant” trajectories obeying their own logic. […] the trajectories trace out ruses of other interests and desires that are neither determined nor captured by the systems in which they develop."15 D’s practices are particularly striking against the rational background of modern architecture. Modernism, a movement driven by rationality, light, space, and hygiene was meant to produce functional spaces but no architect could predict that the owner of the house would nap on the window sill - and 2021 ARCHITECTURE & FILM SYMPOSIUM

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Figure 2: D and the spiral staircase. Image credit: Exhibition (dir. Joanna Hogg) - film still collage by the author.

yet it happened. In that sense, these scenes bring to mind de Certeau’s tactics (which rely on time) as opposed to strategies (which rely on proprietorship of a place) D engages in reading and writing of spaces. She receives and gives, immersing herself in the two-way process. Reaching, once again to De Certeau who draws parallels between texts and spaces and explains how the reader writes: "Renters make comparable changes in an apartment they furnish with their acts and memories; as do speakers, in the language into which they insert both the messages of their native tongue and, through their accent, through their own “turns of phrase,” etc., their own history; as do pedestrians, in the streets they fill with the forests of their desires and goals."16 D’s understanding of spaces is in stark contrast with that of her friend’s. "It’s not really a family home, it’s an artists home, isn’t it." - confers a friend at a dinner when discussing the imminent sale of the property. The reasons for that opinion can be manifold: the associations around modernist architecture, the unforgiving steel spiral staircase or simply the fact that D and H live in it and built a story around it with their childless lifestyle. As a counterpoint to that on-screen conversation, the last scene shows the new owners, a family with small children, playing with a ball in the living room. The 14

view is detached, from street level, looking in through the property’s large windows and it is evident the space has been completely transformed again.

KOOLHAAS HOUSELIFE: PRACTICES OF MAINTENANCE AND CARE In Koolhaas HouseLife, the emphasis is also on the instinctive discovering of space, the improvisation, and "making-do".

The movie follows the housekeeper Guadalupe Acedo and it is through the relationship of her body and the house that we learn about the architecture of it. Even though visually we might not be getting the best view of the interior (it is not shot with a wide angle lens to expose the spatial configuration of the building), by following the housekeeper's footprints, we might get a glimpse of what it is like to get under the skin of the building. The camera is right behind her back (similarly as in My Architect), while she opens up the curtains, squeezing in between two facade layers. The viewer can understand the width of the space, hear the footsteps and possibly understand better what it is like to be in that space.

With a child-like honesty and uninhibited forwardness, Guadalupe reveals the different particularities of the house, and its many faults too. The iconic house by Rem Koolhaas is juxtaposed with the clumsiness of everyday maintenance, resulting in a grotesque, comedic effect. Guadalupe is captured dragging a vacuum cleaner up a narrow staircase,

Strategy, tactics and victories of the everyday in My Architect, Exhibition and Koolhaas HouseLife

in Salk Institute - measuring the space, testing it out, placing himself against the "other".

Koolhaas HouseLife echoes some of the notions set out by De Certeau in his dedication in The Practice of Everyday Life: Guadalupe Acedo is very much a common heroine.

She represents the overlooked who are at the same time so numerous and instrumental in running households.

Her position as an outsider is underscored by her identity as a foreigner in France and the fact that she is a live-in housekeeper further plays to the power relations as described by de Certeau. Her perspective is that of the back door, the maintenance side of things, the "making do". What directors Beka and Lemoine have in common with De Certeau is that they present the ordinary people as the producers of space and their practice as creative and interpretative.

Figure 3: Guadalupe Acedo mopping stairs. Image credit: Koolhaas HouseLife, Bêka & Lemoine, 2008 (production: Bêka & Partners)

dealing with leaks or using a broomstick to close the curtains. This is particularly jarring because the house could be considered as an efficient machine for living - it was designed around a hydraulic platform lift, specially made for the commissioning owner who uses a wheelchair. In her essay titled Maintenance and Care, anthropologist Shannon Mattern highlights the absurdity of the near-impossible task of upkeeping the architectural gem of a mansion: "At one point, the long pole of Acedo’s swimming pool net bonks the camera. The impact — and the absurdity of it — rings in our own heads."17 The movie approaches the house as if it was a body itself a beautiful body yet not free of issues and particularities - noises, cracks, leaks. Together with the juxtaposition of Guadalupe’s body, it creates an intimate and rich story.

Guadalupe knows the house’s nooks and crannies like no one else, her story is intimate and physical and written upon the image of Maison Bordeaux.

All of Guadalupe’s interactions with the house are measured in body parts or extensions of the body (like the vacuum cleaner or mop). She knows exactly what will fit and what will not. She touches the house every day. In many ways, it can be seen as similar to what Nathaniel Kahn did by rollerblading Marianna Janowicz

In Koolhaas HouseLife the use of tactics as opposed to strategies is particularly apparent as we follow Guadalupe who invents different kinds of impromptu methods of dealing with manifold problems that arise in the house. The contrast between what we consider as a work of high architecture and the mundane daily activities involved in managing it on a day to day basis is stark and in many ways entertaining, especially as we learn about all the imperfections and quirks, which arose most probably due to experimental design and non-standard building methods. In the scene titled "leaks" Guadalupe inserts a scored and folded plastic cup into a hole in a concrete wall, to prevent the water from running down the wall and forming a funnel to allow it to dribble into a bucket. It is a tested method, she says, she has done it before and that the problems are "never ending". A male handyman adds from behind the camera: "do it properly". Guadalupe seems to be an indispensable person in the house, she knows it very well and knows all the issues in detail, yet when she is asked in the previous scene what her favorite part of the house is, she says: "I like it all, but I don’t use it, I am just here to clean". Yet, in the movie, she is precisely the person who uses it the most and has the most intimate relationship with it. The everyday practices of Guadalupe Acedo are a manifestation of what De Certeau described as "victories of the <weak> over the <strong>."18 It is the victory of tactic with strategy, of the improvised with the institutional, of a clever trick within an established system.

All three discussed movies show spaces transformed (written) by physical acts of bodies. All of these actions are particularly intimate and often they constitute unusual modes of using those spaces. The practices of everyday life (the walking, the making-do, the improvisation, the fleeting and the temporal) have the power to manipulate spaces and make new memories, whilst subverting the established narrative around them.

Spatial experience is rediscovered by the different authors in 2021 ARCHITECTURE & FILM SYMPOSIUM

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Figure 4: Maison a Bordeaux by OMA. Image credit: Hans Werlemann / Copyright OMA.

their dealing with space and memory as something dynamic and sensual. Tapping into the body and the meanings which it can create through experiencing and interacting with space brings out a depth that is not otherwise accessible.

The vagueness, softness and instability of the corporeal experience is a makeshift thing, dependent on circumstances and subject to transitions but it has a unique capacity to subvert the status quo, and to quote De Certeau again, "open up habitable spaces."19 Architecture, like memory, is temporal, but architecture also has the means to store a memory. The practices of everyday life can offer a form of resistance in manipulating spaces, writing meanings, making memories. In all discussed examples the practices are indispensable for understanding the space and as De Certeau puts it "one can measure the importance of these signifying practices (to tell oneself legends) as practices that invent spaces."20 In line with De Certeau’s theory that "Reading […] introduces an “art” which is anything but passive,"21 the spaces presented in My Architect, Exhibition and Koolhaas HouseLife become activated and meaningful by the practices that are performed in or against them.

The characters who use (read) the spaces inevitably also 16

manipulate (write) them. By using iconic architecture as a background, the movie directors emphasize the idiosyncrasy and informality of tactics which take place inside them, to present (write) those spaces anew.

What do Guadalupe Acedo, Nathaniel Kahn, and D and H bring to architecture? The intimate encounters of bodies and physical space as presented in moving image can help expand the question of what architecture is. The practices of everyday life, as viewed through the lens of strategy and tactics can lead to creation of spaces as richer, more potent, dynamic, fleeting, and meaningful.

ENDNOTES 1. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1984), 117.

2. Ibidem, 117.

3. Ibidem, 117.

4. Ibidem, xix.

5. Ibidem, xix.

6. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994), 14.

7. Francois Penz, Cinematic Aided Design: An Everyday Life Approach to Architecture, (London; New York: Routledge/Taylor and Francis Group,

Strategy, tactics and victories of the everyday in My Architect, Exhibition and Koolhaas HouseLife

California Press, 1984), xix.

Figure 5: Guadalupe Acedo using the platform lift. Image credit: Koolhaas HouseLife, Bêka & Lemoine, 2008 (production: Bêka & Partners)

2018), 21.

19. Ibidem, 106.

20. Ibidem, xxii.

21. Ibidem, xxii.

8. Ibidem.

9. Shannon Mattern, “Maintenance and Care”, Places Journal, 20 November 2018, https://doi.org/10.22269/181120.

10. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1984), 107.

11. Ibidem, 107.

12. Deyan Sudjic, “Tell Me about My Father”, The Guardian, 24 July 2004, http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2004/jul/25/architecture.

13. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1984), 110.

14. Peter Bradshaw, “Exhibition review – Joanna Hogg creates a masterful cinematic enigma”, The Guardian, 24 April 2014, https://www. theguardian.com/film/2014/apr/24/exhibition-review-joanna-hogg.

15. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1984), xviii.

16. Ibidem, p.xxi.

17. Shannon Mattern, “Maintenance and Care”, Places Journal, 20 November 2018, https://doi.org/10.22269/181120.

18. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, (Berkeley: Univ. of

Marianna Janowicz

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Embodied At-Homeness: Reflections on Dwelling Experiences Framed in Yasujiro Ozu’s Tokyo Story

ROOHID NOVINROOZ

Tokyo Story (1953) inscribes plenty of vignettes from everyday life of Japanese homes. Whereas various home visits, daily conversations, and household chores paint the surface of the film, the roiling emotions and transient relations, underneath this surface, give cue to how home environment is shaped from and out of the embodied relations with things. This research takes a phenomenological lens to look at the embodied relations that are mostly unconscious, contextual, and omnipresent. The paper, firstly, demonstrates the frame-shaping techniques of Tokyo Story entailing associations with the context of dwelling experience. It then investigates themes within the framed relations that imply temporariness and transience. The research hence signifies the atmospheric quality of home by articulating what dissociates from it. That includes dwindling relations with the dwelling, as well as capturing the absences and particular placements that haul out of the home environment. More generally, this research also aims to showcase the strength of film studies in examining how spaces are actually lived and what constitutes the atmosphere of home.

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Cinema is a prism through which one can see strata of dwelling experiences. These experiences are embodied and unique to each body-subject. However, in their encounters and appropriation there is a pattern-like characteristic that allows for comparison between different body-subjects.

Focusing on perceptual mode of the dwelling experience, not only the subjective and intimate interactions are addressed, but a bridge to cultural transmission is being built. In explaining the construct of inter-subjectivity in individual experiences, Tim Ingold (2000, 159) writes: “perception is a two-stage phenomenon: the first involves the receipt, by the individual human organism, of ephemeral and meaningless sense data; the second consists in the organisation of these data into collectively held and enduring representations”.1 The point is to look at each experiential phenomenon on its own accord, in the world being built from the first-hand experience between the dweller and the place of her residence.

Besides, one should acknowledge the role of these corporeal experiences in developing a socially approved schema of culture. The latter allows us to interpret these experiences at the level of inter-subjectivity to expand a shared body of knowledge from embodied and pre-reflective dwelling practice.

Many movies tell stories from lived-in spaces, and as a result, touch upon their atmospheric quality. Among the notable films stands Tokyo Story. 2&3 The most celebrated work of Yasujiro Ozu not only exemplifies his cinematic mastery at its peak, but also qualifies to be one of the finest products of cinema ever made. 4 Like most of Ozu’s oeuvre, Tokyo Story is an intricate collection of scenes from middle class households of post-war Japan. Joo (2017)5, Russell (2011)6, and Standish (2005)7 are among those which shed light on social dynamics and their implications, whether carefully reflected or intentionally negated in Ozu’s cinema, including in Tokyo Story. To be more accurate and in tune with the scope of this research, Ozu did not make films "about" Japanese families and domesticity, but he made "from" and "out of" Japanese family/home culture. The precedence of banality engages home situations as essential subject-matters. It is Embodied At-homeness

ingrained in Ozu’s cinematic conventions, some of which will be discussed in this paper. By virtue of its purity [in Ozu style], the simple house easily becomes a field of inter-subjective experiences, for both the character and the viewer. The plot is tempered with direct visuals of everyday banality; there is no accentuation of causes and decision lines, nor a dramatic encompasser to contain a profound question. “Ozu’s spaces”, Deleuz (1989, 15) describes “are raised to the state of anyspace-whatevers, whether by disconnection or vacuity”.8 While briefly addressing particular cinematic earmarks of Tokyo Story, this research holds on to Ozu’s visual material as a phenomenon in its whole unity. The focus is set to the dynamic relations between the dweller and things within dwelling places. Taking the body-thing relations as a lens to study the valence of interior spaces, my study naturally follows a phenomenological syntax. In that regard, I base my arguments on "At-homeness" as the structural notion to follow in the trail of visual materials in Tokyo Story. This paper owes the definition of at-homeness to studies of human geographer and phenomenologist, David Seamon (1979, 70): “the usually unnoticed, taken-for-granted situation of being comfortable in and familiar with the everyday world in which one lives and outside of which one is ‘visiting’, ‘in transit’, ‘not at home’, ‘out of place’ or ‘traveling’”.9 In the context of Tokyo Story, at-homeness refers to all the homes and relations constantly building into it. I would elaborate on the ways these relations are portrayed in 2 chapters: first by focusing on what aspects of at-homeness fall into Ozu’s frames, and secondly by showcasing some distorting relations of at-homeness within those frames. Discussions in both chapters set out to develop the knowledge of at-homeness and illustrate a perspective into studying architecture from film materials.

I shall note that the at-homeness relations in this research will mainly be investigated between the movie characters and their home objects. The movie certainly bestows a rich experiential field upon us. However, we as the spectators, will only be able to dip our toes in that field and never fully enter its time-space constellation.10 What is more, by illustrating the conduct of individual perception of home environment, I wish to stand away from the construct of the cultural programs and high-level representation of home culture. The focus of this research remains predominantly on a "hands-on" set of everyday activities at home and the phenomenology of habitation.

1. WHAT IS FRAMED OZU’S CAMERA AS THE EXTENSION OF OUR BODY More than the objects and people, we are associated with the space created by and from their relations. There is only situated seeing (Ihde 1990, 42).11 We do not simply see houses and people; we see "at-homeness" in action as framed in Roohid Novinrooz

Tokyo Story. The interior scenes are usually long. And the time is given so that we can land into space (of course with limitations to taste, haptic and olfactory senses).

To see is indeed to see within a field with a reliant set of features. Shapes, forms, and relations can vary during the course of imagination. But when it comes to the immediate encounter, the perception is mediated with the camera (Ibid).

Hence, instead of a direct viewer-scene relation, we are left with a (viewer-camera)-scene relation. The articulation applies to all films. What makes it rather unique in Ozu’s films though, is the reductive structure of mediation in use of the camera.

What is embodied by the camera is constantly putting aside what is experienced through it, making the camera itself almost non-existent. Moving from one shot to another, Ozu’s camera never dissolves or fades (techniques often used by directors to pronounce a point of view). It also does not zoom, pan, or dolly.12 Its sedentary attribute diligently impersonates the viewer sitting still and watching the movie. To all appearances, Ozu’s camera enters each scene like a member of the audience and waits for the drama to begin (cited in Richie 1974).13 Ozu’s formal desolates dramatic actions, fast paced movements, and agitated conversations. By decentering the dramatic narrative in the film, the time-space relations gain room to pronounce their presence. “By creating a systemic alternative method of shaping spatial and temporal relations, Ozu [seeks] to engage the spectator’s attention more deeply” (Bordwell and Thompson 2008, 401).14 His stationary camera draws attention to small movements within the frame, incessantly unveiling the emotive feelings of the characters (Ehrlich 1997).15 It allows us to delve into their dwelling experience, underneath the layer of banal everyday life. Depth of the space and Ozu’s blocking technique are two narrating drivers to situate at-homeness emotives within these frames.

INTERIOR SCENES ARE GLARINGLY DEEP Notwithstanding the small domestic setups, the respective scenes are usually deep, gathering a handful of things and activities to our perceptual scope. Apart from the main characters and things occupying the center/foreground, there is room to bring new people and to show them moving about.

Besides, doors and windows at the back of the shots do not set boundaries for our visual experience. Home scenes usually incorporate what is set beyond them as well. They show generous translucent openings that let life elsewhere (plants, neighbor’s laundry, passersby etc.) penetrate their presence inside (see fig. 1). This is in part owed to the special qualities of the Japanese architecture. As Henry Plummer (2016, 259) puts it, “a multitude of latent acts are brought into view [...] where even a closed boundary can hint at further possibilities”.16 He gives an even more poetical description to the sensual certitude of wood lattice in Japanese homes: “they provide 2021 ARCHITECTURE & FILM SYMPOSIUM

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Figure 1: Interior scenes usually set out to incorporate life from beyond home (screenshots from Tokyo Story).

such deliberately imperfect view that give us nothing but offer us everything” (Ibid. 167).

These lively elements sit in the peripheral attention of the dwellers. As and when, with some fluid maneuver, they come forth into the attentive zone. They have more or less the same impact on us, for these deep frames enrich our peripheral perception of the domestic environment we are watching.

One salient example in Tokyo Story is the early scene in which Shukichi and Tomi are at home, packing for the Tokyo trip and their neighbor stops by at the window to have a small talk. Ozu often likes to end his movies in the same location they started. In fact, each and every Ozu film comprises various circles of events that start and end in the same place.

The sequence of these circles, structured around everyday chatters and chores, resonates the continuity of life within and beyond the cinematic portrayal, hence signifies the position of dwelling environment as the place of happening. In the same fashion, Tokyo Story ends in the family house in Onomichi.

Towards the end, there is a scene where the same neighbor pops by the window again to chat with Shukichi who is alone 20

this time. What informs us most about the character’s inner feelings, rather than the dialogue, is the visual comparison between this scene and its par in the beginning of the film.

The space, after Tomi’s demise, is clearly less infilled or inhabited (see fig. 2).

From another angle, homes with such passable structures welcome exteriority. As a common domestic habit, the home owners open the large window frames to let the breeze pass through. Social studies show that the practice is still prevailing in contemporary households of Japan (Daniels 2008, 125)17 or among lower middle class of Singapore where one can find common traits of dwelling practices similar to Japanese apartment units (Teo 2018, 41-64).18 Evoked by cost saving motivations, the practice embeds into everyday life and mitigates the function of windows/doors as a liminal space. In Japanese home setup, the border between inside and outside gets even more overlapped with the fluid space of vestibule or entrance zone (Daniels 2008, 126). What best situates the liminal zone is a set of embodied cultural practices such as removing shoes and performing greeting formalities. They Embodied At-homeness

A

B

Figure 2: parallel scenes from the family house, one in the beginning (A) and the other in the end (B) of the movie, showing the same view from the house with different emotional connotations. (screenshots from Tokyo Story).

could potentially happen anywhere at home, and bring in the feelings and ambiance associated with outside home.

Ozu embraces these inside-outside transitions within his mise en scène. He even utilizes them to drive the story.

One good example is Good Morning (1959) 19 , where interactions between the neighbors through the permeable and exposable layers of their homes becomes the main ground for developing the drama. On the other hand, shooting empty corridors slowly became a rule of thumb in his cinematography. In final passages of chapter two, I will discuss about the time-space effect of this emptiness. But for now let us focus on what is actually framed by means of this technique. The camera sometimes waits in the space of that corridor for the actors to come and drag the drama into the frame, as they live through their act i.e. their everyday life.

Upon entering, they are given ample space and time to fully demonstrate the act of entrance, making it more and more comparable with the real life experience outside the cinematic frame. Likewise in exit, they do not suddenly disappear. Else, we capture their gradual exiting ritual, for instance they first go behind the door panel while their silhouette is still visible. It feels even more real when characters move around the house, particularly when they leave a room for a purpose and come back to it. Tomo Shimogawara, one of Ozu’s set designers, recalls how Ozu used to meticulously time these movements according to the pace of everyday life to eventually size the room suitable for his scene20 (cited in Sato 1982). 21 On the other hand, there is Ozu’s special placement of camera; also referred to as the "tatami view". The lowseated camera pictures the background distant from the figures. It also widens the perspective to cover more from Roohid Novinrooz

floor to ceiling. As a result, several home interiors are shown with a top-shelf filled with objects (see fig. 3). These are the belongings simply pushed aside to fringes of everyday vignette of dwellers. Sealed up and static, they are deprioritized from the order of usability. They simply belong to another time; some time ago or some time in the future. Recent studies on material culture investigate the life of unused objects in Japanese homes and propensity of owners to store them even though being not useful (Daniels 2009). 22 Surplus objects bear complex feelings: gratitude, duty, emotional attachment, burden etc. They simply hang around until they find a use or get disposed of. The storage spaces are also not stable containers, but some spatial junctures that hold places in the lives of things (Gregson and Beal 2004).23 In that regard, the unused things are not entirely lost. They might always reappear. They have fallen into oblivion but not yet completely outside the dwelling practice. And as far as Tokyo Story is concerned, they still have a place in Ozu’s vignette, as they take part in shaping the at-homeness domain of gestalt.

The everydayness of social interactions are deliberately portrayed in the fluid liminal zones Tokyo Story frames in home scenes. By means of this cinematic arrangement, Ozu guides certain appearances and neighboring relations. This is the gist of the matter; as things appear within the perceptual radar they affirm their specific being (Merleau-ponty 1962, 350).24 Ozu’s camera spreads a flat focus on objects in front, middle and the back, closest to the way our vision naturally functions. It also sits low to deepen the vision and incorporate more context. The depth of the interior scenes in Tokyo Story thus creates a gestalt domain with affordance of things and events in the periphery, prior to affirmation, that somehow matter to the dwelling practice. Pallasmaa (2012, 38-39) 2021 ARCHITECTURE & FILM SYMPOSIUM

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Figure 3: Tatami views in Tokyo Story show a generous volume of interior space, including the storage area for seemingly forgotten home possessions. (screenshots form Tokyo Story)

explains the mechanism of this peripheral vision while being in an architectural space: Focused vision makes us mere outside observers; peripheral perception transforms retinal images into a spatial and bodily involvement and gives rise to the sense of atmosphere and participation. Peripheral perception is the perceptival mode through which we grasp atmospheres.25 Things set in the deep focus of Tokyo Story home scenes indicate the significance of unconscious perception as a driver to get a grip of the space. The significance is most apparent in composition of the context. “Atmospheric observations”, Pallasmaa (2016, 133) argues, “fuse and unite all the sensations through the sense of being and self”. 26 Carefully crafted in Tokyo Story, the proliferation of things in the deep interior space seeps into the dwelling experience and its atmospheric quality.

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BLOCKING THE OLD COUPLE AS AN ANCHOR IN THE SCENE In many interior scenes, Ozu blocks27 the shots by positioning Tomi and Shukichi in the foreground and other events around them. The seating arrangements and visual compositions follow certain Ozu-esque traditions. For example, any symbolic reading from the characters positions are carefully eschewed. In addition, they are all shown in full face shots and a sort of alignment to avoid masking each other. And when speaking, the camera looks at everyone in fairly the same way.

This obsessive technical restriction discards any cinematic punctuation so much so reactions, feelings, and judgements are taken away from the camera/director and granted to the viewer. Therefore, without any distractive direction, the viewer is involved in the scene to explore and assimilate. The conversations also meant not to spike with creating a moment of truth, but remain naturally predictable and related to their spatial context i.e. at home discuss domestic arrangements, in office make concrete future arrangements, and in restaurant Embodied At-homeness

Figure 4. A sample blocking of an interior scene in Tokyo Story, where the aging couple (grey circles) are positioned in the center/foreground and they remain still almost the entire scene, likewise the camera.

talk about social issues (Richie 1974, Sato 1982).

In the interior frames of Tokyo Story, the old couple mostly just sit still for the entire scene; while the others come and go out of the frame (see fig. 4). During the development of conversations in each scene, Ozu turns the camera around a few times 180 degrees. This shooting technique provides a multidirectional view to the space framed. The pattern thus continues from one house to another: the couple gravitate the frame by their position, the sequence of 180-degree shots takes in things and spaces as deep as possible, and the chatter between the family develops the scenario while subtly hinging on the roiling emotions beneath that surface. The old couple’s presence weighs an anchor to the system of relations. When they leave, the scene starts to fall apart. Things start to lose their "thingness" in Heideggerian terms (Heidegger 1975, 164-5).28 They will lose their dependence to the body-subject whose presence is integral in sustaining those relations.

Associations here are everything. We do not observe a random home; we see the "house of" and the "house with whose guests".

Blocking of the interior scenes in Tokyo Story stresses more on at-homeness relations associated with the main protagonists, Shukichi and Tomi. One reason that makes their inertia plausible is that, wherever they go, they do not know their way around the place and almost always need guidance or accompaniment. What is missing is the "takenfor-grantedness" (Seamon 1979), or the know-how everyone Roohid Novinrooz

develops with her place of residence. This feeling evolves through time and propels other relationships with the dwelling such as longing, belonging, boredom, attachment, comfort, rest, and so on. In the next chapter, I will shed light on the ways Tokyo Story captures the faltering aspects of these relations.

2. AT-HOMENESS DISTORTIONS UNSETTLING RELATIONS WITH THINGS At-homeness is the process of assimilating the living environment with our full perceptual capacity. It is also a process that goes on as long as the dwelling continues. Tim Ingold (2000, 188) articulates that building: does not begin here, with a pre-formed plan, and end there, with a finished artefact. The ‘final form’ is but a fleeting moment in the life of any feature, when it is matched to a human purpose, likewise, cut out from the flow of intentional activity.

Like using an object, dwelling practices are open-ended, in a sense that they evolve through time. At any point we stop to analyze this set of relations, the result is an articulation in some form of trial-and-error experiments to create a common sense around using/dwelling. Sometimes form follows the function, and sometimes function follows the form. We know intuitively how to live in our home, and we know this knowledge is not sustained in us in a fixed format (Sennett 2018, 13-15). 29 Yet the flux of trial-and-error 2021 ARCHITECTURE & FILM SYMPOSIUM

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Figure 5: The old couple are constantly packing and unpacking, never feeling truly at-home (screenshots from Tokyo Story).

experiments could heighten to a noticeable degree to disrupt the at-homeness phenomenon. The disruption itself triggers awareness towards the body-home relations. This is exactly how the Tokyo Story narrates Noriko’s relations with her home. The widow of the son who died in the war, lives in a deemed small home, which is the least presentable of those shown in the film. The house is overloaded with bygone memories of the lost husband, and rendered in a strong sense of attachment to all bittersweet emotions Noriko cannot let go of. Although she never mentions it, the visual elements do the justice in expressing both her yearning and hesitation to start a new chapter in her life.

On the other hand, Shukichi and Tomi are always portrayed in a context wherein their link to at-homeness habits have been cut out, and the movie also shows their struggle to find themselves at home. When the old couple visit their children one by one in Tokyo, they slowly realize the unpleasant gap departing their lives from their children’s. Consequently, they fail to adapt to the rhythm of their life there. They constantly pack and unpack (see fig. 5). Tomi also forgets her belongings 24

a couple of times. The old couple fail to create attachment with where they are and feel urged to go back to their own home earlier than expected.

The teetering connection with the dwelling environment recalls the embodied nature of attachment to home as an integral property of at-homeness experience. Development of this embodied attachment to the physical environment shows itself in the form of "habit memory". Unlike the "image memory", which is the visual recollection of events, habit memory is not entirely mental; it is “thoroughly mental and yet wholly bodily” (S. Casey 1984, 280). 30 At-homeness habits are a set of skilled and unskilled actions that build into knowing the way around things at home. As perfectly illustrated in Tokyo scenes, the unsettling couple are for some reason always incapable of fully animating their routines and enacting their home-dwelling habits. The more we see them disturbed, the more we are alarmed about their "rootedness" to their own home. Their weakness is both mental and physical and is a witness to rootedness as “the power of home to organise habitual and bodily stratum of [their] lived spaces” Embodied At-homeness

Figure 6: Examples of outdoor pillow shots in the film (screenshots from Tokyo Story).

(Seamon 1979, 79).

temporal make-up.

THINGS IN TRANSIENCE Another trademark of Ozu’s work is shots without the lead characters and independent from the drama, yet particularly coalescing things and spaces with some ambiguous relations with the main constituents of the story. His famous technique, already a universal influence, is also known as "pillow shots": “carefully composed scenes are seemingly random shots, held for several seconds, of everyday life” (Singer 2016).31 Passing by boats and trains, narrow streets, department stores, and factories are among those shots in Tokyo Story (see fig. 6).

Keinosuke Nanbu, was amongst the earliest film critics peaked by this technique and started calling it "curtain shots", for Ozu’s scenery shots resembled the closing curtain during the interval of the classic films (Sato 1982, 190). Despite lacking rigorous choreography, these shots draw attention to the environmental context of where things happen in the story.

Time in a movie is perceived in two currents; one is the running time of the movie (2h and 16m for Tokyo Story), and the other is the time spanning across the drama (several days in Tokyo Story). Ozu keeps the story time as relatable as it gets to the clock time. The time passing on each scene is very realistic, for example, the dialogues follow an ordinary pace with all the natural pauses in between. And there are "multiple" successive states or scenes alike. On the other hand, there is a "unity" in binding them together. The story always moves forward at a somewhat steady tempo. There is neither a flashback nor a leap in unfolding. Devising Henri Bergson’s time theory to analyze Tokyo Story, Jack Lichten (2015)32 argues the "duration" we perceive is a mysterious synthesis of "multiplicity" of states and their "unity" in whole. Pillow shots are Ozu’s best tool for matching the clock time (2h 15m) with the story time (several days), as both multiplicity and unity are reinvigorated in those scenes.

None of these interval frames are entirely empty or lifeless.

There is always a moving element implying the transient nature of relations. Often coupled with soundtrack, these scenes also stimulate the viewer’s anticipation and help with the emotional development of the sequences. The film historian, Donald Richie, even conceives the pillow shots as the focal point of aroused emotions in drama. The emotions and experiences are afforded to the viewer to apprehend something of the texture of life (Richie 1974). Furthermore, placement of these pillow shots in the movie suggest a curious Roohid Novinrooz

Let me explain with a few instances. The movie begins with some outdoor shots from the Onomichi town and ends with similar views, from streets, the passing train, sailing boats etc.

In the beginning, they serve as an introduction to the locale and the ending suggests that we leave the story behind but the life there continues. Throughout the film too, the outdoor pillow shots prepare us for a transition from one place to another. For example, the shot of the restaurant signboard sits in between the scene in the friend’s house (before) and 2021 ARCHITECTURE & FILM SYMPOSIUM

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Figure 7: The medium close-up shot of the hanging laundry is Ozu’s special way of emphasizing on temporality and transience (screenshot from Tokyo Story).

the scene of friends gathering in the restaurant (after). These shots clearly help with realization of the sequence and moving forward in both clock time and story time. Moreover, some pillow shots serve as a conclusion to the scene, imbued and enriched with connotations. On the way back to Onomichi, the couple are forced to stop in Osaka due to Tomi’s sickness.

There is a scene where they contemplate about the whole trip with compromising feelings that things did not pan out as expected, but at least they managed to see all their children.

This is in fact the last conversation between the two in Tokyo Story. Later in the movie we see Tomi’s demise in Onomichi, but before that and right after that particular conversation, Ozu turns the camera to a medium close-up of some hanging laundry (see fig. 7). The laundry shot is not a story element, but it is crucial in Ozu’s story telling. It is a time signifier, as it helps us pass that very moment of the conversation and ponder that life goes on beyond this scene, beyond Tomi’s death and beyond this movie, for as long as people hang their laundry, let them dry, wash, and hang again. As Gilles Deleuz described Ozu’s pillow shots in another movie, these still lifes are pure and direct images of time ( Deleuze 1989, 17).

Thus far, we discussed the functionality of pillow shots in informing the context and perception of time. Another property of the pillow shots, especially the outdoor ones, is to create an inside-outside balance, meaningful to our perception of the environment. They decenter the diegesis with a glance into some expected exterior view. Expected 26

because the shots are always relevant to the context of the story as well as the locale. But why does that matter in our environmental experience? Relph (1976)33 and Seamon (1979) argue that profundity of feeling inside is interdependent with what its opposite feeling entails. To encounter, maintain, and develop at-homeness experience, one has to be away from home from time to time. Neither the aforementioned scholars nor Ozu aim to formulate a prescription for this balance, yet they all affirm the necessity of this inside-outside dialectic in perception of what rests in the familiar, enclosed, and rooted on one hand, and what wanders to the horizons, the unfamiliar and open on the other. The movement from inside to outside, or vice versa, could be prompted by various stimuli. Investigating all of them in Tokyo Story deserves a separate study altogether. Here I just elaborate with a simple allegory. Imagine yourself having a heated conversation with your family at home, which leaves you with unrestful thoughts and feelings. To take refuge from this somberness, you walk out of the house and after a while find yourself looking at the rows of rooftops, smoking chimneys, and fishing boats sailing behind them. The exterior pillow shots in Tokyo Story take us to a similar journey. Not all of them are encouraged by somber feelings, but they all disclose associations that insinuate properties of attachment and rootedness to the interior.

In the interior scenes however, the sense of transience is portrayed by a different technique in Tokyo Story — particularly so in the scenes where the formal composition Embodied At-homeness

Figure 8: The bag in front of the shot seems rather out of place, as it gathers in associations with away-from-home (screenshot from Tokyo Story).

is broken with some disruptive presence (Richie 1974).

Whoever knows of Ozu, must have heard of his obsessive aesthetic details and directing every single movement and position in his frames. In the previous chapter, I have touched upon some of his compositional grammar like creating frames within frames, alignment of characters, seating arrangements, and full-face shots. Most of these rules have been followed through without any exception. Nonetheless, having such compositional orthodoxy allows Ozu to also occasionally disentangle them for a specific purpose. One distinct example can be found in the last day of Tomi’s life.

There the family huddle around her body. The frame is rather dense with people who show little movement and say little words. Crickets are chirping in the background, the ice pack is gradually melting on Tomi’s forehead, and a coil incense is burning in the foreground. Almost everything in this setup denotes evanescence. Soon Tomi dies, the children go back to Tokyo and Shukichi will be sitting alone in the same room that would now feel rather too big for him.

On the last day of Tomi, beside the burning coil we also see a bag, which perhaps belongs to one of the children who just came from Tokyo (see fig. 8). The bag gathers what belongs to the travelling. The cinematic representation gives it a prominent position and highlights its association. Ozu rather emphasizes that the bag should seem out of place, and truly so because it is entrusted with "away-from-home" Roohid Novinrooz

feelings. This might seem too elaborate, but quite a telling example. The materialization of perceptions via things is not confined to the bag or this very scene. It underpins an intrinsic quality in the body-thing relations. Following Heidegger’s phenomenology, every lived environment is conditioned with things (Heidegger 1975, 171). And according to Merleau-ponty (1962, 349-50), their conditions are conveyed to the dweller through perception. This is how the framework of relations are formed in dwelling experience. Once again, Ozu reinstates these relations by subtly composing association to their absence: the bag yearns for not being at home but claims a notable presence in it.

DELAYED CUTS Ozu picks up the emotions sedimented with things by delaying the cuts and capturing a glimpse of the characters’ absence.

Cinematically speaking, the placement of the cut determines the meaning of the shot. In most films, the conversation shots last exactly until the character(s) speak. In Ozu’s though the duration is usually longer. He conventionally punctuates the conversation with a few moments of silence and assimilation after the line is finished. As Doland Richie (1974, 176-177) puts it, “this gives an air of importance, of weight, to almost any conversation, as though replies were being pondered, and contributes to the serious, occasionally even bleak, atmosphere of [the] film”. Atmosphere thus becomes pivotal.

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Figure 9: Ozu’s camera holds on to the seemingly empty scene to show the very moment of the characters’ absence in the interior space (screenshots from Tokyo Story).

Consequently, what we see in Tokyo Story as a whole is decentering the narrative and giving prominence to spatial and temporal structures to come forward and create their own interest (Bordwell and Thompson 2008, 401). The technique does not merely apply to the conversation shots.

Yet in some other interior scenes delaying cuts amplify the atmospheric quality of the space as well.

There are several instances in Tokyo Story where this suspension is deliberately framed; the characters have just left the space and the camera is still running (see fig. 9). Waiting moments like this often end with the characters coming back to the room or a simple cut to another scene. In the meantime, we are left to observe the time-space associations, with the feelings we carry forward from what just happened before in the same frame. It is also a testimony to the fact that the horizons of the phenomenal field are thus elusive from demarcation, yet they are absolutely sensible (MerleauPonty 1962). Similar to the time-space balance Ozu creates with his placement of pillow shots, “It is the tension between the suspension of human presence and its potential return” in delayed cuts that opens up to profound environmental understanding (Burch 1979, 161).34 Ozu’s camera makes up a living space with things situated for an intention — objects bearing specific actions and qualities of dwelling. When the dweller is around, she enables these qualities in things and the living space becomes “the pragmatic field of her experience” 28

(Canguilhem 2008, 118).35 But as soon as the dweller leaves the space, there is no one to attend to those things. Thanks to Ozu we have the privilege to witness that very moment a bit elongated.

What is happening in that moment of absence is things start to lose their thingness and become sheer objects, independent and self-sustained. Ozu’s semi-poetic approach in editing then shows the voiding milieu of dwelling. It is a fleeting moment where things have lost their nearing property, but have not yet become entirely estranged. The dwindling associations speak for the very association itself; this time with the space in its entirety and not only from a direct relationship with a specific object. The threshold of absence keeps the physical property of the space intact but withers away its atmospheric quality. What Ozu meticulously captures is the transition from "the house-of" to "the house".

CONCLUSION At-homeness experience is unimaginable without home paraphernalia. By virtue of being in contact with the dwellers, the home possessions constantly build into the construct of dwelling experience, even the seemingly neglected ones. In this interconnection, their physical property such as size and shape is secondary to their position and the point of view from which the body-subject attends to them. In so far as the perception horizon permits, both the dweller and home Embodied At-homeness

possessions are actively involved in this interconnection.

Co -living with things creates and evolves habits of at-homeness. It grows into the dweller to create “a clearly patterned framework that sets the stage for greater and greater self-understanding” (Marcus 2006, 6). 36 Our bodily and spiritually belongings, in this sense, come from memories, ease, sense of security, familiarity, warmth, appropriateness, and nurture (Tuan 197737; Seamon 1979).

There are certain barriers to get a grip of these experiences in a movie; our intrinsic distance to the space before us weakens our multi-sensory experience, the time in the movie is reinvented to suit the drama, and the projected reality is not as real as it would be to our own naked perception.

However, cinema still gives us a rich mediated perception of at-homeness. It serves as a peek into lived experiences that reverberate architectural space, also “guides, choreographs and stimulates our actions, interests and moods” (Pallasmaa 2014, 82). 38 With an atmospheric narrative of the physical space, movies create a pre-reflective field of experience which is not completely first-hand but is animate and multisensory.

In this article, I have studied Tokyo Story to develop the pertaining knowledge of home-dwelling experiences.

That is an example of reading into the phenomenology of architecture in cinema. Tokyo Story is not made to suggest a pattern of home-making. Rather it is made out of lived experiences and replicating them in purposeful harmony. In studying that, I tried to articulate the framing mechanism that opens up to the depth of the interior space and insinuates corporeal relationships developing and fading within the receptacle of the dwelling environment.

In the first chapter I showed how previously mentioned relations emancipate from the way home scenes are framed in Tokyo Story. At first I introduced the perspective wherein at-homeness experience is mediated through a (viewercamera)-scene relation. Via some unique and effective technical conventions, Ozu’s camera decentres drama and gives precedence to the time-space relations framed. I argued the flat focus of the shots, beside the low position of camera and mise en scène, help adding to the depth of the interior scenes. The composition is by and large corresponding to the first-hand dwelling experience that is situated in a rich out-offocus context and imbues from the atmospheric quality rising from it. The sedentary position of the aging couple, whose journey forms the cornerstone of the story, gravitates most of the home scenes. As elaborated in the second chapter, they themselves are in disconcerting condition, constantly failing in establishing attachment to the homes they visit in Tokyo. This series of effort and growing non-fulfillment are very subtle in Tokyo Story, but rightfully shown pivotal in developing emotional connection with the space.

of change. Starting with discomposure and discomfort associated with some of the main characters’ at-homeness, the initial passages of this chapter indicate that those unsettling relations in Tokyo Story denote the significance of embodied attachment to the dwelling environment.

After that, I discussed other motifs from the film that characterize temporariness in the at-homeness relations.

One is demonstrating the notion of transience in life, namely from uninhabited vignettes of everyday life. I argued that this endeavour is not confined to his famous pillow shots and Ozu composes many interior scenes with the same air of transience. Particularly I discussed the placement of ephemeral and temporary things, which establish a shortlived connection with the dwelling environment. And their shrill to disposal from the home scene echo the withering relation of people with the space, hence an atmosphere of temporariness with a heavy weight of time. The atmosphere is co-opted with certain objects that gather emotives opposite to rootedness at home. Last theme discussed in this chapter was Ozu’s delayed cuts after characters leave the scene. His capturing of a glimpse of their absence confronts us with a voiding space where there is no one to attend to the things.

Those things then start to lose their thingness and turn into independent objects. Ozu’s elaborate technique of delayed cuts makes the atmosphere of body-thing relations tangible.

All themes discussed in this research assert that connection to home environment is corporeal. It is also associated with an embroidery of atmosphere that is constantly being built out of things, space and dweller’s dynamic relations with them. Any cut out in the flow of these connections shows itself in passages of transience, temporariness and sometimes instability.

Tokyo Story is a reference point in the history of cinema and a rich example of studying interior spaces in architecture.

What I tried to achieve in this article was to uncover motifs and embodied relations from this film that illustrate a deep understanding of interiority. I do hope that similar studies take precedence and eventually help spacemakers with insightful design strategies.

The second chapter focused on the emotions in the state Roohid Novinrooz

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ENDNOTES 1. Ingold, Tim. The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. London and New York: Routledge, 2000.

2. Ozu, Yasujiro. director. Tokyo Monogatary [Tokyo Story] . Shochiku, 1953. DVD. 3.

4.

In this drama, Shukichi and Tomi are the aging couple travelling to Tokyo to visit their children. The trip belies their expectations and ends in discomfort, urging a hurried come back home. On the return trip, Tomi gets sick and eventually dies at her hometown. Her death encourages another family reunion at the end of the movie, this time in the paternal house. “Tokyo Story”, Wikipedia. Last modified July 20, 2020, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokyo_Story.

