Proceedings | 2019 Architecture & Film Symposium

PROCEEDINGS

Editors Vahid Vahdat Gregory Marinic

Editors Vahid Vahdat, Washington State University Gregory Marinic, University of Cincinnati Associate Editor Shermeen Yousif, Florida Atlantic University Graphic Design

Cayla Turner

Š2019 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 2019 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 other profit-making purpose.

www.architectureandfilm.org

Review Board Submissions to the 2019 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

Pablo Meninato Temple University

Graeme Brooker Royal College of Art

Marian Macken The University of Auckland

Lorella DiCintio Ryerson University

Michael A. McClure University of Louisiana at Lafayette

Sarah Edwards RMIT University

Kevin Moore Auburn University

Ursula Emery McClure Louisiana State University

Diana Nicholas Drexel University

Nerea Feliz Arrizabalaga University of Texas at Austin

Deborah Schneiderman Pratt Institute

Farzaneh Haghaghi The University of Auckland

Brent Sturlaugson University of Kentucky

Harriet Harriss Royal College of Art

Olivier Vallerand Arizona State University

Susan Hedges Auckland University of Technology

Kevin Walker Royal College of Art

Maki Iisaka Texas A&M University

Yandi Andri Yatmo Universitas Indonesia

Acknowledgements The 2019 Architecture & Film Symosium was made possible by the generous support of the Glasscock Center for the Humanities Research Co-Sponsorship Grant, as well as grant funding from the Texas A&M University College of Architecture and the Department of Architecture. The co-chairs acknowledge the notable efforts of several collaborators including Dean Jorge Vanegas, Robert Warden, Dawn Jordan, Melinda Randle, Kevin Gustavus, and the Texas A&M University AIAS chapter.

The co-chairs thank session topic moderators Stephen Caffey, Thomas K. Davis, Udo Greinacher, Daniel Humphrey, Maryam Mansoori, Andrew Tripp, and Shermeen Yousif for their service to the symposium. Texas A&M students Cayla Turner, Emily Majors, and Nessrine Mansour offered generous assistance with graphic design, production, and event coordination.

CONTENTS CONTENTS

7 of Performance Preface Vahid Vahdat Gregory Marinic

78 Blending Realms Architecture’s Role in Utopia/Dystopia Film Michael J. Crosbie, Theodore Sawruk

PAPERS

MOVING IMAGES

9 Two Images of the City Modern Paris and its Filmic Representation Jean Jaminet

87 Project XYZ Erin Cuevas

17 The Ancient Roman Domus A Forum for Commodification of Space and Sexuality Helen Turner 24 Filmic Topographies Landscape as the Site of Character and Narrative Transformation: The Case of Central Park, as Told by Three Films Sadra Tehrani 30 The Cinematic Spaces of the Horizontal Metropolis The Image of Flemish suburbia Annelies Staessen 37 …and Out Come the Truths Premonition and Space in Jacques Tourneur’s ‘Cat People’ Marko Djurdjic 44 The Thickened Line Constructing exploratory sketches and mobile sections Rebekah Radtke, Gregory A. Luhan 53 Post-production of a Horizon A Collage Sequence for the Resor House Elena Rocchi 60 Architecture of a Film Matter in Reverse Maria João Soares, Susana Tavares dos Santos, João Miguel Couto Duarte 68 Back in Time A Journey Through Built Environments, and Back to the Future Mayet Andreassen 72 Inside-Out Reverse Engineering the Folded Interiority of Hugo’s Mechanical Urbanism Vahid Vahdat

88 Performing Casa Malaparte Popi Iacovou 89 Hops, Skips, and Jumps along MiLines Terah Maher, et al.

90 Animating Architecture Joseph Altshuler, et al.

91 Off the Map Thomas Forget 92 Trax Charlott Greub, Elliott Klinger, Camille Ide, Kristin Clarksean 93 Dancing in Hell Yaoyi Fan, Zixy Zhan 94 Spatial Design and the iPhone Utilizing Students’ Cognizance of an Everyday Technology to Investigate Design Space Sheryl Kasak

96 Author Index

PREFACE PREFACE

of performance Film is a dynamic representational medium offering the ability to collapse time and compose visual narratives frame-by-frame. Like cinematography, architecture engages spaces within the view frame as well as the ambient effects of spaces beyond. In both practices, time may be translated into measures of movement and occupancies of space. Apart from architecture informing scenography and cities serving as backdrops for moving images, film discourses have actively participated in shaping and critiquing urbanism, architecture, and interiors. And while architecture and design may not necessarily be central themes in a film, their latent influences inform cinematic processes of thinking and making.

In his book, The Architecture of Image: Existential Space in Cinema, Juhani Pallasmaa explored the shared experiential territory of architecture and cinema through existential space. Building upon the analogous relationship between cinematic processes and built form, the 2019 Architecture & Film Symposium, Of performance, explored ideas that intersect at the development of concept, context, and making in the overlapping domains film and architecture. Hosted by the Texas A&M University College of Architecture, the symposium adopted cinematic representations of the built environment as a cultural lens for interdisciplinary theoretical debate. It exploits the filmic capacity to produce virtual spatial experiences as a form of design experimentation. By focusing on actions of joining form and space with materiality, Of performance investigated shared conditions at the scale of buildings, interior spaces, and the city.

Of performance 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. The symposium invites interdisciplinary research and collaborations that include, but are not limited to architecture, cinematography, scenography, spatial design, interior architecture, interior design, landscape architecture, urban design, adaptive reuse, preservation, industrial design, graphic design, fashion design, media studies, the humanities, and the performing arts.

PAPERS PAPERS

Two Images of the City: Modern Paris and its Filmic Representation

JEAN JAMINET Kent State University

“For already by then—and particularly in Paris—the ideal of a conglomerate of independent parts has again become replaced by the far more ‘total’ vision of absolute continuity.”

Colin Rowe

“A building, a compound site, or an entire urban matrix … [can] be defined now not by how it appears, but rather by practice: those it partakes of and those that take place within it” Sanford Kwinter

Paris’s history of radical urban transformation can be alternatively framed by a paradigmatic shift that occurred within the discipline of film. This paper presents a historical and theoretical crosscut study that considers the developments in urbanization that occurred in Paris before and after World War II. These developments, specifically in relation to Paris’s unique center-periphery condition, parallel the theoretical implications of the pre-war and post-war cinematographic image. This alternative understanding of Paris’s urbanization is examined in relation to two films: Pierre Chenal’s L’architecture d’aujourd’hui (1930) and Jaques Tati’s Playtime (1967). Two distinct images of the modern city and its architecture emerge that are illustrated and analyzed in terms of Colin Rowe’s notions of literal and phenomenal transparency and Gilles Deleuze’s insights into narrative and non-narrative cinema.

The framing and centering of the subject in Chenal’s montage sequence and Tati’s sequence shot are analogous to their respective images of the city. The Jean Jaminet

phenomenal transparency of the montage sequence characterizes the fragmentation between the city and its suburbs, reflecting the inability of pre-war utopian strategies to reclaim control over the urban environment and the complex movement patterns of its subject. Conversely, sensory techniques utilized in the sequence shot simulate literal transparency, creating a complex notion of urban interconnectivity that can only be offered by the post-war modern city.

The intention of this inquiry, much like film editing or architectural drawing, is to provide a crosscut or cross section that creates parallels and diversions to present alternative associations between the developments in urbanization and the effects of modernism on the city.

Paris’s urbanization throughout history has focused on modernizing the city center and regulating the growth of its surrounding suburbs. Not until near the end of the nineteenth century, at the outset of the industrial revolution, did Paris begin to occupy its suburbs. During the 1950s, urban planning strategies changed as attention moved away from the center to the suburbs. Many strategies tried to delineate the center’s boundaries and its periphery; however, the lack of definition between the two characterizes Paris’s modern urban condition. Paris’s modernization can also be outlined within another context because a similar paradigmatic shift occurred in cinematography at this time. Examining L’architecture d’aujourd’hui (Pierre Chenal, 1930)1 and Playtime (Jacques Tati, 1967)2 reveal the changing states of modern Paris and its filmic representation.

MODERN SPACE AND FILMIC REPRESENTATION During the early twentieth century, a unique relationship formed between space and its representation, specifically between modern space and the role of film as a device for 2019 ARCHITECTURE & FILM SYMPOSIUM

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representation. Filmmakers began to separate film from its traditional space representor role and develop their own notions of perception, while modern architects tried to emancipate space from its three-dimensionality.

Modern space and film can both be defined by the notion of transparency offered by Colin Rowe: “Transparency … implies more than an optical characteristic, it implies a broader spatial order. Transparency means a simultaneous perception of dif ferent spatial locations.” 3 Rowe, fur thermore, differentiates between literal and phenomenal transparency, respectively: “Transparency may be an inherent quality of substance … or it may be an inherent quality of organization.”4 Rowe’s phenomenal transparency definition aligns the ideas of collage and montage in modern architecture and film.

Architecturally, phenomenal transparency is created through the striation or layering of space by a series of vertically disposed material planes that “interpenetrate without optical destruction of each other.” 5 A complexity forms by the interpenetration of overlapping layers of space that are never fully visible yet never fully hidden. Le Corbusier elaborates, “It is while walking, moving from one place to another, that one sees how the arrangements of the architecture develop.”6 The concept of phenomenal transparency lends itself to the architectural promenade—the observer’s pathway through the built space. The architectural promenade depends on a complex layering of space that simultaneously interconnects to a viewpoint in motion.

Figure 1: Montage sequence showing the perspectival centering of the viewing-subject. L’architecture d’aujourd’hui (Pierre Chenal, 1930).

In L’architecture d’aujourd’hui, this phenomenal transparency is evident when a woman ascends the ramp at Corbusier’s Villa Savoye (fig. 1). Immediately understood is the notion of an observer moving through the house’s layered spaces. This cannot be a direct representation of the space, because the camera’s presence cannot be denied. The mobile female is not only observer, but observed—a viewing-subject. Gilles 10

Deleuze calls this a sensory-motor situation;7 the observer is always framed by the camera, and the camera’s movement is motivated by the observer’s movement. The effect is amplified by the use of montage, which allows the framing and layering of different camera viewpoints. In other words, the whole space is implied rather than shown, and time can be manipulated. According to Deleuze, “The evolution of the cinema, the conquest of its own essence or novelty, was to take place through montage, the mobile camera and the emancipation of the view point.”8 The montage sequence creates the illusion that “the chronology of time and the relation of spaces remain untouched.”9 However, this illusion of natural perception establishes and exaggerates the effects of phenomenal transparency.

Although in motion, the position of the viewing-subject remains relatively stationary or central in respect to the frame. What changes is the camera’s viewpoint through montage. The mobility of the viewpoint is paramount to the literal movement of the viewing-subject. The viewingsubject does not move through space so much as she creates a reference point between the fluctuations of changing viewpoints. However, the montage not only reconnects the mobile viewpoint of the camera by the perspectival centering of the viewing-subject, it simultaneously creates an intermediate or virtual image. The mobility of the viewpoint and the intermediate image it creates are perceived—what Deleuze calls a movement-image: “In the cinema, however, [the illusion of natural perception] is corrected at the same time as the image appears for a spectator without conditions … cinema does not give us an image to which movement is added, it immediately gives us a movement-image.”10 What becomes evident is that the shot enters into a temporal condition rather than a spatial one.11 This effect is clearly visible in Chenal’s film by the “slightly stretched promenade architecturale on the ramp of the Villa Savoye.”12 The position of the viewing-subject is fixed in the camera’s frame.

What changes is time. Through montage and the changing viewpoint, time can be manipulated—condensed, extended, collapsed, separated, chronological, or out of order. Were this primarily a spatial shot, time would remain constant.

The following conclusions can be made. First, modern space relies on the movement of a viewpoint, whereas film can change viewpoints through montage. One is a literal movement of a single viewpoint added to space; the other is an implied mobility between images with different viewpoints. Second, phenomenal transparency of modern space attempts to create the illusion of a changing viewpoint (an artificial perception) by the fluctuation of overlapping layers of space, whereas phenomenal transparency in film is defined by a fluctuation of viewpoints hidden within an illusion of natural perception. Finally, modern space attempts to free itself of its three-dimensionality by approaching a Two Images of the City: Moder Paris and its Filmic Representation

space of representation; in contrast, film has transcended its traditional role of representation by creating a new idea of perception within the dimension of time.

L’ARCHITECTURE D’AUJOURD’HUI AND THE CITY OF TO-MORROW L’architecture d’aujourd’hui is one of several films that were used as “instrument[s] for internationalist propaganda … concerned with the issue of housing.”13 Chenal’s film delivers a simple message: The city could accommodate modernization’s effects by bringing its suburbs’ pleasures (light, clean air, open space) into its center. Several montages in the film offer a symbolic fragmentation of urban and suburban conditions.

Paris’s center is represented as a series of dense, dark, and closed spaces scattered in pieces throughout the film. In one montage, the city center is distantly framed through an opening in a freestanding wall on the roof garden of the Villa Stein. In another, shots of the city center intersperse with shots of modern suburban houses and their spaces (fig. 2).

Circulation in the center of Paris is represented by narrow, dimly lit corridors incapable of sustaining movement. In contrast, abundant light and open space in the suburbs allows free movement of vehicles and pedestrians.

Beyond such symbolism, the film uniquely identifies the fragmentation of its urban and suburban conditions in parallel with the montage process, which is fragmentary by nature.

Figure 2: Montage sequence disclosing the fragmentation of the centerperiphery condition. L’architecture d’aujourd’hui (Pierre Chenal, 1930).

For example, the automobile’s relation to the camera frame is similar to the previously mentioned woman’s ascent of the ramp. A correlation can be made between the woman’s movement through the house’s spaces and the motorcar’s movement through the Parisian suburbs. In the previous example, the montage fluctuates between varying camera viewpoints, and the woman (viewing-subject) becomes Jean Jaminet

an organizational element within the frame. Similarly, the motorcar penetrates different layers of urban and suburban space while remaining central within the camera’s frame.

Chenal proposes that the fragmented urban and suburban condition can be reconnected through an organization based on modern technology.

In the film’s final montage, Corbusier presents his Voisin Plan for Paris. The Voisin Plan was a bold attempt to supplant the dense urban center, inserting a new organization based on a modular grid system. Provisions to accommodate a growing population, changing technology, and urban expansion— horizontal density displaced in vertical typologies, open space, and a “programme for dealing with traffic”14—would occupy the ground plane. As Corbusier notes, “The plan makes a frontal attack on the most diseased quarters of the city, and the narrowest street … Its aim is rather to open up in the strategic heart of Paris a splendid system of communication.”15 The plan contained three building typologies: the skyscraper for business and commercial programs and two types of residential blocks. Moreover, broad thoroughfares would be organized on the grid system and stratified in levels above- and belowground, separating different speeds, patterns, and programs of traffic. The city’s residential, commercial, and industrial programs would also have separate locations on the grid—each with their own typology—allowing open space to inhabit the city center.

Corbusier ’s bold plan depicted by Chenal’s montage sequences were powerful instruments that presented an alternative to urbanization, liberating the city from density and congestion. However, these measures could only reproduce a fragmentation that already existed within the urban condition. The new building typologies and separate programs of the Voisin Plan lacked an interpenetration of overlapping layers of spaces and activities vital to city life. The continual activation of space by the presence of its inhabitants that emphatically characterized Corbusier’s modern architecture and its filmic representation was never adapted by Paris.

PARIS AFTER THE SECOND WORLD WAR Although Paris was left largely undamaged by World War II, congestion, overpopulation, under-equipped suburbs, and an inability to accommodate traffic, disease, and drought attributed to the city’s rapid deterioration.16 Two major problems were housing and traffic. Although the city re-instigated the slum clearance projects initiated before the war, they were slowed by a lack of affordable housing and new housing construction. The typical house in Paris was older, smaller, and less equipped than houses in other provincial cities. New housing was similarly under-equipped, constructed badly, and too expensive.17 The automobile’s increasing assimilation added to these 2019 ARCHITECTURE & FILM SYMPOSIUM

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Figure 3: Historical monuments in the urban node only exist as momentary

with the facilities to sustain themselves.

reflections in the swinging glass doors. Playtime (Jacques Tati, 1967).

problems. Traffic and parking congestion reached an alltime high. As Couperie notes, “The sidewalks were overrun, the streets permanently choked, cleaning operations paralyzed, public transport, fire engines, ambulances, delivery trucks, and police vehicles obstructed by the permanent congestion.”18 Drastic measures were taken in the late 1950s.

Unlike American cities, Paris had already occupied its suburbs before the war. Further decentralization was impossible.

Instead, the city established a plan that made “broad projections … to avoid a radiating concentric development.”19 The city’s post-war organization superimposed an irregular grid of axes that traversed the city’s center and projected far into the outskirts. New urban nodes were constructed along them that could sustain their own cultural and economic life.

To support these nodes, other major infrastructural projects were undertaken: The Metro was extended, the Boulevard Périphérique was constructed as a continuous loop of traffic infrastructure around the entire city, riverbanks became thoroughfares, central markets moved into the suburbs, all utility systems were revised, underground garages were built, the city was scrubbed clean, railroad stations were modernized, and new university facilities were built. 20 The city no longer had to rely on its center for its sustainability.

New nodes were inserted into the urban fabric and equipped 12

PLAYTIME AND THE TIME-IMAGE Before World War II, film was dominated by the movementi ma ge. T h e m o ve m e nt- i ma ge d e f i n e d a s p a c e o f predetermined action through sensory-motor linkages wherein time was subordinate to movement.21 However, after World War II, a new image appeared and transcended the movement-image. As Deleuze points out, “The movementimage has not disappeared, but now exists only as the first dimension of an image that never stops growing in dimensions.”22 Deleuze refers to this new image as the time-image and attributes its invention to three reversals of the previous paradigm. First, “the image had to free itself from its sensory-motor link[age]s.”23 Motivated actions needed to be replaced or obscured by other non-motivated optical and sound elements. This new cinema records rather than reacts, and movement becomes subordinate to time. Second, by removing the importance of the sensory-motor linkages, the image could be reinterpreted through the relationship between its visual and sound elements. These sights and sounds are no longer subject to the rules of a response or an action. Third, the image had to redefine the viewpoint.

Fixed or mobile, the camera would become endowed with its own consciousness, “which would no longer be defined by the movements it is able to follow or make, but the Two Images of the City: Moder Paris and its Filmic Representation

mental connections it is able to enter into.”24 In other words, the indiscernibility between the cinematographic object and subject allowed for the framing of a new image. The identification of this shift in filmic representation manifests itself in the shift between pre-war notions of the modern city and post-war realities, as a comparison between L’architecture d’aujourd’hui and Playtime demonstrates.

A major theme that emerges in both films is the city’s unstable center-periphery condition. As noted before, Chenal fragments this condition through montage and eventually makes an attempt at reconnection. In contrast, the setting for Playtime is a fictional urban node in post-war Paris.

Skyscrapers line the streets, displacing horizontal density vertically and freeing the ground for pedestrian and vehicular movement. The historical center in Tati’s city only exists as a reflection—swinging glass doors in three sequences frame the reflection of different historical monuments, but a pivoting glass window in a related sequence is vacant of any historical iconography (fig. 3). Playtime exists exclusively within this urban node, emphasizing the node’s self-sustainability over the obsolescence of Paris’s center. Beyond such symbolism, in contrast to Chenal, Tati’s techniques prescribe to a literal transparency that allows the representation of a voided center and unstable perimeter. Tati creates a complex notion of urban interconnectivity that can only be offered by the post-war modern city.

Ta t i ’s a m b i v a l e n c e t o w a r d t h e u r b a n c e n t e r peripher y condition is translated architecturally and cinematographically. The uniformity and aesthetics of Tati’s modern spaces and the lack of an identifiable spatial typology weaken the relationship between the frame and its subject.

In the film’s opening sequence, the open floor plan lacks any obstruction that might define space or contain action within the frame. Correspondingly, the characters are equally indifferent as they move seamlessly in and out of view. Only at the end of the sequence, as an airplane inconspicuously glides into the background, does Tati disclose the spatial typology.

Spatial ambiguity, a major theme throughout the film, can be attributed to Tati’s abundant use of glass. The glass creates a certain amount of confusion for comic relief; however, the literal transparency of the glass also creates an ambiguous edge condition. By Colin Rowe’s definition, “the transparent ceases to be that which is perfectly clear and becomes, instead, that which is clearly ambiguous.”25 In Playtime, activity is always pushed to and through this transparent edge condition, as evidenced whenever Hulot looks for Mr. Giffard.

The reflectivity of the glass curtain wall confuses their spatial locations.

Similarly, the camera frame also prescribes to a literal transparency. Unlike Chenal, Tati does not use montages.

Jean Jaminet

Instead, sequence shots allow the camera to remain impartial and usually stationary. The perspectival centering of the viewing-subject becomes obsolete; instead, the emergence and disappearance of activities at the frame’s edge become more significant. The notion of a viewing-subject gives way to the notion of a passing-viewer. Whereas Chenal is concerned with the movement and motivations of the viewing-subject within the frame, Tati, through the sequence shot, illustrates the absence of a relationship between the frame and the passing-viewer. The relatively stationary frame represents an objective camera. In turn, the passing-viewer maintains a

Figure 4: Banal activities pushed to the transparent edge; choreographed movements entertain passing-viewers. Playtime (Jacques Tati, 1967).

subjective viewpoint. The phenomenon of the passing-viewer comes about when the frame has been subjectively emptied at the same time as the character has been objectively emptied—represented symbolically by the Hulot character’s dissolution. As Hulot searches for Mr. Giffard in a sequence shot of office spaces, the camera forbids a connection of space because it can only be justified by the subjective viewpoint of a character that is only held momentarily.

Simultaneously, the character searches for a lost objectivity that can only be supplied by a camera no longer concerned.

The uniformity of space and Hulot’s dissolution superficially offer comic relief. However, the indiscernibility between the camera’s objectivity and the character’s subjectivity instills the phenomenon of the passing-viewer.

This transplantation of the passing-viewer signifies a break in traditional narrative structure. The camera no longer follows a character through a space of predetermined activities. Tati replaces these sensory-motor situations with a catalogue of visual and particular sound elements. For example, the camera frames a man moving through a corridor from the background to the foreground. His shoes make an obvious clicking sound against the floor’s surface. The sound is an effect added to the soundtrack, and it is much louder than might be expected. As the man reaches the foreground, the 2019 ARCHITECTURE & FILM SYMPOSIUM

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sound is blatant. The obviousness of this element becomes more relevant to the image than to the action itself; indeed, the action is subordinate to it. In other sequences, sound elements are disconnected from action by their obvious lack of synchronicity. Often, sound elements that might be expected are absent, particularly sound from automobiles, which, based on the relative traffic congestion depicted, might be expected. However, the street is surprisingly quiet.

Traffic sounds added to the sequence are muted, seemingly originating from outside the frame. Similarly, a red lamplight, a television’s blue light, and a display case’s green light are distinguished as apparent visual elements, not only because they act in opposition to an abundance of gray tones but also because they cannot be lost in or confused by the characters’ sensory-motor linkages.

The notion of an absent center and ambiguous edge is further expressed in Tati’s facade sequence. The facade is composed of a large picture-window grid that displays the discrete functions of dwelling. Typically private and closed to the outside observer, the dwelling activities (dressing-undressing, entertaining visitors, watching television) are nonetheless pushed to the transparent edge condition of the building in relation to the street. Passing-viewers on the street, however, rather than embracing such voyeuristic opportunities, browse only as though passing a department store window.

Conversely, passing-viewers are completely fascinated by the installation of a glass window panel (fig. 4). The installers’ movement is a choreographed dance for the entertainment of passing-viewers. Thus, although both public and private activities are on display, their roles are reversed in their ability to provoke interest. Benjamin’s urban types (the flâneur, the gawker, and the detective), once an integral part of the city and the cinema,26 have no place in this modern metropolis.

A direct relationship exists between the camera’s frame and the framed space. As noted earlier, the frame and the space have similar center-edge conditions, as well as the ability to be permeated by disassociated actions. Although a disconnection exists between the two in terms of the camera’s objectivity and the characters’ subjectivity, they are unquestionably linked by their relationship to time. In a movement-image, the temporal frame conditions and corresponding space are separated. Time is dislocated and therefore becomes a variable subject to change. In Playtime, the camera frame and the framed space share the same temporal condition. Playtime participates in Deleuze’s notion of the time-image—a succession of changing states and a collection of sights and sounds that conjure a complex array of mental connections.27 Time is the constant, and movement is the subordinate variable that can be added or subtracted.

Unlike the movement-image, time does not change; rather, things change in time.

Spatial uniformity, an unstable center-edge condition, 14

Figure 5: A struggle at the entrance renders the transparent edge present.

Playtime (Jacques Tati, 1967).

the emphasis on the ordinary, the presence of a passingviewer, and the detection of disassociated optical and sound elements all subordinate action to the frequency in which it occurs. Playtime suggests an empty space that can be filled by a varying frequency of disassociated actions and then emptied again. Though apparent throughout the film, it is exaggerated during the restaurant sequence. The restaurant’s space slowly fills with patrons coming for dinner. A struggle at the entrance between the Hulot character and the maître d’ causes the glass door to shatter (fig. 5). Again, Tati plays with the notion of a transparent edge and its effectiveness.

Though the intact door seems a formidable barrier (it is not), its shattering permits an inflow of passing-viewers from the street to transgress this boundary, saturating the space to the point of super-occupancy. The literal transparency of the boundary sponsors a phenomenal transparency of overlap and fluctuation of activities, or event space. Event space is never defined by predetermined activity or an extreme situation, but rather can be activated by the overlap and frequency of everyday or banal activities. As Deleuze notes, “In fact, the most banal or everyday situations release accumulated ‘dead forces’ equal to the life forces of limit-situation.”28 This holds true for every sequence in the film. Tati’s event space is neither specifically extreme nor banal, but rather marks the continual passage from one to the other. It offers deliberately weak connections of space, frame, and character.

Their indistinctiveness or ambiguity threatens their very cohesion, yet simultaneously always protects them. Each may be emptied of its context and filled with another, not as a means to an end but as a continual adaptability.

CROSSCUT: THE ARCHITECTURAL FIELD AND THE REPRESENTATION OF SPACE AND TIME One of the enduring ef fects of the modern legacy is architecture’s desire to participate in larger networks and Two Images of the City: Moder Paris and its Filmic Representation

urban context. “The desire for relevance and participation in current events has de-emphasized the architectural object and emphasized the application of architectural intelligence to a wider field of operations.”29 This field attempts to simplify architecture under the umbrella of a single idea or understand architecture as a summation of its external relations. In these terms, both Rowe and Deleuze and by extension the films of Chenal and Tati respectively prescribe to the architectural field as a continual space of communication.

The phenomenal transparency of Chenal’s montage sequence is consistent with Rowe’s understanding of the city as scaffold for exhibition demonstration. This metaphor establishes a dialectical relationship between the “fabric of the museum and its contents, a commerce in which both components retain an identity enriched by intercourse, in which their respective roles are continuously transposed, in which the focus of illusion is in constant fluctuation with the axis of reality.”30 Artifacts (scaffold) and events (exhibits) are entangled in continual process of disclosure and deception.

This same complex defines Chenal’s montage sequence of fluctuating viewpoints hidden within an illusion of natural perception. The result of which is a series of adversarial relationships in Paris between center and periphery, darkness and light, compression and expansion, stagnation and activation, open and closed, etc. These conflicts are not solely intended to describe the fragmentation of Paris’s urban and suburban condition; they are the very definition of the city.

In the struggle for dominance between scaf fold and exhibits, Rowe observes, “modern architecture resolved its understanding of these questions in favour of an allpervasive scaffold which largely exhibited itself, a scaffold which pre-empted and controlled any incidentals. This being the case, one also knows, or can imagine, the opposite condition in which the exhibits take over, even to the degree of the scaffold being driven underground or wished away (Disney World, the American romantic suburb, etc.).” 31 The first condition indicts the prescriptive application of pre-war utopian notions of the modern city. The second condition unavoidably overlaps with Tati’s critique of modern architecture and post-war urban realities. Tati’s spatial uniformity and typological ambiguity as well as an impartial and usually stationary camera suggest the disappearance of architecture and the prevalence of the event. The fictional urban node in Playtime is a transparent scaffold onto which the events of the city unfold. Like the romanticized suburb and the amusement park, Tati’s city is sanitized and the attractions are situated to manage the flows and stimulate the sense of its visitors.

Tati’s film participates in the literal transparency of the sequence shot and aligns with Deleuze’s notion of the fold, which interprets the world “as a body of infinite folds and surfaces that twist and weave through compressed time Jean Jaminet

and space.”32 The fold implies that individual things do not exist; instead, everything is part of the same warped surface differentiated in degree only, not kind. In this model, the city is the embodiment of a continual space of communication, in which the built world is transformed into a virtual environment of flows, networks, and processes.

Rowe and Deleuze, having similar inclinations toward the architectural field as a continual space of communication, ultimately formulate dissimilar images of the city. This disparity can be attributed to their selected modes of communication—if Rowe’s metaphor of city as museum is dialectical in nature, then Deleuze’s notion of the fold is characteristically parametric. 33 More relevant to this discussion, however, are their divergent dispositions towards the concepts of time.

The paradigmatic shift that occurred within the discipline of film during the early twentieth century, according to Deleuze, can be attributed to a fundamental change in modes of perception. Before World War II, film was dominated by the movement-image, which defined a space of predetermined action wherein time was subordinate to movement. 34 However, after World War II, the time-image appeared which permitted motivated actions to remain independent from an impartial camera wherein movement becomes subordinate to time. As Deleuze indicates, “The movement-image has not disappeared, but now exists only as the first dimension of an image that never stops growing in dimensions.”35 For Rowe, however, the notion of time that is associated with montage and collage (movement-image) is the more active and didactic instrument. Furthermore, Rowe implies when time remains constant (time-image), space becomes static and prescriptive. “[T]hough sequence and chronology are recognized for the facts which they are, time, deprived of some of its linear imperative, is allowed to rearrange itself according to experiential schemata … the cooler and more comprehensive nature of the second argument might still excite attention. The second argument might include the first but the reverse can never be true.”36 The first argument implies changelessness (time-image) that Rowe associates with the dogmatic arguments of tradition and utopia. The second argument implies a more desirable mutability (movement-image) wherein the dialectical relationship between tradition and utopia are self-restoring and continually productive.

The intention of this inquiry, much like film editing or architectural drawing, is to provide a crosscut or cross section that creates parallels and diversions between the developments in urbanization and the effects of modernism on the city. As with any montage sequence or architectural section, they reveal and conceal simultaneously, they are only fragments of the whole, yet create the illusion of totality.

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The crosscut provides historical narration and analysis of Paris and modern architecture and further investigates the implication of cinematographic representation of the city and its effects on spatial-temporal perception. The crosscut is an overarching metaphor as well as a complex field of ideas that unfold and intersect unexpectedly. This historical and theoretical crosscut study is not simply representational notation, but rather a conceptual apparatus that proposes alternative narratives and association, expressing the desire to invent the city.

ENDNOTES

17. Pierre Couperie, Paris Through the Ages, XVIII, c.

18. Ibid, XVIII, d.

19. Ibid, XVIII, e.

20. Ibid, XVIII, f.

21. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, 5.

22. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, 22.

23. Ibid, 23.

24. Ibid, 23.

25. Colin Rowe, Mathematics of the Ideal Villa, 161.

1. Pierre Chenal, L’architecture d’aujourd’hui (The Journal Architecture d’aujourd’hui, 1930), Film.

26. Tom Gunning, “From the Kaleidoscope to the X-Ray: Urban Spectatorship, Poe, Benjamin, and Traffic in Souls,” Wide Angle 19, no. 4 (1913): 26.

2. Jacques Tati, Playtime (Janus Films, 1967), Film.

27. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, 23.

3. Colin Rowe, The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa and Other Essays (Cambridge: MIT, 1976), 161.

28. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, 7.

4. Colin Rowe, Mathematics of the Ideal Villa, 161.

5. Ibid, 168.

6. Roger Connah, How Architecture Got its Hump (Cambridge: MIT, 2001), 3.

7. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 3.

8. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 3.

9. Andres Janser, “Only Film Can Make the New Architecture Intelligible: Hans Richter’s Die Neue Wohnung and the Early Documentary Film on Modern Architecture,” Cinema & Architecture Méliès, Mallet-Stevens, Multimedia, ed. Penz François and Maureen Thomas (British Film Institute, 1997): 43.

10. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, 2.

29. David Ruy, “Returning to Strange Objects,” Tarp Architectural Manual (Spring 2012): 38.

30. Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter, Collage City (Cambridge: MIT, 1984), 136-7.

31. Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter, Collage City, 136.

32. See book jacket notes. Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).

33. Refer to Patrik Schumacher, “Parametricism: A new Global Style for Architecture and Urban Design.” Architectural Design 79, no. 4 (July/ August 2009): 14-23.

34. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, 5.

35. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, 22.

36. Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter, Collage City, 143-4.

11. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, 3.

12. Andres Janser, “Only Film Can Make the New Architecture Intelligible,” 43.

13. Andres Janser, “Only Film Can Make the New Architecture Intelligible,” 43.

14. Le Corbusier, The City of To-morrow and its Planning, trans. Frederick Etchells (New York: Dover, 1987), 259.

15. Le Corbusier, The City of To-morrow and its Planning, 280.

16. Pierre Couperie, Paris Through the Ages: an Illustrated Historical Atlas of Urbanism and Architecture, trans. Marilyn Low (George Braziller, 1968) XXVIII, a-b.

