The View From the Train
Page 8
The new, virtual world of cinema was typically a world transformed – by eroticism, love, solidarity, crime, war or some similarly extraordinary experience. It differed from that offered by, say, the novel in that it was visible, and in that usually the spaces of the new world were made by photographing fragments of the old one. These fragments were very often specially created for the purpose, but in practice it seems to make very little difference whether the décor of a film is real or artificial, or even whether a film is fiction or documentary. The newness of the spaces of the cinema is a product, not of set-building, but of cinematography. It’s the phenomenon of photogénie.
The earliest reference that I know of to something like this is made in Louis Aragon’s essay ‘On Décor’, which was first published in September 1918 in Louis Delluc’s Le Film. This was Aragon’s first published writing, in which he wrote:
To endow with a poetic value that which does not yet possess it, to wilfully restrict the field of vision so as to intensify expression: these are two properties that help make cinematic décor the adequate setting of modern beauty.2
The first part of this statement – ‘to endow with a poetic value that which does not yet possess it’ – anticipates Aragon’s identification of the Surrealist frisson in Le Paysan de Paris (1926), the ‘new kind of novel’ based on descriptions of two of the several places in Paris that the Surrealists had adopted:
I felt the great power that certain places, certain sights exercised over me … The way I saw it, an object became transfigured: it took on neither the allegorical aspect nor the character of the symbol, it did not so much manifest an idea as constitute that very idea … I acquired the habit of constantly referring the whole matter to the judgement of a kind of frisson which guaranteed the soundness of this tricky operation.3
Later in the book, Aragon identifies a similar sensation as that which accompanies the recognition of a poetic image, and it has always seemed to me that, as a sensibility, the surrealist frisson very much resembles the momentary insight, the instant of identification of an image that sometimes results in a successful photograph, or an image in a film. One wonders, even, if it was partly Aragon’s experience of the cinema that led him to the Surrealist subjectivity to actual everyday surroundings.
The second part of Aragon’s statement – ‘to wilfully restrict the field of vision so as to intensify expression’ – effectively describes film space. Films are made of images with a field of view that is very narrow compared with experience of actual, three-dimensional space. The space of a film is assembled from fragments, their relationship inferred from cues in action, sound or narrative. Most film space is off-screen – either remembered from preceding images, or heard, or merely the imaginary extension of the space on screen. Because it is reconstructed in this way, film space is always a fiction, even when the film is a documentary.
In his book Art of the Cinema (1929), Lev Kuleshov describes making a sequence in Engineer Prite’s Project (1917–18):
It was necessary for our leading characters, a father and his daughter, to walk across a meadow and look at a pole from which electric cables were strung. Due to technical circumstances, we were not able to shoot all this at the same location. We had to shoot the pole at one location and separately shoot the father and daughter in another place. We shot them looking upward, talking about the pole and walking on. We intercut the shot of the pole, taken elsewhere, into the walk across the meadow.
This was the most ordinary, the most childlike thing – something which is done now at every step.
It became apparent that through montage it was possible to create a new earthly terrain that did not exist anywhere.4
Before I ever thought of making a film, I had developed a habit of identifying examples of what might be described as ‘found’ architecture, and documenting them with colour slides. Many were industrial structures of various kinds, including some of the types photographed by Bernd and Hilla Becher, whose work I knew a little. I had also come across the Surrealists’ adoption of particular sites in Paris – the Tour Saint-Jacques, the Porte Saint-Denis, the abattoirs of La Villette, the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont, and so on – the last of which is one of Aragon’s subjects in Le Paysan de Paris.
What began as a search for individual buildings gradually widened to include all sorts of details of everyday surroundings – odd ruined shopfronts, roofscapes, scaffolding, the spaces of the London underground, and so on. The subjectivity involved was very like that described by Aragon, or the state of mind that Walter Benjamin describes in his essays about Marseille. In the long run, the aim was to gradually refine the practice and transform even the most familiar spaces of the city centre – Piccadilly Circus, say, or Regent Street – but it was difficult to progress beyond a certain point without some technique in making images. I recovered the idea, almost inadvertently, in making a film about London over ten years later, by which time the process of defamiliarisation had become second nature.