The New York Times, “Tokyo Story, Critic’s Picks”, September 28, 2010, video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R65wTHVUCGk&list=WL&index=21&t=0s.

Existential Experience”, In Architectural Atmospheres: On the Experience and Politics of Architecture, edited by Christian Borch, 18-41. Berlin: Birkhäuser, 2012. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783038211785.18 26. Pallasmaa, Juhani. “The Sixth Sense: The Meaning of Atmosphere and Mood”.

Architectural Design, no. 86 (November 2016): 126-133. https://doi.org/10.1002/ ad.2121 27. The term refers to precise staging of the actors in a scene to facilitate the performance both in theatre and cinema. “Blocking (Stage)”, Wikipedia, Last modified September 5, 2020, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blocking_(stage).usu.

28. Heidegger, Martin. “The Thing”. In Poetry, Language and Thought, translated by Albert Hofstadter, 161-180. New York: Perennial Library, 1975.

29. Sennett, Richard. Building and Dwelling: Ethics for the City. UK: Penguin, 2018.

5. Joo, Woojeong. The Cinema of Ozu Yasujiro: Histories of the Everyday. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017.

30. S.Casey, Edward. “Habitual Body and Memory in Merleau-Ponty”. Man and World, no. 17 (1984): 279-297. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF0

6. Russell, Catherine. Classical Japanese Cinema Revisited. New York: Continuum, 2011.

31. Singer, Leigh. “ The Enigmatic ‘Pillow Shots’ of Yasujiro Ozu”, BFI. 2016 December 12. https://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/news-bfi/features/ enigmatic-pillow-shots-yasujiro-ozu

7. Standish, Isolde. A New History of Japanese Cinema. New York: Continuum, 2006.

8. Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 2: The Time-image. London: The Athlone Press, 1989.

9. Seamon, David. A Geography of Lifeworld: Movement, Rest and Encounter.

London: Croom Helm Ltd, 1979.

10. From this time on, whenever using ‘we’ in the text, I mean the spectator.

11. Ihde, Don. Technology and the Lifeworld: From Garden to Earth.Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990.

12. There is only one scene in Tokyo Story that the camera moves for a few seconds and that is where the old couple, feeling somehow disoriented, embark on a walk to find their next stop for the day. Over here, as Donald Richie (1974) interprets, the camera does not signal a message but only accompanies the strolling characters, maintaining the same pace and distance.

32. Lichten, Jack. “The Representation of Time as Death: Authentic Being in Tokyo Story and Last Year at Marienbad”, in Ozu: International Essays on the Global Influences of a Japanese Auteur, edited by Wayne Stein and Marc Dipaolo, 151167. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing Inc, 2015. Kindle.

33. Relph, Edward. Place and Placeness. London: Pion, 1976.

34. Burch, Noel. To the Distant Observer: For and Meaning in the Japanese Cinema.

Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1979 35. Canguilhem, Georges. “The Living and Its Milieu”. In Knowledge of Life translated

by Geroulanos Stefanos and Daniela Ginsburg. 98-120. New York: Fordham University Press, 2008.

36. Marcus, Clare Cooper. House as a Mirror of Self: Exploring the Deeper Meaning of Home. Nicolas-Hays Inc, 2006.

13. Richie, Donald. Ozu: His Life and Films. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1974.

37. Tuan, Yi-Fu. Space and Place, the Perspective of Experience. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977.

14. Bordwell, David. and Thompson, Kristin. Film Art: An Introduction. 8th ed. New York: McGraw Hill, 2008.

38. Pallasmaa, Juhani. “Empathic Imagination: Formal and Experiential Projection”.

Architectural Design, no. 84 (September 2014): 80-85. https://doi.org/10.1002/ ad.1812

15. C.Ehrlich, Linda. “Travel Toward and Away: Furusato and Journey in Tokyo Story”, In Ozu’s Tokyo Story, edited by David Desser, 53-75. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

16. Plummer, Henry. The Experience of Architecture. London: Thames and Hudson, 2016.

17. Daniels, Inge. “Japanese homes inside out”. Home Cultures, no. 5 (July 2008): 115139. https://doi.org/10.2752/174063108X333155 18. Teo, You Yenn. This is What Inequality Looks Like. Singapore: Ethos Books, 2018.

19. Ozu, Yasujiro. director. Ohaio [Good Morning] . Shochiku, 1959. DVD. 20. Ozu in a way was testifying the ‘form follows function’ principle. His design looked into the embodied processes of at-homeness, which David Seamon (1989) articulates as ‘body-ballet’ and ‘time-space routines’. These movements are regulated with our body and our home. Ozu, aware of their habitual and embodied nature, attempts to create a home environment that manifests our natural habitat.

21. Sato, Tadao. Currents in Japanese Cinema: Essays. New York: Kodansha International Ltd, 1982.

22. Daniels, Inge. “The ‘Social Death’ of Unused Gif ts; Surplus and Value in Contemporary Japan”. Journal of Material Culture, no. 14 (July 2009): 385-408. https://doi.org/10.1177/1359183509106426 23. Gregson, Nicky. and Beale, Vikki. “Wardrobe Matter: The sorting, Displacement and Circulation of Women’s Clothing”, Geoforum, no. 35 (2004): 689-700. https:// doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2004.03.014 24. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. London: Routledge, 1962.

25. Pallasmaa, Juhani. “Space, Place, and Atmosphere: Peripheral Perception in 30

Embodied At-homeness

Suburban Horror Story: Occupying the Interstitial Spaces of a House JAMES F. KERESTES Ball State University

“The safety and familiarity of houses invites a contemplation of grim compensatory scenarios of penetration and threat.”

Barry Curtis

This paper examines how pochѐ and other typically uninhabitable cavity spaces in traditional architecture are used as passageways in horror films to develop a terrifying narrative. In 1974, the film Black Christmas effectively frightened audiences by basing its narrative around the concept of an intruder using the interstitial spaces of a sorority house to threaten its inhabitants. The unwanted presence of an intruder, real or supernatural, inside the confines of a house eliminates all notions of safety and security. By situating a horror narrative inside a home, or more specifically, inside the pochѐ surrounding living spaces, the genre plays upon the human necessity for a safe sanctuary. As an element of architecture recognized for its superfluous and transitional qualities, pochѐ can present design potential when it is reimagined as functional space.

Using Black Christmas as a design impetus, this paper explores two case studies where traditional American architectural styles are reconfigured to accommodate a larger range of uses and lifestyles.

The first study examines how a Midwest-style 1920s bungalow can reveal alternative methods for composing rooms and spaces of a domestic building typology. The second case study, working with a traditional American foursquare house, continues investigating ways in which inhabitants can further James F. Kerestes

occupy newly formed pochѐ within the home. Both studies draw from an analysis of Black Christmas and previous investigations on the topic of pochѐ.

Fade from black. A static image of a large, three-story Tudor Revival home emerges. Christmas carolers and church bells can be heard faintly in the distance. It is after dark; the title credits for the 1974 film Black Christmas gradually appear on screen.1 Directed by Bob Clark, Black Christmas is a slasher film that tells the story of a sorority house which is terrorized by an unwanted guest. One by one, the sorority sisters are murdered while the killer occupies and moves through innocuous or uninhabitable spaces and cavities within the house.

The Horror film genre reveals to us that homes can be occupied and experienced in ways we do not expect. In the book, Dark Places: The Haunted House in Film, Barry Curtis writes, “The safety and familiarity of houses invites a contemplation of grim compensator y scenarios of penetration and threat”.2 For this reason, numerous movies use residential architecture for their backdrop and location.

Additionally, certain architectural styles, such as the American foursquare, are routinely chosen for their spatial organization and size.

Black Christmas engages the latent architectural conditions of a house, prompting viewers to consider these settings as functional spaces. The film begins from the point of view of the prospective intruder who surveys the exterior of the house, looking for a way inside. This initiates the house as an active character in the film. The interloper gains access to the house by climbing a trellis leading to an attic window, an unnatural entry point. For the remainder of the film, the attic becomes refuge for “Billy” in between killing sprees.

The viewer’s visual and narrative experience of the sorority house is derived from these multiple vantage points. In Black Christmas, alternative representations and interpretations of the house’s spatial organization are revealed through unexpected points of access, the occupation of interstitial 2021 ARCHITECTURE & FILM SYMPOSIUM

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zones, and unconventional sequencing through space.

OCCUPYING RESIDENTIAL POCHÈ Throughout Black Christmas, the killer occupies both interstitial spaces and the architectural pochѐ of the house in order to carry out his crimes unseen. When Clare, the first casualty of the film, is attacked inside her bedroom closet on the second floor of the house, the killer is hiding within what appears to be a secondary cavity in the space. While the sorority sisters and invited guests enjoy a raucous Christmas party on the main floor, Clare’s body is silently transported to the attic. Frequent pans past the attic show Clare, posed in a chair and draped with plastic, more remnant than human.

The eerie reveal raises the question of what discrete path the killer used to move her body to the attic. Did he pass through the walls and ceilings with his burden so that he could remain in the attic with her corpse? Did the house somehow aid his actions and condemn Clare to her brutal fate?

The extent and manner in which the killer occupies invisible interior spaces in Black Christmas specifically highlights the design potential hidden within the pochѐ of the residence. As a convention of architectural drawing and drafting, pochѐ is a visual representation centered on redaction and the absence of contents. In his essay titled Pochѐ, Donald Kunze highlights the duality of represented spaces as both the moments where architecture becomes legible as an idea as well as the location where ideas are encountered as architecture. 3 By altering and occupying the redacted areas of pochѐ, we can inhabit residential architecture in alternative ways.

In his book Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, Robert Venturi states, “A building can include things within things as well as spaces within spaces. And its interior configurations can contrast with its container…”. 4 The mediator between these conditions is where we find pochѐ.

The expression and amount of pochѐ between the inside and outside of a volume is revealed at its openings and thresholds.

Horror films expand upon the reveal of pochѐ by occupying the space between these two layers.

THE COMFORTS OF HOME Despite its horrific and tense dramatization, Black Christmas evokes nostalgic feelings of comfort, community, and place, facilitated by an architectural language of familiarity and expectation. The Tudor revival style of the house, a callback to England’s Tudor period of the 1500s, is comprised of numerous common design strategies and details found in contemporary suburban dwellings. The front façade is organized symmetrically, topped with a series of gabled roofs and with the front door located in the center of the elevation.

The windows are proportional to one another and equally distributed across an exterior clad with stucco and brick and surrounded by a highly manicured front yard. The interior 32

layouts and scale of the rooms align with the organizational logic of the exterior, emphasizing the entertaining spaces on the first floor and bedrooms on the second. In addition to the attic, the house also has a basement, a second uninhabitable space that factors into the climax of the film.

The film does not directly reveal the location or quantity of all the rooms in the house. However, it can be concluded that the ground floor layout is relatively symmetrical along both the long and short axis of the rectangular building. There is a large hallway through the main entry and vestibule where a winding, main staircase with multiple landings leads to the second floor. Upon arrival at the second landing, there is another set of steps leading to an alcove and ladder for access to the attic, off to the side. The second floor appears to have four bedrooms, each with closets and some with fireplaces.

Numerous thresholds, hallways, and residual spaces exist in order to connect the rooms within the highly compartmentalized floor plans. The thick interior walls have multiple layers of wood paneling and decorative trim that allows for numerous built-in storage compartments.

These architectural and tectonic conditions also generate an overabundance of pochѐ. This is where we are reminded of the comfort that surrounds these usually uninhabited spaces, which is what creates the sense of uncanny when the inhabited spaces are used against their purpose.

Though the viewer can recognize the physical characteristics of the house and predict the activities or functions that would occur in certain spaces, domesticity (and all of its idiosyncrasies) has changed over the past 45 years since the film’s release. Developments in technology, public policy, culture, and social constructs raise the question of whether an architectural language of “home” requires an adherence to past formal and programmatic typologies, or whether residential dwellings can become non-deterministic, androgynous, and occupant defined. For example, the first domestic cul-de-sac of Radburn, New Jersey, built in the 1920s aspired to generate and multiply idealistic neighborhoods, resulting in a redundancy of building structures. 5 Similarly, the bungalows of the same period addressed a need for worker housing in highly industrialized areas, giving rise to an abundance of identical houses. These examples do not reflect the unique lifestyles of their occupants, yet numerous new versions of these houses are still built today, and are multiplying.

ALTERNATIVE COMPOSITIONS OF POCHÈ Inspired by the intruder’s activation of interstitial spaces in Black Christmas, I initiated an investigation into the latent potential of residential pochѐ and concealed spaces which could act as a vehicle for evolving and adapting conventional residential typologies. I began by revisiting the 1991 Tourisms installation by Diller Scofidio.6 The installation Suburban Horror Story

Figure 1: Screening composite of 1920s bungalow where x-rays were taken from multiple vantage points in order to unveil existing pochѐ conditions and indicate the introduction of new delineations of redaction. Image by author.

consists of paraphernalia from specific tourist attractions located in each of the 50 U.S. states, and displayed inside 50 identical suitcases. The suitcases serve to transport the artifacts between exhibit locations and function as display cases during installation. 7 Images generated during the airport security screening of luggage inspired the contents and themes of the exhibition. An x-ray image of a suitcase reveals the interior volume of the luggage depicted as a volumetric void, defined by the suitcase’s exterior surfaces, and inhabited by the outlines and overlapping forms of the objects contained within.8 Like an architectural plan in twodimensional representation, the contents are rendered into abstract and unrecognizable shapes, while the overlapping boundaries create new figurations and possible alternate readings of once familiar profiles. The x-ray, in turn, produces a solid/void image illustrated as pochѐ that unifies the contents as one singular composition rather than a series of discrete parts. What would be revealed if this process were deployed on a house? Would new concentrations and delineations of pochѐ emerge as potentially occupiable space?

Like the Tourisms suitcase reference, I digitally modeled and James F. Kerestes

“x-rayed” a common Midwest-style 1920s bungalow from a series of different vantage points. (Fig. 1) Non-orthographic views were deployed to identify unknown or unexpected relationships between the various densities of mass in the building. The bungalow was selected due to its interior room layout and exterior façade composition which are symmetrical and directly inform the order, logic, and rhythm of the overall design; much like the house in Black Christmas, but at a smaller scale.

A composite image of x-rays of the bungalow revealed new configurations of pochѐ where a density of the surfaces overlap. The uncovered delineations of pochѐ served as a guide to explicitly extrude geometry through the compartmentalized logic of the house in order to disrupt the symmetrical composition. This was achieved using the design operations of splitting, subtraction, and addition. I transformed the bungalow’s volumetric composition into a more open, continuous, and connected layout. (Fig. 2) By disrupting the volumetric order of the original bungalow, I produced numerous spatial and figural iterations where the emerging pochѐ distributions blurred the boundary between the container and the contained and between the exterior 2021 ARCHITECTURE & FILM SYMPOSIUM

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Figure 2: Starting with the solid/void plan of the existing bungalow in the top left corner of the figure, this series of iterations reveal numerous ways in which the pochѐ of the bungalow can define and order various spatial arrangements. Image by author.

Figure 3: Set in a speculative context, the definition of the structure and its overall figuration blurs between legible and illegible relative to its surroundings.

Image by author.

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and interior. Rather than providing a design with a limited number of ways to move through the house, the retooled plan depicted an endless number of routes that could be taken through the structure. Additionally, the overall distribution of pochѐ produced a structure with no legible front façade or overall hierarchical logic. (Fig. 3) A wide range of transition points emerged in place of a consistent, ordered distribution of thresholds and points of entry. Finally, the overlapping interior spaces, each defined by various geometric outlines, gave occupants the option to craft the identity of these conditions without a predetermined expectation. The structure was activated in a non-static manner through userdefined activities.

A HORROR FILM’S FAVORITE HOUSE Horror films rely heavily on long, drawn out, tense scenes for the purposes of effective storytelling. The spatial conditions where the narrative occurs are a contributing factor to the success of the narrative as a whole. In Black Christmas, the largest, more spacious rooms for entertaining are situated on the main floor of the Tudor revival style house. The second floor, where the majority of the murders occur, consists of smaller, confined spaces and bedrooms. The cluster of smaller rooms and hallways on the second floor implies that it would be more difficult for the victims to run away unimpeded.

A reveal of the house’s overall order, composition, and size does not happen until the climax of the film where a chase occurs throughout the house. The chase is initiated when the last remaining sorority sister, Jess, learns the killer is in the house and discovers him in her sister’s bedroom on the second floor. She flees from the upstairs’ narrow hallway, down the main stairs, and seeks refuge in the basement. As Jess runs through the house, accompanied by the camera, her path seems circuitous and endless. A classic horror film trope, the chase scene is where an individual or group of people are pursued by a threatening presence. The immense fear and vulnerability that compels a victim to flee illustrates the threat of the antagonist to the audience. For the viewer, the chase scene depicts the house as larger than reality, contributing to a feeling of overwhelming terror.

It is common, in horror films, for a traditional American foursquare style house to be used during an interior domestic chase scene. This is visible in 1978’s Halloween,9 1979’s The Amityville Horror,10 and 1996’s Scream.11 This style of building footprint, like the Tudor style, has a square or rectangularshaped ground floor which is subdivided into four relatively equal squares all sharing a consistent, uninterrupted path of travel. This floor plan layout makes it easy to accommodate and entertain guests because the entire ground floor can be occupied at the same time. The second floor of these layout styles tend to be more compartmentalized due to the location

James F. Kerestes

of the primary staircase and the expectation that the second floor consists of private bedrooms. As a camera tracks a chase scene on the ground floor, the participants can travel through the entire level without moving through the same space twice before navigating to another level or exiting the building.

Replicating the previous study of the bungalow, I turned my investigation to the foursquare in an attempt to expand upon the architectural qualities that makes this building type so appealing to the horror genre. (Fig. 4) In the same manner as the bungalow case study, I made a composite image of x-rays taken from various vantage points around a foursquare house. This informed a series of extractions and additions to the compositional logic of the building. The result added a third floor, relocated the main stair outside the perimeter of the house, generated an irregular exterior silhouette, and maintained the circulation paths on the ground floor common to the traditional foursquare. A number of interstitial zones or varying concentrations of pochѐ emerged from the disruption and reorganization of the volumes. Floor plans depicted a multiplicity of realized pathways, thresholds, and spatial sequences that allowed numerous ways to experience the house depending on the path of travel.

The newly configured second floor consisted of a large bedroom, bathroom, and study. (Fig. 5) The shaded, gray areas in the Figure 5 floor plan represent occupiable, unstructured spaces within the house. These areas are engaged through a variety of nontraditional pathways and openings. For example, to occupy the zone between the study and the bedroom, one would have to travel through the first floor ceiling soffit. Entry to the area adjacent to the bathroom and main stair is achieved by dropping down from an opening in the third floor. These gray areas do not have a prescribed program or set function, allowing the inhabitants to determine the activities in these spaces.

CONCLUSION Black Christmas ends in the same way it begins, with a static image of the house exterior. Bookending the film in this way reinforces the role the house plays in facilitating the tragic events of the narrative. The killer’s use of unstructured spaces in the house highlights the latent potential within pochѐ and its value as an unstructured or programmed inhabitable space. As seen in the case study results, past formal typologies of suburban homes can still evolve and adapt into new configurations and compositions that in turn, can respond to the ever-changing conditions of contemporary domesticity.

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Figure 4: Altered traditional American foursquare house. The configuration and composition is the byproduct of investigations into occupying the unstructured spaces of the original home. A result of disrupting the original two-story house was the addition of a third floor. Image by author.

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Figure 5: The proposed second floor plan of an altered foursquare house accommodating the occupying of pochѐ zones. Image by author.

ENDNOTES 1. Black Christmas (Warner Bros.) directed by Bob Clark in 1974.

2. Barry Curtis, Dark Places: The Haunted House in Film, (London: Reaktion Books, 2008) 33.

3. Donald Kunze, “Poche” essay found in the book Plumbing: Sounding Modern Architecture. Nadir Lahiji & D.S. Friedman, Editors. (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1997) 144.

4. Venturi, Robert, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1977) 71.

5. Cynthia L. Girling & Kenneth I. Helphand, Yard, Street, Park: Design of Suburban Space, (New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1994) 58-69.

6. Elizabeth Diller & Ricardo Scofidio, Flesh: Architectural Probes, (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1994) 198-221.

7. Diller Scofidio + Renfro. Tourisms: Suitcase Studies, 1991. https://dsrny. com/project/tourisms-suitcase-studies?index=false&section=projects& tags=installation&search=built 8. Ibid.

9. Halloween (Compass International Pictures, Aquarius Releasing) directed by John Carpenter in 1978.

10. The Amityville Horror (American International Pictures) directed by Stuart Rosenberg in 1979.

11. Scream (Dimension Films) directed by Wes Craven in 1996.

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The Cultural Impasse of Past Futures and Future Pasts in Brazil and Westworld.

WILL FU Princeton University

“The future as such has succumbed to retrospection.”

Mark Fisher The dialectic attribution between utopia and dystopia is a tenuous thread of subjective judgment.

In the films Brazil of 1985 and Westworld of 1973, the audience is presented with a pressing exacerbated contemporary condition: the subordination of progressing technologies to the repetition of past cultural forms. The stalled regurgitation of past cultural forms through special effects, character tropes, and historical references reflect a current condition of angst and frustration.

In Brazil, the bureaucratic crutches of a ruling system invade physical spaces and condition the psych of compliant citizens represented through precarious logistical systems, and degrading beauxarts buildings. Within the backdrop of Westworld, comes the first mobilization of computer graphic imagery and the collaborative presence of computer engineers and animators in entertainment.

Genre-specific amusement parks stage the social acceptance of past society’s violent delights. The essay will closely analyze the prevailing attitude of nostalgia and dystopia in these two films as suggestive representations of the fragmentary contemporary: a space absent of cultural invention, collective ambition, and critical dialog.

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The Utopian wish in Science Fiction movies operates by a fundamental paradox; an unattainable future that is yet, necessarily valorized in order to present productive difference. Outlined by Frederic Jameson in “Archaeology of the Future,” the Utopian wish creates the necessary distance in which subjects who see the present through the perspective of the future, enabling viewers to engage in its future reconstitution. Here Jameson formulates that Utopia in itself “is a framework for utopias, plural, a place where people are at liberty to join together voluntarily to pursue and attempt to realize their own vision of the good life in the ideal community.1” Rather than unconditional unities, the ever-expanding archipelago of utopias situated on a neutral plane of immanence proposes a break from established definitions of Utopia’s cultural production and governance.

On the flipside, by exacerbating existing trends, the dystopian genre reveal that actions needed to achieve and sustain this ideal world would produce questionable infringements on individual rights, freedoms, and expressions.

This is where Science Fiction movies go beyond their genre and perform as necessary vehicles of social critique by immersing audiences in radical alternatives. Yet the movies of focus: Brazil and Westworld allude to another pervasive present reality of stalled cultural invention. Outlined by the late Mark Fisher; Science Fiction today is inundated with already established cultural forms and past future depictions. While the futures imagined by early Science Fiction films developed in parallel with technological invention of its time, current output of this genre of movies present no formal or narrative innovation. New technologies here are subordinated to the refurbishment of old forms, obfuscating familiar storytelling devices and imagery through spectacular computer-generated effects.

The essay will interrogate the transformation of the Science Fiction genre by counterbalancing the utopian impulse of cultural and technological innovation in Westworld with the nostalgic dystopian tone of Brazil which exemplifies the slow cancellation of the future today.

The Cultural Impasse of Past Futures and Future Pasts in Brazil and Westworld

necessary space of refuge from a stifling reality.

A consciousness of nostalgia temporally wafts through the film through the pervasive consumption of past movies and music. Workers playing a black and white film through the periphery of his gaze to the ambiance of past radio tunes hints at a world vacant of the creative capacity to generate new cultural material and are instead content with the familiar comfort of repetition. Access to outdated cultural materials are never shown as collective enterprises, but a self-serving indulgence. The world of the film is not overtly stated (in an attempt to create direct parallels with the audience’s present), as the time period exists “somewhere in the 20th century.” This ambiguity stages a world out of time through the bricolage of a variety of styles and genres.

Fog machines blur dream sequences and reality of crumbling art deco architecture inspired by Fritz Lang’s Metropolis.

Long stalling shots show buildings rendered in high contrast liken to German expressionism. Elements of 40s film noir proliferate through the film, from the long shadows cast from subjects, architectural elements, and machinery, to the mute formal attire of the workers. People speak English with both an American and British accent, live in cold apartments punctuated with antique furniture, and use whimsical gadgets that teeter towards collapse.

Figure 1: (Screenshot) Ad for domestic futures through consolidated bureaucratic industries, Three Reasons: Brazil ( 00:48).

BRAZIL (1985) The forlorn whistling melody of Geoff Muldaur’s song Brazil is heard diegetically through the dystopic Science Fiction movie “Brazil” of 1985 by Terry Gilliam. The main character Sam hums this melancholic tune while executing mundane tasks (sending checks, driving, walking about) that fully encompass his life. This particular rendition by Geoff Muldaur is a tribute to the original; Ary Barroso’s Aquarela do Brazil or “Watercolor of Brazil” of 1939 written while Ary observed the beautiful landscape from the confines of his home due to an unfortunate storm. In a similar state, Terry Gilliam’s first initial vision for the film was an everyday worker listening to Latin songs through the radio on the beach. The title “Brazil” here does double work; to suggest an idea of escape to an enchanting exotic country while also pointing to the military dictatorship in control of the country at the time of the film’s release. Hailed as a quirky alternative to 1984, the cinematic spaces in Terry Gilliam’s Brazil use the devices of dystopia to weave a critique of the bureaucratic present and a near-future situation in which creativity and collective empathy are utterly stifled. In the context of this essay, the world of Brazil perhaps most blatantly represents the psychological and social effects of a stalled culture that voluntarily obsess over the past as a Will Fu

PRECARIOUS PARTS Disorienting labyrinths of corridors, high cubicles coupled with the ubiquitous tedium of paperwork contribute to a sense of claustrophobia and frustration echoed by the city’s inhabitants. The intricate maze of wires, tubes, and pipes that represent the omnipresence the bureaucratic system produce small errors in the film which blossom into larger consequences. In fact, the whole film exemplifies a kind of defeatist narrative structure of a domino effect of happenstance. For example, the entire firm hinges upon a fly jamming an automated typewriter which causes a misspelling, leading to the wrongful arrest and execution of “Buttle” rather than the intended anarchist “Tuttle.2” Another more sophisticated sequence comes from an offhanded remark

by Sam’s new boss criticizing Sam’s suit in light of his recent promotion to the Department of Records. Changing into a new suit, he leaves his work pass in his old suit pocket. A misdial in the elevator lands him on a restricted floor where his lack of identification forces him to run away from the security officer and by coincidence bumps into the rebellious Jill, marking his descent towards governmental dissidence and revolt.

This precarious narrative structure finds a material parallel in the woefully mis-sized and outdated technology in the film. Technological progress accelerates through improper build-up, where existing parts awkwardly interface with the new. Smalls computer screens are magnified by large lenses, 2021 ARCHITECTURE & FILM SYMPOSIUM

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Figure 2: (Screenshot) Dialog between Sam and Jill through walls and other boundaries impede proper understanding, Brazil ( 45:10).

and typewriters are jerry-rigged to operate electronically.

This attitude of negligence and oversight suggests a larger social absence of responsibility and accountability directed towards individuals. Errors are deferred and passed on as the responsibility of some other nameless department with no effort to go beyond the personal jurisdictions for the betterment of others. Malfunctions of systems constantly backfire on the government and its citizens, resulting in explosions that cause severe casualties which are in turn attributed to nameless terrorists that represent an imageless other that instills fearful obedience from the population.

Under the rhetoric of convenience, ducts invade all spaces, disfiguring even the most luxurious spaces including Mrs. Lowry’s ornate apartment and a lavish French restaurant.

While the imageability of the technology of Archigram was mobilized towards an optimistic synthesis of technological and architecture systems outlined by Reyner Banham, the aesthetics of performance here contribute to the oppressive tyranny of the bureaucratic system. Banham’s support of Archigram comes in consideration of a necessary proposition of how these new systems could not only impact how architecture is dressed but fundamentally provides “an image starved world a new vision of the city of the future, a city of components on racks, components in stacks, components plugged into networks and grids, a city of components being swung into place by cranes.3” This neat modular logic is absent in the world of Brazil. The aesthetics of these large, grey, low hanging systems in turn assert the timeless sustained presence of the status quo. Ducts remain undecorated in a diverse range of architecturally styled spaces, even during Christmas. The only escape offered by Terry Gilliam comes at the end of the film where Sam retreats into insanity. The dream that he conjures is a pastel hazy scene with Jill in an 40

autonomous mobile home parked in nature; unplugged and beyond the ministry’s reach.

PUSHING PAPERWORK In the same way the hand of bureaucracy propagates through mechanical systems, paperwork in the world of Brazil operates to obscure the errors of the government.

An exorbitant number of forms, receipts for receipts, and departments contort the aim of efficiency onto itself, creating an unending sequence of mundane logistical actions. A Kafkaesque condition of banal managerial tasks stifle the threat of productivity, critical thinking, and creativity. The material accumulation of paper layers on top of everything, creating distance between individuals.

Through this outdated process of documentation, paperwork dehumanizes the residents of Brazil, subjugating them to a cold objective process of representation where emotions and human reasoning become trivialized. Characters are also personifications of their professional status; Mrs. Laury’s high heel hat and repeated plastic surgery operations note one form of image based social duty while Informational Retrieval workers are shown subsumed in, around, and through the paperwork. By boxing people into particular roles of identification, the film shows how the state is able to carry out their violence with utter indifference. Those who threaten the establishment become actors who don’t play within the rules. The “terrorist” Tuttle is branded as a cheater for doing freelance maintenance work by not complying with Central service protocols. Towards the end of the film, in one of Sam’s dreams, Tuttle is mummified and killed by a gust of paperwork, the very thing that deters his ability to do actual work.

What is distinct about Brazil is the absence of a Big Brother figure, the real central antagonist is the anesthetic acceptance of the given situation and the general lack of empathy. The self-defeatist civilians in Brazil have no ambitions to take on shared responsibility outside of their given purview out of fear The Cultural Impasse of Past Futures and Future Pasts in Brazil and Westworld

Figure 3: Black and White movies distract workers at work on small screens amplified by large lenses.

Figure 4: (Screenshot) Mechanical systems penetrate with indifference in even the most lavish high class locations, Brazil ( 21:42).

Will Fu

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Figure 5: (Screenshot) Office tug-o-war with fellow neighbor between a shared desk obscured by high wall partitions foster alienation and indifference, Brazil ( 1:06:57).

of punishment. The lack of a meaningful connection is spatially expressed through claustrophobic spaces where barriers and holes deter any semblance of collective dialog.

These boundaries brew miscommunication and a sense of alienation that pit individuals against each other negating their ability to come together in any meaningful way. Sam here, acts as a generic template for the milieu of his society.

His personal fantasies of escape remain within the comfort of his imagination, where the crippling forces of bureaucracy sees Sam immobilized and compliant. Even the onsite movie locations used in the film exemplify this mood of cultural and social impasse. These abandoned sites of industry became perfect canvases to present Brazil as a stagnant, bleak world of gradual entropy. The basement of the CWS Flour Mill in London was used to depict Sam’s place of work while the interior of the cooling tower of the Battersea Power Station was used to shoot Sam’s torture scenes. The gritty decaying remnants of a past industry coupled with elaborately detailed sets shot through wide-angle lenses and Steadicam, immerse the viewer into vaguely familiar scenes of modernist collapse.

WESTWORLD (1973) There is no overt semblance of post-industrial deterioration 42

in the world of Westworld. Instead, the film presents a strict dichotomy between a sleek futuristic haven set amidst a barren landscape. However, the narrative structure of the film folds a complex set of constructed realities on itself through a controlled access based on the role of the characters. While park goers navigate the degree zero simulation of this dressed technological marvel of an old western town, technicians, engineers, security and the android themselves freely navigate between the park and its maintenance underbelly.

It is from the filmgoer’s exposure to this incredible logistical and material investment that sets up both a critique of science fiction and the old spaghetti western genre.

Its prescient posthuman tactics gave means for audiences to empathize with non-human entities. Haraway introduces the cyborg as a celebration of the relative difference between culturally constructed dichotomizes of the organic and mechanic, natural, and artificial. As a counter to the innocence of human nature that celebrates humanity above the complex entanglement of ecologies, the emancipation of the androids in Westworld operates to challenge the sacred essentialism that defines human nature; consciousness and free will. In a similar fashion to the protagonists of the cyberpunk genre which usually deploys social outcasts who are delegitimized because of their difference and denied certain basic human rights, the human-like features of the androids draw sympathy and support from the audience as gradual malfunctions lead to the start of their rebellion. As the The Cultural Impasse of Past Futures and Future Pasts in Brazil and Westworld

were dressed in uniform colors to create a greater figure ground distinction for post processing. The large pixelations of the Gunslinger were highly abstract and low-resolution.

By understanding the visual output of the Gunslinger in the movie itself, the main park goer the audience follows, Peter, avoids detection by lying motionless in a room full of broken androids. The experience of this mosaic composition of computer vision, although it lacked acuity, was a radical introduction towards future electronic immersive and interactive environments. Liken to urban shock, Toffler presents computer simulations as a form of “future shock” in which “advances in fields of science and technology will fire off like a series of rockets carrying us out of the past, plunging us deeper into the new society…It offers only the highly combustible mixture of transience and novelty. 5” As technological innovation intersects with cultural production, audiences are literally presented with new lenses of perception, marking the film as a vanguard for other media franchises like Star Wars IV: A New Hope (1977), to employ unconventional collaborators (software and computer engineers) towards pivotal aesthetics of digital expression and experimentation.

Figure 6: (Screenshot) Peter evades capture by blending motionlessly with other androids due to the low-res pixelated vision of the Gunslinger, Westworld ( 45:10).

Gunslinger breaks free from his program and begins to turn on the park’s guests, certain parts of the film are delivered to the audience through the computerized gaze of the android.

The Gunslinger played by Yul Brynner (who played a similar role in the “The Magnificent Seven,” would later on serve as a new archetypical figure of inspiration for other Sci-Fi films – Replicants in Blade Runner, the Terminator, and the serial killer Michael Myers from Halloween.) Through the calculating gaze of an android, the film faithfully expressed the increasing angst of technological progress of its time.

ALIGNED VISIONS Westworld was one of the first films to employ CGI (computergenerated imagery.) Realized in the film as the pixelized first person perspective of the Gunslinger android, the collaboration with computer animator John Whitney Jr brought about several novel cross-disciplinary precedents.

Celluloid footage was converted by computers into highly pixelated images which open new doors of flexibility and manipulation, giving new plasticity to film. The image according to Whitney Jr could be “reconstituted with different contrasts, different resolutions, different colors. We can enlarge, stretch, squeeze, twist, rotate it, position it in space in any way. 4 ” The transference of a chemical process of indexing images to one of electronic signalization, motivates changes in both the technical strategies of shooting a movie as well as the narrative of the movie. For instance, actors Will Fu

GENRE PLAY However, these technological marvels are undermined by the cinematic space of the movie. Set in a future post-scarcity world, Westworld mixes popular genres and Cold War imagery to reflect anxiety of the outside world. The park’s control room is a direct reference to the screen saturated tapestry of NASA’s mission control center. Large screens showing generalized information loom over other smaller screens arrayed around workstations. This is where the Delos (the park’s managing company) collect data and monitor every interaction and event between the three distinctly themed settings: Westworld, Medieval World, and Roman World.

Surrendering historical accuracy, the parks instead are more invested in their Disneyfication. Playing into our pre-existent knowledge of fictional pasts from other novels and movies, intertextuality 6 intensifies the nestling of cultural tropes of these past societies. The nestling of an old Western into a Science Fiction creates a clear spatial dichotomy between the sleek future in which these visitors come from and a simulated vacation environment in which high-tech systems and apparatuses are hidden by a thin dressing. The park scenes were shot at the Old Tucson Studios in Arizona, the same Wild West Town set used for iconic Westerns like Red River (1948,) The Violent Men (1955,) 3:10 to Yuma (1957,) and The Magnificent Seven (1960.) The staging of genrespecific stereotypes become appropriate supporting devices to the immersive programmatic role of the amusement park; which is historically seen like World Fairs, as sites where novel technological inventions and new mediatic experiences are first introduced to the public in a safe, 2021 ARCHITECTURE & FILM SYMPOSIUM

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controlled environment. By LARPing regressive forms of past societal structures; the autocratic struggle of sovereignty between Popes and Kings in Medieval World, the presence of slaves in the Roman World, and the absence of order in favor of a rugged individualism in the “Wild West,” it calls into question the ideological motivations of the future society.

The escapism offered by this vacation park perhaps allows an explicit outlet/release for the rich or a hint of frustration or disappointment with the future present.

FUTURE ENDS Our trust in the future is undercut today by a perspective of increasing skepticism and dread. Popularized TV shows and movies critique this animosity towards the increasing monopoly of technological innovation with shows like Black Mirror, and Mr. Robot painting a near future exacerbated by inequality. The fiction of dystopia today competes with the increasing surreal scenes of reality. Similar to Westworld, our bodies in Deleuze’s society of control are perceived as fragments of information defined by the institutional systems we interface with. Seen as web history, test marks, credit scores, or genetic makeup, the main threat of the systems of present day is access. In a similar fashion to which the authoritarian presence regulate access to services in Brazil, we are all in a way auto-regulated by systems whose inner logic is hidden by an obscurity of legal restrictions (patents) and technical expertise. On the flip side, we have someone like Elon Musk who radiates a kind of technological determinism.

Musk has won worldwide admiration and support from young people by sidelining actual workable effective solutions for ambitious hypothetical projects. However, Musk’s futurism is really for a select few. These utopian projects show a divide in which commercial rockets give the opportunity for those who can pay for it to escape the climate crisis of Earth and live on Mars or protect themselves from a post-apocalyptic terrain in a bulletproof Cybertruck.

As sites of utopia and dystopia share a reality divided by class distinction, both populations look towards shared cultural relics of the past for a sense of habitual comfort. Retromania resuscitates the zombie forms of proven past representations of the future. Remakes, and expanding canons, are seen as economically failsafe investments which facilitate comfortable spectacles of consumption which deploys nostalgia to funnel cross generational audiences to pre-established future depictions. What was once a vehicle for social critique and speculation animated by social theory and philosophy has become a mere cultural artifact. Early Science fiction clarifies the present with images of the future, breaking down boundaries and creating appropriate cross-disciplinary collaborations that reflected upon the acceleration of culture pushed by technology. The American writer Mike Davis says that William Gibson’s “extrapolative science fiction can operate as prefigurative social theory, as well as an 44

anticipatory opposition politics to the cyber-fascism lurking over the next horizon.7 ” With the nascent developments of the world wide web, the negative utopia present in cyberpunk films depicts a resistance of a present world characterized by dehumanized processes where people are reduced to statistics and commodities like that of Brazil. The future dystopia of Brazil or the negative utopia of Westworld in the glazed eyes of the contemporary audience is seen merely as an established style. The future has no collective ambition or coherence but resides as an endless looping of revivalism facilitated by more and more sophisticated forms of digital recall. As Mark Fisher would lament by these local permutations; “loss is itself lost.8”

ENDNOTES 1. Jameson, Fredric. Archaeologies of the Future: the Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. (London: Verso, 2007), 217.

2. Eggert, Brian. “Brazil.” Deep Focus Review. Deep Focus Review, December 18, 1985. https://deepfocusreview.com/definitives/brazil/.

3. Whiteley, Nigel. Reyner Banham: Historian of the Immediate Future.

(Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2003), 175.

4. Williamson, Colin. “‘An Escape into Reality’: Computers, Special Effects, and the Haunting Optics of Westworld (1973).” Imaginations: Journal of Cross-Cultural Image Studies/Revue Détudes Interculturelle De Limage 9, no. 1 (2018), 24.

5. Ibid., 22.

6. Jameson, Frederic. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. London: Verso, 1993.

7. Featherstone, Mike. Cyberspace/Cyberbodies/Cyberpunk: Cultures of Technological Embodiment. (London: SAGE, 2000), 8.

8. Fisher, Mark. Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures. Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2014.

IMAGE CREDITS 1. Criterion Collection. Three Reasons: Brazil. YouTube, uploaded by Criterion Collection, 21 Dec. 2012, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=aYzUishMeck&ab_channel=criterioncollection.

2. Gilliam, Terry, director. Brazil. Amazon, https://www.amazon.com/gp/ video/detail/B00D6BQQ0S/ref=atv_yv_hom_c_unkc_1_1.

3. Ta f t , N i c o l e, I n t h e f u t u r e, t h e r e ’s a l w a y s p a p e r w o r k, 2 9 J u n e . 2 0 1 8 , h t t p s : // s p e c u l a t i v e c h i c . c o m / 2 0 1 8 / 0 6 / 2 9 / silver-screen-resolution-take-two-brazil/.

4. Gilliam, Terry, director. Brazil. Amazon, https://www.amazon.com/gp/ video/detail/B00D6BQQ0S/ref=atv_yv_hom_c_unkc_1_1.

5. Ibid., 6. Price, David A. How Michael Crichton’s ‘Westworld’ Pioneered M o d e r n S p e c i a l E f f e c t s , T h e N e w Yo r k e r, M a y 1 4 , 2 0 1 3 , h t t p s : // w w w. n e w y o r k e r. c o m / t e c h /a n n a l s - o f - t e c h n o l o g y/ how-michael-crichtons-westworld-pioneered-modern-special-effects.

The Cultural Impasse of Past Futures and Future Pasts in Brazil and Westworld

Fleeting Structures, Vanishing Trajectories

MARINA MONTRESOR ETH Zurich, Department of Architecture

“All of a sudden, on the turbulent streets of Tokyo, I realised that a valid image of this city might very well be an electronic one. And not only my sacred celluloid images. In its own language, the video camera was capturing this city in an appropriate way; I was shocked. The language of images was not the privilege of cinema. Wasn’t it necessary then to reevaluate everything? All notions of identity, language, images, authorship?”

Wim Wenders

Tokyo is often described as one of the first modern metropolises, due to its fast expansion following Second World War’s devastation. It has also often been deemed the quintessential “city of movement”, not only for its sheer size, but also for its impermanent structures, hybrid character, and centerless, dynamic configuration.

In the 1980s, Tokyo was a dense, vibrant city in full expansion, yet with an underlying sense of imminent decline. The text analyzes the original work of three filmmakers, each tackling the zeitgeist of ‘80s Tokyo from different angles: Chris Marker (Sans Soleil, 1983), Wim Wenders (Tokyo-ga, 1985; Notebook on Cities and Clothes, 1989), Katsuhiro Otomo (Akira, 1988), to highlight how a city of perennial, constitutive movement, together with cinema, the technique of representation based on movement, can mutually reinforce each other through their specific agencies.

