COUNTERPOINT by billy sinclair

Introduction

The Manifesto is aimed at providing a constructive framework for realising architecture through the technique of montage. It acts as a precise ‘conclusion’ to each part of the counterpoint, a way of refining observations as illustrative interludes. It is not created as a final composition and instead simply performs as the platform for further explorations.

‘Quite logically the thought occurs: could not the same thing be accomplished more productively by not following the plot so slavishly, but by materializing the idea, the impression, of murder through a free accumulation of associative matter? For the most important task is still to establish the idea of murder - the feeling of murder, as such...The plot is no more than a devise without which one isn’t yet capable of telling something to the spectator!’

Sergei Eisenstein, 1929

‘A Dialectic Approach to Film Form’, in Sergei Eisenstein Film Form: Essays in Film Theory, trans. and ed. by Jay Leyda (New York: Harcourt, 1949), pp. 45-63 (p. 61).

Interlude I The frame is a device that highlights drama through composition and space through event. It is a technical instrument that can be used to create positive â&#x20AC;&#x153;conflictâ&#x20AC;? in public space that can encourage social participation.

Plot

The Buildup Dynamic A dynamic frame looks to facilitate a multiplicity of programmes without defining one particular use. It aims to produce an interactive public space that is driven by the energetic processes of the users. A form that frames the drama of an event, where meaning is only derived through the conflict of action within space.

The Action

The Reaction vi

The Impresion of Murder

Instability An unstable formation that can never find resolve through programme but rather find cohesion through the interaction of events. By maintaining a disjointed configuration between space, events and their compatibility, one use cannot dominate, allowing the space to be in a perpetual state of renewal. It simply becomes the embodiment for a multiplicity of programmes to take place.

viii

The Conflict Frame

Quantity

A framework that facilitates the dialectics of society, and remains responsive to public needs. As change occurs, a dominant event may try to accent form, however the structure will maintain ambiguous to use. So when change prevails the frame remains present to accent a new use. The form encapsulates function without defining it.

Interlude II The sequence is a temporal device that aspires to connect with the users on an emotional level. It becomes a means for appreciating event through time, and a way of manipulating duration in regards to activity.

xii

Woman

Frame Rhythm

The Run The Buildup

35 Seconds

The Protagonist 16 Seconds

Rhythm

9 Seconds

16 Seconds

10 Seconds

The Murderer

Man

Experimenter

Woman

The Woman Woman

A sequential rhythm connects the user with the event on an emotional level. Through developing a common pulse that is felt between the inhabitants and the events, a heightened sense of intrigue and involvement is instilled. Counter rhythms are used to further unite the observers with space to provide meaning through temporality.

xiv

The Run

TheAction Murder The

The Run

The Reaction The Reaction

Woman

Accented Pulses

The Run The Buildup

35 Seconds

The Protagonist 16 Seconds

9 Seconds

Man

Experimenter Trucage

Experimenter

Woman

xvi

10 Seconds

9 Seconds

The Murderer

Man

A qualitative perception of time which appreciates event through duration rather than a metrical rhythm. Events are recognized through their different temporal durations as a means for connecting withThe the Run user on a cognitive level. Space is now experienced rather than acknowledged, where time becomes flexible, and programmes unfold as varying temporal rhythms.

16 Seconds

The Woman

The TheMurder Acton

He ran towards her, and when he recognized the man who trailed him from the camp.

The Run

The TheReaction Reaction

He ran towards her, and when The M recognized the man who trailed him from the camp.

He knew there was no way out of time, and he knew this haunted He ranmoment towards her, he was and when granted he to see as a child, was the moment of his own death. recognized the man who trailed him from the camp.

He see

Emotional Connection

1 2 3 4

Duration Time is a personal experience and becomes subjectively measured by the observer. Space maintains a compositional neglect that facilitates the possibility for the â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;unknownâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;. Temporality is measured as an individual experience allowing for the facilitation of a multiplicity of events and combinations. 1 2 3 4

xviii

Interlude III The superimposition of space and time becomes the observers experience as they traverse through architecture. Space becomes responsive to the movements of time, likewise time becomes visible and takes on new meanings in space.

Visual Kinetic The Run

The Murder

Sequence

Movement-Image The movement-image is an experience observed through the collision of temporal and spatial indicators that produce ambient effects. An embodied formal energy presented as an atmospheric conflict between frame and sequence. Movement-image captures the kinetic through the composition of the frame.

Movement Image

Frame

xxii

The Reaction

Visual Emotive

The Drama of Light The visual drama of space is composed through light and shadow, where direct light is registered as a focus and defused light as a transition. The intimate play of light can produce temporal rhythms or spatial compositions, a peripheral phenomenology constituted as an architectural effect.

xxiv

Haptic Emotive

Immersion The materials of space transcend a temporal atmosphere by engaging with the observer. By expressing a materialâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s ineffable qualities through a perception of tone, colour, luminosity, texture, transparency... the observer is immersed within a world of imagination, a space where meaning is hidden and only exposed as an experiential quality.

xxvi

Memory/Montage A fully comprehensible space-time is a realisation of experience through memory. An ambiance composed of fragments in the mind which only becomes an holistic crystal as a cerebral composition made present through recollection. Whether through the ineffable effects rendered by materials and memory, or through the dematerialisation of space to effect, architecture develops into a form that nurtures imagination and intrigue.

xxviii

‘I am kino-eye. I am a builder. I have placed you, whom I’ve created today, in an extraordinary room which did not exist until just now when I also created it. In this room there are twelve walls shot by me in various parts of the world. In bringing together shots of walls and details, I’ve managed to arrange them in an order that is pleasing and to constuct with intervals, correctly, a film-phrase, which is the room.’

Driga Vertov, 1923 ‘The council of three’, in Kino-eye: The writings

xxx

of Dziga Vertov, trans. by Kevin O’Brien ed. by Annette Michelson (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984), pp. 14-20 (p. 17).

Counterpoint -

Montage (Eisenstein)

Film (La JetĂŠe) &

Architecture (Parc de la Villette)

a dissertation submitted by William Sinclair in partial fulfilment of March 2013

iii

‘Art is always Conflict’ Sergei Eisenstein, 1929 ‘A Dialectic Approach to Film Form’, in Sergei

Eisenstein Film Form: Essays in Film Theory, trans. and ed. by Jay Leyda (New York: Harcourt, 1949), pp. 45-63 (p. 48).

‘There is no Architecture without Violence’ Bernard Tschumi, 1983

Bernard Tschumi, Architecture and Disjunction (Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1994), p. 121.

Acknowledgements Especial thanks to Jessica Reynolds for her advice throughout this dissertation, and to my parents for their continued support.

vii

Abstract The growing socio-ethnic diversity of the 21st Century City has put into question public space and its role in society as a true representation of its inhabitants. Public space can appear unused and unassimilated with the conditions attributed by the interrelationship of groups in society. This dissertation intends to create a manifesto for the design of public space that establishes a language of conflict, collision and intrigue based on the theory of montage. Montage was primarily developed by early soviet filmmakers as a means for finding a coherent language for cinema. However it was not until Sergei Eisenstein (1898-1948) started studying and exploring montage that it took on deep spatial and temporal significance. It is my intention to study Eisensteinâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s theory as manifested in La JetĂŠe (1963) - a film by Chris Marker, and Parc de la Villette (completed 1987) - Bernard Tschumi Architects, and examine its potential in the design of public space. Montage will be explored in three parts; Part 1 will address the frame as a spatial composition, Part 2 will analyse the sequence as a means of assessing its temporal capacity, and finally Part 3 will investigate the experience created through the space-time combination, as a framework for realising an architectural language born from montage. The manifesto serves as the interlude between each part, a booklet that outlines the key ideas from each element of montage. The dissertation concludes with the Postlude, a point to reassess the discoveries made and outline the urban implications concieved through the three elements of montage.

Contents

Prelude

Introduction

5 Montage - An Idea Created Through Counterpoint 7 La JetĂŠe - A Filmic Manifestation of Montage 13 Parc de la Villette - An Architectural Manifestation of Montage 17

Glossary 63

Part One

The Spatial Counterpoint La JetĂŠe - The Conflict Frames 69 Dynamic Conflict Instability of Frame Quantity of Frame

Parc de la Villette - The Urban Frames of Conflict 83 Dynamic Space Instability of Space Quantity of Space

Interlude I The Frame Manifesto

Part Two

The Temporal Counterpoint La Jetée - Sequence of Collision 105 Rhythm & Counter Rhythm Trucage Meaning

Parc de la Villette - Urban Sequence of Collision 113 Rhythm & Counter Rhythm Spatial Trucage Duration

Interlude II

The Sequence Manifesto

Part Three

The Experiencial Counterpoint La Jetée - The Paradox of Time and Space 127 Movement-Image Crystal Image The Paradox of Memory

Parc de la Villette - The Urban Paradox of Space and Time 135 Movement-Image in Architecture The Drama of Night Immersive World Memory and Montage

Interlude III

The Experience Manifesto

Postlude

Conclusion 149

Bibliography & Filmography 157

Prelude Counterpoint - Theory, Film and Architecture

List of Illustrations - Prelude Figures: Inside Cover

Sergei Eisenstein, Scene from Alexander Nevsky, 1938, p.ii Sergei Eisenstein, ‘Montage and Architecture’, in Eisenstein, Towards a Theory of Montage, trans and ed. by Michael Glenny and Richard Taylor (London: BFI, 1994), pp. 59-81

Prelude 0.1 - 0.6

Lev Kuleshov, The Kuleshov Effect, 1910’s, p.23 <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4gLBXikghE0> [accessed 21 January 2013]

0.7 - 0.10

Chris Marker, A Grin without a Cat (frames), 1977, p.25 A Grin without a Cat, 35mm Black-and-White and Colour film, mono, 240min 177sec, 1977.

0.11 - 0.44

Chris Marker, La Jetée (frames), 1962, p.27-49 La Jetée, 35mm black-and-white film, mono, 26min 37sec, 1962

0.45

Bernard Tschumi Architects, Plan of Paris, 1983, p.51 Bernard Tschumi, Cinégramme Folies, p. ii.

0.46

Unknown, The Slaughter Houses of la Villette, 1865, p.51 Bernard Tschumi, Cinégramme Folies, p. iii.

0.47

Bernard Tschumi Architects, Superimposition of the three systems, 1983, p.53 Samatha Hardingham, Supercrit 4 Bernard Tschumi Parc de la Villette, p. 19.

0.48

AA Project - Joyce’s Garden, Homage to Eisenstein, 1976-77, p.55 Bernard Tschumi Architects, Joyce’s Garden (New York, Bernard Tschumi Architects, 1976) < http://www.tschumi.com/projects/49/>

0.49

AA Project - Joyce’s Garden, An Abstract Point Grid, 1976-77, p.55 Bernard Tschumi, Cinégramme Folies, p. v.

0.50

Bernard Tschumi Architects, Context Plan, 1983, p.57 Bernard Tschumi, Cinégramme Folies, p. 1.

0.51

Bernard Tschumi Architects, Site Plan, 1983, p.57 Bernard Tschumi, Cinégramme Folies, p. 9.

0.52

Satellite Imagery, Parc de la Villette, 2012, p.59 Bing Maps, Parc de la Villette ([n.pl]: Bing, 2012) [accessed 21 January 2013].

0.54 - 55

Yukio Futagawa, Parc de la Villette, 1997, p.61 Yoshio Futagawa, Bernard Tschumi, Bernard Tschumi, ed. by Yokio Futagawa (Tokyo: A.D.A. Edita, 1997).

Introduction

This dissertation seeks to develop a design manifesto for public space through the idea of “conflict” based on the soviet theory of montage. I aim to investigate how the dialectic nature of montage may be used to activate public space and encourage social participation in the twenty-first century. The technique of montage was developed by soviet filmmakers (from 1918 onwards) as a means for finding a coherent language for cinema, however it was not until Sergei Eisenstein started studying and exploring montage that it took on deep spatial and temporal significance. He saw it as the ‘dramatic principle’ where the collision of shots, or fragments of montage, generate new ideas beyond the individual frames and in doing so conjure emotive effects in the audience. Eisenstein’s theory of montage will be explored using two case studies; La Jetée (1963), a film by Chris Marker and Parc de la Villette (completed 1987) by Bernard Tschumi Architects. Both of which are sited in Paris and act as two different manifestations of montage. This dissertation will also reference several Parisian philosophers and theorists to maintain a coherent trail of thought throughout. Its structure is divided into three parts; the first two look at independent forms of montage, while the third looks at them in combination. This will provide a structure that aims to develop new ideas out of the counterpoint of the layout and the content. The design manifesto acts as the conclusive bridges between each part, interludes that seek to extract the key ideas from the passages and formed them into a precise manuscript that units the whole dissertation.

Montage

An Idea Created Through Counterpoint [mass noun] ‘The technique of selecting, editing, and piecing together separate sections of film to form a continuous whole.’

[as modifier] ‘The technique of producing a new composite whole from fragments of pictures, text, or music.’1

Montage’s origins in cinema came from an experimental film by the Russian filmmaker Lev Kuleshov in 1918. The ‘Kuleshov effect’, as it became known was the precursor to the soviet theory of montage. The film shows the face of the Russian actor Ivan Mosjoukine between shots of a bowl of soup, a dead child and a seductive female. Kuleshov repeated the same clip of Mosjoukine’s face between each ‘object’, however due to the emotional connotations of each of them, be it hunger, sorrow or lust, the audience believed the expression on his face changed.2 Kuleshov explored this technique as a means of understanding the effects of shot assembly, and how it can be used to portray an emotional response in the viewer [Figs. 0.1-0.6]. He discovered that by splicing film together, emotion was created through the juxtaposition of shots and their content. This allowed film to break loose from the constraints of what was ‘stage theatre’, into a unique language of its own. The Kuleshov effect was developed by other Soviet Filmmakers, the likes of Vsevolod Pudovkin (1893-1953), Dziga 7

1. Oxford Dictionary Online,

Definition’s of montage, <http:// oxforddictionaries.com/definition/ english/montage?q=montage> [accessed 16 January 2013] 2.