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Two Images of the City: Moder Paris and its Filmic Representation

The Ancient Roman Domus: A Forum for Commodification of Space and Sexuality HELEN TURNER

University of Kentucky

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The ancient Roman house, or domus, was an expression of identity and status, serving as the medium through which the inhabitant family constructed it place in Rome through a carefully framed view of the domestic interior which combined and layered personal, familial, and civic identities through spatial sequencing and decoration.

Appropriated for contemporary entertainment and veiled in comedic effect, the ancient Roman domus provided a setting for the 1960s film, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, which metaphorically invited viewers into the ancient Roman home, wherein space and decoration were engaged as an active agent in the cinematic narrative. Reference to third century Plautine plot and character couple with commodification of domestic space and female sexuality, a duality specifically considered on account of acculturation of stereotypical associations. Following this framework, a series of dualities have the potential to connect, compare, and critique ancient Roman space as well as ritual in line with manifest values of Western culture. The result is an analysis of cinema as a visual artifact of popular culture which provides methods for understanding the ways in which ancient place is translated through contemporary filters as a reflection of present society.

The ancient Roman house, or domus, was an expression of identity and status, serving as the medium through which the inhabitant family, “constructed its place in Rome and the Roman populace experienced the family within.”1 Passerby on the street received a carefully framed view of the domestic interior which combined and layered personal, familial, and civic identities through spatial sequencing and decoration.2 Appropriated for contemporary entertainment and veiled in comedic effect, the ancient Roman domus provided a setting for A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. The fact that the movie aligns with the genre of comedy is not insignificant and characterizes the belief that different genres construct various ideological discourses, social identities, and forms of audience pleasure, wherein the seemingly benign narrative represents a vehicle for expressing cultural shifts, attitudes, and/or awareness. While the Broadway production that debuted in 1962 employed a single-set of domestic facades,4 the motion picture of 1966 metaphorically invited viewers into the ancient Roman home, wherein space and decoration act as an active agent in the cinematic narrative.

Written by Burt Shevlove and Larry Gelbart in “the style and spirit of the twenty-six surviving plays of Titus Maccius Plautus, a third-century Roman playwright,”5 reference to plot and character are coupled with commodification of domestic space and female sexuality through Hollywood’s perception of Roman antiquity as a spectacle of debauchery and decadence alongside “the pursuit of sexual pleasure that characterized the late 1950s and 1960s.”6 As exemplification, a quote from one New York Times article written at the time of the movie’s release encourages seeing the movie “to relax and let the gags, the pratfalls and the beautiful, wideeyed, leggy (and busty) scenery engulf you. Here, at last, is a motion-picture spectacle for old men of all ages.”7 As such, the duality of domestic interiors and female personas are specifically considered on account of acculturation of stereotypical associations.

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private sphere to the late eighteenth century on account of modernization and industrialization which took work, previously shared amongst all members of the family, out of the house and, as a result, differentiated work and home, public and private, male and female. Following this paradigm and framework, a series of dualities has the potential to connect, compare, and critique ancient Roman space as well as ritual with manifest values of Western culture in the 1960s through the film A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum as a basis for understanding and critiquing our own contemporary society, societal beliefs, and ideologies.

While the role of women in ancient Rome has primarily been detailed through the lens of men, works like sculpture or wall Figure 1: Collaged images of the entrance and view through The House of the Wooden Partition in the ancient city of Herculaneum transposed over a screenshot from the movie A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum depicting the entrance to the House of Sennex.

painting enable modern scholarship to decipher the values these women were expected to, and most likely aspired to, embody. 8 Typically parallel to wealth and social status as a freeborn, freed, or slave citizen, ancient Roman women were considered according to three virtues. The first was ‘pietas’, which translates as piety, and ‘pudicita’, which was a mix of chastity, modesty, sexual fidelity, and fertility. Inextricably tied to the role of wife and mother, this virtue also connected the Roman woman to the home, a relationship reinforced by the virtue of ‘concordia’, which ensured harmony between husband and wife. Yet, while most women of ancient Rome did not have a public persona or position, marriage was considered a business and the partnership of husband and wife was marked by mutual respect, affection, and equity, particularly in the transition from Republic to Empire when women gained the right to own and manage their own properties, affairs, and inheritance.9 Shifting to contemporary culture and context, in the book Feminism, Domesticity and Popular Culture, Stacy Gillis and Joanne Hollows originate identification of women with the 18

DOMUS AND SETTING Though the title implies a public context, the Funny Thing plot unfolds in front of and within the interior of three neighboring houses “in a less fashionable suburb of Rome.”10 The central house is a family dwelling belonging to one of the main characters, Senex, his wife Domina, their son Hero, as well as two slaves, Pseudolus and Hysterium. One of the other two houses belongs to Lycus, “a buyer and seller of the flesh of beautiful women,” as well as Hero’s love interest, Philia, while the third house is that of Erronius, “a befuddled old man” in search of his children and absent for most of the movie.11 While this stratified residential pattern may seem foreign to modern Western social context and interaction, ancient Rome existed as a social matrix where “the rich frequently lived in close contiguity with their dependents, slaves and freedmen, clients and tenants, the sources of their economic and social power.”12 A reflection of this complex urban life, there was “no simple domestic package,”13 but instead, the domus provided space for essential rituals through a shared common cultural language.14 It was a single unit of habitation, potentially used for both residential and non-residential purposes, accessible from the street, but not from any other unit.15 INTERIOR ARCHITECTURE AND FARCE Characteristically organized along a central axis, experience of the domus began with the fauces, or vestibule, that continued through the atrium to the rear hortus, a garden, or peristyle.

As important as the experience of this axis, however, was the carefully framed and curated view through it.16 Because of this, doors typically remained open, whereby also creating some spaces within the domus that were considered “shared in common with outsiders,” and which any “people have a perfect right to enter, even without an invitation.”17 As one such ‘open’ space, the atrium was a hub of activity, used by various inhabitants for differing purposes according to time of day or season. Not only the central space of a domus, the atrium is identifiable by the compluvium, an opening within an inward sloping roof that allowed passage of light, air, and rain, which was paired with an impluvium, a shallow basin in the floor directly below the compluvium that collected rain The Ancient Roman Domus, a Forum for Commodification of Space and Sexuality

Figure 2: Collaged images illustrating the House of the Ceii in a block of the ancient city of Pompeii, along with the plan of an ancient Roman as described by Augus Mau in Pompeii, Its Life and Art, 1902, transposed over a screenshot from the movie A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum showing the atrium in the House of Sennex.

water. Funny Thing includes two atriums, one in the house of Sennex and the other in the house of Lycus, both of which forgo historic architectural accuracy for the sake of the film and comedic farce.

As a hub of situational plot and the only space throughout the movie seen from above, almost in plan view or as if looking through the compluvium, the atrium in the house of Sennex appears to conform to traditional axial arrangement and sequencing. However, when the fauces is seen from the street, the view through open doors is denied by a solid red wall that serves as a backdrop rather than a functional purpose. The compluvium and impluvium in this house are replaced by a shrine, but they appear in the house of Lycus for comedic affect. The impluvium is disproportionate to statues of female nudes that stand on two corners, and Pseudolous then staggers through this impluvium on his way to view an offering of courtesans with Hero, who is in search of Philia, making light of the practical qualities and collected water represented by the feature.

SPACE AND GENDER Typically radiating off the main axis and an atrium of the ancient Roman domus, were cubiculae, spaces for sleeping or holding meetings, along with other rooms of various function and utility, including the triclinim, which was a space for dining and entertainment. Both rooms were characterized by coordinating floor, wall, and ceiling decoration that corresponded with furniture placement as well as intended human behavior and bodily position. The cubiculum, for instance, can often be “confirmed by the typical presence of a bed niche, marked either architecturally or by contrasts in the decoration of walls and floor.”18 It is in this space that Hero and Philia are first framed and viewed in the film, Helen Turner

both simultaneously receiving lessons from tutors. In a primarily yellow room with decorative reliefs of cupids that reveal no architectural or decorative wall, ceiling, or floor designations, Hero learns of astronomy amidst symbols of music, literature, and engineering. As the formulaic ‘girl next door’, Philia, on the other hand, resides in a purple room accented by figural line drawings, also absent of historic designations, and is seen rubbing a purple flower over her chest to the barely audible words of her tutor: “the soft brushing of a flower on quivering skin.”19 Hence, an ancient Roman domestic space receives modern Western constructs associated with a bedroom, namely expression of individual identity, revealing it as an agent in the narrative and a reflection of gender differentiation.

In the same regard, rather than a place for dining and entertainment of guests, the triclinium in the house of Sennex, serves as location for a “sit-down orgy for fourteen.”

In the ancient Roman domus, feasts held within this space sometimes lasted for hours and consisted of multiple mensa, or courses, each of which was brought into the space on different tables that were placed on a central floor decoration.20 As a derivation of the room name, it was also around this special floor motif that three klinae, or couches, were arranged and on which three guests reclined according to social position and status.21 Beyond floor decoration, the lower panel of wall painting would be solid in color and would correspond to the height of a klinae, with anything pictorial above, ensuring that views of special decoration would not be impeded.22 In Funny Thing, however, Captain Miles Gloriosus and his male comrades randomly sit throughout the space and engage in debauchery as female courtesans fawn over the captain while others are chased by his fellow soldiers, serve as a surface for food and eating, or their body parts become the object of a game.

DECORATION AND SEXUALITY Like space as expressive of gender, the movie capitalizes on 2019 ARCHITECTURE & FILM SYMPOSIUM

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Figure 3: Triclinium in the House of Julius Polybius in the ancient city of Pompeii.

20

The Ancient Roman Domus, a Forum for Commodification of Space and Sexuality

Figure 4: Collaged images from the House of Lycus in the movie A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.

decoration and color, antithetical to ancient Roman practice and perception. As a core construct of identity, status, and occupation in ancient Rome, rich polychromies of domestic decoration were considered prestigious due to cost associated with extraction, production, and implementation of varying pigments. 23 Vitruvius recounts colors as either “natural”, those that are “found in fixes places, and dug up there” (Yellow ochre, Red earths, Paraetonium white / Melian white, Green chalk, Orpiment, Cinnabar) versus “artificial”, which are “compounds of different substances treated and mixed in proper proportions” (Black, Blue, Burnt ochre, White lead, Verdigris, Artificial sandarach, Purple).24 He also alludes to the expression of affluence associated with the color purple as one which “exceeds all the colours that have so far been mentioned both in costliness and in the superiority of its delightful effect.”25 This, however, is averse to the movie, where the color purple is only used in the house of Lycus and follows modern perceptions of the movie as “a riot in colour, the film is triumphant, the vulgarity of the aspiring nouveau-riche, for example, exposed through the excessive decoration in awful purple of their interiors.”26 Color is further appropriated, not only as the method by which characters reference spaces throughout the movie, but in the house of Lycus, color also communicates notions

of female sexuality and male desire. Courtesans emerge from individual cubiculum, each of a unique and brilliant color that washes the walls, furniture and accessories as expressive of and concomitant to the persona of its inhabitant. For instance, Panacea “with a face that holds a thousand promises, and a body that stands behind each promise,”27 resides in a red room, the color associated with love, anger, and passion, while Vibrata who is “exotic as a desert bloom…wondrous as a flamingo…lithe as a tigress…for the man whose interest is wild life”28 emerges from an orange room that associates her with excitement and energy. This overt representation of female sexuality, however, does not align with ancient Roman attitudes or beliefs.

Just like ancient Roman material culture can express a narrative about the values associated with women, it also has the potential to reveal constructs and beliefs associated with sexuality. While images depicted on some ancient Roman artifacts initially seem explicit or erotic in contemporary context, the conversation about sexuality in ancient Rome and in the film must begin with a recognition that “Sexuality, rather than being a universal, a given, differs from one community to another and from one epoch to another. It follows that concepts like heterosexuality and homosexuality express social attitudes that arise within human communities that historians have designated as distinct in their culture.”29 And we must further learn to bracket our own attitudes towards such representations as products of our own 2019 ARCHITECTURE & FILM SYMPOSIUM

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acculturation. Some scholars on this topic follow the thoughts of French philosopher Michel Foucault, which positions that “sexual activity in the Classical world was governed by a power differential, by penetration of the weaker by the stronger,” however some also “acknowledge that features other than sexual identity are reinforced in ritual activity— for example, class, wealth, ethnicity, skill, and age.”30 In studying Pompeiian art and artifacts, like wall paintings, coins, and terracotta vessels, which were seen and used by all citizens at every level of society, including women, slaves, and foreigners, John R. Clarke determines that there were many different Roman sexualities. In fact, images that might be classified in contemporary society as “pornographic” were usually associated with luxury, pleasure, and high status,31 because “it was the artists’ job to please patrons or consumers who ordered or bought their products. Whether they created fresco paintings for the villas of the rich or crude decorations for the owner of a bordello, they had to please the person who paid for their work,” and by extension the people who viewed it.32 CONCLUSION While the notions of gender and sexuality expressed by the movie were present in the original book, Broadway productions have been able to adapt to such changing tensions and conflicts. For instance, “like Plautus, who assimilated what was for him high culture, Greek New Comedy, and adapted it for popular Roman tastes, Gelbart and Shevelove took what was for them high culture, the ‘classics,’ and made Roman comedy popular by translating Plautine humor into vaudevillian and burlesque humor, the Roman slave into a Jewsish comic, and Rome into Brooklyn.”33 Originally played by Zero Mostel, an iconic Jewish actor, the main character and narrator has featured others of diverse identity, like Nathan Lane and Whoophie Goldberg, wherein during performance of numbers like “Free”, the “identity of the performer extends and sharpens the meaning of freedom: rather than a general American value, it takes on a particular edge for those who, at different times, have been dispossessed, marginalized, and/or the object of American racism.”34 More recent productions have also reacted against the obvious female stereotypes and latent impacts on female comedic actors, by presenting an all-male cast.35 Yet, while such successive theater productions have the potential to alter and effectively reframe viewing experience according to contemporary cultural and societal concerns, “cinema has long provided its own distinctive historiography of ancient Rome that has vividly resurrected the ancient world and reformulated it in the light of present needs.”36 It is in this relationship with the present that A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum movie stands as a snapshot of Western culture in the 1960’s, with the interiors as a filter and active agent in the cinematic narrative. However, the foundation 22

of this paper primarily exists in research conducted and published since the creation and production of the movie, signaling the need for recurrent critique and evaluation. Just as MacLachlan calls for “an examination of ritual and sexuality within a culture [as] a valuable tool for reading its social norms and tensions, including sexual identity and gender relations therein,”37 analysis of cinema as a visual artifact of popular culture provides methods for understanding the ways in which ancient place is translated through contemporary filters as a way of reflecting on present society.

ENDNOTES 1. Hales, Shelley. The Roman House and Social Identity. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

2.

Ibid.

3. Meister, Michael. Scenic design model by Tony Walton for the original Broadway production of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, 1962, in Pinosy. http://pinosy.com/ media/497929302521496428/.

4. Shevelove, Burt and Larry Gelbart. A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. New York, NY: Applause Theatre Book Publishers, 1991, 2.

5.

Malmud, Margaret. “Brooklyn-on-the-Tiber: Roman Comedy on Broadway and in Film.” In Imperial Projections: Ancient Rome in Modern Popular Culture, edited by Sandra R. Joshel, Margaret Malamud, and Donald T. McGuire, Jr., 191-208. Baltimore, MD: JHU Press, 2005, 196.

6. Canby, Vincent. “Screen: ‘Funny Thing’ Happens Here:As on Stage, High Jinks are led by Mostel..” The New York Times, 1966. https:// www.nytimes.com/1966/10/17/archives/screen-funny-thing-happenshereas-on-stage-high-jinks-are-led-by.html.

7. University of Washington. Feminae Romanae: The Role of Women in Ancient Rome, 2004, in Honors Program in Rome. https://depts.washington.edu/hrome/Authors/boogieon/ FeminaeRomanaeTheRoleofWomeninAncientRome/pub_zbarticle_ view_printable.html 8.

Ibid.

9. A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. Directed by Richard Lester. USA: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Inc., 1966. DVD. 10. Ibid.

11. Wallace-Hadrill, Andrew. Houses and Society in Pompeii and Herculaneum. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994, 141.

12. Hales, The Roman House and Social Identity, 163.

13. Ibid., 18-19.

14. Wallace-Hadrill, Houses and Society, 72.

15. Ibid., 107.

16. Vitruvius, Pollio, and Morris Hicky Morgan. The Ten Books on Architecture. Elibron Classics, 2004, 181.

17. Wallace-Hadrill, Houses and Society, 57.

18. A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, DVD, directed by Richard Lester.

19. Johnston, Harold Whetstone, and Mary Johnston. The Private Life of

The Ancient Roman Domus, a Forum for Commodification of Space and Sexuality

the Romans. Chicago: Scott, Foresman and Company, 1932, 229-230.

20. Wallace-Hadrill, Houses and Society, xvi.

21. Mau, August. Pompeii, Its Life and Art. Translated by Francis W. Kelsey.

New York: Macmillan, 1902, 264.

22. Wallace-Hadrill, Houses and Society, 31.

23. Vitruvius, Ten Books on Architecture, 214-220..

24. Ibid., 219.

25. Sinyard, Neil. The Films of Richard Lester. London: Croom Helm, 1985, 44.

26. Shevlove, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, 38.

27. Ibid., 39.

28. Clarke, John R. Looking at Lovemaking: Constructions of Sexuality in Roman Art, 100 B.C.-A.D. 250. Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1998, 8.

29. MacLachlan, Bonnie. “Ritual and the Performance of Identity: Women and Gender in the Ancient World.” Journal of Women’s History 20, no.4 (Winter 2011): 177.

30. Clarke, Looking at Lovemaking, 4.

31. Ibid., 10.

32. Malamud, “Brooklyn-on-the-Tiber,” 192.

33. Ibid, 196.

34. North, Jesse. “A Feminist Thing Happened on the Way to Two River’s ‘Forum’.” Culture Vultures Arts Weekly, November 2015. http:// features.jerseyarts.com/content/index.php/njtheater/2015/11/ afeministthinghappenedonthewaytotworiversforum/.

35. Wyke, Maria. Projecting the Past: Ancient Rome, Cinema, and History.

New York, NY: Routledge, 1997, 8.

36. MacLachlan, 177.

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Filmic Topographies: Landscape as the Site of Character and Narrative Transformation SADRA TEHRANI

Pennsylvania State University

Landscape and space can be considered as not only the foundation for a film’s narrative, but also one of its primal agents in forming the audiences’ desire in relating to the moving image. In three films (Portrait of Jennie, 1948; Manhattan, 1979; Leon the Professional, 1994) this paper shows how characters and locations – specifically Central Park - operate within analogous structures to progress the story.

The particularities of each film and their relations to Central Park require (1) analysis of common archetypal and topological drives and motives; and (2) specific formal expressions of “motive structures” in both the characters and Central Park — the site common to all films — itself. The concept of a character that is a composite of both father figure and romantic lover dominates all three films.1 Although there are varying degrees of paternity and romanticism in the examples, what’s constant is the transformation of the relationships in either intensity and/or quality. In all three examples, Central Park becomes the main site of this transformation either through a main plot point or a representational constant throughout the film. These three films adequately demonstrate the dual nature of a figure who is both a father and a lover. The balance between father and lover varies in the examples, but the effectiveness to transform relationships, either in intensity or quality, is a constant. Central Park is the key to this effectiveness, so it is not an accident that it is an essential factor, not just as a backdrop or set but as a place of transformation.

24

In the third chapter of their book Film Art: An Introduction, David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson underscore the fact that every character possesses a set of qualities that define him or her: “Along with a body, a character has traits: attitudes, skills, habits, tastes, psychological drives and any other qualities that distinguish the character.”2 The main trait of the protagonist is his agency and willfulness. Yet, none of the protagonists in these films are perfect or heroic at the beginning. The narrative trope that pushes them forward and persuades them to overcome their weaknesses/shortcomings is, in all examples, a little girl. The storytelling device of the “little girl” becomes that of awakening the inner soul of the protagonist.

This soul could relate to something humane — such as love or empathy — or something metaphorical, like the creative drive of an artist. The little girl becomes a cause whose effect is much greater than could be expected of the protagonist as we have known him. She becomes the activator for what Bordwell and Thompson explain as a three-dimensional complexity in the protagonist’s contradictory drives.3 Typically, the protagonist’s dilemma arises as a conflict between principle and instinct. The little girl activates and emphasizes this dilemma by forcing the protagonist to have to choose. This is analogous to what Robert McKee calls “self-contradictory unconscious desire”. In his book Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting, he writes: ‘Although these complex protagonists are unaware of their subconscious need, the audience senses it, perceiving in them an inner contradiction. The conscious and unconscious desires of a multidimensional protagonist contradict each other. What he believes he wants is the antithesis of what he actually but unwittingly wants.’4 In this light, the choice between neurotically playing by the rules versus disobeying the internal order and attempting to pursue the unconscious desire can be seen as the transformation of a neutral (sometimes apathetic) fatherlike figure into a relentless lover. These characteristics are not only visible in the characters themselves, but also the Filmic Topographies: Landscape as the Site of Character and Narrative Transformation

Figure 1:”Present outline” vs. “Effect proposed” in The Lake in the Lower Park (1) (left) and Meadow in Upper Park (right), in Forty Years of Landscape Architecture: Central Park, ed. Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr. and Theodora Kimball (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1973), 224 & 232.

mise-en-scène, where the location expresses them directly through conditions of the landscape. Its structural relations to the city parallel the father’s structural relations to being a lover, or the structural relations of the consciousness to the unconscious.

In the case of these three movies, the relationship between Central Park and New York plays a key role in the expression of the father/lover — daughter/girl dynamic. This is not to say that each of those is necessarily represented symbolically, but that the underlying structure between the characters and the spaces are similar. The girl is indeed a symbolic gap inside the protagonist’s psyche — a space that his “order” cannot account for or acknowledge. This could be due to a fear/trauma, negligence, or a lack in self-consciousness. The girl — by her bold and fearless expression of an essential value — momentarily fills up that gap and allows the protagonist to imagine the possibility of completeness. This switches the point of from an exterior “diegetic” frame of a story “seen from the outside,” to an inner subjective frame, located within the intimacy of a personal feeling and transformation. The little girl typically releases the “father” from his self-imposed rules and restrictions by revealing a gap in the paternalistic position. She becomes the agent by which the father becomes a lover by overcoming this gap.

Within the context of filmic form and by looking at the key concepts, this paper treats the park as almost a psychic void in the city; one that allows for its discovery and selfconsciousness, and one that is situated inside but has the potential to look at the city from outside. Such an extimate (reversible between inside and outside) relationship similar to that of an inside frame is most literally apparent in the panoramic cityscapes seen from the park, where the three layers of foreground (park’s space), mid-ground (threshold of trees) and background (Manhattan’s skyline) visualize the

extimate condition of the park.

‘The “comparative largeness” of Central Park was essential, since a park should “be a ground which invites, encourages & facilitates movement.” The giddy impulse you feel, upon arriving at the Great Lawn or Sheep Meadow, to burst into a full-out sprint — that is by design.’5 When in 1811 the Manhattan grid — the commissioner’s plan — was approved, no such space was thought of as necessary.

According to Burrows and Wallace, “The commissioners admitted that it ‘may be a matter of surprise that so few vacant spaces have been left, and those so small, for the benefit of fresh air and consequent preservation of health.’”6 Yet the test of time proved that the urban conditions that arose from the technical supremacy of the grid did not satisfy the greater needs of the city. The gridded Manhattan before Central Park was in dire need of some open-air development.

In the descriptive report for the Greensward plan, Olmsted continues to describe his strategy for the development of the park’s scheme by visualizing it not only as an opening in the city’s fabric, but as a void that generates energy and subconscious engagement: ‘Provisions for the improvement of the ground, however, pointed to something more than mere exemption from urban conditions, namely, to the formation of an opposite class of conditions; conditions remedial of the influences of urban conditions …. Two classes of improvements were to be planned for this purpose; one directed to secure pure and wholesome air, to act through the lungs; the other to secure an antithesis of objects of vision to those of the streets and houses, which should act remedially by impressions on the mind and suggestions to the imagination.7 ‘ From a formal and motional standpoint, if the static yet flexible grid of Manhattan is a thesis, Central Park is the 2019 ARCHITECTURE & FILM SYMPOSIUM

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antithesis to it. Expressing the grid’s abstractedness, Rosalind Krauss states “It is what art looks like when it turns its back on nature” in her essay “Grids.”8 The grid — an island of about 15000 acres, has an irregular boundary, but an orderly network of lines inside, whereas the park is violently defined by a rectangle, and is fluidly structured by a free flowing system of passageways and routes. It sits at the center of the commissioner’s plan of 1811 — not having been accounted for initially. The park‘s grounds and outlines flow harmonious to the actual topography of the land, whereas the grid defines modules of land irrelative to their form. In describing such form of artificiality, Stoppani argues: ‘As it builds itself in its own artificiality, the Manhattan grid intentionally confounds its relation with an origin. ‘There is no “origin” in Manhattan, but rather the continuous repetition of foundational acts whenever the Grid is traced on the ground (confirmed or transgressed).’9 However, Central Park is not simply an antithesis to the orderly grid of New York. It constitutes a chasm in the excess of built-up land around it.10 It functions structurally as the place where the “excesses” of New York can be released yet restructured and preserved. The park is contained by the city, but at the same time its emptiness affords a visibility and openness that re-frames the city from the inside. Thanks to its centrality and size, the park’s lush naturalism easily gains the upper hand over the city’s man-made grittiness. This, combined with the inside–out conversion of the point of view, constitute an anamorphic fracture that connects directly with the protagonist’s own internal gap. In essence, the little girl functions through this connection between the park’s anamorphic fracture and her father/lover’s internal conflict.

Once the frame is relocated from outside to inside, it joins the psychological problem of transformation with the physical transformative capabilities of the park.

When we look at the individual films, we can see how the specifics of each film tailors the way characters’ inner conflicts and the park’s inside–outside potentiality are the media for the development of site–specific ideas.

PORTRAIT OF JENNIE: EXPEDIETED IMPOSSIBLE Portrait of Jennie is the story of a depression-era New York artist named Eben Adams who meets a girl from the past in Central Park. In this film, the two worlds constitute a similar topological structure to that of a torus: The exterior cold New York which is at the same time very intimate to Eben as it resembles his own state of mind; and the interior subjective imagination of Eben in the park, through which he is able to envision Jennie, an uncanny figure so far away and exterior to him that she has to travel in time for him to see her. In this exchange of internal exteriority and external interiority, the park functions as the site where the pendulum swings from one to the other. Central Park’s liminal quality is in connecting 26

distant spacetimes. Jennie is a girl from the past -who is dead — but the imaginative space of Eben’s subjectivity has to travel back in time in order to retrieve her image. This travel happens first and foremost in Central Park.

The particular lighting and framing of scenes in which Jennie appears and disappears establish the park as a portal into and out of not just Eben’s everyday life but his painterly fertility. The park becomes a site of desire, but one that is unknown until it is activated. “Suddenly I had the awareness of something extraordinary,” Eben narrates when he’s about to first see Jennie in the park. Eben is more and more charmed

by Jennie’s strangeness — something he finds both familiar and unsettling or, in other words, uncanny: a quality that makes a fully realistic perception of her impossible.

Jennie is made to appear magically inside the park and in between the towers. Such an effect is achieved through a combination of devices: The near-symmetrical framing of the shot illustrates a gap in between the two towers, which is further emphasized by the motivated silhouette lighting behind Jennie, which turns her into a shadowy figure, heightening the drama of her appearance. Such fantastic alignments of spatial elements are a work of visual effects using matte technique. The use of matte painting as a filmic technique goes back a long way, to Georges Méliès, as means to decompose the image and create blanks in the film using a glass pane painted black. Matte painting and lighting effects are used to make the appearance and disappearance more dramatic. The film’s extensive use of mattes to create “magical” set effects, largely the work of Clarence Slifer, won it the award for Best Visual Effects.11 The park’s potential in the utilization of matte painting derives from its alreadypresent layered-ness. The filmmaker is able to separate different elements — the cityscape from nature — and recompose them to form a new combination. In doing so, he re-reads the picturesque landscape put in place by Olmstead.

In using the new skyline, the filmmaker turns the park into a lens for seeing the fantasy of Jennie.

LEON THE PROFESSIONAL: PERSONAL TRAINER In the case of Leon, Jean Reno is a cold-blooded hitman with a sentimental side to his personality. This notion is represented by his very intimate relationship to his plant.

Matilda lives next door. When drug dealers and corrupt cops murder her family, she seeks refuse with Leon. Matilda is rebellious, but Leon at first regards her as a child in need of his protection. This plot point deflects Leon from his normal assassin’s trajectory. In the beginning, the relationship is unsteady. Gradually, however, she becomes interested in his violent vocation and insists on being his apprentice. They go to a rooftop overlooking Central Park to begin the first lesson. The training scene is the first time the characters are brought together in a frame. The whole sequence is in fact a Filmic Topographies: Landscape as the Site of Character and Narrative Insert Paper Transformation Title Here

Figure 2: Portrait of Jennie (1948), Dir: William Dieterle. Stills from the film

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coming together of both Mathilda and Leon, and the urban training ground is Central Park, a void in the middle that has given way to this coming together of pieces. “Peeking into the void” becomes the metaphor for this scene – as well as other scenes throughout the film – which illustrates the film’s question of Leon’s identity and character. This void is opposed to the street view, Leon’s spatial zone as the invisible flâneur.

Central Park as the opening in the fabric of the city marks a gap in Leon’s ideology and Mathilda locates and exposes it. The training scene becomes the first location of Leon’s identification with Mathilda’s quest for revenge. He — a professional hitman — agrees to teach her how to shoot by firing paintballs at a random stranger in the park.

In the following sequence, we Mathilda’s transformation through a montage of scenes that show her working out with Leon, learning how to assemble a gun, supplemented by mundane chores, like buying milk. The training scene above Central Park could be called the point that transforms their relationship, from patriarchal to affectionate. This is literally referenced later in Mathilda’s word-game with a hotel employee: “He’s not my father. He’s my lover.”

MANHATTAN: “I’ M DATING A GIRL WHEREIN I CAN BEAT UP HER FATHER.” Similar to the previous to films, Manhattan also depicts the transformation in the relationship between an older man and a (much) younger woman, in this case Isaac (Woody Allen) and Tracy (Mariel Hemingway), a conversion of paternalism into romance. He is dating a much younger girl who loves him deeply, but he gets interested in a woman his friend is seeing, an extra-marital affair. Isaac, however, turns from this binary to challenge the extra-marital relationship of his academic friend, Yale Pollack. As Isaac becomes interested in Yale’s new girlfriend, Mary, the film’s romanticized aesthetic framing of

these conflicts, the young girl, purest of them all, stays faithful to Woody Allen. Despite his neurotic pessimism, partly in reaction to their great age difference— “I’m 42 and she’s 17. I’m older than her father!” — Isaac becomes increasingly attached to her. The scene of transformation — or the most romantic encounter — happens in Central Park when the two are enjoying a carriage ride.

The sequence, which is composed of three scenes, uses a formal display of the scalar layering in the cinematography of trees and the cityscape. With the camera pointed at the southern edge of the park, the carriage glides along as we hear soft music and the off-screen voice of actors. The first layer — the trees — moves to create a filter for the much desired cityscape in the back, before almost completely covering it, in effect creating a moiré effect that turns city lights into twinkling stars.

In the Carriage ride scene in Manhattan, the foreground (a. trees) and the background (b. the buildings of the cityscape) – which in reality are very far – are brought close to each other and fused into a composite image that is neither a or b but a third impossible shimmer – a twinkling effect of lights - that continues to be present as long as the camera (mounted on the carriage) is moving. This state of continuum relates back to Olmsted’s inscription of motion in the park though the particular spatial configuration of solids and voids and the effect is indebted to his aim “to secure an antithesis of objects of vision to those of the streets and houses, which should act remedially by impressions on the mind and suggestions to the imagination” .What is achieved is a spatial flip – a fold – that is made possible through an overlap of filmic techniques and landscape techniques. This Orthographic scene in Manhattan visualizes both the park’s function as an ocular lens, and the

Figure 3: Léon: The Professional (1994), Dir: Luc Besson 28

Filmic Topographies: Landscape as the Site of Character and Narrative Transformation

Figure 4: Manhattan (1979), Dir: Woody Allen. Carriage ride scene

revelatory role of Tracy in representing Issac to himself and the inside-out flip which inverses the (symbolic) father and the(real) lover.

