CineMuseSpace Project, University of Cambridge, Department of Architecture Centre for Chinese Contemporary Art, Manchester
Introduction This exhibition is a reflection on the idea of a Cinematic Home of the Everyday . It is part of an ongoing research project, A Cinematic Musée Imaginaire of Spatial Cultural Differences [CineMuseSpace] that proposes to enlarge upon Malraux's idea of the Musée Imaginaire (imaginary museum) to display, compare, contrast and communicate a novel understanding of cultural differences through an analysis of cinematic spaces. Film has unwittingly made visible how we live, love, work and sleep in buildings. Cinema can be construed as a form of spatial ethnography and as such it constitutes the most comprehensive lived in building data in existence. Key to the CineMuseSpace concept is the construction of a cinematic spatial cultural ontology that focuses on similarities and differences between films from China & Japan as well as Europe & the USA. Some of the material you are about to see in this exhibition was first shown in the NextMixing Gallery in Shanghai in the Spring of 2019 and explored cinematic everyday life activities encountered in and around the home. The Cinematic Home of the Everyday exhibition offers a reappraisal of the routines and gestures of daily life made possible by the analysis of a range of cinematic scenes from different countries post-1945 and imparts new interest in the home. The displays make visible the changes in patterns of everyday life – the way we live is changing through time and our homes need to be rethought. The stencilled lines on the floor and the real objects and furniture, create an augmented reality ‘home’. The cinematic projections fill the gap between the abstract and the very real to combine a unique atmosphere. As an extension of the home, the garden is the necessary transition between the domestic and the urban that leads to the other exhibits. The garden projection is the product of a CineMuseSpace garden cinematics workshop filmed in and around the Chinese gardens of Nanjing in the spring of 2018. Observing the present and the past through everyday domestic cinematic situations may help us to reflect on the art of future living. In an increasingly globalized world we propose a greater level of understanding and engagement amongst different cultures. Our similarities and differences have to be acknowledged, revealed and celebrated. Cinema's people-centricity opens up the path to an innovative reflection on the complexity of architecture as experience and the need for a more humanistic-based approach.
Contents Introduction
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Cinematic Timelines of the Everyday
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Garden Stroll: Illusive Realm
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Keep Cool - The Augmented Hutong Reality Experiment
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Cinematic Home of the Everyday A Short Catalogue Raisonné of Everyday Life Activities
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Based on the film Fish Tank (Andrea Arnold, 2009)
Based on the film Black Snow (Fei Xie, 1990)
Cinematic Timelines of the Everyday
Two complete fiction films – the Chinese film Black Snow (Fei Xie, 1990) and the British film Fish Tank (Andrea Arnold, 2009) – are here compressed into a single image each. A computer aided slit-scan procedure was employed to create these artworks. This technique captures the central pixels in every frame of a film to compile a timeline that reflects an abstract impression of the film’s colour scheme, cinematographic texture and editing rhythm.
Timelines The visual overview offered by the slit-scan timelines of films from diverse cultures gives a first glimpse into the visual and formal cinematic qualities given to the everyday.
Print on vinyl Timelines by CineMuseSpace in collaboration with Jan Gerber and Sebastian Lütgert
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Garden Stroll: Illusive Realm This film decomposes the illusion of nature created in Chinese gardens and was produced by Jie Chen as part of a workshop entitled Cinematic Interpretation of Spatiality , which the CineMuseSpace project hosted at the University of Nanjing. The camera follows the stroll of a garden visitor in close up and increasingly moves outwards to reveal the actual spatial context. Only after all illusory garden elements are removed, the view onto the real city – here symbolised by an urban street – becomes accessible to the viewer and the illusion of the garden is shattered. The single shot film, produced through drone technology, finally leaves the main character in the distance as he re-joins the real cityscape around him. Through the gradual removal of spatial layers, the film generates an analytical view into the cultural construction of natural spaces.
(2 minutes 38 seconds) Film by Jie Chen and her team made as part of the CineMuseSpace Workshop hosted at Nanjing University in 2018
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Keep Cool The Augmented Hutong Reality Experiment In this film sequence based on Keep Cool , a 1997 film by Zhang Yimou, the camera follows a character walking through the narrow lanes of a HutongSiheyuan neighbourhood in Beijing. The camera’s path is made visible by forming a solid volume across the spatial structure of the Hutong neighbourhood. It renders tangible the immaterial and temporal patterns of the film movement. The material trace of the film is revealed as each frame is inscribed in time and space at the place where it was shot.