Vsevolod Pudovkin (another filmmaker and figurehead in the birth of soviet montage) explained how ‘the public

raved about the acting of the artist. They pointed out the heavy pensiveness of his mood over the forgotten soup, were touched and moved by the deep sorrow with which he looked on the dead, and admired the light, happy smile with which he surveyed the girl at play.’ Referred to

by Herbert Zettl, ‘Aesthetics Theory’, in

Handbook of Visual Communication, Theory, Methods, and Media, ed. by

Ken Smith, Sandra Moriarty, Gretchen Barbatsis and Keith Kenney (New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2005) pp. 365-284 (p.367).

Vertov (1896-1954) and Sergei Eisenstein (1898-1948), and soon became known as the theory of montage. ‘Given man’s power of memory, the existence of two facts in juxtaposition prompts their correlation; no sooner do we begin to recognize this correlation than a composition is born and its ideas begin to assert themselves.’3 These four contemporaries began writing at length on the theory of montage interpreting it into two schools of thought. While Pudovkin and Kuleshov used montage as ‘linkage’ to progress narrative and instil rhythm so that shots were linked to portray the essence of a story, the films of Eisenstein and Vertov became a means for making rhetorical and metaphorical statements above and beyond the given narrative.4 This meant that they became strongly linked with ideas of propaganda films, indeed Vertov expressed that film and the newsreel can be used to include ideological arguments where “any political, economic, or other motif” can be incorporated.5 The political connotations some of Eisenstein’s films portray are not relevant to this study of his theory of montage, as they would develop an architectural language of power and control; a language that does not create openness or participation, but dictation and authorship. While Eisenstein’s theory may be developed in this way its essence is in the form of expressing a dialectic.6 In this dissertation I will use montage as Eisenstein first formulated it to be, a method for depicting an idea through images and their relationship without the necessity for storytelling based on a linear narrative.

Vsevolod Meyerhold, Meyerhold on Theatre, trans. and ed. by Edward Braun (New York: Hill and Wang, 1969) p.322

David Bordwell, ‘The idea of montage in soviet art and film’, Cinema Journal, Vol.11 (1972), pp. 9-17 (p. 10).

Ibid,. p. 10. [Bordwell interpretation of Dziga Vertov writing]

Sergei Eisenstein started exploring montage in film from 1925, The Battleship Potemkin (1925) October (1927) and Alexander Nevsky (1938) are considered the most noticeably. These became audio-visual means for testing his theory which was writing down in the form of essays from 1928. Most noticeable of which are A Dialectic Approach to Film Form (1929) and Methods of Montage (1929) which where eventually translated to English in Sergei Eisenstein, Sergei Eisenstein Film Form: Essays in Film Theory, trans. and ed. by Jay Leyda (New York: Harcourt, 1949), pp. 45-63 and pp. 72-83. Leyda also translated several essays earlier in Sergei Eisenstein, Sergei Eisenstein The Film Sense, trans. and ed. by Jay Jeyda (London: Faber and Faber Limited, 1943).

Three types of montage Eisenstein’s idea of montage as ‘explosion’, ‘collision’, ‘drama’ and ‘tension’, will be the basis for testing an architectural language not born purely from material space but rather from surprise, the unexpected and social engagement. I will explore Eisenstein’s ideas of space (captured in a frame) as well as time (captured in a sequence), and their generative conditions used in cinema. These will be the means for exploring possible urban implications. The frame and the sequence will then be juxtaposed in search of a third kind of montage (Space-Time) that hopes to be generative not just in a physical dimension but also an experiential one. The sections are as follows:

Part One

The Frame (Spatial contradiction)

Part Two

The Sequence (Temporal contradiction)

Part Three

The Experience (Temporal Spatial contradiction)

La Jetée A Filmic Manifestation of Montage Chris Marker’s 1963 sci-fi film La Jetée is composed almost entirely from still photographs shown in varying intervals throughout its twenty-seven minute duration. This constant flow of images, taken on a Pentax Spotmatic (35mm Film), is broken only once to allow for eight seconds of motion footage.7 The film is a cine-roman that takes the viewer on a journey backwards and forwards through space and time. Marker uses all three types of montage listed above as a means for composing the film. Although elusive and rarely interviewed, his connection with Eisenstein’s theories stem from the use of montage to depict an idea.8 This is referenced in ‘Le Fond de l’air est rouge, A grin without a cat’ (1977) a French essay film about the Soviet involvement in the Prague Spring during the Cold War.9 Shots of a soldier immerging from a tank in the middle of a rally, are cut with a scene from Battleship Potemkin forming a ‘dialectical montage’ [Figs. 0.7-0.10].10 Marker uses Eisenstein’s strength of cinematic syntax and the meanings that they compose to further distil resonance in his own work. La Jetée is set in a post apocalyptic future that sees Paris in ruin after World War III. Human extinction lies in the balance where finding a solution for the currently depleting resources becomes imperative. The protagonist, a slave, is sent through time in search of food, medicine and

7. IMBD, FAQs on La Jetée, <http://www.

imdb.com/title/tt0056119/faq> [accessed 16 Januray 2013]. [Motion-picture segment taken on 35mm Arriflex film camera] 8.

Chris Marker started his career in the cutting room as a film editor, and so from an early stage appreciated the role of montage in cinema. J. Hoberman notes that while Marker was working as an editor, he discovered that ‘montage produces meaning...[an] heir to Kuleshov, Eisenstein, and Vertov.’ J. Hoberman, The Lost Futures of Chris Marker, (New York: The New York Review of Books, 2012) <http://www. nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2012/ aug/23/lost-futures-chris-marker/> [accessed 16 Januray 2013].

Daniel Fairfax notes that ‘each of the two shots from Potemkin inserted into the sequence last barely a second, with the montage-act functioning close to the threshold of perception’ in, Montage

as Resonance: Chris Marker and the Dialectical Image (Australia: Senses of

Cinema, 2012) <http://sensesofcinema. com/2012/feature-articles/montageas-resonance-chris-marker-and-thedialectical-image/> [accessed 16 January 2013].

The Lost Futures of Chris Marker (New York: The New

10. J. Hoberman,

York Review of Books, 2012) <http:// www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2012/ aug/23/lost-futures-chris-marker/> [accessed 16 Januray 2013].

energy using the image of a woman from his childhood as the means. This perpetual memory develops a journey through past, present and future in search of the event that takes place on the viewing pier at Orly airport, Paris [Figs. 0.11-0.44]. La Jetée will provide the basis of each section, a means for analysing Eisenstein’s theories of montage, and a way of bridging the gap between film and architecture. Marker developed an art form that used film techniques without the associated process of 24-frames per second; this enables me to focus on the effects of montage in a precise manner. The frame is a photograph, the sequence is a collection of photographs defined by intervals, and the whole film is how we understand them in relation to each other. Eisenstein’s theory states that a film has to be generated by an idea, a ‘thesis’, and Marker declares this in the opening line of the film: This is the story of a man, marked by an image from his childhood. [Narrator]

A fragment of memory, becomes the basis for the exploration of the film. An idea captured as an image of a woman recoiling in terror. The gesture of the woman holding her hand over her mouth in shock of what she is seeing becomes the catalyst for the whole film, and as such the seed or the embodied energy of the filmic montage [Fig. 0.13].

Parc de la Villette

An Architectural Manifestation of Montage

The urban milieu is fragmented and it is argued that different social groups are becoming insular: ‘wherever large numbers of differently constituted individuals congregate, the process of depersonalization...enters.’11 Public space can appear unused and unassimilated with the conditions attributed by the interrelationship of groups in society. With a growing ethnic diversity in the city these issues become more prevalent, and public space becomes less and less representational of the very people it is built for. I believe that the public space of the city should present use as more important than function. A space that looks to attract inhabitants not to simply partake in a given activity but rather interact, socialize, and communicate as a break from the manic image-saturated world. The event of reading a newspaper, playing a game, or simply watching people go past become programs of coincidence that aren’t prepurposed or structure, but are allowed to just ‘happen’. Bernard Tschumi’s Parc de la Villette, looks to engage society through the superimposition of activities. It is a means for reactivating public space, through interaction and so allows me to assess the social implications of montage and whether it is a positive devise for the design of urban spaces. The three main parts of this dissertation will incorporate a detailed study of the park, which like La Jetée, will be explored against the frame, the sequence and finally the space-time combination.

Urbanism as a way of life, in Metropolis: Center and Symbol of our time, ed. by Philip Kasinitz (New York:

11. Louis Wirth,

New York University Press, 1995), pp. 58-82 (p. 72).

The site, located in north east of Paris, was the subject of an international competition in 1982 which looked at redeveloping the former Paris slaughterhouses into a contemporary park [Figs. 0.45 & 0.46]. The winning entry by Bernard Tschumi Architects shows, through clear diagrammatic images, an implied framework of the layering of different elements. The surfaces act as the base, the points became a grid of follies and the lines are routes, where their conflicting interrelationships produced a ‘meaningless’ organisation [Fig. 0.47].12 This was to be the first completed work by Tschumi who was already widely known for his theoretical projects. It became a stage for him to test his philosophy of Deconstructivism, theorised by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) who himself was consulted during the design stages.13 Tschumi’s architectural standpoint has strong roots in the work of Sergei Eisenstein and his methods of montage. He references the Soviet filmmaker when leading a student project at the AA 1976-7, which was based on an extract from James Joyce’s text, Finnegan’s Wake [Fig. 0.48 & 0.49]. The narrative became the program, and Eisenstein’s diagrams where reengineered to adopt an architectural form. During the late 70’s Tschumi devised the Manhattan Transcripts, a visual manifesto for realizing architecture through the disjunction of event, movement and space. Architecture, Tschumi believed, couldn’t be understood without appreciating the events that take place within them. The disjunction of event, movement and form defines an experience of space that provides the user with a personal meaning.

12. Peter Blundell Jones, ‘La Villette’,

Architectural Review, August (1989), pp. 53-59 (p.56). Jones, later in the article, translates Bernard Tschumi’s explanation of the concept behind the park. ‘The game of architecture

is neither function (questions of use), nor form (questions of style), nor even the synthesis of function and form, but rather the bringing together of possible combinations and permutations between different categories of analysis - space, movement, event, technique, symbol, etc’ (p. 57). 13. Eva Meyer, ‘Jacques Derrida’, Rethinking

Architecture, A Reader in Cultural Theory, ed. by Neil Leach (London: Routledge, 1997) pp. 300-328 (p.300).

The Parc de la Villette adheres to the ideas of Deconstructivism as it denies to have a coherent meaning, or that the meaning is unsustainable, and so the different events, programs and activities work as a system for providing meaning through use. Tschumi sought to remove this meaning through the collision of the layers. The montage of routes, points and surfaces provides a disjunction, which this dissertation will explore as a means for critiquing it. Through a critical analysis and comparison of the film and the architecture, I seek to re-invent an architectural language of conflict; a means for establishing a design manifesto that can be used to transform the 21st century public space of the city into a place of social discourse.

Figures 0.1 - 0.6. Lev Kuleshov, The Kuleshov Effect, Black-and-White film, 17sec, images from one of his experiments during 1910â&#x20AC;&#x2122;s

Figures 0.7 - 0.10. Chris Marker, Le Fond de lâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;air est rouge (A Grin without a Cat), 35mm Black-and-White & Colour film, mono, 240 mintues, 1977

Figures 0.11 - 0.44. Chris Marker, La JetĂŠe, 35mm Black-and-White film, mono, 26mintues 37seconds, 1962

Figures 0.45. Bernard Tschumi Architects, Plan of Paris with sites of â&#x20AC;&#x153;Grand Projects and existing parks, 1983

Figures 0.46. Unknown, The Slaughterhouses at la Villette, 1865

Figures 0.47. Bernard Tschumi Architects, The Superimposition of the three systems (Point, Line & Surfaces, 1983

Figures 0.48. Architecture Association Project - Joyce’s Garden, Homage to Eisenstein, 1976-77

Figures 0.49. Joyce’s Garden, An Abstract Point Grid, Students sites in Covent Garden, 1976-77

Figures 0.50. Bernard Tschumi Architects, Context Plan, 1983

Figures 0.51. Bernard Tschumi Architects, Site Plan, 1983

Figures 0.52. Satellite Imagery, Parc de la Villette, 2012

Figures 0.53 - 0.55. Yukio Futagawa, Parc de la Villette, 1997

Glossary Movement-Image Cine-Roman Durée

Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995) A term derived as an extension of Henri Bergson’s writing on movement in film. Deleuze believed that ‘Cinema proceeds with photogrammes that is, with immobile sections - twenty-four images per second. But it has often been noted that what it gives us is not the photogramme: it is an intermediate image, to which movement is not appended or added; the movement on the contrary belongs to the intermediate image as immediate given.’

French Definition of Cine-Roman: ‘Film Story’ [The term is devised from Photo-Roman]

French Definition of Durée: ‘Duration, Length of Time’ Henri Bergson (1859 - 1941) developed his theory of Durée as a measure of time in relation to an individuals progressive consciousness’, an endurance of time. ‘[Bergson] establish[ed] the notion of duration [durée], or lived time, as opposed to what [he] viewed as the spatialized conception of time, measured by a clock, that is employed by science.’

Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, Trans. by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (London: The Athlone Press, 1992), p. 2.

Crystal Image

Encyclopedia Britannica, Henri Bergson (Worldwide: Encyclopedia Britannica) <http:// www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/61856/Henri-Bergson> [accessed 21 January 2013] (p.1).

Trucage

Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995) One needs the ability to rearrange various fragments of time to understand the film as a whole. ‘The cystal-image is...the point of indiscernibility of the two distinct images, the actual and the virtual, while what we see in the crystal is time itself’

French Definition of Trucage: ‘Special effect’

Christian Metz (1931-1993) ‘The word “trucage” itself normally designates two kinds of interventions... during shooting (= camera trucages) or after it (= Track Trucages)...The “blurred focus,” for example, belongs in the category of filming... The totally black screen, the dissolve, irising, wipes, the swish etc., are all, to varying degrees, cinematographic processes which entail... treatment of the celluloid [after the process of filming]’

Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, Trans. by Hugh Tomlinson & Barbara Habberjam (London: The Athlone Press, 1992), p. 82.

Christian Metz, ‘”trucage” and the Film’, trans. by Françoise Meltzer, Critical Inquiry, Vol.3, No. 4. (Summer, 1977), pp. 657-675.

Part One -

Contradiction of the Frame

Montage - The Spatial Counterpoint

List of Illustrations - Part One

The Urban Frame of Conflict 1.17

Figures:

Bernard Tschumi, Conceptual Folies of La Villette, 1983, p.79 Bernard Tschumi, Cinégramme Folies, p. 25.