CONCLUSION As discussed, the setting of a particular scene or sequence should be seen not only in itself but with relation to the overall setup of the film. Central Park and New York work together in that they provide frames for each other to be seen from. The park — whether through temporal and spatial patterns or the exposition of the nature/city border — creates a realm in which things can be observed, hidden or exposed. Central Park becomes such a distinguished boundary of formal and metaphorical relations that it stands not in opposition but complementary to the city around (or within) it. What is discussed here as the “structure” — of the characters or the locations — is indeed an underlying set of relations in containment and visibility that offer the creative mind — be it a director or the audience — opportunities for framing particular encounters: the creation of virtual Central Parks. Such virtualities situate proto-cinematics as ways of looking in the landscape that revolve around the visual and spatial structure of the park which had been to a great degree intentionally devised by Olmsted and Vaux. In the bigger scale, by operating as a void in the city, the park allows for its surroundings to change while it remains unchanged and stable. Furthermore, the park itself resists definition by sustaining desire and allowing the gaze to function as something that is unseen. The “link” between Olmsted and film is itself an uncanny crisscross of an older creative mind able to anticipate not-yet-developed technologies of visualization and, concurrently, modern creative minds haunted by older ways of representing time and space, even without the film production apparatus.

to Slavoj Žižek’s “Why are there always two fathers?” in Enjoy Your Symptom!: Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out. Routledge, 2001 2. David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, Film Art: an Introduction, (McGraw-Hill, 2013), 78.

3. Bordwell and Thompson, 78 4. Robert McKee, Story: Substance, Structure, Style, (ReganBooks, 1997), p. 138 5. Nathaniel Rich, When Parks Were Radical, (The Atlantic, August 12, 2016), https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/09/ better-than-nature/492716/ 6.

G Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 421.

7.

Frederick Law Olmsted, Forty Years of Landscape Architecture: Central Park, ed. Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr. and Theodora Kimball (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1973), 45.

8.

Rosalind Krauss, Grids, October 9, MIT Press, Vol. 9 (Summer 1979): 50.

9.

Teresa Stoppani, Paradigm Islands: Manhattan and Venice: Discourses on Architecture and the City (London: Routledge, 2015), 66.

10. Frederick Law Olmsted, 45.

11. Steven Jacobs, Wrong House - the Architecture of Alfred Hitchcock (Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2007), 179.

ENDNOTES 1.

For an in-depth Lacanian analysis of the theme of “two fathers”, refer

Sadra Tehrani

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The Cinematic Spaces of the Horizontal Metropolis: The Image of Flemish Suburbia ANNELIES STAESSEN Ghent University, Belgium

Pe r c e p t i o n s , i n c l u d i n g t h e i r c i n e m a t i c representations, have an influence on the evolutions of spaces. They influence the way in which we understand what spaces and places mean and how we deal with it. This research assumes the cinematic space reflects the intrinsic characteristics, the experience value and the typical dynamics of space.

Prevalent perceptions of the Flemish urbanized landscape, a highly fragmented settlement structure resulting from an uncontrolled development, are widely divergent. On the one hand, urban planners as well as policy makers struggle to get grip on the congestion of this space, indicated as a Horizontal Metropolis. On the other hand, the pervasive suburban dream of a detached single-family house with a garden is strongly embedded in the Flemish cultural identity. Especially the suburban allotments of Flanders conflict with the plans for reducing the widespread settlement structure.

This research regards film as a unique representational medium, and thus a tool to discover a more nuanced image, mediating between the planological opinion and everyday experience, of this peculiar suburban context. The contemporary Flemish fiction films Violet (Bas Devos, 2014), Fucking Suburbia (Jeff Otte, 2012) and Nowhere man (Patrice Toye, 2008), are all dealing with the specific suburban conditions in Flanders. A cinematic analysis of these films in their reflection and relation to the discourse of urbanists and planners, will reveal a nuanced position regarding the experience of suburbia.

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Cinema and the urban landscapes are closely intertwined.

Since the very beginning of cinema, cities and urban landscapes have been a subject of interest for amateur and professional cinematographers. Furthermore, different aspects of the relationship between cinema and urban space has been demonstrated by many authors. 1 In our mediatized society, film, amongst others, influences the way we construct images of the world and, as a result, how we operate in it. Our understanding of (urban) space cannot be viewed independently of cinematic experience. Cinematic perceptions, in particular the depiction of spatial environment in films, represent, reflect and influence the evolutions of spaces. These perceptions determine not only the ideas about space, the way in which areas are depicted also affects those who live and work in it.

As urban planners analyze, interpret and design places, they formulate theories and concepts of space, 2 in order to understand its meaning and how it is used. Therefore, it is important for urban planners to consider perceptions of space, including those provided by the images on screen.

This consideration is particularly the case for the Flemish urban landscape and how this urbanized condition is perceived. For more than half a century now, the uncontrolled urbanization has been a difficult subject to tackle for urban planners as well as policy makers. This uncontrolled development resulted in a highly fragmented settlement structure covering almost the entire territory. Although Flanders is a densely populated region 3 , with a settlement area of 33%, Flanders has one of the lowest densities in terms of settlement structure.4 Peculiar allotments, defining the phenomenon suburbia in Flanders, are an essential component of the Flemish urban landscape. The phenomenon of the allotment – facilitated by different measures, the use of the car and purchasing power - was so extensive it became the dominant manner of urbanization in Flanders. These allotments are composed by a succession of the so-called fermette, a typical detached house styled to refer an old farmhouse.

The Cinematic Spaces of the Horizontal Metropolis : the Image of Flemish suburbia.

FILM AS A MEDIATOR Cinematic representation of the Flemish urban landscape can introduce a new perspective, one operating as a mediator to understand the discrepancy in perceptions on the horizontal metropolis and suburbia in particular. The capacity of film to mediate between realities and theories on the contemporary perceptions of the urban landscape, originates in a twofold quality of the cinematic image.

Figure 1: Violet - still 1:00:58.

The horizontal metropolis, one of the terms referring to this widespread urbanized condition,5 is a complex issue for spatial professionals. Furthermore, this professional environment has been repeatedly criticizing this spatial condition. A famous example hackling the Belgian development is the manifesto ‘The ugliest country in the world’ written by Renaat Braem in 1968. 6 Today, after years of laissez faire, laissez passerpolitics, also the governance feels the emergency to achieve a more concentrated spatial arrangement by means of planning.

Moreover, urban planners severely critique the low-density suburban areas in which about 70% of Flemish people live.

With a growing population this wasteful residential model not only affects energy consumption and the environment but also the quality of life. Planners voice an urgent need for densification of the centers to safeguard the remaining open space from further land parceling, combined with the development of new housing types.

On the contrary, the mindset of the Fleming has been stimulated over the years so private homeownership has become the norm. About one in four families lives in a typical allotment8 and a vast majority of the Belgians still aspires the ideal of owing a (semi)detached single-family house with a garden. Different surveys demonstrate how strongly this ideal is embedded in the Flemish cultural identity.9 In 2018 still four hectares of open space disappear every day in Flanders, hence suburbanization simply continues. Urban development plans seem to have little effect, despite the current sharpened policy with a strong emphasis on the challenge of densification. The negative perception of spatial professionals – low densities, high energy consumption, high car dependency, etc. - does not seem to have impact on the ‘suburban dream’, daily practice unimpededly continues consuming space. This paper hypotheses that this (growing) distance between the urban discourse and the everyday life and practice is related to a different perception of this condition.

Firstly, film is a visual medium. It represents information about space and can thus function as a reading device by which information about the everyday surfaces. The moving image combines filmic characteristics – montage, lighting, storyline, camera position, mise-en-scène, soundtrack, ... – with the attention for the everyday. Film functions as a mirror to the world. Pallasmaa describes how cinema articulates lived space (Henri Lefebvre), environments in use, everyday life scenes.10 Secondly, film is narrative and spatio-temporal. The cinematic narratives reflect and interpret, thus as a social construction the moving images can be used to reshape concepts. City images create a specifically urban imaginary which is defined

by Edward Soja as ‘our mental or cognitive mappings of urban reality and the interpretive grids through which we think about, experience, evaluate and decide to act in the places, spaces and communities in which we live.’11 The stories told to us and by us, narratives structuring the practices of our everyday life, provide knowledge of the world. The narrative in both film and the city has been discussed extensively by authors as Koeck.

The intention of this paper is to use film as a (cultural) lens to gain insight in the everyday experience of the horizontal metropolis. Starting from the pronounced discrepancy in perception regarding the Flemish suburbs, the filmic visualizations of suburbia will be investigated in their reflection and relation to the discourse of urbanists and planners. Hence the research question of this paper, what are the prevalent cinematographic perceptions of Flemish suburbia in contemporary fiction films?

CINEMATIC PERCEPTIONS OF FLEMISH SUBURBIA Postwar suburbia has been the setting for numerous suburban films since 1940s.12 Especially the last twenty years there is an increase of films set in (American) suburbs. Films like The Truman Show (Peter Weir, 1998), Pleasantville (Gary Ross, 1998), Happiness (Todd Solondz, 1998) and American Beauty (Sam Mendes, 1999) are no longer depicting suburbia as a peaceful, idyllic realization of the American dream. These narratives located in clean, save and ordered allotments, reveal opposite feelings and tensions of imperfection and anxiety. Numerous studies focus on this peculiar portrayal of suburbia and demonstrate an evolution from a suburban

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Violet, the film directed by Bas Devos, captures the grief of fifteen-year-old Jesse. After he witnesses the random, lethal stabbing of his friend Jonas at the beginning of the film, the movie depicts how Jesse struggles to come to terms with himself and his environment after that trauma. Unable to answer the questions of his friends, a group of young BMXrides, Jesse gets isolated and a growing feeling of loneliness complicates his mourning process.

Figure 2: Violet - still 1:18:08.

utopia to dystopia. 13 Although the allotments of Flanders are comparable to the American suburb - both composed of detached single-family houses and both in an ambiguous position of neither city nor countryside - there are no studies focusing on the contemporary representations of the Flemish suburbia in film.

In order to investigate the Flemish suburban context with film as an instrument to discern a more nuanced image, able to revise the pessimistic planological opinion, three fiction films were selected through criteria based on thematic features as well as production-related characteristics. The latter mainly concerns the origin of the film: a recent release date within ten years and Belgian director with home-grown funding.

While the qualifying thematic specifications were mainly based on the synopsis incorporating location and (historical) situation of the narrative. In comparison with the manifold international ‘suburban films’ there is surprisingly little attention for suburbia in Flemish films. The selected films – Violet (Bas Devos, 2014), Fucking Suburbia (Jeff Otte, 2012) and Nowhere man (Patrice Toye, 2008) – are all dealing with the specific suburban conditions in Flanders.

These films will be described and analyzed in order to discover how these cinematic representations relate to urban planners point of view regarding suburbia and the pervasive suburban dream of the Fleming. The cinematic analysis focusses on the narrative rather than the technical aspects (camera position, soundtrack, light, etc.) and is structured in four parts. The first section is a general description of the storyline. The second part embodies a characterization of the constructed space and its specific function of the suburban in the narrative.

Thirdly, crucial scenes will be highlighted in relation to the narrative and the representation of suburbia in order to discover the social construct of the film. Finally, the fourth part describes a general cinematographic construction of Flemish suburbia in the film.

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The story is situated in the suburbs of a big city, a very average and recognizable Flemish allotment. This suburb is projected as a place of isolation and loneliness. The disaffecting atmosphere is accentuated by static camerawork, slow pace and selective sound. The camera focuses on unmoving characters, details and empty streets. The only signs of habitation are the shots with BMX-riders, apart from them the streets are deserted. Passengers occur only in the shopping mall in the city or driving along on the highway. The montage of these typical long shots of cinematographer Nicolas Karakatsanis creates the effect of a dilatory sequence of silent compositions. The spare and concrete sounds, fixating on environmental noises that are alternately natural and mechanical, contribute to an unnatural stillness.

In order to examine the connotations of the allotment for the characters, three specific scenes stand out. The first one is the evening scene where Jesse spies on Jonas’s family. Jesse stands alone outside, in the shadows, looking at the family of his deceased friend. Just like Jesse has to cope with his feelings of grief individually, the family members are also split up in separate rooms. Portrayed within lonely squares of light, each character is individually dealing with their pain.

This scene reflects an enforced individuality, apparently also present in the at the scale of the neighborhood where different lives occur isolated next to each other.

The second scene deals with a feeling of absence, which is carefully constructed throughout the film. This is most explicit when Jesse returns from an encounter with Jonas’s father. Two bikes move quietly next to each other through the allotment, one of them has no rider. Jesse is on his own, holding the bike of his friend. The only sound in this scene is produced by the bikes. Again the silence reinforces the loneliness in this scene. (figure 1) In the third scene, the final tracking shot, desolate environment and silence culminate. After Jesse’s father carries the crying boy home from finding him on the street at dawn, the camera starts moving. This contrasts with the overall static camera in the rest of the film. Like the crew of young bikers in the beginning of the film, the camera slowly hovers through the neighborhood. In complete silence, the shot takes six and a half minutes, the audience arrives in a big overwhelming cloud. (figure 2)

The Cinematic Spaces of the Horizontal Metropolis : the Image of Flemish suburbia.

Generally, there is a predominant distant point of view in the cinematographic construction of the neighborhood. This is characterized by the overwhelming silence and the absence of many conversations, moreover, the action is often situated outside the boundaries of the frame. The murder in the openings scene is also depicted through the cctv security monitors of the shopping mall. Furthermore the alternation in shallow and focus in the images enhances this removed position. Finally, the abstract images of light that mark the transition between different scenes also underline a distorting time and space.

Jeff Otte’s short film, Fucking suburbia, depicts two brothers with nothing to do during a hot summer in a boring neighborhood. The oldest of the two, a thirty-year-old man, temporarily moved back into the parental house to take care of their grandmother who is confined to bed. He doesn’t seem to connect with his peers who are building their house and having children. The younger brother tries to cope with the presence of his brother and puberty during an endless hot summer holiday.

Just like Violet, this story is set in a typical and very recognizable allotment. Again this suburb is represented as a mundane, desolate environment. The streets are empty and deserted, nothing really happens. In contrast to Violet, where the violence happens in the shopping mall of the city, this narrative is completely situated within the neighborhood. The lack of action in the narrative combined with the oppressive

heat creates a sluggish atmosphere.

Three particular scenes draw the attention in terms of the cinematic construction of the suburb. First, the barbecue party at the beginning of the film accentuates how the oldest brother feels alienated in this environment of settled people.

Walking back home with a girl, he recollects memories of their youth in the neighborhood, when they played together in the street. The happy memories suggest he did fit in at the time.

Second, the fragment in which the camera observes the sixteen-year-old brother sitting with the other teenagers at the empty football field stresses difficulties these youngsters experience in finding their place. Especially this residential environment has not much to offer. They do not speak to each other, just wait for time to pass.

The most surreal representation of the neighborhood is caught in the scene when the camera follows the girl riding through the allotment on her bike in the twilight. On every parcel she passes there are people standing close to the road, on their own piece of land, all looking in the same direction.

When she turns around the corner and passes the ice cream cart it becomes clear what everyone was waiting for. (figure 3) The dominating boredom, both in the agenda of the characters as in the depicted environment, determines the overall representation of the suburb in this short movie.

open space from further land parceling, combined with the development of new housing types.

On the contrary, the mindset of the Fleming has been stimulated over the years so private homeownership has become the norm. About one in four families lives in a typical allotment8 and a vast majority of the Belgians still aspires the ideal of owing a (semi)detached single-family house with a garden. Different surveys demonstrate how strongly this ideal is embedded in the Flemish cultural identity.9 In 2018 still four hectares of open space disappear every day in Flanders, hence suburbanization simply continues. Urban development plans seem to have little effect, despite the current sharpened policy with a strong emphasis on the challenge of densification. The negative perception of spatial professionals – low densities, high energy consumption, high car dependency, etc. - does not seem to have impact on the ‘suburban dream’, daily practice unimpededly continues consuming space. This paper hypotheses that this (growing) distance between Figure 3: Fucking Suburbia – and still 0:17:33 the urban discourse the everyday life and practice is related to a different perception of this condition.

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Figure 4: Nowhere man – still 0:12:27c.

Johannessen and the director Patrice Toye, revolves around forty-year-old Tomas who stages his own death longing for a new start and a more spectacular life. Living an apparently average but good life, with a wonderful wife, he entertains fantasies of a different life. Soon after executing his plan and having set foot on a tropical island, he regrets his decision.

The paradise he imagined appears to be a place of hard labor, violence and racism, a place where he is desperately lonely.

After five years he tries to return to his former life, where his remarried wife now takes control of his life.

The first part of the film, before the fake suicide, is set in a residential district characterized by the big white villas. This environment represents the boredom and lack of authenticity the main character is struggling with. It seems like the protagonist feels not quite comfortable in that environment: he mocks the man at the party in the opening scene of the film and the lamentable condition of his front garden draws the attention.

The contrast of two scenes details the construct of suburbia in this motion picture. In the build-up to the escape, the aerial view of the big houses with worn-out lawns diverge from the bald and lamentable garden of the couple.

Symbolizing the man’s growing sense of unhappiness with his mundane life, the contrast with the other gardens show he does not belong there. (figure 4) At the moment the protagonist makes an effort to improve this situation, by planting a young tree in the garden, he decides to walk into the raging house fire to fake his suicide.

When the main character returns after five years in search for his wife and former life, the allotment is portrayed in spring. The condition of the house and the front garden has 34

drastically improved. A nice garden with a mowed lawn, a fully grown tree, plants and bordered by a hedge is now the territory of a playing kid. (figure 5) The lifeless impression is exchanged for a pleasing and vivacious place as a new family moved in. Noteworthy, this is the last image of this neighborhood in the film, the following part of the movie is situated in the city.

Nowhere man presents a dual position regarding the residential outskirts. The suburbs of the first part, where the protagonist does not feel at ease and wants to escape, contrast with desirable suburbia, almost an utopian place.

CINEMATIC REFLECTIONS ON FLEMISH SUBURBIA The thematic reading of these contemporary fiction films initiates nuanced reflections of spatial imagination of Flemish suburbia. The most pronounced reoccurring themes are dealing with the general atmosphere of the environment and stroke with the impressions of suburbia in contemporary American fiction films. According to the American counterpart the general depiction of the allotments is as mundane, boring quarters where the individuals live in isolation of each other.

Moreover, the suburbs portrayed in these films are desolate, empty places.

Next to the distant ambiance created in the films, three reflections concerning the spatial imagination of Flemish suburbia can be articulated. Firstly, the protagonists of the three films seem somehow trapped in suburbia. In Violet this is visualized almost literally in the scene where Jesse rides around his district after the incident with his BMXfriends. Jesse’s mother has ordered him to stay in the street.

The group wanders on their bikes through the streets when dissenting the conversation, suddenly one of the boys stops, changes direction and rides back. The whole group follows and stays within the borders of the allotment. It seems death The Cinematic Spaces of the Horizontal Metropolis : the Image of Flemish suburbia.

Figure 5: Nowhere man – still 0:43:07.

provides the only way to escape suburbia, as in Jonas’s case.

This is also confirmed by the other two films. In Fucking suburbia, the oldest brother can only go back to Brussels after the death of his grandmother. And the protagonist of Nowhere man can only escape Suburbia by faking his own death.

Secondly, teenagers and adults seem to take different positions regarding their environment. The teenagers in Violet as well as those of Fucking suburbia, frequent the so-called wastelands. The skate park, the woods and the edge of the football field are the places of the teenagers, where they are not bound by the adult society. Here, the BMX-crew flies in the air, but comes down to earth when Jesse is called a coward by another biker who subsequently tells him he’s not welcome. Similarly, the difficulty of conversation of these teenagers is uncomfortably clear in Fucking Suburbia. There is infinite silence when they are together. Even when the younger brother isolates himself with the girl in the wood, they do not talk.

Thirdly, the central figures in the three films are part of a disrupted family which seems to disturb their experience of space and suburbia in particular. It is clear that the murder of Jonas in Violet shadows over his friend and the other bikers. In Fucking Suburbia, the absence of parents and the dying grandmother bears down on the two brothers. The main character of Nowhere man struggles with a crisis, he is deeply unsatisfied with his existence and convinced he is not good enough for his wife. In these disrupted conditions the environment of suburbia is a desolate place of distortion, imprisonment, isolation and individuality as described above.

However, when the family is restored, another perception surfaces. In the final scene of Violet, the father finally succeeds in connecting with his son Jesse. At this point the Annelies Staessen

camera starts moving through the allotment to leave the spectator in a foggy dream at the end. Hence, suggesting things will turn out right. A comparable reversion occurs when memories of childhood enter the narrative. When the oldest brother recalls memories of playing in the streets as a child, in Fucking Suburbia, a positive vibe is related to the allotment.

He even indicates a house as beautiful. The scene with the ice cream car recalls the happiness of children in a dreamlike impression. Nowhere man combines the ideal of childhood and harmonious family in depicting how a happy family with a nice garden now lives in the house Tomas escaped from.

These suburbia are then nice surroundings for (innocent) children and harmonious families. Once this ideal, dreamlike situation (of childhood) is distorted, alienation and isolation sets in. The pervasive residential suburban dream simulates this utopian vision. Teenagers occupy a special position in this. Being in transition to adultery, they also inhabit these transition places.

CONCLUSION Throughout this paper I have investigated the cinematographic perceptions of Flemish suburbia in a selection of contemporary fiction films. Reflecting back on the discrepancy between the urban discourse and the everyday life and practice, the films depict a similar tension.

On the one hand, suburbia manifests itself as an idealized place. Children and undisturbed families experience suburbia as a paradise-like dream location. While, on the other hand, alienation through individual isolation and imprisonment is the overshadowing ambiance in these suburban movies.

These critiques correspond with the rather negative urban discourse.

Apparently adults prefer the suburbs to create a living place for their family since these places allow to simulate 2019 ARCHITECTURE & FILM SYMPOSIUM

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the paradise imagined in childhood. However, adultery, through puberty, involves alienation of this utopian image.

Planners recognize this alienation and emphasize isolation and imprisonment. But in ignoring the inclination to realize this paradisiac settlement, planners reduce their impact.

Moreover, planners stress the negative elements of suburbia, low densities, high energy consumption and car-dependency.

They portray suburbia as a dystopian place without providing an alternative that can resemble the childhood utopia, which results in unexecuted plans.

8.

Film was used to acquire knowledge and insight into the everyday and its intrinsic characteristics, the experience value and the typical dynamics of the Flemish urbanized landscape, or the horizontal metropolis. In particular the visualizations of suburbia depict a dichotomy between utopia and dystopia.

This cognition can be deployed by planners to establish a more nuanced perspective and spatial opinion.

10. Pallasmaa, Juhani, and Francisco Gilardi. "Lived Space in Architecture and Cinema." (2000).

ENDNOTES

13. For example: Beuka, Robert. "Introduction Utopia, Dystopia, Heterotopia." In SuburbiaNation, pp. 1-22. Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2004; Coon, David R. Look Closer: Suburban Narratives and American Values in Film and Television.

Rutgers University Press, 2013; Forrest, David, Graeme Harper, and Jonathan Rayner. "Filmurbia: Screening the Suburbs, 2017."; Muzzio, Douglas, and Thomas Halper. "Pleasantville? The suburb and its representation in American movies."

1.

For example: AlSayyad, Nezar. Cinematic urbanism: A history of the modern from reel to real. New York: Routledge, 2006; Barber, Stephen. Projected cities: cinema and urban space. Reaktion books, 2002; Clarke, David B., ed. The cinematic city. Psychology Press, 1997; Koeck, Richard, and Les Roberts, eds. The City and the Moving Image: Urban Projections. Springer, 2010; Mennel, Barbara. Cities and cinema.

Routledge, 2008; Penz, François, and Andong Lu, eds. Urban cinematics: Understanding urban phenomena through the moving image. Intellect Books, 2011; Pratt, Geraldine. Film and urban space: critical possibilities.

Edinburgh University Press, 2014; Shiel, Mark. “Cinema and the City in History and Theory.” Cinema and the city: Film and urban societies in a global context (2001): 1-18; Shiel, Mark, and Tony Fitzmaurice, eds.

Cinema and the city: film and urban societies in a global context. Vol. 48. John Wiley & Sons, 2011..

Pisman, Ann, Isabelle Loris, Katleen Vermeiren, Karin Hahn, Sophie De Mulder, and Stijn Vanacker. "De verkaveling in cijfers." In Verkavelingsverhalen, pp. 17-32. Public Space, 2016.

9. Elchardus, M., and L. Roggemans. "De ideale levensloop van jongeren."

N. Vettenburg, J. Deklerck & J. Siongers (Red.) Jongeren in cijfers en letters, Bevindingen van de JOP-monitor 2 (2010): 161-180; De Decker, Pascal. "A garden of Eden? The promotion of the single-family house with a garden in Belgium before the Second World War." In The powerful garden: emerging views on the garden complex, pp.

27-50. Garant Uitgevers, 2011; Verhetsel, A., F. Witlox, and N. Tierens.

"Jongeren en wonen: een onderzoek naar de woonsituatie, woonwensen en woonbehoeften van jongeren (tot en met 18 jaar) in Vlaanderen."

Wonen onderzocht 2004 (2002).

11. Soja, Edward W. Postmetropolis: critical studies of cities and regions.

No. 307.764 S6. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000: 324.

12. Postwar suburbia has been the setting for numerous suburban films since 1940s, such as: It’s a Wonderful Life, Frank Capra, 1946 – The Graduate, Mike Nichols, 1967 – the Swimmer, Frank Perry, 1968 – The Stepford Wives, Bryan Forbes, 1975 – Blue Velvet, David Lynch, 1986 – Edward Scissorhands, Tim Burton, 1990 – etc.

Urban Affairs Review 37, no. 4 (2002): 543-574.

2. For example: Healey, Patsy. "The treatment of space and place in the new strategic spatial planning in Europe." In Steuerung und Planung im Wandel, pp. 297-329. VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2004; Harvey, David. The condition of postmodernity. Vol. 14. Oxford: Blackwell, 1989; Lefebvre, Henri, and Donald Nicholson-Smith. The production of space.

Vol. 142. Blackwell: Oxford, 1991.; Massey, Doreen. For space. Sage, 2005; Soja, Edward W., Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-And-Imagined Places. Cambridge (Mass.): Blackwell, 1996.

3.

The average population density in Flanders is 485 inhabitants/ km2 in 2018. (https://www.statistiekvlaanderen.be/ bevolking-omvang-en-groei).

4.

Vlaanderen, Ruimte. "Witboek Beleidsplan Ruimte Vlaanderen."

Brussels, Belgium.[https://www.ruimtevlaanderen.be/Portals/108/ WhitePaperSpatialPolicyPlanFlanders_brochure2017_1.pdf] Available from (2017); Vlaamse Overheid. (2017a). “Vlaams Bouwmeester meerjarenprogramma 2017-2020.” Brussels, Belgium. [https://www. vlaamsbouwmeester.be/nl/meerjarenprogramma-2017-2020.]

Available from (2017).

5. Other terms to describe this dispersed field of urban sprawl are dispersed city, nevelstad, edge city, città diffusa, città fractale, network city, generic city, tapijtmetropool, etc.

6. Braem, Renaat, Het Lelijkste Land Ter Wereld. Leuven: Davidsfonds, 1968.; Many aspects of the book The ugliest country in the world, in which Renaat Braem deplores the Belgian sprawl, remain contemporary sore points. .7. Vlaanderen, Ruimte. "Wit Boek Beleidsplan Ruimte Vlaanderen." 188p [En ligne]. https://www. vlaanderen. be/nl/publicaties/detail/ witboek-beleidsplan-ruimte-vlaanderen (page consultée le 12 septembre 2017) 2016.

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The Cinematic Spaces of the Horizontal Metropolis : the Image of Flemish suburbia.

…And Out Come the Truths: Premonition and Space in Jacques Tourneur’s Cat People MARKO DJURDJIC York University

Cat People, a were-tale of a traumatized woman, Irena Dubrovna, trying to balance animalistic urges with her need for human connection and love, uses diegetic spaces and props as premonitory tools that reveal more than they conceal, evoking the film’s tragic finale by actualizing the figurative spatial and physical elements—including statues, paintings, and furniture—as the narrative unfolds.

Through art, dreams, memories, and fantasies, the film’s representational spaces, and the design of these spaces, evoke Irena’s dueling identities, both the internal-mental, and the external-material.

The conflict arises when the trauma evoked by the place occupied by Irena in the past (her village in Serbia) bleeds into the present (a generic American cityscape). Here, her past, a veritable nightmare, clashes with her present, where the notion of the ‘American Dream’, one where everyone is ‘happy’, is represented by the eventual union between her husband Oliver and his colleague (and Irena’s foil), Alice. Through four essential pieces in Irena’s home (a statue of King John of Serbia, a Francisco Goya painting, a panther-adorned Byōbu, and a birdcage), this paper outlines how these various elements become realized through the course of the film, transgressing the allegorical and metaphorical to become actual. By subjecting figurative language to the needs of the narrative, Cat People explicitly, and systematically, reveals its ending throughout the course of the film through these self-actualized spaces and objects.

Marko Djurdjic

As the opening credits of Cat People (Tourneur, 1942) roll, they do so over a Byōbu, a folding screen commonly used to separate spaces in Japanese homes, or to change clothes behind. And thus the film, a mysterious, smoky, shadowed picture directed by Jacques Tourneur and produced by “suggestive horror” practitioner Val Lewton, immediately invokes two elements which will consistently play out during the picture’s run time: space and metamorphosis. And the Byōbu’s painting of a leering, stomach-churning panther, stalking its unknown prey in the jungle, points to something feline and dangerous lurking not only behind the screen, but on the screen in front of us as well.

The film, a “domestic drama with a tinge of the supernatural,” begins with Irena Dubrovna (Simone Simon), a shy lonely girl, meeting a handsome boy (Kent Smith) at the zoo. She reveals to him that she feels an evil, feline spirit living inside her, and that their union will result in his demise: when they embrace, she believes she will transform into a cat. This premise evolves into a psycho-sexual love story with tragic consequences, as various auxiliary characters become entangled in Irena’s supposed mania, including Alice (Jane Randolph), one of Oliver’s colleagues at the ship building company where he works, and Dr. Judd (Tom Conway), a psychiatrist hired by Oliver (on Alice’s recommendation) to ‘cure’ Irena.

As a self-aware feminine monster, Irena goes against the typical depiction of ‘The Housewife™’ that was pervasive in the 1940s, caged by the “culturally specific symbolic association of women/Woman/local” that she rallies against.

For Irena, ‘home’ is not simply a place—or space—of comfort.

She is more ‘real’ than the domesticized Alice, in that the idea of a comfortable home does not necessarily encapsulate her life as a real women, even in the cultural milieu to which it refers. Instead, “the home may be as much a place of conflict (as well as of work) as of repose.” Irena eschews gender norms by denying the affections of her husband, but in attempting to escape “the norms of sexuality and gender formation— especially heterosexuality,” Irena loses out to the normal, static Alice, who Oliver eventually realizes is his true love.

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Figure 1: The statue of King John of Serbia proudly spearing a feline sits in the centre of both Irena’s apartment, and her psyche

Home, for Irena, is therefore not a haven from the world.

It is not a place of respite or calm. Even when she seems comfortable, something comes along and discomfits her tranquility. In Irena’s case, her space, her apartment, generally seen as an “unproblematical ‘home’, [is] a site of indulgence in nostalgia, [and relies] on a very different concept, […] one which is very tied in with gender.” While Doreen Massey states that “many women have had to leave home precisely in order to forge their own version of their identities,” Irena’s true home—her village in Serbia—is inescapable because of the lasting effects the stories she heard as a child have left on her psyche, effects labelled by the men in the film as verging on insanity.

When Oliver and Irena first go back to her house, we fade in from the image of Irena’s speared-panther drawing from the opening scene at a zoo to a silhouette of the statue. After turning on the lights, she tells Oliver how she likes the dark, that it is friendly. Later, we will see that she is in turn very friendly with the dark, using it to stalk Alice in the park and in the pool. Oliver, now in the light, becomes intrigued by the statue. He asks who it is (“King John of Serbia” she answers), and why he is spearing a cat. She tells him, in cryptic Irena fashion, “It’s not really a cat: it’s meant to represent the evil ways into which my village had once fallen,” and here we are presented the first instance where an element in her space will have lingering effects on the rest of the narrative.

In Cat People, Irena’s space is not simply occupied, or filled, by her body and the objects she holds dear. Instead, these elements point to something greater, holding clues to not only Irena’s truth, but to the entire narrative of Cat People.

In this paper I posit that the various spaces and objects in the film hold premonitory qualities that reveal more than they conceal, that looking ‘behind closed doors’ actually leads to more truths than what we expect to find, and that figurative spatial elements are actualized as the narrative unfolds.

Tom Gunning writes that Irena’s interpretation of the speared cat as not ‘really a cat’ casts the statue as allegory, in that it “consists of an explicit reference to a second meaning which effaces, or at least undermines the representative quality of the first image.” The ‘evil cat’ in question is actually representative of the “former evil way of life in her village,” but here, the statue seems to be employed more as a piece of explicit premonition, than simply as a reference to a meaning greater than itself.

A CENTRAL FIGURE: THE STATUE OF KING JOHN OF SERBIA The statue of King John that sits in the centre of Irena’s living room is, from the outset, designed to invoke violence, particularly against the ‘evil cats’ of the world. It is one of the first images we see in the film, and plays a prominent role in Irena’s space, placed right in the middle of the living room on a high table. It is one of the first things Oliver notices and talks about, and, as a plot-point, sparks the cat-people story which drives the narrative.