HD (2 minutes 13 seconds) Animation by Amir Soltani, 3D Model by Yiqiao Sun, Directed by François Penz
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Hutong 7
technology 1
maintenance
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2
3
eating
Cinematic Home of the Everyday The three films shown here explore cinematic everyday life activities encountered in and around the home. The first one concentrates on technologies, showing how cinema has recorded the technological evolution of the home with admirable accuracy, across cultures and generations; from the electric toothbrush and the humble kettle to wearable technologies and intelligent homes. The second on is concerned with maintenance, a compilation of our daily gestures that involve repeated actions in and around the home both in maintaining our bodies and our domestic environment. The third one is devoted to drinking and eating and reveals deep cultural differences, from preparation to types of food and ways of eating.
(11 minutes 46 seconds) Film1 by Franรงois Penz and his team, Film 2 by Matthew Flintham, Film 3 by Janina Schupp, Music by Joel Swaine
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A Short Catalogue Raisonné of Everyday Life Activities This section presents an extract of A Catalogue Raisonné of Everyday Life Activities , published in Shanghai in April 2019. A catalogue raisonné is usually understood as a systematic and comprehensive catalogue of works of art accompanied by scholarly commentary. This catalogue raisonné follows this tradition, but with a twist: the ‘art’ examined here is the ‘everyday activities’, as explored and revealed in films. A sample of three activities is presented here: Sleeping (regularly portrayed in film – especially the passage between one state to another, from wakefulness to sleep and vice versa), Writing (intellectual activities carried out in the home can take many forms, including writing, reading, studying), Playing (denoting an activity performed for enjoyment, which may stand in contrast to the dreariness of the everyday routine).
Catalogue edited by François Penz and Janina Schupp Design by Stephanie Veanca Ho,Yiqiao Sun, Jiayue Qiu and Jingyu Cheng
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sleeping Jeune Femme (Léonor Serraille, 2017)
Our Little Sister (Hirokazu Koreeda, 2015)
海街 diary
Two Days, One Night (Jean-Pierre Dardenne, Luc Dardenne, 2014)
The Strange Little Cat (Ramon Zürcher, 2013)
Deux jours, une nuit
Das merkwürdige Kätzchen
The Strange Little Cat (Ramon Zürcher, 2013)
The Tree of Life (Terrence Malick, 2011)
Das merkwürdige Kätzchen
Café Lumière (Hsiao-Hsien Hou, 2003)
珈琲時光
Eternity and a Day (Theodoros Angelopoulos, 1998)
Mia aioniotita kai mia mera
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writing Elena (Andrey Zvyagintsev, 2011)
Nobody Knows (Hirokazu Koreeda, 2004)
Елена
誰も知らない
Nobody Knows (Hirokazu Koreeda, 2004)
Drifting Clouds (Aki Kaurismäki, 1996)
誰も知らない
Kauas pilvet karkaavat
Black Snow (Fei Xie, 1990)
The Seventh Continent (Michael Haneke, 1989)
本命年
Der siebente Kontinent
Autumn Sonata (Ingmar Bergman, 1978)
Poor Cow (Ken Loach, 1967)
Höstsonaten
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playing The Tree of Life (Terrence Malick, 2011)
The Tree of Life (Terrence Malick, 2011)
Home (Ursula Meier, 2008)
Nobody Knows (Hirokazu Koreeda, 2004)
誰も知らない
Nobody Knows (Hirokazu Koreeda, 2004)
Ratcatcher (Lynne Ramsay, 1999)
誰も知らない
Poor Cow (Ken Loach, 1967)
Mon Oncle (Jacques Tati, 1958)
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A Cinematic Home of the Everyday Date 1st Aug 2019 - 20th Oct 2019 Location Centre for Chinese Contemporary Art (Market Buildings, Thomas Street, Northern Quarter, Manchester, M4 1EU) CineMuseSpace Research Team François Penz - Principal Investigator, University of Cambridge Suzanne MacLeod - Co-Investigator, University of Leicester Andong Lu - International Co-Investigator, Nanjing University Janina Schupp - Principal Research Associate Matthew Flintham - Research Associate Stephanie Veanca Ho - Research Assistant Maureen Thomas - Senior Research Associate Yiqiao Sun - Research Student, University of Cambridge Jingyu Cheng - Research Student, Nanjing University Jiayue Qiu - Research Student, Nanjing University This project is supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK) project CineMuseSpace: A Cinematic MusÊe Imaginaire of Spatial Cultural Differences www.cinemusespace.com