1.18

Chris Marker, La Jetée - 5min 29sec (frame), 1962, p.81

The Conflict Frames

1.19

1.01

Sergei Eisenstein, Conflict = Dynamics, 1929, p.65 Sergei Eisenstein, Film Form, p. 54.

Unknown, Under the Pavement the Beach, 1968, p.81 Unknown, Under the Pavement (Unknown, Procrastination Collection) <http:// procrastinationcollection.tumblr.com/post/531832427/situationist-internationalgraffiti-from-the-1968-paris> [accessed 21 January 2013].

1.02 & 1.03

Sergei Eisenstein, Conflict Frames x 2, 1929, p.65* Sergei Eisenstein, Film Form, p. 53

1.20

Bernard Tschumi, The Manhattan Transcripts - The Park (part), 1978, p.81 Bernard Tschumi, The Manhattan Transcripts, p. 17.

1.04

Chris Marker, La Jetée - 2min 41sec (frame), 1962, p.67* La Jetée, 35mm black-and-white film, mono, 26min 37sec, 1962

1.21

Bernard Tschumi, Ideograms, 1983, p.83 Bernard Tschumi, Cinégramme Folies, p. 53.

1.05

Chris Marker, La Jetée - 21min 55sec (frame), 1962, p.67*

1.22 - 1.24

1.06

Chris Marker, La Jetée - 25min 52sec (frame), 1962, p.67*

Bernard Tschumi, Combination Models of the Folies, 1983, p.83 Samatha Hardingham, Supercrit 4 Bernard Tschumi Parc de la Villette, p. 25.

1.07

Ingmar Bergman, Persona (frame), 1966, p.67 Persona, 35mm black-and-white film, Mono, 85min, 1966

1.25

Bernard Tschumi, Exploded Programs across the Site, 1983, p.85 Bernard Tschumi, Cinégramme Folies, p. 4.

1.08

Chris Marker, La Jetée - 4min 49sec (frame), 1962, p.69*

1.26 & 1.27

1.09

Chris Marker, La Jetée - 4min 18sec (frame), 1962, p.69

Sergei Eisenstein, Unknown, 1933, p.85 Vladimir Nizhny, Lessons with Eisenstein, trans. and ed. by Ivor Montagu & Jay Leyda (New York: Da Capo Press, 1979), p. 55 & 65.

1.10

Stanley Kubrick, The Shining (frame), 1980, p.69 The Shining, 35m colour film, Mono, 142min, 1980

1.28

Bernard Tschumi, The Manhattan Transcripts - The Street (part), 1978, p.87 Bernard Tschumi, The Manhattan Transcripts, p. 29.

1.11

Chris Marker, La Jetée - 10min 49sec (frame), 1962, p.71

1.29

Bernard Tschumi, Superimposition, 1983, p.87 Bernard Tschumi, Event Cities 2, p. 75.

1.12

Chris Marker, La Jetée - 14min 27sec (frame), 1962, p.71*

1.30

1.13

Chris Marker, La Jetée - 26min 3sec (frame), 1962, p.73

Bernard Tschumi, The Park is part of the City, 1983, p.89 Samatha Hardingham, Supercrit 4 Bernard Tschumi Parc de la Villette, p. 31.

1.14

Chris Marker, La Jetée - 26min 13sec (frame), 1962, p.73*

1.31

Bernard Tschumi, The Exploded Folie, 1983, p.89 Samatha Hardingham, Supercrit 4 Bernard Tschumi Parc de la Villette, p. 25.

1.15

Sergei Eisenstein, Battleship Potemkin (frame), 1925, p.75* Battleship Potemkin, 35m, black-and-white, silent, 75min, 1925

1.32

Bernard Tschumi, The Manhattan Transcripts - The Block (part), 1978, p.91 Bernard Tschumi, The Manhattan Transcripts, p. vii & ix.

1.16

Chris Marker, La Jetée - 26min 21sec (frame), 1962, p.75*

1.33

OMA, Model of the competition entry for Parc de la Villette, 1983, p.91 OMA, Parc de la Villette, (Rotterdam: OMA, 1982) <http://oma.eu/projects/1982/ parc-de-la-villette> [accessed 21 January 2013].

1.34 - 1.36

Bernard Tschumi, Perspective, Section and Plan of Folie 8, 1983, p.93 Bernard Tschumi, Event Cities 2, p. 119-121.

* Figures that incorporate authors drawings 67

La Jetée The Conflict Frames ‘Murder on the stage has a purely physiological effect. Photographed in one montage-piece, it can function simply as information, as a sub-title. Emotional effect begins only with the reconstruction of the event in montage fragments, each of which will be an all-embracing complex of emotional feeling.’1 Sergei Eisenstein, 1929

Figs. 1.01

The spatial counterpoint is the name given for ‘framing’ shots, where the ‘counterpoint’ is in reference to Eisenstein’s theory of ‘conflict’.2 He distinguishes between the different ways of forming conflict in shot and highlights them as a ‘montage cell’.3 This passage explores La Jetée through the frame, which is used for expressing the dynamics, the instability and the quantity as a means for understanding the thesis of the film. La Jetée’s structure of still photographs being composed as a film holds much akin with Eisenstein’s theory of conflict within the shot [Figs. 1.02 & 1.03]. The prolonged exposure of each of the frames accents the spatial tension composed through the lens. For the most part, Marker deliberately chooses not to alter the frame during a shot, as per traditional use of motion picture cameras, so his composition has to be accurate and in line with the thesis of the film.

Sergei Eisenstein, ‘A Dialectic Approach to Film Form’, in Sergei Eisenstein Film Form: Essays in Film Theory, trans. and ed. by Jay Leyda (New York: Harcourt, 1949), pp. 45-63 (p. 60).

Ibid., pp. 45-63.

Ibid., p. 53.

Conflict of graphic direction

Sergei Eisenstein, Conflict=Dynamic, 1929. (Film is a representation of Conflict.)

Figs. 1.02 & 1.03

Sergei Eisenstein, Conflict Frames x2, 1929. (Frames from a selection of his films identifying ‘conflict frames’. Below are two examples that I have broken down. The top is a conflict of x graphic direction, and the bottom is conflict of volume.)

Counter Rhythm

Conflict

Conflict of graphic direction

Counter Rhythm

Conflict of planes

Strong vertical plane

Conflict Receding horizontal planes axis

Conflict of planes

Strong vertical plane

Receding horizontal planes axis

Conflict of volumes

Strength

Imbalance is

Fig. 1.04

Chris Marker, La Jetée 2min 41sec, 1962. (Conflict of graphical direction, the gesture of women accented by her hands, her wind swept hair and framed as if trying to recoil out of the frame.)

Dynamic Conflict The gesture of the Woman(played by Helene Chatelain)with her hands held to her face in shock, is one of the strongest frames of La Jetée. The frame captures the energy of the moment, a dynamic expression given presence by the four walls of the camera. This moment of conflict between the figure and the lens evokes a dynamism in the audience imprinting the frame in their minds. Eisenstein’s theory of Conflict through graphic direction is also represented here. The camera is positioned next to the event while the woman is held to one side as if trying to recoil out of the frame [fig. 1.04]. This evokes a sense of fear. La Jetée uses these frozen moments as a method for representing the dialectic of the film how memory functions, and how film and photography become a tool for representing it.4 As Harbord notes, ‘they belong neither to a time nor place, but to a way of imagining and making the world as a scene, a range of different textures, memories and fantasies that resist temporal classification.’5 They don’t reveal the actual event but capture the emotional relevance of it as a means for developing the thesis. This emotion, captured in a fragment of consciousness, as understood by the protagonist, sets up a string of further events whose energies are also captured primarily through the use of conflict frames. Another means of composing a conflict frame is through volume, where physical size and its relationship organise a visual structure. The experimenters tower over the figure of a man with apparatus over his eyes and ears. Their physical volume bears down on the victim and in

Fig. 1.05

Chris Marker, La Jetée - 21min 55sec, 1962. (Conflict of space, the creatures of the museum control the space. The man and the women are simply passing by.)

Janet Harbord, Chris Marker, La Jetée (London: Afterall Books, 2009), p. 4. Ibid., p. 25.

Fig. 1.06

Chris Marker, La Jetée - 25min 52sec, 1962. (Conflict of planes, the flow of visitors to the pier stand as the obstacle between the progagonist and the women at the end of the pier.)

Fig. 1.07

Ingmar Bergman, Persona, 1966. (A film that depicts the melding of two womens personalities becoming one. This early shot is used to protray the blank personality of one of the women. The frame composes the conflict between objects, room and actress. A scene of silent energy.)

turn the victim is cut by the frame, with only his head remaining in the bottom right corner [fig. 1.08]. Marker does not attempt to reveal the man’s emotions rather the tension of the situation. By positioning the camera opposite the main experimenter he closes off the space with a 4th figure(the audience) in this way, Marker is suggesting that we too are one of the experimenters, crowding round the man in anticipation of a result. Both these conflict frames are composed using different methods to provoke an emotive response, however they are still holistically represented through one conflict, that of light and dark. Film is in essence a conflict of light and so becomes the simplest way of representing tension. The human existence survives underground in the darkness of the Paris tunnels, and so exudes a sense of restriction, isolation, and claustrophobia [fig. 1.9]. Marker also associates darkness with the present unknown and uses time travel as a means for shedding light on the present.

Fig. 1.08

Chris Marker, La Jetée 4min 49sec, 1962. (Conflict of Volume, the frame acts as the 4th side of the enclosure and enphasizes the tension.)

Fig. 1.09

Chris Marker, La

Jetée - 4min 18sec, 1962. (Conflict of Light, revealing the confines of life underground.)

Fig. 1.10

Stanley Kubrick, The Shining, 1980. (Kubrick used the recent invention of the steadi-cam as a way of dampening any movement that was transferred from the camera man. The camera now had the ability to follow the action as if participating, and allowed a far more realistic experience of the spaces of the film. Terri Meyer Boake observes that the camera was ‘able to alter the emotional focus of the interpretation of the architecture by relating to the stature of the viewer.’ In reference to Terri Meyer Boake introduction to the Architecture and Film course at the School of Architecture in the University of Waterloo p.3)

Instability of frame As the experiments begin, the protagonist (played by Davos Hanich) seeks to return to the spaces of the past. The narrator states: ‘images begin to ooze like confessions. A peacetime morning. A peacetime bedroom, real bedroom. Real children. Real birds. Real cats Real graves.’6 These images ‘have the fixed, elegiac, self contained quality commonly associated with photography’ [fig. 1.11].7 The frames stand isolated and compose scenes rather than capture the dynamics of the events. Marker understands this difference and therefore expresses them as a way of retracting from the main progressive story. These are places that the hero (and Marker) doesn’t want to explore. So when the man does rejoin the woman the conflict within the frames resurfaces; they take on more of a cinematic weight as if bloated in the possibility of transforming into something else [fig. 1.12].8 Montage is in part conjured by the instability of frames. This is a dynamic language that doesn’t intrinsically need the progression of 24 frames per second to be cinematic. Montage maintains the appearance of a film in disregard of this rhythm. The instability of the frames continues to develop the story until the hero is exposed to the space of the future. Four heads are shown floating balanced and centrally located in the frame. It appears that the fragility of the memories from the past has been uprooted and a more perfect world has been created. A resolution of the frame that is only read due to the prior frames being constructed through the principles of conflict in frame. The climax of the film is back

Jean Négroni, La Jetée, Narrator, 35mm Black-and-White film, mono, 1962

Catherine Lupton, Chris Marker, Memories of the Future (London: Reaktion Books Ltd, 2008), p. 91. Ibid., p. 93.

Fig. 1.11

Chris Marker, La Jetée - 10min 49sec, 1962. (‘elegiac, self contained quality’)

Fig. 1.12

Chris Marker, La Jetée - 14min 27 sec, 1962. (The woman appears completely composed, and the frame is organised off her axis.)

on the pier at Orly where the man runs towards the woman at the end of the platform. The stills are depicted unstable where some are burred and out of focus, suggesting he is trying to break free from the confines of the frame [fig. 1.13].9 The final frame shows the man depicted in a perpetual fall, held frozen by the camera lens allowing for the realization, ‘that this moment he had been granted to watch as a child... was the moment of his own death [fig. 1.14]. Marker frames the shock on the woman’s face, a different photograph than before but composed in a similar way, allowing for the audience to now appreciate the emotional response of the woman [fig. 0.43].

Ibid., p. 93.

Fig. 1.13

Chris Marker, La Jetée - 26min 3 sec, 1962. (The photo is soft (out-of-focus), and the protagonist almost breaks free from the frame.)

Fig. 1.14

Chris Marker, La Jetée - 26min 13 sec, 1962. (The composition depicts the protagonist in line with the gun man and the woman. Is he protecting the image of the women?)

Quantity of frame

Conflict of graphic direction

Counter Rhythm

Conflict

Conflict of planes

Strong vertical plane

Receding horizontal planes axis

Fig. 1.15

Throughout the film, Marker uses quantity of frame as a form for creating an emotional response in the viewer. After the titles the audience is held in darkness for ten seconds with only the voice of the narrator expressing continuity.11 Harbord states that ‘to throw an audience into darkness is one of the most powerful, and possibly sadistic, things a filmmaker can do.’12 This technique can be interpreted in several ways. Firstly as an acknowledgement of the potential power of darkness in film which Marker appreciates as “the nocturnal portion that stays with us, that fixes our memory of a film.”13 But it is also a prolonged suspension of the images which notifies the audience to take heed of these images as frames, frames that represent the emotion of the event. Marker perceives frames as emotive fragments which are held retracted from time and uses the

xis

a Sergei Eisenstein, Conflict of Plain, 1929

The final shot shows the man lying face down juxtaposed with the woman depicted as a silhouette in the background [fig. 1.16]. After eight seconds the still fades to black, a time of sorrow, where the man understands ‘there was no way to escape from time.’ Marker uses the length of the shots as a means for controlling the tension, held by the conflict, composed in the frame. As Eisenstein stated, ‘The quantity of interval determines the pressure of the tension’.10 In essence, the shooting on the pier is imbued with significant emotive strength by being held in focus for eight seconds. It allows the audience to fully appreciate the weight of the composition. A fraction too short and the tension is not constructed, a fraction too long will cause it to break down.