Alongside the four movies, the paper refers to coeval impressions of Tokyo recorded by philosophers, writers and architects, aiming to provide a vision of a city which, with movement as its constitutive core, can only be represented by means of moving images.

Marina Montresor

Cities exist, like cinema, in the dimensions of time and movement; regarding what architecture has borrowed from cinema, Paul Virilio has shown how concepts of sequence, speed, displacement, memory (imposed trajectory), enable to compose an architectural space based not only on what is seen but also on what has been memorized as a succession of sequences, perceived to follow one another.¹ This relation between perception, interpretation, and remembrance happens in both the experience of space and that of movies: while in an urban environment the beholder moves between a series of carefully disposed phenomena which she absorbs sequentially through her visual sense,² in cinema this carefully arranged series flows in front of an immobile spectator, yet recreating a similar perceptual effect; even if the images composing a film have "a field of view that is very narrow compared with the experience of actual, three-dimensional space"³ and a lot remains off-screen, cinema provides a very phenomenologically effective way of conveying spaces and indeed a vast body of literature exists regarding the mutual relation between movies and cities,⁴ as well as on the equivalence between the sequential experience of space and the material nature of film⁵—a rapid succession of recorded images, simulating movement when reproduced.

As graveyards were considered the perfect setting for the first photographic exposures, due to their utter immobility and stillness,⁶ cities were the preferred background and subject of the first movies⁷—one famous example being Man with a Movie Camera by Dziga Vertov—with their pullulating life and ever-changing landscape as the perfect subject for the new medium. Of all cities, Tokyo during the 1980s certainly occupies a place of its own; a city in constant change, already embodying most of the conditions which would become typical of so many metropolises at the beginning of the XXI century, it represents the perfect subject and main protagonist for movies aimed at recording the spirit of their epoch.

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relations with Tokyo; each highlights a specific modus essendi of the city, yet all together, they compose a mesmerizing portrait of it, moving around while filming its unique fictional reality.

The former, by doing a poetic portrait of Tokyo as a “pole of survival”, consciously moves along the blurred line of fiction and non-fiction; the second, by chasing the Japanese spirit through the personalities of Yashuhiro Ozu (Tokyo-ga) and Yohji Yamamoto (Notebook on Cities and Clothes) ends up narrating the city with its idiosyncrasies and peculiar characters and culture; the latter by doing an "animated post-apocalyptic cyberpunk film",⁸ addresses one of the most deeply-rooted fears of the Japanese society—the possibility of a nuclear disaster and the aftermaths of technology’s and progress’ failures.

In each movie, movement plays a central role in both a figurative and a metaphorical sense, from the way of filming and depicting to the very meaning which movements of both camera and city embody.

A CITY IN FIERI In the decades around 1980, Tokyo stands at the crest of its post-war growth and its future economic bubble and following crisis; regarded with fascination from the rest of the world as the Asian miracle of capitalism—an extremely successful experiment of post-war US influence through the rise of a capitalist-socialist hybrid⁹ where technology and progress, up until that moment considered positive promises of endless possibilities, are starting to be questioned. A city of acceleration, in constant change and becoming, Tokyo offers a very compelling example of a milieu hardly perceivable from a privileged, fixed point of view, where movement is the only antidote to avoid getting lost in its vastness and chaos.

There is nowhere to get a proper view of Tokyo; its main streets and squares are not about providing vistas,10 and the best approximation of the essence of the city can only be conquered flowing through its streets, following everchanging flows. Yet the movement is not continuous: as the city unfolds in an amoeba-like fashion,11 spreading in all directions, the attempt of crossing it along straight lines would not result in a climax towards a center or a periphery, but rather enhance its utterly desultory landscape. Different densities, building heights, gardens, one-family houses, temples, huge shopping malls alternate themselves in an apparently chaotic fashion, with a variety of connective and purposive spaces dissolved within a single field of flow.

Since the moment Edo (as Tokyo was formerly known) evolved from a fishing village into a growing city to become one of the largest metropolises on the planet, a bewildering speed of construction and destruction—due to wars, natural disasters, 46

fires—has characterized the city and influenced the spirit of its people. As Ian Buruma observed regarding the impermanent state of built matter in the city, "not so very long ago, Tokyo was made up of canals and wooden houses, which regularly went up in flames in firestorms called the “Flowers of Edo”.

Very few buildings were meant to last forever; history in Tokyo can only be traced in fragments: a ruined nobleman’s garden here, a rebuilt Shinto shrine there".12 The continuous changes have resulted in a city of highly evolved hybrid structures, where it is often impossible to embrace reality in a single gaze.

These are some of the reasons why few places better than Tokyo show how much film and the moving image are deeply related and rooted into the perception of the city, its understanding, and its designing. Tokyo seems to evolve around perceptual phenomena peculiar of cinema: transience, luminescence, instantaneity, insubstantiality—a dynamic and apparently incoherent urban environment where juxtaposition and superposition are the predominant techniques of space composition: a pinball parlor sitting below a restaurant, aside of a bank, with a golf court on top, all saturated with neon light and advertising boards.

Spaces are filled with noises produced by technology, the city atmosphere suffused with a variety of sounds, colors, information, and odors, mediated through technology,13 and such an intensification reached an acme in the ‘80s.

Tokyo has long been regarded as the city of the future, and movies have contributed greatly to the creation and the diffusion of such an idea: Andrei Tarkovsky went to Tokyo to film the doomed future city of Solyaris; Gaspar Noé found in Shinjuku and Kabukichō the perfect ephemeral, hallucinatory world of appearances of Enter the Void (2009); in these same neighborhoods Ridley Scott reportedly took inspiration for the futuristic neon-lit streets of Blade Runner’s dystopian Los Angeles (1982). In all these cases and in several others, Tokyo is the city where transformation piled upon transformation, and whose visual, haptic, and auditory signals have been captured through the techniques proper of movie making, allowing to emphasize the characters widely associated to the futuristic city.

MOVEMENT AS FICTION […] Any elements, no matter where they are taken from, can be used to make new combinations. The discovery of modern poetry regarding the analogical structure of images demonstrates that when two objects are brought together, no matter how far apart their original contexts may be, a relationship is always formed.14 As a place of unexpected proximities and sudden shifts, in Tokyo, it is very difficult to establish a relation of causality between adjacent structures; everything changes function quickly, everything can be replaced and displaced; spaces Fleeting Structures, Vanishing Trajectories

continuously improvised in accordance with events are essential, constitutive elements of the city.15 Buildings are not the only realities in constant change, and a portrait of an urban environment cannot be detached from that of its people. As Rousseau’s dictum, "houses make a town, citizens make a city": it is therefore a portrait of men and environments, the essence of Sans Soleil.

Filmed at the turn of the decade, between 1978 and 1981, Sans Soleil is described by its author as a "musical composition, with recurrent themes, counterpoints and mirror-like fugues: the letters, the comments, the images gathered, the images created, together with some images borrowed. In this way, out of these juxtaposed memories is born a fictional memory, and in the same way as Lucy puts up a sign to indicate that “the Doctor is in”, we’d like to preface this film with a placard: “Fiction is out” – somewhere".16 And indeed, fiction is out, all over Tokyo: pachinko parlors, temples dedicated to cats, technological heavens of synthesizers and computer games, "Planet Manga", with "pictures bigger than people, voyeurising the voyeur;"17 as the Japanese architect Toyo Ito considers regarding the difficulties of living in Tokyo, "on the one hand, we are floating in the space of unreal images and, on the other hand, we are, as ever, living in everyday reality. Certainly, viewed from one angle, our lifestyle is that of nomads floating in a fictional city."18 Moving along the blurred border between real and imaginary, Marker creates a bits-and-pieces portrait of Tokyo, without any apparent logic but that of random juxtaposition and surprising proximities.

never synchronized with images, the coherent sequences of places and time are never respected. The movie itself floats in an undefined past, as the woman narrating the story—by reading the letters from the fictitious cameraman Sandor Krasna—emphasizes with the persistent repetition of the locution he wrote. Only at the very end of the movie, the last sentence brings the events to the present and projects the whole into the future.

The letters are themselves an expedient to challenge the notion of a documentary movie—as a travelogue, Sans Soleil presents Tokyo (and Guinea Bissau and Cape-Verde) through the subjective lens: "as for Sandor Krasna, […] was to use some degree of fiction to add a layer of poetry to the “factuality” of the so-called documentary."20 It is difficult to define what is real and what is not, what belongs to the realm of fic tion and what to that of documentary, but perhaps this is exactly the message that Marker wishes to transmit: like Tokyo exists on the verge of reality and appearances, only experienceable through movement, so does cinema.

These characters are constitutive of Tokyo since its foundation; between the XV and the XVII centuries the city evolved into a complex metropolis ante litteram, and it remained such until the present days. This evolution—linear in its growth, asymptotic in its heterogeneity—has never achieved an overall “order” as intended from a western perspective. Tokyo can still be considered an ensemble of small communities, or as Japanese writer Abe Kōbō writes "a limitless number of villages, joined together by proximity, culture and traditions, yet each preserving its own independence."19 Such an independence seems to have no scale in Tokyo: asynchronicity and fragmentation are characters observable when looking at the city from above and when experiencing it from within—in neighborhoods, blocks, buildings; an oxymoronic city, Tokyo calls for an oxymoronic approach, proceeding through contrasts, and such is the underlining fil rouge within Sans Soleil.

The movie adopts techniques and methods deduced from direct, spontaneous observation; the asynchronicity for instance is mirrored as a recording technique: sounds are Marina Montresor

Figure 1, 2: Chris Marker, Sans Soleil (France: Argos Film, 1983)

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MOVEMENT AS DESCRIPTION A city without an exterior, and a labyrinthine interior that one inadvertently enters at some point: this is the mysterious character of the city called Tokyo.21 In 1983, German filmmaker Wim Wenders travels to Tokyo, with the intent of searching residual traces of the conditions which inspired Yasuhiro Ozu to shoot his 54 movies. By that time, Ozu was barely known outside of Japan as his art was reportedly considered “too Japanese” to be fully appreciated by foreigners. However, as Deleuze points out, Ozu was the one director who "managed to build up in a Japanese context a body of work developing pure optical and sound situations, employing the trip-ballad [bal(l)ade] form, train journey, taxi ride, bus trip, a journey by bicycle or on foot."22 Movement through time and through space were Ozu’s mediums to address a changing society and environment, methods which will then be taken on by future generations of filmmakers.

While Wenders will admit himself that little of what Ozu used to witness was left in the 1980s’ Tokyo, his journey, shot in the form of a “diary on film”23 (Toyko-ga translates to Tokyoimages), will end up being a deep exploration of a series of constitutive characters of the city, echoing the movement so present in Ozu’s movies.

observations and manage to extend them to the realm of the visual: like the obsessive reproduction of real food in wax and plastic or the golf courts and batting camps cramped in between buildings or simply standing on top of them, among ever-present advertisement signs. Unescapable arbitrariness of location, as well as a pleasantly anachronistic nearness between traditional and very contemporary programs and styles and programmatic juxtapositions contribute to the fictional impression of the city as well as to its impermanent state. The emerging portrait of Tokyo is a mixture between cultural and behavioral formality and urban informality, expressed through views from above and montage of disconnected footage held together by the steady observations narrated by Wenders himself.

A labyrinthine ensemble of structures, the city appears similar to the environment of Borges’ The Immortal, "a chaos of heterogeneous worlds, the body of a tiger or a bull in which teeth, organs and heads monstrously pullulate in mutual conjunction and hatred";25 or to Piranesi’s dungeons in Carceri d’Invenzione; or Escher’s impossible geometries—the city itself can be read as an endless system of permutations, the movie too can be decomposed and recomposed rendering visible the double dependency of its reality and its narration.

Figure 3: Wim Wenders, Tokyo-ga (US, West Germany: Wim Wenders Productions, 1985)

Figure 4: Wim Wenders, Tokyo-ga (US, West Gemrany: Wim Wenders Productions, 1985)

Fifteen years earlier, in 1970, Roland Barthes had written a book on Tokyo, developed in thematic chapters addressing through European eyes its essential characters. Wim Wenders must have known the text by Barthes, for several references are made to his most iconic observations; Pachinko, "a collective and solitary game" which "reproduces, in short, on the mechanical level, precisely the principle of painting alla prima, […] the ball, once propelled, cannot be deviated […] its path is predetermined by the sole flash of its impetus." 24

Six years later, Wenders did another “diary on film” on a Japanese artist—this time a contemporary of his—fashion designer Yohji Yamamoto. Like in Tokyo-ga, in Notebook on Cities and Clothes the character of the person blends with that of the city, resulting in a complex intertwining of common and diverse traits.

Wenders’ images offer an accurate counterpart to Barthes’ 48

If Tokyo-ga was born out of an inner and self-initiated necessity—to trace Ozu’s Tokyo—Notebook on Cities and Clothes was commissioned to Wenders by the Centre Georges Pompidou, and despite the director ’s initial Fleeting Structures, Vanishing Trajectories

Figure 5: Wim Wenders, Notebook on Cities and Clothes (France: Axiom Films, 1989)

skepticism—attributed to his lack of interest in fashion—the movie ended up being almost a continuation of the reflections started with Tokyo-ga.

Compared to the former, movement as a descriptive and analytical tool is even more accentuated in this second movie, with extensive footage of the city largely shot from a moving car, superposing other images, always from Tokyo. The doubling of the screen is a stylistic choice characterizing the whole movie (and already experimented with in the preceding one): Yohji Yamamoto talks while in the background film rolls are being re-mastered; his show is visualized through screens while the actual models walk the runway right behind. Most striking though are the images of the flowing city displayed while moving through it. As Chris Marker mentions in Sans Soleil, "crisscrossed by trains, tied together with electric wires [the city] shows her veins"26 and it is not only trains, but also viaducts, layered highways of different speeds, pedestrian overpasses… a stable notion of ground gets often lost, replaced by several overlapping planes in non-hierarchical relation to one another. What emerges is an electronic image, which as Wenders points out might very well be the most valid one, a statement echoed by Marker, for whom in Tokyo "the electronic texture is the only one that can deal with sentiment, memory and imagination."27

Marina Montresor

MOVEMENT AS SURVIVAL Now he slept in the cheapest coffins, the ones nearest the port, beneath the quartz-halogen floods that lit the docks all night like vast stages; where you couldn’t see the lights of Tokyo for the glare of the television sky, not even the towering hologram logo of the Fuji Electric Company, and Tokyo Bay was a black expanse where gulls wheeled above drifting shoals of white Styrofoam. Behind the port lay the city, factory domes dominated by the vast cubes of corporate arcologies. Port and city were divided by a narrow borderland of older streets, an area with no official name. Night City, with Ninsei at its heart. By day, the bars down Ninsei were shuttered and featureless, the neon dead, the holograms inert, waiting, under the poisoned silver sky. […] Stop hustling and you sank without a trace, but move a little too swiftly and you’d break the fragile surface tension of the black market.28 One of the most shared beliefs characterizing Tokyo’s postwar era concerns progress and technologies. From the 1950s to the 90s, Japan is synonym of technological avant-garde: post-war efforts to rebuild were seen as the chance to implement the city of the future, achieving unprecedented technological sophistication; modernization had brought Japan from physical and psychological ruin to First World levels of wealth,29 yet around the 1980s, with the economic miracle showing signs of weakness and mounting evidence of pollution damages due to an unsustainable ethos, a general disbelief in technology as Japan’s unproblematic salvation from wartime destruction (more likely potentially destructive 2021 ARCHITECTURE & FILM SYMPOSIUM

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Figure 6: Katsuhiro Otomo, Akira (Tokyo: Tokyo Movie Shinsa, 1988)

itself) begins to spread.

Japan’s suffered World War II surrender was prompted by the tragic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 and even if already in the 1950s nuclear power had become one of the country’s main sources of energy production, phantasies exorcising the fear of further nuclear disaster have populated cultural and artistic production: several manga and movies are set in a post-apocalyptic world, like an episode of Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams, in which the aftermath of an eruption of Mount Fuji is a nuclear disaster, with radiations spreading destruction and death all over Japan.

Together with this, the speed of modern life and the rise of virtual technologies had prompted a whole generation of intellectuals, among them architects Toyo Ito and Kisho Kurosawa, to theorize the Homo Movens as the protagonist of life in Tokyo: a nomad flowing in the city, "a fugitive individual in a world of fugitive phenomena."30 These two aspects of the modern Japanese zeitgeist fuse in Katsuhiro Otomo’s Neo-Tokyo, the environment against which the events of Akira unfold.

An outspoken opponent of the technophilia characterizing the period, the movie shows modernization in Tokyo through its dynamic, incoherent, urban environment. Echoing William Gibson’s Night City, as well as preceding science-fiction cities such as "the comic strips of Moebius, the highly influential manga Tetsujin 28-gō (Mitsuteru Yokoyama, 1956) and the blinking holographic façades of Blade Runner (1982)"31, NeoTokyo is a post-nuclear disaster city where a group of bikers 50

drift through violent streets. The city itself is an alternation of clusters of skyscraper, underground secretive spaces, and dilapidated ruins from a long-gone era.

This alternation reminds of most of Tok yo’s ac tual neighborhoods: Shinjuku and Kabukichō above all, but the enhanced scale of the clusters and especially the extraordinary speed of movement from scene to scene and through the city itself, the noises and colors, all contribute to the futuristic appearance of a polluted, somehow undesirable environment. Being on the verge of a second apocalypse, Neo-Tokyo appears as a suspended city, stuck in between its former state (nostalgically evoked) and its doomed future.

Movement becomes the antidote to the decay of the environment: it entails the possibility of fleeing as well as the only mode of survival. Kaneda’s motorcycle, capable of reaching the speed of a bullet train, allows the illusion of possessing the city, which itself evolves at enduring speed: "as if set in the overlapping planes of an early Cubist painting, point of view remains fugitive and the dreamer is lost in the collision of light and surfaces that form the kaleidoscopic immensity of the city". 32 In Akira, the urban spaces of the past serve as basis to imagine the spaces of the future, exacerbating the conditions already present in Tokyo and warning of their possible outcome.

VANISHING LINE The four movies analyzed deal with the implications of the large-scale city, the fragmentation and the artificiality it produces, and the necessary mechanisms of resistance enacted by its inhabitants; through material and media Fleeting Structures, Vanishing Trajectories

culture, they enhance the city’s atomized identity.

Moving through the city, each in a particular way, they embrace disassociation, disconnection, contrast, and rupture as both constitutive elements of the city and stylistic tools.

Even if no movie alone can address the multifaceted appearance of Tokyo, whose fleeting portrait only emerges from the shared vision of several directors, the image emerging from the movies chosen seem to evoke Armilla, one of the invisible cities described by Marco Polo to Kublai Kahn, where one cannot tell whether the city "is unfinished" or "has been demolished, whether the cause is some enchantment, or only a whim."33 In Tokyo, this sense of permanent incompleteness, perhaps due to what Marker calls the Japanese constitutive “ethos of impermanence”, are existential traits of the city and nourish its culture as much as its urbanism, making it necessary to explore it from several points of view, often returning to the same place, only to find it different. Movement, transience, illusion are necessary states of being to apprehend the city, as much as its shaping forces; the same happens with cinema and the proximity of these two conditions emerges in Tokyo stronger than anywhere else.

Scaling up to the dimension of a whole territory a typical feature of traditional Japanese architecture, the space of Tokyo does not develop around the concept of a fixed viewpoint, integral to the viewer; it rather attaches itself to buildings, 34 to singular objects presupposing movement to be fully apprehended. For this reason, to capture the shifting proximities of Tokyo the only possible state is movement, and the only tool cinema: here, the only viewpoint is a vanishing line.

Howard Eiland, Gary Smith (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 512 7.

Giuliana Bruno, Atlas of Emotion. Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film (New York: Verso, 2018)

8.

Akira, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akira_(1988_film)

9.

Alejandro Zaera Polo, Rem Koolhaas, Encontrando libertades: conversaciones con Rem Koolhaas / Finding freedoms: conversations with Rem Koolhaas (Madrid: El Croquis, 1992), 8

10. Donald Richie, Tokyo: A View of the City (London: Reaktion Books, 1999), 32 11. Yoshinobu Ashihara, The Hidden Order Tokyo through the Twentieth Century (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1992) 12. Ian Buruma, A Tokyo Romance (London: Penguin Random House, 2018), 24 13. Toyo Ito, “What is the reality of Architecture in a Futuristic City?” (1988) in Toyo Ito, Architecture Words 8, Tarzans in the Media Forest transl. and ed. Thomas Daniell (London: AA Publications, 2011), 65 14. Guy Debord, Gil Volman, A User’s Guide to Détournement (Brussels: Les Lévres Nues No. 8, 1956) 15. Ito, “What is the reality of Architecture in a Futuristic City?”, 65 16. Chris Marker, Letter to Theresa by Chris Marker. Behind the veils of Sans Soleil (Fax, year unknown) 17. Chris Marker, Sans Soleil (France: Argos Film, 1983) 18. Ito, “What is the reality of Architecture in a Futuristic City?”, 67 19. Abe Kōbō, The Dead Girl’s Song (Tokyo: Shinda Museum ga Utatta, 1954) 20. Marker, Letter to Theresa by Chris Marker. (year unknown) 21. Ito, “What is the reality of Architecture in a Futuristic City?”, 61 22. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2, The Time-Image transl. Hugh Tomlinson, Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989) 23. Vincent Canby, The Screen: Tokyo-ga, in The New York Times, April 26 1985 (New York: The New York Times, 1985) 24. Roland Barthes, The Empire of Signs, transl. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983) 25. Jorge Luis Borges, The Aleph, Transl. Andrew Hurley (London: Penguin Classics, 2004), 20

ENDNOTES

26. Chris Marker, Sans Soleil (France: Argos Film, 1983)

1.

Jean Baudrillard, Jean Nouvel, The Singular Objects of Architecture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002)

27. Ibidem

2.

Sergei Eisenstein, Montage and Architecture (1938) (Cambridge: MIT Press, Assemblage, No. 10 (Dec. 1989) 1989), 110-131

3.

Patrick Keiller, The View from the Train (London: Verso, 2013), 76

4.

See, for instance, Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, transl. and ed. Donald Nicholson Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 189-190; Patrick Keiller, The View from the Train (London: Verso, 2013); Nezar-AlSayyad, Cinematic urbanism: A History of the Modern from Reel to Real (New York: Rutledge, 2006); Stephen Barber, Projected Cities: Cinema and Urban Space (London: Reaktion books, 2002); François Penz, Lu Andong, Urban Cinematics: Understanding Urban Phenomena through the Moving Image (London: Intellect Books, 2011); Iván Villarmea Álvarez, Documenting Cityscapes: Urban Change in Contemporary Non-Fiction Film (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015)

5.

See, for instance, Juhani Pallasmaa, The Architecture of Image: Existential Space in Cinema (Helsinki: Rakennustieto Publishing, 2001); Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement Image transl. Hugh Tomlinson, Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986); Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2, The Time-Image transl. Hugh Tomlinson, Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989)

6.

Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Vol. 2, Part 2, ed. by Michael W. Jennings,

Marina Montresor

28. William Gibson, Neuromancer (New York: Ace, 1984), 7 29. Thomas Daniell, The Fugitive in Toyo Ito, Architecture Words 8, Tarzans in the Media Forest transl. and ed. Thomas Daniell (London: AA Publications, 2011), 8 30. Ibidem, 11 31. Mahfuz Sultan, Dream Cities: Meditations on Urbanity and Architecture in the Sci-Fi Genre (PIN-UP Magazine No.27 2019/2020, 2020) 32. Ibidem 33. Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, transl. William Weaver (London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974), 49 34. Kazuo Shinohara, Anthology Space Design (1979) in Kazuo Shinohara (New York: Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies and Rizzoli International Publications, 1982)

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Get Pissed, Destroy: Landmarks, City- Spaces, and ‘Punkspectations’ in Alex Cox’s Repo Man and Sid and Nancy

MARKO DJURDJIĆ York University

“There are no half-measures about nihilism.”

- Albert Camus

he views as both a peripheral, physical place, and “a state of mind: a mental territory inhabited by people with an interest in hallucinogenics [sic] and catastrophe.”3

Utilizing two of director Alex Cox’s "punk films," Repo Man (1984) and Sid and Nancy (1986), “Get Pissed, Destroy” looks at how punk, as a subcultural phenomenon, interrogates the dichotomy between urban and suburban spaces, and how punks occupy these spaces. With a particular focus on landmarks, architecture, and the "city as background," as well the films’ fantastical, dream-like endings, this paper engages with the notion of spaces and people on the fringes, both metaphorically and physically.

Cox’s distinct lack of reverence for cultural and architectural landmarks is shown through his subversion, reinterpretation, and appropriation of city-spaces, emphasised by his rebellious punk protagonists. Although "punkspectations" demand certain actions, reactions, and consequences for those who prescribe to the subculture, Otto from Repo Man subverts these expectations and accepts the artifice and upward mobility promised by Los Angeles and its glittering skyline. Conversely, Sid Vicious from Sid and Nancy walks away from New York City’s oppressive demands, and thus his own failures as a partner and artist, fashioning himself as the first Punk Martyr in the process.

As an independent punk provocateur, director Alex Cox “grew up with a passion for the pictures, and for weird, marginal, independent films.”1 His first short, 1980’s Edge City—which serves as a precursor to his first feature, Repo Man (1984)2— introduced viewers to Cox’s concept of "Edge City," a space 52

In his book Edge City: Life on the New Frontier,4 Joel Garreau outlined five major points for all Edge Cities. An Edge City: 1. Has five million square feet or more of leasable office space.

2. Has 600,000 square feet or more of leasable retail space.

3. Has more jobs than bedrooms.

4. Is perceived by the population as one place. It is a regional end destination for mixed use—not a starting point—that “has it all,” from jobs, to shopping, to entertainment.

5. Was nothing like “city” as recently as thirty years ago. Then, it was just bedrooms, if not cow pastures. This incarnation is brand new.5 Garreau considers these places as “a little ragged at the fringes,” since “Edge Cities, after all, are still works in progress.”6 As both a place and an idea, Alex Cox’s appropriation and actualization of "Edge City" applies many, if not all, of these principles. In fact, living on the edge—while living in an "Edge"—is nowhere near as subversive as the punks occupying these spaces would lead you to (or would like you to) believe: people actually work in Cox’s Edge City, and no one travels to Downtown L.A. for their respective jobs (unless they’re on a job). In Repo Man, the aptly named Edge City certainly “has it all” for protagonist Otto Maddox: it’s where he becomes the eponymous Repo Man, where he shops in fluorescent, perpetually robbed convenience stores, and where slamdancing, blaring hardcore, getting wasted and hooking up are de rigueur forms of entertainment.

Architecture in Cox’s films serves to illustrate “the composition of real and representative content within an image. Authenticity of place here makes the vision more critically plausible and allows for an in depth critique of social and architectural possibility.”7 The characters who occupy Cox’s cities are not the stereotypical inhabitants generally seen in films about L.A. and NYC: no suits, no surfers, no bikinis, no Wall Street, no Santa Monica, no Times Square. None of that yuppie crap. Instead, the worlds of Repo Man and Sid and Nancy (1986) “play out

Get Pissed, Destroy: Landmarks, City-Spaces, and ‘Punkspectations’ in Alex Cox’s Repo Man and Sid and Nancy

with an intentional focus on utilizing and/or reimagining the existing city”8 by setting the action, and the characters, on the fringes, and beyond clichés. In these two films, Alex Cox uses the “visualized environment to aid the narrative of the story,”9 positioning his rebellious punk "protagonists" in two very disparate settings, but with two very similar, fantastical endings. Using the cityscapes of two ubiquitous American cities (Los Angeles and New York, respectively) to comment on the unconventional, fringe nature of his punk characters and the worlds they’ve fashioned for themselves, Cox locates Punk’s (and a punk’s) place within a larger, consumeristic society through a rejection of "punkspectations," characterized by suffocating notions of authenticity, opposition, and nonconformity.

HOLY PUNK As with all subjects participating in any number of marginalized, fringe or alternative groups, punk affiliation offers “a contested site of resistance”10 to mainstream values and consumerist culture. Cox presents punk as it presents itself: as a subculture “too extreme to court the likes of the urban bourgeoisie as anything more than dumbfounded spectators.”11 This is not a lifestyle for the everyday working stiff with 2.7 kids and a white picket fence: this is, like, raw power, man!

Figure 1: Otto Maddox, nonconformist extraordinaire.

Punk, for all intents and purposes, was a “response to the counter-culture of the 1960s.”12 In both films, hippies (or the ghosts of hippiedom past) are chastised, berated, and rejected, in an attempt to interrogate the displacement of the bourgeois subject of the 1970s, one “constituted in labor, learning, and production,”13 in favor of the ceaseless and compulsive consuming subject of the 1980s. Characters steeped in anticommercialistic and anti-authoritarian beliefs are thus perfect vessels for commenting on, and interrogating, the prevalent (and suffocating) consumeristic practices of the 1980s. Through the “unglamorous East L.A. city-scape”14 of Repo Man, Cox actualizes the spirt and anger of the marginalized punk culture by relegating it to the hopeless, barren suburban wastelands, where violence and cheap thrills offer the only respite from the “bone-numbing vacuity and circularity of daily life.”15 Conversely, through the anarchic Sid, Cox dramatizes—and parodies—punk’s immature narcissism, and fatalistic nihilism.

Marko Djurdjić

While “Repo Man outrageously satirized American culture, with consumerism, TV-evangelism and government-inspired conspiracies,”16 the tabloid-esque Sid and Nancy is certainly less goofy, less cheeky, and much more pessimistic, presenting the punk pair “as traitors to a genuinely revolutionary movement, one which rebelled against the social, economic and political climate of the time.”17 By employing characters who live on the fringes (both spatially and ideologically), Cox embraces punk’s “critique of capitalist systems, the media, and the rise of bourgeois values,”18 while simultaneously antagonizing the subculture’s preoccupation with authenticity, merit, place, and the performative role punks, as outliers, are expected to embody.

REPO MAN According to Thom Andersen, director of Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003), LA is “just beyond the reach of an image,”19 distant and “hard to get right,”20 its hazy downtown core, as depicted in Repo Man, a testament to this wistful notion. L.A. is always out of focus, always just a little too far away, and Repo Man wholeheartedly embraces this motif of "city as background" through its conscious avoidance of “monumental and architectural reference points.”21 When Cox does bring in one of these reference points (the iconic Sixth Street Bridge), his ironic appropriation of the imagery is purposely anticlimactic.

It’s as if Cox doesn’t even have a choice: he has to shoot a scene here.

A staple of action movie excess, seen in everything from music videos to Terminator 2: Judgement Day (1992) and Transformers (2007), Cox stages a car chase under L.A.’s Sixth Street Bridge in order to legitimize and spatialize the film, while connecting it to L.A.’s stereotypical infrastructure and architecture. And yet, the car chase itself—a profanity-laden, 50-second flash that ends in the festering remnants of the L.A. River—adheres to Repo Man’s simultaneous exclusion, and ironic repurposing, of L.A.’s cultural landmarks. The scene is “cinematically unique and in line with [the film’s] ideology of critique”22 precisely because of its subversive nature, dissecting and antagonizing the viaduct “as a site of narrative extravagance and disruption.”23 A prominent location adhering to Cox’s idiosyncratic vision of Los Angeles, the site’s bombastic

Figure 2: The Sixth Street Bridge chase ends after a ‘harrowing’ 50 seconds.

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potentiality is rendered impotent by Cox’s consciously blasé presentation. They barely even drive up the sloped sides!

In his 1971 book, Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies, English architectural critic Reyner Banham developed four ecological models for describing, and contextualizing, Los Angeles: 1) the foothills, 2) the flatlands (or “the plains of id”), 3) the beaches (or “surfurbia”), and 4) autotopia, those snaking, freeway veins connecting the various parts of Los Angeles to itself.24 While the Foothills (with their unattainable modernist homes and rising geography) and the Beaches are unsurprisingly absent in Repo Man, the sprawling flatlands and autotopias are on full display. Although freeways and other L.A. transportation systems play a striking (and key) role in many L.A. films,25 Repo Man, ironically, tends to look at highways either from a distance, twisting through the background, or from underneath, as looming, rumbling overpasses. At one point, Miller, the Hippie Sage of Repossession, says, “The more you drive, the less intelligent you are,” interrogating the pervasive auto-culture that Los Angeles has made famous.

While auto repossession is rampant, it happens exclusively on neighborhood streets, with cars picked up by the repossessors in front of squat bungalows and anonymous brick buildings.

Statistically, the "endless" sprawl of Banham’s foothills would paint an accurate picture of L.A. “if Los Angeles consisted only of the problem areas of the City proper.”26 While this may actually be an unfair, and untrue, summary “of the built structure and the topography of the Greater Los Angeles area,”27 there is nevertheless a “certain underlying psychological truth about it,”28 namely, that Los Angeles is a vast wasteland, save for its glittering, monstrous core, those cultural and industrial pillars of L.A.—Hollywood, Beverly Hills, et al.—manifesting independently from Suburban L.A. (the unglamorous Plains of Whatever, perhaps?). Repo Man actively associates suburban living with the bland and the dreary, exposing suburbia as a generic undertaking where Otto and his friends, like the crumbling neighbourhoods they inhabit, are deteriorating.

Although “Otto’s ties to the L.A. nonconformist punk scene”29 position him as our knight in shining rebellion, Otto, like many punks (including Sid), embraces the scene by outfitting himself in the clothes and attitudes commonly attributed to the subculture. A "costume punk," Otto embraces rebellion and disenfranchisement while living comfortably with his parents in a suburban home.30 Escape from the Sprawl only comes to Otto at the film’s climax, after he finds a much sought after (and possibly nuclear) Chevy Malibu. As the neon-glowing car goes airborne (!), Otto and fellow repo-person Miller blast away from the suburbs towards, and then through, the skyscrapers of downtown L.A., the illuminated skyline, sardined buildings, and dazzling lights luring the pair “into the greed of the city limit.”31 This illusory, psychedelic ending presents downtown as a twinkling salvation from the dystopic, fluorescent suburbs, and as Otto and Miller bypass the city for further intergalactic shores (in that they disappear into space and towards stars…), the "dream" that L.A. supposedly realizes is signified by 54

the ultimate fantasy-cum-reality of "stardom" and escape.

Hypnotized by the warm, inviting lights of downtown, the pair denounces the suburbs and thus, their conversion is complete: they are now one with Hollywood, no longer raging against the machine, but happily part of it, a luxury never afforded to, or embraced by, the ever-rebellious Alex Cox. SID AND NANCY Sid and Nancy is Alex Cox’s impressionistic retelling of the tumultuous, star cross’d story of Sex Pistols “bassist” Sid Vicious (Gary Oldman) and his girlfriend, Nancy Spungen (Chloe Webb). Rejecting biopic stereotypes, Cox repeatedly usurps the "true," real-world narrative in order to employ Sid’s warped, subjective viewpoint, which becomes essential for the film’s symbolism, tone, and allegorical presentation. This is probably also why Johnny Rotten has always missed the point of the film: it’s not about telling the truth, it’s about telling a story.

Cox is aware that, “in the world of narrative and architectural representation, […] words cannot sufficiently describe the intention, expression or feeling a space and a story can generate.”32 Through posters, banners, and flyers, as well as relevant location-shooting (including maîtresse Linda Ashby’s actual St. James flat where Sid met Nancy33), Cox and assistant art director—and original Pistols associate—Deborah Wilson recreated the haphazard, safety-pinned visuals of the era through garish "punksthetics." In one indelible scene, Sid and Nancy kiss in an alley as garbage rains down on them, presenting the only “atmosphere in which their love could have flourished.”34 Cox juxtaposes dreamy slow motion with a dirgey soundtrack, further accentuating the notion that Sid and Nancy belonged in the city’s innumerable drug-filled alleys, the leather-clad couple framed by graffitied brick and concrete monoliths, their bodies rendered as both on junk, and as junk.

Figure 3: Junk falls down around Sid and Nancy as they kiss in an alley.

Cinema’s romantic idealization of NYC is further interrogated

by Cox’s portrayal of the city as constantly cloudy, overcast, and grey, much like American renderings of London. Filmed and released in the mid-80s, Sid and Nancy represents a view of NYC both from an outsider’s perspective, and from an out-of-time perspective, one which uses the still-dilapidated NYC of the 80s to tell its 70s story.

Get Pissed, Destroy: Landmarks, City-Spaces, and ‘Punkspectations’ in Alex Cox’s Repo Man and Sid and Nancy

In the mid-70s, New York City was close to defaulting due to a cooling Wall Street and national economy. The city was "saved" by “a consortium of real estate executives, financiers, and political power brokers called the Municipal Assistance Corporation (a.k.a. ‘Big MAC’),”35 which “issued bonds to pay the city’s bills, but also fundamentally changed the way the city taxed and spent.”36 The city eased corporate taxes, “the stocktransfer tax [was] all but done away with, and real-estate tax assessments [were] lowered, all in the hopes of attracting large corporations to Manhattan.”37 Which they did. The subsequent conservative revolution of the 1980s (implemented happily by a former Hollywooder-cum-president…) was essentially triggered by the same men who implemented these changes— changes which left parts of the city demolished and smoldering deep into the 1980s.

This was the crumbling New York in which Sid and Nancy was filmed, where the effects of the financial crisis were still being felt in the mid-80s by both the people, and the city itself. In one telling scene, while attempting to score in the Bronx, Sid and Nancy leave the frame with a fellow addict, and Cox leaves the viewer alone with the smoky, demolished architecture, a moment for us to reflect on NYC as a dying behemoth. The landscape is bombed out, destroyed, the borough a veritable "warzone." Conversely, when the pair visits Nancy’s family in upstate New York, Cox inverts the suburban wastelands of Repo Man in favour of what Sid calls a “fucking paradise.”

Later, while wasting away in a claustrophobic, first-floor room at the Chelsea Hotel, Cox uses the decomposing architecture of the room itself to mimic Sid and Nancy’s oppressive relationship, and the unsurprising end that is to come. In their previous room, when Sid stepped out onto a balcony, the wet, teeming streets of Manhattan and the lights of the looming Chelsea Hotel sign washed over him. Here, in this tomb, there is nothing but a brick wall in front of the lone window. There is no more New York, no more beautiful countryside, no more life with Nancy.

Cox’s films, the landmarks of these (post)modern cities are never the focus; instead, landmarks are relegated to the literal background, or avoided entirely, letting the "real," streetlevel city break through. In Repo Man, Cox leaves out almost all of L.A.’s familiar locations, and in the process, disrupts “traditional media representations focusing on the good life of Beverly Hills or Malibu.”42 Cox instead turns his lens on the “dirty sidewalks of East L.A. and the decay of industrial zones,”43 which are the antithesis of those "clean," "proper" places. The film distances itself from depictions of “specific, even cinematic, points of interest”44 by actively refusing to utilize L.A.’s landmarks as signifiers. By presenting the L.A. skyline from a distance, Cox conveys his themes of marginality and isolation, demystifying “the illusory rewards promised by Reagan’s trickle-down economics,”45 depicting the city “as just one large bad neighborhood.”46 Even the film’s opening credits roll over a moving map of New Mexico (!) as the alien Malibu burns through the desert on its way to California, while L.A. itself doesn’t get to show a single recognizable feature until more than a third of the way through the film, when the Sixth Street Bridge makes an appearance.

Similarly, when Sid leaves the towers of Manhattan for a slice of pizza in a single-floored, single-roomed "shack" on the other side of the river in Jersey City, Cox uses the architecture to further promote Sid’s desire for more "down to earth" goals (including the impossibility of domestic bliss with Nancy). The diminutive pizza shop stands in stark contrast to the background skyline, which engulfs Sid as he walks along the train tracks. When Sid leaves the urbanized, explicitly capitalistic space of Manhattan, he does so by walking past the Twin Towers, which have long symbolized the 80s trifecta of capitalism, consumerism, and American globalization. Cox distances Sid from the commercialization and commodification of punk by showing him "walking away" from NYC, and thus capitalism’s destructive stranglehold on art, the city a symbolic monolith from which Sid must escape.

This is oblivion.

THE FRINGES In Los Angeles Plays Itself, Thom Andersen looks at the depiction of Los Angeles on screen, from the early days of cinema up to the present. Although he makes a compelling argument for the importance of Los Angeles’s landmarks and their repeated (re)appropriation by the movies, Andersen nevertheless asserts that “movies aren’t about places, they’re about stories,”38 and that, “if we notice the location, we’re not really watching the movie. It’s what’s up front that counts,”39 namely, characters, narrative, and action. Yet, in Alex Cox’s films, the city is a character because the city has character; there is an attitude that permeates his depictions of both L.A. and NYC, and this attitude, this organic "realness," causes “the relation between reality and representation [to get] muddled.”40 While “filmmakers rely upon architectural conventions to instill familiarity, authenticity and understanding into a film,”41 in Marko Djurdjić

Figure 4. Sid Vicious walks away from the city, and all its ‘punkspectations’

Although “marginal spaces and practices have their own modes of social ordering, rules and relations of power,”47 as evidenced by both the repo world and the punk scenes in L.A. and NYC, Sid’s traversal into the margins shows him striving “for greater 2021 ARCHITECTURE & FILM SYMPOSIUM

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Figure 5 (above): Sid and Nancy’s dream-cab drives off into the distance, right before a title card arrives, telling us that Sid died of a heroin overdose shortly after being paroled.

Figure 6 (below): Otto flies through the Los Angeles skyline, in a moment described by the young punk himself as “intense.”

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Get Pissed, Destroy: Landmarks, City-Spaces, and ‘Punkspectations’ in Alex Cox’s Repo Man and Sid and Nancy

freedom and autonomy,”48 emancipating himself from the dominant “forms of social order”49 that have suffocated punk since its mid-70s inception. When he leaves Manhattan, Sid rejects "punkspectations" and embraces “counter-hegemonic [and] resistant ideologies”50 that are decidedly unpunk, including dancing with a group of kids to KC and the Sunshine Band (blasphemy! Funky, funky blasphemy...).

Sid’s self-imposed exile from NYC’s seedy downtown core effectively “questions appropriate codes of behaviours attached to place,”51 further cementing his status as a transgressive, rebellious figure who embodies the social and cultural fringes that punk claims to inhabit. While punk attempts to uphold its authenticity and its rebelliousness, Sid is the only one who is shown "walking away" from the commercialization and commodification of punk, away from a city that claims Punk™ but inevitably sells its wares to the masses.52 The city and its architecture represent the oppressive nature not only of stardom, but of your own responsibilities: Sid was supposed to be punk, and the architecture he leaves behind signifies his rejection of monetary aspirations for a "purer" existence that punk promises. There is a “horrible purity here, the purity of immortality,”53 which is gained, ironically, by his rejection of what the city-space offers.