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Although Irena herself allegorizes the statue, the film, in contrast, uses the statue to depict the violence which occurs at the end of the film explicitly on screen. In one telling scene, as Irena ‘stalks’ Alice over the phone, the statue of King John sits in front of her, the violence depicted precise and heroic, violence that Irena is now poised to commit. It is only later that we realize that the violence will be directed at Dr. Judd, a predatory male figure, and not Alice.

While the final battle between Dr. Judd (and his unsheathed cane-sword) and the transformed Irena is shown on screen, it is done so through shadows, the graphic violence of her spearing and of his mauling alluded to by both the shadows, …And Out Come the Truths: Premonition and Space in Jacques Tourneur’s Cat People

painted cats staring down at Irena, judging her, knowing the truth of her animalistic ways. Even when he breaks contact with her, the cats never drop their stare. In two further scenes, one with a kitten Oliver buys for her and another in a pet store, it becomes apparent that the attitude of the wideeyed cats in the painting towards Irena is reflected by living animals in the ‘real’ world, who uncontrollably hiss, caw, and thrash in her presence.

Figure 2: Irena paints while the Byōbu panther stalks its caged prey.

and the statue. The violence at the end—both technically difficult due to budget and effects constraints, as well as censorship issues—is shown explicitly through the statue: a man with a sword has speared a cat. The statue, as a form of ‘high-art’, is used as a guise for the violence of the ‘low-art’ film. The statue is more akin to visual ekphrasis than allegory, vividly depicting one piece of art (the film) through another (the statue). In Cat People, “the figurative becomes realized on an intra-textual and diegetic level”: from the very moment Irena’s statue appears on screen, we are unambiguously shown—and thus made to expect—that a cat will be speared by a sword in this film: there are no metaphors or allegories or surprises hidden in the image of the statue. It clearly tells the audience that a sword will go through a cat, a moment which is actualized when Dr. Judd stabs Irena with his cane-sword.

HANG THEM UP: THREE PIECES IN IRENA’S HOME While the statue itself has a specific meaning to Irena, and her conception of it is important in the diegetic world of the film, for the audience, this statue is a prime example of the premonitory nature of Irena’s space. This notion is further promoted by—and inherent in—three objects in her home: the giant painting above her fireplace, Manuel Osorio Manrique de Zúñiga by Francisco Goya, the folding screen from the credits of the snarling, prowling panther, and the birdcage given to her by Oliver.

After Oliver first inquires about the statue, Irena walks over to the fireplace and stands under the Goya painting, as we cut to a medium shot of her telling her story. Above her head, there are three cats, their eyes fixated on her, silently interrogating her from behind. The painting itself seems to be conscious, aware of something we do not yet know. Even though, in the painting, the cats are looking at a magpie, the framing and composition of the filmic scene lends itself to an air of suspicion on the part of the cats: even painted animals will watch Irena closely. When Oliver walks over to join her, to comfort her, we once again see the probing eyes of the

Marko Djurdjic

The two other pieces of note are a birdcage and the aforementioned panther-adorned Byōbu, both of which tie into the image of the caged panther at the zoo from the opening moments of the film. After viewing the panther, and speaking to the zookeeper, Irena rushes from the scene as we fade from the zoo into her bedroom, revealing, for the first time since the credits, the folding screen’s panthered face.

Although it is obscured by the shadow of the birdcage, the panther’s mouth and face are menacingly revealed behind the bars, and—following the previous scene, as well as the opening shot—Irena is once again closely associated with the image of a caged panther. As we continue to pull back, we see Irena calmly drawing and whistling, while in the background, the bird’s shadow flitters across the panther’s head and face.

This continuous image “provides a visual link with the previous scene, taking up the ‘caged panther’ motif, and connects the panther with the bird,” Irena to the panther, and Irena to her space. Like the panther in the zoo, and the panther on the screen, she is trapped within her apartment, and within her own body. As Irena walks over to the birdcage, she tries to take the bird out, but within seconds, the bird is dead, the panther’s predatory face now eerily connected to the bird’s death at the hands of Irena. She puts the bird in a box, and goes to the zoo, presenting the panther in the cage the carcass of the bird, and as she leaves, we hear the sounds of the panther eagerly devouring the bird.

When Irena and Oliver later talk of the bird’s death, she tells him she had to throw the bird to the panther, and that this compulsion to appease the panther frightens her. They talk by the statue of the impaled cat, and as Oliver tells her she needs to get help, her head is bowed, and she looks wearily at the statue. Oliver, in his All-American, dad-joke way, tells her, “Not that sort of help!”, even though she appears cognisant of her doomed fate. This close linking of the screen to the statue further promotes her inevitable end, that the apartment itself is trying to make Irena aware that she has no chance of surviving now that she has chosen her human ‘mate’.

The birdcage—which, like the oncoming violence, is invited into her home by Irena herself—plays one more prominent role, in a scene where Alice visits the Reeds. As Irena opens the door of the apartment, we see Alice perching, bird-like, on the edge of the couch, hat angled like plumage on her head.

From the moment we see her through the door frame, and

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Figure 3: Oliver and Alice share a nice, wholesome conversation.

during the ensuing conversation with Irena, Alice is framed sitting beneath the now-empty birdcage where Irena’s last victim was held. While Alice is positioned as the bird, Irena does not take off the fur coat, giving her the image of the panther on the screen from earlier, hunched slightly, as if ready to strike. Alice is thus positioned as Irena’s next victim, the next ‘bird in a cage’. As Alice leaves and Irena voices her displeasure with Oliver sharing their intimate home life with his colleagues, she never takes off the fur coat: the animalism is building, no longer simply inside her, but now manifesting on her physical, outside body.

ALICE, INEVITABLY And unfortunately for Irena, Alice’s continued presence signals the impossibility of a happy end for Irena. Alice is not the aforementioned caged bird, the victim: Irena is, trapped in her own mind and body by the evil she senses inside herself.

No one can unlock the cage and set her free. Alice’s alignment with the generic C.R. Cooper office where she and Oliver work, with its bland water cooler talk, is where Oliver reveals both his ordinary upbringing and life, and where him and Alice have their first ‘intimate’ moments. The office, and thus their work space, with its light walls and rows upon rows of faceless desks, reflects his life up until his meeting with Irena: repetitive, singular, ordinary.

Oliver, even before Irena is killed, blatantly flirts with Alice, and a scene at the museum not only aligns the two, but overtly casts Irena out of the picture, both from their diegetic relationship, and literally when she leaves the frame. As they walk through an exhibit on ships (there are models and paintings all around them), Oliver and Alice tell Irena to go explore other parts of the museum, in order to protect her from boredom. The two are framed tightly behind a model ship, which keeps them in close proximity to one 40

another, entwined by the ship’s ropes as Irena stands in the back, staring longingly at the happiness of their union, their commonalities, and their shared interests.

Soon after the ‘museum incident,’ Irena follows Alice home and stalks her blonde foil at Alice’s pool (one of the film’s impressionistic set pieces). Here, Tourneur explicitly aligns Alice with water, the scene setting her apart from Irena in two ways: first, it “trades on what Barthes has called in S/Z the gnomic or cultural code, which in this case would state: ‘cats hate water’; second, and perhaps more tendentiously, it suggests her emotional transparency, in contrast to the mysterious obscurity of Irena’s origins and motivations.”

For Irena and Alice, the spaces they occupy serve as a reflection of characterization, explicitly alluding to how each of their relationships with the traditionally-minded Oliver will play out: Oliver ‘dives head first’ into his relationship with Alice, once he realizes that he will never understand Irena. As much as he is attracted to her on a physical level, her thoughts and feelings are too obscure, too strange, too foreign to Oliver. She is—quite literally—coming from a different place than him, trapped in the stories of her homeland.

Her customs and beliefs, although they turn out to be true, are nevertheless unknown to Oliver. He scoffs at them, patronizing her and glossing over her words. Conversely, his talks with Alice are straightforward, wholesome; there is nothing hidden behind their conversations, nothing cryptic.

She offers Oliver a non-threatening relationship awash with instant devotion and wholesome reassurance. Like the love that will follow once Oliver has cast Irena aside, Oliver and Alice’s love, and relationship, will be built on their mutual participation in the bland work-space: not necessarily cold, but not warm either. The perfect capitalistic couple.

And yet, although Alice is associated with transparency and Irena with mystery, Irena is just as straightforward and honest with Oliver. It is Oliver’s inability (perhaps, unwillingness) to …And Out Come the Truths: Premonition and Space in Jacques Tourneur’s Cat People

Figure 4 (above): The cats from Goya’s painting stare down at Irena.

Figure 5 (below): Oliver grows weary of both his wife, and her tall tales.

Marko Djurdjic

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believe or acknowledge her words which allows him to easily cast her away when the All-American girl comes into his life.

IRENA HERSELF And because she occupies these alien, premonitory spaces, Irena herself becomes a figure of premonition. In her very first act on screen, she draws an image of a stabbed panther, seemingly aware of her fate. She knows where she will end up, how her death will play out, and it all stems from her past. From the moment Oliver walks into her building, he comments, “I never cease to marvel at what lies behind a brownstone front,” stunned by the ornateness present behind the brownstone’s hard, homogenous front. There is something almost organic about the inside of her space, a response to the sterility of the spaces occupied by Alice and Oliver. And thus, Oliver’s first interaction with Irena’s space is one of opposition: what is seen on the outside does not necessarily reflect what is revealed inside. Here, Oliver represents what Henri Lefebvre would call the illusion of transparency. Oliver, in his simplistic way, embodies this illusion because of his sense of wonder. He views space “as innocent, as free of traps or secret places.” Although it may not always deliver what it promises, he never expects there to be anything dangerous behind the façade. Like Irena, who he tries to describe and explain through his established morals and beliefs, Oliver assumes that her space is just as innocent and pure, albeit marred by the past. Unfortunately, like Irena herself, her space holds the keys that should reveal to him her true nature...if only he knew what to look for.

For Lefebvre, spaces that hide or disguise are dangerous, and thus “antagonistic to transparency, under whose reign everything can be taken in by a single glance from that mental eye which illuminates whatever it contemplates,” and his illusion of transparency is built on assumptions and presumptions. Oliver sees a cute, shy girl, alone at the zoo, and immediately assumes she needs a friend, company. When he sees her statue and she tells him her story, he forms in his mind a pop-psychology interpretation of her mental acuities (“You’ve got to have help, Irena,” he tells her during one of her more vulnerable moments, with all the subtlety and nuance of a sledgehammer). He does not attribute any power to her space, but sees it as four walls and some decoration, with all her neuroses stemming from Irena herself. And yet, Irena’s ‘transparency’, her willingness to tell the truth, to try to get others to believe her, is constantly contradicted in favour of ‘logical’ explanations. Oliver strives for transparency, wants to know the truth behind the façade of the brownstone, yet he denies the truth when it is clearly and explicitly presented to him. When he ends up with Alice over Irena, it is not a surprise, as her alliance with—and reliance on—the transparency of water. In a film consumed by doublemeanings and contradictions, Irena’s space, like Irena herself, unambiguously attempts to reveal to the audience and to the 42

other character’s that “nothing is certain, no issue is clear-cut, nothing is what it seems.”

While Irena speaks of the loneliness and isolation she has felt, and that it was never her intention to fall in love with Oliver, in her (supposed) paranoia, she has become distanced from the world around her, building up ‘walls’ to protect herself from the world. This distancing from society stems from her belief in the stories of her past, which have convinced her that she is evil, that there is something evil inside her. David Harvey writes that, “Collective memory, a diffuse but nevertheless powerful sense that pervades many an urban scene, can play a significant role in animating political and social”—and in this case personal—movements. Although Irena comes from a village, and thus a rural scene, those stories have nevertheless enacted a powerful influence on the way she lives her life.

Irena’s memories of the stories she heard of her town’s history have altered the way she lives, how she experiences love and other people, who she falls for and gives herself up to, and how she has designed and constructed the space she inhabits.

Her home is a testament to the past and to memory.

This preoccupation with the past—and with the idols of the past—serves to impose a fixed narrative on her space. By living ‘in the past’ and historicizing not only her space but her entire life, Irena has foreclosed all future possibilities and interpretations, thus negating the generative power to build a different future with Oliver. By devoting her apartment, her fear, and her sexual life, to the possibility of the ‘ludicrous’ idea that she is a cat, Irena has accepted—in Oliver’s mind—a self-imposed ‘foreclosure of change’. When she attempts to augment her historicized narrative, to change it on Dr. Judd’s insistence by removing the offending pieces from her space, the violence of the past, signified from the outset by her statue of King John, is transferred into her real, present life by the very person who told her to dissolve her connection to the past: Dr. Judd. He imposes himself even in her dream-space, in the form of the cat-vanquishing King John, brandishing a sword, a stand in for his own cane-sword, which he will use to kill the transformed Irena.

While it is Judd’s job to “banish Irena’s irrational fears, he is also another potential mate,” and thus, a potential victim.

Irena ‘accepts’ Judd as her ‘mate’, transforms, and kills him, and in doing, spares Oliver so that he can be with Alice.

Since she has dedicated her life to upholding and preserving the beliefs of her past through the decorations inside her home, when the past—and its deeply ingrained beliefs—is threatened, Irena attacks ferociously. By asking her to negate her past through the removal of the ‘offending’ objects from her space, Judd invites retribution, and enables the violent, premonitory function of King John’s statue to finally be realized.

…And Out Come the Truths: Premonition and Space in Jacques Tourneur’s Cat People

ENDNOTES 1. Chuck Bowen, “Cat People,” Film Essays, Library of Congress, accessed March 22, 2018, https://www.loc.gov/programs/static/national-filmpreservation-board/documents/cat_people.pdf.

2. Ibid.

3. Doreen Massey, Space, Place, and Gender (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 10.

4. Ibid, 11.

5. Ibid.

6. Ibid.

7. Ibid, 10.

Figure 6: Irena stalks the zoo grounds, adorned in her furs.

CONCLUSION Early in the film, when Irena talks to the zookeeper about the panther, he says the animal is evil because of a line from Revelations, where the Great Beast is compared to a leopard. Like Irena, it is able “to defy classification and therefore knowledge,” and “its threat (and fascination) lies in its transgressive and transforming possibility.”

Space in Cat People has the same function: it is not simply defined by the people who occupy these spaces, who buy furniture to put into these spaces, who take baths and sleep there. Instead, the spaces are constantly in turmoil with these very occupants. These people do not simply live in these spaces, and the spaces do not simply exist to be lived in. Instead, the space itself interacts with the occupants, and inevitably defines their fates. The painting in Irena’s apartment looms over her and judges her; the park where Irena stalks Alice seems to sense the danger and ‘saves’ Alice by providing a bus; the bland office reflects the banality of Alice and Oliver’s future relationship. Space in Cat People is not simply occupied by the characters. It intervenes in their lives and provides explicit depictions of events in the film, clues to the inherent nature of the characters that, upon subsequent viewings, become more apparent.

The visual emblems of the pierced-panther sketch from the opening scene, the painting that judges Irena, the panther on the folding screen, and the statue, become “transferred to the diegetic level in the scene when Irena, who has been stabbed

by Dr. Judd’s sword-cane while in her cat form, falls and dies.”

The images presented earlier are actualized, thus embedding their premonitory power not only visually, but in the very narrative of the film itself. In the world of Cat People, the figurative becomes actual because it was always actual.

8. Ibid.

9. Ibid, 11.

10. Tom Gunning, “‘Like Unto a Leopard’: Figurative Discourse in Cat People (1942) and Todorov’s The Fantastic,” Wide Angle 10, no. 3 (1988): 33-34.

11. Ibid, 34.

12. Ibid, 35.

13. John Berks, “What Alice Does: Looking Otherwise at The Cat People,” Cinema Journal 32, no. 1 (1992): 36.

14. Robin Wood, Personal Views: Explorations in Film (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2006), 266.

15. Berks, 35.

16. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Cambridge (USA): Blackwell Publishers Ltd., 2001), 28.

17. Ibid.

18. Wood, 264.

19. David Harvey, “Space as a key word,” Spaces of Global Capitalism: A Theory of Uneven Geographical Development (New York: Verso, 2006), 138.

20. Ibid, 137.

21. Ibid.

22. Wood, 264.

23. Gunning, 36 24. Ibid, 36.

25. Gunning, 37.

All figures: Cat People, on A Val Lewton Horror Double Feature: Cat People & The Curse of the Cat People DVD, directed by Jacques Tourneur (1942; USA: Warner Home Video, 2005). Screenshots by author.

Because sometimes, what is important is not what lies ‘behind’ the (folding) screen. Sometimes, it is right there in front of you, stalking menacingly.

You just need to look more closely.

Marko Djurdjic

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The Thickened Line | Constructing: Exploratory Sketches and Mobile Sections

REBEKAH RADTKE GREGORY A. LUHAN University of Kentucky

“Design is not merely conceived as a building, streetscape or room interior, but as an active and holistic experience that factors in the ephemeral and emotive qualities of space as moments in time...”

Rebekah Radtke and Gregory Luhan

This paper presents a pedagogical case study that uses a hybridized collaborative learning framework to leverage the fundamental principles of the moving image through content-specific “deep dives” that heighten student learning, developmental expertise, and built environment knowledge. This research uses the metaphor of “the thickened line” as a repository of layered information for teaching collaborative design studios. In this context, “the thickened line” is an active device that integrates cinematic principles and mobile sections to enhance collaboration and improve design education. In a studio comprised of architecture and interior design majors, individually and collectively students explored collaboration through hybrid forms of multimodal communication and used the outputs to explore interiority and urbanity in two international cities. The students, through a series of film-based pedagogical provocations, developed the tools for understanding space through intuition and representation. Using the cultural contexts of Beijing and Cincinnati, the students, examined the meaning, perception, experience, and emotions of space as intentionally-delineated evidence for understanding architecture and design. The studio analyzed these urban spaces through film to provide formative opportunities for enhancing critical thinking, spatial observation, and cultural understanding. This 44

pedagogical approach revealed sensitivity to the human experience within a built space as an output and provided the fundamental basis for comparative studies between the cities as each investigation used an identical iterative process. The knowledge gained from this study illustrates the broader impacts of this pedagogical approach, most notably, using filmic readings of place to translate lessons learned from one context to inform another. The research also showed that integrating filmic experiences of the built environment improved how students considered creativity at a variety of media and scales from the urban plan to the streetscape to the spaces between buildings to the building to the interior of a room to the interior details.

Design education connects meaning with making through representation, abstraction, and scaled construction. Students often draw, hand-crafted and digitally constructed lines that vary in thickness to reveal specific information about an issue, place, context, or theme. The drawn line in this context is an exploratory device – a powerful design tool that oscillates between big-picture thinking and project detailing – where students develop representational intersections that are distinct, yet interrelated and overlapping. The varying thickness of this linework illustrates the degree and kind of a student’s disciplinary-specific and accumulated knowledge but also demonstrates the importance for integrating multiple complementary or contrasting vantage points into the design process and the inherent necessity for communicating visual and graphic information across disciplines. The research presented in this paper presents a pedagogical case study which uses a hybridized collaborative learning framework to leverage the fundamental principles of the moving image.

The study incorporated content-specific “deep dives” that improved student learning, developmental expertise, and built environment knowledge. Using the metaphor of “the thickened line” as a repository of layered information The Thickened Line | Constructing Exploratory Sketches and Mobile Sections

Figure 1: Overall pedagogical framework informed by film and the moving image.

also served as an active device for teaching collaborative design studios with the resulting “mobile sections” linked to integrated cinematic principles, enhanced collaboration, and design education improvement.

There is a robust foundation in literature exploring film in higher education, which creates critical pedagogies for understanding time and space for undergraduate education (Cresswell and Dixon 2002). The integration of film offers an expansive opportunity for pedagogical purposes than other media, connecting current critical topics such as politics to larger societal issues in ways that other media cannot (Giroux 2001). Diverse fields such as theology, psychology, and geography widely embrace avenues for a film to inform pedagogy (Kozlovic, 2005; Sandercock, 2010; Kennedy and Lukinbeal 1997). A review of literature also links opportunities for transformative learning and multidimensional application to the field of architecture which draws upon film and its scalar representation of architecture, interiors, and urban environments. Within the discipline of design, film links to interdisciplinary approaches to extensive exploration at the scale the city, architecture, and in interiors (Penz, 2014; Koeck & Roberts, 2010; Ellsworth, 2005; Cocchiarella & Booth 2015).

During his tenure at the Bauhaus from 1919-1928, Walter Gropius actively connected culture to the visual environment through design education. His pedagogical approach aimed at developing “teachers and students as a working community . . . leading them to become vital participants in the modern Rebekah Radtke & Gregory Luhan

world . . . seeking a new synthesis of art and modern technology” (Schlemmer, 1961). In this context, the Bauhaus faculty coordinated and formulated teaching methods driven by perception, space, and form. Their lesson plans and studio harnessed the Bauhaus’s blended environment. Students and faculty worked across scales and media types in the hopes of deepening student knowledge and individual exploration.

The theoretical underpinnings provided by Gropius also connected architecture to film with educators such as László Moholy-Nagy leading the way. This same connection between multi-modal outputs and collaborative contexts serves as a guidepost for the pedagogical framework chronicled in this paper.

The collaborative Global Studio developed at the [Institution name withheld] by professors [faculty names withheld] utilizes perception, collaboration, and synthesis as critical drivers for design innovation. In her essay, “Notes on Film and Architecture,” Diana Agrest suggests that architecture (image as background) has spatial, formal, and symbolic features that link culture to context through image and spatial depiction that combine to form “a continuous sequence of spaces as perceived through time” (Agrest, 1998). This approach builds upon Sergei Eisenstein’s pioneering efforts to advance architectural experience through the architecture of the film.

His essay “Montage in Architecture” lays the foundation for the Global Studio approach by explaining how to control the viewer’s gaze in ways that forces them to absorb and connect 2019 ARCHITECTURE & FILM SYMPOSIUM

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Figure 2: Student collage images exploring taxonomic structures through operative terminology.

physical spaces while the director creates architectural and cinematic grounds. These operations served as additional instructions for the Global Studio lesson plans. In his films, Eisenstein demonstrates how time and space relate to human movement through conventional architectural drawings, yet, in new cinematically-inspired ways of representation (Agrest 1988). The underlying structure of Agrest’s observations informed the Global Studio’s student-driven investigations across multiple forms of graphics output. These deliverables included two-dimensional collages (2D), three-dimensional assemblages (3D), and four-dimensional urban diagrams (4D) which the students later translated into the design of sitespecific accessory dwelling units (ADUs) in two metropolitan areas - Beijing (China) and Cincinnati (USA).

GUIDING QUESTIONS This research examines three primary research questions emerge: 1. How can integrating film into the studio inform design pedagogy and its process-driven approach?

2. How can filmic readings link initial student perceptions to serve as a bridge that deepens design and cultural competency prior to travel?

3. How can a film-based design studio pedagogy provide formative opportunities for enhancing critical thinking, spatial observation, and cultural understanding linked to urban analysis and design?

STUDIO FRAMEWORK The faculty lesson plans addressed these conditions by connecting place to words and by synthesizing terminology that could actively connect a student’s intuitive notions of place to inform cultural perception. The students advanced the lessons learned from these initial perception-based 46

images by translating them into three - dimensional constructions - assemblage-based models, that linked two-dimensional content to narrative and form and the perceptions of space and culture as spatial interpretations.

The students then advanced their knowledge of place through urban diagrams that captured the urban condition a series of flattened four-dimensional representations. The dynamic structuring of the two-dimensional, three-dimensional, and four-dimensional representations coincided with the integration of film theory. This integration provided an embedded structure for new modes of representation where the students could demonstrate how to co-locate form, content, and narrative expression in one composition. The studio framework enabled students to achieve this integrated goal by noting the importance of traditional methods of representation and embracing new ways of making that combined digital fabrication and milling whereby connecting film and architecture theory to an advanced design process driven by making well-crafted artifacts and visualizations.

The students in the Global Studio, by necessity, had to rely on film-based structural elements to give their representations deeper implied meanings, thus furthering Eisenstein’s and Agrest’s ascertain for linking “film to visioning” and simultaneously confronting fantasy (Agrest 1988) with the realities of place ripe with a dynamic interplay of concepts for envisioning filmic interpretations.

METHODOLOGY AND PROCESS In the Global Studio, architecture and interior design students individually and collectively explored collaboration through hybrid forms of multimodal communication and used the outputs to explore interiority and urbanity in two international cities. The studio intentionally analyzed these urban spaces through nine different films which provided formative opportunities for enhancing critical thinking, spatial observation, and cultural understanding; noting that film can serve as a means for understanding perception and intuition The Thickened Line | Constructing Exploratory Sketches and Mobile Sections

Figure 3: Student assemblage models exploring taxonomic structure through operative terminology.

without students experiencing a place firsthand. Most importantly, as noted in the literature review, integrating film into the studio could link initial student perceptions to their advanced preparation and as a result, serve as a bridge that deepens design and cultural competency. More specifically, design students could learn how to read and understand places and spaces beyond conventional means.

The rationale for this pedagogical approach was to connect spatial awareness with the five traditional registers of design education, most notably, to develop architecture and interior design student ability to speak, write, draw, model, and build (Luhan, 2004) within a transformative studio experience. The alignment and overlap of this logic created a broader narrative where cross-disciplinarity and filmic interpretations informed one another. This multimodal form of teaching studio also enabled students further by developing architectural designs that seamlessly shifted from 2-dimensional representations to 3-dimensional assemblages to 4-dimensional diagrams in three-week intervals. By enabling students to use a methodology related to film (such as integrating multiple vantage points, jump cuts, framing, splicing, and editing) and by looking at topics, objects, and places through collages (2D), assemblages (3D), and urban diagrams (4D) students were also able to simultaneously represent topics from different viewpoints and imply deeper meanings and narratives.

Initial research collected at the start of the semester revealed a latent organizational structure informed by site-specific conditions. The faculty transcribed their site-centered exchanges with students, which led to the development of nine taxonomies - edges, districts, influences, infrastructures, networks, places, territories, textures, thresholds - and the team-based student groupings. Faculty then assigned one taxonomy to each of the nine multidisciplinary collaborative teams comprised of 3-4 students which had a least one student from each discipline. These taxonomies served as a filter for their semester-long investigations and tripartite Rebekah Radtke & Gregory Luhan

assignments - collages, assemblages, and diagrams across the selected urban centers. These taxonomies also served as thematic drivers related to the films as a theoretical framework that drove the student research narratives. Within these taxonomies, each assignment explored the following four architectural variables as explained below.

01 - Collages - contrast, pattern, juxtaposition | In the collage exercise, students use a process-driven two-dimensional exercise to conceptualize their ideas about a place (Figure 2).

This exercise challenged student’s assumptions graphically, while also requiring students to write about the operations in narrative form. The representations used the principles and elements of design, yet challenged traditional architectural forms of drawing by transforming, manipulating, and abstracting resource images. The resulting compositions then visualized their team’s interpretation of the aesthetic narrative structures of the urban environment. This initial collage explorations served as an invaluable research tool that enabled and graphically illustrated the initial student perceptions of place and culture through the terms contrast, pattern, and juxtaposition. The analysis of the urban realm (Figure 2) through collage captured the salient qualities of the studio’s filmic readings by exposing the student to time, space, and representation through a two-dimensional form.

Students iteratively developed additional rigorous tonalities that investigated intuition and place through research as a collection of information and reinterpretation of material construction that would have otherwise gone unnoticed.

02 - Assemblages - (unit - module - assembly) - layering, time, scale | In the assemblage exercises, students synthesized both drawing and modeling by analyzing and visualizing each of the urban conditions before visiting them (Figure 3). These assemblages transformed the two-dimensional collages into a series of hybridized three-dimensional dynamic forms. The process of transference between media types connected the discrete exercises that the integration of film studies 2019 ARCHITECTURE & FILM SYMPOSIUM

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Figure 4: Student urban diagrams exploring taxonomic structure through operative terminology.

enhanced. The faculty assigned each taxonomic group of students a film (Figure 1) that depicted themes connected to their taxonomy. This intentional alignment allowed students to develop a deeper understanding of each city while inspiring them to generate additional two-dimensional and three-dimensional abstractions of place contextually.

Students used the assigned films to facilitate the translation of information from their collages into assemblage models.

Faculty encouraged students not to use subtitles while watching the films and instead challenged them to understand the film’s narrative through lighting, color, music, and camera angles. The students then used this knowledge to develop three-dimensional abstractions connected to subsequent discussions about the films. By interpreting how the director used devices to create the narrative structure of the film, students were able to formulate embodied narratives about their specific assemblage models. In this sense, the student served as the director for their assemblage models enabling them to develop framing devices that conveyed the narrative aspects of their project.

After watching the assigned films, the faculty challenged the students to identify the “visible and invisible barriers” between the audience and the film and to articulate ways in which the director transported the audience to the place of the film; thus, immersing them in a virtual context. Using their operational words – juxtaposition, scale, and contrast – the students connected the exercise to provoke emotional messages that the director delivered in their films. The students discovered that by combining time with performance led to an incremental differentiation which linked storytelling and storybuilding (narrative) to the studio’s process-driven approach as well as data visualization techniques and the moving image. Since the students used the collage as a basis of their assemblage-based inquiry and adapted each image through the lens of pattern, contrast, and juxtaposition, a parallel trajectory driven by this transformation linked the 48

modality of collage to digital fabrication. The studio used a combinatory drawing and model technique coined by the architect Thom Mayne (Morphosis) “drawdel” and further developed by Nikita Troufanov and Gonzalo Padilla in their material-based research (“DrawDEL Strands,“ 2012). The use of “drawdels” pushed the artifact to serve not only for the presentation of ideas but also proved to be a useful design tool, resulting in a composite drawing and model. Similar to the collage exercise the faculty required the students to write narratives that described how the film informed and challenged their initial design assumptions and helped them translate two-dimensional information into three-dimensional constructions.

03 - Urban Diagrams - hierarchy, flow, density | Similar to the films, urban diagrams can convey and then animate complex issues found in each urban context (Figure 4).

A curated set of lines, colors, and forms informed by the Chinese film selections challenged the students to distill narrative, time, and perception while testing their place-based assumptions. Whereas the collages and models situated intuition and material research as two- and three-dimensional investigations, the diagrams conveyed perceptions of the urban context through film and research, both as a sequence of moving images as well as two-dimensional static representations that have depth. The students used the terms hierarchy, flow, and density to operationalize and encapsulate each taxonomy. Using their filming readings, students also developed short narratives about how the diagrams completed their tripartite assignment and connected them to a broader discourse centered on their collective understanding of Beijing.

04 - Narratives - descriptive text | Students collected and analyzed information that connected and informed their iterative project series. As noted above, each exercise had an accompanying narrative where students had to write about their collages, assemblages, and diagrams. The student The Thickened Line | Constructing Exploratory Sketches and Mobile Sections

teams used the narratives to verbalize their design concepts, convey more profound understandings of the assigned films, and articulate how their research informed the way that they spoke and wrote about their work. The narratives challenged the students to state not what abstraction was, but rather what the image was doing and what the student-as-director was trying to achieve. This exercise enabled the students to translate topics, terms, and context into well-written narratives that elucidated the visual 2D, 3D, and 4D works in new ways. The integration of these narratives continued to enhance the multimodal design process while providing overt and critical insights about the design intent and context.

Writing about the exercises helped the students to better position their work while allowing the viewer to understand the student’s intuition, perception, and spatial reading.

RESULTS The application of filmic readings in a collaborative, multidisciplinary design studio proved to be a useful pedagogical approach for process-driven exploration centered on the perception of place. The active integration of cinematographic concepts, such as the composition of image and signs, requires coding of organizational concepts that revealed latent structures. Students subsequently decoded the concepts through analysis and evaluation before applying them to their final design project; thus, enabling the full realization and totality of the pictorial research as a multidimensional production and collaboratively integrated design. Just as the film scenes infused purpose, meaning, and intention in film, so too did the corresponding pedagogical framework. By integrating filmic readings into the studio as a vital component of the design process showed incremental shifts in knowledge and project development throughout the semester. This growth enabled the film to serve as a bridge between multimodal translations (Figure 1) and the final studio project. In addition, faculty and reviewer feedback served as a filter between individual iterations of each exercise, which subsequently elevated the quality of the studio artifacts. The integration of an iterative review process stresses the importance of achieving excellence and allowed students to critically reflect on the production of their design.

The outcome resulted in a higher quality project output, not limited to the bounds of a single final review without reflection and revisions.

With the language barrier and the lack of subtitles (especially in the Chinese language-based films) in the viewing of the films, students focused on interpreting the nuances of the film by first using their collective intuition. Each student then aligned their intuitive assumptions to inform subsequent discussion about how these preconceptions challenged, disrupted, or shifted their work. Students concluded that the film’s director used an “essential tension” to produce sudden shifts in the narrative. These shifts were most visible in the Rebekah Radtke & Gregory Luhan

graphic readings of their associated collages, assemblages, and diagrams. Other students noted that character growth in their assigned film illustrated an emergence and proliferation through progression, which the team adeptly translated through their line work and modeling.