Conflict of volumes

Conflict of space

Strength

Imbalance

DRAW

Conflict of light

Mass and form

Void

Focus

Depth

Fig. 1.16

Chris Marker, La Jetée - 26min 21sec, 1962. (The protagonist, lies in focus, with the women partially lost through the short depth-of-field. She is simply a silhouette.)

10.

Sergei Eisenstein, ‘A Dialectic Approach to Film Form’, in Sergei Eisenstein Film Form: Essays in Film Theory, trans. and ed. by Jay Leyda (New York: Harcourt, 1949), pp. 45-63 (p. 47).

11.

Harbord, p. 41.

12.

Ibid., p. 42.

13.

Antoine de Baecque, Marker Direct: An Interview with Chris Marker, trans. by Samuel Douhaire and Annick Rivoire (New York: Film Society Lincoln Center) <http://www. filmcomment.com/article/markerdirect-an-interview-with-chris-marker> [accessed 18 January 2013] Interview originally published in Liberation (March 2003).

temporal joins to develop understanding. The conflict frames are the preliminary elements of montage â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Montage fragmentsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; that contain the energy of events. I will take these conflict frames and explore their possible urban implications with regard to the city, which I will use to analyse Parc de la Villette.

Parc de la Villette

The urban frames of conflict ‘Our work argues that architecture - its social relevance and formal invention - cannot be dissociated from the events that “happen” in it.’14 Bernard Tschumi, 1994

Film, in essence, frames event. Architecture, on the other hand, provides a frame for event. For example; the football field acts as an architecture that isolates a sporting event, however this doesn’t define the game. What makes the event so thrilling, or not at times, depends on the amount of conflicts, be it goals, penalties, saves or challenges throughout the ninety minutes of play. In this way, The space becomes experienced through the users not just the use. The architectural frames are constructed prior to the experimental qualities that define space. Orly Airport in La Jetée, similarly accents this idea, where the architecture simply sits as the background for the event; the woman’s gesture is remembered not the space. Bernard Tschumi writes at length about the dislocation of an architectural thesis and eventual experience by the user - The pyramid of concepts and the labyrinth of experience. Space needs to appreciate the dynamics of events. A frame that only becomes apparent when in use. Conflict starts to drive the architecture and allows it to change in response to not just the events, but the ambiance that defines them - dynamic space.

14.

Bernard Tschumi, Architecture and Disjunction (Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1994), p. 139.

Fig. 1.17 Bernard Tschumi,

Conceptual Folies of La Villette, 1983

Dynamic space The connotations of dynamic space in the urban milieu would develop an interactive understanding of public space that is driven by the events that take place in them. The interaction of people during events provides a space that confronts the idea of ‘public ownership’, transforming it to a space that is continually changing to facilitate the active processes taking place there. A space that does not control event so to invite conflict, but a dialectical architecture whose thesis is in the embodiment of the ideas of its society. Guy Debord, a prolific figure in the Situationist International movement in the late 1960’s, believed that many problems in society were attributed to the public not participating. Debord saw current society as a spectacle built from mass media and capitalism that was degrading human life away from experience and interaction to ‘mere representation’. 15 He wrote in The Society of the Spectacle (1967), ‘The spectacle is not a collection of images; rather, it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images.’16

Fig. 1.18

Chris Marker, La Jetée 5min, 29sec, The Head of the Apostle, 1962

Fig. 1.19

Unknown, Under the Pavement the Beach, 1968 (Situationist International slogan) 15.

16.

Bernard Tschumi was 24 when the movement was at its most influential during the Paris riots of 1968, and these ideas can be seen in his work from the Manhattan Transcripts to the architecture of Parc de la Villette. The Manhattan Transcript’s first section, ‘the park’, traces the event of a figure stalking its victim, the murder, and the search for clues transcending into the capture of the murderer in New York’s Central Park. Each fragment of action in the event is

Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. by Donald NicholsonSmith (New York: Zone Books, 1994), p. 12. Originally published as, La Société du Spectacle, (France: BuchetChastel, 1967). Ibid., p. 12.

Fig. 1.20

Bernard Tschumi, The

Manhattan Transcript The Park, 1978 Left - The Action Middle - The Plan Right - The Movement

represented by three images, a photograph ‘the action’, a plan ‘the cruel and loving architectural manifestation’ and the final changeable image that represents ‘the movements of the main protagonist’.17 Tschumi distinguished that no image could be read on its own, and so to comprehend the space of the park, images were intrinsically connected to provide meaning. Echoing Debord’s, The Spectacle of Society, Tschumi points to action as a means of appreciating your surroundings, and only through conflict, be it between space and event or within society, can a truly representation of meaning be derived. 17.

French definition of folie: Madness

The Parc de la Villette’s 35 folies are organised on a point grid across the entire site (about 800m East-West and 1000m NorthSouth). A grid located at 120m intervals (the largest common denominator) which locate the deconstructive structures that sit inside volumes of 10m3. Jacques Derrida wrote point de folie, a literal reflection on the idea of the folies in 1986, where he notices that ‘they deconstruct first of all...the semantics of architecture’ as such that ‘we inhabit it, it inhabits us’, but no physical reading of the structures can be obtained.18 The folies are not constructed to take banners or adverts so maintain a divide from the ‘fashion’ of the time. They are completely stripped back, deconstructed from society, to allow the public to self determine their meaning through use. Tschumi’s The Manhattan Transcripts became the theory behind La Villette, and like The Park in section 1, the folies become the ‘plan’ that can

18.

Bernard Tschumi, The Manhattan Transcripts (London: Academy Group

Fig. 1.21

Ltd, 1994), p. 8. (The Manhattan Transcripts were first publicly shown in 1978 at Artists Space in New York).

Ideograms, 1983

Eva

Meyer,

‘Jacques

Derrida’,

(London: Routledge, 1997) pp. 300328 (p. 307 & 308).

Figs. 1.22- 1.24

Rethinking Architecture, A Reader in Cultural Theory, ed. by Neil Leach

Bernard Tschumi, Combination models of the Folies, 1983

Bernard Tschumi,

not be realised without an associated ‘action’ and ‘movement’. The folies pose as empty frames for these events to take place within, around and on top of them. The distribution of programs on the site complies with this idea, where by events that need to be built, covered or open to the elements are first isolated then exploded across the point grid therefore ‘encouraging the combination of apparently incompatible activities’; ‘The running track passes through the piano bar inside the tropical greenhouse’ [Fig. 1.25].19 Tschumi looks at this disjunction as a means for generating social participation.

19.

Bernard Tschumi, Cinégramme Folie: Le Parc de la Villette (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1988), p. 4.

Figs. 1.26 & 1.27

Sergei Eisenstein, Unknown, 1933, Plans are simply used to show spatial relationships and movement, the frame, constructed through conflict, represents the true experience of the space.

Figs. 1.25

Bernard Tschumi, Exploded Programs across the Site, 1983

Instability of space Marker developed the story of La Jetée so that it could only be understood through the association of conflict frames with other conflict frames. If we take the frame as an embodied conflict, then the formulation of space is only comprehended through the association of several dynamic frames. The ambience of the film is primarily driven by this and the urban milieu is closely associated with it as well. The agglomeration of events, and the people that partake in them produce the given ambience. To formulate this into an architectural motif is to appreciate the dialectic of these events as a frame. The dynamic space can now be understood more programmatically, and in reverse, the instability of space provides the capacity for dynamic space to exist. Part 2 of The Manhattan Transcripts, ‘the Street’, now develops a relationship between fragments of conflict as represented in ‘the park’. This produces a transitional plot that travels through a typical street of Manhattan. 42nd Street is used to set up a formal architecture that is deconstructed to facilitate the events and movement of the plot. Tschumi notes that ‘the street’ is a ‘border crossing’, where ‘borders’ are spaces that facilitate events.20 The repetitive point grid of la Villette, like the block structure of Manhattan, is a representation of the ‘borders’ in the transcripts. The whole grid acts as the street or border crossing which provides a cohesion between each ‘isolated’ event in the individual folies. The

Figs. 1.28

Bernard Tschumi, The

Manhattan Transcript The Street, 1978 Top - The Action Middle - The Section Right - The Movement

20.

Bernard Tschumi, The Manhattan Transcripts (London: Academy Group Ltd, 1994), p. 8.

Figs. 1.29

Bernard Tschumi, Superimpositions, Parc de la Villette, 1983

structure for these bright red folies are all derived from a cube of 36 x 36 x 36 foot, that is then divided into three sections in each direction forming a cage with 9 ‘frames’ on each side.21 This 1:1 format sits, interestingly, between Le Corbusier’s and Perret’s ideal window sizes. A dimension that doesn’t comply to the dimensions of a man (vertical) or to the dimensions of the visual (horizontal), but rather a combination of the two.22 This primary structure is then either ‘decomposed’, where frames will break or be removed, or ‘extended’, where frames will be subdivided, filled in or completely enclosed, depending on program or simply randomly. Where as the protagonist from La Jetée strives but fails to break out of the frames, the events in la Villette are released from the constraints of these frames, and in return help shape them when necessary.

21.

22.

Bernard Tschumi, Event - Cities 2 (Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2000), p. 63.

Bruno Reichlin, For and Against the Long Window: The Perret - Le Corbusier Controversy’, in Constructing Architecture: Materials, Processes, Structures a Handbook, ed. by Andrea Deplazes, trans. by Gerd H. Söffker and Philip Thrift (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2005), pp. 175-183.

Figs. 1.30

Bernard Tschumi, The Park is part of the

City, 1983 Figs. 1.31

Bernard Tschumi, The Exploded Folie, 1983

Quantity of Space The instability of space, driven by the collision of events, seeks to form a programmatic approach for realizing space. Where the relationship of events starts to create the cohesion of the architecture. The quantity of event adds another dimension to this and measures the amount of use attributed to a particular activity. The more a certain event takes place in a space; the more the space is associated with that event. Marker used the quantity of frames as a method for controlling tension in La Jetée. An architectural frame of quantity does the same as it provides a framework that facilities all kinds of events, where their amount of use provides the changeable tension that coheres them. The urban milieu finds foundation through the quantity of event. Held in a perpetual instability, its continuous change provides the structure. An architecture of this premise needs to formulate tension as cohesion, while maintaining unpredictability.23 Tschumi’s 4th and final section of The Manhattan Transcripts is ‘The Block’. His focus is now directed at one block (a border - in reference to ‘the street’ section) that is concerned with the contradiction and juxtaposition of events and programs as one entity. This is a concentrated study into the ‘disjunctions between movements, programs, and spaces’ in search of a resolved logic.24 Five programs/events are outlined; ice-skaters, soldiers, football players and dancers, and then their relative movements and spaces are

Figs. 1.32 Bernard Tschumi,

The Manhattan Transcript - The Block, 1978

23.

24.

OMA, Parc de la Villette, (Rotterdam: Office of Metropolitan Architecture, 1982) <http://oma.eu/projects/1982/ parc-de-la-villette> [accessed 18 January 2013]. OMA note that ‘the permanence of even the most frivolous item of architecture and the instability of the metropolis are incompatible.’ Bernard Tschumi, The Manhattan Transcripts (London: Academy Group Ltd, 1994), p. 8.

Figs. 1.33 OMA , Model of competition entry for Parc de la Villette, 1983. The runner up, whos design looked at programmtic strips rather than the superimposition of the point grid.

conflicted with each other. This results in an architecture language that facilitates all, but doesnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t define any particular one. The folies of Parc de la Villette are similarly conceived out of this notion, and only transcend to a particular function when necessary. Some of the folies have been taken over and a function asserted but by no means does this define the space, if anything it helps to assert it as architecture rather than a landscape piece. Folie 8 was originally designated as a kindergarten but eventually became a television studio [Figs. 1.34 - 1.36], and in another folie a restaurant ended up becoming a sculpture garden.25 So the quantity of space is a conception of social need and response. These folies act as structures for program, and when these programs fade or change they can equally stand as the framework for new ones.

25.

Peter Blundell Jones, â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;La Villetteâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;,

Architectural Review, August (1989), pp. 53-59.

Figs. 1.34 - 1.36

Bernard Tschumi, Perspective, Section and Plan of Folie 8, 1983.

Interlude I The Frame Manifesto

Part Two -

Contradiction of the Sequence

Montage - The Temporal Counterpoint

List of Illustrations - Part Two Figures: The Sequence of Collision 2.01 - 2.03

Sergei Eisenstein, Battleship Potemkin - The Lion Wakes (frames), 1925, p.102 Battleship Potemkin, 35m, black-and-white, silent, 75min, 1925

2.04 - 2.13

Chris Marker, La Jetée - The First Experiment (frames), 1962, p.104

2.14 - 2.23

Chris Marker, La Jetée - The Awakening of the Girl (frames), 1962, p.106

2.24 - 2.33

Chris Marker, La Jetée - The Meeting at the Museum (frames), 1962, p.108

The Urban Sequence of Collision 2.34 - 2.43

Bernard Tschumi, Cinematic Storyboard, 1983, p.110 Samatha Hardingham, Supercrit 4 Bernard Tschumi Parc de la Villette, p. 20-21.

2.44

Bernard Tschumi, Frame & Sequence of Parc de la Villette, 1983, p.112 Bernard Tschumi, Event Cities 2, p. 71.

2.45

Bernard Tschumi, Bamboo Garden, 1983, p.112 Bernard Tschumi, Event Cities 2, p. 83.

2.46

Unknown, Bamboo Garden, Unknown, p.112 Bernard Tschumi, Event Cities 2, p. 82.

2.47 - 2.50

Sergei Eisenstein, Montage Sequence of the Acropolis, 1937, p.112 Sergei Eisenstein, ‘Montage and Architecture’, in Eisenstein, Towards a Theory of Montage, trans and ed. by Michael Glenny and Richard Taylor (London: BFI, 1994), pp. 62-65.

2.51

Bernard Tschumi, The Principles of Montage that frame Cinematic Promenade, 1983, p.114 Bernard Tschumi, Cinégramme Folies, p. 16.

2.52 - 2.53

Bernard Tschumi, “Rhythms” and “Melodies”, 1983, p.114 Bernard Tschumi, Cinégramme Folies, p. 13.

2.54

Bernard Tschumi, Sequence 10 - The Dragon Garden, 1983, p.114 Bernard Tschumi, Event Cities 2, p. 84.

2.45

Unknown, Downtown Athletics Club, 1931, p.116 Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York, p. 154.