For Otto, however, there are zero expectations. He doesn’t have to be anything, and so he is free to choose a life away from punk. He consciously decides to leave the fringes behind for the city, which allows him to "reach the stars" and embrace something new, something better than the suburban fringes can offer him. When he flies through the skyline and then up into space, he accepts the consumerism associated with downtown L.A., appropriating its height in order to achieve further (quite literal) upward mobility. While the short-stacked buildings and bungalows of suburbia physicalize the perceived lack of upward mobility anticipated by its characters, those that have goals and ambitions strive for similarly conservative and humble outcomes. Like the modest, unambitious buildings, the characters in Repo Man long for their own repo yards, families, and experiences, their attitudes towards life mirrored by the suburban cityscape. Yet Otto wants purpose, something more, and in order to escape his suburban "prison," he must reach the architectural pillars of downtown L.A. Bypassing inevitably jammed highways in favour of a more direct, aerial approach, this becomes Otto’s (and Cox’s) Space Odyssey moment: a trip beyond the stars. Repo Man doesn’t want to “cheapen or trivialize the city”54 (surprisingly), so it doesn’t go there until the end, reaching the oneiric city the only way it can: fantastically.

Both Otto and Sid actively shed the veneer of punk in favor of upward mobility and (imagined) domestic bliss, respectively.

While Otto escapes his suburban ennui through L.A’s skyline, its transatlantic counterpart offers Sid nothing but disappointment and death. The cityscape is therefore recontextualized in Sid and Nancy: it features none of the allure that Repo Man’s more fantastical realization promises. In L.A., you must "escape" Marko Djurdjić

to the city in order to un-punk yourself and find the upward mobility you so desperately crave. Otto does it, Miller does it, and you would to. And why not? After all, this is Hollywood.

LAST EXIT In the final scene of Sid and Nancy, Sid takes a public vehicle, a taxi, to finally escape the nightmare of the city in favor of a dream life with his dearly departed Nancy (which, according to Cox and the film, was Sid’s doing), who sits in the backseat, glowing in a lace wedding gown. Pulling away in the dreamcab, New York does not simply retreat, it is left completely off-screen. We watch as the cab drives through the derelict, dilapidated "fringe" landscape of Jersey City, repurposing the endless garages and short-stacked businesses seen in Repo Man, before disappearing in the distance. In both films, our protagonists get into their respective vehicles as passengers, willing participants in punk and relocation. However, while Sid is shown driving away from the city that doomed him, Miller and Otto drive directly into theirs. For the first time, Otto’s dream of escape is realized when he reaches the cityscape we’ve seen in the distance and longed for throughout the film. Whereas Otto accepts the artifice that comes with the city, Sid would rather disappear away from it. His escape into domesticity and marital bliss is short lived, but it is nevertheless unspoiled. And this is where Otto’s and Sid’s differences are made explicit: while Otto longs for the upward promise of skyscrapers and office towers and the Strip, Sid, having "lived" through that, actively (and physically) seeks to leave that life behind.55 Sid Vicious has often been portrayed as an outlaw, a martyr for authenticity and "realness,"56 yet all of that is lambasted by Cox. Sid wasn’t a person, he was a commodity, something to be sold and packaged to the torrents of similarly "rebellious" youths for whom Sid is, was, and always will be the Patron Saint of Punk Rock. But for Cox, Sid’s life wasn’t cool, and it wasn’t rebellious. Instead, Cox views him as a trapped, tragic figure. What a waste.

While “Otto’s transformation into a repo man has been read as a gradual inculcation sapping his subversive energy,”57 Otto never claims rebel-status. He is simply looking for the right line of work to suit his unique temperament. When he gets into the glowing Malibu as the passenger, he is comfortable with this role in life. Escape-through-conformity. This seems counterintuitive for a punk, but it also makes complete sense: Otto, like all punks, appropriates this space for his own concerns, for his own needs. For Otto, this isn’t political or ideological. Instead, this is just another experience, something to do, something that can help “break through the anesthesia of everydayness—just a device that might prove he is a living being.”58 While Sid’s spaces are filled with dead-ends, nihilism and death, Otto’s “wide-eyed indifference [is] focused […] on his desire for ‘intense’ experiences,”59 subverting Sid’s drive for self-destruction. Otto embraces the classic punk "sellout" model, rejecting his convictions for a new life, a new intensity, a new adventure, and in doing so, he reaches the city, and then "the stars"; Sid rejects all of that, and so he burns out.

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And yet, so long as there are suburban punks looking for a hero, he’ll never fade away.

ENDNOTES 1. Cox, Alex. X Films: True Confessions of a Radical Filmmaker. New York: Soft Skull Press, 2008: 1.

2. Ibid, 17.

3. Cox, 8.

4. Garreau, Joel. Edge City: Life on the New Frontier. New York: Anchor Books, 1992.

5. Ibid, 33-34.

6. Ibid, 35.

7. Barton, Gemma. “The Grey Area between reality and representation: The practices of architects and film-makers.” https://www.academia.edu/35301119/ The_Grey_Area_between_reality_and_representation_The_practices_of_ architects_and_film_makers?auto=download, 2006: 4.

8. Ibid.

9. Ibid, 5.

10. Rombes, Nicholas. “Repo Man: Reclaiming the Spirit of Punk With Alex Cox.” New Punk Cinema, ed. Nicholas Rombes. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005: 2.

11. Lewis, Jon. “Punks in L.A.: It’s Kiss or Kill.” Journal of Popular Culture 22, no.2 (Fall 2018): 87-88.

12. Trafton, John. “L.A. Punk Cinema.” JohnTrafton.com. Last modified March 2019. www.johntrafton.com/suburbia.

13. Ibid 14. Lewis, 91 15. Ibid.

16. Shaw, Tony. “OUR MAN IN MANAGUA: Alex Cox, US neo-imperialism and transatlantic cinematic subversion in the 1980s.” Media History 12, 2006: 210.

17. Ibid.

18. Jamieson, Claire. NATØ: Narrative Architecture in Postmodern London. New York: Routledge, 2017: 144.

19. Los Angeles Plays Itself. Directed by Thom Andersen. New York: Cinema Guild, 2014. Blu-ray.

20. Ibid.

21. Naveh, Jonathan. “Real Dystopic Visions: Cinematic Critiques of Postmodern L.A..” Ekphrasis: Images, Cinema, Theory, Media 1 (2014): 50.

22. Ibid, 51.

23. Ibid, 52.

24. Banham, Reyner, Los Angeles: the architecture of four ecologies. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009.

25. Trafton.

26. Banham, 161.

27. Ibid.

28. Ibid. Emphasis added.

29. Naveh, 51.

30. See “Suburban Home” by Descendents for further clarification.

31. Naveh, 51.

32. Barton, 3.

33. Savage, Jon. “Sid & Nancy.” Criterion Collection: ON FILM/ESSAYS. Oct. 18, 1998. https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/28-sid-nancy.

34. Denisoff, Serge R. “A Hard Day’s Night in Hell: Sid and Nancy.” Popular Music and Society 13, no.3 (1989): 68.

35. Flood, Joe. “New York City: The Birthplace of Reaganomics.” New York Magazine, February 18, 2011. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2011/02/new_ york_city_the_birthplace_o.html.

36. Ibid.

37. Ibid.

38. Andersen.

39. Ibid.

40. Barton, 5.

41. Ibid.

42. Traber, Daniel. Whiteness, Otherness and the Individualism Paradox from Huck to Punk. New York: Palgrave Macmillan US, 2007: 152.

43. Ibid.

44. Ibid.

45. Ibid.

46. Lewis, 91.

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47. Traber, 205.

48. Ibid.

49. Ibid, 201.

50. Chatterton, Paul & Robert Hollands. Urban Nightscapes: Youth Cultures, Pleasure Spaces and Corporate Power. New York: Routledge, 2005: 200.

51. Ibid, 201.

52. I’m looking at you Varvatos…buying CBGBs and turning it into a store where you sell CBGBs t-shirts for $140…yeesh…the epitome of the failure of punk values and sensibilities…

53. Savage.

54. Andersen.

55. Interestingly, both endings seem to menacingly recall (and parody) the ending of Grease (1978), with its delusional flight up into the clouds.

56. In Repo Man, Otto’s punk-buddy Duke even wears a sleeveless Sid shirt when he’s introduced, ironically prophesizing his own violent end.

57. Traber, 155.

58. Ibid, 157.

59. Ibid.

Figures 1, 2, and 6 from: Repo Man. Directed by Alex Cox. New York: The Criterion Collection, 2016. Bluray.

Figures 3, 4, and 5 from: Sid and Nancy. Directed by Alex Cox. New York: The Criterion Collection, 2017.

Blu-ray.

Get Pissed, Destroy: Landmarks, City-Spaces, and ‘Punkspectations’ in Alex Cox’s Repo Man and Sid and Nancy

Mirrors of Mirror: Architecture as the Expanded Picture

ELENA ROCCHI Arizona State University

In Mirror (1975), Andrei Tarkovsky links cinema to architecture. He displays mirrors as paintings in movement and uses them as devices to construct a movie as an expanded picture — as architecture.

Therefore, Tarkovsky’s mirrors are not only the site of inhabitable abstractions the viewer experiences as part of the story: they are objects that transform the two-dimensional film image into a physical reality. In a room with Aleksei on his deathbed, all mirrors appear on a wall: at the end of the movie, Tarkovsky gathers them to show their surfaces without reflections, revealing that Mirror’s mirrors create a kaleidoscope together with the camera, generating a continuous intertwining of points of view that break the film’s two-dimensionality. It is in this sense that Mirror must be understood as an expanded picture defined by three things arranged in a triangular formation: the space containing the actors; the mirrors as flat empty rooms where to insert objects as reflections; and Tarkovsky’s camera. As the whole movie’s conceptual model, this associative display made of virtual and physical framing modes shows Tarkovsky’s interest in blurring disciplinary boundaries to change film into architecture.

The paper’s body discusses Mirror’s kinds of mirrors — their significance in constructing the movie as an expanded picture, like architecture. The conclusion offers a meditation: in juxtaposing the camera and the mirrors, Tarkovsky creates a tension between two contradictory modes of picturing the viewer’s relationship to a movie (film) and the world (architecture).

Elena Rocchi

In all his movies, Tarkovsky shows a devotion of equal intensity to the film’s space and one of the paintings.

He captures masterpiece paintings by Leonardo, Pieter Brueghel the Elder, Rembrandt, Albrecht Dürer, and Piero Della Francesca in most of his films. However, with Mirror, by reflecting the film’s three-dimensional reality into a series of mirrors, he experiments with cinematically creating an expanded picture. With independent shots he cuts as close-ups to enter the mirrors’ different kind of surface, he grasps the three-dimensional situations to resume them two-dimensionally. While exploring the indirect vision to produce paintings in motion, Tarkovsky connects architectural design with film by juxtaposing the cinematic and the mirror frames. Distorted and refracted, mirrors double the actors on stage while the camera frames them, building a complex four-dimensional representation system. As fragments of consciousness dispersed along with the film, all mirrors appear without reflections reunited in a room where Aleksei is dying. In recalling Malevich’s disposition of paintings in the 0.10 exhibition room of 1915, this scene speaks of Tarkovsky’s contribution of moving the film image into a different medium — into architecture.

MIRROR (ZERKALO, 1975) It isn’t easy to make sense of the most misunderstood Tarkovsky’s film, Mirror — the most difficult of his movies.

It is a purely dreamlike memory moving between past and present, and with a challenging complexity on both thematic and stylistic levels. Tarkovsky continuously jumps from past to present and between frames, from dream to the reality of a movie mostly defined by critics as a puzzle without a linear objective narrative structure. To them, it is an interior monologue of a narrator’s disembodied voice seen only once on his deathbed. However, if Mirror is filled with memories on the one hand, on the other hand, it has mirrors as well. They are all distorted, refracted, and doubled up as the necessary construction of the “mysterious glow of another world placed on the other side of the mirror: the world of childhood.” ¹ Their surfaces have no real narrative significance. Therefore, 2021 ARCHITECTURE & FILM SYMPOSIUM

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Figure 1: Mirror, Still frame. Mirrors as inner world.

they are somehow the most physical attribute of the movie articulating the complex visual structure introduced by the title, ZERKALO (mirror). It appears twice — at the beginning and after the credits titles — to bracket the director’s family drama as a story of two Soviet generations.

In the opening shot, a boy switches on the TV where a documentary shows the curing of a young man’s stutter.

“I can speak,” is the initial message delivered after the TV’s dark screen as the film’s first mirror reflecting the room. A poem follows the opening scene. Then, the camera tracks in slowly to a young woman sitting on the fence. A male voice explains that this was their summer place just before the war.

And right after, Tarkovsky’s father is heard reciting his poem "First Meetings." The camera stops on the surface of an old mirror, reflecting a boy and a girl standing in a doorway. Fire is reflected in the distance. As an incomprehensible image, the mirror looks like a painting. Then, the director cuts to a black and white scene and introduces a dream sequence.

Two burners appear in a full-length mirror in a room with a barefoot woman dressed in a white shirt. The camera tracks past her to reveal her figure reflected in the mirror.

Another cut takes the viewer to a mirror with a landscape, and a gas burner superimposed. An older woman appears in the reflection. She seems to walk out of the mirror, while the camera tracks in, toward her. Then, in color, a presentday apartment scene shows Alexis telling his mother about his dream about her. From now on, everything is about reflections. Sequence after sequence, purely dreamlike memory alternates with the film’s reality. Tarkovsky creates inner worlds in each mirror (rather than recreate reality) as interrupted passages of time within the frame. (Figure 1) At the end of the movie, as the barriers between dream and memory, past and present, real and imagined characters are reconciled, mirrors disappear after appearing together in one room.

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A MOVIE AS A QUASI CONSTRUCTION As living paintings — Tarkovsky’s metaphors for paintings by other means — mirrors render unrelated instants. (Figure 2) Against them, Tarkovsky puts actors the same way a painter put models against a canvas and uses them in different scenes that flow before the spectators’ eyes like paintings in a museum’s gallery. Actors are more in front of mirrors than his camera — behaving as if they are not there while staying still in scenes that come into being during a shooting that exists within the mirrors. Like Pascal Aubier’s ten-minute film Le Dormeur (1974), these shots of scenes displayed in mirrors show rhythm as the sole organizing force of the film image.

In alternating them with conventional scenes, the Soviet director indicates that he is not concerned with montage as the synthesis of motion, the creation of gaps, intervals, or moments of stasis between scenes but with the shots as units of perception. However, if all these mirrors are the system Tarkovsky uses to represent the narration of Aleksei’s memories, editing the transitions between the real and the dream using rhythm on the one hand, on the other hand, they are the devices that break the two-dimensional screen’s illusory. As optical instruments made for creating a supervision, these mirrors essentially transform the movie into a quasi-construction that emerges from the screen’s surface to move into the three-dimensional lives in the viewer’s mind as spectators. In this sense, Tarkovsky builds a Suprematist movie — nearly quasi-architectural as mirrors display images subjected to architecture’s timeless laws, not the camera.

Therefore, Tarkovsky’s choice of using mirrors produces a beauty that viewers cannot explain — a feeling they perceive when watching a film framed not only by a camera but also by them as physical artifacts.

TARKOVSKY’S MIRRORS Mirrors in Mirror are real frames in the cinematic frame, small movies in the movie detached from the film. As autonomous entities, they are necessary for the director to express the absolute Truth ² of human existence as paintings: inserted among conventional scenes, they produce a real depth, different from the one of the lenses of a camera. As part of the set design to build the indirect vision, they form an optical instrument with the camera that finds the actor’s location through triangulation. Over and over, the film recalls this relationship between the locations of all three points: the mirror, the director, and the actor, therefore, the threedimensionality of the film image. In this sense, Tarkovsky allows the film to continue beyond the screen’s edges, becoming space. As visible objects fixed in the plane, mirrors transform the movie into a phenomenon that exceeds its limits, breaking them, provoking thoughts, leading to the absolute, and stretching the image into infinity. This is how the movie’s space becomes tangible, as it is coincidental with the space and time of the viewers looking. When one senses Mirrors of Mirror

Figure 2: Mirror, Still frame. Mirrors as inner world different than reality.

something truthful beyond the events on the screen, space manifests as the experience, and the film image extends beyond the frame through mirrors.

Where exactly? In spectators’ minds that interpret the image within the time of their time at intervals as mirrors. Then, time becomes present, an immediate present.

Therefore, it is clear that Tarkovsky speaks of the infinite of the image through the mirrors’ finiteness. This is what these mirrors represent: a reference that allows viewers to experience. “Time becomes tangible when you sense something significant, truthful, going on beyond the events on the screen; when you realize, quite consciously, that what you see in the frame is not limited to its visual depiction, but is a pointer to something stretching out beyond the frame and to infinity; a pointer to life. Like the infinity of the image we talked about earlier, a film is bigger than it is — at least if it is a real film.”³ A ROOM FILLED WITH MIRRORS The profusion of critics’ misinterpretation about this movie reflects the dreamlike quality of a film one must watch more than once. Its apparent disintegration aspect is similar to one of the reflections: one often doubts if a scene has already happened or not as any scene can be accommodated elsewhere in the movie. However, what is indisputable is that Elena Rocchi

all sets are real as they are concretely built using a geometric triangulation of three vertexes: the lens of the director’s camera, the actor, and the mirror’s position. Each mirror is as a fourth wall, as a rational category designed on set and combined with the camera’s angle view to visually support not only Tarkovsky’s father’s poetry — the engine of everything.

Still, to send spectators out of the frame back to their places asking themselves, “What is it that’s going on here?” The triangulation of mirrors, the cinematic frame, and the actors is one of the dream state, virtuality, and reality — a complicated trap system for indirect vision. Tarkovsky uses it consistently along with the film until one real final scene disintegrates it as a painful memory. Here, the director’s camera focuses on a real space — just a room with no reflective devices. The vision is honest and direct, not complicated as that rendered on mirrors. As Perseus with his reflective mirror-like shield, the hero Tarkovsky fights and kills inter-generational connections, the eternal return, and the spatiotemporal discontinuity of moments in time as memories he generates by looking at their reflection on mirrors to escape their inexorable gaze, and not directly looking into the eyes of his actors. However, as the end of the movie approaches, he shows their reality as of all the stratagems he has used. He gathers framed mirrors on a room’s wall by the bed where Aleksei is dying. On the wall as a surface unit, they symbolically represent the linear sequence of film’s spaces finally three-dimensional. Heterogeneous in size, these mirrors fragment the wall space into areas that trigger an association with a 0.10 exhibition room with Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square and other paintings in 1915 — what Margarita Tupitsyn calls “the expanded hanging.” ⁴ As Malevich’s paintings inserted in the context of the 0,10 exhibition’s display, those mirrors appear now as scraps of film, a quasi-construction of the movie floating in the distance like an entirely different medium. In losing their status of being unique frames, the mirrors gain one of the objects without images gathered on the wall, exposed as Tarkovsky’s framing strategy to manipulate the movie’s perception as physical. It is because of mirrors that Mirror stops being a film as an imitation of reality and takes the form of an image of a movie in a frame at a distance — of architecture.

CONCLUSION Mirror is Tarkovsk y ’s at tempt to translate the t wo dimensional image of a painting into the three-dimensional reality of space — an expanded picture as his contribution to observe how to move the film image into the different medium of architecture. Tarkovsky uses mirrors to edit the transitions between the real and the dream, showing something unexpected: movies can exit the two-dimensional screen’s illusory. As optical instruments made for creating a super-vision, the kinds of mirrors he pairs with the camera essentially transform the film into a quasi-construction emerging from the screen’s surface. They not only display 2021 ARCHITECTURE & FILM SYMPOSIUM

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Figure 3: 0.10 Exhibition, Petrograd 1915. Suprematist works by Kazimir Malevich. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/0,10_Exhibition#/media/ 62

Mirrors of Mirror

is a world not seen but only experienced as a reflection on a mirror. Therefore, Mirror is the world as physically seen, different from the film image: hidden to our view, it is rarely seen but only experienced as a mirror reflection. Like the unresolved ambivalence of Janus’s head, Tarkovsky’s movie can be intended as a two-sided door that connects the act of looking within the mirror (architecture) to look at the mirror (film). While one side is open/visible, the other one is closed/ invisible, precisely because Tarkovsky, in Mirror, is concerned with himself as a protagonist who looks and is seen. He is the viewer of a mirror, and he is looking at the world through a mirror. The visual parallelism he creates with this movie as the juxtaposition of two perspectives allows us to see two different constructions as the two positions of Marcel Duchamp’s door at 11 rue Larrey. Between two adjacent rooms as architecture and film, when the door is open in one direction, it is closed in the other one.

Figure 4: Mirror, Still frame with the room of mirrors.

images subjected to the timeless laws of architecture. They produce depth physically real. In being paired with the camera, they form an optical instrument that finds the actor’s location through triangulation: the relationship between all three points — the mirror, the camera, and the actor, is precisely the film’s three-dimensionality. In this sense, Tarkovsky allows the film to continue beyond the screen’s edges and become space.

ENDNOTES 1. Johnson, Vida T., Petrie, Graham. 1994. “Mirror,” in The Films of Andrei Tarkovsky. A visual Fugue. Indiana University Press; First Edition edition: 118 2. Tarkovsky, A. 1986. Sculpting in Time, translated by Kitty Hunter-Blair, Austin: University of Texas Press: 106 3.

Tarkovsky, Idem: 117.

4. Tupitsyn, M. 2002. Malevich and Film, with essays by Kazimir Malevich and Victor Tupitsyn, London, Yale University Press: 15.

In this light, Mirror is a highly symbolic work of difficult interpretation. And that’s because, in juxtaposing the film and the mirror frames, Tarkovsky creates a tension between what Svetlana Alpers would call two contradictory modes of picturing the viewer’s relationship to the movie and the world. In this reflection game, the film remains untranslatable as one without meaning. Viewers see it through the window frame while experiencing its unresolvable ambivalence in the mirrors.

Instead of following the strategy of describing the movie dilemma and reflections, the argument here has been to show a movie as architecture focusing on mirrors. In terms of mirrors, rereading Mirror allows distinguishing what is framed — the film — from what mirrors. And to see where Tarkovsky stands in relationship to the film’s reality and reality. On the other hand, it depicts the unresolvable ambivalence that exists between architecture and film. As a movie director, Tarkovsky constructs a filmed world of scenes using a camera. However, as an architect, he builds mirrors as devices that produce a reality he can film. The first one — the space as an idealization of the real space — is seen in a frame: viewer and film director coincide. The second one — the actual area intervened by Tarkovsky— is the space in which he organizes the actors: unframed, it Elena Rocchi

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Memoirs of Spaces: Cinematic Disposition of Space-Induced Retrospections into Cultural and Spatial Hegemony of Experiences

C. APARNAA & SPARSH PATLAN CEPT University, Ahmedabad, India

Places are translations of spaces in the built realm, an amalgamation of memories, and identities formed as a consequence of the experience of spatial attributes. Movies are often the demeanors of such spaces comprehending a virtual scenario effectively. Quite often, films document and depict historically significant and evocative storylines imagined through the eyes of its characters (both real-life witnesses and fictional characters) by mediating their identities through such embodied spaces. They communicate personal narratives attached with a space that is metaphorically bridged through individual identities transcending them into collective personalities. The paper highlights various domains of articulation about how there exists a dynamic correlation and interdependence between spaces and their memories. It concentrates on how the living experience is transformational and expresses a strong cinematic narrative in today’s times, the dynamic development and gentrification of spaces which often get mingled with the identification of perceptive spaces. It reviews how adeptly the reflection of space is imbibed in a person’s mind cinematically by scrutinizing two films: Lion and Swades that have diverse frameworks to promulgate the interrelations of the terms "memory", "identity" and "space". These films are based in the Indian context and portray two distinct kinds of affiliations to one’s homeland as a result of transnational experiences. They portray how memories and identities are intricately linked with spaces where diaspora has played a crucial role in permeating nostalgia in the character’s mind to accentuate their cultural affiliation with their homeland. The paper thus elaborates how these 64

spaces re-define notions of memory with time and should be a narrative of itself where it beholds the strength to form an identity thus creating a memory of its own in the minds of the people.

PERCEPTION OF SPACES AS SYMBOLS OF ASSOCIATED MEMORIES AND IDENTITIES. Homogenization often captures the vital essence of curiosity of how once spaces would have been, reviving interest in the question of how or through what lens should it be perceived.

While it is important to look at spaces as they are, it becomes equally essential to analyze them in coherence with other characteristics that form such spaces. These built, un-built, and intermediate spaces carry potential for transformative human encounters and relationships and tend to form a very subjective notion in an individual’s mind as to how it could be perceived. Christian Norberg Schulz (1979) talks about the concept of how the genius loci, i.e. the spirit of the place seeks the aspects of image, character, and space and juxtaposes them to define a place. There are various lenses through which spaces can be perceived. Whether it focuses on the morphological aspects that are manifested through the distinct vernacular or generic yet notable architecture, the visual aspects in terms of what all catches the eye as landmarks, the functions that take place in different kinds of spaces or the socio-cultural history that has shaped the city into what it is and what it chooses to be, the perception of the Memoirs of Spaces

city remains in the genius loci of these places, characterized by a combination of varying intensities of all these aspects.

Spaces tend to create an impression that is both individualistic as well as a collective in nature. They serve as a palimpsest of identities associated with it, from its inception to the times they undergo distinct alterations. At each point in time, they bear a distinct collective identity, certain memories are attached with them by individuals when they were present in that setting and each defining period would make them recollect the previous time. This aspect of spaces with individual and collective identity extends into the everyday sphere of life with spaces that may seem ordinary to a person, but have developed from a nuanced experience of that space as a resultant of accustomization based on everyday life.

Thus, spaces in the built realm serve as an amalgamation of memories and identities formed as a consequence of experiences of pronounced spatial attributes.

LION (2016) The premise of the movie is to depict how diaspora has played a crucial role in permeating nostalgia in the character’s mind to accentuate their cultural affiliation. The movie Lion tries to overlap impressions that one tends to grasp from a space. It depicts the cultural affiliation of a person with his surrounding spaces that creates a distinct identity of it in their minds and with time, a memory. Remembrance and memorization is a very arbitrary aspect and encoded as a qualitative and subjective determinant formed by the human unconscious.

Guy de Maupassant (1884) quotes “Our memory is a more perfect world than the universe: it gives back life to those who no longer exist.” The quote narrates the strength of the human mind in accordance with spatial attributes that define the coexistence of life, death, and interim in the same spectrum which is highlighted extensively in the visual canvas of the mise en scène.

PORTRAYAL AND INTERPRETATION OF MEMORY, IDENTITY, AND SPACE IN THE CINEMATIC CONTEXT. Films are simulacrums of embodied spaces in tandem with the memories and identities it encompasses. Narratives of such spaces that embody a multitude of memories and identities require ingenuity with which they are simulated in films and the incorporation of various manoeuvers to do so. One of the conventional methods is the reminiscence of a space depicted through parallelism between places of different spatial, cultural, and historical attributes to permeate its essence with corresponding intensity.

Considering the deep associations that spaces tend to create in a person’s mind, it becomes imperative that the quintessence of such spaces is conveyed with profundity in the movies by imbuing a sense of belongingness for the viewers to empathize. Lion (2016) is a depiction of a person’s yearning to reunite with his family, focusing on the significance of the visual memories of his childhood whereabouts and the use of Google Earth imagery in accordance to trace his way back home. Swades (2004) on the other hand portrays the cultural affiliation of a person instigated by the recollection of the native setting which compels him to contribute to his nation’s rural area development.

One of the common features across the two films considered is the several mechanisms utilized to demonstrate the correlation between same as well as different spaces and the built environment under different circumstances and time-periods. The paper thus analyzes and culminates how memories and identities are intricately linked with spaces and portrayed in movies based in different socio-cultural contexts by highlighting the contradictory spatial qualities.

C. Aparnaa, Sparsh Patlan

Figure 1: (Canning, Fielder, & Sherman, 2016) Collage of two contrary images; one of extreme havoc and distress and other with dead silence and comfort with the protagonist contemplating the purpose of his presence at the very moment in that space and experiencing a dilemma of his thoughts.

The movie reflects on how the conscience of the human mind is reflective of the surrounding and tries to imbibe or adapt itself to it, absorbing the transformations. These transformations are framed and shot as scenes stitched through the narrative of presenting the two realities that the protagonist experienced as a cinematically grasping plot which keeps switching between the past and the 2021 ARCHITECTURE & FILM SYMPOSIUM

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present. It makes one understand how people behave or present themselves in a particular space. These could be the commotions around or the resemblance of spaces with one another or this idea itself of spaces being more than just places to be. Spaces are intersections of memory and identity stimulating information of perception and apprehension. The built space around often tends to create behavioral or social associations that are suggestive of certain intangible dialogues and norms that these spaces acquire. These impressions always create some variable components along with few constants. For instance, when an impression gets registered in the memory certain elements tend to be more overpowering than others whereas few get over-shadowed and often forgotten. These fluid thoughts are arbitrary yet often linked with our everyday stories, interactions or even traumatic experiences that might get registered in the subconscious.

his own. The emphasis on the vehemence of the memories of space as a tool of orientation is portrayed by how, as a child, the protagonist tries to make his way back home but is unable to do so because of his inability to remember the name of his hometown (or even his name). Yet, he remembers every single detail of his hometown. Throughout the movie, the protagonist constantly tries to make sense of the situation that he becomes a part of and attempts to relate them or familiarize those with his past memories. Later on as he grew up and tries to find his way back home the missing pieces of the puzzle (incident blots from the memory) become stronger directives in his attempt to understand the incidents of the past and connect the blurred visuals and articulate a strengthened and well-structured piece of narrative for his search of his real identity. The protagonist subconsciously tries to replace what has been lost with comparable events

Figure 2: (Canning, Fielder, & Sherman, 2016) The journey of overlapping,

and associations for his sanity. For instance, a scene in the film depicts his interaction with an unknown elderly woman who takes him under her roof, feeds him, and even offers to take care of him, substituting for the motherly warmth that he had just been disconnected with. Further, as he moves to Hobart

blurred memories of the protagonist in search of a place which he once remembered as home, where his mother and brother live.

The protagonist in the movie Lion had been displaced from his family at a very young age and ended up in a new city on 66

Memoirs of Spaces

Figure 3: (Canning, Fielder, & Sherman, 2016) Interpretation of the protagonist’s memories from his past into extractable data from google earth to navigate his way back home to India and reunite with his family.

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with his newfound parents, he meets his new brother (also adopted by the couple). Despite the irritable and self-isolating character of his brother, the protagonist tries to maintain an affectionate relationship with him with an attempt to provide equivalent love and care that his elderly brother nurtured him with to fill the gap of his longing for reuniting with his long lost siblings and family.

The film, further, exquisitely portrays that even after being habituated to a different cultural context for many years; similar elements in a different setting induced the memory of the space that he was accustomed to in the initial years of his life that helped him return home. The parallelism between the sandy beaches in the proximity of his home in Tasmania and the sandy plains of Ganesh Talai (that led to his neighborhood from the railway tracks), the evocation of the turns he took to reach his home in Australia and India highlights the sense of familiarity that he craved since childhood. It results into the simultaneous reminiscence of the narrow street formed by the built facades of clay leading to the courtyard created by multiple houses (one of them being his own home), as he presently walks through the streets of Hobart.

The character during multiple phases of the movie is subjected to the trauma of being separated from the family and he is haunted by the possibilities of what the family might have gone through when he went missing, their wellbeing, and happiness. He is suggested by his friends to look up the places near Calcutta, where he was displaced before being adopted and moving to Tasmania, Australia. As he creates zones on Google Earth based on his calculation of how long it took him back on that day to reach Calcutta from his home by train, the memory of his neighborhood is induced when he views a water tank near the station. The distinct built setting of the water tank alongside a railway station served as the initial point for navigation of his way back home due to the remembrance of an accustomed space. The places that he observed on Google Earth concomitantly induced remembrance and is exhibited through simultaneous scenes of the views that he recollected as he traced his journey back from the Water Tank, walking amidst the fields and sandy plains with coalmines leading to his neighborhood.

The movie thus inculcates the power of memories and identities associated with a space in helping one orient themselves and revive their cultural associations. It depicts the aspect of spaces with individual identities and instills the idea that spaces that may seem ordinary to a person have developed from a nuanced experience. It is a resultant of accustomization based on their everyday lives. It reflects on the notoriously fickling and self-indulgent phases of a human’s life where their thoughts, blurred visions, and memory make them question their identity at every stage of life. It takes on multiple tangents of the same hem, for instance, the main character Saru’s stepmother in the latter 68

part of the movie reminisces her past where in her darkest time an unknown stranger brought new hope and radiance to her life. That meeting gave her a new, positive direction and a purpose to her existence which she never realized before while holding onto her saddening past. It highlights how there is always a hidden conscience in each individual which often gets empowered once the right opportunity strikes.

These consciences are identified as the epitome of human psychology, thoughts triggered out of certain incidents, etc.

It’s essentially important to observe the complexities and underlying nuances that often get overshadowed. The theme principle of the movie was not to immediately resolve but to create strategies that consolidate these fragmented issues under a singular umbrella which could be used as a powerful tool to channelize the approach.

SWADES (2004) The film Swades is a reflection of an individual’s yearning to find his true self while adapting to the constant chaos and inevitable changes around him that stimulate the reminiscence of past occurrences and associated identities.

It comprehensively depicts patriotism inculcated through the memories of events that unfold in the protagonist’s life as he revisits his native place, which deeply impacts him and compels him to return and contribute to the nation’s progress. With rapid urbanization post-1950s, both domestic and transnational migration proliferated with increased employment opportunities, engendering an aspiration of affordability of an enhanced way of living. While there are many reasons as to why a person shifts to different places, a perpetual yearn to figure out one’s identity has led people to connect with their cultural roots now more than ever.

The oblivion about their own identity and a remembrance of their past, the awful recollections as well the fond memories that they associate with, has led to what Bandyopadhyay (2008) terms as diaspora tourism, where people set out on a journey to relive their memories by being in the same space. The films based in the Indian context of late have been increasingly rendering a multitude of storylines with the aforementioned theme at its core to exhibit the significance of spaces embodied with several notions and the deep impact that they create on an individual’s mind. Swades is one such film that astoundingly captures the cultural affinities that are reinforced through the memories one has of their homeland.

The protagonist, Mohan, an Indian settled in America works as a project manager at NASA. Off late, as each day passes, the thoughts of his childhood caretaker whom he regarded as his mother makes him regret not having ensured her comfort over the past decade and decides to bring her to live with him in America. His journey to get Kaveri Amma (childhood caretaker) back commences and leads him to Charanpur, a small village in India where she lives with a childhood friend of his. The movie further demonstrates Memoirs of Spaces

Figure 4: (Gowariker, 2004) Multiple scenes from the movie Swades highlighting the theme, background, and emotional tone that the movie impersonates and reflects on.

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the intricacies of Mohan’s experiences in the village which is deprived of basic amenities like schools, electricity due to a generally conservative attitude amongst the residents who refrain from taking initiatives. A heart-wrenching encounter of Mohan with a family struggling to make both ends meet and the detrimental conditions of many impels him to undertake the responsibility of generating electricity in the village with the help of the residents. The music, impressions, and subtle snitches towards the harsh realities that co-exist even within these blurred juxtapositions creates solace to the viewer yet highlights how infrastructural manifestations which abide to the necessities of communities address various social issues that exist in the spaces. Subsequently, he is asked to return to finish the project. As he stands in the room where a colleague presents the due course of the satellite, the mention of India culminates into a series of memories of his homeland. These are depicted through the fast pacing consecutive views recollecting the house made of clay with the well-lit courtyard in the middle, the fields in the village, the destitute family in their thatched house, the intermediate railway station on his way back to the village, and the water bund that was transformed to generate electricity to the entire village.

It concludes with a scene of Mohan residing in the same village, subsuming the lifestyle and reliving one of his fondest recollections of wrestling in the temple premises along the river.

The film, therefore, brilliantly demonstrates the competence of spatial features in deeply impacting an individual’s impressions that are evoked on the slightest mention or resemblance of something corresponding with their memories. The formation of identities based on these memories is skillfully portrayed where the experience of the protagonist is explicitly documented majorly throughout the film and the finesse with which the memory of it is instigated through the fast-moving stills from the detailed out experiences to permeate its essence and intensity, consequently inculcating patriotism.

CONCLUSION The paper reviews different spatial attributes and how they activate varied human senses to create an identity of the space. The cinematic disquisition of the embodied spaces disseminates how the aforementioned aspects form the crux of the films. Furthermore, the storylines retrospect a collective identity in congruence with the outline as well as the period of its filming and release; representation of India as a developing country focusing on its rural areas in Lion and Swades. It highlights the intricacies that are embodied in the spatial and built environment which create strengthened relationships of individuals with not just the spaces but also their own selves. The films thus are apt representations of the context and merge with the potential ideas of how memory is a discourse when seen in isolation but narrates a set of visual, 70

condensed realities collectively.

The narratives draw on the assimilated data and try to rupture the crux into understandable text which highlights the cinematic nuances and visuals into expositions of memory and identity. Memory thus is subjective of inferences and instances that form its shape and could be condensed as water which forms its shapes based on the vessel it is kept rather than having its own form. It is an articulation of one’s thoughts. The entire idea of juxtaposition of radically different notions into one inextricably bound relationship ties the ends of a cinematic theme. This idea of indulgence of everybody, acts as a focal point to catalyze multiple thoughts and opinions and present a platform of verbalization, networks, overlaps, and fill the underlying voids of discrepancies, complexities. The narratives that often are created in the memories about spaces tend to shape their identity for us.

It is important to explore the cross networking between spaces and memories as it helps in the logical interpretation of identity.

The relationship that are formed between spaces and identity potentially influences social formations, cultural practices, societal norms, ergonomics, built environment, and dynamics of functioning. The distinctiveness of these spatially varied identities is what defines a space as it is and creates, even if momentary, a memory in one’s mind. As surmised by Chow (2012) in her article The Landmark on Film: Representation of Place and Identity, the discourse of the movies in this paper are also visual representations of the lived realities manifesting a palimpsest and accretion of identities entrenched in everyday spaces. The films elaborated and tested for argument thus try to set a framework to bridge the gap between the virtual euphoria and the set of preconceived notions of cinematic experiences at a common platform.

ENDNOTES 1. B a n d y o p a d h y a y, R a n j a n . 2 0 0 8 . “ N o s t a l g i a , I d e n t i t y A n d Tourism:Bollywood in The Indian Diaspora”. Journal Of Tourism And Cultural Change 6 (2): 79-100. doi:10.1080/14766820802140463.

2. Chow, Pei-Sze. 2012. “The Landmark On Film: Representations Of Place And Identity”. Opticon1826, no. 13: 14-22. doi:10.5334/opt.ab.

3. Maupassant, Guy de. 2012. “Suicides’’. Americanliterature.Com. https:// americanliterature.com/author/guy-de-maupassant/short-story/ suicides.

4. Norberg-Schulz, Christian. 1996. Genius Loci. New York: Rizzoli.

Images (Screenshots for collages from the movies Lion &Swades): 5. Davis, Gareth. 2020. Lion. Film. Australia: The Weinstein Company. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PAWpsyW9Hkk 6. Gowariker, Ashutosh. 2004. Swades. Video. India: UTV Motion Pictures. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7v07PLlIPgo

Memoirs of Spaces

Infrastitial Scenes

DOREEN BERNATH AND SARAH MILLS Leeds School of Architecture, Leeds Beckett University, UK

“The scene is not the illustration of an idea. It is a little optical machine that shows us thought busy weaving together perceptions, affects, names and ideas, constituting the sensible community that these links create, and the intellectual community that makes such weaving thinkable.”

Jacques Rancière, Aisthesis (2013) The paper questions the assumed opposition between the immateriality of films and the material basis of architecture by unravelling a possible shared domain of "scenic" constructs which can be considered as the material artifice of films and the immaterial confluence of architectural spaces. In order to overcome the reductive dichotomy of material versus immaterial, the construct of "scenes" is further complicated in the paper through the identification of two distinct processes – constellating and grafting – that relate, penetrate, translate, and interrogate between filmic, scenographic, and architectural practices. The notion of "infrastitial scenes" is construed as the stitching of differences in the mode of "grafting" and the simultaneous transitioning in the mode of "constellating", both propelled by the mechanism of returning, essaying gaze shared between filmic and architectural experiences. Infra- implies that which is just below the horizon of awareness, and -stitial implies the recognition of the in-between, the intervening; the intention to articulate, apply and theorize these moments of disjointed, tacit, and elusive transformations between spaces, bodies, and consciousness is to resist the subordination of such experiences by the dominant imperative in conventional architectural methods to objectify, rationalize and neutralize.

Doreen Bernath and Sarah Mills

Materiality and spatiality are unfolded through subjects transiting and revisiting, producing a multitude of "I"s connecting others. Relations take on forms of gathering that capture autonomous yet interpenetrating experiences, personal and foreign. Cities, buildings, and lived spaces take on illusor y and immer sive transformations in architectural productions that combine projectional and scenographic techniques. Altogether, these synthetic scenes of togetherness, a mise-en-scène of concepts at work, transcribes and inscribes anomalies and radicals in bodies of architecture and urbanity. Off-screen spaces and fictional spaces converge at the infrastitial between situations and thoughts, bodies and sites, visceral impressions, and conscious expectations. The infrastitial also describes the contingent process of repetition of overlapping images from films, theatrical scenes, and architectural spaces which depends on active interactions of the viewer’s imagination, which in turn could be redirected as a design process. The subversive and affective potentials of "infrastitial scenes" are identified in the paper at moments of such revelation and resistance.

This paper has been developed based on the work of "Cinematic Commons", a postgraduate architecture studio established at Leeds School of Architecture. Over the years, the studio has developed a critical, diverse body of urban propositions, in response to inter- and infra-stitial polemics, by probing new relations between a plurality of interrogative mediums and their architectural possibilities. It has explored interweaving strategies of essay film, cinematic forensis, storyboarding, set modelling, composite space, layered scene, and 1:1 performative installation as alternative architectural processes. It has worked with a diverse range of international collaborators from Mumbai, Mexico City, Tokyo, London, Berlin, and Marseille to Beijing. Visual evidence from these experimental processes supports the elaboration of both "constellating" and "grafting", through which emerge the infrastitial constructs. We are grateful for the contributions from students, colleagues and collaborators in the development of this body of research, propositions and 2021 ARCHITECTURE & FILM SYMPOSIUM

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commons not a space or place within the film.

insights.