In some cases, students were quite literal with the filmic interpretations. When the film focused on water, so too did the students. In one taxonomy, the students directly translated this awareness into explorations that connected the urban canal systems of Beijing and its reservoirs to further their research on how the canals changed over time and influenced the surrounding urban conditions. Another student team used their film as an underpinning for a spatial model that articulated the influence of past dynasties from the 1300s and chronicled how it corresponded to changes in urban development. The research also revealed that tasking students to conduct close readings of the films without depending on language or subtitles as a means of comprehension, allowed the students to be more intuitive in their design approach. Subsequently, this process enabled the work to have more emotive qualities, which added to the studio’s productive discourse about the nuances found in each interpretation. Observing the interactive and intuitive learning process/methods suggested in this paper led to a faster and more in-depth understanding of the digital modeling and digital fabrication processes necessary to generate the design solutions. The process also resulted in a more in-depth urban analysis and integrated design and communication strategy building up to the year-end design exhibition and showcase.

The Thickened Line research produced four primar y outcomes: Teacher as Director, Student as Director, Internal Feedback and Critique, and Studio Translations.

Teacher as Director | By insisting upon two-dimensional, three-dimensional, and four-dimensional media outputs students engaged with filmic readings through a variety of scales interactively. Within this context, the intentional rationale for integrating film into the studio was to provide new and more tangible devices for improving architectural and interior studies and to enable more opportunities for students to connect these devices to the realities of a given place that was unknown to them before the studio.

Students used these lesson plans to draw, model, and analyze urban environments by connecting the project through architectural devices such as plan, section, elevation, through cinematographic outputs and montaged images. The filmic operations improved the course artifacts and served to operationalize the faculty as film directors.

Student as director | At the beginning of the semester, none of the students had previous exposure to film theory or knew how to produce or integrate close readings of a film beyond passively attending movies at a theater. Faculty linked the approach to architecture and design by teaching the students 2019 ARCHITECTURE & FILM SYMPOSIUM

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Figure 5: This image illustrates the impact of the filmic reading and interpretation on the iterative process on student work.

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The Thickened Line | Constructing Exploratory Sketches and Mobile Sections

how to conduct a deep dive into this new territory. Students did not know the answer, nor did they immediately know how are they going to represent their ideas and intentions until they did their close reading of the film. This “unknowing” led to deeper discovery as the students learned how to present their ideas through the Global Studio’s process-driven approach. The studio exchanges improved dramatically by aligning the work with Wolfgang Meisenheimer’s essay “The difficulties of depicting time and space.” This approach used collages, assemblages, and diagrams as annotations for the design process. With students operating as the director, they were able to learn how to engage effectively as a team, leveraging peer-to-peer learning opportunities to quickly translate filmic readings into a physical product. Students had varying fabrication skills because of the different disciplines represented in the collaboration and were tasked to produce outputs that pushed existing skill sets and develop new skills through the collective work. Students stated how they were able to learn from each other in a more effective and efficient way because of the teams that were established.

Studio Translations | The studio trajectory focused on translating the initial conceptual drawings into hybrid models and then by extracting key variables from which the students translated into multi-dimensional representations. The concept of time introduced by watching and mining pieces of information from assigned movie resources and literature resources enabled the students to diagram the urban condition. Students captured the complexity of a site through various line weights and by revealing societal, political and environmental influences that they translated through cohesive narratives that ran through their representations.

Juried reviews throughout the semester served as valuable moments of repose that enabled the students to step away from their work and share their pieces of evidence in an open forum. The feedback provided in these critiques advanced design work rapidly. In a moment of reflection, after the completion of the collage exercise, students shared thoughts about the overall experience. It became apparent that some students lacked critical digital skills to be successful in the class. After an active listening session, the faculty shifted the pace of the course, restructuring it to include digital workshops that deepened the student’s understanding of these techniques and enabled the students to develop proficiency in areas that were initially lacking. This type of critical evaluation of student work resulted in better studio artifacts and student learning outcomes.

Internal Feedback and Critique | The studio used group critique and reviews for feedback. The faculty taught the students how to use the iterative feedback to improve the quality of their design decisions, their work while building critical foundations for their work through analysis. The scaffolded learning exercises used throughout the semester Rebekah Radtke & Gregory Luhan

led to problem identification (Pena, 2012) and solution finding that built up to an assumption of a place that simultaneously validated and challenged the student ’s site visit and contextual experience (Figure 5).

CONCLUSIONS The studio leveraged film to find understanding in design as an expression of time and space as a pedagogical framework for design education. Analyzing the meaning, perception, experience, and emotions of space as clearly and intentionally delineated in the art of film can be formative for understanding and advancing the design process. The intentional analysis of space through film provided students opportunities for critical thinking, spatial observation, and cultural understanding. Fundamentally this approach revealed sensitivity to the human experience within a built space as an output. Viewing urban conditions through the camera lens as a new way of seeing and thinking, provided a framing device for how students can view the world. These ideas align with Laszlo Moholy-Nagy’s book “The New Vision” and served as a way for students to isolate and narrow their focus in an otherwise data- and information-saturated culture.

FUTURE RESEARCH Intentional documentation and comparative studies of the iterative process illustrated the broader impacts of this pedagogical approach and its impact on student learning outcomes and improved artifact development. Using film to translate and make jumps between shifts in work can help students transition between two-dimensional work through four-dimensional explorations. The ability of a student to “sightsee” through a film in architecture described by Giuliana Bruno as an inscribed motion serves three primary purposes.

First, it allows the viewer to act as an urban tourist whereby providing an educational experience to the immersive environment of film. Second, it serves as a viable method for experiencing places. Third, it enables the students to gain empathy for a culture that ultimately will inform their design decisions (Bruno, 1997). If travel to the site is possible, going to the actual urban realms could validate or challenge assumptions and thus, align the student work accordingly.

This other type of immersive experience gives the students the ability to bring back findings to inform future studio work. Alternatively, using film as a substantive supportive substitutional experience or supplementary experience could also inform cultural experience when travel is not possible and thus enable the students to gain a deeper cultural understanding of place while on campus.

A threaded investigation through the course had multiple types of output. Relevant films provided at key intervals throughout the semester allowed students to make their architecture quite literally move, through visual enhancements and the process of design. Returning to the 2019 ARCHITECTURE & FILM SYMPOSIUM

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concept of the thickened line, using architectural conventions to enhance discipline specific understanding, yet provide a context of collaboration, the studio framework enabled pathways for connecting cinematic moments across the semester. These moments allowed the students to develop an implicit awareness related to visual oscillation techniques that simultaneously zoom in for detail views and zoom out to see “big picture” contextual relationships, thus furthering the relationship between the built environment and one’s perception of space. The class enabled the students to learn across disciplines (architecture and interior design) and contexts (Beijing and Cincinnati) by thinking about experiences in the built environment as an approach to integrating film and producing filmic readings of space. The faculty challenged the students to consider design not merely as a building, streetscape or room interior, but as an active and holistic experience that factors in how the ephemeral and emotive qualities of spaces are moments in time.

the Bauhaus. Middleton: Wesleyan University Press.

16. Sigler, T. & Albandoz, R. (2014). Beyond Representation: Film as a Pedagogical Tool in Urban Geography, Journal of Geography, 113:2, 58-67, DOI: 10.1080/00221341.2013.764918 17.

Sandercock, L. & Attili G.(eds.) (2010). Multimedia Explorations in Urban Policy and Planning. Urban and Landscape Perspectives, 7, 265286, DOI 10.1007/978-90-481-3209-6_14.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This project was developed and led collaboratively with Gregory Marinic and Jeffrey Johnson in the University of Kentucky College of Design. Special thanks to the generous grant funding support of the Confucius Institute, as well as the Beijing offices of Zaha Hadid Architects, Steven Holl Architects, and Urbanus.

ENDNOTES 1.

Agrest, D. (1993). Architecture from without. Cambridge: MIT Press.

2.

Bruno, G. (1997). Site-seeing: Architecture and the moving image. Wide Angle 19(4), 8-24. Johns Hopkins University Press. Retrieved January 23, 2019, from Project MUSE database.

3.

DrawDEL Strands: An Experiment in the oscillation of materiality.

(2012, December 20). Retrieved from http://www.evolo.us/ drawdel-strands-an-experiment-in-the-oscillation-of-materiality

4.

Eisenstein, S. Bois, Y.A., & Glenny M.(1989). Montage and Architecture.

Assemblage.

5.

Ellsworth, E. (2005). Places of learning: media, architecture, pedagogy.

New York: Routledge Press.

6.

Giroux, H. (2001). Breaking into the movies: Pedagogy and the politics of film. JAC: A Journal of Composition Theory, 21, 583–98.

7.

Kennedy, C., and C. Lukinbeal. (1997). Towards a holistic approach to geographic research on film. Progress in Human Geography, 21 (1): 33–50.

8.

Koeck, R., & Roberts, L. (2010). The City and the Moving Image: Urban Projections. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire; New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

9.

Kozlovic, A. K. (2005). Hollywood hermeneutics: A religion-and-film genre for the 21st century. Film Journal, 11. Retrieved March 26, 2008, from http://www.thefilmjournal.com/ issue11/religion.html

10. Luhan, G. A., Domer, D., & Mohney, D. (2004). Louisville guide (1st ed.).

New York: Princeton Architectural Press.

11. Meisenheimer, W. (1993). The Difficulties in depicting of time in space.

Daidalos 47.

12. Moholy-Nagy, L., & Hoffmann, D. (1938). The new vision: fundamentals of design, painting, sculpture, architecture. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.

13. Peña, W., & Parshall, S. (2012). Problem seeking: An architectural programming primer (5th ed.). Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley & Sons.

14. Penz, F. et al. (2004). Space: in Science, Art, and Society. Cambridge, U.K.; New York: Cambridge University Press.

15. Schlemmer, O., Moholy-Nagy, L., & Molnar, F. (1961). The Theater of

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Post-production of a Horizon: A Collage Sequence for the Resor House

ELENA ROCCHI

Arizona State University

“I never create an image when I want to build a house.“ Mies van der Rohe, interview with Bauwelt 1964.

The idea of frame exists in visual arts, films, and on stage as the boundary between the space that ‘is’ and the one of everything else. It is in the frame where the author’s mind and the viewer’s perceiving eye, unite.

Within the broader framework of a doctoral thesis on the idea of ‘frame’ as a designation suspended in between theatre, films, and architecture, this paper reflects on a research question: “How do we bring the concept of the visual frame into the physical space defined by architecture?” It does it by sequencing three collages Mies van der Rohe made for the Resor House in between 1937 and 1939, and interfacing them with 1) the grandeur format and simultaneous vision of Raoul Walsh’s movie The Big Trail (1930) and 2) the fragmentariness of Paul Klee’s painting Gay Repast (1928.) The study reframes Mies’s use of photomontage technique of the quantifiable of measures and materials as the non-quantifiable of sensations and imagination — a total work to describe the reality of experiencing the breadth of a landscape, the Jackson Hole Valley.

While taking in consideration the invention of the space of Modern Architecture going hand in hand with one of the new techniques of representation, the research reveals how ‘gaze’ penetrates the surface of the bidimensional screen by building a frame as a horizon and a duration. Compared with a panoramic movie, the construction of a window frame is one of simultaneity of the ineffable with the expressible.

Elena Rocchi

In Spring of 1937, Philip Johnson invited Mies van der Rohe to the States to design a ranch in the Jackson Hole valley for a MOMA patron, Stanley Resor — the father of the modern concept of publicity and the largest U.S. advertising agency of the last century. Threatened by the Gestapo in Germany, Mies accepted and migrated to the States to design a house as a bridge “to spam a stream that branched off the Snake River (with) the Grand Tetons loomed in the distance.” Immediately after his arrival in New York on August 20, 1937, he traveled to Wyoming and spent a few weeks at the Resor’s ranch. With the help of William Priestley and Bertrand Goldberg, two former members of the Bauhaus, he began the design of a house he did not build, producing more than eight hundred drawings and three collages. As part of the Mies van der Rohe Archive, they all appeal to Mies’s deep interest for this project as a fluctuant interior anchored to a horizon post-produced by a panoramic window.

THE BIG TRAIL AND DEPTH-STAGING: PHOTOMONTAGE EFFECT Three collages show three different views of a site dominated by a geological system formed 2.5 billion years ago that movies’ directors used as the set of Westerns films: the Teton Range mountains, a location Raoul Walsh featured in 1929 in The Big Trail. Using the Grandeur format as an expanded horizontal screen, he organized the film’s space upon the contrast between continuous actions in the foreground and the mountains in the background. The width of the panoramic ‘luminous window’ attracted more attention through means of representation technologically evolved than the classical one, accentuating values of a site otherwise invisible in a traditional screen, presenting it even more realistically, selectively, more meaningful than in reality.

The choice of the panoramic format helped Walsh not only to favor a much more complex set of the scenes happening both laterally and in-depth but to suit them to human eyes better. Human vision has a more developed field of action in 2019 ARCHITECTURE & FILM SYMPOSIUM

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Shore Drive Buildings Apartments in Chicago (1948-51), an epochal revolution of the relationship between architectural interiors and exteriors.

the horizontal plane (180 degrees) than the vertical one (90 degrees).

Figure 1: “The Big Trail” Directed by Raoul Walsh, 1930. Still frame.

In one of the scenes, Walsh filmed the settlers lowering wagons down the creek into the Jackson Hole. Movie’s spectators confronted 1) with the reality of a horizon — a breathtaking panoramic of the American landscape with the Mountains in the background; 2) a cliff and 3) a movement of wagons in the foreground, along with the right side of the frame. Simultaneous events design a ‘depth-staging’ — a montage effect without editing as the contrasting narrative events in a single shot — necessary to spectators for reading the movie in depth. After engaging with the cliff’s action in the foreground, viewers could rest their eyes on the background, wandering along the Teton Range in search of attractions. In experiencing a constant movement of eyes, they would end up fixating a point, breaking the frame, entering the space of the movie as a camera’s zoom in. By building contrasts between actions in the foreground and the background, Walsh’s Grandeur format virtually brings observers into the landscape to move them ‘beyond’ the frame.

Mies’s collage for the Resor House No. 716.63 has a coincidence with three things of The Big Trail: the landscape in the background, its panoramic format, and the (photo) montage effect as depth-staging. Coincidence? Deep down Mies “invested in the cultural issues of his time naturally, …clearly aware of the latest filmic experiments” as the American modernity’s greatest invention: the monumental form of cinema. Evocative of the spirit of a time embodied

by Stanley Resor — that of the value of images as that main medium of communication — the collage No. 716.63 is a design tool to investigate bidimensional ways of editing narrative as cinema. As Lutz Robbers’s reimagination of Mies’s 1927 ‘Glassraum’ in Stuttgart, the collage is a ‘projective apparatus’ and generator of moving images. It is the inception of Mies’s future research on the curtain wall for the Lake 54

The merging of Mies architectural window and Walsh’s Grandeur format speaks of the same: what we see on screens depends on frames. It is the choice of frames as formats — the cinematographic language — that influences film’s dramaturgy as well as internal and external views, or the figures and the objects they contain. Gran Teton’s view is not the same depending upon a traditional or a panoramic frame.

In the latter, everything gets lost; therefore, the eye wanders, and the frame is crucial, as Gunning pointed out, in designing the dialectic between attractions and narration. Observing these choices together with the manufacturing processes of movies show architecture a path not to design artifacts but ways-of-seeing, challenging drawings and design processes — the body of architectural knowledge.

STOP-MOTION OF A PHOTOMONTAGE SEQUENCE AND THE FRAGMENTARINESS OF PAUL KLEE’S GAY REPAST After the perspective for the ‘Bismarck Monument’ in 1910, Mies used the collage technique as the union of image and drawing to represent the non-quantifiable of the typical fluctuate of his architectural spaces. “Until 1928-29, Mies used montage exclusively in exterior views of his major projects. After 1930, however, he developed another type of montage to show interiors:” the collages for the Resor house are extroverted, revealing — as Plutarch said — that the exile did not change Mies’s ideas but only the place where he had them. The aesthetics of a collage technique he implemented in other European projects, represented his first American project not as an interior space but as the ‘infra-minimal’ depth of a panoramic window with a chromaticism composed by color, monochrome, and drawing lines — all combined with a black and white photograph.

Once he accepted the commission, Mies began to redraw in 1937 a project initially designed by Philip Goodwin: both, the house’s East wing and the bridge piers were partially built. A structure was standing on pillars, and from there, Mies took a picture he used in the first collage, looking north at the Teton Range Mountains and the wooden bridge. By widening the same image, in a second collage, he zoomed in to see better: the foreground disappears, and the mountains in the background become visible. In a third collage — the one numbered 716.63 — he zoomed furthermore on an exterior landscape the large glass contemplates facing South: here, all interior and exterior details are represented ‘flat’ and as magnified by a lens. Mies produced this third collage as a revision to his design in 1939, “although the clients had lost interest in pursuing the project.” As the last of a series of still frames of a static movie, this collage amazes and involves the viewer more than the other ones, mostly using attraction.

Post-production of a Horizon: A Collage Sequence for the Resor House

As the most representative document of this project, it is a typical Miesian photomontage as the reproduction of an interior, with a large texture on the place of the panoramic window to extrovert the interior space. A series of subjects as four physical-chromatic elements in the foreground, middleground, and background stand out in this slightly perspective representation: in brown, a low furniture bench; in color, a magnified image of Klee’s painting Gay Repast (1928) of Resor’s art collection; in black and white, a photograph of a landscape; and in pencil, two pillars, the ceiling, and the floor of an architectural space all compressed against the window. In observing this collage, the eye moves across the different parts. As Terence Riley pointed out, “the disposition of these elements is neither functional nor even literal:” the extraneousness of these elements and their relation draw attention towards the center of the image — a Cartier-Bresson “decisive moment” that is happening outside the window: two cowboys on horses are moving along the landscape, and one of them is looking at us.

As Josef Albers in Graphic Tectonics, Mies used the collage technique as a “maximum effect from minimum means” to simultaneously create the interior and the exterior space, according to concepts of simultaneity and multi-dimensional contacts. If it is true that a collage — a quantifiable object of defined composition — provides a context for “strange objects” to communicate a non-quantifiable value in a “nonverbal” manner, the enlarged image of Paul Klee’s painting is the strangest of the collage’s objects. Mies worked with Klee at the Bauhaus when he was the director in the 30s, but the act of enlargement is not merely a tribute to a friend, as Jean Louis Cohen indicates: its optical aberration is a strategy for the vision. In looking at this photomontage, someone has to orient first; then to decide what to look at; and finally, to place the sight between the partitions of the frontal planes. One pillar, visible in the previous collages, has disappeared: but it is still there, hidden by the image of Klee’s artwork. The eyes keep wandering, shifting from the spill of symbolic figures of Elena Rocchi

Klee’s square composition to the bench’s rectangular plane.

In their movement, they conquer the space in depth, breaking the frame to enter the fourth dimension of time.

Figure 2: Luminous Window, Photocollage, Elena Rocchi 2019.

Klee’s painting is crucial in this game of looks: placed by Mies as a bridge between the house’s interior in the foreground and the exterior landscape in the background, it bridges the flat image and the three-dimensional reality. At a first look, it appears detached from the composition since the aberration of its measurements turns uncertain the ones of space, opening the mind to a guess: ‘this’ is not an interior, and ‘that’ is not a window. If it is true as he stated, that he never created an image when he wanted to build a house, the creation of this monumental painting is not the representation of an interior, but a test about looking at symbols as an experience.

Mies admired Klee’s way of incorporating symbols in paintings, compositions of visual pictographs: in being organized as a cosmogony, Mies’s collage refers to Gay Repast as a category of a symbolic image in which elements “produce forms, but without losing their identity.” Mies’s enlargement of the image of Gay Repast is a symbol and its exemplary fragmentariness, a reference for his total work.

If Klee’s painting is a cosmic still life in which one can find “the parts but not the whole,” Mies’s collage is an attempt to describe the reality of an experience, impossible to hold on without using symbols. Klee often talked of his impossibility of understanding a concept without the presence of its opposite: the static and the dynamic; the logical and the psychological; the ponderable and the imponderable; the emptiness and the objects. Therefore, the infra-minimal depth of the pencil drawing in Mies’s collage — as the activation of a vacuum contrasting the fullness — suggests that one must look at this collage as if it were a screen. Flat images are floating in the void of the space of the collage as multiple scenes framed by a window as a horizon similar to the one of Walsh’s movie.

As Klee’s pink “March hare” in the tea scene in Carroll’s 2019 ARCHITECTURE & FILM SYMPOSIUM

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DRAFT

Figure 3: “Bunte Mahlzeit” by Paul Klee also known as “The Gay Repast, 1928

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Post-production of a Horizon: A Collage Sequence for the Resor House

Alice in Wonderland, the frame presides all fragments of the cinematic collage.

Figure 4: Archivo Drexler, N 716.63, p 81, Interior Perspective of the living room, looking south. Pencil, wood veneer, cut out color reproduction (Paul Klee, Bunte Mahlzeit 1928) and photograph on Illustration board. (76.2 x 101.6 cm)

As Klee’s painting background, Mies used the chromaticism to highlight the line the eye must follow when observing a two-dimensional representation. By organizing the contrasts between full and empty space, photo and drawing, he defined the frame of the monumental window without drawing it, using movement and counter-movements theory of Klee: it is in antithesis that expressions of forces are founded. The exaggerated dimension causes “the feeling of the planes,” and therefore, the space of the image becomes fluid: a fourth dimension appears as time in a moving picture.

The three parts of the collage No. 716.63 build multiple focal points to lead viewers’ eyes towards the cowboys, the painting, or the piece of furniture — creating and dissolving the window as the interior-exterior union in the observer. Depth-staging, montage/photomontage effect, and fragmentariness of both, The Big Trail (1930) and Gay Repast (1928), merge naturally: they are part of those visual experiments of the 30s aiming to involve spectators’ peripheral vision as Napoleon, (1927) the experiment on polyvision by Abel Gance. Similar to his three synchronized Elena Rocchi

films projected simultaneously on three screens, Resor House’s collages are three bidimensional fragments as part of a unity: following Gance’s description of his experiment, each part is dedicated to something or something else, and all together they are cinema. Therefore, paradoxically, their essential element is not the screen as the surface of the assemblage, but the window as the autonomous framing — the fulcrum of representation to connect the juxtaposition of individual scenes in the infra-minimal depth along the panoramic length.

Since the brain cannot record motion in terms of one frame only, Mies sensed ‘motion’ connecting visually these ‘apparently’ disconnected collages as a sequence of static images. Individually, they appear unnatural as rendered with sharp clarity. However, reading them one after the other as a stop-motion renders a sense of the movement of thoughts.

The sequence is so expressive that manifests the need to speculate a story about the client experiencing it as a piece of a bigger film. Maybe the Resor couple experimented the flow of the camera’s eye moving on their future life. Maybe they discovered the main idea for their house — the postproduction of a horizon as the interior’s quality. Maybe they entered the seemingly-permanent form of images as single stop-motion to feel spectators of the sizeable threedimensional format movie. Maybe not. However, with this stop-action photomontage’s sequence, Mies tested static medium’s capability to represent the movement of time 2019 ARCHITECTURE & FILM SYMPOSIUM

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as an experience, to realistically depict motion in 2D as it happens in watching a movie. As part of a broader narrative, these single shots revolutionized the concept of architectural representation to transport viewers into the scene of an American landscape like the one in Walsh’s movie.

Figure 5: Resor House, Sequence of Landscape view from living room (through a north glass wall) Drexler Archive. From top to Bottom: N 3800.808 Pencil, Photo-collage on Illustration board. (50.7 x 76.2 cm); N 3800.809, Pencil, Photocollage on Illustration board. (76.2 x 101.6 cm); N 716.63, Interior Perspective of the living room, looking south.

Pencil, wood veneer, cut out color reproduction (Paul Klee, Bunte Mahlzeit 1928) and photograph on Illustration board. (76.2 x 101.6 cm).

To design a panoramic window involves first the construction of a sequence of looking-outside-the-window. In using collages as still frames Mies referenced cinematic technique of montage to zoom and pan in exterior views and the depth of field, incarnating them not only in the collage but in the whole design process.

CONCLUSION In the Resor House, Mies confronted the design of a house as a frame for a landscape, using a sequence of three photomontages as a cinematic sequence of still frames 1) to zoom into a view; 2) to design a two-dimensional surface of a window; 3) to capture the observer’s attention; 4) and to frame an image of reality by alluding to the depth of vision.

These three photomontages, as the fleeting instants of time, capture a moment of a landscape to post-produce a horizon in a house’s interior. Since Mies’s work or written essays have no ‘concrete’ evidence of involvement with cinema as 58

Robbers pointed out, it would be difficult to say that Mies’s spaces of architecture are filmic or that they can be intended as cinematographic devices, but Resor House photomontages demonstrates that he conceived the design process as ‘cinematic’ and as the mechanisms of formal description of an experience challenging the staticity of drawings, and therefore, architecture. In fact, for Mies as for others architects and artists of the beginning of the past century, moving pictures questioned pictures as drawings; the way they could communicate architecture to clients; and the process of designing in an epoch of change of the representation’s technology. Mies’s use of the motion picture medium is absent as a way to propagate his architecture but present in every photomontage he made to build an artistic experience in viewers: this is why Mies’s photomontages are not descriptive neither can be considered similar to the products of the modern practice of assembling fragments. Inspired by panoramic moving images, Mies changed the walls of architecture into picture frames, as if the technology of panoramic movies format pulled off his fantasy of space and made him render the surface of Resor house’s large glass with the idea that ‘to look outside’ is like watching a movie. The Grandeur format of American cinema shifted the investigation on representation he started in Europe in the early 1920s as part of a bigger debate between artists and architects about rethinking the role of images in perception — about reconsidering their role from being a medium of visual representation of space to the one of informing the experience of time. The collage No. 716.63 together with the Resor House’s photomontage sequence show Mies’s collages are a ‘static cinema’ as a search for the authenticity of an experience — not only of design. The act of zooming in shows their essence of being an accurate facsimile of reality as a movie, to experience time while looking. As in movies, they are opaque windows that cannot look outside at the reality of the Teton Range, blind cinema screens, luminous windows, and surfaces of the imaginary. They are necessary tools to play with the sense of embodied feeling and to expand shared knowledge about the movement of thoughts. If Le Corbusier’s horizontal window is a precursor of the panoramic cinema, Mies van der Rohe’s three photomontages of the panoramic window are the medium for architects to orchestrate the simultaneity and understanding of the ineffable with the expressible to postproduce a horizon in the sense of letting the window as the horizon organizing “the outside into a vertical plane, that of vision … (because) before vision, the horizon is a boundary, an enclosure, an architecture.” Observers cannot fly outside into the landscape of the Jackson Hole: but as Mies commented some years later about a similar panoramic window — the one of the Farnsworth House — viewers can enter exteriors from inside, using the frame as a “higher unity,” necessary to get a deeper meaning of reality: “…we should try to bring nature, houses, and human beings together into a higher unity. When you see nature through the glass walls of the Farnsworth-house, it gets a deeper meaning than outside.”

Post-production of a Horizon: A Collage Sequence for the Resor House

ENDNOTES 1.

In 1937 Mies van der Rohe produced 844 drawings for the Resor House.

In 1968, they were reunited in the Drexler Archive with a chronological order classification system by Mies. 3800 — the Resor House — where (38) indicate the year of commission, and (00) since it is his first American project. Introduction to each project by Franz Schulze (FS) or George E. Danforth (GED).

2.

Scholars as Lutz Robbers have widely proved the relation between Mies van der Rohe and the medium of cinema, his association with pioneers of the abstract film as Hans Richter and the opening of a new chapter in the history of Modern Architecture. Mies “who remained silent on the question of cinema, was an avid movie goer… (and his) archive contains evidence that substantiates Mies’s connection with the world of film.” in Robbers, Lutz, Modern Architecture in the Age of Cinema: Mies van der Rohe and the Moving Image, A dissertation, Princeton University, January 2012: p 5-6.

3.

McQuaid, Matilda, Envisioning Architecture: Drawings from the Museum of Modern Art, New York: The museum of Modern Art, 2002, p.

90.

4.

This was the first film shot with a Mitchell Fox 70mm camera, image aspect ratio of 2,13:1, and screen size 35x171/2 ft. .

J. Dudley Andrew, “The Film Theory of Jean Mitry,” in Cinema Journal, Vol. 14, No. 3 (Spring, 1975), pp. 1-17.

5.

6.

Dietrich Neumann, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Vol. 66, No. 1 (March 2007), pp. 131-135 University of California Press.

7.

Lepik, Andres. “Mies and Photomontage, 1910-1938,” in Mies in Berlin, ed. Terence Riley and Barry Bergdoll, New York: the Museum of Modern Art (2001): 328.

8.

Idem, Matilda McQuaid.

9.

Detlef Mertins, “Architektonik des Werdens. Mies van der Rohe und die Avantgarde,” in Mies in Berlin, ed. Terence Riley and Barry Bergdoll, New York: the Museum of Modern Art (2001): 106-133.

10. Cohen, Jean Louis, Mies van der Rohe, Madrid: Edita Akal Arquitectura, (1998): 45.

11. As Franz Schulze reports in the introductory text to the Drexler Archive, Mies was fascinated with the idea of considering this window a large mural in-between spaces, a window that takes on “the character of the monumental painting” by using means of the collage technique.

12. Klee, Paul. Notebooks, Volume 1, The thinking eye. London: Lund Humphries, (1961): 77 13. Colomina, Beatriz, “Battle Lines: E 1027” in Hughes, Francesca, The Architect: Reconstructing Her Practice, MIT Press (1998): 6 14. Cohen, Jean-Louis, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Taylor & Francis, 1996:

Elena Rocchi

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Architecture of a Film: Matter in Reverse MARIA JOÃO SOARES SUSANA TAVARES DOS SANTOS JOÃO MIGUEL COUTO DUARTE CITAD - Universidade Lusiada de Lisboa

“A major portion of the creative action consists of a manipulation of time and space. [...] The kind of manipulation of time and space to which I refer becomes itself part of the organic structure of a film.

There is, for example, the extension of space by time and of time by space” Maya Deren

This paper is based on a concrete experience: the conception and production of the documentary film Aires Mateus: Matter in Reverse (2017) directed

by Henrique Pina. And it is in the condition of researchers and architects and cinematographic producers that we seek to reveal the reverse side of that experience.

film inside out is a search for specific processes of approximation of architecture to cinema, in which understanding is gained, from the architect’s point of view, through the act of doing and devolving that very doing, seeking to register an experience, whilst at the same time leaving it open. In other words, this paper is an experimental architecture of this film.

Reflecting on cinema is, from a certain point of view, indissociable from thinking space or time.

The latter two are dimensions that are rooted in the very essence of the cinematographic object.

They are structural, and for architecture they are precisely that, too. So, reflecting on the structuring of architectural thought is also a close approximation to reflection on cinematographic thought, and viceversa. Hence, all the texts produced over almost the last one hundred years that look at the relationship between architecture and cinema – from Sergei Eisenstein to Juhani Pallasmaa – are not just the result of a whim on the part of the authors.

Let us enter the architecture of a film; enter its matter in reverse.

In this context, we propose a journey to the interior of a film – a film we helped to construct – deconstructing it. A journey that reveals its structural narrative, its architecture. This act of turning a 60

Architecture of a Film: Matter in Reverse

Architecture and film, ever since the latter was invented, have established complicities between them, determined by the desire to frame time and space; in architecture, film has found a welcoming home for its narratives; in film, architecture gets the opportunity to see itself inhabited.

If one accepts that a structure is the genesis of an object – at once, the foundational reference and ultimate summary of its whole – and considering that that matrix, both for architecture and film, is firmly rooted in the concept of space/time, it is perhaps possible to find a common level of reciprocal observation between these two forms of artistic expression.

The possibility of thus gaining insight into architecture and film calls for a comprehensive look at both, given that the mainstays of both are always complex and wide-ranging.

This possibility is provided by a trans-disciplinary approach, a crossing of the sphere of architecture with the sphere of cinema, thus revealing common conceptual processes.

This could result in the re-discovery, with new limits, of the identities of both architecture and film.

This paper is based on the experience of the conception and production of the documentary film Aires Mateus: Matter in Reverse 1, directed by Henrique Pina (b. 1987). At its origin is research work carried out at CITAD, a research center at Universidade Lusíada de Lisboa. The conviction that cinematographic language is a privileged medium for the dissemination of architecture contributed to the research work and this paper. Indeed, for this reason the documentary has taken on ever growing importance.

Aires Mateus: Matter in Reverse is based on the work of the Portuguese architects Manuel Aires Mateus (b. 1963) and Francisco Aires Mateus (b. 1964) 2, and takes a look in particular at eight houses built by them in Portugal. Differing contexts are reflected – some of the houses are set in an urban context; others have a rural setting – and their states of completion also differ: the already completed and lived-in houses contrast with houses still under construction and those that have become ruins because they were never completed.

The film begins with an introductory segment featuring a conversation between the architect Manuel Aires Mateus, the visual artist Fernanda Fragateiro (b. 1962) and the philosopher José Gil (b. 1939), which raises questions that serve to frame the relationship between architecture and life. This is followed by the presentation of the eight houses with intermittent excerpts from an interview with Manuel Aires Mateus, thus crossing his thoughts with his work. The spatial experience of the eight houses is interpreted by the dancer Teresa Alves da Silva (b. 1977). The architectural bodies are revealed by an inhabitant body, that of the dancer, whereby said revelation is

captured by a camera body. The film emerges as a synthesis body.

This paper proposes a new look at the documentary from the perspective of the architecture, the very architecture that gave rise to it. The initial movement towards appropriation of the architecture by the film is contrasted with a movement in the opposite direction, one that seeks to establish an understanding of the architecture through the medium of film.