2.56- 2.60

Unknown, Pompidou Center, Unknown, p.116 Saki, Ichikawa, The Space of Events (London: AA diploma Blog, 2010/2011) < http://www.aadip9.net/ saki/2010/10/> [accessed 21 January 2013].

2.61

Ceronne, La Villette, 2008, p.116 Flikr, La Villette, ([n.ap]: Flickr, 2008) <www.flichr.com> [accessed 21 January 2013]

2.62

Bernard Tschumi, Open-air Activities, 1983, p.116 Bernard Tschumi, Event Cities 2, p. 81. 103

Eisenstein’s Five Principles for Constructing a Montage Sequence

Metric Montage

By cutting a scene, so that each shot is proportionate to the following shot, a rhythm is produced in the sequence. This is ‘not by impression as perceived, but by measurement,’ and so creates a unison between the film and the audience; a ‘pulse’ that can be felt in both, as a means of creating emotional tension.

Rhythmic Montage

Creates emotional tension by containing a movement within the shot that plays against the sequence of a scene, be it with the content or the metric montage. Eisenstein points out that rhythmic montage works by violating the feel on the sequence, and it can be easily achieved by introduction ‘material more intense in an easily distinguished tempo.’

Tonal Montage

The style of a certain sequence; be it with the use of soft focus; a similar degree of illumination ‘light tonality’; or repetition and comparison of similar shape ‘elements’, ‘graphic tonality’. The emotional effect of the scene as a whole is instilled in the viewer, and allows ‘emotive structures [to be] applied to non-emotional material’. When different tonal montage sequences are juxtaposed, the emotional effect can be intensified.

Overtonal Montage

Tonal montage is understood as the ‘emotional colouring’ of a sequence or the film as a whole, and so overtonal becomes the level up, ‘a directly physiological perception.’ So this could be understood a the audience having a visceral reaction to what they are viewing.

Intellectual Montage

Creates meaning outside of what is being represented, so that the audience is trusted in making the connection for this montage to work. A good example would be from the 2012 film Killing them softly, where scenes of low life criminals are cut with news footage of Wall Street bankers being accused of gross misconduct after the economic collapse. The audience is metaphorically asked the question, is there any difference between them? [References made to Sergei Eisenstein, ‘Methods of Montage’, in Sergei Eisenstein Film Form: Essays in Film Theory, trans. and ed. by Jay Leyda (New York: Harcourt, 1949), pp. 72-83.]

Figs. 2.01 - 2.03 Sergei Eisenstein, Battleship Potemkin - The Lion wakes to the horror of the scene on the Odessa Steps , 1925

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La Jetée The Sequence of Collision ‘The concept of the moving (time-consuming) image arises from the superimposition – or counterpoint – of two differing immobile images.’1 Sergei Eisenstein, 1929

This dissertation will now discuss the temporal aspect of montage and the way we interpret film through watching sequences. In 1929 Sergei Eisenstein wrote two essays, A Dialectic Approach to Film Form, which developed his theory of conflict in frame, and secondly (relevant to this section), Methods of Montage which laid down his five principles for constructing film sequences.2 Through examining various sequences in La Jetée, I aim to comprehend how Marker creates a form of temporality through organising frozen frames in a non-linear manner. This will be analysed with the help of three sequences: The first experiment, the awakening of the girl, and the meeting at the museum. Part two of this section will then be used to analyse the urban implications of montage in relation to temporality, and how Parc de la Villette addresses these principles. 1.

Sergei Eisenstein, ‘A Dialectic Approach to Film Form’, in Sergei

Eisenstein Film Form: Essays in Film Theory, trans. and ed. by Jay Leyda

(New York: Harcourt, 1949), pp. 45-63 (p55).

105

Sergei Eisenstein, ‘Methods of Montage’, in Sergei Eisenstein Film Form: Essays in Film Theory, trans. and ed. by Jay Leyda (New York: Harcourt, 1949), pp. 72-83.

The First Experiment INT. EXPERIMENTATION ROOM <<2 MINTUE 19 SECONDS SEQUENCE>> [Below is the sequence of events, highlighting key images and the voice over of the narrator. The sound of a heartbeat, which increases in tempo, is heard juxtaposed to the whispers of the experimenters.] <<07.56>> [08.13 - Image 1] NARRATOR This man was selected from among a thousand for his obsession with an image from the past. [08.08 - Image 2] whispers heard from the experimenters [08.30 - Image 3] [08.46 - Image 4]

a faint heartbeat is heard

[08.49 - Image 5] NARRATOR (cont’d) At first, nothing else but stripping out of the present. [PAUSE] They start again. NARRATOR (cont’d) The man doesn’t die, nor does he go mad. He suffers. [PAUSE] They continue. The heartbeat is now heard louder

[09.22 - Image 6]

The heartbeat quickens

[09.55 - Image 7] [09.59 - Image 8] [10.05 - Image 9] [10.14 - Image 10]

Image fades to black <<10.15>> [Figs. 2.04 - 2.13 Chris Marker, La Jetée, 1962]

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Rhythm and Counter rhythm Chris Marker employs a layering of montage techniques to create a connection with the audience during this sequence. While the frames aren’t joined proportionately in time, as in Eisenstein’s theory of metric montage, they still however concur to a rhythm, a rhythm based on what they are framing. This means that frames of the hero are connected in small sequences and then shots of the experimenters are also joined in sequence. The audience has the time to take in the pensive look of anticipation on the faces of the experimenters, before being shown the look of anguish on the victim. The emotional impact of these small sequences compels the scene to takes on an atmosphere through the progression of time. This makes for a unison between the film and the viewer, a ‘pulse’ that can be felt in both.3 Above this layer of montage is the rhythmic montage, a counter rhythm that plays against the rhythm of the photographs. It is used to violate the feel of the sequence by inputting ‘material more intense’ than the associated response caused by the order of the frames.4 For this Marker uses sound effects - the heartbeat of the hero; background noise - the whispers of the experimenters; and the voice track - the narrator. Like a broken record, these elements become moments of conflict in a visual rhythm. The recognition that the experimenter’s whispers are in German evokes a pensive depth by the association with Nazi concentration camps in WWII.5 However it is the narration that provides the melancholy of the sequence. The script, beautifully written in its assertion of the events, is given extra poignancy by the tone and rhythm of Jean Négroni (the Narrator). A poetic conversation is created between the content and the narration

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that creates the perceived depth of the sequence.6 The English subtitles seem somewhat unnecessary as the combination of all these rhythmic layers compose an ambiance that defines the scene. The sequence is only given depth in time, where the rhythm and counter rhythms allow the audience to be drawn into the film on an emotional level. The spatial counterpoint in part one is composed of photographs that generate a conflict between content and frame, a means for conjuring emotion through composition. The temporal counterpoint now recognises the effect of joining them, casting not a visual interpretation but a temporal one allowing for new meanings and ideas to develop above and beyond the spatial ones already depicted. 3.

4. 5.

Sergei Eisenstein, ‘Methods of Montage’, in Sergei Eisenstein Film Form: Essays in Film Theory, trans. and ed. by Jay Leyda (New York: Harcourt, 1949), pp. 72-83 (p.73). Ibid., p. 74. Janet Harbord, Chris Marker, La Jetée (London: Afterall Books, 2009), p.12. [Harbord notes Marker’s Nazi influences stems from working as script writer on Alain Renais’s Nuit et brouillard (Night and Fog, 1995).]

Terry Gilliam, the director behind Twelve Monkeys (1995) a Hollywood adaptation of La Jetée, describes the film as ‘poetry and music’. Extended Interview below. Chris Marker Documentary (A piece of Monologue, 2012) <http://www.apieceofmonologue. c o m / 2 012 / 0 8 /c h r i s - m a r ke r- f i l m documentary.html> [accessed 17 January 2013].

“It works because it’s so technically brilliant, [what I means by this is] it works on a musical level. It’s like we’re listening to music, the images are coming up, and the editing is the most extraordinary editing I’ve ever seen. Because its a rhythm he is setting up in the voice, the narrative voice, you are dealing with poetry at this point.” “I’ve never seen La Jetée in English, I’ve only seen it in French and my French is appalling. It didn’t matter, I could tell what the story was. Now that’s an intriguing thing to used still, not use the conventional techniques of cinema to tell a story and yet [Marker] is doing it. We get it because the images are the right images, we can understand the images even if we don’t understand what is being said. But you know what is being said because of the images. It’s quite extraordinary how he does it, it’s a wonderful juggling act is what it is. But ultimately it works because it is a piece of poetry and music.”

The Awakening of the Girl INT. WOMENS BEDROOM - Day <<1 MINUTE, 2 SECONDS SEQUENCE>> NARRATOR [prior to sequence] One day she seems frightened. One day she leans over him. As for him, he never knows whether he moves towards her, whether he is driven, whether he has made it up, or whether he is only dreaming. [The first image of the hero who appears to be asleep. This fades to black, and a background track of birds chirping starts. This is the only sequence in the film that contains motion pictures. The womanâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s awakening becomes the only point that temporality is recognised as a rigid structure.] <<17.52>>

[17.52 - Image 1] [18.00 - Image 2] [18.05 - Image 3]

The chirping of the birds slowly increases in volume [18.10 - Image 4] [18.20 - Image 5] [18.25 - Image 6] [18.30 - Image 7] The still photographs transcend into a 8 seconds piece of film [18.40 - Image 8] The volume of the birdsong crescendos to this point, then is suddenly silenced by the film clip finishing and the image of the experimenter. A dramatic cut. [18.42 - Image 9] [18.44 - Image 10] <<18.54>>

[Figs. 2.14 - 2.23 Chris Marker, La JetĂŠe, 1962]

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Trucage During this sequence, from the first image of the woman asleep up, to the actual piece of ‘reel’ film, the frames are joined through slow fades. The images appear inseparable from one another, which Marker uses to prepare you for the eight seconds of the woman in continuous motion. These special effects or ‘trucages’ are the fabric that bonds montage together and allows a viewer to understand the film unitarily.7 Christian Metz defines trucage as something that ‘belongs to the narrative, not to the story; to the telling process, and not to the told.’8 The trucages become the intervals, a transparency that represents time between images. The segment of film is the pinnacle of La Jetée, Marker gives it specific significance through preceding it with the use of frozen frames and abruptly ending it with the motionless frame of the experimenter (Jacques Ledoux). The frames, prior to the piece of film, depict movement as if condensing hours into seconds. By using soft fades a different sense of temporality is created then by simply joining shots together, time appears more progressive. So when the motion pictures cut in, time is finally recognised. The woman opens her eyes, blinks and smiles at the camera. The film then cuts to the frozen face of the experimenter, reminding the audience of the essence of cinema - motion pictures. This moment of motion footage is a abrupt retraction from the flow of the film. Its stark contrast to the rest of the film completely alters the viewer’s conception of montage as it accents the thesis of the film for the first time above the narrative journey of the Man.

Marker composes time through trucage, to manipulate the film and in doing so helps pronounce montage as the filmic thesis. Montage is beyond the constraints of time, however its interpretation by the audience is still read in a particular understanding of time. This is the ‘primary illusion offered by cinema itself,’ and Marker uses this isolated moment to pronounce that.9

109

Christian Metz, ‘”trucage” and the Film’, trans. by Françoise Meltzer, Critical Inquiry, Vol.3, No. 4. (Summer, 1977), pp. 657-675 (p. 672). Ibid., p. 663.

Lupton, Chris Marker, Memories of the Future (London:

Catherine

Reaktion Books Ltd, 2008), p. 94.

The Meeting at the Museum INT. MUSEUM - Day <<3 MINUTES, 24 SECONDS SEQUENCE>> [This sequence follows on from the ‘awakening of the woman’. It is the last time the couple are together. There is little narration through this section and instead a flowing cinematic soundtrack takes control] <<18.54>>

NARRATOR Around the fiftieth day, they meet in a museum filled with timeless animals. [19.13 - Image 1] NARRATOR (cont’d) Now they have hit the bull’s-eye. Thrown at the right moment, he may stay there and move without effect. [19.38 - Image 2] [20.25 - Image 3] [20.41 - Image 4] [20.47 - Image 5] [21.00 - Image 6] NARRATOR (cont’d) The girl seems also to be tamed. She welcomes him as a natural phenomenon the ways of this visitor who comes and goes, who exists, talks, laughs with her, stops talking, listens to her, then vanishes. [21.53 - Image 7] [21.54 - Image 8] [22.11 - Image 9] [22.16 - Image 10] <<22.18>>

[Figs. 2.23 - 2.33 Chris Marker, La Jetée, 1962]

110

Meaning This 3 minute 24 second sequence is easily the longest of the entire film. The man and the woman leisurely wander around a museum of extinct creatures, stopping occasionally to study them in their frozen states. These ‘objects’ of another time, held in frame-likecases, echo the reality of the man and the woman in the frames of the film. Marker’s use of the museum reflects that of filmmaking where the organisation of frames as montage evoke meaning that doesn’t necessarily cohere to the progression of time. Marker’s sympathy for the couple is revealed when he steps back from the ‘means to an end of narrative cinema: they have ‘no plans’, where the characters encounter does not seem to progress, but rather become more wholesome.10 Like Eisenstein’s theory of intellectual montage, this sequence is used as a way of creating meaning outside of that represented, and attributes the audience with making the metaphorical connection. The photograph of the man and the woman taken from behind the glass of one of the cases, highlights this theory. Marker is suggesting that these ‘objects’, the man and the women are, in essence fragments of memory, frozen in the frames like the stuffed menagerie in the vitrines before them.11 They are only brought to life by the viewer appreciating a sequence of film frames which renders the concept of montage as more of a personal matter. To perceive montage the filmmaker organizes images to create meaning and in turn the viewer organizes meaning to develop an understanding. So this highest point of montage, intellectual montage, can be described more contemporary as nonnarrative cinema, a structure for creating meaning from something that appears disjointed or dissimilated.

111

‘They are like memories of a film, which in our mind seem to be motionless and quantifiable, but if we search through the print never exactly correspond to one individual frame, or to the frozen drama of production stills’12

10.

Harbord, p. 82.

11.

I use the word menagerie as a hint at the Tennessee Williams play, The Glass Menagerie, (premiered 1944) due to it being played out as Tom’s memory of his mother and disabled sister. Tom narrates the opening lines, “Yes, I have

tricks in my pocket, I have things up my sleeve. But I am the opposite of a stage magician. He gives you illusion that has the appearance of truth. I give you truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion.” Similar ideas are addressed in The Glass Menagerie as in La Jetée. Also Marker became known by his peers as ‘magic marker’, which represents the depth of illusions he could create with film.