CONSTELLATING The trains and interchanges form important "characters" in Madhushee’s Dutta’s documentary film Seven Islands and a Metro (2006), which concentrates on the invisible citizens and fringe dwellers who have kept the city moving.1 In motifs of arrival and departure and conversations with citizens, Dutta’s scenes narrativize the concept of a commons or commoning in a metropolis. The film constructs riddles for the present: graveyards speak, application forms disappear, Bombay ducks glisten, fisherwomen, and coffee vendors grumble, city maps haunt and vehicles rumble through the night. Two storytellers, writers Saadat Hasan Manto and Ismat Chugtai as fictionalized narrators, gather these characters to re-tell their stories, of the irrepressible rhythm of the city. At the Chinese cemetery, the monk explains in Hindi, "The first Japanese to ply their trade in this port city were 200 prostitutes," and here a burial service offers a lullaby to a man asleep on a nearby grave. Overnight, a European graveyard is transformed into living quarters by a migrant Tamil community. Marbles stolen from Jewish graves across the road become parts of temples. Children hop in and out through the window, from an unseen swing, behind a watchman of the Chinese cemetery.

These surreal scenes cut into the real to offer a truth through the city’s history and geography revealing the contrary worldviews that make up Mumbai’s rambling public sphere.

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Transiting and voyaging, characters, carriages and stories, in what Giuliana Bruno describes as a "site of passage" and a "methodological in-between", is that which "opens the door to… a transitorial aspiration", mobilizing architecture’s practices of the everyday and a "map of travelling cultures".2 Acknowledging the limitation of architecture conventionally regarded as static constructs, she expands on the notion of transito as a "wide-ranging and multifaceted notion of circulation, which includes passages, traversals, transitions, and transitory states" to accentuate how architecture relies on (dis)locations, analogous to filmic gazes and spaces. Passing scenes as experienced from a train, with moving bodies, at points of departures and arrival, is "a speculative experience of the world: being outside of these things that stay there", which Michel De Certeau considers as "detached and absolute", leaving us with "astonishment in abandonment" and leading to possible means of cultural transportation. 3 This is what can be characterized as "constellating", as a mode of forming relations that requires transitorial connections between detached and autonomous scenes, such is the way we invented legible constellations as astronomical and mythical constructs from stars that are light years apart from one another and from an earth that never ceased to move.

In resonance with Walter Benjamin’s proposition of the Idea, and later his re-conception of history, as "constellation" which are distinctively relational, reconfiguring actual phenomena yet non-synthesizing, and simultaneously subjective and objective.4 The transitorial aspiration, both temporal and moving, is manifested in the oscillating relations between past and present, in that moment of now and what-has-been coming "together in a flash… to form a constellation", which imprints the critical state of the present and interrupts the continuum of history as a preservation force.5 Constellating, as a mode of both material and conceptual rearrangements, transposed into formal methodologies of collage, montage, and assemblage, permeated Benjamin’s incising writings on photography, film, and speculative scenes of experiences in cities with intentions which Adorno describes as "philosophy directed against philosophy".6 Figure 1: "New Bloomsbury" (2015), Abdullah Iqbal.

Figure 2: "Darukhana Reimagined" (2015), Joe Myerscough. In one of the world’s biggest ship breaking yard, Joe Myerscough proposes a productive entanglement of precarious ship breaking processes, re-appropriation, and reassembly of vessels parts, service utility interventions from sanitation to soil for crops, and empowering participation of laborers in improving their own community along the coast. A provocative future constellation, potentially a new vernacular form and coastal ecology, in the context of Mumbai, it establishes possible new relations between previously incongruous scenes of seafaring, industry, pollution, labor, poverty, services, food, and community.

Infrastitial Scenes

Dutta had been part of Project Cinema City (2013) which, through multidisciplinary collaborations across five years, accumulated a summary anthology across different visual and textual forms based on the "hypothesis that cinema in the terrain of cinema city is as much an everyday practice as it is a part of a speculative desirescape." Reminiscent of a Benjaminian constellation, scenes were taken apart and reassembled, from locations, languages, moving peoples, labor, productions, icons, conventions to hidden processes, of films and cinemas the city makes, as well as the city its cinemas produce. Rohan Shivkumar who also contributed to the project explains its two parallel inquiries: firstly, the interrogation of the domain of imageries traversing architectural, urban planning, and film-making practices; and secondly, the research on the intensive and extensive film industry revealed through filmic documentation and architectural analyzes in the organization of spaces, activities, people, resources, production, and distribution in Mumbai.7 He writes: Architecture carries with it a burden of hope. It cannot but be embroiled in the utopian project of "anticipatory illuminations". Its domain is that of building for better-ness.

Architects and urban planners are as involved in telling stories as film-makers are. They tell their stories through images that are drawings to make their arguments. Architects present the existing city as a problem to be resolved or an artefact to be preserved. This is what allows them the authority to intervene.

They evoke idealizations and retreat to a mother’s arms, the logic of science, the pleasure of a garden, efficiency and cleanliness, freedom and liberty as escape from the labyrinth, dungeon, prison, chaos of the city. They call upon archetypes to images regarding the state of the city. These too get consumed in the clamour of images shattering the city into parts. They are at best provisional paradises whose spectres join the innumerable ghosts that haunt the city.8 As impossible to conclude as The Arcades Project endeavor

by Benjamin almost a century ago, Project Cinema City makes Doreen Bernath and Sarah Mills

use of extensive yet disjointed points of view and evidence to stitch together an inclusive yet resolutely partial constellation of the relation between the cinemas and the city of Mumbai.

Ghosts that haunt the city, in Shivkumar’s fable, rather than being expelled, are invited to the constellation. Here the interrupted and transitorial mode makes legible a terrain with a set of urban, territorial and physical rules, and at the same time, a domain of exchange, negotiation and collective operation.

Constellating differs to the notion of commoning which in recent debates has been framed as that which counters the problematic opposition between so-called "public" and "private" domains of the city, and the rise of privatized mechanisms being given the responsibility, and profitability, of organizing public spaces in the city. Commoning becomes a pertinent notion, harking back to the historical category of "commons", for those driven by the socio-political concern to resist which in essence is the disappearance of the public both as an operative mechanism and a spatial and territorial entity. David Harvey, an influential voice in this resistance, characterizes how the reduction of the public domain came as a result of underestimating the capability of how "individuals can and often do devise ingenious and eminently sensible collective ways to manage common property resources for individual and collective benefit." 9 Departing from what commons meant in the past as a territory demarcated and collectively suspended from private ownership yet differentially occupied by disconnected private parties through negotiation, i.e. a legitimized and representative space of conflict, increasingly communing in a contemporary sense, has been associated with much more coherently organized forms of co-habitation and co-production, and politicized notions of representative bodies in civic society and agencies in urban ecologies. This is where the notion of constellating, not so much in opposition to or as being directly supplementary to commoning, offers itself as a mode of rethinking the sphere of relations of 2021 ARCHITECTURE & FILM SYMPOSIUM

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urban subjects and the endeavor to construct, with urgency and passion.10 Furthermore, the liberation of the territorial bound of legitimate scenes of conflict and negotiation that could, enlarge, rather than reduce, the power of occupation of city and citizens as multivalent, inclusive, and temporal situations, overcoming hegemony of control, segregation, and commodification. Commoning is thus produced by the setting of specific architectural assemblies that manifest the incongruous yet tolerant co-presence of these confluent or conflicting scenes. The scenic mechanism of grafting between physical, experiential and imaginary/propositional elements,

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central to Jacque Rancière’s attempt to rethink "community" starting from the notion of "common world", will be further elaborated in the next part. This "common world", a socially crafted "distribution of the sensible world", is always more than a shared ethos and a shared abode.

Figure 3: "Ghosts of Tokyo" (2016), Sarah Gerrish. This project reworked Chris Marker’s stills from Tokyo Days (1988) in the exploration of "subtraction" as a way to renew the urban landscape along a hidden San’ya Canal. The layering and moving images splice through the city and precarious lives of day laborers in San’ya, and are stitched together using repetitive images of travelling to work via trains, labor sites and cramped living conditions.

Infrastitial Scenes

GRAFTING The performance in Marylebone, London, started as the audience took their seat in the windowless vault once used to test concrete resistance for the Channel Tunnel. Screens rise to reveal an installation consisting of an uncanny stack of five pianos, stripped of covers exposing their insides and interspersed with tree branches, in front of which several large rectangles are flooded with water, and yellow light pours down like the sun. An unseen actor reads from an Adalbert Stifter passage describing a woodland covered in snow. Jacob van Ruisdael’s view of a marsh is projected on to a screen and the floor appears to become a frozen lake. Next rain begins to fall and ice melts, small whirls of vapor rise, and the mood shifts while the pianos play with no pianists from the second movement of J. S. Bach’s Italian Concerto in F major.

Of the five pianos, two uprights are played by invisible fingers striking keys and small hammers hitting strings following the traditional mechanism. The rest are played by robotic arms gliding down the strings. "Time has Changed", the voice of Malcom X echoes across the space. Other voices woven into the polyphony are William Burroughs and Claude Levi-Straus, as well as traditional Greek songs welcoming immigrants and strangers.

The intensity of recording many aspects of nature’s wonders through deceleration of time and heightened awareness in smallest details is abundant in Stifter’s writing. In anticipation of many of today’s ecological changes, his literary journeys dedicated enthusiastically to describing phenomena on the margins of the event, sets them in new rhythms and rituals, and in particular giving voices to cultures that are different Doreen Bernath and Sarah Mills

Figure 4: "Recycling Chapultpec" (2015), Sarah Gerrish. This project proposes a series of charged, layered scenes assembled through set models, projected images, staged activities, and collaged characters.

Essaying between problematic developments, urban interstices, socialecological programs, laboring, and material processes, and the architectural intervention engages with subjects producing and being produced.

and peripheral to what is dominant and taken for granted.

Within Heiner Goebbels’ art installation-performance Stifter’s Dinge (2008), in collaboration with set designer Klaus Grünberg, things that often only serve as illustration now become the main characters: the curtain, the lighting, the images, the noises, the sounds, the voices, wind and fog, water and ice. At the end, the audience is invited to inspect the set, which Goebbels emphasizes as integral to the experience of the performance: "it sets the human body in a relation to a non-human machinery… immersing into the things, even when you are not involved yourself, but you see someone else walking around. You relate humanity with the elements which we cannot master."11 "How far we could go with a play that consists of a lack of actors, and of the attention that the audience pays, to materials, to objects, to forces that we do not always fully perceive," as Goebbels questions. The absence of performers, and the foregrounding of sets and scenes, subvert the relation between performers, the performance, scenes and audience.

Things are not merely illustrations to grand ideas in Stifter’s writing, and in the same way, Goebbels’ sets are not just illustrations of the play: it is the play, to the point that "the actor has to share it… with all the elements involved and 2021 ARCHITECTURE & FILM SYMPOSIUM

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Figure 5: "Memory Machine" (2014), Aimee Major. The project interrogates the translation between memory and its physical manifestation in Berlin through a scenographic and filmic construct. Skewed planes of grafted scenes are employed with imprints of significant urban settings of memories of escaping, pursuit, and capturing, which are arranged like a theatrical set and filmed as stop motions, implying a cinematic experiential journey through and between actual and remembered events.

produced by the reality of the set, which is not an illustrative décor, but a powerful artistic statement." In such a way the performative construct gathers – texts, images, objects, sounds, human figures wandering in and out, acting and reacting within and outside of scenes – and conjures new relations. The construct is predetermined and substantial, but its performative outcome is indeterminate and liminal, thus the work is shared, in the sense that the audience shares the work of the gathering with the material assembly of the scene, creating a sense of a collective experience.

A performative installation which also shared the exploration of absence is Pascal Schöning’s Cinematic House (2006).

A glass box is presented like a stage set where lights and moving images are projected on the walls, interspersed with layers of shadows of visitors; this animated "scenic" construct without actors seem to suggests everyone is an actor. The reading of this "house", however, triggered controversies which still lingers in a debate held in 2009.12 Participants of the roundtable session have different opinions in answering the question: is the "Cinematic House" really a "house"? But then what really is a "house"? If, as some speakers insisted, there remains a distinction between a "real house" and a "cinematic house", then how does one relate to, takes place 76

of, superimposes upon, alludes and transgresses another?

If instead, as the host of the roundtable counter-argued in her footnotes, there should not be a distinction - cinematic house is a real house - then what is it about the cinematic house that brings us closer to a house more real than a house defined through the convention of a physical object? The moderator Ingerid Helsing Almaas inserted a footnote in the transcript of conversations to insist that the Cinematic House is a real house: "Not an artistic interpretation of reality. Not a metaphor. It was real, without a doubt, a real house, as any architecture has to be." This echoes Schöning’s declaration in the Manifesto for a Cinematic Architecture (2006): "The user of cinematic architecture, at its most extreme, will lose any consciousness of being housed or, the opposite, have the somewhat disappointing experience of there not being more than a house. In this way, cinematic architecture is a form of physical dialogue."13 However much of the emphasis is on the ephemerality of life experience, the dialogue takes place through the physicality of the immersive scene. The same architectural reading can be distilled from Stifter’s Dinge, where the construct’s insistence on both the physicality and centrality of experience of things not only opens up experiments with that which is architectonic, so to speak, but also with that which architecture enacts or enables, from use, view, action, connection, pleasure, protection, memory, knowledge, dream to beauty.

The coming together of a "scene", of possibilities of incongruous adjacencies, and the nature of "constructed realit y" has long been a question of intrigue in the tradition of theater. The sophistication of the technique of perspective in scenographic design involving twodimensional backdrops and three- dimensional props, later the intrusion of the camera lens upon the stage or studio set in the production of photographic and filmic pictures, all imposed a different regime on the relation between perceived, conceived, projected, imagined, constructed, and simulated visual realities. Hubert Damisch describes such process of deliberately convincing yet illusory transformation as "grafting": from a flat simulated painted space with streets, houses and cities to semi-relief, to semi-model, to a magnificent city with "real" streets and three-dimensional details. In a 1513 document about a scene for comedies in Florence, Damisch quotes a particular description: "though relatively detailed, does not allow us, given the conventions of dissimulation at work in the scene, to determine precisely which elements were painted, where were in relief, and which were "really" constructed."14 Painted architectural elements are grafted onto modelled ones in the set, and then grafted onto material construction of the theater; theatrical realities are grafted onto real realities as actuality, as experience, as memory and as image. From the city outside to the city inside the theatre, from the painted city to the city imagined,these transitions are overlapping, reaching into each other, yet Infrastitial Scenes

displaying discernible gaps gnawing at viewers’ minds. The ‘grafted’ scene has a partial integrity which, although with blurred boundaries, resists complete smoothing over to retain distinction between participating realities.

Such a strategy of incongruous yet symbiotic co-existence of representations of realities, held in one "scene", makes possible the alteration of relationships between givens through the coming together of multiple differences. A "scene" is a synthetic togetherness that requires work, which according to Rancière, is "a little optical machine" that "captures concepts at work, in their relation to the new objects they seek to appropriate, old objects that they try to reconsider, and the patterns they build or transform to this end."15 As that which invites an opportunity of a scenic "communing", Rancière points to a tangible situation of concepts becoming thinkable and imaginable and, more importantly, sharable. Since the architectural gaze according to Walter Benjamin is that of a distracted nature, the voice directing the gaze and grafting the scene becomes instrumental in pertaining the filmic construct towards an architectural experience. This is where the maker leads the viewer to multiple distinct positions of vieue-en-scène to choreograph the translation from set-lens-screen to architectural experience, and furthermore, to a language of design that is neither purely visual, nor purely spatial, but gathering and grafting of differences, gaps and voids.

In the discussion on the construct of "scenes", Damisch started with the notion of "distancing… the liberating resolution, to resist giving in to it and to persist putting questions to it, in considering it from different angles and submitting it to sustained interrogation."16 The exploration of the scenographic construct in both filmic and architectural production has implications which are twofold: it enables an "imaginability" of architecture, and at the same time, it is placing the matter of "theatricality" right at the core of architecture-making, through the interrogative grafting of imageries, texts and voices: the becoming of a "scene" is also a tangible formation of a discourse.

ENTERLUDE

The scene that enables imaginability, which Carlo Salzani calls the combination of "representation with what is not representable" when he dislocated Benjaminian characters from The Arcades Project and juxtaposed them with contemporary texts as an extension of "constellations of reading". Connecting and returning to the mode of constellating, Salzani’s distinction of ever-changing force fields of configurations with immutable figures, or forms and spaces, from stereotypes, archetypes or ideal types, is further extended to the production of critical meaning.17 The representability of an interstitial scene, as the paper has attempted to demonstrate, is also that which enables it to penetrate, intervene and interrogate seemingly immutable figures as a critical practice. The angst of confronting one’s self, Doreen Bernath and Sarah Mills

becoming mutable through the recurring gaze in these infrastitial transitions, propels the recognition of new spatial identities and inhabitations. The filmic and the architectural fold onto one another as internal and external doubles to propound scenes of contradictions and confrontations, the personal interwoven with the propositional, the past in co-presence with the current and the future, us and others, familiarity and strangeness. Extending Theodor Adorno’s suggestion of how "luck and play are essential to [the essai]" ("essay" in English or "trial/testing" in French)]18 as an act that both probes and assesses, opportunities that can be opened up at the interstitial scene entail not only play and luck, but also precarity and audacity.

END NOTES 1. Madhushree Dutta, “On Seven Islands and a Metro” interview by Filmibeat, October 9, 2006. https://www.filmibeat.com/bollywood/features/2006/ madhushree-dutta-091006.html. (accessed in Jan 2016) 2. Giuliana Bruno, “Bodily Architectures,” Assemblage, no. 19 (Dec. 1992).

3. Michel De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 111-112.

4. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, ed., Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Vol.1 (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1991–1999).

5. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA. and London: Belknap Press, 1999), 463.

6. Andrew Benjamin and Peter Osborne, eds., Benjamin’s Philosophy: Destruction and Experience (London: Routledge, 1994), 1-31.

7. Madhusree Dutta, “The Journey of a Project: Traces, Trails, Travails,” in Project Cinema City, ed. Madhusree Dutta, Bhaumik Kaushik, and Rohan Shivkumar (New Delhi: Tulika Books, 2013).

8. Shivkumar wrote in Project Cinema City with reference to Ernst Bloch notion of ‘anticipatory illuminations’.

9. David Harvey, Rebel Cities (New York and London: Verso, 2012) 10. “Issues of scale (nonhierarchical enlargement) and issues of enclosure (non-commodified spaces) requires authority, but at an operational level, it retains a ‘local autonomy’ that is non-hierarchical and noncommodified...” Harvey, Rebel Cities.

11. Heiner Goebbels interviewed by Artangel, 2008. https://www.artangel. org.uk/project/stifters-dinge/ 12. “AA roundtable ‘What is Cinematic Architecture?’” on May 15, 2009, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30_tt7rZbFY 13. Pascal Schöning, Manifesto for a Cinematic Architecture (London: AA Publications, 2006).

14. Hubert Damisch, The Origin of Perspective, trans. John Goodman (Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press, 1994) 15. Jacques Rancière, Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art, trans.

Zakir Paul (New York and London: Verso, 2013).

16. ‘Distancing’ as désinvolture, from the Italian dis- and involta, ‘enveloped’, ‘package’. Damisch, Origin of Perspective.

17. Carlo Salzani, Constellations of Reading: Walter Benjamin in Figures of Actuality, Cultural History & Literary Imagination (Bern: P. Lang, 2009).

18. ‘…its efforts reflect the leisure of a childlike person who has no qualms about taking his inspiration from what others have done before him. The essay reflects what is loved and hated… Luck and play are essential to it.’

T. W. Adorno, “Essay as Form” in Notes to Literature, Vol. 1, trans. S. W. Nicholsen, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991).

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Bebop in the Underbelly: Race, Space, and Embodiment in Paris Blues (1961) J. ENGLISH COOK

Ph.D. Candidate, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University

“…I tapped a power line leading into the building and ran it into my hole in the ground. Before that I lived in the darkness into which I was chased, but now I see.

I’ve illuminated the Blackness of my invisibility—and vice versa. And so I play the invisible music of my isolation.”

– Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952)1 “But [the cellar] is first and foremost the dark entity of the house, the one that partakes of subterranean forces. When we dream there, we are in harmony with the irrationality of the depths.”

– Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (1958)2

On paper, the film Paris Blues (Martin Ritt, USA, 1961) should have been a box-office knockout. Starring Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, Sidney Poitier, Diahann Carroll, the city of Paris, and the first-ever musical meet-up between Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong, the film had the star-power of a cinematic hit. Yet the reviews were largely critical, and box office results proved meager. Why? This article positions the film’s use of architectural framing, narrative, and its musical score in the context of contemporary trends in architecture’s adaptation of phenomenological discourse. Ultimately, Paris Blues, like many other well-intentioned films of the decade, applies a spatial rhetoric that mimics the universalism of theorists like Gaston Bachelard, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Christian NorbergSchulz—to the detriment and displacement of its Black protagonists. Considering the resonance 78

of 1960s racial politics with our own, this film points to the continued need for a rethinking of phenomenology—or what Bryan E. Norwood has called “phenomenologies”—across creative fields.

On paper, the film Paris Blues (Martin Ritt, USA, 1961) should have been a box-office knockout. Starring, in billing order, Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, Sidney Poitier, Diahann Carroll, the city of Paris, and the first-ever musical meet-up between Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong (with Billy Strayhorn and Aaron Bridgers), the film had the megawatt star-power of a cinematic hit. Yet reviews were largely critical, and ticket sales proved meager. Variety wrote that “within its snappy, flashy veneer [it] is an undernourished romantic drama,” while the New York Times declared that “…thin is the word a kindly critic can most thoughtfully find to tag the film.”3 Promoted for its suggestions of interracial love, and supported by its liberal cast, the film might have also been a cinematic landmark, had it followed through with its initial scripted plans for a celebrity coupling between a white and a Black character—what would have been a first for a Hollywood film. This conflict between the movie’s narrative and its visual racial dynamics reveals the limitations of liberal thinking in the decade of Civil Rights debates. It also manifests in the film’s use of the Parisian cityscape, establishing racially segmented spaces of embodied agency for each of its key characters.

The film’s opening scene introduces two of its protagonists, tenor saxophonist Eddie Cook (Poitier) and bandleader/ trombonist Ram Bowen (Newman), in their roles as American jazz musicians in an underground Parisian nightclub, Marie Seoul’s Club 33 (Fig. 1). This low-lit lounge, a scrappy mélange of barrel vaults, stucco walls, and exposed red brick, is in full swing: As the musicians play—the film’s score was composed

by Ellington—the camera slowly pans and dollies to the left, away from the stage and into the crowd of jubilant swingers.

Here, a series of close-up and medium shots reveals an eclectic mix of cavorters, from interracial, queer, and mixedage couples to individuals in artistic, professorial, and professional garb. The combination of multiple viewpoints Bebop in the Underbelly: Race, Space, and Embodiment in Paris Blues (1961)

Figure 1: Eddie (Sidney Poitier), left, and Ram (Paul Newman), right, perform in Club 33 in the film’s opening scene. Paris Blues (Martin Ritt, USA, 1961).

with the camera’s fast pan, which follows the tempo of the musicians’ jazzy set, creates a vibrant atmosphere within the dark, cavernous club. This vivacity, however, eventually dwindles, as the following scene abruptly cuts to an aerial view of an early sunrise over a stuporific Paris (Fig. 2). In contrast with the previous segment, the camera now pans to the right, leading from a distant view of the Eiffel Tower back to the street-level entrance of Club 33. The contrast between these two vistas is illustrative of the film’s spatial apparatus at large: in the first scene, an eye-level sweep reveals underground, cacophonous bodies in motion, and in the second, a partial bird’s eye panorama frames a stoic, nearly empty urban fabric, mute except for the clerical chimes of a neighboring bell. These opposing spatial frameworks ground the rest of the film, helping to reinforce its overarching engagement with race by either strengthening or delimiting the Black characters’ sense of agency. Poitier, in particular, is precariously positioned. Eddie often operates as the key interlocutor of the underground caves de jazz, compositionally pushed to the center of the picture, physically framing the scene himself, or acting as a guide for its visitors (Fig. 3). Yet his architecturally limiting forays into the Parisian streets, as discussed below, render him a caricature of 1960s African American debates. The trope of a Black American man finding agency in the darkened, illegible spaces of the underground, in contrast to the legible, illuminated spaces of the cityscape J. English Cook

above, would become a popular motif in literature of the time. 4 Thus, by situating this film’s spatial rhetorics within the history of Paris’s architectural underbelly, as well as in conversation with postwar African American experience in France, this article aims to reposition architectural phenomenology as a critical tool for diversifying design.

Like Foucault’s oft-cited example of the panopticon, the Haussmannian boulevards of Paris in the daylight function as a place of observable discord for Eddie, Ram, and the two American women they eventually meet and romance, Connie Lampson (Carroll) and Lillian Corning (Woodward).

In contrast, the murky vaults of the below-ground cellar club serve as spaces of revelry, largely untainted by the social surveillance of the streets above. The adaptation of the Parisian underground as a source of alternative, antimainstream escapism largely stems from the immediate postwar moment. 5 Subterranean caves de jazz, in particular, became critical outposts for communities at the margins, especially for African Americans seeking greater freedoms abroad. 6 In the several decades that led up to the Civil Rights Movement, these cavernous nightclubs provided not only an ideological refuge for adventurous thinkers (it was not uncommon to spot Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty among the ranks).

They also cultivated a space in which Black bodies—at least of American, influential jazz musician origins—created the spatial parameters of cultural performance, generating a form of corporeal agency in defiance of conventional norms. From 2021 ARCHITECTURE & FILM SYMPOSIUM

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Figure 2: Aerial view of the Parisian cityscape, with Sacré-Coeur in the distance. Paris Blues (Martin Ritt, USA, 1961).

Le Tabou to Le Caveau de la Huchette, jazz performers like Miles Davis and Sidney Bechet became popular fixtures on the scene.

The play of racial dynamics in these subterranean spaces resonates with several contemporary literary tropes. Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), in particular, adopts the theme of an African American who finds fulfillment in the separatist space of an underground cellar. Having secretly adapted this basement into a makeshift home in accordance with his own, independent needs, he is able to disavow the racial segregation of the spaces above, thus using “the Blackness of [his] invisibility” as a tool in his quest for experiential freedom. 7 As scholar Jonathan Weate observes, this motif aligns with the phenomenological writings of one of the more frequent participants in the Parisian underground, MerleauPonty. For the sake of this short essay, I’ll refrain from delving too deeply into the knottier aspects of Merleau-Ponty’s works; as Weate notes, however, the philosopher argues that invisibility is a foundational element of perception. Things, writes Merleau-Ponty, are “not really observable: there is always a skipping over in every observation, one is never at the thing itself.”8 Our inability to fully grasp an object’s every angle ultimately gives us the freedom to imagine and perhaps alter said object’s worldly experience (such as in the case of artists who first observe, and then translate their mind’s eye into a material thing). Ellison, claims Weate, complicates this existential understanding of invisibility by adding a social 80

bent: the Invisible Man calls himself such because his highly charged (and therefore highly visible) Black skin renders him sub-human within a “universal,” or white-majority, system. 9 Invisibility, in this sense, does not appear to be a positive tool. His resulting inability to be seen as simply human thus leaves him at a crossroads: does he fight to regain full visibility within a world that is socially constructed against him, or does he adapt this status in an act of self-fulfilling agency, away from that world? Like Eddie Cook and the communities of African Americans who sought refuge from American racism in postwar France, the Invisible Man chooses the latter— complicating Merleau-Ponty’s argument that invisibility (or any phenomenological concept) is an unequivocal element of existential freedom for everybody. For Eddie and others, the underground caves de jazz can therefore be considered as racially-coded and historically separatist spaces of phenomenological sovereignty, in opposition to the architectural efforts of the world above.

PARIS BLUES AND THE QUESTION OF RACE In Paris Blues, what is that world above, and how does it relate to contemporary approaches to race? The oppositions between Eddie’s experience below ground and above ground speak to the historical context surrounding the film and postwar American race relations, particularly in terms of Black Americans living and working abroad. Based on the novel by Harold Flender (1957), Paris Blues repurposes Poitier’s role— the main figure in the original book—as third bill, introducing Newman’s character as the primary, light-skinned protagonist.

After an initial scene gestures to the Bebop in the Underbelly: Race, Space, and Embodiment in Paris Blues (1961)

Figure 3: Eddie, left, looms large, with Ram in the background. Paris Blues (Martin Ritt, USA, 1961).

possibility of interracial coupling, with Ram voicing interest in Connie, the four characters romantically split along racial lines. Both male characters are driven by these encounters to reconsider living abroad. Ram becomes torn between continuing to master his musical craft in Paris and moving back to a small American town with Lillian. Eddie, on the other hand, is confronted by Connie, whom he calls “one of those socially conscious chicks,” about living so far away from and neglecting civil rights gains in the states. However, her description of this “race question,” the central topic in the initial novel and early scripts, is ultimately sidelined in the film. Poitier, in an interview conducted several years after the movie was released, revealed that the Hollywood studio had “chickened out” and “took the spark out of it.” “Cold feet,” he said, “maneuvered to have it twisted around—lining up the colored guy with the colored girl.”10 The film’s civil rights discussions were made secondary to the racially unburdened development of the white characters’ American suburbsversus-genius narrative.

In contrast with the studio’s reversal, Paris, in both the interwar and postwar years, had become known as a comparably supportive cultural ground for both interracial couples and African American artists, performers, and authors at large. 11 The list of notable Black American expatriate luminaries is long, from Josephine Baker to James Baldwin to Beauford Delaney. 12 On the topic of the comparable freedoms afforded African Americans in Paris, expat Richard J. English Cook

Wright once claimed that there was “more democracy in one square block of Paris than in the whole United States.”13 As scholar Rashida Braggs points out in her analysis of Paris Blues, however, these freedoms are complicated, particularly when placed in the context of France’s colonial history, poor treatment of non-American Black communities, and the postwar Algerian struggle for independence. 14 Despite the film’s release just twenty days before the Paris Massacre on October 17, 1961, it maintains an illusion of Paris as a colorblind capital.15 One scene in particular illustrates this fantasy: A young French child, after being handed a lost ball, thanks Eddie and Connie by stating, “Merci, Monsieur Noir. Merci Madame Noir.” While Connie questions this response, Eddie claims that it doesn’t bother him because he is, in fact, a Black man, suggesting that French racial qualifiers carry less of a sting than the American inflections he’d previously left behind. 16 Andy Fry, in his analysis, claims that Eddie’s colorblind dreams in this Hollywood film aren’t really descriptive of France as it actually existed. Rather, they showcase a general liberal mindset for “an idealized vision for the future of America…. [The film uses] France to shine a light on America, while ignoring or downplaying its own ‘race problem.’”17 Paris Blues, in other words, geographically displaces the operative race relations of 1960s France with American projections, using its two Black protagonists as cyphers for hard discussions at home—resonant for certain American audiences, but at a far remove on the map.

FRAMING RACE IN THE INTERIOR The film underscores this racial rift via two different 2021 ARCHITECTURE & FILM SYMPOSIUM

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approaches to architectural space, particularly in the use of interiors. First, unlike Lillian and Ram, Eddie and Connie are never filmed inside, except for the underground jazz club in which Ram and Eddie perform. While the two white stars’ sexual dalliance is often shown enframed by interior windows, doors, corners, and closets (acceptable to the studio in part because Newman and Woodward were married in real life), Connie and Eddie are always above ground and out-of-doors.

Unable to express sexual desire or physical intimacy, which a bedroom would provide, they are granted only one quick, suggestive clip on Poitier’s part, their images plastered against a shot of Notre Dame. And like with this iconic Parisian site, these two characters are consistently pinned against other recognizable tourist sites, from the Sacré-Coeur and the steps of Montmartre to the Arc de Triomphe.

In contrast, Ram and Lillian’s ability to exist alongside the detritus of Ram’s home—its posters, sheet music, instruments, coats, lamps, and linens—is reminiscent of Gaston Bachelard’s text The Poetics of Space (1958) (Fig. 4). Translated into English in 1964, this critical publication became a touchstone for phenomenological innovations in the architectural field. 18 According to Bachelard, “A house that has been experienced is not an inert box. Inhabited space transcends geometrical space,” thereby inaugurating a poetic form of architectural thinking that prioritized oneiric space over abstract formalism and technoscientific progress. 19 Yet while Ram and Lillian have access to the dreams and memories instilled in the clutter and corners of lived-in rooms, Connie and Eddie are locked out, stripped of the ability to be just bodies—versus specifically Black bodies—within the home. Unable to gain entrée into the postwar phenomenologist’s house, they instead become part and parcel with the postcard imagery of Paris. Pinioned against these tourist icons, their images are to be looked at and consumed, as distant and removed as the American racial imaginary that sees France’s color-blindness as a hopeful, future mirror.

This contrast is embedded in two brief, ensuing scenes. In one, Connie and Eddie talk on a hilltop, framed by a semiopen enclosure (Fig. 5). Connie tells her newly beloved that, “I don’t feel average when I’m with you. I feel very, very special.” However, their physical distance, inability to express themselves in intimate locations, and the camera’s removed, third-person perspective tempers her passionate statement.

We see only them, rather than what they themselves might see. In the other, Lillian rises from Ram’s bed, crosses to his window, and sticks out her head to glance at the Parisian landscape beyond. “It really is like every painting of Paris I’ve ever seen,” she says, before lying down again beside her lover.

Rather than remain enclosed by the architectural frame, like Connie and Eddie, Lillian breaks free of it; in other words, we see her seeing, active in her own haptic agency. “It’s the way 82

he feels when he plays [his horn],” she continues, explaining her attraction to Ram, “and the way he made me feel,” conflating within Ram’s bedroom her body’s sensing abilities and, comparably, its uninhibited vision.

This dilemma peppers the film’s conversations and even invades its advertising. One of the primary posters leads with the tagline, “A love-spectacular so personally exciting you feel it’s happening to you!” In smaller font, toward the bottom of the page, reads the line, “Nothing gets under your skin like ‘Paris Blues’.” Whose skin, and which bodies have access to excitement, is clearly defined in the poster’s composition. In this and a number of other, similar ads, Ram and Lillian are shown front and center, in titillating, half-naked embrace.

Often, a smaller image of the couple embracing is embedded in an architectural frame, either ensconced in an intimate, domestic interior, on a walk across Paris, or on the secluded scaffolding of a friend’s apartment. In contrast, Eddie is almost always in-action as his public, jazz musician persona (a performing “object among other objects”), while Connie, if included at all, is presented as physically contained, her arms folded inward. Which (white) bodies are able to experience space on the street and inside—to titillate, to excite; to be intimate, sensorial actors in unison with their own feeling flesh—is countered by (Black) bodies that are only given the space to perform for the audience’s (white Hollywood studio) gaze. Unable to look, either at Paris or Connie, Eddie, here, is only to be looked upon. “Body and soul,” the original novel begins, reinstating its originally Black protagonist within the conflicted divide that a “universal” phenomenology has attempted to overcome. 20

Figure 4: Ram and Lillian in Ram’s apartment. Paris Blues (Martin Ritt, USA, 1961).

FEELING THE BLUES: ARCHITECTURAL PHENOMENOLOGY AND DOMESTIC DISPLACEMENT This notion of “feeling,” of who gets to feel, and where, is a central issue for the architectural phenomenologist, particularly in Paris Blues. In the aforementioned conversation between Eddie and Connie in front of the Notre-Dame, Bebop in the Underbelly: Race, Space, and Embodiment in Paris Blues (1961)

Figure 5: Left: Looking at Eddie and Connie on a hilltop. Right: Lillian looking at Paris. Paris Blues (Martin Ritt, USA, 1961).

Eddie is able to articulate the single line in the entire film that hints at a sexual connection between these characters: “You know, if I had a teacher like you when I went to school,” he says with a playful half-wink, “boy, I would have learned something.” In contrast to Ram and Lillian’s explicit sexual relationship—they both appear together in bed the next morning, while Lillian vaguely describes her progressive, sexpositive outlook—Eddie and Connie are otherwise forced to remain at the platonic level of respectability politics. Albert Johnson, a scholar and critic who reviewed the film upon its release, critiqued their cookie-cutter constructions, describing them as “likeable puppets quite unlike any Negroes one might meet in Europe or America. They are, ultimately, only figments of a white person’s [Flender’s] literary fancy….”21 What critics haven’t remarked upon, however, is the way in which Connie and Eddie’s conversation continues: Eddie: Look at it [Paris]. Look. And not just what you see, but the way the place makes you feel. I’ll never forget the first day I walked down Avenue Champs Élysées. Just like that, I knew I was here to stay.

Connie: How long have you been away from home?

Eddie: Five years.

Connie: You’ve never wanted to go back?

Eddie: No! You stick around Paris for a while and stretch a bit.

Sit down for lunch somewhere without getting clubbed for it.22 And you’ll wake up one day, look across the ocean and you’ll say, “Who needs it?”

Connie: Well, we certainly don’t need to sit down for lunch and get clubbed for it. But we do need our roots, don’t we?

And where our roots are, our home is. (emphases mine) This conversation explicitly pits Eddie’s desire to “feel” Paris, unburdened by the color of his skin, against Connie’s wish to find “home” in her (American) roots. From the standpoint of architectural phenomenology, this directly mirrors a conflict described in a recent edition of the academic journal Log. J. English Cook

Largely popularized by individuals like Norwegian architect Christian Norberg-Schulz, architectural phenomenology in the 1960s and 1970s shifted the conversation from designing with abstract forms to creating holistic spatial experiences. 23 As the issue’s editor Bryan E. Norwood writes in his introduction, Norberg-Schulz’s implicit normativity, however, has: “largely remained an assumed feature…. This assumption, I will suggest, results not from the consistent application of the phenomenological methodology, but rather from an underlying ethical project that has aimed…to sanctify the subject as whole and complete. This ethical project is rooted in a presupposition of an ideal type of subject—one we can essentially characterize as colonizing, enlightened, white, straight, male, and able-bodied—whose orientation has functioned as the implicit origin and goal of architectural phenomenology.”24 By challenging the standardization of this singular, ideal type, Norwood’s analysis calls for a broadening of phenomenological practice, one which can better account for a multiplicity of bodies in shared and intersectional space.

Connie and Eddie’s tension mirrors that between NorbergSchulz’s normative desire for a primal, universal “home” and the Black body’s inability to ever achieve it, described

by Frantz Fanon in his notion of doubling. Norberg-Schulz, in his defining text Existence, Space, and Architecture (1971), released ten years after Paris Blues and nearly twenty after Invisible Man, outlines the home as a lost paradise, a place that affords a sense of wholeness to which architectural phenomenology, properly practiced, might direct us. Fanon, however, describes the tensions inherent in a Black body that attempts to access such a “universal” home. In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon describes how the cry, “Look!

A Negro!” dismantles his body schema, simultaneously rendering him a sensing, subjective body and “an object among other objects.”25 In Paris Blues, this doubling extends to the architectural treatment of Eddie’s desire to experience the way a place makes him feel, unbounded by the white, patriarchal gaze that has always made him Other.Without 2021 ARCHITECTURE & FILM SYMPOSIUM

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this ability, he will never be able to access this circumscribed notion of “home.” Yet unless America achieves its on-screen fantasy of a color-blind state, Connie’s ultimatum—to leave France, or lose your roots—ironically disavows him of exactly that choice.

CONCLUSION In attempting to detail the complexities of love, jazz, expat life, and postwar American race relations, Paris Blues applies a white, liberal Hollywood lens, displacing or alienating Black spatial experience in the name of on-screen progressive politics. Made in a decade in which phenomenology and other experiential discourses in architecture began to flourish, the film speaks to the (often violent) limitations of unilaterally applying a white-centered spatial experience.

Yet as the editors of the recent publication Race and Modern Architecture (2020) observe, “Architectural historians have largely avoided the topic of race.” Modern architecture, they write, “entailed spatial practices like classifying, mapping, planning, and building that were integral to the erection of this racialized epistemology.”26 Eddie experiences this dynamic firsthand, unable to square his physical limitations in the legible, illuminated Parisian streets with his comparable freedom in the low-lit, ramshackle spaces of the underground.

By comparing this case study of racial division with historical examples of architectural phenomenology, I aim to provide one example among many of how embodied difference can operate in the built environment. As Norwood ultimately argues: “Architecture doesn’t need a phenomenology; it needs phenomenologies.”27 Looking ahead to the future of design, how might architects analyze and use media to create a more just approach to spatial design, one that ethically welcomes and sustains a multiplicity of views?

2008).

7. Ellison, Invisible Man, 13. For additional sources on phenomenology and race, see: Sara Ahmed, “A phenomenology of whiteness,” Feminist Theory 8, no. 2 (2007): 149–68; and Linda Martin Alcoff, “Towards a phenomenology of racial embodiment,” in Race, ed. Robert Bernasconi (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2001), 267–83.

8. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1969 [1964]), 192.

9. Jeremy Weate, “Changing the Yoke: Invisibility in Merleau-Ponty and Ellison,” Philosophia Africana 6, no. 1 (March 2003): 12.

10. Aram Goudsouzian, Sidney Poitier: Man, Actor, Icon (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 193.

11. For major texts on this topic, see: Andy Fry, Paris Blues: African American Music and French Popular Culture, 1920–1960 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014); Explorations in the City of Light: African-American Artists in Paris, 1945–1965, ed. by Audreen Buffalo, exh. cat. (New York: Studio Museum in Harlem, 1996); Rashida K. Braggs, Jazz Diasporas: Race, Music, and Migration in Post-World War II Paris (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2016); and Tyler Edward Stovall, Paris Noir: African Americans in the City of Light (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1996).

12. Additional figures, among others, included Ada “Bricktop” Smith, Richard Wright, Ollie Harrington, Chester Himes, William Gardner Smith, Sidney Bechet, Aaron Bridgers, Bud Powell, and Melvin Van Peebles.

13. William Gardner Smith, A Return to Black America (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1970), 60. As quoted in Braggs, “Coda: Beyond Color-Blind Narratives: Reading Behind the Scenes of Paris Blues,” in Jazz Diasporas, 203.

14. Ibid., 207–13.

15. On this date, the French National Police attacked a demonstration of 30,000 pro-National Liberation Front Algerians in Paris, killing an estimated 40–300 people. See: Braggs, 207; and Jean-Paul Brunet and Emile Chabal, “Police Violence in Paris, October 1961: Historical Sources, Methods, and Conclusions,” The Historical Journal 51, no. 1 (2008): 195–204.

16. Braggs, Jazz Diasporas, 205–9.

17. Fry, Paris Blues, 5.

18. Joan Ockman, “‘The Poetics of Space’ by Gaston Bachelard,” Harvard Design Magazine 6 (Fall 1998).

ENDNOTES

19. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 210.

1. Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (New York: Random House, Inc., 1952; Vintage International, 1995), 13. Citation refers to the 1995 edition.