It is an attempt to manifest the architecture of a film.

ARCHITECTURAL BODY: THE ARCHITECTURE OF AIRES MATEUS Giving expression to contemporaneity – in all its complexity and contradictions – is one of the most difficult roles of architecture, but also one of its most pressing and challenging ones. The work of the architects Manuel and Francisco Aires Mateus is seen as understanding that role. The sheer scope of the work that they have been producing for a long time confirms this. Their designs develop a language that has a strong universal impact, with the confrontation between permanence in the sense of time and the finiteness of the existence of man contributing to that universality.

It would be appropriate to find in their work, especially as far as the definition of the domestic space is concerned, an affiliation with a certain perception of Portuguese architecture that finds its impulse in its relationship with the place. The place, which is also assumed as cultural and not just topographic, serves as the leitmotif for the design action.

Portuguese architecture tends to highlight adaptation to the territory, a preference for affirmation of the matter, the interiority of the space and the clarity of the game of light and shade. There is appreciation for how much the architecture appeals to the senses, its connection to the earth. These values reveal a tradition, albeit one in permanent motion, that is the result of a poetic approach.

The architecture of Aires Mateus adheres to that tradition.

It clasps the local territory, at times even appearing to rise straight out of it. It revisits long recognizable spatial values, consolidating archetypes. It seeks to achieve the quotidian, providing it with a framework for its own realization.

But it does so while asserting contemporaneity. It is true that their architecture functions on the basis of a set of recognized values, but it redesigns those values in response to contemporary technical, material and design circumstances.

Only thus, in a constant equilibrium between permanence and reinvention, can those values take on new meaning.

Architecture as constant transformation.

What emerges is architecture of volumes that assert clear geometries, thick walls that shield the interiors. But it is also architecture of luminous, unexpected and, above all, 2019 ARCHITECTURE & FILM SYMPOSIUM

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questioning spaces. It builds a covering for life to unfold, giving architecture meaning by signifying it. The aim is atemporality.

To use the words of Emilio Tuñón (b. 1959): Connections between time and space pervade the architecture of Aires Mateus Brothers. Their educational and professional work is experimental, persistently reflecting this timeless relationship, a human fascination since the birth of memory.

It reminds us of the finite nature of our existence, juxtaposing it against the continuity of time that stretches beyond the individual destiny of each one of us. [...] The architecture of Aires Mateus deliberately leads us towards these universal ideas about the uncontrollable passage of time in which we are nevertheless obliged to intervene.3 Perhaps for all these reasons one can confirm the existence in the work of Aires Mateus of an appetite – a desire almost – for cinematographic appropriation.

INHABITANT BODY Mechanics of Thought As if it were an architectural design, the film Aires Mateus: Matter in Reverse was formulated in an ex ante drawing. In a scheme made up of lines and words, the organization of an object – a film – was determined by defining how a set of other objects – eight houses – should be appropriated. It was an as yet imprecise drawing, as are all initial drawings for a design, but it revealed the desire for a centripetal movement, like dance, of discovery of an interior. The matter was taken on its own reverse.

There followed some small written texts, through which the eight houses were revisited. Their most challenging aspects were examined: their rooting in the landscape; the disequilibrium of some of the spaces; the texture of their bodies. The texts reflected how each of the eight houses was discovered. The texts are not screenplays. They are short narratives, if not to say parts of narratives, that at some point crossed with another more ambitious and complex narrative. They are reflections-cum-provocations. They proceed from architecture and end up in cinema; they are balanced between architecture and film. But they are neither architecture nor film. They are other transitional entities, just as all drawings that lead to an architectural design are transitional.

With these registers – drawings and texts – the aim was to fix values associated with the universe of architecture that could be appropriated by the universe of film; the desire was to experiment with a mechanics of thought which, as it is at the root of architecture and the design thereof, could also be 62

at the root of the construction of a film.

Openness to this intention is found in the thoughts of Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995), here acknowledged by Gregory Flaxman: In Difference and Repetition (1968) “[t]he search for a new means of philosophical expression… must be pursued today in relation to the renewal of certain other arts, such as the theatre or the cinema.” Although art and philosophy are materially different enterprises, the arts can be used to affect a new philosophical style because, Deleuze claims, they are comparable and even compatible. Directors, painters, architects, musicians, and philosophers are all essentially “thinkers.” The difference is that artists, unlike philosophers, do not create concepts; rather, they create “precepts” and “affects,” which are particular to a given medium but which philosophy can engage conceptually.4 Accordingly, it is of interest here to seek to establish a transversal common ground for architecture and film, as processes of “thought ”, and for concepts that are essentially inherent to the “plastic” philosophy of Deleuze.

In this common ground, the relevance of the production of “precepts” and “affects” in the context of the arts opens up a path to the consolidation of an intention that has been, from its origins, inherent to the structuring – and to the aforementioned mechanics of thought – of a cinematographic approach to architecture: to use the body on the screen as a projection of the spectator’s body, seeking to recreate “being there” for a body that is “not there”. Flaxman argues: “[t] he cinema provokes us to see, to feel, to sense, and finally to think differently […].”5 Hence the need for a body – an inhabitant body – to dialogue with the other bodies of the houses, as a mirror of another’s body, in quietude. A spatial central thread with which he explains durée.

Ronald Bogue (b. 1948) argues: How do we see durée? To answer this question, Deleuze extends Bergson’s thought by introducing two concepts that are not strictly Bergsonian – durée as the whole of relations, and movement as the expression of durée. […] When we see objects move through space, we also see changes in the relations between objects, and those changes extend into a whole beyond the specific objects under consideration. The movement of the bodies, in a sense, serves as the intermediary between closed sets and the open whole, in that the movement may be seen simultaneously as bodies changing positions and as an ongoing transformation of relations between bodies.

The movement of bodies, in this regard, may be said to express durée, or manifest the whole through a specific set of qualitatively changing between bodies.6

Architecture of a Film: Matter in Reverse

At the very beginning of the film, this need for transformation associated with movement, or durée, is advocated by José Gil when he states: “And there has to be something else: transformation. You need to transform in order to survive; which is to say: to survive, you have to live.”7 What is sought, with varying degrees of success, is the experience of the body of the spectator as a living being in the open space of the screen through the film, which is a Whole. Duplication of the body through projection. A body that is also in a durée, which may be external to it, but which will transform it as a living inhabitant being. In preceptive and affective terms, the architectural space/time is experienced through the projected image.

In Aires Mateus: Matter in Reverse, the aim is that the body functions as an element that weaves together diverse relationships: between architectural objects; between exterior and interior; between places; between space and time; between presences and absences. It is a weaving element.

The body both lends identity to the architecture and lends identity to the film. It is a double agent that serves architecture as architecture and film as film.

Towards a Cinematographic Narrative: Matter in Reverse With this reflection the aim is to identify the values that have fed the narrative, as structure, of a film. And also to find, in the depth of a film, the depth of the architecture. It is values such as “durée”, “movement”, “delimitation” that emerge through a body that inhabits – inhabits a space; inhabits a film.

Juhani Pallasmaa (b. 1936) writes: [a] film is viewed with the muscles and the skin as much as by the eyes. Both architecture and cinema imply a kinesthetic way of experiencing space, and images stored in our memory are embodied and haptic images as much as retinal pictures.8 For there to be life there must be transformation; and for there to be transformation there must be movement.

Movement, like durée, can be understood more immediately as the movement of the body in the space, but here it is also assumed to mean the movement inherent in the transposition of architectural values to filmic values. By being inherent to film, movement realizes in a Whole that which is inscribed in the Idea. Cinema is the medium par excellence for narrating space and time through the editing of the image – the Idea, the Whole.9 In the montage one can find a durée that has been reinvented.

Cinema, just like architecture, must have life.

Let us return to José Gil once more: If you think about it… To dwell, it’s not about sheltering; it’s not protecting something so that it will survive. Survival requires going further than just repeating what is already there; there has to be movement. 10

Maria João Soares, Susana Tavares dos Santos, João Miguel Couto Duarte

The reflections of José Gil confirm the choice, in the context of the work of Aires Mateus, of the eight houses, demarcating the residential scale. The house is perhaps the most easily recognizable of architectural programs, as its “permanence” is the object of constant transformation. It provides intimacy by forming a boundary to the lack of certainty that tends to mark the public space. The house designs everyday life.

Furthermore, it is also one of the programs where one can best recognize a sense of unity that should be inherent to the Whole of an architectural body.

The notion of subtraction, manifested in the games of volumes and voids, of the space and its boundaries, is intrinsic to the work of Aires Mateus, and is a notion that runs through the eight chosen houses. This idea opens up a path for the definition of confrontations, which also serve as the basis for the construction of a narrative. These architectural bodies – the houses – become expectant bodies in relation to the film camera in the construction of a narrative, almost as if one is dealing with a work of fiction. The camera itself becomes an expectant body, the inhabitant body of qualified movement.

The inhabitant body is activated through confrontation with the architectural bodies.

The bodies imbricate; a path towards abstraction is created.

CAMERA BODY The construction of the film seeks to assume the challenge of reflecting that imbrication. The contemporaneity of the eight houses provides the rationale for confrontation with primeval places – a cave, a beach, a quarry, a cromlech. The result is dialogs that arise through the confrontation of the artificial and the “natural”. The desire is to re-naturalize the artificial, while at the same time proposing an understanding of architecture as an almost natural element and of nature as an almost artificial element.

To further strengthen these reflections, one must also convoke the manifestly different characters of the contexts the houses have been placed in – the urban context and the rural context. Not only do these contexts permeate the constitution of each of the houses, but they are also decisive for the construction of the cinematographic narrative. In the rural environment, the camera achieves the interpretation the house’s relationship with its context by adopting an exterior/ interior/exterior cadence (fig. 1; fig. 2). A centrifugal and centripetal relationship results; a relationship of reciprocal transfer. However, there is no merging of exterior and interior.

The boundaries are clear.

In the urban context, the camera interprets the relationship between the house and its setting by adopting an interior/ exterior/interior cadence, extracting an eminently centripetal relationship, with a tendency towards a continuous interiority that is only interrupted now and again by a centrifugal intromission (fig. 3; fig. 4). The short narratives, which are 2019 ARCHITECTURE & FILM SYMPOSIUM

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Figure 1. House in Time (2010-2014), Aires Mateus: Matter in Reverse [film still, 07:37].

Figure 2. House in Monsaraz (2007- ), Aires Mateus: Matter in Reverse [film still, 17:22].

closed in on themselves, that tend to be constructed in the rural houses, contrast in the houses in an urban context with fragments of narratives that are more abstract in scope. The inhabitant body walks through the houses as in a state of reverie.

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This intertwining of narratives, protagonized by a weaving body, seeks to realize an experimental process, the result of which also leads to the evocation of poetic dwelling. In the words of Maya Deren (1917-1961): “[p]oetry, to my mind, is an approach to experience.�11

Architecture of a Film: Matter in Reverse

Figure 3. House in Ajuda (2009-2014), Aires Mateus: Matter in Reverse [film still, 25:37].

Figure 4. House in Estrela (2012-2017), Aires Mateus: Matter in Reverse [film still, 29:53].

But there is an exception: the house at the end of the film.

Whilst it is located in a rural context, a narrative of interiority, interiority that is increasingly self-absorbed, is constructed there, obliterating the context. The exteriority is always interior here (fig. 5). The inhabitant body moves in tension with a second body – a new inhabitant body. The reverie becomes reality.

Maria João Soares, Susana Tavares dos Santos, João Miguel Couto Duarte

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Figure 5. House in Melides I (2013- ), Aires Mateus: Matter in Reverse [film still, 1:02:32].

To quote Pallasmaa:

CONCLUSION

Lived space resembles the structures of dream and unconscious, organized independently of the boundaries of physical space and time. Lived space is always a combination of external space and inner mental space, actuality and mental projection.12

Whilst the realization of the film Aires Mateus: Matter in Reverse on the one hand closed a cycle in that it constitutes the result of a process of research on the other hand it has allowed for new reflection, new perspectives and new dimensions on the topics that were the object of the research, feeding a desire to explore relationships that has not yet been fulfilled.

Throughout the eight houses the film camera never takes a strictly documental dimension; it never limits itself to merely registering a given circumstance. On the contrary, it seeks to be an active element in the construction of the narrative sequence. Here one finds echoes of Deleuze’s observations: “[...] the sole cinematographic consciousness is not us, the spectator, nor the hero; it is the camera – sometimes human, sometimes inhuman or superhuman.”12 CORPORAL SYNTHESIS The overlaying of the camera body with the movement of the inhabitant body in the architectural body is fixed in the film, with the film emerging as a corporal synthesis. This corporal synthesis is not just the body, it is not just the camera, it is not just the architecture; it is the film. The film – as mentioned above – is the Whole, the realization of the Idea, and remains something that is open.

The challenge of defining new paths and new studies that are capable of convincingly revealing the results achieved with the construction of the film and with the reflected tested herein remains a pertinent one. Observations that are made a posteriori lead to greater understanding and a deepening of theoretical and analytical knowledge, which in turn form both a basis for and the result of the crossing of the spheres of architecture and cinema.

However, another challenge also emerges: the desire to find in architecture a sustainable basis for film that goes beyond understanding architectural bodies as mere objects. A common plane for the structuring of thought – the mechanics of thought – must be found that would provide a sustainable basis for both architecture and film.

The aim is a corporal synthesis that is open and instrumentable through the possible capacity to accommodate the spectator body.

1.

Henrique Pina, Aires Mateus: matéria em avesso (Lisboa: Moonway Films, 2017) [65min].

Matter – as is the desire here – is discovered through its reverse.

2.

Brothers Manuel Aires Mateus and Francisco Aires Mateus were born in Lisbon, Portugal. They graduated from the Faculty of Architecture at the

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Architecture of a Film: Matter in Reverse

Universidade Técnica de Lisboa in 1986 and 1987. They started out their own office in 1988. The visibility of their work has meant that they have been invited to, and accepted, lecture and teach at several institutions, such as the Graduate School of Design in Harvard (USA), the Accademia di Architetura in Medrísio (Switzerland), as well as several schools in Portugal. The Aires Mateus office has two studios, both based in Lisbon, and has several partnerships with local studios for international projects.

3. Emilio Tuñón, “At the heart of time”, El Croquis, October 186, 2016, 9.

4. Gregory Flaxman, “Introduction”, in The Brain is the Screen: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Cinema, ed. Gregory Flaxman (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 3.

5.

Flaxman, The Brain, 3.

6. Ronald Bogue, Deleuze on Cinema, (New York: Routledge, 2003), 26.

7. Gil, José. Pina, Aires Mateus [03:05]. José Gil observes in the introductory segment to the film. One should mention that José Gil is a disciple of the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze.

8.

Juhani Pallasmaa, The Architecture of Image: Existential Space in Cinema, (Helsinki: Rakennustieto Publishing, 2007), 18.

9. In his book Cinéma 1: L’image-mouvement (1983), Gilles Deleuze argues, in a section about Sergei Eisenstein (1898-1948) that montage is the Whole of a film. It is the Idea. In this sense, montage is an operation that relies on movement-images – a Deleuzian expression based on the philosophy of Henri Bergson (1859-1941) – to release the Whole, which is the Idea, and which, according to Deleuze, is the time-image. This whole operation should be understood as an a priori. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, (London: Bloomsbury Academia, 2013), 30.

10. Gil, José. Pina, Aires Mateus [02:44].

11. Maya Deren, in Poetry and the Film Symposium: Amos Vogel, Maya Deren, Parker Tyler, Willard Maas & Dylan Thomas. Sessions 1 & 2 at Cinema 16, 10/28/1953, audio, accessed November 4, 2018, https:// ubusound.memoryoftheworld.org/Anthology/Poetry_and_the_Film/ POETRY-AND-THE%20FILM_PT1_CINEMA16_AFA_1953.mp3,.

12. Pallasma, The Architecture of Image, 18.

13. Deleuze, Cinema 1, 21.

Acknowledgements This work is financed by national funds by FCT – Foundation f o r Sc i e n c e and Te chno l o gy un d er th e P r ojec t UID/AUR/04026/2019.

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Back In Time: A Journey Through Back to the Future

MAYET ANDREASSEN Texas A&M University

“Mise-en-scene can be defined as the articulation of

cinematic space, and it is precisely space that it is about.”

(Kolker 47) How does film represent, filter, manipulate, and alter our perception of the past, present, and future in the built environment? In the Back to the Future trilogy, mise-en-scene is used to manipulate the audiences’ perception of past, present, and future. Through the use of deliberately built environments and placed props, as well as the transformations in the depicted era’s, the representation of cultural differences and changes in our own society are shown through time.

Through the Hill Valley Courthouse, a landmark to the time traversed during all three movies, the film audience becomes immersed within whatever point in history is being currently represented on screen with the aid of the production design.

Robert P. Kolker, the renowned author on film theory and culture, is referring to a term that originated in the French theater. Mise-en-scene literally means “To put in the scene,” and refers to all aspects of the composition of a shot. This includes the camera movement and placement, the characters, sets, locations, lighting, even the sound and overall emotional tone of the scene or sequence. Miseen-scene directly relates to how film represents, filters, manipulates and alters our perception of the past, present, and future in the built environment. At its core, Mise-enscene includes built environments as an essential part of overall storytelling. The movie trilogy Back to the Future is an excellent example of how film takes us through several time periods and informs the audience of the changes by using different set dressings, and period-appropriate props.

Back to the Future (BTTF) is the first blockbuster film that is a cinematic romp through time. Its classification spans several genres, including comedy, adventure, and science fiction. The film’s success is due to the incredible storytelling and character development that Bob Gale and Robert ‘Bob’ Zemeckis created and brought to life on screen. Though the most obvious characters and their development appear to be Emmett “Doc” Brown, Marty McFly and his family, and Biff Tannen, there are several essential, non-human, characters that appear throughout all three films. The most obvious, non-human character is the time machine itself, the Delorean, which underwent subtle changes throughout the trilogy. However, arguably one of the most important, and least considered, characters throughout the films is the Hill Valley Courthouse and Clock Tower. Like any main character, she is a huge presence throughout the series, and yet, unlike most human characters, her significance is often overlooked.

The Hill Valley Clock Tower gives the audience an obvious keystone to the time they traverse during the three movies,

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and much like a human character, she goes through many transformations. From the worn out and broken 1985 Clock Tower that is in danger of being torn down, to the clean and well-kept 1955 version with a working clock, to the restored and futuristic 2015 incarnation, and the not yet completed 1885 beginnings, the Hill Valley Clock Tower and Courthouse helps to both manipulate the audience’s perception of the time period being represented, and to represent the cultural differences and changes in our own society through time. The town square, or main drag, surrounding the Clock Tower, also changes significantly during 1885, 1955, 1985A, 1985B, or “Biffhorrific” (Gaines 145), and 2015 incarnations. The changes act as both a practical representation of the time period that the characters find themselves in, as well as an emotional anchor. The feelings of nostalgia, innocence, and simpler times that the 1955 timeline elicit are in stark contrast to the grungy ennui, and consumer-capitalist mindset of the 1985A and 1985B timelines. These changes to the townscape were purposefully designed by both Bob Gale, Bob Zemeckis, and Production Designers Larry Paull and Rick Carter. “…the aesthetic of Hill Valley, in both its present-day iterations, was an integral component of the … film” (Gaines 141).

“SAVE THE CLOCKTOWER!” (Clock Tower Lady, Back To the Future) All movies have sets, locations, and props. Without them, it would be incredibly hard to tell a visual story. In cinema, the person responsible for creating the sets and cinematic spaces is called the Production Designer. “[The Production Designer’s] design can be detailed and crafted to catch the viewers’ attention, or made invisible – depending on how the film’s director crafts his mise-en-scene, which is based partly on the production design” (Kolker 149). In Back to the Future, one of the most important sets in the film is the Hill Valley Courthouse and Clock Tower. “Introduced within the first few minutes of the film the Clock Tower was an important character in its own right” (Gaines 75).

Surprisingly, the Clock Tower almost did not happen. It came into being initially because of budget constraints. It is hard to imagine that this integral landmark to the story almost did not exist. In Back to the Future: The Ultimate Visual History, Bob Gale and Bob Zemeckis describe how they came up with the idea. The original climax of the movie involved Marty and Doc Brown driving to a nuclear test site, and setting off an explosion which would then send Marty forward in time. However, that particular visual effect would have cost one million dollars, so the idea of a lightning strike was born instead. Bob Gale says of this “... with the idea of the bolt of lightning. It occurred to us we could put a clock on the pediment of the courthouse” (BTTF: The Ultimate Visual History 36). The addition of the clock on Mayet Andreassen

the courthouse also tied time back into the theme of the film, and referenced Harold Lloyd in the film Safety Last, hanging from a giant clock tower. A reference to Safety Last is made in the opening sequence of the first Back to the Future film with a photograph from that particular scene in Safety Last propped against some clocks in Doc Brown’s lab.

Now that the two Bob’s had their third leading character, it was time to dress her for multiple incarnations in time.

Initially, in 1985, we see a worn out courthouse and Clock Tower that is in danger of being destroyed. The space in front of the courthouse is a concrete parking lot and adjoining street and town square. “There was an obvious deterioration in terms of the quality of life for Hill Valley’s 1985 residents ...The design, in ef fect, highlighted a subtle, understated critique the Bobs’ script made about the 1980s” (Gaines 142). The message conveyed to the audience is that the present day 1985 is, according to Larry Paull, Production Designer, “really run-down and funky” (Gaines 142). It is inferred that 1985 society is not interested, or capable, of taking care of its historical landmarks of the past. Further inference of 1985 society is that it is utilitarian, dirty, worn, and broken. The Clock Tower itself doesn’t work, and no one has bothered to fix it in the 30 years since it was damaged. Bob Zemeckis says of the time, “what happened to everyone’s hometown . . . they built the mall out in the boonies and killed all the business downtown” (BTTF Featurette). Larry Paull explains further, “Various towns or cities are just falling apart at the seams because no one shops there anymore” (Gaines 142).

The audience’s perception of the Clock Tower and town is then altered when Marty goes back in time to 1955. Larry Paull, the Production Designer for the first film “sought to create a saccharine look for the 1955 set” (Gaines 42).

The audience is shown a well maintained and beautiful green space in front of the 1955 Clock Tower. Families are spending time together, children are playing, and business people pass through the vibrant, clean setting. To further represent change, the audience hears the loud gong of the clock striking the hour. Larry Paull really wanted the audience to feel like they were back in the 1950s. To create this transformation he looked extensively at books, magazines, and photographs from the 1940s and 1950s.

Paull says of the production, “one of the ways we’re able to do that is to push the film back visually a little further than 1955 because if we were right at ‘55 what happens is that it almost looks a little too new” (BTTF Featurette).

This attention to detail between 1985 and 1955 was done to elicit different responses from the audience, depending on the age of the viewer. Bob Zemeckis stated that he wanted the audience members who grew up in the ‘50s to feel a sense of nostalgia and the idealism of a time gone by (BTTF Featurette). For audience members who 2019 ARCHITECTURE & FILM SYMPOSIUM

were Marty’s age, it would produce feelings of both awe, and wonder, but also unease, because they would not understand or be familiar with that time. The manipulation of the audience’s sense of time is continued in the first movie when Marty comes back to 1985. The sharp-eyed moviegoer would be aware that a large chunk of ledge underneath the clock is now missing. That ledge was broken away when it collapsed under Doc Brown’s weight while he was dangling from the Clock Tower in 1955, trying to send Marty back to his time. In this example of mise-enscene, time is both manipulated in the film, acknowledged by the f ilmmakers, and shown to the audience.

“YOU MEAN WE’RE IN THE FUTURE?” (Marty McFly, Back to the Future II) Back to the Future II continues where the first movie left off and takes our human characters to the year 2015. Once again, the Clock Tower acts as a reference point for the audience. 2015 Hill Valley is both familiar and foreign in its depiction of the future, with familiar landmarks, product brands, and new and wondrous technology. Bob Gale states that “we had this idea that we wanted to keep the future as a nice place, a decent place” (BTTF II Featurette).

To create the new look, a new Production Designer named Rick Carter was hired. Carter’s previous work included Amazing Stories and The Goonies. He brought a lightness and sense of awe and wonder to the future world, which was exactly what the Bobs wanted. While “most movies of the time depicted Orwellian dystopian [grim] futures for humanity” (Zemeckis, BTTF II Featurette), the Back to the Future team was determined to do the opposite. With the use of bright colors, familiar brand names, and fantastic, fun new technologies, the Bobs and Carter created a future world that the audience could look forward to inhabiting.

The Clock Tower, in this time, is restored with a facade of bright mosaic glass. Instead of the concrete parking lot of the 1980s, there is a manmade lagoon, beautifully tended, with a rock garden and seating area. Holographic displays manifest throughout the town square, advertising movies, and products, and the downtown is bustling and thriving with brightly colored businesses and patrons. Using the theory of mise-en-scene, the physical representation of the future through its environment encourages the audience to be both enthusiastic and hopeful.

knows what 1985 was, with George McFly alive, and Marty’s family and friends doing well, versus what the divergent timeline has now become, “where sex and pollution were dominant in those scenes, and there was an exaggeration of the value of money” (Gaines 145). The Production Design evokes these feelings by setting the action at night, incorporating a lot of garish neon colors within the dark setting, and populating the town square with motorcycle gangs, and vagrants. “Rick Car ter and his team had transformed the courthouse square into ‘Hell Valley’” (BBTF: The Ultimate Visual History 131). To further push the air of sleaziness, the production design incorporated a Casino into Biff’s Pleasure Paradise Hotel which has associations with excess, lack of control, loose morals, desperation, and illegal activities. Even the moniker “Pleasure Paradise”, brings to mind salacious inferences. At the entrance to Biff’s Hotel and Casino, the audience sees the Clock Tower nestled behind a massive image of Biff smoking a cigar and surrounded by the garish lettering of the Hotel’s name.

The Clock Tower has now become a part of Biff’s Pleasure Paradise Hotel. Its presence and significance diminished by the large billboard cutout of Biff and the hotel’s name.

The Casino and Hotel shoot up behind the clock face and pediment, both dwarfing the Clock Tower and making it all but invisible. This further pushes the audience’s feelings of being caught outside of time and into something wrong. This is Biff’s world, manufactured and intentionally manipulated into being, and the production design wants the audience to never forget this fact. Dean Cundey, Director of Photography for BTTF II says “ we were visiting 1985 and Biff had changed the rules, and so we were able to give it a different look, a darker more sinister effected time period” (BBTF II Featurette). Setting the entire 1985 Biffhorrific sequence at night was another way to set up the mise-en-scene to influence the audiences’ perception of this alternate world. Nighttime is associated with darkness and blackness because of the lack of sunlight illuminating objects. Because it is harder for humans to see, nighttime is often associated with fear and unknown terrors. The color black has historically been symbolic of villainy, crime, and evil in many cultures. This unconscious association with darkness was used by the filmmaker’s production designers to help influence the audience’s perception of the 1985 Biff timeline, and route for the success of Marty and Doc Brown.

“KID, I OWN THE POLICE!” (Biff Tannen, BTTF II)

“MAY IT STAND FOR ALL TIME!” (Mayor of Hill Valley, Back to the Future III)

The Biffhorrific version of the Hill Valley town square is perhaps the most jarring for its drastic transformation of its leading lady. This alternate timeline from Back to the Future II is a gaudy, Vegas-style, tacky, polluted, crime-filled reality that lives up to its moniker ‘Biffhorrific’. The audience’s perception leans towards horror and sadness because it

In the final installment of the trilogy, our human characters are transpor ted to the year 1885. According to Bob Zemeckis, “1885 was a natural because it was set exactly 100 years before 1985” (BTTF III Featurette). Before they are transported back into the far past, Doc and Marty break into the Public Library of 1955 to find proof that

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Back In Time: A Journey Through Back to the Future

1985 Doc Brown was indeed stranded in 1885. There they find a photograph of Doc standing next to the clock of the famed Clock Tower at its dedication ceremony. It acts as proof of the adventures of the main characters as later the photograph is updated to include Marty. “Marty and Doc ... [are] photographed in the front of the clock for a souvenir of their traveling adventures” (BTTF: The Ultimate Visual History 177). This photo cements the tower as a major character in the three films. Once our characters are in 1885 the audience is again grounded by the familiar edifice. The courthouse is not completely built, highlighting both the early period’s rustic appearance and creating an inverse relationship to the other two films, because the beginning of the Clock Tower’s existence is the end of Doc Brown and Marty’s adventures. Rick Carter, the Production Designer on both Back to the Future II, and III, says of the set in Back to the Future: The Ultimate Visual History, “One of the great things was to see the progression of a western town in the way we’re used to seeing, like in a Sergio Leone movie, a rougher version that leads all the way up to where the Café is a saloon, and they’re just building the courthouse” (Carter 166). Creating a town square that truly looked like it was set in the Old West, meant that the Bob’s chose not to film on the Universal backlot, and instead built the entire town from the ground up in Sonora California. “For Zemeckis, one of the advantages of building his own town was the ability to place the buildings where he wanted. . . Carter built the sets as fully functional, practical edifices featuring both exteriors and interiors” (BTTF: The Ultimate Visual History 170).

Bob Gale refers to the American Old West as America’s mythology (BTTF III Featurette), and the filmmakers strove to represent that to the audience on film. This mise-enscene is achieved with the use of standard camera shots and narrative devices that are found in most western films, as well as with the use of sweeping vistas, and lens filters with sepia tones. The Bobs and their production crew were able to transport the audience into a familiar, yet mythical past, creating a believable 1885 Hill Valley.

“TO BE CONCLUDED . . .” (End Credits, Back to the Future II) A Film can manipulate our perception of time through carefully crafted props and environments. The visual m e dium o f f ilm l en d s i t s el f to f ull imm er si o n fo r the audience, if the stor y is well craf ted. With the implementation of mise-en-scene, the audience of the Back to the Future films believe that they have been transported to the year 1955, thrown into the possible future of 2015, journeyed into the Old West, and visited three different versions of 1985. The movie creators’ decision to use a major landmark in the form of the Clock Tower as a keystone for the audience to reorient themselves as they travel through time, was a smart and Mayet Andreassen

effective decision. The filmmakers were able to elicit very different emotional responses from the audience by changing built environments and time periods. While 1985 was contemporary for the viewing public at the time of the film’s release, when viewed now by those who grew up in the 1980s, it is a fun and kitschy romp through nostalgia and memory. For audiences of 2019, many of whom may not have been born until after the 1980s, it’s a look at the past, and much like Marty McFly’s trip to 1955, a look at the world in which their parents grew up. It firmly grounds the audience in that decade with the technology displayed, the styles of clothing shown, and the now retro product design scattered throughout the 1985 scenes. The audience is always aware of the era on screen because of the deliberate, and thoughtful decisions made physical by the built environments, the produc tion designers, and the f ilmmakers.

ENDNOTES 1.

David A Cook. A History of Narrative Film, 3rd Edition,(New York, NY: Norton & Co., 1996), Print.

2.

Caseen Gaines. We Don’t Need Roads: The Making of the Back to the Future Trilogy, (New York, NY: Plume, 2015), Print.

3.

Robert Kolker. Film Form and Culture. (New York, NY: McGraw-Hill College, 1999), Print.

4.

Michael Klastorin, Randal Atamaniuk, Back to the Future: The Ultimate Visual History. (New York, NY: Harper Design, 2017), Print.

5.

Back to the Future. The Making of Back to the Future Featurette. 1985; Universal City, CA: Universal Pictures, 2002 and 2015. DVD and Blue Ray.

6.

Back to the Future II. The Making of Back to the Future II Featurette.

1989; Universal City, CA: Universal Pictures, 2002 and 2015. DVD and Blue Ray.

7.

Back to the Future III. The Making of Back to the Future III Featurette. 1990; Universal City, CA: Universal Pictures, 2002 and 2015. DVD and Blue Ray

8.

Back to the Future, 1985. Director and writer Robert Zemeckis, Producer and writer Bob Gale. Film

9.

Back to the Future II, 1989. Director and writer Robert Zemeckis, Producer and writer Bob Gale. Film

10. Back to the Future III, 1990. Director and writer Robert Zemeckis, Producer and writer Bob Gale. Film

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Inside-Out: Reverse Engineering the Folded Interiority of Hugo’s Mechanical Urbanism VAHID VAHDAT Washington State University

Train stations, as art historians would attest, have been a source of inspiration for many artists and cinematographers alike. For Martin Scorsese’s Hugo (2011), they offer an opportunity to cinematically depict the collage city in a manageable setting. The recreation of Gare Montparnasse, which housed Georges Méliès’ toyshop, was an outcome of a cinematic kitbashing process—an assemblage of “photographs of the original station, as well as bits and pieces from many other stations in Paris [… and] New York,” as Brian Selznick, the author of Hugo Cabret, would later confirm.

The main drama of the film however does not occur at the locations that passengers habitually occupy at a train station. It rather takes place within the assumed pochés of the station, where the camera provides the viewer a peek into an interiority that is otherwise visually inaccessible. Once the camera peels the civic interiorities of the train stations, the viewers get a peek into the hidden infrastructure of a mechanical maze that houses the central narrative of the movie.

The film, as voiced through its main character, maintains that “the whole world, is one big machine.”