12.

Lupton, p. 91.

Parc de la Villette EXT. URBAN PARK - Day <<INFINITE SEQUENCE>> [This sequence is created by the inhabitants and users of the parc de la Villette. It is directionless and open, the user creates there own plot through the scale of temporality] MT 1 ‘They found the Transcripts by accident. Just one little tap and the wall split open, revealing a life-time’s worth of metropolitan pleasure - pleasure that they had no intention of giving up. So when she threatened to run and tell the authorities, they had no alternative but to stop her. And that’s when the second accident occurred - the accident of murder....They had to get out of the Park - quick. But one was tracked, by enemies he didn’t know - and didn’t even see - until it was too late.’ MT2 ‘Border Crossing...Derelict piers and luxury hotels, junkies and detectives, cheap whorehouses and gleaming skyscrapers had all been part of his world. So when he got out of jail, he thought he could pass safely from one to the next...but then he met her. To him, she was an enigma - bold, shy, wanton, and childlike in turn. From the moment he saw her he was a man possessed - possessed by a women who was beautiful to look at, but lethal to love....’ MT3 ‘The fall...First it was just a battered child, then a row of cells, then a whole tower. The wave of movement spread, selective and sudden, threatening to engulf the whole city in a wave of choas and horror, unless....But what could she do ... now that the elevator ride had turned into a chilling contest with violent death?’ MT4 ‘Here is the Block, with its loose yards and its ruthless frames - where well-dressed soldiers get rich on acrobats’ habits ... where fat football players send you up for knowing the wrong kind of strong arm dancers ... where everything you want belongs to somebody else, and the only way to get it is illegal, immoral, or deadly....’ * -

[MT1 - The Park

MT2 - The Street

MT3 - The Tower

MT4 - The Block]

Bernard Tschumi, The Manhattan Transcripts (London: Academy Group Ltd, 1994)

[Figs. 2.34 - 2.43 Bernard Tschumi, Cinematic Storyboard, 1983]

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Parc de la Villette The Urban Sequence of Collision

‘Construction “with depth” suggests that in montage, it is not the elements that are significant, but the space inbetween that defines the potential depth. The space of the interval is a shallow, compressed space, unfolding in time and linked together by the perception and recall of the observer. A transparent space developed out of the density of information and event.’13 Stan Allen, 1997

The sequence enables montage to be appreciated over time. Maker’s use of rhythm and counter rhythm throughout La Jetée helps to immerse the audience into the experience of the events dictated by the plot. A perceived rhythm of images allows for the audience to feel the pulse of the film, a means for being absorbed by the narrative. This, along with other counter rhythms, allows the audience to appreciate the filmic experience as a temporal process. I will now take this understanding of filmic temporality and use it to analyse the urban milieu, and specifically its manifestation at Parc de la Villette.

13.

Allen, Practice: architecture technique + representation, 2nd edn

Stan

(New York: Routledge, 2009), p. 30.

113

‘It is hard to imagine a montage sequence for an architectural ensemble more subtly composed, shot by shot, than the one which our legs create by walking among the buildings of the Acropolis’ Sergei Eisenstein, ‘Montage and Architecture’, in Eisenstein,Towards a Theory of Montage, trans and ed. by Michael Glenny and Richard Taylor (London: BFI, 1994), pp. 59-81 (p. 60).

Figs. 2.44 Bernard Tschumi, Frames & Sequence of Parc de la Villette, 1983

Figs. 2.47 - 2.50 Sergei Eisenstein, Montage Sequence of the Acropolis, 1937 Figs. 2.45 Bernard Tschumi, Bamboo Garden, 1983

Figs. 2.46 Unknown, Bamboo Garden, Unknown

114

Rhythm & Counter Rhythm Architecture is also appreciated through temporality where space transforms as an individual moves through it. Le Corbusier wrote, ”…Architecture can be classified as dead or living by the degree to which the rule of sequential movement has been ignored or, instead, brilliantly observed.”14 His architectural promenade became the archetype of this thesis, where the Villa Savoye, completed in 1931, is a prominent example. Spaces are composed off a ramp that transports you from the entrance vestibule to the roof, a temporal dictation that frames different spaces depending on how you perceive them.15 Similarly Auguste Choisy’s seminal work, Histoire de l’Architecture (1899) decades earlier, describes the organisation of the Acropolis as a language of the ‘picturesque’, and suggests that the site was organised into various ‘scenes’ which were “ponderated” off a central object.16 The temples act as frames for particular events, and the traversing as a means for organising them temporally. The act of walking produces a rhythm, and the various statues and temples provide a visual counter rhythm creating ‘a sense of anticipation and climax’ [Fig. 2.47 - 2.50].17 A montage sequence looks at counter rhythm as the means for creating intrigue, wonder and a heightened sense of experience. These ideas can be read in the work of Gordon Cullen and Kevin Lynch. who analysed the city through visual frames and movement diagrams. Their work is easier to read through its temporal form than through the observed spatial organisation of townscapes. Certain temporal rhythms can be read between frames which organise the space accordingly. In the case of La Villette the folies act as the frames so that the space in between

115

expresses the temporality in the park. This includes the accented temporality of routes and the general temporality of the space between. The routes are either axial (cut the whole park), partial cuts (routes to events) or curvilinear to produce varying sequences and flowing promenades [Fig. 2.44]. Tschumi describes these routes conceptually as lines, as a means of removing them from an A to B function, and instead allows them to become simply temporal devises. Parts of the park are formulated from this principle, where different temporal lengths govern the particular surface of a given space. The Path of Thematic Gardens, the large curvilinear route that appears to randomly flow through ‘programmed nature’ was a ‘carefully planned circuit’.18 Tschumi writes that, ‘If the spatial sequence inevitably implies the movement of an observer, then such movement can be objectively mapped and formalized - sequentially.’19 The Bamboo garden [Fig. 2.45 & 2.46], the Dragon Garden and the Garden of mirrors are but a few of the many sequences that are measured temporally. The movement lines, paths and routes flow through or cut the main promenade to constitute varying measures of time, as a means for creating a heightened sense of wonder. In these situations, as in the case of La Jetée, a comprehension of space is only perceived temporally. 14.

15.

Richard A. Etlin ‘Le Corbusier, Choisy, and French Hellenism: The Search for a new Architecture’, The Art Bulletin, Vol. 69, No. 2 ( June, 1987), 264-278 (p. 275). Yve-Alian Bois and John Shepley, ‘A picturesque Stroll around “ClaraClara”’, October, Vol. 29 (Summer, 1984), 32-62 (p. 56).

16. 17. 18.

19.

Richard A. Etlin, p.272. Ibid., p. 273. Bernard Tschumi, Event - Cities 2 (Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2000), p. 57. Bernard Tschumi, Architecture and Disjunction (Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1994), p. 162.

Figs. 2.51 Bernard Tschumi, Principles of Montage that Frame the Cinematic Promenade, 1983

Figs. 2.54 Bernard Tschumi, Sequence 10 - Dragon Garden, 1983 Figs. 2.52 & 2.53 Bernard Tschumi, “Rhythms” Use movements [left] - “Melodies” Spatial Ambiances [right], 1983

116

Spatial Trucage Henri Bergman (1859-1941), a prolific French philosopher, wrote at length in regards to time and its perception, which he developed into the theory of durée. ‘We shall see movement as rather quality than quantity, and, as such, akin to consciousness.’20 He believed that a person perceives space experientially rather than through a metric measure of time, where our consciousness stretches and retracts time accordingly. During the sequence of the woman awakening in La Jetée, Marker shows a governance of time that acknowledges durée. The intervals between frames, composed through the idea of trucage, can similarly be associated to temporality and refine events as a means for accenting their associated conflict. The streets and passages of the urban milieu, seen in its temporal state, can be envisaged as an immense trucage. It defines a framework that adheres to a rhythm either by foot, bike or car and gains its structure from ‘a multiplicity of programmes and events.’21 The streets of Manhattan are a clear example of this. They set up a rigid metric rhythm which is broken by various events that happen on them, be it the diversity of buildings and their functions or other linear rhythms (Broadway for example). The architecture sits as the frames for events and the streets as the intervals. The trucage can therefore be associated with the rhythms on the street. Events that manipulate time attribute to how we perceive time in our consciousness. For example an accident, a group of tourists, or a market stall would make a monotonous rhythm of streetscape more immersive and stretch

our perception of time accordingly. The observer, through their perception and recall of events, interrupts the interval as a space that unfolds in time.22 Tschumi refers to these intervals as ‘cinematic sequences’ and uses ‘movement’ and ‘melodies’ as trucages to manipulate their metric rhythms [Fig. 2.51 - 2.53].23 Time is measured through these spaces as qualities not quantity and in return the form of the routes are warped to facilitate these trucages. The Path of the Thematic Gardens in La Villette, swells and narrows depending on the quality of certain spaces, benches appear as movements of frozen time, bridges intercept as elements to speed up time, and other routes cut and join implementing a new duration of time [Fig. 2.54]. The holistic effect being time implied through experience. Tschumi sets up a system of lines that constantly interact causing moments of conflict that are experience by the inhabitants. This allows for the park to be perceived temporally in an infinite variety of ways.

20.

21.

Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. by Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer (New York: Dover Publications, 2004), p. 267.

Plotting Traces in Practice, Architecture, Technique and Representation, 1st edn (London: Stan

Allen,

Routledge, 2000), p. 67.

117

22.

Stan Allen, Practice: architecture technique + representation, 2nd edn (New York: Routledge, 2009), p. 30.

23.

Samantha Hardingham and Kester Rattenbury, Supercrit #4 Bernard Tschumi, Parc de la Villette (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012), p. 23.

Figs. 2.61 Ceronne, La Villette, 2008

Figs. 2.55 Unknown, Downtown Athletic Club, 1931 [The physical manifestation of the ‘Culture of Congestion’, where functions are superimposed on 38 platforms that are restricted by the footprint.26]

Figs. 2.56 - 2.60 Unknown, Pompidou Center, Unknown [A ‘Culture of Congestion’ in disrespect of preconceived programs.]

Figs. 2.62 Bernard Tschumi, Open-air Activities, 1983

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Duration As I have already noted with regard to La Jetée, it is not possible to create time with a film camera only suggest it Therefore the temporal meaning of film is a cognitive experience. Similarly in an architectural experience this means that we only appreciate movement and space through time as a conscious measurement. ‘A place is...a qualitative total phenomenon, which we cannot reduce to any of its properties such as spatial relationships.’24 Christian Norberg-Schulz in his book Genius Loci: Towards a Phenomenology of Architecture (1980) looked at the reality of space and how we consciously measure it. Experience is attributed to a subjective perception as well as an objective one, which can be measured through duration. The urban milieu is experienced in this way proving montage is a representation of this. The structure of film, processing at 24 frames per second, can be associated as a objective medium, which is only revealed in depth through the spatial frames and temporal intervals being perceived subjectively. The cinematic routes in La Villette are objective representations of movement, very much like the sequential rhythm of a film, and so to analyse the temporality of space in the park subjectively is to explore the spaces between these routes.

surfaces’ that allow complete programmatic freedom [Fig. 2.62].25 The contemporary city similarly facilitates events alongside one another but also allows for the unexpected inception of other events. A ‘culture of congestion’ is implied where the personal desires of users can be facilitated with the multiplicity of other programs [Figs. 2.55 - 2.60].26 Tschumi allows for this in the park as a stark contrast to his routes, a preconceived neglect of program, which facilitates a much more personal interpretation of the space temporally [Figs. 2.61]. With reference to Eisenstein’s theory of intellectual montage, Tschumi allows the users to establish their own subjective reading of time depending on their personal movements; they construct their own sequences across the in-between spaces, made possible through the architectural montage techniques discussed.

24.

Many of these spaces are organised as predetermined events, space for sport, space for exercise, market space, space for entertainment etc. but there are also the ‘so-called left over

119

Christian Norberg-Schulz, Genius

Loci, Towards a Phenomenology of Architecture (Minnesota: Academy Editions, 1980), p. 5.

25.

Bernard Tschumi, Event - Cities 2 (Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2000), p. 57.

26.

Rem Koolhaas, coins the term ‘Culture of Congestion’ in reference to the Downtown Athletics Club, New York, in, Delirious New York, A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan (New York: The Monacelli Press, 1994), pp. 152159.

Interlude II The Sequence Manifesto

Part Three -

Contradiction of the Experience

Montage - The Temporal-Spatial Counterpoint

List of Illustrations - Part Three Figures: 3.01

Chris Marker, La Jetée - The Girl (frame), 1962, p.125

The Sequence of Collision 3.02

Chris Marker, La Jetée - The Girl 2 (frame), 1962, p.127

3.03 - 3.06

Chris Marker, La Jetée - The Pier (frames), 1962, p.128

3.07 - 3.10

Chris Marker, La Jetée - The Future (frames), 1962, p.128

3.11

Chris Marker, La Jetée - The Girl 3 (frame), 1962, p.129

3.12 - 3.20

Chris Marker, La Jetée - The Park (frames), 1962, p.130

3.21

Chris Marker, La Jetée - The Girl 4 (frame), 1962, p.131

3.22

Chris Marker, La Jetée - The Girl 5 (frame), 1962, p.133

The Urban Sequence of Collision 3.23

Bernard Tschumi, Superimposition: Point, Line, Surface, 1983, p.135 Bernard Tschumi, Cinégramme Folies, p. 14.

3.24

Bernard Tschumi, North-South Gallery, 1983, p.136 Bernard Tschumi, Cinégramme Folies, p. 40.

3.25

Bernard Tschumi, North-South Gallery and Folie L6, 1983, p.136 Bernard Tschumi, Cinégramme Folies, p. 45.

3.26

Bernard Tschumi, North-South Gallery and Folie L7, 1983, p.136 Bernard Tschumi, Cinégramme Folies, p. 45.

3.27

Bernard Tschumi, Perspective view of Galleries, 1983, p.137 Samatha Hardingham, Supercrit 4 Bernard Tschumi Parc de la Villette, p. 17.

3.28

Mitchell Funk, Liquid Light - Time Square, Unknown, p.138 Steven Holl, Urbanisms: Working with Doubt (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2009) p. 20.