20. Harold Flender, Paris Blues (New York: Ballantine Books, 1957), 1.

2. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1958; Boston: Beacon Press, 1994), 18. Citation refers to the 1994 edition.

3. See: Variety staff, “Review: Paris Blues,” Variety (December 31, 1960); and Bosley Crowther, “‘Paris Blues’ Opens at Astor; Sidney Poitier Stars with Paul Newman,” New York Times, November 8, 1961, 41.

4. For additional examples, see: Jack Kerouac, “On the Road Again,” unpublished journals, The New Yorker, June 22, 1998, 46–59; and the unpublished novel by Richard Wright, The Man Who Lived Underground, 1945. As referenced in Charles C. Nash, “‘ The Man Who Lived Underground’: Richard Wright’s Parable of the Cave,” Interpretations 16, no. 1 (Fall 1985): 62–74.

5. Histories that focus on the development of these postwar cellar clubs are scarce. For engaging overviews, see: Alain Clément and Gilles Thomas, Atlas du Paris Souterrain: La doublure somber de la Ville lumière (Paris: Parigramme, 2001); and Boris Vian, Manual of Saint-GermainDes-Prés (New York: Rizzoli, 2005 [1950]).

6. These clubs frequently repurposed forgotten or underused cellars. See: Dany Doriz, 60 ans de jazz au Caveau de la Huchette (Paris: Archipel,

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21. Albert Johnson, “The Negro in American Films: Some Recent Works,” Film Quarterly 18, no. 4 (Summer 1965): 16.

22. Events like the Greensboro sit-ins, which took place from February to July 1960, had recently catalyzed protests against segregation, particularly at the lunch counters of prominent stores like Woolworth.

23. For a full-length text on the history of phenomenology in the architectural field, see: Jorge Otero-Pailos, Architecture’s Historical Turn: Phenomenology and the Rise of the Postmodern (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 2010).

24. Bryan E. Norwood, “Disorienting Phenomenology,” Log 42 (Winter/ Spring 2018): 12.

25. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2008), 89–93.

26. Irene Cheng, Charles L. Davis II, and Mabel O. Wilson, “Introduction,” in Race and Modern Architecture (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020), 3–4.

27. Norwood, “Disorienting Phenomenology,” 22.

Bebop in the Underbelly: Race, Space, and Embodiment in Paris Blues (1961)

The Crisis of Authenticity: Vertigo and the Seagram Building

ANDREW RYAN GLEESON Iowa State University

“Doth suffer a sea change into something rich and strange."

The Tempest Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo and Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building are two artworks whose only objective connection is that they both opened in 1958. Vertigo, a film about an everyman who becomes involved in the machinations of a complex murder plot. The Seagram Building, a perfected culmination of the modernist glass tower. However, a close comparison between these two works reveals a deeper connection. Both utilize the residual after-effects of ghostly haunting to uncover hidden depths. The ghost can be thought of as the lingering impression that reveals insights only after the surface lesson is exhausted. What these artworks share is under this surface and includes: a paradoxical longing for metaphysical wonder; a desire for control in a chaotic world; a meditation on the fluidity of time; a utilization of self-reflexivity in order to synthesize a more inclusive “whole;” a frustration of the limitations of artworks; and a reckoning with unknowingness. Creative comparisons between two seemingly arbitrary artifacts reveals insights that would not have happened otherwise—a call and response, which can reframe the other and lead to deeper discoveries.

Alfred Hitchcock’s film Vertigo and Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building both opened in 1958. Both are masterpieces in their respective fields. The Seagram Building expressed all the lessons Mies had learned about architecture in a perfectly proportioned slab tower fronting a plaza on crowded Park Avenue. Vertigo, a deeply personal film about Scottie, a flawed everyman in San Francisco who becomes romantically entangled in the machinations of a complex murder plot.

It is a serendipitous coincidence that two masterpieces in two different fields opened in the same year. Serendipitous, because they did not inform each other—they have nothing in common, they are artistic expressions realized through two different mediums. On the surface, they represent their zeitgeist, but underneath they conceal a polemic.

Creative comparisons between two arbitrary artifacts can act as a call and response, each reframing the other. However, these two specific works share affinities which are intrinsic to each other—a surface concealing hidden depths revealed through the residue of ghostly haunting. Great artworks, like parables, do not reveal their secrets immediately. Their lingering specter haunts the viewer, leaving behind a residue where deeper insights slowly develop. The gloss of conformity wielded by these projects is armor for an underbelly consumed by philosophical doubt. This comparison does not attempt to make film more like architecture or to suggest filmic metaphorical qualities of architectural experience. Instead, it utilizes aesthetic theory to demonstrate the way autonomous artistic mediums grapple with similar issues. For this study these issues include; a shared crisis in the contemplation of authenticity, the gulf between truth and desire, and the inability of an artwork to convey the holistic complexities of life.

THE NECESSITY OF SUBTEXT After emigrating from Europe in the late 1930s, both Hitchcock and Mies performed successfully within American capitalism, finding wiggle room for their artistic obsessions within the confines of a conservative system that discouraged deviations

Andrew Ryan Gleeson

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On the surface Vertigo is a murder-mystery with a plot to murder a rich man’s wife. Underneath it is a multi-faceted and complex rumination on identity, truth, concealment, control, and the longing for a perfect past that can only be reacquired through an inauthentic surface (i.e. the remaking of Madeleine). Characters are never who they say they are to each other, even his closest friend Midge never professes her love to Scottie. Complexity increases when the surface that recreates the ideal past paradoxically de-conceals the truth (that Madeleine and Judy are in fact the same person).

The reification (Judy’s makeover into Madeleine) of the false surface reveals a new truth.

Creative works can support multivarious, even contradictory, agendas, while maintaining overall unity of purpose. The distance between the initial impression of an artwork and its aftertaste is the ghostly residue, haunting the viewer and keeping the project in mind. The ghost becomes a necessary instrument for deeper revelation in the same way that other films use ghosts to expose unresolved mysteries from the past.

But what do these haunting accumulated residues uncover? from the status quo. Mies designed the Seagram Building to make money for his office and his client, Samuel Bronfman.

Hitchcock made Vertigo intending box office success. These works both gently subverted the system within which they worked in on a subtextual level, outside the grasp of understanding by those in power. In the same decade, Arthur Miller’s play, The Crucible, accomplished a barely concealed critique of anti-communist hysteria using the seventeenthcentury Salem Witch Trials as a setting. Vertigo and the Seagram Building are similar, but instead of using subtext to address contemporary politics these works uncover crises in epistemology. Their surface is order; a belief that perceived reality is an expression of truth, their subtext is radical, and nothing less than a crisis of subjectivity.

Imitators of Mies’s glass towers displayed an unwavering belief in rationalism but misunderstood the poetry of proportion, surface effects, material precision, and subtle but embedded contextuality that enriched his work. Like Scottie (Hitchcock’s protagonist), the Seagram Building is viewed as a typology of the generic, a rational office building with a compact core in the center, an evenly distributed column grid, open office spaces, maximum daylighting and leasable square footage, with efficient vertical circulation and HVAC systems (at least during a time when energy consumption was cheap). This initial reading lingers long afterwards, to reveal a mysterious series of intangibles: dark cladding, temporal shifts of shadows, reflective glass, Rorschach-like marble patterning, water reflectance, contrasting tree geometries, pockmarked travertine surfaces, and layered opacities created by the mullions.

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THE LAMENT Mies’s complex absorption of avant-garde movement in 1920s Weimar Germany (including his direct leadership in the journal G) put him squarely within a camp that believed architecture could actualize itself in its time, unencumbered by the arbitrary rules inherited from an ossified past, while positively reintegrating art into what Peter Bürger called, “the praxis of life.”1 But in post-war America these ambitions were superseded by profit-driven power machines, undermining a "purity" in expression, and resulting in a coded, perhaps mournful, lamentation that existing in the world requires artists to find ways to maintain their integrity in a compromised world.

Concealment of the revolutionary ambitions of the avant-garde becomes necessary in order to maintain integrity for the artist without directly undermining the patron’s investment.

Mies’s subtext interrogates the stubborn myth that he is a rationalist. Instead, the ghostly residue reveals that he laments the loss of the avant-garde project, and the ability of architecture to transcend the material world. Reaching back further to 18th and 19th century clashes between Enlightenment and Romantic thinking, Mies utilized phenomenological affects to bring back an illusory approximation of metaphysical wonder that he believed had vanished in a rationalist/capitalist world. The surface reifies the positivist (Apollonian) world, but it’s necessary (Dionysian) opposite—whose presence exists in order to achieve a holistic work—is subsumed. This approach is more romantic than rational, echoed by the 18th century romantic poet Novalis: “When I give the commonplace a higher meaning, the customary a mysterious appearance, the known the dignity of The Crisis of Authenticity: Vertigo and the Seagram Building

the unknown, the finite the illusion of the infinite, I romanticize it.”2 Alfred Hitchcock in the silent era also innovated avant-garde practices in film. His use of montage in the opening of The Lodger would have made Eisenstein take notes. But Hitchcock’s move to America and his absorption into the Hollywood machine incurred similar challenges faced by Mies; the director was forced to tone down his avant-garde effects in service to the conventions of Hollywood in order for his films to achieve box-office success.3 In service to rational norms Hitchcock’s "supernatural" plot in Vertigo rekindles the viewers’ wonder in the unknown, while still keeping them technically in a plausible rational realm; the ghost of Carlotta is revealed as a trick instead of an actual supernatural being. This was a cliché “old dark house” trope, manipulated deftly by Hitchcock.

CONTROL Scottie deals with lost control in the first half of Vertigo. He has trouble coping with a perceived inadequacy caused by his acrophobia, and is unable to breach the somnambulant state of Madeleine, who is possessed by Carlotta. At the midpoint of the film Scottie’s limitations have prevented him from stopping his true love’s suicidal plunge from the tower. He loses balance and fears the abyss. With Judy he sees an opportunity to regain his grounding, but goes to unethical lengths to salvage the wreckage of his life. Through his effort at grooming her into becoming another woman Judy feels victimized and inadequate. She wants to be attractive for her true self, not Andrew Ryan Gleeson

a surface imitation. Furthermore, Judy hides her true identity from Scottie while hiding her own feelings of love towards him.

As soon as he tries to recreate Madeleine, Judy knows what he is attempting, but Scottie assumes that she is ignorant of the specific person he is trying to recreate. Scottie’s motives are also more complicated than merely recreating his lost love; he is trying to eradicate his guilt for not preventing Madeleine’s suicide, which is compounded by his failure to prevent the death of the police officer at the beginning of the film.

The Seagram building reveals Mies’s obsession with control, manifested in extreme tectonic precision and formal proportions. The gridded surface is a register of logic in an unconscious urban web. This control over craft alludes to a conquest over mortality, the entropy of nature, and the disorganization of lazy minds. He transforms this order into a polemic in the way the tower retreats from the street as a non-participant (and a retreat for quiet, Carlotta-esque, contemplation) in the real presence of the city, and is replaced with the absent volume of the plaza, what K. Michael Hays described as “[a] primary clearing in the deadening thickness of the Manhattan grid.”4 However, the building re-engages with the city through its axial alignment with McKim Mead and White’s Racquet Club across the street. Beaux arts classicism (an architecture of control) is literally inscribed on the building through symmetrical reflection of the Racquet Club on the glass lobby façade.

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All Images by Author

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The Crisis of Authenticity: Vertigo and the Seagram Building

TIME AND MOVEMENT In Vertigo, the sublime (a feeling of finitude within a vast nature) is evoked through references to temporal space outside of a human lifespan. The ruse performed by Madeleine as Carlotta is captured best in the scene at Redwood National Forest amongst the vast trees, which live on a macroscopic time register. Madeleine indicates her possession by the ghost of Carlotta by pointing to her moment of birth and death in a large tree ring. The big trees become the ultimate sublime symbol of deep time, an immortality both characters covet.

The Mission San Juan Bautista becomes a location for a fictionalized past, a husk of a once vibrant society turned into a nostalgic tourist attraction (symbolized by the fake horse in the carriage house) reminding the viewer that the return to Carlotta’s past is a crafted illusion.

Scottie begins in the modern world of San Francisco. Midge’s apartment is contemporary, as is his own, but when he begins to investigate Madeleine she immerses him in a barely concealed historic infrastructure. Scottie is swallowed up by indications of the past: historic maps in Gavin Elster’s office, the bookshop, the old hotel, the graveyard, and eventually the Redwoods and the Mission. The boldly shot Golden Gate Bridge is the only clear modern image during Scottie’s covert monitoring period of Madeleine. It acts as a stark warning from present reality urging him to wake from her spell. Instead, he plunges into the water after her, completing the illusion of her possession and his love for her.

The glacial and repetitious pacing of the film (the slow kiss by the water, Carlotta spending hours at a museum), calibrated carefully by Hitchcock, is contrasted with short bursts of extreme action. The norm-shattering placement of a climax at the midpoint of the film leaves the viewer adrift in a confusing filmic space with an unclear direction. Madeleine’s Carlotta authentically recreates the suspended time of an individual who has transcended the bonds of subjectivity, “… like one arrested in the act of dying and detained in her body by magnetic influences.”5 She is ironically emancipated from subjective experience but trapped in “the liminal state of the somnambulist.”6 Madeleine is located half between the living and the dead, between subject and transcendence of subject.

Scottie is the opposite: a representation of the trappings of a subjectively limited view of the whole picture, yet he continues the desirous striving towards holistic understanding.

As a constructed object, the Seagram Building oscillates between atemporality and immanence. The immediate impression is one of cutting-edge modernity, but the ghost uncovers classical allusions to symmetry and proportion.

Materials undermine the cutting-edge narrative of the project, particularly when contrasted with the shiny aluminum Lever House across the street. Burnished bronze—which Mies likened to an old penny—has a dark weathered patina. Fluting in the Andrew Ryan Gleeson

cladding of the columns and the tripartite language of the tower allude to Greek Classicism and the legacy of Chicago School skyscrapers. Amber tinted windows (both a platonic revealer and a phenomenological concealer) trap the mysterious silhouettes of workers in timeless arrested motion. The veining swirls in the green marble benches and rear-façade infill panels fetishize the ancient processes of deep geological time (like the Redwood stump). The color green is a common metaphor for ghosts7 and becomes a striking moment in Vertigo when the re-apparition of Madeleine is revealed behind the green neon glow of the motel sign. Material choices and their formal treatment continually undermine the narrative of modernity, resulting in perceptual oscillations between projection and retrospection, and spiritual and material.

THE CRISIS OF AUTHENTICITY On a deeper level these projects ponder how subjective desire clouds objective reality. Scottie is a man torn between truth and desire. On one level, he desires Madeleine while trying to discover the truth of her haunting. Later in the film, his transformation of Judy into Madeleine covers over the truth that he believes she is someone different. He is not only being deceived, he is deceiving himself. When she is revealed as the true Madeleine he must again grapple with whether or not he can continue pretending in order to keep his love. By taking her once more to the mission tower Scottie chooses truth over desire, de-concealment over deceptive love.

Mies’s Enlightenment rationalist aesthetics are informed by his readings of complex texts (exhaustively covered in Fritz Neumeyer’s The Artless Word), which reach back to German Idealism and the clash between Romanticism and Rationalism at the turn of the 18th century. Mies used a distilled rational language in order to impart a surface of objective beauty in "truth," 8 but the allowance of phenomena within the work itself is not suppressed but aggrandized (he learned the phenomenological consequences of glass in his early 1920s glass tower projects).9 He uses phenomena to complicate the objectivist framework of his rational grid. The project becomes a balancing act between real and ghost, engaged and detached, becoming and arrival, revealing and concealing. Mies is not, however, a nihilist, suggesting that truth is unobtainable, instead, as in the philosophical groundwork of Friedrich Schlegel’s Romanticism, the revealing of these crises point towards an eternal striving as the best way forward within an obscured subjectivity. As argued by Beiser, this method seeks “the maximum amount of unity for the greatest diversity of ideas.”10 Architecture, for Mies, therefore becomes a potent discipline for exploring these complex concepts.

However, it is unclear to what extent Mies still believed in the grand aspirations of the avant-garde project crystalized during his time in Weimar era Germany. The Seagram Building can be interpreted as a continuation of his striving for the defining 2021 ARCHITECTURE & FILM SYMPOSIUM

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does not state facts, he curates the complexities of architecture within a set of expressive rationalist goals, but these subjectively prioritized rationalist hierarchies create a crisis of rationalism itself, revealing the true unobtainable nature of a platonic ideal within contingent circumstances. Rationalism thus becomes qualified by a subjective set of hierarchies and conscious or unconscious agendas (i.e. tectonics over cultural meaning) in the same way that the complex multivalent agendas of the characters in Vertigo mask their motivations. The crisis of authenticity thus becomes a reckoning with what Robert Pippin, in his study of Vertigo, calls “unknowingness,” which is a constant “encountering [of] people [and buildings] who are not what they say they are.”12 Mies and Hitchcock utilize these ambiguities to create openings for these deceptions to reveal themselves in order to uncover a more complete totality.

SELF-REFLEXIVITY On this unworthy scaffold to bring forth so great an object.

Prologue addressing the audience, Henry the Vth.

forms of his time. The weight of the responsibility of the avantgarde project caused vertigo in Mies, he desired grounding, even if this grounding shifted the focus from a practice of transformative cultural change towards a singular perfected architectural object—a style shift instead of an epochal one. In line with Scottie’s self-deception, Mies may be going through the motions, utilizing the mystique of phenomenological delight as a cover for shallower motivations—a quest towards a hollow unattainable goal. The longing for depth may remain a wish, fulfilled only by the cosmetic application of surface.

With Scottie, Judy’s form follows the function of his desire to restore Madeleine, even if he knows inside that it will not restore his ideal romance, only its hollow shell. Through these masterworks, Mies and Hitchcock participated in the postwar readjustment towards the commodification of the avant-garde with a final cynical result: the actualization of a lost cause.

Finally, the expression of truth in the rationalist surface of the Seagram Building is undermined by a larger question (addressed during postmodernism) of how to define these words in architecture. Is truth the expression of the structure/ construction alone? What about the expression of programs, social interaction, cultural meaning, individual users, or the expression of shear walls (as pointed out by Kahn in his famous critique that the Seagram Building hides its corsets)?11 Mies 90

Hitchcock’s inability to reveal truth turns his art in a self-reflexive direction. Vertigo is continually framed as a reminder that the audience is watching an actor portray characters. Kim Novak’s performance playing Madeleine playing Carlotta playing Judy, becomes a self-reflexive layering of the actor portraying a fake character in front of a camera.13 The consciousness of the fourth wall is a reminder of yet another layer of deception inhabited by the characters. This allows the act of filmmaking to participate within the film, revealing a truth within a lie.

One experiences a constant oscillation between falling into the plot of the movie and being reminded that it is a movie.

This is reinforced by artificial back screen projections in many outdoor scenes. A manufactured multiple simultaneity (gestalt psychology) has a narrative reason in Vertigo: it keeps the audience distant from the film14, enhancing the effectiveness of the distances the characters keep from each other. The audience is deceived in the same way that the characters are, and like Scottie in the second half, one goes along with the self-deception because it is pleasurable; the illusion can bring comfort. This simultaneity and meta-distance allow for a more expansive, but never complete, understanding of both the content and form of the holistic artwork. This is the great paradox of all film: using falseness to reveal truth about human experiences.

Mies’s attempts to reveal the concealed process of construction in the tower requires illusion and deception. Ornamental I-Beams become actors playing a role. They become the standins for the real structure, which is concealed in fireproofed concrete jackets. The façade is a self-reflexive expression of the process of its creation—a paradoxical simultaneity which reveals the concealments, in the same way Carlotta’s necklace uncovers truth towards the end of the film. Mies equates truth to the revelation of the industrial process of creation, but he The Crisis of Authenticity: Vertigo and the Seagram Building

must use "actors" ( i.e. architectural elements that serve only to enhance a formal and material understanding), to reenact this truth. Such actors clarify the messy complexities of the reality of skyscraper construction, eliminating boring parts (the nuts and bolts) that may inhibit clear understanding. These "actors" are exaggerated further; a lip at the edges of the H-extrusion leaves the impression that the material is thicker than it really is. Mies’s details thus prioritize appearance over factuality. As in Vertigo, there is a layering of deception in the building, but a willingness by the spectator to accept this illusion, because the spectator understands the usefulness of a simplified explanation over overt (and therefore ironically obfuscating) complexity: architecture and film as parable not as documentary.

RICH AND STRANGE A comparison of two separate artworks, both from the same year, uncovers lasting residuals and ghostly insights that haunt us, deepening the mysteries of existence—instead of clarifying themes, the ghost broadens complexity. This comparison reveals the inability of art to be truthful in a literal sense. A film cannot go to Proustian lengths to recreate reality; it must summarize the complex world. Architecture as well, when distilled, ironically reveals many crises of honest expression, because of the multi-various and multi-hierarchical agendas by the many different actors that influenced it (the client, the designer, the contractor, the user, the visitor all have a different hierarchy of motivations). Architecture and film synthesize profound complexity into digestible objects, and the utilization of a residual ghostly subtext is an effective way to critique necessary limitations. Ultimately, this allows the viewer and user to participate in the content of the living works through self-reflection. The viewer’s obligations are voluntary, approachable on both a surface and a deeper level. This essay is itself a framework whose structure can be inhabited by a myriad of other valid perspectives, ones which change over time as perspectives and trends shift. Fear of heights is a relevant metaphor for both works, suggesting the dizzying effects caused by a lack of clarity and a multiplicity of readings: “the term ‘vertigo; is multiply determined and its role in the film could sustain several complementary interpretive directions. The sheer density of the interpretive possibilities…is also vertiginous, as is the state of unknowingness.”15

Andrew Ryan Gleeson

ENDNOTES 1. See, Bürger, Peter. Theory of the Avant-Garde (Minneapolis, MN.: University of Minnesota Press,1989), Ch.3.

2. Novalis quote found in, Beiser, Frederick C. The Romantic Imperative (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press,2003), 20.

3. This absorption already occurred in his later sound British Films, but the move to Hollywood under the capricious eye of producer David Selznick prevented the autonomy that Hitchcock desired. This is of course more complicated for both men, they both desired success and profit, so it is not fair to totally assign externalities for the change in approach.

4. Hays, Michael K. “Odysseus and the Oarsmen, or, Mies’s Abstraction Once Again.” In Presence of Mies, ed. Detlef Mertins (New York, NY.: Princeton Architectural Press,1994), 238.

5.A ghostly trance as described in, Andriopoulous, Stefan. Ghostly Apparitions (New York, NY.: Zone Book,2013), 130.

6. Ibid, 130.

7. “Green is... traditionally the color in which stage ghosts are bathed, presumably through association with green as the color of the fairies and therefore of the non-Christian supernatural in general.” Durgnat, Raymond, The Strange Case of Alfred Hitchcock; Or, The Plain Man’s Hitchcock (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1974), 294.

8. Mies attributes truth to St. Thomas Aquinas’s “Truth is the significance of Fact.” For more info see, Frampton, Kenneth. Modern Architecture: A Critical History (London,UK.:Thames and Hudson,2007),161.

9. This phenomenological manipulation of glass is discussed in, ibid.,162.

10. Beiser, Frederick. German Idealism (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press,2002), 456.

11. See, Kahn, Louis. Louis Kahn: Essential Texts (New York, NY.:Norton,2003),51.

12. Pippin, Robert. The Philosophical Hitchcock: Vertigo and the Anxieties of Unknowingness (Chicago, IL.: University of Chicago Press, 2017),29.

13. Reportedly, Kim Novak did not like the color gray and resisted, but the director won out; a literal mirroring of the scene in the motel with Judy.

14. Further distance is felt in modern viewership by our cold reception to blatant misogyny and patriarchal assertions of dominance, of which Hitchcock was notorious for, and is even more pronounced in Marnie.

15. Pippin. The Philosophical Hitchcock, 33.

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Pedagogical and Epistemological Dialogues in Teaching Architecture as a Means Towards Cinematic Design KATARINA ANDJELKOVIC Atelier AG Andjelkovic

Ever since the moving image technologies were formed, cinematic inspiration has been common in many fields of cultural practice triggering a profound change to be established in our visual literacy. Given that the 20th century was the century of the moving image, contemporary life has been completely formed by the impact of film on our ways of thinking, moving around, and seeing things. It has ignited a surge of the knowledge acquired through film and requires to re-formulate sets of inquiries to configure new educational methods for understanding, thinking, and designing space. In this paper, I will provide a theoretical insight into pedagogical and epistemological dialogues in teaching architecture with film by analyzing the research-based teaching curricula from the 1980s onwards. As the main focus of my research, I will take a series of workshops and architectural programs taught at the universities across Europe and the United States that perform cinematic design experiments, in the range from modernist discovery of spaces through movement towards the framework of our primarily mediasaturated urban conditions of the 21st century. By interpreting the key aspects of their epistemologies for teaching foundations, the aim of this paper is two-fold: to discuss the possibility of introducing cinematic design in teaching architecture, and to contribute to grasping cinematic design in relation to a designer’s response to complex architectural and urban phenomena governed by rules of unpredictability, indeterminacy and temporality.

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Pedagogy is often referred to as the activities of educating, or instructing or teaching, the activities that impart knowledge or skill. Pedagogy is also defined as "the profession, science or theory of teaching."1 Contemporary media-saturated urban conditions have significantly challenged the characteristics and matters that pertain to traditional pedagogy and its limitations. The rapid pace of these transformations has urgently asked to reidentify the prevailing links between education and research, where exploration fuses with reflection and research is an instrument of discovery. Yet the representatives of early twentieth century Avant-garde art demonstrated that research and teaching can create an epistemological dialogue for identifying the break of traditional values. In the spirit of Jean-Paul Sartre’s claim, "only the guy who isn’t rowing has time to rock the boat," it is vital that the traditional role of the educator is broadened towards developing students’ capacity to create their own insights and understandings through the design process.

If research is considered a foundational component of this process, equally then the established thought-models within the contemporary architectural pedagogy should be inevitably challenged. Accordingly, the paradigm of this approach is the research-based teaching that aims to provide new grounds for investigating current spatial realities, production processes, and speculative futures. The hypothesis is that the researchbased teaching transmits theoretical foundations, introduces new thought-models in architecture and employs operative representational techniques adopted from other media, to open up traditional design education. The aim of this paper is to discuss the pedagogical and epistemological dialogues in teaching architecture, as a means towards cinematic design.

As first, the research-based teaching will be discussed as anticipating the understanding of architecture based on students’ personal experience of space: through movement, sensing the environment, and their diverse perceptions and interactions in the context. A hermeneutic view of knowledge is applied here: "the idea of knowledge as a kind of invariant artifact must be coupled with that of knowledge as dialogic with context."2 This may mean dialoguing with the individual

Pedagogical and epistemological dialogues in teaching architecture as a means towards cinematic design

Figure 1. Wim Wenders, Paris, Texas, 1984, Film stills.

as a means to gaining personal insight.3 Therefore, instead of pointing students’ attention to the quality and conceptions of spaces as represented on film, the focus is rather placed on developing personal repertoire of references from film. I will deal with diverse pedagogical modalities that neglect the traditional linear trajectory of research and establish a nonlinear path from historical references towards imaginative futures.

THE BEGININGS AND RISE OF CINEMATIC DESIGN Although a number of prominent architects contributed to professional film productions in the early 1920s, it is debatable whether any of the early film products actually informed the architectural practices of those architects involved.4 From the historical perspective, it is worth drawing attention to the 1980s asking how the role of film as an instrument in design has changed to date. In this period, TU Delft designed a course Environment and Psychology taking video for exploring, analyzing and critiquing an objective image of the environment instead of exposing a subjective one. The primary aim was to examine how video recordings of interaction in the environment may reveal diverse modes of behavior in the urban space, in their spatial and temporal configurations. The challenge was to determine a set of principles for the development of the urban space that would respond to the needs of different groups of users.

Underlying the significance of this research project, TU Delft – Faculty of Architecture has established a long-term research and educational program to investigate whether and how videography could play an additional role in the exploration, registration and understanding of urban environments. 5 The program started with a design studio called "Camera Eye", which is focused on exploring ways to apply moving images in the process of urban mapping. The method of collecting video footage was combined with a very specific artistic approach and a clear identification of the site-specific conditions. Videography was used to create an "objective" depiction of these urban settings. Another example is the Masterclass Media & Architecture course at The Berlage Institute (1995-96), aimed at addressing architecture and media professionals. Nevertheless, the Berlage Institute also employed video as the final form of representation.

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The 1990s examples include a series of workshops in creative digital media developed and run by Maureen Thomas.6 She deemed her workshops a necessary part of cinematic design experiments and is moving more firmly beyond mere representation. Given Thomas’s concern that this kind of cross-disciplinary and convergent activities carry a high risk of indiscriminate and sometimes unfortunate intellectual hybridization when cinema enters architectural processes, it is not surprising that her teaching approach is organized around the close relationship between epistemology and methodology. The uniqueness of this method is in creating basic conceptual structures to describe precisely the kind of knowledge production and transfer in architecture, as well the ways of extending means and methods of teaching.

For this purpose, her classes are focused on investigating how wandering through the filmmaker’s arrangements of images, narratives and spaces, can help students comprehend more deeply the dramatic changes in how they normally see the basic architectural elements of our everyday urban environment. Thomas understood that students need to examine how a "realistic attitude to reality, the dynamism of perception and the narrativity of experience"7 change to improve their capacities of knowledge for diverse interpretations of the urban environments. On the other hand, the question of language communicated between these media was exemplified to embrace a grammar of space. Architectural movie clips were used to exemplify the "screen language", and the concepts of Plot Grammar (the structure of the story) and Shot Grammar (the action staged by the director) were introduced.8 Moving to the "screen language" required the analysis of the script and the captured material. It gave an opportunity to develop a discussion of both theoretical issues and the practical matters of material collection and interpretation. For example, architectural theorist Kevin Lynch’s parsing of the legible city was systematically combined with traditional screen grammars. Using this practice-based and practice-led approach, new design knowledge is discovered in developing ways of observing, analyzing, theorizing, contextualiing and presenting both the objects of study and the outcomes of the research.

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Wim Wenders’s essay on film Like Flying Blind Without Instruments: On the Turning Point in Paris Texas first appeared in his 1991 collection The Logic of Images. Film Paris, Texas (1984, fig.1), like many of his films, started off with a roadmap instead of a script and worked with places which were not entered on the map. Mapping the territory and inscribing the trajectory in a zigzag manner over Texas felt for Wenders like flying blind without instruments. He also experimented with making buildings "real-life" objects and relating them more closely to humans. His 3d video installation “If buildings could talk” placed at the Rolex Learning Center (EPFL Learning Center, SANAA, 2010, fig. 2) in Lausanne, commissioned by Kazuyo Sejima for the 12th Venice Architecture Biennale (2010), ran in a continuous loop to unfold interactions and demonstrate in this way the real nature of human experience while moving through spaces. In such experiential interaction, a person enters into the dialogue with the context and forms different types of connections with objects and environments.

The three-dimensional film shot plays the supporting role in this method: it secures a real-life dimension of the space of "a university building in which there are no walls, just an undulating landscape intended to promote chance meetings between students and disciplines - a social education space, like Socrate’s Agora but for the Facebook generation."9 Thanks to cutting edge three-dimensional technology, this method responds to current situations capturing what is just about to happen inside buildings, the pure experience of space.

This gives the impression that a viewer could walk into the screen, as he would enter a real physical space. From the

pedagogical perspective, the significance of this method is in providing students with the opportunity to discover new aspects of the world. In these final two works, we finally see a turn from the objective image of the environment towards acknowledging human experience, but film is still treated as the final form of presentation. This said, it seems almost impossible to explore architecture without film. What the historical overview also demonstrates is that in the process of education, film has been used predominantly as an instrument of narration and representation. In other words, significant were the quality, conceptions, experiential, socio-cultural and political dimension of spaces represented on film or video.

This was reflected in a direct implementation of the moving image on top of the techniques and methods used in these research projects. For the film not only to be the final form of representation, it is necessary to design a more open research framework for working with previously collected materials.

Otherwise, the results are linked only to specific site analysis.

This also means that the knowledge produced in such process is not, in turn, related to its material and conceptual base in architecture. Therefore, the challenge was to find a method to transfer knowledge between architecture and film. In that regard, the discussion is open to examine how might history, theory and practice – which have long viewed architecture as a subject of rigid categories –provide opportunities for enhancing epistemological and pedagogical dialogues. I argue that the research-based teaching dissects the intertwined histories of film and architecture to put them together in the framework of design principles and methodologies.

Fig. 2. SANAA, EPFL Learning Centre, 2010, epfl.ch

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Pedagogical and epistemological dialogues in teaching architecture as a means towards cinematic design

RESEARCH AS A PROCESS AND PARADIGM IN CONSTRUCTING ARCHITECTURAL KNOWLEDGE According to the results of the Research in Design Thinking workshop, Jill Franz (1994) concludes that "the 1980s experiments allowed educators to confine disciplinary boundaries in the framework of different research models."10 Moreover, given that a way of communicating knowledge is crucially controlled through either theoretical or practical models, in addition, it is necessary to differentiate "ways of thinking" (theory) and "ways of making" (practice). For example, Donald Schön’s theory of design as reflective practice (1983) was among the first experiments to deal with the interpretative and contextual nature of knowledge, based on the interaction in the environment. His theory seeks to establish the relationship between problem-solving projects and reflective practice and creative production. Driven by desire to learn from experience, reflective practice evolves around deliberate activities that engage the architect in a critical manner with the relationship between conceptual, theoretical and practical concerns.11 The epistemic value of these investigations is secondary to human experience, because knowledge can, in certain types of projects,12 come out as a by-product of the process rather than its primary objective. Nonetheless, evaluating experience in the light of existing knowledge, according to Boud, Koegh and Walker, involves the integration of this new knowledge into one’s conceptual framework.13 TEACHING CINEMATIC DESIGN IN ARCHITECTURE, THE 1990S ONWARDS It seems that the use of film and cinematic principles came more naturally at particular American universities to facilitate engagement with architectural spaces. Most notably, Bernard Tschumi’s (the former Dean of GSAPP, 1987-2003) Columbia University teaching curricula of the 1990s was inspired by film to introduce new conceptual devices into architectural education. Tschumi focused on the criticality of an organizing structure of architectural program that could exist independent of use. He proposed an "abstract mediation" device reinforced by recent developments in philosophy, art and literature.14 In teaching design, the question of cinematic architecture was open by showing an attachment to poststructuralist and deconstructivist theories, and to the philosophies of Derrida, Deleuze, Barthes, and Bataille. According to Richard Koeck, "Regardless of how much Tschumi sees his argument rooted in the decomposition of linguistic formalism, he demonstrates a deep fascination for the fragmented, composite quality of contemporary urban spaces, and the expressive nature of architectural form and function." Koeck continues to indicate the consequence of this approach: "[…] the theories related to film, film editing and cinema have permeated the process and articulation of architectural and urban design."15 In the next decade, the Katarina Andjelkovic

official Visual Studies Curriculum at GSAPP has continued to change architectural education in the like spirit, grounded on what Tschumi started with paperless studios around 2004.

Furthermore, for the past eight years Wiel Arets, the new Dean of the Illinois Institute of Technology (Chicago), has been exploring “Re-thinking the Metropolis”: the vision for a new era of the school. The college’s new educational and urban-centric approach thematically spans from Fritz Lang to Rem Koolhaas,16 recognizing the altered circumstances of the human condition. It has become commonplace to consider cities as profoundly mediated environments, where media crucially change the way we perceive space, behave, interact in our environment, and consequently the way we understand and configure future urban settings. This epistemological shift has led to opening the prospect of a reinvigorated IIT and Columbia GSAPP’s “Studio-X” pedagogical typologies as schools for the 21st century.

Media and Architecture (2012) Graduate Seminar in Media Studies, taught by Shannon Mattern at The New School in New York, introduces the narrative dimension of cinema.

Mattern believes that teaching architecture must be considered as a diachronic exercise, because without time, narrative will not be generated. She deals with creating a vision of space through time, but also with detecting the ways in which past and present interact. Premising that both film and architecture explore spatiality and temporality as fundamental categories of human experience, Mattern’s teaching approach answered the questions such as: how to operate film in the design. In fact, in her design pedagogy she employs architectural program structured by cinematic means, which is then exercised in the tripartite mode: "as a function of the past (program becomes the lessons of history), as a function of the present (program is the act of design), and as a function of the future (program is the beauty of infinite combination of events that can occur within a space)."17 On the other hand, using mental maps of the city as the multi-faced representations of what the city contains and layout according to the individual, has brought human condition even more firmly into the discussion. This method uses the notion of temporal sequences and their relation to the visual appearance of architecture. This pedagogical shift provided students with a personal approach to studying urban environment and helped them reconnect with the reality of urban condition of the everyday space. In this way, the consumer of architecture becomes what Giuliana Bruno refers to as the "prototype of the film spectator."18 Ultimately, the spatial relationships and physical dimensions of objects change with each viewpoint. What comes along is introducing the order of experience, the order of time – movements, intervals, sequence (fig. 3) – for all inevitably intervene in the reading of the city, which was made possible by applying the tripartite mode of notation- events, movements, spaces.19

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Fig. 3. Space sequencing. Project by K Andjelkovic performed at the FAUP [The Faculty of Architecture of Porto University], 2012, Courtesy of the author

In the twentieth-first century, film challenges the architectural discussion to increasingly extend into various other cinematic formats such as fiction, comic books, and video games, but still tend to keep the film as the primary tool of projecting architecture through its content. Recently, curricula of architecture schools have been decolonized to investigate more deeply the agency that cinema offers in providing a lens through which students can interpret the current condition of the recession and the subsequent employment crisis. This strategy is especially significant as an opportunity to engage students in autoethnographic research, and by implication, that they become co-producers in cinematic content that can enact disciplinary and canonic disruption through diversification of content authorship and content production.

Thus, students begin making their own films by situating their video practice and architectural practice, which guides and activates new understandings to emerge in theoretical and practical approach. Architecture has always been well positioned to play a significant role in addressing these queries but it seems that current demands on the profession to deal with proliferating social, economic, and environmental challenges while keeping up various software programs and emerging fabrication technologies, for instance, have left us often thin on existential and ethical enquiry.20 CINEMA AS A RESEARCH TOOL: CRITICAL EVALUATION Going beyond mere representation, cinema as a research tool requires challenging the traditional disciplinary boundaries.

The aforementioned studies have also shown that the basic prerequisite for engaging in cinematic research is the study of the visual qualities of urban environment and the setting of a subjective and empirical counter-perspective to rationalist doctrine and the study of spatial paradigms.21 Crucially, the introduction of cinematic design in teaching requires more than an alternative to the existing curricula. Being still unburdened with the conventions and traditions of design thinking, and using only their own senses and camera to experience their immediate environment, students have an opportunity to comprehend the age of mediated space they currently live in and begin placing architecture in that world.

This is possible because film has an enormous capacity to 96

exit the dark room and pave the way to exploring the street, equally entering the social milieu and the gallery, transcribing historical messages or “walking” the political discussions, Apollo adventures and the Sci-fi imaginations of future societies. Its diverse means of addressing varying aesthetics, cultures, and environments, make film compatible with the means of production and representation of architecture.

Equally then, basing this argument on the concept of mediation works well with François Penz and Andong Lu’s suggestion that "the film has a potential to become architecture, insofar as it transforms the immediate presence into mediated or mediatized urban experience."22 We can either learn this lesson from the practicing and research architect Daniel Libeskind who understands a possibility of mapping human relations in reading Hamlet, or we can take an advice from Wiel Arets who advocates for understanding Godard’s reading of architecture regarding the ways in which casa Malaparte’s interior and exterior are prominently featured in his 1963 film Contempt (Le Mépris, fig. 4). On the other hand, artist Darko Fritz detects the problematic relationship between the two disciplines concluding that architecture students feel uncomfortable while experimenting with a video because they are not trained as conceptual artists. Yet Rem Koolhaas’s installation for the Venice Biennial Fundamentals (2014) proposes a view on architecture from the lens of the Italian neorealist film production (such as Antonioni and Pasolini). Recently, video artists’ scripting system is considered important by Bill Viola. More recently, the experience of new generations has demonstrated that "thinking through images," which was initiated by the modern authors, has the capacity to promptly transfigure two-dimensional to three-dimensional spatial elements, so that architecture remains at the conceptual level. Mobile applications may function today as a prosthesis. New media like Facebook work to abolish differences and establish the control of the world, while the algorithmic scripting has become a new instrument for designing, already tested in Vedran Mimica’s book The Berlage Affair (2018, fig. 5).

Applying the system of tagging moves us away from the film scripting towards establishing relationships between data.

The result of the algorithmic reading of text and images is the collage. Expressing the beginning of faith in the algorithm, we

Pedagogical and epistemological dialogues in teaching architecture as a means towards cinematic design

are moving towards the posthuman society.

CONCLUSION The analysis of the pedagogical modalities from the 1980s onwards is indicative of how diverse knowledge is communicated and interpreted through the educational framework for cinematic design in architecture. It is also indicative of how architectural pedagogies provided transfer of knowledge between diverse disciplines in a close connection to research and practice. Featuring key points of the art of architecture debate, such a profound change has grown to be established in our visual literacy, as part of what we need to learn, or in

Figure 4. Jean-Luc Godard, Contempt [Le Mépris], 1963, Film still.

ENDNOTES 1. The Oxford English Dictionary, 2002 update (Oxford University Press, 2002).

2. Stephen Awoniyi, ‘Premises for a question about memory’, in Working papers in ART & DESIGN, Volume 2: the concept of knowledge in art & design (2002): n. p.

3. Ibid, ART & DESIGN, Volume 2 (2002): n. p.

4. Richard Koeck, CINE-SCAPES: Cinematic Spaces in Architecture and Cities (New York and London: Routledge, 2013), zz9.

5. François Penz and Andong Lu, eds, Urban Cinematics: understanding urban phenomena through the moving image (Bristol, UK: Intellect, 2011), 241.

6. Maureen Thomas has been developing and running cross-border workshops at University of Cambridge (Architecture and Screen Media and Cultures), London (Goldsmiths Digital Studios), Ulster (Visual Arts/Design, Architecture), Bath (Architecture/Engineering), National Film and Television School in UK, Aalto Media Lab in Helsinki, Malmo (Interactive Narrativity Studio) Sweden and Norwegian Film School/Arts Fellowship Programme Norway.

7. François Penz emphasises the importance of introducing ‘a realistic attitude to reality, the dynamism of perception and the narrativity of experience’ to explain how cinema challenges the traditional disciplinary boundary of urban design, in his introduction to: cinematic urban design practice.