Hugo’s attempt to reverse engineer all objects (e.g. the automaton, the toy mouse, and the inspector’s prosthetics) to their mechanical parts extends to architecture and space. The architectural body of Gare Montparnasse is thus reimagined through the x-ray vision of the filmic apparatus as a playful, mechanical utopia of pipes, gears, beams, vents, chains, ducts, and stairs.

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KITBASHING AN INTERIOR COLLAGE CITY Martin Scorsese’s Hugo1 (2011) can be considered a cinematic depiction of collage city through the interior confines of a Parisian train station.2 And within the forgotten spaces of this cinematically-manageable collage city, Hugo Cabret, a teenage orphan tries to refurbish an automaton that eventually leads him to Georges Méliès (1861 – 1938), a French film director who pioneered fictional narratives in cinema. To revive the broken automaton, Hugo Cabret takes parts from items he steals, including from the station’s old toy shop, operated by Méliès. The movie itself is similarly a collage of historic film sequences as I shall discuss later.3 The background presence of figures such as jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt (1910-1963) who is seen briefly as he plays at the station’s café to an audience that includes painter Salvador Dalí (1904-1989) and the novelist James Joyce (1882-1941)4 , shows that the same superimposed assemblage of parts is at work in the entourage that occupy the station.

The architecture of the station enjoys a similar fragmentation that allows the pocket-spaces within it to function as part of the dynamic and ever-changing spatial relationships of the station as a whole. The movie was based on the awardwinning children’s book by Brian Selznick. 5 The author discusses his rendition of Gare Montparnasse, which housed the actual location to Méliès’ shop but was eventually torn down in 1969, through a similar collage-like assemblage process. Gare Montparnasse, Selznick describes, “is the only one that has been torn down, so to create the station in my book, I used vintage photographs of the original station, as well as bits and pieces from many other stations in Paris, especially the Gare du Nord. I also used details from Grand Central Terminal in New York City”6 (see Figure 1). How is this process any different from Hugo Cabret’s kitbashed automaton that only finds life through an assemblage of external pieces?

This playful juxtaposition of spatial elements is intensified in the filmic representation of the station. While the film crew had taken extreme measures to rebuild Méliès’ original Inside-Out: Reverse Engineering the Folded Interiority of Hugo’s Mechanical Urbanism

Figure 1. Gare Montparnasse was imagined and recreated by Brian Selznick as a collage of “pieces from many other stations.”

studio, “constructing it to the exact plans,” as Rob Legato, second unit director and visual effect supervisor to the movie, puts it, they “didn’t build much of the train station.”7 In fact, unlike the obsessive realism required for Méliès’ studio, the train station enjoyed an unreal, if not surreal, configuration, allowing it to accommodate contradictory/impossible shots.

“The big problem for our asset team was that in visual effects, we’re obsessed with taking things realistic,” Ben Grossmann, the film’s visual effect director, says. “The Eiffel Tower moved where it needed to be. Some routes made no sense at all, the train station would look different in some shots—but there was consistency in that everything looked good.”8 Spatial consistency here is not sought through a rational functioning of architectural elements and their relationships.

What Scorsese seeks is not the recovery of Paris’ historical reality, or the station for that matter, but as Annett puts it, “a creative engagement with the cinematic construction of memory.”9 It is only through the kitbashing of spaces and architectural elements that an opportunity opens to create a fluid space that can adjust its properties to accommodate the best views of Paris, the movement of cameras and characters, and the suspense/action of the movie. In fact, the metropolitan spirit of the train station allows and welcomes this fragmentation. As an interior urban space, the station Vahid Vahdat

becomes a Collage City with fragments from the past, present and future, that defies the centralized, controlling, and dominating nature of total-design, in favor of a juxtaposition strategy that allows autonomous spatial microcosms to perpetually create themselves within the station.

LAYERED INTERIORITIES The film adopts the interiority of the train station as an urban laboratory that situates the narrative within the manageable limits of a controlled metropolitan ecosystem.

The train station thus becomes a microcosm of metropolitan life—a small world if you will, much like the world of movies, which is similarly compact yet complicated, fragmented yet generalizable, and autonomous yet highly dependent upon the realities of the outside world. Through Hugo, the interiority of the movie intersects with the interior urbanism of the metropolitan world of the station. The train station is a model within a model—a simulation of the real, depicted in the virtual world of cinematography.

This layering of worlds within worlds however does not stop at the station level. In fact the main narrative that the camera chases throughout the movies does not take place in the locations that people habitually occupy, mingle, and interact.

The movie peels the central architectural space to give the viewer a peek into the hidden infrastructure, that is not only unoccupied, but is even visually inaccessible to the inhabitants of this interior city. Deep within the assumed pochés of the 2019 ARCHITECTURE & FILM SYMPOSIUM

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“adores the history of movie making, and this films is about the history of moviemaking.”13 But where does the history of movie making originate from? “Scorsese’s film,” as Davidson suggests, “situates the origins of movies in fin-de-siècle Paris as the modern industrial city.”14 Hugo is thus not a teleological glorification of Méliès’ oeuvre, but it is more so about the cinematic processes he introduced and used to create his work: his early career as a magician and an entertainer, his collaboration with the Lumière brothers, his not-so-conventional team, and above all, his palace-like glass studios, where “dreams [are] cultivated in a green-house of industrial activity.”15 And Hugo is not a mere celebration of the creative authorship of individual inspiring mind, but it is more so about Méliès’ role in the greater history of cinema—a “part,” if you will, of a larger cinematic machine.16

Figure 2. Through the free movement of the camera beyond the otherwise impenetrable pochés of the station, the film exposes another layer of interiority within the interior urbanism of the station.

station, a maze of mechanical infrastructure homes the central narrative of the movie (see Figure 2). By relocating the center to this in-between-space that continuously wraps all sides of station, below its floors, above its ceilings, between levels, within walls, columns, and objects, the station is reduced to a peripheral position—a left-over space to the central character. The station for Hugo Cabret is as an exterior to his home—one that provides amusing but distant urban views, similar to how Paris becomes periphery to the central position of the station.10 Paris is an outside world that glimpses of its reality is reflected in the public life of the station, in the same way that movies reflect the reality of the outside world.

MECHANIZATION OF SPACE It is within this continuous Deleuzian folding and unfolding of space that the story takes place.11 The movie subverts of the interior/exterior dualities as part of a larger attempt to reverse the center and periphery, in artistic productions, including cinema and architecture. While some critics have tried to position the movie within auteurist discourses, Hugo is in fact a celebration of artistic processes over products. Scorsese’s in-depth knowledge of and interest in the history of cinema explains why he took on Hugo.12 Scorsese, as Legato confirms, 74

Much like Hugo Cabret, Scorsese sees the objects of his inquiry as machines that cannot function unless their mechanical processes are fully understood. “The whole world,” according to Hugo Cabret, “is one big machine.” Even living forms are treated as such—and the signs are endless: the automaton and its consumption of Hugo’s body in his dream, the mechanical mouse that Hugo fixes and brings to life, and the prosthetics enabling the station inspector to bring some excitement and humor into the film. The film is thus an attempt to reverse engineer all objects, from cinema to life itself. And if objects such as the anthropomorphic moon of Méliès’ 1902 short Le Voyage dans la Lune (A Trip to the Moon) are seen to have life and their behind-thescene mechanics can be brought to the forefront, so can architecture.

The architecture of Hugo subverts the figure ground relationships by diver ting the focus to the assumed mechanical infrastructure of space (see Figure 3). It is within this maze of pipes, gears, beams, chains, and stairs that the main story resides. What is conventionally appreciated as the figural space in architecture is secondary to this processual infrastructure and also to Hugo Cabret, who treats it as an exteriority whose views can be enjoyed through ducts and vents and screens that in his world replace doors and windows.

To emphasize the infrastructural significance of architecture, what typology better than a nineteenth-century train station;17 and to celebrate the mechanical processes that bring life to architectural space, what style better that that of contemporaneous Paris, through structures like Gare Montparnasse, Gare du Nord, and Henri Labrouste’s Sainte-Geneviève Library, all of which were built around the same time in the 1840s. The significance of these buildings, as architectural historians explain, is not merely for their innovative use of cast iron for building structure, but more so for their attempt to bring architectural (infra)structure Inside-Out: Reverse Engineering the Folded Interiority of Hugo’s Mechanical Urbanism

Figure 3. The often-neglected mechanical infrastructure of the station assumes an agency within the film that elevates architecture from remaining a passive backdrop to the narrative.

to the forefront of space.18 The intricate metal frame work and gas lighting that cover and illuminate the vast interiors are no longer hidden (see Figure 4). They are privileged and exposed the same way Hugo brings them to the forefront of attention.19 Quite like the urban interiority of the station, which owes its vitality to its infrastructure, the metropolis in Hugo gains life from mechanical processes. Isn’t that what the opening scene of the movie where the aerial shot of Paris centering the Arc de Triomphe de l’Étoile fades into a series of mechanical gears is all about?20

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Figure 4. The industrial trains stations of mid-19th-century with their exposed structure function as an ideal site to Hugo’s celebration of mechanical processes.

Computer Graphics Magazine, 2011, p. 22.

8.

He also explains how the asset team who built the train station got frustrated by constant changes in their model to accommodate demands about relocating walls, removing roofs, and even shifting the Eiffel Tower or Arc de Triomphe to provide more compelling imagery.

Ibid.

9.

Annett, Sandra. "The Nostalgic Remediation of Cinema in Hugo and Paprika." Journal of Adaptation in Film and Performance 7, no. 2 (2014): 169-179, p. 174.

ENDNOTES 1.

The title of the movie is taken from its main character, Hugo Cabret. To distinguish the two throughout the paper, I have used “Hugo” to refer to the film and “Hugo Cabret” to signify the protagonist.

2.

Collage City is a book published in 1979 by Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter as an extension of their earlier essay with the same title.

Collage becomes a central concept through which the authors articulate their theory of architecture—one that negates the holistic and decontextualized hegemony of modern utopianism and offers an alternative proposal through radical heterogeneity of architectural and urban form. Rowe, Colin, and Fred Koetter. Collage City [in German]. Basel: Birkhäuser, 2009.

3.

“In Hugo,” as Sandra Annett argues “we see that digital cinema is a machine made from the parts of many other machines.” Sandra Annett, “The Nostalgic Remediation,” 175. Annett, Sandra. "The Nostalgic Remediation of Cinema in Hugo and Paprika." Journal of Adaptation in Film and Performance 7, no. 2 (2014): 169-179..

4.

Downing, Crystal. Salvation from Cinema: The Medium Is the Message [in English]. 2016, p. 170.

5.

Selznick, Brian. The Invention of Hugo Cabret a Novel in Words and Pictures [in Engelsk tekst]. London: Scholastic, 2008.

6.

Selznick, Brian, Martin Scorsese, David Serlin, and Jaap Buitendijk.

The Hugo Movie Companion : A Behind the Scenes Look at How a Beloved Book Became a Major Motion Picture [in English]. New York: Scholastic Press, 2011, p. 21.

7.

Robertson, Barbara. "Visual Effects Artists Push Deep into Cinema History to Help Martin Scorsese Create Hugo Magic Man." 20-24.

10. The exteriority of Paris to Hugo’s world is emphasized in a scene in

which Hugo is chasing Méliès to get his notebook back. As Méliès steps out the station, the camera shows Hugo’s hesitance to set foot in the unchartered territory of Paris.

11. In Deleuze’s materialist metaphysics, the universe (including

consciousness) is the result of folded matter. Influenced by Leibniz’s theory of the monad that suggests the whole universe is contained within each being, it is this process of folding that, according to Deleuze, constitutes the basic unit of existence. This infinite process of folding and unfolding the outside generates interiorities that are not separated from an autonomous exterior world but rather result from doubling/multiplying of the outside. The fold is thus best understood as an ontology of becoming (and of differentiation) while maintaining continuity. The conceptualization of interiority as folded exterior has allowed architects to rethink the figure-ground relationship as a reversible extension of one another and thereby blur the boundaries between of inside/outside, solid/void, and mass/space. The same uncertain, open-ended, inexhaustive, and non-exclusive relationship between exterior and interior in the film (and outside of it for that matter) is what makes the concept of folding evermore significant in understanding/unfolding the movie. For more information see Deleuze, Gilles. The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993; Deleuze, Gilles. Foucault.

Collection "Critique". Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1986.

12. Obviously, Hugo is not Scorsese’s only attempt to pay tribute to film

history and Méliès is not the only film-maker that he showcases in

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Inside-Out: Reverse Engineering the Folded Interiority of Hugo’s Mechanical Urbanism

his movies. For example, in his 2004 Aviator, Scorsese reflects on the life and works of Howard Hughes. See Scorsese, Martin. The Aviator.

Sydney, N.S.W.: Gem, 2013. For Scorsese’s take on the history of cinema, see Scorsese, Martin, and Michael Henry Wilson. The Century of Cinema: A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese through American Movies. London: British Film Institute, 2000.

13. Robertson, Barbara. "Visual Effects Artists Push Deep into Cinema

History to Help Martin Scorsese Create Hugo Magic Man." 20-24.

Computer Graphics Magazine, 2011, p. 22.

14. Davidson, John E. "Industry in Idealized Form: The Work of Movies in

Film's First One Hundred Years." PMLA 127, no. 4 (2012): 879-889, p.

11.

15. Ibid 16. In fact through Hugo, Scorsese pays homage to many films and

film-makers. Some scenes, for example from Edwin S. Porter’s 1903 “The Great Train Robbery” and Lumière brothers’ 1896 “The Arrival of a Train” are directly shown in their original format and others such as Harold Lloyd’s 1923 “Safety Last!.” and Hitchcock’s 1958 famous staircase scene in “Vertigo” are recreated and indirectly alluded to within the movie. Visually, it also pays homages to René Clair’s 1930 “Under the Roofs of Paris”, and Jean Renoir’s 1938 “La BêTe Humaine” For more, see Higgins, Scott. "3d in Depth: Coraline, Hugo, and a Sustainable Aesthetic." Film History: An International Journal 24, no. 2 (2012): 196-209.

17. Romanticization of steam locomotives and train stations has been a

reoccurring theme in art and literature. As the subject or backdrop of artistic imagination, train stations have glorified the industrial power of human will over nature, represented nostalgia for the machine age, or celebrated the role of infrastructure as a catalyst for social justice. Numerous masterpieces by 19th- and 20th-century artists, e.g. William Turner, Claude Monet, Charles Sheeler, Camille Pissarro, and Edward Hopper capture the aesthetics of the machine through railroads, train stations, and steam locomotives. For more, see Danly Walther, Susan. The Railroad in the American Landscape, 1850-1950.

Wellesley, Mass.: Wellesley College. Museum, 1981; Rose, Ted. In the Traces: Railroad Paintings of Ted Rose. Railroads Past and Present.

Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 2000; Kennedy, Ian, and Julian Treuherz. The Railway: Art in the Age of Steam. Hardcover ed.

New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008.

18. Interestingly, Bibliotheque Sainte Geneviève is dubbed by the

Encyclopedia of Art Education as the “first non-utilitarian building to show exposed metalwork.” Collins, Neil. "19th Century Architecture." visual-arts-cork, www.visual-arts-cork.com/history-of-art/ nineteenth-century-architecture.htm.

19. The filmic imagination of metropolis as an outcome of infrastructural

processes has probably first been depicted in Walter Ruttmann’s 1927 "Berlin: Die Symphonie Der Grossstadt (Symphony of a Metropolis)."

Ruttmann’s camera provides the audience with visuals that that would be otherwise hidden to the wondering eyes of the urban flâneurs.

Objects such as light bulbs, bottles, bread loafs, newspaper, and even the food served at a restaurant are demystified as products of often-mechanical processes of manufacture and labor. Ruttmann’s metropolis should also be read in this context as an outcome of mechanical infrastructure—scenes of which are montaged throughout the movie. The film’s emphasis on roads, railways, subways, water pipes, sewage, and other forms of urban services becomes a predecessor to Hugo’s mechanical metropolitan lab.

20. Legato articulates the “philosophy” behind this scene as creating a

subconscious visual of “Paris as a mechanism.” Robertson, Barbara.

"Visual Effects Artists Push Deep into Cinema History to Help Martin Scorsese Create Hugo Magic Man." 20-24. Computer Graphics Magazine, 2011, p. 11.

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Blending Realms: Architecture in Utopia/Dystopia Film

MICHAEL J. CROSBIE, THEODORE SAWRUK University of Hartford

This paper argues that over the course of nearly a century of the depiction of utopia and dystopia in firm, these separate realms have steadily moved from being distinct architectural realms to a single, blended environment that can be read as either utopian or dystopian. Film uniquely offers the visual and auditory experience of utopia/dystopia through the presence of architecture that makes the utopia or dystopia manifest. This paper examines film critiques forwarded by such scholars, historians, and commentators as Juhani Pallasmaa, Mark Lamster, Nezar AlSayyad, and Dietrich Neumann. There is an analysis of four films in the cinema of utopia/ dystopia: Metropolis, Blade Runner, Brazil, and The Bothersome Man. The earlier films (Metropolis and Blade Runner) distinguish and portray utopia and dystopia as separate spatial realms within the film, which can be read as exclusive of each other (they never overlap). The film Brazil signals a blending of utopian and dystopian realms. While still spatially separate, in Brazil both utopia and dystopia appear to look more alike than different, primarily through architectural elements that pervade both realms and give both distinguishing environmental features. These features are expressed as mechanical systems (ducts, pipes, wires) that signify the overbearing presence of a dysfunctional bureaucracy throughout both utopian and dystopian realms. Brazil’s suggestion that utopia and dystopia are equally tainted with a troubling presence is presented in The Bothersome Man as a single architectural environment that functions as both utopia and dystopia, simultaneously. This is the product of multiple readings of a single space (utopian architecture can be dystopian, dystopian 78

architecture can be utopian, depending on one’s experience of the same environment). The paper concludes with speculative questions as to whether this reading of architecture as simultaneously utopian or dystopian reflects Michel Foucault’s and Walter Russell Mead’s conceptions of heterotopia: utopia is a good place, dystopia is a bad place, and heterotopia is a different place--it dislocates and disorients, depending on one’s personal psychological makeup and the reading of the space.

INTRODUCTION The design and creation of such utopian communities as New Harmony, Indiana, and of utopias never realized, such as Frank Lloyd Wright’s Broadacre City, rest on the belief that architecture is central and critical in shaping conditions of existence for the betterment of those who inhabit the built environment. The carefully considered architecture of such communities seeks to create places where justice, fairness, freedom, privacy, spirituality, harmony, and happiness can be attained. A parallel, counter argument would be that architecture might also result in the creation of dystopia: places where anxiety, fear, oppression, alienation, surveillance, spiritual emptiness, disharmony, and the crushing power of the state or the corporation are the result.

Readers can “experience” dystopias in books such as George Orwell’s 1984 and Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. In contrast, film offers us the opportunity for visual and auditory experiences of utopias/dystopias in which the architecture actually plays a supporting role, a character, to manifest the utopia/dystopia. There are several films over the past century that have served this purpose, the most celebrated being Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927), Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982), and Terry Gilliam’s Brazil (1985). In each of these films, a utopia and a dystopia are portrayed side-by-side in the film—a light and dark contrast of how architecture can create realms of pleasure as well as places of pain. This paper argues that over the spectrum of four films spanning nearly Blending Realms: Architecture in Utopia/Dystopia Film

Figure 1: In Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) the realms of utopia and dystopia are distinct and separate.

a century, architectural utopias and dystopias have actually blended—presenting a single environment that plays both roles. This paper explores how film utopias and dystopias have grown closer together, resulting in a single architectural environment in film that can be read as either or both utopian and dystopian, depending upon the personal psychology of the film’s characters.

In his book, The Architecture of Image: Existential Space in Cinema, Juhani Pallasmaa describes the use of architecture in film and the structure of film itself as “amplifiers” to transport the viewer into utopian or dystopian experiences. He writes: “Cinematic architecture evokes and sustains specific mental states; the architecture of film is an architecture of terror, anguish, suspense, boredom, alienation, melancholy, happiness or ecstasy, depending on the essence of the particular cinematic narrative and the director’s intention.

Space and architectural imagery are the amplifiers of specific emotions.”1 The film utopias/dystopias examined here employ architecture experience by the film’s characters (and the film’s viewers) as the primary means to “create” the utopian and dystopian environment in the film, typically one set within an urban environment. However, in the most recent of the four films examined, utopian and dystopian environments are actually a single, unified environment. The Michael Crosbie, Theodore Sawruk

perception of this environment as being utopian or dystopian rests exclusively on the mindset and value system of the film’s characters. While many of those characters may perceive this single environment as utopian, outlier characters experience it simultaneously as dystopian. This paper postulates that this melding of utopian/dystopian environments might be a product of architectural theory.

CASE STUDY FILMS We turn our attention to case studies of films in which the presence of architecture is used as the primary medium to create utopian and dystopian environments. Architecture has had a “starring” role as either utopia or dystopia in multiple films over the past century, three of which were mentioned above (Metropolis, Blade Runner, and Brazil). A fourth film warrants close attention because of its blending of the utopian and dystopian realms. Jens Lien’s Den brysomme mannen (The Bothersome Man) (2006) is a Norwegian film that presents a single, contemporary architectural environment as simultaneously utopian and dystopian.

We first should note the time, place, and genre of these films.

Metropolis, released in 1927, is set in a future date that is not stipulated; this categorizes it as part of the science fiction film genre. The actual “place” of the city of Metropolis is not stated in Thea van Harbou’s screenplay. It is a city of the future—it occupies an unknown place forward in an unknown time. In contrast, the 1982 film Blade Runner, based on Philip 2019 ARCHITECTURE & FILM SYMPOSIUM

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Figure 2: The tight Los Angeles streets of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982) are dense with old and new architecture, retrofitted and crumbling .

K. Dick’s science fiction novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, is set in a specific place and time: Los Angeles, 2019, 37 years in the future. The setting for Brazil is similar to the conditions of Metropolis: it is a science fiction film, maybe set in the future (Gilliam is imprecise as to exactly what the period in the film is—the first few minutes of the film state that it is “Somewhere in the 20th century,” which could be the present, or even the past (the computer technology portrayed in the film is archaic for 1985, and the character’s costumes have a 1940s film noir flavor). Gilliam and Charles Alverson, who wrote the first draft of the screenplay together, described Brazil’s setting as “…neither future nor past, and yet a bit of each.”2 The film’s production design has been described as “retro-futurism.”3 In contrast to these three films, The Bothersome Man is not science fiction. It appears set in the present, yet in an unnamed contemporary city. As such, it can be read as the current condition, not a foreshadowing of utopia/dystopia, but one that is lived today. This distinction is key in analyzing how utopia and dystopia are presented as distinct architectural realms in the first two films, while Brazil blurs the lines between the two. The Bothersome Man collapses the distinction altogether. Architectural historian Nezar AlSayyad characterizes Metropolis as the first film to depict utopia/dystopia, that it set the “visual and architectural language” that has been used to render utopia/ dystopia in films that followed it.4 Metropolis provided a 80

template for the spatial organization of utopia/dystopia in cinema over the next 60-plus years. In Lang’s film, utopia and dystopia are clearly two distinct architectural realms in both environmental quality and physical location. The elites enjoy their utopia in the upper reaches of the city, on an elevated plane, while the incarcerated victims (the workers) of the dystopia occupy the lower depths of the city, literally below its surface. An article about the movie in the June 1927 issue of the magazine Science and Invention showed a sectional diagram of how the city was organized (Figure 1). Above is light and air; below is darkness and suffocating atmosphere. In the upper reaches of grand buildings are those who surveil, while those beneath the ground plane of the city are those who are under constant monitoring. In Metropolis, the class system is expressed spatially, but a key element of that architecture is the luxury of privacy (only for the elites), while public exposure is the lot of the working class. With sets designed by Otto Hunte, Erich Kettelhut, Karl Vollbrecht, many of the architectural symbols of power in Metropolis are highly symmetrical, such as building-sized machines and the “Tower of Babel” that occupies the city’s center. The balanced architectural compositions imply social, political, and technological stasis, control, and domination through perfect compositional equilibrium, while the architecture of the workers’ city beneath the earth’s surface is asymmetrical and disorienting. Architecture in Metropolis is also capable to signifying the mental states of certain individuals—a hallmark of German Expressionist film. For example, the mad scientist, Rotwang, lives in an old house that reflects his dishevelment, with rooms that confuse and confine visitors who cannot exit Blending Realms: Architecture in Utopia/Dystopia Film

Figure 3: The overbearing, predatory nature of a bureaucratic state out of control in Terry Gilliam’s Brazil (1985) is expressed by aggressive ductwork.

through doors without knobs.

Fifty-five years after Metropolis, Blade Runner replicates the same separation of utopian and dystopian realms: the corporate privileged occupy the tallest building in 2019-era Los Angeles—the 700-story monolithic headquarters of the Tyrell Corporation, in the shape of a Mayan pyramid. The elites enjoy an abundance of architecture, but it is without much quality or a unified vision. Instead, classical ornament becomes a cipher for the well-to-do—such as that seen in the luxurious apartments in the Tyrell building. It is the symbol of a decadent and decaying culture. As in Metropolis, the powerless of the city live in a dystopia situated in the depths, in low- to mid-rise buildings that betray constant surveillance; Ridley Scott achieves this through the persistent presence of searchlight beams invading the exteriors and interiors of the confined quarters for the masses. These buildings are old and covered with a patchwork of retrofits and exposed mechanical systems (Figure 2). Visual futurist Syd Mead, who set the visual tone of Blade Runner, explained in an interview: “Everything had to look old, sleazy, and odd…a strange, compacted crowded look that exaggerates the danger and hopelessness of these people’s lives.”5 Released in 1985 just three years after Blade Runner, Brazil signals a blending of utopian and dystopian realms,

experienced in similar ways by the film’s elites and proles.

The elites live in a utopia of large residences and apartments, dine at exclusive restaurants, and attend lavish parties. The denizens of dystopia lived in cramped quarters—small, cluttered apartments reached through crumbling public spaces and trash-strewn corridors. However, both utopia and dystopia share a dominant physical presence. Each are architectural environments overrun with mechanical systems--ducts, pipes, ventilators, hoses, fans, wires, outlets, cables. They not only infiltrate the poché of both realms; in fact they are a major presence within the architectural space of utopia and dystopia alike. They snake across ceilings and walls of dystopian apartments and public spaces, they are an architectural feature of public housing estates (one of which is crowned with gargantuan cooling towers). In the same way, spaces occupied by elites are likewise permeated with ducts, pipes, wires, and cables. The interior of the utopian French restaurant where the film’s main protagonist, Sam Lowry, meets his mother to discuss his promotion to the elite Ministry of Information Retrieval is infested with sequin-encrusted ducts that dwarf the dining room. (Figure 3) Even the vast office of Mr. Helpmann, one of the highest placed figures in the utopian echelon, is chock-full of pipes and ducts. These mechanical elements are the film’s primary villainous characters, ciphers for an out-of-control, predatory bureaucracy. According to AlSayyad, it has been suggested that these architectural elements “are reflective of the control of the individual by the state, as if the ducts are umbilical.”6 2019 ARCHITECTURE & FILM SYMPOSIUM

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Figure 4: .Simultaneously utopia and dystopia, the bland, colorless modern city of Jens Lien’s The Bothersome Man (2006) reflects the inhabitants..

While the personal workspaces of the bureaucrats are confining, the public spaces of the headquarters of the Ministry of Information and Information Retrieval appear modeled on the scale-less, intimidating lobby of Philip Johnson’s AT&T Building at 550 Madison Avenue in New York, completed in 1984, just a year before the film’s release (in fact, the lobbies in Brazil are dominated by gold-colored, super-scaled sculptures of distraught human figures that recall the over-bearing “Sprit of Communication” gold-leafed figure that originally occupied the AT&T lobby). In Brazil, the dystopian presence of the bureaucracy insinuates itself into utopian and dystopian realms alike, signaling that—at least in terms of architectural quality—there is very little difference between the two. Although utopian and dystopian realms are separate, Gilliam renders them as essentially the same.

Making its appearance two decades after Brazil, Norwegian filmmaker Jens Lien’s The Bothersome Man (Den brysomme mannen) is a unique depiction of utopia and dystopia as an identical built environment. The same architectural setting can be either utopia or dystopia, based on the interpretation of the film’s characters and their interaction with the architecture. Utopia and dystopia are a uniform space. The film is set in the present time in an un-named Norwegian city of almost exclusively bland, late-modern architecture.

(Figure 4). Lien uses little color, contrast, or ornament: the built environment is a washed-out monotone of grays, whites, 82

and blacks. Workspaces and home environments are void of personal mementos. The main character, Andreas, finds a similar blandness in the food (which he finds tasteless) and alcohol (which has no intoxicating qualities). Sight, taste, smell, touch, sound, (even sex) are all drained of joy, and the film’s architecture reflects this pallid state. However, the rest of the film’s characters, except for Andreas, are oblivious to the dullness of the environment. They believe they are living in a utopia, where little is demanded of them except to behave as good consumers. As a city authority explains to Andreas: “Most people are happy here…. They think it’s a nice city. They have everything they need. People are happy.

And we’re proud of that.” Near the end of the film, Andreas discovers his own personal version of a utopian environment, concealed behind a thick basement wall in an old building.

He discovers a crack in the wall, through which he hears soulful violin music and laughing children (the city is devoid of children). Andreas diligently works to enlarge the crack to satisfy his curiosity. Finally, he reaches through another crack, into a room alive with color, warmth, freshly baked pastry, ornamented antiques, sweet music, the sounds of children—it is like grandma’s kitchen. He manages to grab a piece of tasty pastry before the authorities arrive to apprehend him and banish him from the monotonous city. Andreas is expelled because he views the same utopian city created for everyone as a dystopia—his own personal hell.

IS HETEROTOPIA AND NEW UTOPIA/DYSTOPIA? Framing these four films in this manner, one sees a Blending Realms: Architecture in Utopia/Dystopia Film

development of the architectural depiction of utopias and dystopias from distinct separate realms within the films to a single built environment that functions as both utopia and dystopia, simultaneously. The films also move from the science fiction genre, set within a future time (or, perhaps in the case of Brazil, in the future or the past), to a setting that is not a science fictional world but rather a contemporary city in a contemporary time. Might there be a corresponding development in architectural theory that parallels this development in the architecture of utopian/dystopian films?

Is it possible that that this co-existence of utopia/dystopia can be found in concept of heterotopia? I will close this paper with some speculative questions on this possibility.

Heterotopia was proposed by the French philosopher Michel Foucault in a March 1967 lecture, “Des Espaces Autres: Utopia et Heterotopies.” While the term heterotopia originated in the context of medical pathology as early as 1920, it did not enter mainstream architecture discourse until the 1970s. In a 2008 thesis on the 40-year development of heterotopia, Nick Owen writes that “heterotopia is in its most contemporary sense – in the epoch of space. It deals with the spatial implications of heterotopia – be they physical, imaginary, or somewhere in between.”7 This idea is echoed in Walter Russell Mead’s observation, in reference to postmodernism: “Utopia is a place where everything is good, dystopia is a place where everything is bad; heterotopia is a place where everything is different.”8 Might this difference be what one sees in the later films: a single place that is different—utopian and/or dystopian—depending on personal psychological makeup?

Heterotopia is therefore a concept of human geography, used to describe places and spaces that function in opposition to social and cultural predominance. According to Foucault, these spaces are characterized by “otherness,” as they are neither here nor there.9 They exist simultaneously as physical and mental--they are both “some-place” and “no-place.”

Might such a description be relevant to a place that is simultaneously utopian and dystopian, where an occupant is physically in one place, while mentally existing in another? Is there not evidence of such a condition in the very last scene of Brazil, where Sam Lowry is bodily a prisoner of a dystopian bureaucracy, but has escaped psychologically to the utopia of “Brazil”--the tune which he continuously hums to himself?

CONCLUSION These case study films offer examples of how architecture in film employs space, relational scale, natural and artificial light, materials, ornament, symbols, style, color, shadow, and sound to create a utopian and dystopian environments.

On an historical spectrum, we see that the films move from a depiction of utopia and dystopia as separate physical, architectural realms—most clearly in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis— to an “in-between” space (“in-between” being a key

description of heterotopic space) that permits both utopia and dystopia to exist simultaneously in the same architectural space. The film Brazil creates a bridge between these two separate realms in film, employing the architectural elements of rampant ducts to signify that utopian and dystopian realms are perhaps not all that different--both are tainted by the overbearing presence of a dysfunctional bureaucracy. By the time one arrives cinematically in the Scandinavian city of Jens Lien’s The Bothersome Man, utopia and dystopia are blended, having lost all distinction as separate realms.

ENDNOTES 1.

Juhani Pallasmaa, The Architecture of Image: Existential Space in Cinema, (Helsinki: Rakennustieto Oy, 2001), p. 7.

2.

“Brazil (1985 film),” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazil_ (1985_film), retrieved March 30, 2019.

3. Ibid.

4. Nezar AlSayyad, Cinematic Urbanism: A History of the Modern from Reel to Real, (New York and London: Routledge, 2006), p. 72.

5. Dietrich Neumann, editor, Film Architecture: Set Designs from Metropolis to Blade Runner, (New York: Prestel Verlag, 1999), p. 45.