3.29

Bernard Tschumi, Folies of Spectacles, 1983, p.138 Bernard Tschumi, Cinégramme Folies, p. 15.

3.30

Peter Mauss, Intersection between bridge and folie, Unknown, p.138 Samatha Hardingham, Supercrit 4 Bernard Tschumi Parc de la Villette, p. 29.

3.31

Bernard Tschumi Architects, Firework Display, 1992, p.139 Samatha Hardingham, Supercrit 4 Bernard Tschumi Parc de la Villette, p. 32.

3.31 - 3.35

Various, Disjunction of Nature and Urbanism, Unknown, p.140 Flickr, Various images of parc de la villette, ([n.ap]: Flickr) < http://www.flickr.com> [accessed 21 January 2013].

3.36

Robin Evans, Barcelona Pavilion, 1986, p.140 Robin Evans, Translations from Drawings to Building and Other Essays, pp. 233-272.

3.37

Julian Galaad, Contrastes Incorporés, 2008, p.141 Flickr, Contrastes Incorporés ([n.ap]: Flickr, 2008) < http://www.flickr.com/photos/ galaad_569/2995001103/> [accessed 21 January 2013].

3.38

Stephan Doesinger, Ménilmontant, Unknown, p.143 Pascal Schoning, Cinematic Architecture, p. 46-47.

124

125

1. Sergei Eisenstein, ‘Montage and Archi-

tecture’, in Eisenstein, Towards a Theory of Montage, trans and ed. by Michael Glenny and Richard Taylor (London: BFI, 1994), pp. 59-81 (p. 59).

Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, and Cinema 2: The Time-Image, Trans. by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (London: The Athlone Press, 1992) [First Published 1983 & 1985 respectively]

Gilles Deleuze, a prolific modern figurehead in film theory, investigated many of the matters that I have already discussed. Cinema 1 - The movement-Image, dissects the theory of Montage set up by the Early Soviet Film Makers, through there films and essays, and develops new theories through existing ones . Cinema 2 - The time Image, stands as a continuum of the Cinema 1 and looks to new ideas beyond the Movement-Image. The Crystal Image is one the main theories devised in this book, which he develops through the study of many prominent films of the modern era, from the directorial likes of Alain Renais to Akira Kurosawa.

Fig. 3.01 (Previous Page) Chris Marker, La Jetée - 13min 20sec, 1962 Fig. 3.02 (Opposite Page) Chris Marker, La Jetée - 2min 32sec, 1962

126

La Jetée The Paradox of Time and Space ‘The word path is not used by chance. Nowadays it is the imaginary path followed by the eye and the varying perceptions of an object that depend on how it appears to the eye. Nowadays it may also be the path followed by the mind across a multiplicity of phenomena, far apart in time and space, gathered in a certain sequence into a single meaningful concept; and these diverse impressions pass in front of an immobile spectator.’1 Sergei Eisenstein, 1929 The dissertation up to this point has explored frame and interval as a means of understanding the complex dialectic of La Jetée (and La Villette): A man marked by an image from his past, a memory, or a fragment of one, that drives the hero on a journey through time, in search of realising that moment as the present. The protagonist’s aim is to appreciate memory as if it were reality and temporality as if it were spatial, which Marker explores by using the techniques of montage as a form for representing this paradox. This final section looks to understand La Jetée through a combined spatial and temporal matrix. As a means for comprehending this element of montage, I will examine two theories of the Parisian philosopher Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995), the MovementImage and The Crystal Image.2

127

Jean-Louis Schefer, On La Jetée, trans by Paul Smith, (unknown: Chris Marker online) <www.chrismarker.org/jean-louis-schefer-on-la-jete/> [accessed on 20 January 2013] originally published in, Passages de l’image, as a Exhibition catalouge in Pompidou Center, Paris, 1990.

Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, Trans. by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (London: The Athlone Press, 1992), p. 2.

5. Roland Barthes is his essay ‘The

Retoric of the Image’ distinguishes photography of ‘having been there’, which allows Marker to retract from the illusion of cinema that of ‘being there’. Catherine Lupton, Chris Marker, Memories of the Future (London: Reaktion Books Ltd, 2008), p. 93.

6. Stan Allen, Practice: Architecture, Tech-

nique + Representation, 2nd edn (New York: Routledge, 2009), p. 140.

Figs. 3.03- 3.06 (Left) Chris Marker, La Jetée - The Pier, 1962. (The camera appears to zoom out, an illusion that Marker casts through the repetition of the same photograph). Figs. 3.07 - 3.10 (Right) Chris Marker, La Jetée - The Future, 1962. (The lens now zooms into the future, a montage sequence that transport the audience from the present to a far away world in 15 seconds.) Fig. 3.11 (Opposite) Chris Marker, La Jetée - 2min 40sec, 1962

128

Movement-Image La Jetée plays temporal tricks to expose the drama and intrigue of a progressive plot. As previously described, trucage becomes a means for the director to control the progression of time through interval. However can the frozen image incorporate temporality in itself? Jean-Louis Schefer notes that ‘Time isn’t a content, nor a frame; it’s no more than an affect’; it is ‘consciousness that has become autonomous, become independent of the events that were once its form.’3 This comment corresponds with Deleuze’s theory of the movement-image where time is not added to images through the progression of 24 frames per second, but rather that the image immediately conveys an effect of time in this process.4 Marker’s use of still images in La Jetee stretches this idea of the movement-image to the max, to a point that lies on the cusp of photography but still is perceived as cinema.5 This illusion would fall short without the constant vibration of the image, replicated 24 times per second. The printing and projecting of the medium of film is not a perfect process as colliding chemicals produce grain and other imperfections which are melded with the material, producing an organic image. A ‘re-mastered’ perfectly still digital print and projection of La Jetée, would simply render an image, however this organic visual hum instils the temporal capacity of film and allows for the image to become several movement-images. We appreciate this movement as ‘not literally present, but visible and affective’ and so implies ‘a mobile section, a cut, not through time but along time, with measure and duration of its own.’6 Marker introduces this movement-image in the opening shot, where the camera appears to zoom out exposing Orly Airport, but in fact it is simply zooming out of a still photograph [Figs. 3.03 - 3.06]. Other recognitions of this include the use of dissolves, where images are slowly lost behind emerging new ones, further exposing the effect of the movementimage. This creates a sense of realism and movement which helps absorb the audience into a progressive narrative.

129

Time roles back again, the moment happens once more. This time she is near him. He says something, she doesn’t mind she answers. They have no memories, no plans. Time builds itself painlessly around them. As landmarks, they have the very taste of this moment they live. And the scribbling on the walls.

They walk. They look at the trunk of a sequoia tree covered with historical dates. She pronounces an English name he doesn’t understand. As in a dream, he shows her a point beyond the tree, and hears himself say, this is where I come from. And falls back exhausted. ‘The notion of the crystal image is a specific time-image, where the difference between past and present aren’t forgotten, but instead become “unattributable” where they become a cycle of ‘mutual exchange.’ Michelle Langford, Allegorical Image: Tableau, Time and Gesture in the Cinema of Werner Schroeter (Bristol: Intellect Ltd, 2006), p. 79.

Later on they are in a garden, he remembers there were gardens.

Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, Trans. by Hugh Tomlinson

and Barbara Habberjam (London: The Athlone Press, 1992), p. 66. 8. Uriel Orlow, ‘The Dialectical Image: La

Jetée and Photography as Cinema’, in

The Cinematic, ed. by David Campany

(London: Whitechapel, 2007), pp. 177185.

She asks him about his necklace. The combat necklace he wore at the start of this war which is to break out someday. He invents an explanation. Figs. 3.12 - 3.20 (Left) Chris Marker, La Jetée - The Park, 1962. (1min 25sec sequence) Figs. 3.21 (Right) Chris Marker, La Jetée 2min 43sec, 1962.

130

Crystal Image Deleuze states that ‘cinema does not just present images, it surrounds them with a world’.7 For an audience to accept the plot a film depicts, it needs to ‘believe’ that the film’s world is possible so needs to be partially based on reality. The viewer can then use their own understanding of the real world to generate a virtual world that makes sense within the context of the film. The film now creates a depth for the audience to appreciate the story. Deleuze’s crystal image becomes the conceived world that is born out of these frames, a means for emphasising a space-time through the association of frames and their content in a given scene. Take for example the sequence where the man joins the woman in a park, where they walk, talk and observe the inhabitants [Figs. 3.12 - 3.20]. The world of the park is conceived through the agglomeration of frames and the temporal movements associated within each of them. Marker here uses wide angle shots that create more of a spatial reconciliation in the frame than previously used. As Eisenstein notes a tight angle shot, taken on a long lens, ‘flattens the composition’ and so the wide angle exposes a more truthful spatial depth [Fig. 3.17]. By widening the shot, a sense of movement is attributed to the figures, some are caught mid step, others mid conversation, and so the audience imagines a world of movement, a world of time, even though these images are never captured in more than one frame. By setting the scene in a park the audience can personally relate to it spatially and temporally. There are children playing, old men talking, women pushing prams and individuals walking; a typical scene from the everyday real world. The crystal image embodies the temporal aspects that surround these frozen frames, and in doing so creates an ‘holistic time’ that the audience perceives.8 Most films create a world through Deleuze’s crystal image, however the flow of La Jetée doesn’t hold the story in one holistic time. Here the world of the past, the present and the future agglomerate into one cinematic piece, where multiple worlds are interwoven like fragmented crystal images. It’s the constant juxtaposition of past, present and future that makes La Jetée so intriguing and allows for Marker to experiment with the very function of memory. 131

10. Uriel Orlow, ‘The Dialectical Image: La

Jetée and Photography as Cinema’, in

The Cinematic, ed. by David Campany

(London: Whitechapel, 2007), pp. 177185 (p. 182). 11. Antoine de Baecque, Marker Direct: An

Interview with Chris Marker, trans. by

Samuel Douhaire and Annick Rivoire (New York: Film Society Lincoln Center) < http://www.filmcomment. com/article/marker-direct-an-interviewwith-chris-marker> [accessed 18 January 2013] Interview originally published in Liberation (March 2003).

On La Jetée, trans by Paul Smith, (unknown: Chris Marker online) <www.chrismarker.org/jean-louis-schefer-on-la-jete/> [accessed on 20 January 2013] originally published in, Passages de l’image, as a Exhibition catalouge in Pompidou Center, Paris, 1990.

12. Jean-Louis Schefer,

Fig. 3.22 (Opposite) Chris Marker, La Jetée - 26min 9sec, 1962

132

The Paradox of Memory Marker superimposes the past, the present and the future on top of one another to represent the dialectics of memory in the film. An interrelationship that creates a web of space-time held in a state of constant evolution till the point of the protagonist’s death. A victim of his own memory, he is trapped, ‘as [if ] in a labyrinth - in the drama of memory whose whole experience consists of making something his own (in a certain way he dies within himself, by a reconciliation or a coincidence of time and images).’9 It is this journey through the man’s memory, in his search for that moment in time, a moment of personal resolve, that registers in the audience as a holistic understanding of the film. Uriel Orlow likens La Jetée to an ‘archaeological expedition’ where the digging up of space excavates a temporal dimension, ‘one independent of forward motion or action, but rather embedded in the labyrinthine circuits of memory.’10 During a rare email interview in 2003, Chris Marker stated, ‘If I were to speak in the name of the person who made [La Jetée] it would no longer be an interview but a séance’.11 He later remarked that during the production of La Jetée, ‘I photographed a story I didn’t completely understand. It was in the editing that the pieces of the puzzle came together’. This is exactly how the audience appreciates the film, a photograph of a woman’s face, a fragile memory from the past finally develops into a coherent composition held taut by the function of montage. A structure that exposes memory as a form of montage, the same process is used for editing the film as well as watching it. A paradox of montage which begins with the face of the women on the pier, ‘she is the face of time and, above all, the very content of time’.12 This technique of montage becomes just as visible to the audience as the very content of the frames or a sequence in the film. It works as another layer of montage bringing coherence to the film as a whole, and so developing a cinematic world.

133

13. Pascal Schรถning, Manifesto for a Cine-

matic Architecture, (London, Architecture Association: 2006), p. 24.

Fig. 3.23 (Opposite) Bernard Tschumi, Superimposition: Point, Line, Surface, 1983

134

Parc de la Villette The Urban Paradox of Space and Time

‘Overlay becomes projection: Projection involves not only the physical but also the mental and psychological realms. Hence contradiction and overlay are important principles in creating. Memories are specific and must be contradicted with the specifics of other memories before they can spark a new understanding. Consequently, our conception of space is based on perception in relation to purely physical sensations, which obviously has an impact on architecture and urbanism.’13 Pascal Schoning, 2006 La Jetée’s dialectical structure of the relationship between the past, present and future depicts a world through space and time. The audience needs to believe in these frames to comprehend the relationships and compose a world. This film needs to be fully absorbed and questioned by the audience to comprehend its ingenious representation of the work of memory as montage. I will now look to the park in regards to this final synthesis of montage, as a means for deriving new possibilities through experience.

135

Fig. 3.24 (Left) Bernard Tschumi, North-South Gallery, 1983 Fig. 3.25 (Middle) Bernard Tschumi, North-South Gallery and Folie L6, 1983 Fig. 3.26 (Right) Bernard Tschumi, North-South Gallery and Folie L7, 1983 Fig. 3.27 (Opposite) Bernard Tschumi, Perspective view of Galleries, 1983

14. Stan Allen, Practice: Architecture Tech-

nique + Representation, 2nd edn (New York: Routledge, 2009), p. 140.

CinĂŠgramme Folie: Le Parc de la Villette (New York: Prince-

15. Bernard Tschumi,

ton Architectural Press, 1988), p. 40.