8. Read more about the workshop in: Maureen Thomas, ‘The Moving Image of the City: Expressive Space/Inhabitation/Narrativity: Intensive studio workshop on ‘Continuity of Action in space’, in Urban Cinematics,

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words of Walter Murch: "You need to know how to write, you need to know mathematics, you need to make a film even if you don’t become a filmmaker. You need to know what goes into making a film because films will manipulate you through the media if you don’t know what’s happening."23 More importantly, a constant appropriation of new knowledge for designing space is well aligned with Murch’s ideas about the democratization of media: "with writing we had to develop literacy, motion picture is no different."24 Then, it is debatable how to use film for educating architects today when contemporary media abolish differences and establish control of the world?

Figure 5. Vedran Mimica, Algorithmic scripting for the book The Berlage Affair, 2018. Dizajn: Damir Gamulin Gamba. Courtesy of V. Mimica.

François Penz and Andong Lu, eds. (Bristol, UK: Intellect, 2011), 281-309.

9. Justin McGuirk, ‘ This year ’s Venice Architec ture Biennale is about people, not plans’, in The Guardian, August 31, 2010, h t t p s://w w w.t h e g u a r d i a n .c o m /a r t a n d d e s i g n / 2010/a u g / 31 / venice-architecture-biennale.

10. Jill Franz, ‘An Interpretative Framework for Practice-Based Research.

Research in Architectural Design’, Working papers in ART & DESIGN, Volume 1: the foundations of practice-based research (2000): n. p.

11. Stephen AR Scrivener, ‘Reflection in and on Action and Practice in Creative-Production Doctoral Projects in Art and Design. The Foundation of Practice-Based Research: introduction’, in Working papers in ART & DESIGN, Volume 1: the foundations of practice-based research (2000): n. p.

12. According to Stephen AR Scrivener, in reflective practice it is crucial to distinguish between problem-solving research projects and creativeproduction projects.

13. D. Boud, R. Koegh and D. Walker, eds, Reflection. Turning experience into learning (London: Kogan Page, 1985), 26-31.

14. Bernard Tschumi, Cinégramme Folie, Le Parc de la Villette (Princeton Architectural Press, 1987), IV. 15. Richard Koeck, CINE-SCAPES: Cinematic Spaces in Architecture and Cities (New York and London: Routledge, 2013), 13.

16. Since the time of his Delirious New York, Rem Koolhaas continues to pursue an interest in the relationship between architecture and cinema.

17. Shannon Mattern, ‘Polite resistance and the Dimensions of Narrative – Week Six Response’, Media and Architecture 2012, A Graduate Seminar in Media Studies at The New School. Taught by Shannon Mattern, 2021 ARCHITECTURE & FILM SYMPOSIUM

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February 27, 2012: http://www.wordsinspace.net/ 18. Giuliana Bruno, Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film (New York: Verso, 2002).

19. Bernard Tschumi, The Manhattan Transcripts (London: Academy Editions, 1994).

20. David T. Fortin, Architecture and Science-Fiction Film. Philip K. Dick and the Spectacle of Home (London and New York: Routledge, 2011), IX. 21. D. Walters and L. Brown, Design First: Design-based Planning for Communities (Oxford: Architectural Press, 2004).

22. François Penz and Andong Lu, Urban Cinematics, 16.

23. C i t . W a l t e r M u r c h i n : J o h n P. H e s s , ‘ I n t h e N e a r F u t u r e Ever y Student Will Be Required to Make a Film’, Filmmaking 3 6 0 , J u l y 1 8 , 2 0 1 7 : h t t p s : // f i l m m a k e r i q . c o m / 2 0 1 7/ 0 7/ in-the-near-future-every-student-will-be-required-to-make-a-film/.

24. Ibid.

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The Eye of the Camera

PATRICK TILL University of Texas at Austin School of Architecture

“From the viewpoint of the ordinary eye you see untruth, From the viewpoint of the cinematic eye, you see the truth.”

DZIGA VERTOV1 In the contemporary city, the vast majority of the population has access to a movie camera. As video imagery is now the environment we live in, it is worthwhile to examine the camera’s ability to show the truth. Dziga Vertov, the man behind the 1929 Man with a Movie Camera, proposed that the autonomous machine eye of the camera reveals the true nature of things (the Kino-eye). Decades later, the architects Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio experimented with the camera’s ability to distort and replace the world around us. Through careful manipulation of video and architecture, Diller Scofidio’s early work eroded perceptions of space and image. The language of film examined by these two distinct creative projects can both reveal and distort. This tension is increasingly fraught as the human condition is linked inextricably to image and video. This paper examines Dziga Vertov’s theoretical writing in contrast with Diller and Scofidio’s early experiments within the framework of Guy Debord’s spectacle. The camera is one of the most potent methods through which we participate in the spectacle. It is a complex tool in understanding space, relationships, and the bones of our society – but its potency lies in its ability erode and complicate lived experience.

PATRICK TILL

The human condition is inextricably linked to image and video.

We consume our food and our fashion, explore works of art and walk through our cities, all within reach of the mediating lens of a camera. It could be the phone in our pockets or the miasma of media that precedes each action in our image saturated urban environment. Rarely do we allow ourselves to experience space without the lens of the camera involved at some point. The camera is a useful if unreliable narrator – like any media, it is a commodity in service to a creative narrative however opaque – while the camera distorts, it can also reveal.

This paper will focus on two creative entities who grapple with the inherent tension of the moving image in the urban context – Soviet cinematographer Dziga Vertov and the architecture practice DS+R. Although separated dramatically by circumstances, geographical location, and profession, both DS+R and Vertov pursued similar questions about the power of looking and recorded observation throughout their work. Both grapple with the possibilities of a media saturated environment – Dziga Vertov operating before and during the introduction of mass media and DS+R in the contemporary digital age.

Dziga Vertov, the dynamic director and theorist behind Man with a Movie Camera, explored sound and cinema in the early days of the Soviet Union. Vertov proposed the theory of the kino-eye, the autonomous eye of the camera which reveals the true nature of things.

Vertov’s kino-eye is contrasted with the early work of Diller and Scofidio. Before their partnership developed into a more traditional architecture practice, their body of work consisted of gallery installations, public art experiments, and theatrical collaborations. They approached the camera’s eye not as a truth teller, but as an object which distorts narratives.

Their work eroded perceptions of space and image through careful manipulation of video and architecture. In DS+R’s architecture, the building participates in our mediated experience of the city.

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With his Patephone, Vertov was one of the first to montage sound to create entirely new musical compositions. These musical compositions can be understood as early concrete music or even proto-electronica.7 More importantly for the topic at hand, they reveal Vertov’s recognition of recorded media’s power to both reveal and distort essential qualities.

Figure 1: Still from the opening sequence of Man with a Movie Camera. The

These initial attempts at distilling the process of sound to essential elements was closely related to the Russian avantgarde interest in Zaum. From 1913 -1914, Mayakovsky and his followers had toured Russia, proselytizing Russian Futurism.

The Zaum, or a transrational search for reason beyond reason, was a unique feature of the Russian Futurists. 8 It could be understood as the search for a real language, one that explored the actuality of a given phenomenon. It is highly likely that the young medical student Vertov was inspired by the Russian futurists and their existential artistic endeavors.

As Vertov broke down individual sounds to create a machinebased language he approached Zaum through a decidedly Futurist mode.9 This cut-up method of creation set the stage for Vertov’s initial work with the camera.

audience looks back at the camera.

In her seminal essay “Aesthetics and Anaesthetics”, Susan Buck-Mors outlined Walter Benjamin’s warning that the constant stream of images in modernity will numb the senses – by looking at too much, we cease being able to see anything. 2 Further developing this warning, author and architect Nadir Lahiji describes the urban environment as the “hyper mediated” city, where not only are we surrounded by images, but the buildings themselves are icons to be looked at. 3 In these readings of urbanity, the city has become both the scaffolding for media and an extension of the media itself.

By examining early media theory (Vertov) and a contemporary architectural practice obsessed with the dynamics of looking (DS+R), we can begin to navigate the hyper-mediated environment of the spectacular city.

DZIGA VERTOV AND HIS EARLY EXPERIMENTS Dziga Vertov was born Denis Kaufman in 1912 Bialystok, Poland. As World War I rolled across Poland, the Kaufman’s retreated to Moscow. Moving to St Petersburg to enroll in medical school, he came into contact with the avant-garde – it was around this time he adopted the moniker Dziga Vertov - a combination of the verb “to spin” and the onomatopoeia of the sound of a spinning top, or perhaps the whirring of a movie camera.4 While ostensibly studying medicine, Vertov turned his dorm into a sound lab. Vertov’s experiments with sound montage used a 1910 Patephone recorder to record the city around him. He spliced these urban fragmented clips into complex soundscapes. 5 Vertov’s experiments revolved explicitly around the idea of reducing sound to essential parts in order to reassemble them as a new creation.6 100

DZIGA VERTOV AND THE REVOLUTION In the heady early days of the Russian Revolution, Vertov joined the state’s propaganda production apparatus and learned the basics of the movie production. The October Revolution had brought a new synergy between the Bolsheviks and the avant-garde. In this climate of revolutionary expectation, Vertov joined the Moscow Kino Committee and began organizing mobile camera units to record and produce the semi-journalistic series Kinonedelia.10 Ver tov was now a member of the most well-funded propaganda apparatus in Russia. Vertov’s finger was on the pulse of a nation, editing miles of film in support of the struggling Bolsheviks. Early scholars of Soviet cinema, de la Roche and Dickinson, suggest that the wartime scarcity of raw material led to Vertov splicing Tsarist-era footage of the war with contemporary footage, creating a “new dramatic style.”11 While perhaps more urban legend than fact, this anecdote points to Vertov’s obsession with “real” footage. Moreover, this legend underlines his initial status as a propagandist: even as he relied on actual footage, his actions as editor began to undermine the reality of each reel, using documentary footage to create an augmented hyper-reality.

In 1919, Vertov jumped of the roof of the Moscow Kino Committee while his boss filmed his descent with a movie camera. This experiment would prove to be pivotal in Vertov’s own narrative of his philosophical development: the bystander sees only a man jumping off a building, while the camera can slow down the motion to reveal the thoughts and troubles of the man himself, exposing underlying emotions hidden to the naked eye. Vertov summarized this idea in 1934, writing that, “From the viewpoint of the ordinary eye you see THE EYE OF THE CAMERA

untruth, From the viewpoint of the cinematic eye (aided by special cinematic means, in this case, accelerated shooting) you see the truth. If it’s a question of reading someone’s thoughts at a distance…then you have that opportunity right here. It has been revealed by the kino-eye.”12 The kino-eye, a machine, allows humans to see life more accurately than the subjective human eye.

DZIGA VERTOV AND THE SOCIETY OF THE SPECTACLE With the popularity of Vertov’s seminal work Man with a Movie Camera, his concept of the kino-eye casts a long shadow on the history of cinematography. From its opening scene, the film immediately engages the audience in a mirror play about rhythm and observation, the camera acting as a mediator between humans on both sides of the screen. The beginning of Man with a Movie Camera depicts an audience filling a movie theater, a projectionist sliding in the reels, the editor preparing the film, the orchestra warming up. This can be understood as placing Vertov and his crew solidly in the artist-worker mode: film is a direct product of human labor, a machine art crafted carefully by Soviet citizens.13 With the opening sequence, Vertov invites the audience into the spectacle to reveal its inner working and to create a moment of participation that transcends the picture plane.

Of course, Vertov’s theory of the revealing kino-eye and his early experiments in sound are specific to the context and technology of Revolutionary Russia. What then can a person inhabiting the globalist 21st century with our camera phones and our social media take away from Vertov’s body of work?

Vertov’s proposition that the kino-eye camera reveals innate truths is a counterpoint to later pessimism about the role of manipulated images in modern society. If the human story is increasingly mediated by manipulated images (as in advertisements, movies, Instagram stories, all curated visions of human life) then humanity becomes alienated from authentic interactions – in other words, the spectacular society Debord warned about in 1967.14 Within this framework of the spectacle, the veracity of Vertov’s kino-eye comes under suspicion. In Vertov’s early work on Kinonedelia, real images were manipulated into new narrative sequences, presented as fact. These elements of propaganda gained potency through their status as fact and thus became elements of the mass consciousness.15 Much later, Man with a Movie Camera spliced together scenes filmed across multiple days and multiple cities to convey a single day in the life of the Soviet Union.16 Picture the Muscovite who steps into the cobblestoned street after seeing Man with a Movie Camera. The stirring movement of Soviet street life fills his mind as trolleys rattle past and the glow of the factory furnace competes with the setting sun.

He begins to understand himself and his comrades as part of a vibrant urban milieu, where machines clatter through PATRICK TILL

Figure 2: City scene in Man with a Movie Camera.

crowded squares, workers stream through factory gates, and hydroelectric dams pump power into an electric society.

Although created from real footage, the Muscovite imagines not one city, but several: not reality, but a hyper-reality created from carefully curated images. On one hand, the kino-eye has the unique ability to reveal the truth of society: to reveal the excitement of industrial and social upheavals of Russian urbanism in 1929. On the other hand, Vertov’s hyperreality undermines what is really there, replacing a real city with an imagined and idealized city-montage. This is vital tension in Vertov’s experiments: In using the camera to reveal and record truth, one erodes the truth through the very act of recording.

DILLER AND SCOFIDIO While Vertov’s oeuvre was born out of the October Revolution and the philosophical searchings of the Russian Futurists, Diller and Scofidio work was born during of the digital revolution. In response to the ubiquity of video recordings, Baudrillard posited that the line between the real and its reflection had been eroded. The real was no longer rational as it could be replicated and re-replicated from digital memory banks an infinite number of times.17 As the digital revolution began to shape the world into a new hyper-reality, Elizabeth Diller studied art and architecture at Cooper Union. Although she entered Cooper Union interested in studio art, she eventually gravitated towards architecture. She found that the discussion in the architecture studio engaged with larger social and spatial issues than the art studio. At this point Diller also encountered avant-garde theatre and other environmental experiments, a theme that would crop up later in many of DS+R’s most powerful explorations.18 2021 ARCHITECTURE & FILM SYMPOSIUM 101

Figure 3: para site installation at MOMA

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Ricardo Scofidio, meanwhile, was interested in the rapidly revolutionizing technologies of photography and video. Like Vertov in 1917, Scofidio in the early 1970s was fascinated by the potential of technologies used to develop contemporary mass media. While at Cooper Union and later at Columbia, he engaged in artistic mechanical experimentation and followed his sci-fi related impulses. In 1979, Scofidio left his traditional practice and began to collaborate with Elizabeth Diller on what would be 31 years of diverse and insightful architectural experiments.19 DS AND PARASITE The cameras of Diller and Scofidio para site took over the MOMA for a month and a half in 1989. The installation was comprised of 6 cameras focused on circulation areas (lobby, revolving doors, and escalators) which broadcast a live feed to screens elsewhere inside the gallery itself. Museum goers could observe their fellow unaware citizens as they entered the building and ascended the steps, slowly coming to the realization that mere minutes ago they too had been under observation.20 This strange looking glass scenario recalls not only the subjects of Man with a Movie Camera, but the sinister advance of mass media in Society of the Spectacle. In Man with a Movie Camera there are moments when the Vertov’s subjects stare back at the camera, curious, afraid, embarrassed, delighted, suddenly aware they are being filmed. In the Society of the Spectacle, “lived reality is materially invaded by the contemplation of the spectacle while simultaneously absorbing the spectacular order, giving it positive cohesiveness.”21 In other words, reality is at once invaded and informed by media.

Figure 4: Still from the Man with a Movie Camera. The camera looks back at the cameraman.

Reality is not so much subverted as it becomes a hybrid order or a tautology consisting of “lived reality” and the spectacle.22 This is a common thread running from Man with a Movie Camera in 1929 to para site in 1989: humans have become both the subject and the voyeur. As Diller and Scofidio describe para site, the cameras and video monitors link “… self-conscious and unsuspecting viewers in a reflection about looking.”23 In the “hyper-mediated city” the kino-eye becomes a perceptive organ that starts to make sense of our saturated experience.

plate glass window. In Boston’s ICA, a media center descends towards a framed view of the harbor. In each instance, the actual space delineated by the building is almost secondary to the world beyond the curtain wall and the project’s boundary.

Author Hal Foster examines the framing functions of DS+R’s ouvre in The Art-Architecture Complex. Foster writes that DS+R’s application of looking and façade creates a “mediated blend of screen space.”24 In this reading, DS+R’s manipulation of space becomes a formal exercise in navigating a complex, video saturated environment by allowing the building to use the logic of the viewfinder. The visitor to the Highline sees the city framed and the action of looking is made evident. Once again the visitor is an aware participant in the spectacle - both subject and voyeur.

ARCHITECTURAL FRAMES There are elements in many architectural works by DS+R where the building works to frame a scene. On the Highline, for example, there is moment when the elevated trail drops down to form an amphitheater above 10th avenue. Terraced seating descends to a glass backdrop dramatically framing a view southeast into New York City. At Brown University’s Granoff Center for the Performing Arts, an outdoor terrace continues the seating of the interior concert hall beyond the

CONCLUSION Something vital is revealed when placed behind the lens of the camera. For Vertov, the action reveals a human truth at the same time as linking man and machine into the grand socialist project. For Diller and Scofidio, this action is more intricate.

Instead of a straightforward revealing of fundamental truth, what is revealed by the camera is only made clear (maybe) when both subject and recording are placed side by side and their symbiosis is self-evident. We are a society of voyeurs

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nature of railroad tie pavers, urban grasses, and the steel and glass buildings simply become a backdrop or a social media commodity. Instead, this is a moment to consider that the camera is not distorting physical reality but allowing us to participate in another dimension of perception – the spectacle does not merely obfuscate but expands the landscape in which we live. 26 The spectacle has instead become an additional aspect of our current lived reality. In order to navigate this hyper-reality, we have developed new, external sensory organs - DS+R’s buildings help us frame and engage with the spectacle of the city, while every passerby can access the kino-eye of their phone camera and begin to complicate the narrative of the city for themselves.

ENDNOTES 1. Dziga Vertov and Annette Michelson, Kino-eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov (Berkeley, Ca: University of California Press, 1984), xix.

2. “Susan Buck-Morss — Texts — Aesthetics and Anaesthetics, Part I,” accessed January 9, 2021, http://susanbuckmorss.info/text/ aesthetics-and-anaesthetics-part-i/.

3. Na di r L ahij i, “ Phant asma go r ia an d th e A r c hi te c tur e o f th e Contemporary City,” Architecture_MPS ( October 1, 2015), https://doi. org/10.14324/111.444.amps.2015v7i4.001.

Figure 5: para site installation at MOMA

and actors, our urban environment a place to see and be seen that stretches across the physical reality into the reality made manifest by the camera.

Vertov saw his camera as a method of revealing true emotion, as an instrument of pure revolution. His early work, however, consisted of heavily edited newsreels splicing together actual war footage with Tsarist propaganda.25 Vertov’s later work, Man with a Movie Camera, reflects an almost anachronistic postmodern self-awareness. The director is aware of his role as the creator of spectacle. The comrades who appear in Vertov’s film stare back at the camera, aware of their participation in the production. This is the similar state of aware participation in the spectacle that is now a constant occurrence in the contemporary experience of the city - not only because cameras are an eminently accessible technology, but because architecture like that of DS+R frames these moments of self-reflection and voyeurism.

The camera has become a part of how we experience architectural space. Even if you haven’t been to the Highline, you can watch a drone video in 4k, receive a social media video from a close friend, or even participate in the image production yourself when you finally visit the now familiar architecture. One could argue that the above interactions obfuscate the lived experience of the Highline - the physical 104

4. Dziga Vertov and Annette Michelson, Kino-eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, xix.

5. Georges Sadoul, Dziga Vertov (Paris: Éditions Champ libre, 1971).

6. Seth Feldman, “Peace between Man and Machine: Dziga Vertov’s ‘The Man with a Movie Camera,’” in Documenting the Documentary: Close Readings of Documentary Film and Video, ed. Barry Keith Grant and Jeannette Sloniowski, vol. Contemporary film and television series (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1998), 40–54.

7. Feldman was able to verify this as perhaps the first use of a recording device to create a new composition. However, no recordings exist today and their existence is known only through Vertov’s own 1935 speech.

Feldman, Seth. “Peace between Man and Machine: Dziga Vertov’s ‘The Man with a Movie Camera.’” In Documenting the Documentary: Close Readings of Documentary Film and Video, edited by Barry Keith Grant and Jeannette Sloniowski, Contemporary film and television series:40–54. (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1998), 12.

8. Gerald Janecek, Zaum: The Transrational Poetry of Russian Futurism (San Diego, Calif.: San Diego State Univ. Press, 1996), 2.

9. Gerald Janecek, “1. Introduction. A Historical Perspective,” in The Look of Russian Literature: Avant-Garde Visual Experiments, 1900-1930, Course Book (Berlin, Boston: Princeton University Press, 1989), 4.

10. Feldman, Evolution of Style in the Early Work of Dziga Vertov, 30-32.

11. Thorold Dickinson and Catherine De la Roche, Soviet Cinema, The National Cinema Series (London: Falcon Press, 1948), 22.

12. Vertov and Michelson, Kino-eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, 125.

13. Feldman, Seth, “Peace between Man and Machine: Dziga Vertov’s ‘The Man with a Movie Camera,” 43.

14. In Society of the Spectacle, Debord posits that lived reality and actual interaction between people has been replaced by interactions between commodities. This is an alienation more convoluted and more developed than alienation from production; humanity is instead alienated from “authentic” interaction as social relations are mediated by images. Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, 1st paperback ed

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(New York: Zone Books, 1995), Thesis 1,4.

15. Thorold Dickinson and Catherine De la Roche, Soviet Cinema, 22.

16. Ian. The Concise Routledge Encyclopedia of the Documentary Film.

(Routledge, 2013), 603.

17. Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, Body, in Theory (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994).

18. Guido Incerti, Daria Ricchi, and Deane Simpson, Diller + Scofidio (+ Renfro), the Ciliary Function: Works and Projects, 1979-2007 (Milano, Italy: Skira, 2007), 16.

19. Guido Incerti, Daria Ricchi, and Deane Simpson, Diller + Scofidio (+ Renfro), the Ciliary Function: Works and Projects, 1979-2007, 16.

20. Elizabeth Diller, “Projects 17 : Elizabeth Diller, Ricardo Scofidio : The Museum of Modern Art, New York, July 1-August 15, 1989,” (The Museum of Modern Art, 1989) 5.

21. Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, Thesis 8.

22. In “Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin’s Artwork Essay Reconsidered,” Susan Buck-Morss explores the how constant streams of image reproduction and the scale of urban activity has narcoticized the urban experience, affecting the senses in a very real way. This “intoxication” of society is a hybrid phenomenon – fake images where the effect and the perceptions are real with real consequences. Susan Buck-Morss, “Aesthetics and Anaesthetics, Part I.” 23. DS+R. Accessed May 10, 2018. https://dsrny.com/project/para-site.

24. Hal Foster, The Art-Architecture Complex, 1st edition (London: Verso, 2013) , 96.

25. Thorold Dickinson and Catherine De la Roche, Soviet Cinema, 22.

25. Mark Foster Gauge accurately points out that the concept of the spectacle is often used in architectural criticism to set up a dichotomy between truth and ornament, the spectacle concealing otherwise apparent architectural truths. Mark Foster Gage, Designing Social Equality: Architecture, Aesthetics, and the Perception of Democracy, 1st edition (New York: Routledge, 2018), 47-48.

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Permanent Sets: Harry Oliver and the Introduction of Filmic Grammar to the Built Environment DAVE GOTTWALD

University of Idaho

“People are looking for illusions; they don’t want the world’s realities….They go to the movies. The hell with everything else.”

Morris Lapidus1 In this paper, I focus on one aspect of the relationship between architecture and film—the power of the moving image to subsume our spaces. Instead of suggesting how architecture challenges the cinematic, this paper notes the opposite—that filmic grammar, introduced into the built environment by the co-mingling of Hollywood art directors and architects in the 1920s, became the basis of a design language which is still with us today in the form of themed spaces.

In a 1970 interview for Progressive Architecture, Morris Lapidus described his motivations for repudiating modernism.

Lapidus was passionate about film; after all this was a man who was first trained to be a scenic designer. His gift was to see the power of the moving image to shape the desires of the public and respond to that desire through his architecture.

Lapidus understood the public took their conceptions of space largely from the movies they saw, and he wished to deliver a cinematic experience for retail shoppers and hotel guests, as if they were performing on a set; a permanent set. This notion began decades prior in Southern California at a time when the co-mingling of motion picture art directors, set designers, draftsmen, and architects coalesced explicitly. The products of this interplay were populist and varied widely in taste; as such, the work is often dismissed by many critics. Here I remark on some aspects which are largely unmentioned in the literature and consider the introduction of filmic grammar to constructed spaces. I describe the nature of film sets, elaborate on their properties, and recount how design for film came to intermingle with architecture in Southern California. Within this context, I point to four works by art director turned architect Harry Oliver as examples of a design language which is still with us today in the form of themed spaces.

FROM SCENIC DESIGN TO ART DIRECTION Probably the first to begin to explore the spatial possibilities of film during the first decade of the twentieth century was Frenchman Georges Méliès. Yet his craft was more directly connected to the theatrical tradition of scenic design.

Over the next ten years, more elaborate sets began to be built, though for many it was still prohibitively expensive to shoot outside the confines of a soundstage. Italian director Enrico Guazzoni, who trained as a painter and stage designer, was the first to use large, outdoor sets designed and built specifically for his productions. American D. W. Griffith followed with his massive and elaborate Babylonian environments for Intolerance (1916). These were full scale,

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freestanding structures which resembled actual buildings—a far cr y from the crudely painted flats which Méliès augmented with miniatures.

Beginning in Hollywood in 1920, what was first called art direction and then later production design branched off from theater arts into its own practice which became increasingly architectural. A few developments account for this. The first was advances in panchromatic film stock technology, which provided greater clarity. Everything seen on screen needed more detail. Simple painted backgrounds would now only work out of focus at a distance and would not hold up to close scrutiny. Another was better lensing; depth of field meant that finally three-dimensional structures would actually be read as such, no matter what their relationship to or distance from the camera. Most revolutionary were advances in camera motion. Early films were shot on a fixed tripod and resembled a stage play in presentation. The movie house also replicated a theatrical experience, in that the audience’s relationship to the show was static. With the development of camera rigs which allowed movement around actors, the viewing experience became more dynamic, tied to the camera’s point of view (POV). The use of increasingly sophisticated cranes and booms also took the camera—and the audience along with it—into film sets. As a result, by the late 1920s, what were once crude flats had to evolve into whole environments which could actually be inhabited by actors. This was the shift from stage to set; from staging a drama to acting in a setting.

Spanish art historian Juan Antonio Ramírez was the first to closely examine set design for motion pictures, and this work was later expanded upon by Charles Affron and Mirella Jona Affron. Ramírez derived six properties which make film sets distinct from architecture. First, to be economical, film sets are fragmentary. Only what is photographed is constructed.

Second, sets have altered sizes and proportions to account for both lens distortions and to accommodate their soundstages.

Perspectives can be “forced” to make structures appear taller or shorter, or larger or smaller. Third, further assisting these illusions, the interiors of sets are rarely orthogonal. Rooms are frequently trapezoidal, both to assist in controlling echoes and also in forcing perspective to produce an illusion of depth. Fourth, sets are exaggerated. Hyperbole can instantly communicate visual literacy to an audience, establishing notions of locale, time period, gender, and class. This suggested to directors that sets could function as characters within their films, conveying—along with lighting—mood and tone, in addition to expository aspects which contribute to the story. Fifth, sets must be extensible and mutable, easily moved and reconfigured. They are frequently disassembled to allow the camera to enter, making them “wild.” This aspect was later amplified by television production, in which entire walls might be removed and then replaced. Finally, film sets are the very definition of an ephemeral craft. They must be Dave Gottwald

hastily erected then brought down or “struck” just as fast to make way for the next production.

Drawing on the earlier theories of Italian Marxist critics Baldo Bandini and Glauco Viazzi, the Affrons concluded that through these six properties, sets allowed film to exceed the construct of an essentiality and determination which confines theater, for “sets...conform to spatial and temporal rhythms; theatrical sets remain tied to the constraints of the stage.”2 ARCHITECT AS ART DIRECTOR Skilled labor was needed to sketch film sets, draft them, and finally build them. During the 1920s, architecture journals frequently expounded upon the benefits of working in “the pictures,” not least of which was the often exceptional pay. Later during the Great Depression, many California architecture graduates could only find work at the studios.

Perhaps ninety-five percent of art directors in the industry during the 1930s were trained in the profession and they commented on the freedoms afforded them by the nature of film production, especially that script and the characters drove the design direction. There also were chances for greater experimentation, especially where otherworldly settings needed to be imagined. Opportunities to work in almost any style, from any region, and from any time period as required were also touted as a major selling point for heading to Hollywood. Yet perhaps most seductively, the fruits of an art director’s labors could be seen by more people in an hour than in a lifetime of viewing a traditional commission. Some practitioners and critics argued that the cultural and emotional impact of film exceeded that of architecture; that images of environments would educate better and make a more lasting impression than actual buildings. This was a time when only the wealthy travelled abroad, yet millions went to the movies every week. If an average member of the public had a chance to admire an Italian villa, a French cathedral, or even a famous American city, it would be via a stage set facsimile on screen.

During the 1920s and 1930s, architects thoroughly ensconced themselves within the motion picture industry. Yet the interplay went both ways; those with primarily movie making experience also ventured out into the built environment.

Harold Miles, set designer, art director, and concept artist for Cecil B. DeMille thought it inevitable that this would change architecture and, he argued, for the better. “Motion pictures…. will eventually take their place as an independent art with a technique appropriate to their needs and possibilities. They will then rank even more than they do at present as one of the most powerful sources of molding public opinion that civilization has devised. Architecture as well as the other graphic and plastic arts will naturally be affected and the reciprocal influence of the various arts and motion pictures should result in a stimulating influence everywhere [emphasis 2021 ARCHITECTURE & FILM SYMPOSIUM 107

Figure 1: Spadena House after being moved and converted into a private residence. Gottwald 2020.

added].”3 The region was ready for this motion picture architecture, not just because lavish movie sets felt comfortable and familiar to industry players, but because the built environment of Southern California was something of a mirage already. The Spaniards who built the Missions up and down the Pacific coastline relied on romanticized notions of home in a mélange of Mediterranean styles which were altered to account for available materials and variance in climate. A restoration of the Mission Carmel began in 1884 and enthusiasm for restoring others soon followed as most of these structures had been languishing for decades; from restoration came renewed aesthetic appreciation. It was in this context that the Mission and Spanish Colonial Revival styles became popular in the first decades of the twentieth century across California as well as in other cities of the Southwest. This was but one aspect of a romanticized Spanish fantasy heritage perpetuated by white Californians. Other European revival styles also flourished throughout the area because vernacular or “programmatic” design was “through its historical allusions, direct and understandable” to the general public.4 They had 108

seen them in the movies. This increased the general desire for expression; more exotic, bolder, louder, and crazier architecture. As historian and cultural geographer Richard V. Francaviglia observes, “our perceptions of place in the twentieth century are colored by moving images…[this] has increased our expectations.”5 The public consumed images of far away and exotic places on the silver screen by the millions every week. During the Depression, the film industry prospered and audiences grew larger still. Their expectations for exaggerated, hyperbolic fantasy forms increased, and a feedback loop emerged. At the same time, much construction in Southern California was new yet designed to look old, and could appear to be from anywhere in the world. Those trained as architects yet employed by studios increasingly opened public practices, and their clients included a growing industry elite who had the wealth to live the life at home which they produced for the screen. “In California...before elsewhere in America, a direct influence of the cinema...becomes evident” as art director G. Harrison Wiley observed, addressing the elite commissioning such homes. “If you doubt the influence of the screen….We are glad that we are helping [the] architect Permanent Sets

Figure 2: One of many extinct Los Angeles Van de Kamp retail locations which featured Oliver’s windmill design. Gottwald 2020.

in so great a way.”6 Concurrently, the built environment was being augmented by people with no formal architectural experience at all. Both groups exported the Hollywood sensibilities of their craft from the backlot and out into the greater environs of Southern California.

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ART DIRECTOR AS ARCHITECT Harold G. “Harry” Oliver (1888–1973) was one of the more influential among the many art directors who took up architectural work. Like so many, he fell into the movie industry by chance. When a production came to Santa Cruz where his family had settled, he took a job with the effort and left soon after to seek his fortune in Hollywood. He worked 2021 ARCHITECTURE & FILM SYMPOSIUM 109

Figure 3: The Tam O’Shanter restaurant in the Los Feliz neighborhood of Los Angeles. Gottwald 2020.

extensively for MGM, but also for Fox, Metro, Paramount, and United Artists, receiving multiple Academy Award nominations. In 1917, Oliver built a home for himself out of adobe, the first of many. But his debut commission was for director Irvin V. Willat in 1920, whom he was producing sets for. Willat wanted a dual-use structure which could serve as his studio’s new offices yet also be suitable as a shooting location. Thus, it was a perfect experiment for Oliver to try out filmic grammar in the real world. The structure lacks rigor, it’s wildly inconsistent and imaginatively exaggerated and appears as though it may collapse (Figure 1). No two windows are the same size or shape. Oliver took care to weather the materials to make the site feel centuries old, burning the wood and distressing the plaster and stone. When completed it was known as the Witch’s House. Five years later Willat sold his studio to Ward Lascelle who had the structure moved to Beverly Hills in 1929 and converted into a private residence where it remains to this day, known as Spadena House. The project gained Oliver much attention, and he continued to work in this style, referencing postcards for inspiration.

When the house was featured in architect Walter W. Dixon’s magazine The Home Designer and Garden Beautiful the quirky project became “widely influential” for practitioners looking for fresh inspiration.7 Thus did Oliver’s fanciful Storybook architecture begin to proliferate throughout Southern California, joining Spanish, Mission, English Tudor, and French Norman styles. Yet Oliver was not providing a pastiche of any one vernacular; this was his own cinematic fantasy, actualized in the built environment. To the public, it resembled revival architecture but had no actual roots in it. Like the sets it was derived from, the style itself was an illusion.

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In 1921 Oliver designed a windmill for the Van de Kamp’s Bakery. The founders wanted something iconic for their first retail location which passing motorists could not fail to miss.

It was constructed on the Willat studio lot and installed right next door. Within seven years there were over sixty bakery shops all based on Oliver’s original design, and over one hundred were eventually built on the West Coast (Figure 2).

The Van de Kamp’s windmill was perhaps the earliest retail chain design to achieve widespread recognition, and as a logo it has remained the company’s trademark ever since. Again, the grammar is filmic; hyperbolic and constructed using forced perspective. Oliver’s windmill was an integral part of the mimetic architecture movement of literal symbolism combining signage and façade. Proprietors needed to capture the attention of automobile drivers, competing to fulfill desires stoked by advertising. As it was image-based, exaggerated, and expressive, motion picture architecture provided the ideal format. What was prescient about Oliver’s approach is he successfully collapsed an entire cultural identity into a life-size toy a child could identify, much like Walt Disney would later use a castle as the center of his theme park as well as the logo for his films and various companies.

Hundreds would follow the lead of Van de Kamp’s, filling American roadsides with what Brown and Venturi would later call “ducks.”

When Lawrence L. Frank (Van de Kamp’s partner) wanted to open a restaurant in 1922, he turned to Oliver and this time encouraged him to produce an imaginative expansion of the Witch’s House. The objective was the same as the windmill—make motorists stop—as the site was roadside on Permanent Sets

Figure 4: Gold Gulch entrance, California Pacific International Exposition, 1935. Gottwald 2020.

an undeveloped link between Glendale and Hollywood. Oliver repeated the hyperbolic presentation and non-orthogonal design; not a single frame was plumb to the ground. He outdid himself on aging the materials, charring all exposed beams in a lumberyard incinerator and distressing them with metal wire before installation. As before, plaster, masonry and stone was also worn to suggest a centuries-old establishment.

Montgomery’s Country Inn came to be called The Tam O’Shanter three years later, but not until after Oliver was hired to add more dining rooms and give the design a Scottish motif (Figure 3). Appropriately, during the 1920s and 1930s it was a regular stop for Walt Disney and his studio animators to lunch, and became one of Disney’s favorite Los Angeles restaurants. Again, Oliver was ahead of his time. One of the major design phenomena of the twentieth century would be themed dining, and restaurants just like this one employing filmic grammar would form chains all across the United States in the postwar period.

While in Seattle as a younger man, Harry Oliver took a job as a scenic painter for the 1909 Alaska–Yukon–Pacific Exposition.

So it’s appropriate that the crowning example of his use of filmic grammar was at yet another world’s fair. The 1935-36 California Pacific International Exposition was held in Balboa Park, San Diego. Unlike the fair held there in 1915, which had a historical focus, this new endeavor “commercialized the Dave Gottwald

history of California’s cultures and peoples.”8 The structures, landscapes, and attractions within and throughout the grounds were presented as what today we would call a theme park. And just like Disney years later, there was ideology; to show the world that “California and the West had moved from the dusty frontier days of ‘49 to modern industrial civilization” and to claim that “San Diego is the birthplace of California.”9 Oliver was hired to design and supervise the construction of an entire frontier mining town called Gold Gulch to celebrate the rush of 1849. He enlisted one Marion Parks, a prominent local historian and the author of numerous books, so that the project could claim a hallmark of authenticity. The rest was pure Hollywood (Figure 4). A 21-acre site was chosen in the southeast corner of the property in a natural ravine which would isolate the rustic setting. Oliver employed all his studio tricks and tropes. He played with exaggerated proportions and again elaborately burned, stained, and weathered all wood to achieve an antique patina. He also couldn’t wait to “shoot” his movie; with Gold Gulch not yet half-completed, Oliver encouraged the construction crew to dress as miners, effectively having them play-act on the site.

Once open, the town was populated with costumed characters all day long much like Disney’s later cast members.

There was music, dancing, food and drink, gambling, contests, and games. It was at Gold Gulch that the public was first 2021 ARCHITECTURE & FILM SYMPOSIUM 111

encouraged to enter and inhabit an image from the movies in the form of an environment designed like a movie backlot; decades before the Hollywood studios would offer elaborate backstage tours or the establishment of the theme park industry. Gold Gulch was the single largest attraction at the fair, and was immensely popular. The official guidebook recommended taking a half-day to enjoy it all. There was an assay office, a blacksmith demonstration, a dance hall, and the requisite saloon. Promotional materials told the public that Gold Gulch was both authentic and a fantasy. The mining town was “a faithful ‘movified’ version of the pioneering period by a Hollywood motion picture art director….Gold Gulch isn’t just a show. It’s real.”

When Walter Knott visited he spent hours in Gold Gulch, and decided to assemble a similar town at his boysenberry farm.

Knott happened to be good friends with Lawrence L. Frank (for whom Oliver designed the Tam O’ Shanter). Through Frank, he had conversations with Oliver. Although a direct collaboration did not come to pass, Knott’s “Ghost Town” was very much inspired by Gold Gulch and the grounds have evolved into what today is Knott’s Berry Farm theme park. And of course when Disneyland opened in 1955 it featured a very similar area called Frontierland which Disney’s designers developed using the design language of film sets, taking Knott’s “Ghost Town” as one point of inspiration. Even though the least recognized, given the sustained popularity of themed spaces like these, Gold Gulch is probably Oliver’s most influential project.

CONCLUSION Johann Wolfgang von Goethe once observed that architecture is like frozen music. Following that metaphor, Harry Oliver came to practice architecture as a form of frozen cinema.

The conflation of the built environment and the film set was also spread by others like him, notably Walter S. Davis and Robert H. Derrah. The 1920s–1940s in the Southwestern United States presented an opportunity to experiment and often run wild with commissions for restaurants, taverns, hotels, and casinos. As such the filmic approach as largely pioneered by Harry Oliver was exported to Mexico and then on to Las Vegas by architects like Wayne McAllister during the postwar years. In 1955 came Disneyland, a built environment project designed completely by art directors and animators, which has led to the widespread adoption of themed spaces founded in motion picture art direction. Oliver used the language of film sets to deliver four major contributions: the Storybook style in American architecture, perhaps the earliest example of a structural retail trademark, a prototypical themed restaurant, and the progenitor of theme park representations of the Old West as a studio backlot. Though he practiced at a time and in a region already flush with revival forms of architecture from around the world, Oliver’s work was intended to be “read through our remembrances 112

of the fairy-tale world” and to be inhabited as “dollhouses enlarged.” His projects represent the power of the moving image to capture our imagination in actual spaces, and signal the beginning of a relationship between architecture and cinema in which filmic grammar continues to be expressed within the built environment all around the world­—from Las Vegas to Shanghai, the Disney parks to Dubai.

ENDNOTES 1. Margolies, John S. 1970. “Morris Lapidus: ‘Now, Once and for All, Know Why I Did It.’” Progressive Architecture (September 1970): 118–23. https://usmodernist.org/PA/PA-1970-09.PDF. 2. Affron, Charles, and Mirella Jona Affron. 1995. Sets in Motion: Art Direction and Film Narrative. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

3. Miles, Harold. 1927. ‘‘Architecture in Motion Pictures.’’ Pencil Points 8, no. 9 (September 1927): 535–44. https://usmodernist.org/PA/PP-192709.pdf.

4. Gebhard, David. (1980) 2018. “A Lasting Architecture” in California Crazy: American Pop Architecture. Revised ed. Köln: Taschen.

5. Francaviglia, Richard V. 1996. Main Street Revisited: Time, Space, and Image Building in Small-Town America. Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press.

6. Wiley, G. Harrison. 1926. “The House That Jack Builds.” The Motion Picture Director 2, no. 6 (January 1926): 37–39. https://archive.org/ details/motionpicturedir4240moti.

7. Gellner, Arrol, and Douglas Keister. (2001) 2017. Storybook Style: America’s Whimsical Homes of the 1920s. Revised ed. Atglen, PA: Schiffer Publishing Ltd. 8. Bokovoy, Matthew. San Diego World’s Fairs and Southwestern Memory: 1880–1940. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 2005.

9. California Pacific International Exposition. 1935. Official Guide, Souvenir Program, and Picture Book. San Diego: California Pacific International Exposition. https://archive.org/details/guide_1935_da_official_2-b.

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MOVING IMAGES

Posthuman Cartographies

Farzam Yazdanseta and Eva Perez de Vega The film presented in this application for the 2021 symposium on Architecture and Film, is a collection of student generated work that emerged from two different, yet interrelated, assignments: Machinic and Drift. The work was produced in the first semester of Degree Project by architecture students as part of a research seminar, which extends into the spring as a studio -currently underway- where final projects are developed and presented.