6. AlSayyad, p. 84.

7. Nick Owen, HeteroTO(DAY)pia: An Analysis of Heterotopia 40 Years Since Conception (Research Report, Victoria University of Wellington, 2008), p. 17.

8. Walter Russell Mead, “Trains, Planes, and Automobiles: The End of the Postmodern Moment,” (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, World Policy Journal, Vol. 12, No. 4), 1995/6.

9. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, (New York: Vintage Books, 1971).

REFERENCES 1. Albrecht, D. (2000). Designing Dreams: Modern Architecture in the Movies. Santa Monica, CA: Hennessey+Ingalls.

2. AlSayyad, N. (2006). Cinematic Urbanism: A History of the Modern from Reel to Real. New York and London: Routledge.

3. Armstrong, Rachel (2000). “Cyborg Architecture and Terry Gilliam’s Brazil,” in Architecture + Film II. London: Architectural Design; Vol. 70, No. 1; pp. 55-57.

4. Bruno, Guiliana (1987). “Ramble City: Postmodernism and Bladerunner” October (41) (Summer 1987), pp. 61-74.

5. Clarke, D., editor (1997). The Cinematic City. London and New York: Routledge.

6. Dadoun, Roger (1986). “Metropolis, Mother-City--“Mittler”--Hitler,” Camera Obscura, vol. 15, pp. 136-163.

7.

Elden, S. and Crampton, J. W. (2016). “Introduction.” Space, Knowledge and Power: Foucault and Geography. New York: Routledge, pp. 1-16.

8. Fear, B. (2000). Architecture + Film II. London: Architectural Design London: Architectural Design; Vol. 70, No. 1.

9. Fortin, D.T. (2011). Architecture and Science-Fiction Film: “Philip K. Dick and 10. the Spectacle of Home.” Surrey: Ashgate Publishing Ltd. 11. Foucault, M. (1971). The Order of Things. New York: Vintage Books.

12. Foucault, M. (1984). “Des Espace Autres.” Architecture, Movement, Continuite, October (5), pp. 46-49. (translated from the French by Jay 2019 ARCHITECTURE & FILM SYMPOSIUM

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Miskowiec).

13. Jacobs, S. (2007). The Wrong House: The Architecture of Alfred Hitchcock. Rotterdam: 010 Publishers.

14. Koeck, Richard, and Roberts, L., editors (2010). The City and the Moving Image: Urban Projections. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

15. Koolhaas, R. (2002). “Junkspace.” October (100), Spring, pp. 175-190.

16. Lamster, M., editor (2000). Architecture and Film. New York: Princeton Architectural Press.

17. Mead, W.R. (1995/6). “Trains, Planes, and Automobiles: The End of the Postmodern Moment.” Durham, NC: Duke University Press, World Policy Journal, 12(4), pp. 13-31.

18. Neumann, D., editor (1999). Film Architecture: Set Designs from Metropolis to Blade Runner. New York: Prestel Verlag.

19. Owen, N. (2008). HeteroTO(DAY)pia: An Analysis of Heterotopia 40 Years Since Conception. (Research Report) Victoria University of Wellington, pp. 1-37.

20. Pallasmaa, J. (2001). The Architecture of Image: Existential Space in Cinema. Helsinki: Rakennustieto Oy. 21. Teyssot, G. (1980). “Heterotopias and the History of Spaces.” (Trans.

David Stewart) A+U 121 October, pp. 296-305.

22. Toy, M. (1994). Architecture & Film. London: Architectural Design.

23. Wollen, Peter (2002). “Bladerunner,” in Paris Hollywood: Writings on Film, London: Verso; pp. 123-133. the Spectacle of Home.” Surrey: Ashgate Publishing Ltd. 24. Foucault, M. (1971). The Order of Things. New York: Vintage Books.

25. Foucault, M. (1984). “Des Espace Autres.” Architecture, Movement, Continuite, October (5), pp. 46-49. (translated from the French by Jay Miskowiec).

26. Jacobs, S. (2007). The Wrong House: The Architecture of Alfred Hitchcock. Rotterdam: 010 Publishers.

27. Koeck, Richard, and Roberts, L., editors (2010). The City and the Moving Image: Urban Projections. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

28. Koolhaas, R. (2002). “Junkspace.” October (100), Spring, pp. 175-190.

29. Lamster, M., editor (2000). Architecture and Film. New York: Princeton Architectural Press.

30. Mead, W.R. (1995/6). “Trains, Planes, and Automobiles: The End of the Postmodern Moment.” Durham, NC: Duke University Press, World Policy Journal, 12(4), pp. 13-31.

31. Neumann, D., editor (1999). Film Architecture: Set Designs from Metropolis to Blade Runner. New York: Prestel Verlag.

32. Owen, N. (2008). HeteroTO(DAY)pia: An Analysis of Heterotopia 40 Years Since Conception. (Research Report) Victoria University of Wellington, pp. 1-37.

33. Pallasmaa, J. (2001). The Architecture of Image: Existential Space in Cinema. Helsinki: Rakennustieto Oy. 34. Teyssot, G. (1980). “Heterotopias and the History of Spaces.” (Trans.

David Stewart) A+U 121 October, pp. 296-305.

35. Toy, M. (1994). Architecture & Film. London: Architectural Design.

36. Wollen, Peter (2002). “Bladerunner,” in Paris Hollywood: Writings on Film, London: Verso; pp. 123-133.

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Blending Realms: Architecture in Utopia/Dystopia Film

ABSTRACTS ABSTRACTS

Project XYZ Erin Cuevas

University of Southern California Project XYZ is a canon of short film and live performance pieces produced through collaboration between dance, film, and architecture. Five works are showcased in the submitted reel: Point, Line, Expansiveness: Changing Perspective, Gradient, and Frame. Each piece examines an affecting feedback system between humans and their digital and physical environments, where media circulates and evolves recursively through all three parties. Project XYZ creates interactions between dancers (human body), film-makers (digital media), and architects (physical space), studying movement, social interaction, and embodiment through immersive and interactive environments. The films Line and Gradient specifically focus on the use of storytelling in choreography, architecture, and film. In both pieces, dancers evoke a story through their movement, complemented by an interactive architectural component which evolves with the choreography.

In Line, for example, twins work together to build a physical and emotional representation of their relationship by building up a spatial geometry constructed of elastic bands. The dancers begin with two lines and gradually construct a full web that diagrams the narrative through lineweights: the thinnest lines are ones constructed in the beginning, with wider lines being implemented at the end. The film team is able to capture the choreographic and spatial narrative by framing the relationship between each dancer and highlighting the spatial geometry they construct together.

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Performing Casa Malaparte Popi Iacovou

University of Cyprus Time-based media, such as photography, video, and mixed media animation techniques provide the technology of capturing space in time. However, the way animation and film techniques have been used in architecture so far, both in education as well as in the profession, is limited in its scope and implementation.

These techniques act in two polarized directions; from photorealistic representations of not yet realized visions to the construction of fictional worlds not located in real sites. As an alternative to the most common uses of animation the proposed moving image project, Performing Casa Malaparte, explores the possibilities of time-based media to study existing buildings, as a form of reflective practice by working between ‘site’ analysis and design. Performing Casa Malaparte (11 minutes and 28 seconds) is an animated portrait of Casa Malaparte reconstructed after my visits and seven-day occupation of the house.

It is made as a mixed-media animation, combining photography, video and digital drawing. The animation interprets the house’s compositional logic and animates spaces, views and fragments of it in a series of animated tableaux, each capturing a specific theme of the house: Raining Windows, Salon, T-Corridor, Writing Room, Boat. The result is an animated portrait that is not merely a photorealistic representation of the house. Part documentary and part fiction, it is a subjective reconstruction. Performing Casa Malaparte aims to go beyond the house’s common iconic image of its exterior. Rather, this portrait endeavors to show an intimate point of view of the interior, which has been neglected in academic research published on the house. Through my filmic work, I want to make visible the transient conditions of atmosphere, affect and imaginary, all outcomes of my encounter and temporal occupation of the house.

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Moving Image Abstracts

Hops, Skips, and Jumps along MiLines

Terah Maher, Mason Charanza, Courtney Bishop, Kelechi Chigbu, Cassady Fredriksen, Danton Kranz, Daisy Limon, Adam Nesbit, Spencer Reddick, Levi Rey, Katherine Sasu-Twumasi, Josiah Thomas, Kaitlyn Warmack, Richard Zamorano, and MaryAlice Torres-MacDonald Texas Tech University

The short video, MiLines, attempts to locate the construction of a sequence of still images – more commonly known as animation – within the context of architectural representation, as a variation of experiential site mapping. The animation segments of MiLines were executed during an architectural study abroad program in Milan. As part of their site research for an architectural intervention, students created a storyboard and an animated video utilizing the technique of photographic replacements.

Traditionally, replacement animation is the utilization of multiple stop-motion puppets, swapped out from one frame to the next to evoke movement. To mediate the differences between frames and create the illusion of formal integrity, the essential condition required of the body of images is sameness: first, in the registered alignment of the background surrounding primary figures, and second, in the establishment of formal threads between the changing scenes. Applying these visual principles to digitally edited animation, the term replacement animation has expanded from stop-motion puppets to dimensional animation methods such as photography; instead of alternating puppet heads, one photograph is swapped out for another. In photographic replacement animation, two metaphysical effects occur: simultaneity in time (different objects co-existing in the same space-time), and the compression of space (the collapse of measurable distances between images). These effects open the possibilities of a sequenced image montage to simulate cognitive maps of urban situations.

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Animating Architecture

Joseph Altshuler, Maddie Aragon, Yvonne Li, Choonghyun Nam, Vivi Cloe, Yutong Zhao, Baoying Zhong, and Jacobo Zuazua School of the Art Institute of Chicago

In opposition to a live performance, architecture is traditionally regarded as stationary and inert—according to one popular cliché, architecture is even described as “frozen music.” However, in today’s world, houses speak in first person via social media, cartoonish renderings of buildings combat complex forces of gentrification, and buildings play starring roles in films. These examples beckon us to augment the performative potential for architectural forms and spatial ideas to enact animate agency in the world. Architecture and design teaching need an expanded capacity to perform live. Whereas traditional forms of representation remain static, rehearsed in fixed pigment or pixels, how might architecture students and practicing architects leverage tactics from film and stop motion animation to engage lively audiences?

This moving image compilation, developed in collaboration with first-year architecture students, projects new or alternative narratives surrounding existing landmark buildings in Chicago. Each segment leverages stop-motion techniques to exaggerate or undermine salient architectural features in order to conjure a fictional, animate identity for the existing architecture. Unlike the realism provided by more cinematic videos and sleek three-dimensional “fly-throughs,” the intentionally wonky and lower fidelity animation techniques invite audience participation and solicit the humor and spontaneity of live performance. The moving image features work created in collaboration with first-year architecture students at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

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Moving Image Abstracts

Off the Map Thomas Forget

University of North Carolina at Charlotte Off the Map is an experimental motion picture analysis of urban complexity. It is a work-in-progress that will be completed in April 2019 (running time 15 minutes).

The clips included in this submission are pre-production “sketches” executed in 2018 during preparations for the current production. The methodology of the video involves a catalog of relatively simple and classically “Modern” cinematic procedures: the collection of clips on static and dynamic cameras; and the editing of clips into a montage through techniques of abstraction common to the city symphony genre: superimposition, inversion, splicing, manipulations of speed and direction, et cetera.

In addition to city symphonies of the 1920s and 1930s, experimental works that influence this experiment include: Outerborough (Bill Morrison, 2005), City Slivers (Gordon Matta-Clark, 1976), Carriage Trade (Warren Sonbert, 1971), and Side/Walk/Shuttle (Ernie Gehr, 1991). Post-War experimental filmmakers use the built environment as their medium in ways that hold great promise to inform and advance the architecture-cinema discourse, and a secondary objective of this experimental work is to correct the relative marginalization of artists using film within the mainstream of the architecture-cinema discourse. All footage is captured in New York City and its subway is an especially prominent subject. The author is currently researching the history of the subway and its potential future as a smart system.

This project is parallel but independent to that one. The analysis balances verité and incongruity, seamlessness and discontinuity. No medium is capable of replicating, or even capturing, the reality of the city, but the medium of the motion picture, when handled in certain way, is capable of reorganizing urban phenomena on their own terms—space and time—so as to illuminate aesthetic qualities embodied in the city. In this motion picture, the objective is neither to document an existing city nor to design a future or fictional city—it is to explore, through techniques of photography and montage, the underlying logic of urban complexity. A primary objective that inspires the classical methodology of the video is to confront the tectonics of the city. Whereas production design, both material and computer-generated, transcends and reinvents the material reality of the city, raw footage captured in natural and normally-occurring artificial light imposes a creative limitation on this production. The city is mediated, but only to a certain extent. The limit is not understood as a proper or somehow ethical method, but rather simply as a constraint that steers the experiment in one of its many possible directions. Ultimately, in Off the Map, the indexicality of clips pushes against the imagination of montage.

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Trax

Charlott Greub, Elliott Klinger, Camille Ide, Kristin Clarksean North Dakota State University

How can film be used to frame theoretical making/teaching pedagogies in architecture and design? Two architecture courses at North Dakota State University addressed the potential of film and the moving image as tools for the analysis and representation of architecture and space. A film like Metropolis is a quintessential product of modernity. For this reason, the cinematic representation of modern architecture and urban space have been a key focus from its very origin.

Film and architecture share similar practices of perception and representation of space: both need to be traversed in order to become readable. It was the modern metropolis of the late 19th century that brought into being a spatial dispositive, or device, of the transitory through characteristic typologies such as the arcades and railway stations described by Baudelaire. Within this urban setting new viewing machines evolved such as the panopticon, the panorama, and the diorama, all of which may be seen as architectural precursors of cinema. The film scholar Giuliana Bruno has stated in this regard: “By changing the relations between spatial perception and bodily motion, the architecture of transit prepared the ground for the invention of the moving image.� In this sense the film Trax: A transitional Space composed by the students Elliott Klinger, Camille Ide, and Kristin Clarksean refers to the beginning of film and cinema.

The film was experimental and structured through geometrical principals such as layering, repetition, rotation, and mirroring to create a spatial representation of a transitional experience.

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Moving Image Abstracts

Dancing in Hell

Yaoyi Fan and Zixy Zhan Cooper Union

The film is produced by 3D scanning choreography inspired by Dante inferno.

Using the 3D scan, we can construct the form of movement in the faction of a second. By layering a series of digital point clouds, we can create an entire sequence of a particular act, such as descending a stair, walking in a passage, rotating between columns, and even dancing in a room. Because photogrammetry can construct a model through a relational position, the moving bodies have distorted the physical space to present eccentric forms. In a traditional standard of the architecture survey, the changes between each set of models would be considered “imprecise,” but movement documentation challenges the notion of precision in reproduction by presenting scans of perception.

The representation of perception of space has existed in ancient time, particularly on the religious belief of unseemly spaces such as heaven or hell. In the Renaissance painting of Dante’s Inferno, Botticelli attempted to illustrate the architecture of hell. He painted a sectional painting call “The Chart of Hell,” in which he depicted the movement of Dante and Virgil to represent hell. Botticelli illustrated a series of rings attached to each other to form an inverted cone. The architecture of inferno is not static space. Rather, space is growing and extending as the characters move in the story. Each ring constructs the perception of moving and suffering figures in hell. The circle is not constructed through concrete masonry, but build upon the perception of a sinner’s constant movement: the inverted cone built from the experience of Dante and Virgil and the wayfarers of hell who witness the fall of sins. This section of Dante’s Inferno is an episode of perpetual, eternally moving sinners.

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Spatial Design and the iPhone Utilizing Students’ Cognizance of an Everyday Technology to Investigate Design Space Sheryl Kasak Pratt Institute

The smart phone - really the iPhone - has allowed for the constant presence of video in our daily lives. Capturing information as still or moving images; what format to shoot in; standard rectangular, time lapse, slow mo[tion], video, square, or pano[ramic] has become an innate activity, the device determines an objective image boundary. This familiarity with the smart phone as both a mediator and conveyor of experience combined with the predication of how we place ourselves within space allows us to utilize these devices as design tools.

Entry-level design students lack the ability to recognize and define spatial conditions and/or translate and apply them to produce desired design outcomes.

Often these students do not understand how to organize and implement geometric and material elements to create new environments. They may, however, be able to capture the properties of their real-time surroundings utilizing video, and then define and analyze which components are responsible for specific experiential events. Bernard Tschumi opened this door in 1976 with Screenplays Scenarios; individual frames of film sequences were spatially diagrammed and abstracted to produce a recognizable architecture based upon the action which had taken place.

Over a five-year period, undergraduate interior and graduate architecture students were asked to create a one-minute video documenting their given project site from an experiential point of view. Students first analyzed films including Galveston and Blade Runner. In the latter, the character Deckard uses an “Esper� machine to effectively navigate a 2D image 3-dimensionally, enabling the viewer to inhabit the photographic space and understand the spatiality and connectivity of elements within the room through a perceived occupancy including light and reflection.

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Moving Image Abstracts

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AUTHORS AUTHORS

90 Joseph Altshuler is co-founder of Could Be Architecture, a Chicago-based practice that designs seriously playful spaces, things, and happenings. He is also the founding editor of SOILED, a periodical of architectural storytelling positioned between a literary journal and a design magazine. He teaches architecture at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Illinois Institute of Technology.

68 Mayet Andreassen is both an artist and educator whose core philosophy centers on promoting artistic and creative excellence in her students and herself. Mayet has over nine years of teaching experience in higher education and is currently working as a full-time lecturer in the Department of Visualization at Texas A&M University. There she teaches advanced classes in animation and game design. Her previous work experience is in the games industry, working as an artist at 2K Sports, where she created interactive menus and UI using 3D software. Other experience includes contract work for Zynga Games and freelance design and illustration.

PP Alejandro Borges is an Assistant professor at the College of Architecture at Texas A&M University. Borges received his Master of Architecture from Cornell University and obtained a professional degree in Architecture from the Faculty of Architecture, Universidad Central de Venezuela.

He is a practitioner Architect and design studio and visual arts professor. He has taught at Universidad Simon Bolivar in Caracas, Venezuela, Cornell summer design program, the Polytechnic University of Puerto Rico, University of Texas in Arlington, Universidad de Cuenca, Ecuador among others.

He has lectured in Puerto Rico, Colombia, Ecuador, Chile, Argentina, United States, Dubai, and Venezuela. His work has been widely published in national and international books, magazines, and web pages like ArchDaily and Plataforma Arquitectura.

PP Roger Connah has taught for over three decades in Canada, Finland, India, Pakistan, Sweden and the United States.

Connah was Director of the Graduate School (2009-2012), the Azrieli School of Architecture and Urbanism at Carleton University (Ottawa).

78 Michael J. Crosbie is Professor of Architecture at the University of Hartford in Connecticut, where he teaches

a course on architecture in film. He is the editor of Faith & Form: The Inter faith Journal on Religion, Ar t, and Architecture, and the sole author, editor, or contributor to more than 70 books on architecture. The author of hundreds of articles on architecture, design, and practice, Dr. Crosbie is a frequent contributor to international print and online publications, and has lectured on architecture throughout the U.S. and abroad. He is a registered architect and has practiced with Centerbrook Architects and Steven Winter Associates.

87 Erin Cuevas is an architect and co-founder of Curious Minds Los Angeles (CMLA), a design studio which aims to produce fluid interaction between humans and their material and immaterial environments. She also founded Project XYZ, a scenography production collaborative composed of architects, dancers, choreographers, and film-makers. Erin received a graduate degree from the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and a bachelor's degree from the University of Southern California, where she currently holds a faculty position teaching design and digital media in both undergraduate and graduate programs.

37 Prior to starting his PhD in Cinema and Media Studies at York, Marko Djurdjić (picture the DJ in “adjustment”) received a BA from McGill University, a BEd from the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, and an MA from York University. His dissertation will eventually focus on the pedagogical potential of new media, pop culture, and archives. He likes punk, so if you know of a good spot for some loud music and/or good brisket, let him know. He is Serbian, but most certainly not a car person...probably.

60 João Miguel Couto Duarte studied Architect at the Faculty of Architecture, Technical University of Lisbon (1990); MSc in Art Theories from Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Lisbon (2005); Ph.D. from Faculty of Architecture, University of Lisbon (2016). He is an Assistant Professor at Universidade Lusíada de Lisboa and a Fellow researcher at Centro de Investigação Arquitectura Território e Design – CITAD. The relation between architectural representation and design practice has long been his main research field, authoring several essays and presenting multiples communications on the subject both in national and international conferences. Aires Mateus: Matter in Reverse, directed by Henrique Pina, is his debut in film production.

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PP

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Roxane Enescu is an architect and lecturer at the Faculty of Architecture of ULB where she initiated in 2012 the course and the laboratory "Architecture and Cinema".

Complementary to architecture, she studied sculpture, painting and digital video production in Beaux-Arts and SAE Brussels. She is affiliated with the research centers Hortence/ HTC and Sasha/H, where she conducts research on the question of « almost nothing in architecture", based on the analysis of underground films of the 1970s. Her videos and works of art focus on the same interests as her researches or built architectures: film-architecture, duration & movements, ways of capture the real…

Popi Iacovou is a Lecturer in Communication Media in Architecture at the Department of Architecture at UCY and an architect and design researcher investigating transdisciplinary models of thinking and practicing architecture.

She received a PhD by Architectural Design (2017) from the Bartlett School of Architecture and an MPhil on ‘Architecture and the Moving Image’ (2004) from the University of Cambridge. Her work brings together architecture and performance practices with media, and discusses the production of space through human agency and action.

Her methodology is based on situated filmic practice as design research method that investigates spatio-temporal phenomena across different scales. It explores the potential of time-based media for analysing, designing and representing architecture by addressing issues of subjectivity, occupation and temporality.

93 Yaoyi Fan, co-founder of UEOdesign studio in New York.

She graduated from the Cooper Union with the award for excellence in architecture. Her studio focused on developing new technology and tools through design. They have developed large scale 3D printer, digital fabrication techniques, and machine learning for design motion. Yaoyi has also taught international workshops in the field of architecture and technology, in Europe, China, and New York.

91 Thomas Forget is an Associate Professor at UNC Charlotte School of Architecture and a principal at Ciotat Studio, an interdisciplinary design practice based in New York City.

92 Charlott Greub is an artist, architect and urban designer, educated at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, Germany, who had received many fellowships and awards: among them the Cité des Arts Paris, France and the Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart, Germany. Her work has been exhibited at Gallery Aedes Berlin, the German Architecture Museum DAM, Frankfurt, and the Lehmbruck Museum Duisburg, Germany. Currently, she serves as Assistant Professor for Architecture at North Dakota State University in Fargo.

Previously she taught design studios in architecture and art at the University of Utah, the Bauhaus University in Weimar, Germany, and the Technical University Graz, Austria. She is licensed as an architect in Germany since 1993 and practiced internationally as an architect in New York City (USA), Maastricht (Netherlands), and Berlin (Germany). Since 2015 she is a Ph.D. candidate at the Technical University in Aachen, Germany where she conducts research about the pavilion as a new genre between art and architecture.

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9 Jean Jaminet is an architectural designer and educator. He received his Master of Architecture from Princeton University and Bachelor of Science in Architecture from the Ohio State University. Jean’s professional experience includes the offices of Deborah Berke and Steven Harris in New York City.

Currently, Jean is an assistant professor at the Kent State University College of Architecture and Environmental Design.

His academic concentrations are shaped by the dynamic intersections of design, theory, and technology, raising questions about architecture’s formal, representational, and tectonic affiliations.

94 Sher yl Kas ak is the founder of Interim Design, an architectural, interior design and research practice. The work focuses on investigations based upon the communication of information through developing and everyday technologies and the notion that we are all living in an interim state that is constantly evolving and reacting to our surroundings and our actions. Sheryl teaches at Pratt Institute in the Department of Interior Design and at Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation [GSAPP]. She holds a BFA and BARCH from The Rhode Island School of Design [RISD] and an MSAAD from GSAPP. Sheryl is currently working on research and practical project proposals which engage our relationship to, and need for, both technology and the extreme absence of technology.

PP In addition to teaching at the Academy of Art University , Rebal Knayzeh is an Associate at Studio VARA, a small firm in

San Francisco. He holds a Masters degree from the Bartlett School of Architecture at UCL in London. Rebal is an avid photographer and is interested in film and the moving image as a medium of architectural expression. The city and the human connection to it figures centrally in his work which has been exhibited at the International Architecture Bienale in Rotterdam and the Seattle Short Film Festival.

PP Ashlie Latiolais, AIA, NCARB, is an Assistant Professor in the School of Architecture and Design at the University of Louisiana and is founding Principle of ARCH&also residential/research practice. Her multi-scaler work focuses on expanding the boundaries of architecture through innovative design collaborations, and is dedicated to interdisciplinary efforts to unite academia and the profession as a path to her teaching, research, and service. She presently teaches graduate studios and seminar coursework.

Ashlie has presented her research at various nationally and internationally recognized architectural education conferences, and was most recently honored with the 2019 AIA National Young Architects Award.

Department, in addition to working in production design in New York and exhibition design at Harvard. Maher's film Choros, which follows a lineage from Etienne-Jules Marey to Norman McLaren, transforms her own choreography through chronophotographic effects, and was screened in over 50 film festivals internationally. She currently coordinates the 1st year design studios at Texas Tech University, and investigates the potential of filmmaking techniques within architectural representation.

PP Ryan Manning is a designer and principal of Quirkd33 a design collaborative in landscapes, film, and architecture. He has collaborated with Heron-Mazy since 2008.

PP J.P. (John) Maruszczak is an associate professor of architecture at the University of Texas at Arlington.. Teaching appointments have included Experimental Architecture Studio, Institut fur Gestaltung Studio, University of Innsbruck, Rice University, School of Architecture Houston Texas and Carleton University, School of Architecture, Ottawa, Canada.

44 Gregory Luhan is the John Russell Groves Endowed Professor of Architecture in the UK College of Design and an affiliate professor with UK’s Lewis Honors College and the College of Engineering Center for Visualization and Virtual Environments.

Dr. Luhan holds a University Research Professorship and is a nationally recognized architect, scholar, author, professor and academic leader whose work investigates how design, emerging digital technologies, critical theory, pedagogy, practice, and academic-industry partnerships intersect.

He earned his Bachelor of Architecture from Virginia Tech, Master of Architecture from Princeton University, and Ph.D. in Architecture at Texas A&M University. Dr. Luhan teaches Architecture and Historic Preservation digital studios and seminars on design theory, systems thinking, and design computing. His professional practice includes awardwinning, research-driven projects which enabled him to forge collaborative relationships with disciplines outside architecture, most notably engineering, education, business, physics, arts & sciences, and the fine arts.

89 Terah Maher studied architecture during her undergraduate years at Yale, and completed a MARCH at the Graduate School of Design. For the next 8 years she swerved from the field of architecture to pursue and teach experimental animation in Harvard’s Visual and Environmental Studies

PP Mingqian Liu is a Doctoral Student from the Department of Architecture and Center for Heritage Conservation at Texas A&M University. Her research interests include architectural history, historic preservation, heritage tourism, and public education in museums. She had an M.A. in History of Art and Architecture from Boston University and a B.A. in International Studies from The University of Iowa.

Her current dissertation research focuses on the peoplecentered approach in historic neighborhood preservation and revitalization.

44 Rebekah Radtke is an Assistant Professor in the University of Kentucky, College of Design-School of Interiors. She earned a Master of Architecture at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Interiors at the University of Kentucky. Her research investigates how interior design enables social change by applying boundary-spanning pedagogical approaches rather than disciplinary-specific processes. Her transdisciplinary and multi-scalar projects study enhanced living-learning environments and healthy communities in national and international contexts. Her collaborative work, funded by national entities, includes preservation projects in rural China, design-build projects in Brazil, community-activated art interventions in Appalachia, and education-based design initiatives in Lexington, Kentucky.

53 Elena Rocchi is the Environmental Design Program Coordinator and Clinical Assistant Professor at ASU The Design School; Current Ph.D student at Doctor of Philosophy in Design, Environment, and the Arts at ASU; Faculty Affiliate, The Biomimicry Center; FHA Barrett Honors College Faculty; Former Fellow at Taliesin the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture. She has been Professor at the ESARQ-UIC, Barcelona, Spain, and Director of Master “Interior Design for Commercial Spaces” at IED, Barcelona. She has been Senior Architect and Office Director of Miralles Tagliabue Associated Architects from 1995 till 2008. She gave lectures nationally and internationally.

PP Katie Reyes interest in architecture began from an early age when she was introduced to Louis Kahn’s work. Her educational background includes Texas A&M University as well as the Barcelona Architecture Center. She graduated in 2018 with her undergraduate degree in Environmental design.

During her undergraduate studies she has presented work at the Environments for Aging Conference. Her design for aging project has been published in the2016, AIA Design for Aging Review. She is currently pursuing her Masters of Architecture degree at Texas A&M University, and will graduate in spring of 2020. During her graduate studies she has participated in multiple student design charrettes including the Healthcare Design Expo & Conference. Miss Reyes has been a member of SHEA (Student Health Environments Association) for many years, and was elected as president for the 2019-2020year.

60 Maria João Soares is a practicing architect, since 1988 and holds a PhD in Theory of Architecture, from Faculdade de Arquitectura e Ar tes da Universidade Lusíada de Lisboa. Her other affiliations included Research fellow at Design, Architecture and Territory Research Center [CITAD], ULL|Research coordinator of RPs Architecture and Transdisciplinarity [ArT] and Meta-Baroque: Architecture’s Aesthetics and Future’s Materiality [metA], CITAD|Member of CITAD’s Board of Directors, and coordinator of Architecture and Urban Planning Research Group|Member of the Reviewers’ Board of Athens Journal of Architecture|Film producer.

30 Annelies Staessen holds a Master of Science in Engineering: Architecture - main subject Urban Design and Architecture (Ghent University, 2003) and Master of Architecture in Human Settlements (KULeuven, 2004). After working for ten years as 100

an architect (360architects, Nuarchitects, …) and as lector at the college university of Antwerp and the bachelor in applied architecture at the college university Howest in Bruges, Annelies started as an academic assistant at AMRP (Centre for mobility and spatial planning) in December 2017. The PhD focusses on the relationship between urban planning and the imagination of the Flemish landscape in film productions.

60 Susana Tavares dos Santos studied Architect at the Faculty of Architecture, Universidade Lusíada de Lisboa (1994); MSc in Urban Plan from ISCTE - University Institute of Lisbon (2000); Ph.D. from Faculty of Architecture, Universidade Lusíada de Lisboa (2012). She is an Assistant Professor at Universidade Lusíada de Lisboa and Fellow researcher at Centro de Investigação Arquitectura Território e Design – CITAD. Authoring several essays and presenting communications on the subject - architecture and cinema, in national and international conferences. Aires Mateus: Matter in Reverse (2017), directed by Henrique Pina, is the debut in film production.

24 Sadra Tehrani is an Architect and a Graduate of Penn State University. His research involves a cross-analysis of architecture, city and cinema and investigates the representation of urban space and the transformation of Modern cityscapes in film. His Masters thesis, titled "Central Park in Film: Architecture as the Structure of Desire" analyzes the proto-cinematics of the park through its spatial structure and design aesthetics. He has received a Graham Endowed Fellowship award in 2016 and three Graduate Student Travel Grants in 2017 and 2018, and directed three short films during his studies.

17 Helen Turner holds a Master of Science in Architecture from the University of Cincinnati, is NCIDQ certified, LEED accredited, and an award-winning educator. This foundation coupled with unique experiences, like working on an archaeological dig in the ancient city of Pompeii, provide a foundation for her position as Assistant Professor in the School of Interiors at the University of Kentucky. Her scholarly pursuits center on sustainability, materials, theory, and history, which expand the notions of interior design beyond four walls, generating work that has been presented at national and international conferences, exhibited, and disseminated in peer-reviewed publications.

72 Vahid Vahdat is an Assistant Professor at Washington State University. His primary field of research is the theory and history of modern architecture and urban space, with an emphasis on non-Western experiences of modernity. He is the author of “Occidentalist Perceptions of European Architecture in Nineteenth Century Persian Travel Diaries—Travels in Farangi Space.” Dr. Vahdat has more than 10 years of teaching at universities in the US and abroad, including Texas A&M University and the University of Houston. Aside from teaching a graduate seminar on Architecture and Film, Dr. Vahdat brings filmic discussions into architectural studios.

PP Christina Vaughn is a Master of Architecture Student who is interested in hospitality design. She has also interned for Vaughn Construction which got her interested in the built environment. Followed by a year of working for Bercy Chen Studios, located in Austin Texas, while in between degrees. It is this background of construction, art and architecture that has developed her unique perspective that can be seen in all she accomplishes.

CO-CHAIR Gregory Marinic is Associate Professor in the University of Cincinanti College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning.

A widely published scholar, his research and teaching operate at the intersection of architecture, obsolescence, and geography. His creative work and scholarship have been recognized by awards from the American Institute of Architects, the Seoul Metropolitan Government, and the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture. His work has been exhibited in the AIA Center for Architecture in New York, Center for Architecture and Design in Philadelphia, Estonian Architecture Museum in Tallinn, Dongdaemun Design Plaza in Seoul, TSMD Architecture Center in Ankara, and the National Building Museum in Washington, DC. He holds a PhD in Architecture from Texas A&M University.

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