136

Movement-Image in Architecture Stan Allen believes that an architectural movement-image is encapsulated like the ‘taut surface energy of a body in motion’ and is perceived as not literally present, but as an experimental quality, a cinematic effect.14 This will appear at the point of collision between a movement sequence and a frame, a montage of space and time that creates an effect, read by the inhabitant as a sensory depth. According to Tschumi, the North-South Gallery of La Villette, is the ‘most spectacular expression’ of this superimposition of points and lines (frame and interval), which induces a collision between space and time, setting up the potential for a movement-image to exist. The route runs for 1km and is open 24 hours a day as a lit public street allowing access to the cinema-folie, restaurantfolie, video-folie, the Grande Hall, the Theatre, the City of Music and the Science and Industry museum. The gallery is aligned with the Museum, so is slightly juxtaposed to the point grid of folies implementing four collisions on its route through the park. Tschumi notes that this conflict of frame and sequence renders the folies their ‘respective architecture’, and so has a literal effect implied, but does also induce an [e]motional effect that is not literally present.15 The programmatic use, either existing or implied by the current inhabitants, does create an emotive energy. For a person who is simply walking through the park, this disjunction of two uses, the gallery and the folie, would entail a moment of surprise, intrigue or wonder, that can be assessed as a movement-image, an effect cast by the conflict. For example, Folie L6 is used as an entrance to the children’s playground and lounge with access to the slide and bathrooms. The physical structure is manipulated by the collision where the top side of the frame cantilevers over the route that breaks through one third of it. A movement energy is created by the route that bursts into a form through its collision with the point grid. Likewise if you are moving along the route (South to North) you initially see the cage of the folie that is broken into a cantilever which implies a gravitation tension. As you continue, you see the bridge to the slide jetting out as if traversing along the gallery beside you. Through this juxtaposition, the form of folie six registers kinematics which is incorporated into the very ambience of its functional form. 137

“Good architecture must be conceived, erected and burned in vain. The greatest architecture of all is the firework: it perfectly shows the gratuitous consumption of pleasure.”17

Fig. 3.28 (Top Left) Mitchell Funk, Liquid Light - Time Square, Unknown. Fig. 3.29 (Bottom Left) Bernard Tschumi, Folies of Spectacles, 1983. (Even though imaged as temporal stages that at ectivited by lighting, the Folies didn’t relize their potentially through their lack of lighting).

16. Nigel Coates proclaims ‘The

Fig. 3.30 (Right) Peter Mauss, Intersection between bridge and folie, Unknown.

Routledge, 2012), p. 97.

whole Parc is a folie’ in Samantha Hardingham and Kester Rattenbury, Supercrit #4 Bernard Tschumi, Parc de la Villette (Abingdon:

Fig. 3.31 (Opposite) Bernard Tschumi Architects, Firework Display, 1992.

138

The Drama of Night On completion of the park, Tschumi was asked to design a firework spectacular as a grand opening on 20th June, 1992. He used it as a means for manifesting the ideals of the park into a single event, an ambience that was created by a three dimensional firework display accenting the superimposition of the three systems of logic, the principles of the point grid, the lines and the surfaces. This thirty minute composition of light, colour and excitement illustrated a cinematic beauty that was composed as a explosive event, a completely temporal experience.16 This display was a movement-image, where the exploding fireworks represent a spatial organisation as an effect cast through moments of time. This event was a perfect example of how the park was intended, a cinematic experience created through the montage of time and space creating an atmospheric ambiance. Similarly the canals at night possess the capacity to express an atmosphere of intrigue. The constant flow of water produces a reflective shimmer from red and white fixed lighting along the main promenade, but their equal spacing still produces a monotonous under-whelming experience. In comparison the reflections of the lights of Time Square at night on the wet streets of Manhattan transcend the tarmac into a piece of artwork; here the canal seems to express very little apart from a continuous rhythm [Fig. 3.28 & 3.30]. Night time events do however drive the possibility for capturing atmospheric montage through light and shadow, a technique that Marker uses to develop mood and ambience in La Jetée. The folies act as potential ‘stages’, lying in wait to receive an act, but they appear untheatrical, incorporating few lights which retracts from a sense of drama. The emphasis instead is on the route,drawn by the continuous street lamps, rather than the points. During the summer however, music and film festivals take centre stage with open air events to capture the audience’s imagination. The filmic narrative draws a prescribed energy that enhances the mood of the park into one large folie, an encapsulated plot driven by a large event.16 This allows the individual folies to become the intermit parts of the park, a bar, a cafe and other facilities, are condensed into little ‘stages’ of events, a true realisation of their concept. 139

17. In reference to Mies’s Barcelona Pavil-

‘Cinema does not just present images, it surrounds them with a world’7

ion - Robin Evans, ‘Mies van der Rohe’s Paradoxical Symmetries’, in Transla-

tions from Drawings to Building and Other Essays (London: Architecture

Association, 1997), pp. 233-272 (p. 256). 18. Jean-Luc Godard, For Ever Mozart,

35mm colour film, Dolby SR, 1996.

Figs. 3.32 - 3.35 (Left) Various, Disjunction of Nature and Urbanism, Unknown. Fig. 3.36 (Right) Robin Evans, Barcelona Pavilion by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, 1986. (Evans acknowledges the material depths, and illusions that produce the complex ambiance of his buidlings). Fig. 3.37 (Opposite) Julian Galaad, Contrastes Incorporés, 2008.

140

Immersive World The 2D aspect of cinema renders an immersive world which finds resolve through a plot without having to explain or depict everything. This is similarly illustrated in the folies of La Villette, which appear as empty structural frames, ruins to a fictional past that appear as a broken crystal image of another time. They are a-temporal space-frames that are presented as fragmented diagrams of use preserved in red enamel with no surface texture. This ambiguity coheres with the intellectual logic of film, however they still remain abstracted from the experimental depth of montage. Their red tone seems to deliberately contrast with the public idea of ‘green’ space, a montage that Tschumi deliberately sets up as a collision. Other materials in the Park similarly seem to coalesce with this logic; the grass, the trees, and the water possess natural phenomenological sensory qualities that become elements of conflict within the urban materials of steel, concrete, gravel, stone and mirrors. In La Jetée the montage is reliant on a huge amounts of spatial and temporal ambiguity, whereas here the distinction between surfaces is clearly defined and events become almost too controlled. Through the diagrammatic montage of materials, an experiencial disjunction is lost, resulting in a structured composition that fails to capture the sensual qualities they possess. La Jetée however encapsulates this element of montage through light, dark, reflection and transparency capturing the effect of a material presence, and presenting it an aura of ambience. Robin Evans cites that architecture ‘adopt[s] the procedure of abstraction in order to reveal properties that are neither formal nor material...by accentuating colour, luminosity, reflectiveness and absorption of light’.17 Evans dissects the very principles of film that make it ambient; an implied depth without the need for explanation, or as Jean-Luc Godard puts it, ‘the light of their absence of explanation’.18 To create this atmospheric element of montage in La Villette, the materials would need to conjure the unexpected, create story through effect, and plot through imagination - a phenomenological and experiential composition. This final section will speculate on the potential for materials to be used as an experimental aspect of montage.

141

‘I have to believe in the world outside my own mind. I have to believe that my actions still have meaning, even if I can’t remember them. I have to believe that when my eyes are closed, the world’s still there.’

‘The mind is a powerful platform and memory is the architecture’23

Leonard Shelby suffers from Short term memory loss, his mind can’t recollect new memorys so space and time are condensed into polaroids as a frivolous attent to comprehend the world. Leonard Shelby, Memento, 35mm Colour Film, Dolby Digital, 2000

19. Allen, p. 138. 20. Ibid., p. 98. 21. Ibid., p. 99.

Manifesto for a cinematic architecture, (London, Architec-

22. Pascal Schöning,

ture Association: 2006).

‘Le Corbusier lived out the last years of his life in a small, simple hut on the Cote d’Azur… It gave him a place to sleep, shelter from the rain, wind and cold. More than that, it had a big window facing the sea, from where he could look out across the broad expanse of water and see the curvature of the horizon and the vastness of the sky. And all this after he had dreamed and realized huge material spaces! He didn’t need those spaces any more because the spatiality he envisioned was bigger and constantly changing in its appearance – a ‘cinematic experience’24

Memento, Memory and Montage, (Unknown: CTheory, 2001)

23. Nate Burgos,

< http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=321> [accessed 20 January 2013]

Fig. 3.38 (Opposite) Stephan Doesinger, Ménilmontant, Unknown.

142

Memory and Montage As previously discussed, the paradox of La Jetée is that it is both created and observed through the same process; montage is the technical process of assembling the film, as well as the cognitive process of recollecting it. One needs the ability to rearrange various ‘fragments of experience’ to understand the meaning of a film as a whole - ideas conceived through memory.19 Film frames and intervals do not create atmosphere, the audience interprets atmosphere as a perception through montage. Architecture can be similarly read in this way as it is only when a person moves through the space and absorbs it as a temporal and spatial experience that an ambience is formed. A plan is simply a script, a necessity, used in presenting space and time, however it is not a true representation of the atmospheric qualities produced by the physical architecture.20 One’s perception of architecture is only made whole through the ‘recall and comparison of parts experienced along the way’. This prescribes an architecture that doesn’t need a frame or sequence per say, but does need the associated effects that they create. A complex cinematic architecture of montage looks to materiality as a means to manipulate light, shadow and atmosphere, and allows space to unfold through their perception in relation to the intricacies of a human’s peripheral vision.21 In this way, the physical presence of materials becomes secondary to their interpretable emotive effects that absorb the observer in an imaginative world built from the montage of experiences. This notion therefore picks at the thesis of dematerialization which looks to generate more dimensions of imagination through allowing a greater flexibility and adaptability of space and time.22 An architecture that looks to experience for meaning, casts a much more visceral interpretation on the observer. Space becomes intrinsically linked to not just its physical form, event and time but also through recall and memory as a way of composing a personal understanding of architecture. Whether through the ineffable effects rendered by materials and memory, or through the dematerialization of space to atmosphere, architecture develops into a form that nurtures imagination and intrigue; a platform for encouraging social participation and creating a truly explicit ‘public ownership’ of urban space. 143

Interlude III The Experience Manifesto

Postlude Counterpoint - Theory, Film and Architecture

Conclusion This dissertation explores montage as a technique for reactivating public space. Having studied Eisensteinâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s theory as manifested in La JetĂŠe and Parc de la Villette, I have discovered positive implications for its spatial-temporal design. These investigations have established a manifesto that defines existing understandings of montage and highlights other urban implications as a basis to further test the thesis. The dissertation therefore acts as an apologia that will only find holistic comprehension through physical tests and explorations, which I hope to pursue further. The materialisation of montage through frame, sequence and experience allowed Chris Marker to portray the complex workings of memory into a provocative 27 minute cine-roman. By deconstructing the principles of motion pictures, Marker composed a dialectical resolve through montage. Bernard Tschumi translated this theory into an architectural motif where physical frameworks produce interactive public spaces driven through the energies of the users. This engagement develops a language of public ownership which perceives the disjointed demographic structure of society as a constructive premise. A prescribed architectural language that creates unity through disjunction by encouraging the combination of seemingly incompatible events and programs. A democratic society strives to incorporate the different needs and desires of society into an architectural dialectic that finds coherence through participation. The fundamental components of montage provide 149

this resolve and by superimposing them, a physical form can be realised. The frame, the sequence and the experience as seen at Parc de la Villette are the means for investigating the theory of montage and developing a coherent language of conflict. A dynamic montage reconfigures urban space by acknowledging the interaction of the public as the premise. The dynamic frame is the realisation of this that aspires to facilitate a multiplicity of functions without defining one particular use. By incorporating instability and quantity to maintain a disjointed configuration between space, events and their compatibility, space is perceived in a perpetual state of renewal. The sequence then seeks to coalesce with the inhabitants and create space through temporality, a means for providing cohesion through a common pulse. This is manifested as a collision of montage which establishes a language of engagement between events and programs that finds resolve through temporality. Finally, the phenomenological experience of montage looks to engage the user on a haptic level. The abstractness of Parc de la Villette is intellectually fascinating and coheres to a pragmatic design of montage, however it still maintains a lack of experiential depth. Tschumiâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s use of montage is primarily theoretical therefore the park underachieves its potential to fully fuel the imagination of the public. By exploiting the phenomenological effects of space-time, a montage can be developed which truly immerses the observer within a world of imagination; a space where meaning is hidden and only exposed as an experiential reality. The complex cinematic architecture of montage looks to materiality as a means to manipulate light, shadow and atmosphere. Thereby allowing space to unfold through its material perception in relation to the intricacies of a humanâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s peripheral vision.

151

The thesis of montage opens up the realm of experience to investigate new categories in architecture and urban space. The ineffable effect of materials holds one line of enquiry that starts to examine the very fabric of architecture. A fully corporal space-time becomes the realisation of experience through memory. An ambience that is composed from experiential fragments that becomes an holistic crystal through the cerebral composition of recollection. Dematerialization becomes an abstract register of this notion, a ramification of a Debordian idea, that looks beyond physical materials into a world of infinite possibilities driven by imagination. These explosive elements of montage assimilate the ideas of Sergei Eisenstein into the realm of physical comprehension, a means to envisage new architectural possibilities, that are realised through the disjunctive counterpoint of space and time.

153

‘The plot is no more than a devise without which one isn’t yet capable of telling something to the spectator!’ Sergei Eisenstein, 1929 ‘A Dialectic Approach to Film Form’, in Sergei

Eisenstein Film Form: Essays in Film Theory, trans. and ed. by Jay Leyda (New York: Harcourt, 1949), pp. 45-63 (p. 61).

155

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Filmography Alexander Nevsky, 35mm black-and-white film, mono, 112min, 1938 Battleship Potemkin, 35mm black-and-white film, silent, 75min, 1925 Citizen Kane, 35mm black-and-white film, mono, 119min, 1941 The Conformist, 35mm colour film, mono, 106min, 1970 For Ever Mozart, 35mm colour film, Dolby SR, 84min, 1996

La JetĂŠe, 35mm black-and-white film, mono, 26min, 1962 Last Year at Marienbad, 35mm black-and-white, mono, 94min, 1961 Memento, 35mm black-and-white and colour film, Dolby Digital, 113min, 2000 Metropolis, 35mm black-and-white film, silent, 153min, 1927 Nuit et Brouillard (Night and Fog), 35mm black-and-white film, mono, 32min, 1955 Persona, 35mm black-and-white film, AGA sound System, 85min, 1966 Sans Soleil, 35mm black-and-white film, mono, 100min, 1983 The Shining, 35mm colour film, mono, 142min, 1980 Soy Cuba (I am Cuba), 35mm black-and-white film, mono, 141min, 1964 Strike, 35mm black-and-white film, mono, 82min, 1925 Touch of Evil, 35mm black-and-white film, mono, 95min, 1958 Vertigo, 35mm colour film, Dolby Digital, 128min, 1958 2001: Space Odessey, 70mm colour film, 6-Track, 141min, 1968

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