The aim of our seminar, and subsequent studio, is to use cinema as a new mode of thinking about architecture and its performative dimension; exploring the potential of motion, perception, time, and space to create new conceptual frameworks from which to build future architectural proposals. This work is the foundation that will allow students to project new architectural futures into New York City’s urban environment, using cinema as a tool for exploring the city and rethinking the role of the human in near-future speculative scenarios.

Each Machinic film constitutes a concise compilation of individual student research as manifested through drawings produced in the first four weeks of the seminar. For the movie, these drawings became animate representations to reflect the energy of the ideas and to materialize the various forces at play. A key aspect of each student short film is the inclusion of the performance from their Kinetic Model, which was a construct that embedded multiple states released through mutation and transformation of its parts.

In Drift, student teams of two were asked to reconstruct a portion of an emblematic movie filmed in New York City, by reenacting and staging a scene from the movie. In addition, students had to fulfill the role of a production team; each tasked to act as camera person, map maker, writer, photographer, diagram maker, and actor. This exercise was undertaken with the realization that relationship between New York City and the way it is, and has been, portrayed in movies since the sixties is profoundly formative of the city as it stands today. As such, students filmed on actual sites in the city to acquire adequate analytical and documentary materials, which also opened them to a range of performative influences and transitory forces and flows.

The film presented provides the viewer with a glimpse into the journey we embarked with our students: engaging with specific cinematic techniques of representation and cartography that take into account the scale of the body in order to explore, rethink, and re-make the city.

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On Reading Wet Dreams

Karen Lange, Nathanael Ramos, Renata Galan Hoffman, Fernando Astiazaran, Michael Jablonski, James Nguyen, Serena Guo, Ames Han, Elizabeth Evangelista, Ishita Gupta, Monica Mendoza, Gabriela Molina, Logan Gillis, Vivian Pham, Lucy Zhu, Mackenzie Bailey, Brian Chan, Ariq Chowdhury, Barnabas Luke, Jerrod Dockan To read is to converge in time and space with text, losing oneself in the words through the act of reading. To read in public is to share the transference and communication of knowledge. A reading room is this space of simultaneity, and is the project brief for this installation.

Authorship of the installation, Wet Dreams, belongs to 19 architectural thesis students who were tasked to design an experience for the objective of the reading of their thesis research books. The resulting books were individually investigated and written regarding 19 different concepts – the industrialization of asteroids, a sex church, the democratization of a golf course, amongst others. While all the books are different the students tie their disparate ideas into a space for reading, a space that not only accommodates reading, but speaks to the concepts of their books and provides an atmosphere conducive to the engagement of the reader’s imagination. Reading suggests; the mind is activated.

Wet Dreams is an installation based on the idea of floating. Flotation devices are both lifesavers and toys, allowing the partial removal of the user from the element of water, safe but precarious. However, taken in the context of floating in a gallery well away from water, the flotation device suggests a cocoon in which to share the architectural thoughts of the authors.

The creation takes over an existing gallery that serves as structure for the hanging inflatables. Pool floats hang tenuously by threads of plastic wrap creating an ethereal web of inflated objects caught between ceiling and floor. The colors of the flotation devices are muted by the webbing; their wings clipped to their sides; their sizes doubled by twinning.

Video projections colorize and synthesize the exterior, punctuating the interior through voids and holes. To read in a dark place requires light accomplished by individual light sources for each book. To complete the experience, the audio is a composition of ambient noises, synthetic beats, and whispered excerpts from the books. The transitions between these excerpts blend a series of extracted vocalities, estranged from comprehensible language. The tactile nature of the plastic material, the alien noises of the supple inflatables under human weight, and the mesmerizing images of projections culminates a synesthesia experience.

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Unlike the library where silence is the rule, Wet Dreams is about the sharing of knowledge and experience as a communal reading experience. As opposed to the scholarly solitude suggestive of a normative library reading room, inflating sound as well as reading becomes a new background.

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Pedagogy of the Fourth Wall Kevin Marblestone and Emily Whitbeck

Contemporary design pedagogy has failed to produce architects that can operate effectively within time-based global crises. In their attempts to address issues of sustainability and resiliency, architects have trapped themselves in a false binary, understanding structures to be either temporary or permanent.

However, this considers only time-span. This shallow understanding of time has stifled the work produced by students and professionals today and reinforces the use of static mediums and conventions of orthography. Architecture needs a new generation of practitioners that can think differently about time.

In order to engage the time-based urgencies of the Anthropocene that challenge the perception of our environment, the profession must reevaluate its relationship to time. Rather than rely on private organizations that profit off the desire for sustainability, architects must rely on the profession itself to produce new structures of thought. This project focuses on rethinking the true beginning of the design profession, the moment of inception, the first-year design studio.

This fictional studio course is structured as a pedagogical experiment that establishes a working methodology focused on time and perception, rather than program and form. The curriculum engages a new critical eye on time, one that folds linear understandings of time in on themselves and acknowledges its cyclical, recursive nature. Additionally, the course acknowledges that the media students work through impacts how they design, and the actual time spent working, day-to-day, week-to-week, semester to semester. This new framework around time mandates the use of time-based media at the very beginning of the design process. Students work through video, sound, and material fabrication to operate within concepts of cyclical time on multiple perceptual scales, establishing the video editing process as an integral part of the student’s design workflow. The series of videos presented in this film, increasing in both duration and complexity, are the results of this fictional studio.

The impact of propagating this pedagogy through an entire architectural education could produce a fleet of architects that are capable of addressing architecture through time. How could this then redirect the course of the profession?

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Foundation Design Video

Thomas Forget, William Philemon, Noushin Radnia, Arturo Lujan This moving-image presentation is a synopsis of a video making curriculum being developed within an accredited degree program in architecture. The primary author is working with colleagues to establish video making as a foundationlevel method of architectural thinking, introduced in first-year studios and developed in subsequent studios, culminating in the acquisition of both a highly marketable job skill and a body of work that demonstrates the critical and creative capacity of video making, as well as its practical applications.

The curriculum begins at the first-year level with a coordinated method that introduces a specific school-of-thought rooted in the research and practice of the primary author. That initiative was launched during the past year and will be iterated in future years. Eventually, as students advance through the program, the intention is to integrate complementary sensibilities at other levels of instruction through the input of different instructors and the objectives and themes of different studios.

The methods and objectives of the first-year video curriculum mirror those of traditional first-year architectural design pedagogies, in which fundamentals of composition and principles of abstraction are introduced independent of the complexities of site, program, and systems integration. Video is posed as a medium through which to explore the construction of spatiotemporal compositions, rhythms, hierarchies, ordering systems, scale, and human occupation/ movement—in other words, the basics of architectural design; however, unlike traditional foundation-design pedagogies, the video exercises are relatively open-ended and low-stakes, as opposed to procedural and laden with theoretical constructs. Precedents shown to students are drawn primarily from the PostWar experimental film tradition (e.g., Brakhage, Snow, Gehr, Morrison, Clarke).

The objective of the curriculum is not to execute an established understanding of the relationship between architecture and film, but rather to explore the potential of video making as a mode of critical inquiry. Our students’ media literacy and technological facility enable knowledge-building through video making. Through exercises, students learn lessons on process and gain insights into fundamental aesthetic conditions and matters of craft and abstraction, all of which are directly applicable to other design methods; however, we discourage assumptions regarding the literal translation of videos into buildings, and encourage knowledge-building for its own sake.

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Associations between the videos and matters concerning the built environment are foregrounded, but video making is posed as a vehicle of design-thinking, not an instrument of a specific design process. As students trained in this curriculum progress into upper-level coursework, the foundational lessons of this video curriculum may be applied to more discrete objectives. The intention of the first-year exercises is to open up possibilities for video making in multiple venues—to integrate it into students’ tool kits as a matter-of-fact and to avoid the marginalization of video making as an elective opportunity only for those interested in the established architecture-film discourse. The variety of the work attests to openness of the curriculum.

The presentation will include a synopsis of the curriculum and clips of more videos than the complete ones shared in the Vimeo link; it is envisioned more as a workshop session than a formal presentation.

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This is a Sick City

JP Maruszczak and Roger Connah This is a city, mediated and unmediated, where ER meets Westworld, a reality hunger of extracts and trends, of incoherencies linked together by pre-texts.

Strategies do not conform with, or are in opposition to, or even defined by, existing, freshly minted mediated discourse. Sick City seeks another currency. If Gaming is its obvious connection to Sim-City then we suggest this interpretation be cautioned as most of what we present has happened and will go on happening without us.

Architects, urbanists, scholars, theoreticians, and planners - leaving us triumphantly outside the marginal discourse and sideswiped cities of the 24/7 variety, those huddled agreements offering sleep prevention and deprivation models for an ideologically hankered re-calibration of the capital of urban life.

The Re-calibrators - there is no boundary today between the urban and the non-urban, between the language that controls it and the language that bounces off it, between mediated and unmediated, between the mall-of-beyond and the mall-to become.

The cyborgs are already away with the fairies and the next is being prepared. This is the pre-textual world where consensus can no longer work its seduction on us.

The post-consensual is already upon us; and we will be chased by Ambulance Architecture before we even realize.

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Intricate Irritations

Gabriel Esquivel, Gonzalo Vaillo, Finn Rattana, Manuel Alvarado, Joey Reik As human actors, we lose ourselves to a cognitive condition related to the conscious awareness of ourselves. It is this obsession of we as objects, and the condition of “I” or ego, that drives the speculation of this project.

This condition also lends our engagement to qualities, rather than objects themselves, thus lending the project to the mediation of the “Jective”(Vaillo 2019) mereological system. In doing so, we utilize metaphor to speculate on the pursuit of unknown excess, in terms of the Other, and the trajectory of the Architectural Project beyond its manifestation alone. We establish the project as an assemblage of parts with unfamiliar qualities, operating within the intrigue of unknown excess. Ultimately, this quality of the project begins to cross the lines of culture and nature, house, and garden, and subject and object.

The project began within the framework of pursuing the space of abundance with regards to the relationship between the Architect and the Architectural Project. The way we pursued this idea was to dive into the concept of “Jectivity” (Vaillo 2019) and utilization of the process of Metaphor-Variation-Repetition as initial drivers for the project. Our approach led to an ontological treatment of Metaphors as mediators within the manifestation of the project, which we redefine as the Jective-Metaphor, which allowed us to liberate the Project from the limitations of subjectivity and objectivity through the connection of these legible qualities. In doing so, we were able to establish the trajectory of the project and the metaphorical vehicles through which the metaphorical vehicles we pursued the unknown qualities of the space of abundance.

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Mech[Animal]Sitelessness Beta Branden Hudak and Ebrahim Poustinchi

Mech[Animal]Sitelessness Beta—here referred to as MAS-Beta, is a speculative project-based research investigation, looking at the intersection of storytelling, experience design (UX) robotics, and animation as a hybrid medium for urban design. Moving beyond urban planning and designing in “plan”—from the top view, MAS-Beta, revisits the notion of atmosphere and environment as drivers for spatial user experience in an urban context. Employing contemporary representational methods and platforms such as 3D modeling, animation making, real-time rendering, and game design, this design research investigates the potential of these platforms to reimagine parts of New York City as an urban canvas for speculation, to receive speculative/atmospheric projections.

It is crucial to use a theoretical framework to guide the process, to develop cohesion throughout this speculation. Through contemporary readings of post-human philosophy and building upon earlier investigations in the field of digital and physical animation—in relation to architecture, MAS-Beta borrows three main concepts from the existing bodies of research: 1- The concept of robotics, as a means for physical animation (Poustinchi, 2018), 2- the idea of super-component as a part of an “object”—composition, that is big enough to be an independent “object”—whole (Wiscombe, 2014), and 3- a different yet relevant reading of the notion of digital discrete (Retsin, 2019). Through the proposed theoretical frameworks, MAS-Beta revisits the idea of an urban fabric and context as a platform/canvas for storytelling and atmosphere creation/ development through a “speculative” urban-design and a short hybrid animation movie. Building upon earlier investigations in speculative architecture and urbanism, ranging from “speculations” on Utopia/Dystopia, to the conversation about the aesthetics of city through “Machine” vision/learning— in the work of Liam Young (Young, 2017) or Yara Feghali (Feghali, 2018), MAS-Beta employs storytelling and narration as a medium to illustrate the power of “Atmosphere” as an urban design element. Using digital storytelling techniques through animation and game-design, MAS-Beta visits an existing urban condition and aims to modify, change, or augment existing/speculative qualities of that context through atmosphere making. Utilizing “actors” and “accessories” of the urban “scene,” texture, lighting, urban furniture, vehicles, buildings, signage, and many others, each of these elements grow into storytelling platforms through which speculation/atmosphere-making becomes possible. Situated in a postapocalyptic world, MAS-Beta lives a hybrid life where part of New York City has experienced a radical shift of time, past the apocalyptic era and is restarting a new life again. Through this rebirth, a robotic chunk of the city--the MAS-Beta

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machine, serves as an active agent to this process. Collecting and re-purifying the fuel, increasing the awareness through news billboards, and participating in the food-supply chain to feed the hungry in this newly born neighborhood, MAS-Beta operates in three modes. Using the MAS-Beta machine and its performance/operations, atmosphere-making through film, and speculation, as possible mediums for urban design, the project aims to study/design the urban fabric from the inside-out and through a close-up. MAS-Beta calls attention to revisit the possible potential of atmosphere, experience, and space, as crucial elements for an urban experience, beyond the parallel views of urban planning/ programming.

2021 ARCHITECTURE & FILM SYMPOSIUM 125

PECHA KUCHA

Tenebrous Poetics of Cityscapes C. Aparnaa and Sparsh Patlan CEPT University, India

Juxtaposition of cinematic propositions amidst the city-scape often creates an impression on how the city behaves and what it could possibly offer. Geographies, physical manifestation of infrastructure, inhibit or encourage activities that occur in cities. Cities are an agglomeration of physical & experiential exhibitions, imbibing the dynamic interrelationship and overlap of contradicting notions; of fantasies and nightmares. The 21st century witnessed rampant urbanization that dealt with the construction and deconstruction of spaces in terms of its form, placemaking, character of the area, access, legibility, and the mobility of the inhabitants to address the intent of how transformations within city spaces might arrive. The pervasive urbanization (and the concomitant suburbanization) connoting the idea of modernization has led to the gentrification of spaces, resulting in the emergence of both public and private derelict places.

It draws together strands of aggravating the intermediate spaces into multifold transient time-based spaces which reflect on the darkest facets of hollow, shady, crime instigative spaces. The noir film genre is a cinematic evince of such spaces, depicting the prevailing somber cityscapes as well as the envisaged utopian turned dystopian scenario. Dwelling onto the maneuvers of depicting the aforementioned concept, the presentation illustrates both the physical and psychological elements of the noir genre, manifested through the unscrupulous conducts ensuing in the dark, tenebrous urban settings. Inspired by Robert Doisneau’s (1962) The Lodgers, the presentation depicts the presence of illicit activities throughout a building, as if it is owned by a mafia or don. It tries to highlight dark mise-en-scène in terms of old buildings, futuristic buildings in a dystopian world, dingy subways, crime areas, shady corners and the dreary sky as a backdrop. The trajectory of a vigilante as an individual, observing and protecting people, is traced through the labyrinthine spaces and marked by literal and symbolic pathways. The tenebrous actions are emphasized through the blood-ridden hands and footprints and miscreants in the same hue set against the somber backdrops. The emotional implications, coherent with, as well as a consequence of such prevalent spaces, are thus acknowledged through the utilization of the pronounced ubiquitous perceptions of noir elements.

The presentation thus, is an accumulation of poetic dynamics that unhinge an individual from delusions to a more realistic dilemma of arbitrary circumstances.

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The Gravity of Perception Unearthing the Subterranean Films of Gordon Matta-Clark Alan Webb

University of Toronto, Canada Filming as exploration, trespassing as documentation, underground passage as a shadow derive of free movement in the sunshine. The multidisciplinary artist Gordon Matta-Clark (New York City, 1943-1978) used film as a medium of perceptive inquiry, an approach he applied in an archaeological investigation of the underpinnings of our urban environments.

In closely examining the two subterranean film works of Matta-Clark, Substrait (Underground Dailies) (1976), and Sous-sols de Paris (1977), we may appreciate these works as discrete projects unique to the medium of film and gain a deeper understanding of the multidisciplinary artist’s lines of inquiry. The improvisational works contain both a lament and a celebration, of things past but still in existence, the remarkable archaeology of the everyday to which MattaClark was so inexorably drawn.

The reverse topography of these films illustrates the dense layers of accumulated history of a recently settled city such as New York as well as the rich layers of inhabitation, from catacombs to medieval caverns, to be found in Paris. The films allowed Matta-Clark to continue his critique of the modernist project by modifying the relationship between the contemporary and the historical, the architectural inside and outside, and by providing a counter-site to his works above ground.

This creative critique drew on anti-monuments, the often forgotten and hidden yet essential structures that enable a functioning metropolis.

Taken in isolation, these two films are remarkable documents of little seen urban spaces and snapshots of a time in the 1970s when major infrastructure works were ongoing in New York and Paris. Placing these films in relation to MattaClark’s wider body of sculptural-architectural work, including Splitting, Office Baroque, and Day’s End, they provide a complement that suggests other ways to situate the artist’s interests and ideas in a richer context, and affording us an opportunity for a deeper understanding of the city as illuminated by the floodlight of a camera in the darkness.

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Cultural Narratives Unfolded Sarah Ra

Oklahoma State University In Charles Renfro’s discussion of the influence of film in his work, he notes that, “any film with an edit has a point of view. It cannot simply be an index of a place”. The tools that we use to capture impressions, whether of culture or space, put their own unique filter on the message and provide students with a unique medium for engaging the active spaces and people of other cultures. Renfro’s projects are about a site evolving with its context, about people moving and living in a space, interacting with it rather than just looking. We can think of our experiences capturing spaces in a similar way.

For our study abroad course, students unfolded these cultural influences by exploring and analyzing urban spaces and their relationship with the societies in which they exist. Utilizing digital analysis tools such as film, photography, and sound recordings, students captured their experiences and observations, ranging from interviews, religious ceremonies, and cultural performances, to the movement of transit systems. Students not only had a platform to share their work, but the immediacy in information sharing of film, images, and social media provided a better capacity for communication and collaboration.

Some film captured a moment to frame various types of cultural messages, while some were figure or compositionally oriented, artistic, or more tectonic. While the students strived to focus their visual narratives on the topics that they wished to address with their research, film revealed other issues that were perhaps subconscious, but which were brought to light with the medium. For example, one student chose to focus on green spaces, but ultimately captured compelling portraits of everyday people inhabiting these spaces. Another student chose to extrapolate concepts by looking at the more tectonic nature of urban spaces, capturing transit and movement systems. They explored changing scenes and perspectives, and the impact on the spaces created by these systems. These types of changing perspectives were best captured through film. Another student took footage of the countryside near the Korean Demilitarized Zone, as the bus rolled through the barren landscape. Empty fields lined with razor wire were eventually punctuated with a lonely guard shack, seeming to reflect the spirit of isolation and discontent in this ‘in-between’ place. Film was necessary to capture the extent of the landscape, but also the intimacy of the small stand, all in one segment.

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Film served as a dynamic medium, but it also forced students to evaluate their work, and to address unconscious emphases or issues that they captured.

Critique and development ultimately slows the process, wherein students can better understand the work, and interrogate the meaning of what they have created. The editing is a key part of the learning process, and ultimately helped assess what students have gained and what their work can become. Beyond still image and sound, the aspect of movement allowed them to assess multiple dimensions in a single medium.

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A lot more than just Picturesque Exploring Functions of Landscapes in Films Prachi Nadkarni

Indian Education Society, India Landscapes in their very definition are referred to as natural physical features with a high visual appeal. The quality of picturesque is attached to them and more often, landscapes are viewed from an aesthetic lens.

Landscapes, whether examined from a scientific point of view or a creative filmic point of view, are a representation of works of various forces in nature. They are dynamic. Although captured or recorded in films, they have the potential to convey a lot more than what is evidently seen. They perform different functions in films and unfold many meanings in the narrative.

This presentation tries to examine the different functions that Landscapes can perform in Films. While the research investigates this idea through works of various writers, directors, and film geographers, it is largely based on analysis and opinions produced by Chris Lukinbeal through his study on J.B Jackson’s essay titled "Landscape as Theater". The presentation intends to put together a diverse understanding of how landscapes perform different roles in a film and how they have been creatively used by filmmakers in order to enable, facilitate, empower, and challenge the cinematic narrative. The research further attempts to identify examples mainly from Indian Films and even others, and to correlate findings from the studies and comprehend the type of functions performed

by Landscapes in those examples which again distinctly iterate the idea of Landscapes being a lot more than just "Picturesque"!

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Representation, Symbols, and Dreams From Modern Architecture to the Modern City Isabella Leite Trindade

Ryerson University, Canada This presentation focuses on the interface between cinema and modern architecture. It is particularly concerned with the ways in which cities and their architecture are represented in movies, based on the premise that these representations can help us to understand how cities and their architecture become a set of symbolic artifacts.

A scenario built specifically for a movie is seen as a fictional space, a space of imagination filled with symbolic representations. This differs from the nonfictional space built by architects, builders, and interior designers, conceived with specific use and transformed by the individuals who occupy it daily. Thus, scenography is part of an imaginary universe, while architecture is part of real life. One is temporary, the other, supposedly, lasting. What influence does one have on the other? Could fictional space transcend the role of mere scenario?

In this sense, scenography has multiple functions. First, it has a didactic function introduced through shapes, color, objects, and style; second, a time-related function: as it shows historical epoch with objects from other times and place, seasons, or times of day; and finally, it reveals the cultural identity of place as the material anchors of narratives.

This presentation takes into account these categories of analysis, and is organized as follows: 1) an introduction; 2) characteristics of the Modern Movement as an aesthetic expression; 3) a critique of modern architecture; 4) a critique of the modern city; and 5) a conclusion.

The interface between cities, architecture, interiors, and movies is a relatively new, interdisciplinary academic field. This presentation specifically engages with - and borrows analytical tools from - a number of disciplines, including history and theory of architecture, and communication and film studies. Through the analysis of key films, this presentation seeks to investigate modern architecture as a vehicle of interpretation and sociological criticism.

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From Object to Building Space, Form, and Movement Jason Scroggin

University of Kentucky The Louisville Children’s Museum and Rainbow Massimal present two scales of architectural projects, the building and installation, developed to investigate the relationship between color, movement, static form, and their resulting experience. Each design presents an array of colors organized by its construction technique that changes in graduation based on the position and movement of the viewer. Similar to the organization of a zoetrope, an early precursor to film animation which mobilizes a series of static frames inside a cylinder that when viewed from a static position portray movement, the Rainbow Massimal and Children’s Museum are static geometries that present a continuous transformation of color as you circumnavigate the object. In the case of the Children’s Museum, this is true from the city’s sidewalks and streets as well as the structural corridor enveloping the exterior of the building.

The Rainbow Massimal is an installation designed and fabricated utilizing a simple slotted model assembly technique at full scale. As a large and unmovable object, it reconfigures spatial flow and creates a visual transformation of color and shape as one walks around its exterior. Its inhabitable belly contains an atmosphere of varying hues and patterns as light passes through its colorful egg-crate exterior.

The Louisville Children’s Museum is a dynamic experience of color, light, and activity. It directly engages the site by wrapping the city’s sidewalk around its exterior as a vertical playground. The building’s cylindrical form presents a continuous façade that changes color as you move around its perimeter. Inside, the visitors experience the gradual color transformation of the structural partitions as they move along the ramp containing five stories of gallery spaces.

This extends to the roof garden 100 feet above ground presenting commanding views of the city.

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Shelter Shift

Jessica Colangelo and Charles Sharpless University of Arkansas

Shelter Shift is a pair of bus shelters designed by Somewhere Studio on the connector highways of Athens, Georgia. The project was the winner of a national call for artistdesigned bus shelters for the county’s growing public transportation network.

The bus shelters are conceived as a dynamic visual object that shifts its color and appearance with the change of the viewer’s position. Inspired by primitive motion graphic devices such as periaktos and tabula scalatas, this project amplifies the effects of these techniques by wrapping the entire bus shelter in a lenticular metal screen. The metal screen is designed with a repetitive “V”-shaped geometry in plan with a different color coating each side of the component. In combination, the plan geometry and color coating produce an object that appears one color from one vantage point and another color from a second vantage point.

The overall geometry of the shelter is regulated by the intersection of two spheres with the perimeter screen. The front sphere establishes the opening for the primary entrance of the shelter. The additional sphere intersections create opportunities for porosity within the metal screen, reducing the “V”-shaped unit into a single metal slat. This allows for daylight into the shelter and views out.

Sited alongside multi-lane thoroughfares, the design works for waiting as well as it does for passing. Looking through the shelter from different angles, one sees a constantly changing frame and layering of light and color through to the surroundings. The color-shift is heightened when speeding past in a car. But for the waiting bus rider, the openness of the shelter provides a clear visual connection between the interior seating and the approaching bus driver.

Initially commissioned for a single shelter, the designers convinced the city of the value of producing multiple shelters in different colors. The first iteration of the shelter was painted red, black and white to harken back to the spirit of the University of Georgia Bulldogs. A second shelter was commissioned in a color scheme that resonated with the Georgia state fruit: the peach.

The complex form of each shelter was fabricated with standardized metal components. A bent metal frame outlining the circular openings forms the underlying structure of the shelter. The metal screen is achieved with a sandwich of individually painted metal slats around a standard 2” metal angle. This method avoided any complex bends in the metal components and simplified the painting process.

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Bus shelters serve a variety of speeds of observation. At one extreme, one sits for hours within the shelter waiting for a bus to take us somewhere else. At the other extreme, drivers speed past these landmarks in their vehicles, barely noticing as their eye darts to the next thing coming. Somewhere in the middle, a bus shelter is a piece of urban furniture appreciated at the pedestrian scale as an object that gives identity to a suburban streetscape. Shelter Shift addresses all of these scales of motion in two small constructions.

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Kinetoscopic Vision George Themistokleous De Montfort University, UK

The kineto-scope (1889-92) developed by William Kennedy-Laurie Dickson and Thomas Edison, is a pre-cinematic device. Kineto-scope derives from kinesis, meaning movement, and scopia, meaning to see, i.e. a movement-image. The kinetoscope emerged after innovations in the development of photography, which made it possible to record images on the kinetograph. The projection of the moving images occurred in the same space as their recorded capture, i.e. inside the actual device through the peephole, as "the figures appeared to emerge from the screen" (Michaud 2004, 51). In this experimental space the figure that entered the “set” of the kinetoscope was simultaneously converted into a moving image. Therefore, "by bursting into the image, the figure demonstrates his exclusion from any context" (Michaud 2004, 51). The kineto-scope captured an initial appearance of the body literally in and through film. Once the cinematic medium replaced the kinetoscope, the body of the recorded and projected subject was excluded from the process. As Michaud notes, "the figural properties of filmed bodies" marked a "moment of initial elucidation that would brutally disappear from the world of commercial cinema" (Michaud 2004, 51).

The Diplorasis, a multi-media installation of my own making (2019) becomes a contemporary kineto-scopic experiment, exploring the simultaneous recording and projection of an unaware participant through digital means. The set of the Diplorasis is essentially a constructed corridor. The inside of the corridor is composed entirely of mirrors. The outer shell of the corridor – the exposed timber frame - contains various cameras and electronic wires. The juncture between the outside and inside is negotiated via two-way mirrors. Upon entering the mirrored corridor the participant observes a sandblasted translucent screen at the far end of the corridor. Within this glass panel is a cavity in the shape of a human head with two peepholes. The participant walks towards the screen and positions their head inside the wall cavity. When the participant looks through the peepholes they encounter stereoscopic projections of themselves from a previous position inside the corridor space of the installation. The stereoscopic images are then being replaced with another view of the participant. When viewing the projected images, the visitor becomes aware that their image was captured when they were walking along the corridor, that is in the space behind them (at the very moment when they see themselves). The photographic cameras within the device are attached to sensors and have been programmed to capture different views of the moving participant, and then to digitally split the images before sending them to screens that project the image back to the

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participant. The installation uses various software and hardware processes that are set up in relation to the configuration of another older medium, the Wheatstone stereoscope, invented in the 1830s. The Diplorasis operation, by attempting to incorporate a live digital feed of the viewer’s own body as they have just passed through the installation space, produces new ways to experience one’s self-image by synthesizing kinetoscopic and stereoscopic vision.

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AUTHORS

92 Katarina Andjelkovic, Ph.D., M.Arch.Eng., is a theorist, practicing architect, researcher, and a painter. For the Spring semester of 2021, Katarina is a main instructor of the HAND-DRAWING COURSE: THE FACE[S] OF ARCHITECTURE in New York City. She served as a Visiting Professor, Chair of Creative Architecture, at the University of Oklahoma U.S.A., the Institute of Form Theory and History in Oslo, the Institute of Urbanism and Landscape in Oslo, and the University of Belgrade - Faculty of Architecture, and guest-lectured at Master Studies of TU Delft - Faculty of architecture and the built environment, Doctoral studies of AHO - Oslo School of architecture and design and Bachelor studies of ITU - Istanbul Technical University.

64 C. Aparnaa is a final year urban design student at CEPT University, who has a keen interest in understanding how the inter-relations formed between historic, economic, political, and socio-cultural aspects result into either the physical or functional manifestation of the ‘space’ in order to turn it into a ‘place’. She also endeavors to comprehend how literature, case studies, or theoretical frameworks, act as guides to design and explores different mediums of sketching to express her understandings and inclinations.

71 Doreen Bernath is an architect and a theorist across disciplines of design, technology, philosophy, visual art, media, and cultures. Trained at Cambridge and the AA, she won an RIBA scholarship and was a finalist in 2011 for the RIBA President’s Award for Outstanding Thesis. She is currently a co-editor of RIBA’s The Journal of Architecture, a tutor in AA PhD, AA Project Cities MPhil, and AA HTS programs, a co-founder of the research collective ThisThingCalledTheory, AAVS Uncommon Walks, and a senior lecturer at Leeds School of Architecture.

78 J. English Cook is a PhD candidate at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, where she specializes in intersections between architecture, cinema, and philosophy. Cook is currently co-organizing the 2021 Architecture Film Festival London. She has also worked as a Graduate Curatorial Assistant at the Grey Art Gallery, NYU, a Curatorial Assistant in Modern and Contemporary Art at the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, and as a Commissioner’s Assistant for the U.S. Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale. She received an MA from the Institute of Fine Arts and a BA from Williams College.

University, a BEd from the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, and a MA from York University. His dissertation work will focus on pedagogy, phenomenology, and student film production during the COVID-19 pandemic.

122 Gabriel Esquivel was born and educated as an architect in Mexico City with a degree from the National University and received his master’s degree in Architecture from The Ohio State University. He worked for some years for NBBJ ending up as interior director. He previously taught Architecture and Design at the Knowlton School of Architecture and the Design Department at Ohio State University. After joining the architecture faculty at Texas A&M University, he has investigated the benefits and vehicles of a heterogeneous model that integrates both technology and architecture’s proprietary devices. Gabriel began to explore different possibilities of research through digital fabrication in partnership with the Department of Aerospace Engineering.

He has created a new advance Research fabrication Lab that deals with the concept of Robotic assisted fabrication and AI. Gabriel has been the director of the T4T Lab at Texas A&M University since 2010 where he examines the integration of digital technology to exchange architectural information and its connection to contemporary theory. He is also the director of the AI Advanced Research Lab. He was the moderator of Interface 2017, the discussion between Patrik Schumacher and Mark Gage, as well as the curator of the Deep Vista Conference in 2018 that gathered 20 contemporary thinkers, architects, philosophers, artists, and curators to talk about design agency and most recently in DigitalFutures where he moderated the talk about Agency, Borders, and Immigration.

He is a founding partner of the online magazine AGENCIA, a publication dedicated to problems about teaching, theory, and technology in Mexico.

119 Thomas Forget is an Associate Professor in the School of Architecture at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

His practice, Ciotat Studio, is based in New York City and produces videos, buildings, and installations.

38 Will Fu holds a Masters in Architecture from Princeton University and is currently a designer and research specialist for Monica Ponce de Leon with prior work experience at Johnston Marklee and BIG. His writings and drawings have recently been published in POOL, Scroope, and Pidgin, and shown at the AA and the Sao Paulo Architecture Biennale.

52 Marko Djurdjić (pronounced JOOR-JICH) is a PhD student in Cinema and Media Studies at York. He has a BA from McGill 2021 ARCHITECTURE & FILM SYMPOSIUM 139

85 Andrew Ryan Gleeson currently teaches Architecture, Design, and Urbanism at Iowa State University. He holds a B. Arch.

(2006) From Iowa State University, and an M. Arch. II (2013) from the Harvard GSD, and has worked in the offices of Helmut Jahn (JAHN) in Chicago from 2006-2011, and Foster + Partners New York from 2013-2017. His research focuses on Mies van der Rohe, historiography, and aesthetics. He has published essays in the ACSA, the CTBUH, Iowa Architect Magazine, and Architecture + Film.

106 Dave Gottwald is an award-winning visual designer, design educator, and writer with extensive experience in design for user experience and interaction, print and digital media, and within the built environment. He is currently an Assistant Professor in the Art + Design Department of the College of Art & Architecture at the University of Idaho, where he teaches interaction design (UI/UX) for mobile devices, experiential design for the built environment, graphic design, typography, digital imaging, design history, and a variety of other core classes. His research explores the theming of consumer spaces and the genealogy and taxonomy of thematic design.

11 Marianna Janowicz is a London-based architect and researcher. Her project for the main exhibition of the 2019 Oslo Triennale "Age of Forage" dealt with issues around rights to land through the communal ritual of foraging. She is part of feminist design collective, Edit, where she works on built, as well as research, projects.

Marianna is currently studying for an MA in Architectural History at The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. Her writing has been published on Open City blog and in Eyesore Magazine and she is currently working on a new piece about public toilets and social justice.

31/CO-CHAIR James F. Kerestes is an Assistant Professor of Architecture and the Director of HIVE: Design Collective, a thought leader shaping the global discourse brought about by disruptive innovations in digital technologies at Ball State University’s College of Architecture and Planning. He holds a Bachelor of Architecture degree from Syracuse University and a Post‐Professional Master of Architecture degree from Pratt Institute.

Prior to his current position at Ball State, he has taught digital media and emergent technologies at Pratt Institute, Princeton University, and the University of Pennsylvania.

His current research focuses on identifying and exploring the latent potential within tools and building typologies to instigate novel architectural design inquiries. This emphasis explores methods for engaging tools as mediums where 140

authorial exchanges lead to new opportunities in design communication, architectural storytelling, user interaction, digital fabrication, and construction.

116 Karen Lange, Professor of Architecture at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, is thesis professor and instigator of the annual thesis bookshow, an architectural installation designed collaboratively by her thesis studio, represented here by: Renata Galan Hoffman, designer, Eric Owen Moss, Los Angeles; Serena Guo, designer, Frank O Gehry, Los Angeles; Mike Jablonski, designer; Fernando Astiazaran, designer ZGF, Los Angeles.

118 Kevin Marblestone is currently a designer at Kennedy and Violich Architecture in Boston, where his work focuses on the realization of digital media tools and product design. He is a recent graduate of the Masters of Architecture program at MIT, where he was the recipient of the MIT Graduate Merit Fellowship. Kevin also holds a Bachelor of Design in Architecture degree from the University of Florida.

121 J.P. Maruszczak is an associate professor of architecture at the University of Texas at Arlington and principal with Roger Connah of heron-mazy (US/UK) design studio. Awards in architectural competitions, include: Finalist, Secret Life of Buildings International Competition, Finalist, ARCHDaily and INDEXCanada Virtual Spaces Competition, First Prize, White House Redux International Competition, Finalist, Porous City International Design Competition; Bangalore, India, Finalist, Dead Malls International Competition, L.A. Forum for Architecture and Urban Design, and the American Architecture Award, Visionary Landscapes Competition Chicago Athenaeum, (with E. M. Baum) for the built work, The Dallas Police Memorial, First Place. Films have been screened at: Lisbon Arquiteturas Festival, Lisbon, Spain, Observatory for Digital Culture, Detroit, Michigan, Dallas Video Fest, Dallas Museum of Art, Arctic Frontiers Tromso Norway, BEYOND MEDIA 09, Florence, Italy, VIS Vienna Independent Shorts, Vienna, Austria, Centro Arte Contemporanea, Luigi Pecci Prato, Italy, & Cranbrook Museum of Art. 71 Sarah Mills is an architect, Head of the Leeds School of Architecture and Head of Subject in Architecture and Landscape at Leeds Beckett University. She has co-directed the MArch studio "Cinematic Commons" with Dr. Doreen Bernath since 2013/14 and jointly founded Group Ginger.

Sarah’s research reconsiders future models of interdisciplinary practice and the relationship between architecture and film in challenging urban conditions.

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Marina Montresor graduated from the Accademia di Architettura di Mendrisio in 2017. She has worked in the offices of Christian Kerez in Zurich, Made In in Geneva, and collaborated with the architectural magazine DOMUS, in Milan. She is the editor of Defining Criteria (Quart Verlag, 2018) and in 2019 started her own studio, GRADIENT, together with Stephan Lando.

Ebrahim Poustinchi, an award-winning designer and inventor, is currently an Assistant Professor of Architecture and the founder/director of the Robotically Augmented Design (RAD) Lab at Kent State University and the founding principle of STUDIO EP. Poustinchi’s research is focused on the intersection of media and robotics, with an emphasis on an alternative reading of “post-digital” discourse through platforms, UI/UX, Human-Machine Interaction (HMI), physical computation, and tangible interfaces. Ebrahim has widely lectured, taught workshops, and exhibited his work nationally and internationally. His work has been disseminated worldwide in various Journals, conferences, galleries, and museums including the International Journal of Architectural Computing (IJAC), Journal of Engineering Technology (JET), ACADIA, CAADRIA, eCAADe, SIGraDi, ASCA, and over 20 Museums and galleries in Russia, Slovakia, UAE, New York, Michigan, California, and Iran. Poustinchi has completed his post-professional degree in architecture under Greg Lynn at UCLA and holds a bachelor of architecture from the University of Tehran, Iran.

Aside of her own practice, she is involved in teaching at the ETH Zurich within the Chair of Architectural Design Charbonnet-Heiz, while also working on her PhD. In her work and research, she attempts to explore, through different mediums and disciplines, the possibilities – within the contemporary world – of architecture and craft, regarded as fragments of the realm of Art. 18 Roohid Novinrooz is an architect and design researcher. As a former Bauhaus graduate, his key research interests are phenomenology of space, anthropology of architecture, and human-centered design. Beyond architecture and research, he has practiced design and innovation in the fields of service design and user experience. Currently working as a workplace strategist in MMoser, Roohid is providing consulting and strategic planning services for workplace design across the APAC region. Today he is helping companies rethink their office space and workstyles to embrace the post-pandemic norm, and create a workplace of the future tailored to their behaviors and needs.

64 Sparsh Patlan is a final year urban design student at CEPT University, who is trying to understand growing urbanism in coherence with human behavior and environment. She is a conscientious person who has a constant urge to challenge the monotony of the “let it be as it is” attitude and strives towards making a difference even at the most initial level.

115 Eva Perez de Vega is an architect, designer, and educator. She is a founding partner at e+i studio based in NYC, approaching architecture as an interdisciplinary practice that emerges from the exploration of the performance of matter and bodies in space.

59 Elena Rocchi is a Clinical Assistant Professor at ASU and recently appointed Affiliate Faculty of the Sidney Poitier New American Film School. She is a PhD candidate in Design, Environment, and the Arts PhD program at ASU. She was Senior Architect and Office Director of Miralles Tagliabue Associated Architects in Barcelona from 1995 until 2008. She was recently awarded The 2020 AIA Arizona Educator of the Year Award.

99 Patrick Till first became interested in architecture when he took an undergraduate class at Brown University which he thought was about film, but was instead about buildings in film. Since then, he has been inspired by the way architecture frames human narratives and how film reveals the complex interactions between us and buildings in the urban environment. Patrick recently completed his Master’s in Architecture at the University of Texas at Austin. He now lives and works as an architectural designer in Philadelphia where he continues to read and write about the intersection of narrative, architecture, and the city.

She studied architecture at the University of Madrid (ETSAM) specializing in Building Structures and has a Masters in Philosophy from the New School For Social Research, where she is currently in the PhD program in Philosophy.

She is professor of architecture at Pratt School of Architecture and Parsons where she teaches studios engaged in a multispecies approach and a reframing of architecture from within our climate crisis condition.

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CO-CHAIR Vahid Vahdat is an Assistant Professor at the School of Design and Construction at Washington State University. His primary field of research is the global circulation of modern architecture, with an emphasis on medial agency. He is the author of “Travels in Farangi Space.” Dr. Vahdat has held academic positions in the US and abroad, including at the University of Houston and Texas A&M University. His teaching primarily involves explorations in architectural media, including virtual interiorities and filmic expressions of space.

122 Gonzalo Vaillo is a registered architect in Spain and practicing in Austria. He graduated with Honors at the ETSAG Universidad de Alcala, Spain (2010), studied at the University of Innsbruck (AT) and post-graduated with Distinctions at the University of Applied Arts Vienna in 2014, where he also taught as Teaching Assistant in the Postgraduate Program Excessive. Since 2016, he has been a faculty member at the University of Innsbruck, formerly at the Institute of Urban Design IOUD, currently as a University Assistant at the Institute for Experimental Architecture Hochbau and in Spring 2020 He was a visiting Adjunt Professor of Architecture at Texas A&M University. Parallel to his academic work, Gonzalo has extensive experience in international projects at different scales throughout all their design phases. He was Design Director at Wolfgang Tschapeller ZT GmbH (2010-2018) prior to founding MORPHtopia in 2017.

118 Emily Whitbeck is currently a designer at Anmahian [an-MAHhee-un] Winton Architects in Boston, where she has worked on a variety of institutional and residential projects. She is a recent graduate of the Masters of Architecture program at MIT, where she was the recipient of the MIT Graduate Merit Fellowship. In 2018, Emily received MIT’s Marjorie Pierce Fellowship Award for women in architecture. Emily also holds a Bachelor of Design in Architecture degree from the University of Florida.

115 Farzam Yazdanseta, AIA, NCARB, is the Assistant Chairperson of Undergraduate Architecture at Pratt Institute. He has held academic positions at Pratt Institute, Rhode Island School of Design, City College of New York, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute of Technology, and University of Maryland, teaching design, animation and representation courses. Farzam has graduate degrees in architecture from Columbia University and University of Maryland. His work experience includes working at the offices of Eisenman Architects, Reiser Umemoto, Perkins Eastman, and Handel Architects in New York City. He is the founder of FYA: Farzam Yazdanseta Architecture PLLC based in Brooklyn.

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