By then I had made a number of short films, all of which were combinations of 16mm monochrome images of urban or rural landscapes and a fictional voice-over. To begin with, it had been difficult to see what one could make with sequences of architectural images, however intriguing, other than some kind of installation. To some extent, a sense of continuity could be achieved by making long takes with a moving camera (the first film was twenty minutes long, but contained only three shots) or by adopting the structure of a journey, but I had always thought that any film I might make would involve some kind of interior monologue. Ten years earlier, as an architecture student, I had seen Marker’s La Jetée (1962).
The technique gradually evolved so that the films included more montage, with larger numbers of shorter shots. They were mostly made by undertaking journeys, but the pictures were rarely planned, and were always subject to the unpredictability of natural light. The narration was always written after the footage had been shot and edited, so that the writing was determined by the picture, rather than the picture by the writing, and if one had put the pictures together in a different order, or shot different pictures, some other equally plausible fiction might be the result. It was very difficult to write coherent narration for an already-edited sequence of brief, spontaneous images, but it seemed a suitably modern, or even postmodern way to approach fiction. It also resembled the method of cinema newsreels. I found out later that other, more critically respected documentaries had been made in a similar way, without too many preconceptions. The combination of moving camera and interior monologue suggested some more-or-less comic attempt to represent consciousness, or perhaps artificial consciousness – the inner experience of an alienated and rather unreliable artificial flâneur. This was in homage both to Frankenstein and to the confessional voice-overs and subjective-camera sequences of noir.
Piancastagnaio, Province of Siena, Italy, from The End (1986)
The cinematography had also developed a distinct technique. Some of the best footage was shot directly following thunderstorms, or in windy weather at the coast. In this clear air, shadows were very sharp, detail was brightly illuminated, and the sky was darker, or at least not brighter, than the ground. It was possible to produce footage of unusual sharpness and richness of detail which achieved an almost three-dimensional quality, despite the limitations of 16mm. This seemed to confirm the preference for monochrome, and the old idea that the illusion of depth in photographs of architecture is often most convincing in fine-grain, high-contrast, deep-focus, monochrome pictures.5
On the other hand, this preference for particular kinds of daylight made it increasingly difficult to produce pictures. The various stylistic traits – interior monologues; the compressed writing of the voice-overs; the reliance on atmospheric effects – also encouraged allusions to genre: Gothic fiction, or even expressionism. The films were becoming stylised and increasingly difficult to make. The quasi-Surrealism of the original project seemed to have been diminished in the attainment of technique.
In the early 1990s, London did not seem a very promising camera subject, especially for someone obsessed with clear air. During the summer of 1989, when the film was conceived, visibility along the river was often so poor that one could stand on a bridge and find it difficult to see the next one. On the other hand, in the absence of traditional London fog, perhaps the traffic fumes had possibilities. I wondered whether to make the film in colour, which might be more suited to the haze.
It had occurred to me that if the film was to be longer than its predecessors, it ought also to be wider. In any case, a feature-length film for theatrical distribution would conventionally offer the more extensive spectacle of 35mm cinematography, with the sharper resolution that I sought for making architectural images. It was not that much more expensive to shoot the film on 35mm stock. I was worried that it would be very difficult to make monochrome images of everyday surroundings in London – the film’s documentary aspect implied less freedom to abandon a subject if it proved too difficult to get a decent shot out of it. Colour might not achieve the vertiginous three-dimensionality of monochrome pictures, but it would be much less dependent on the weather. I’d never liked the look of most 16mm colour – for some reason, I didn’t think it would produce pictures that were sufficiently sharp or colour-saturated, but this aversion to 16mm colour did not seem to apply to 35mm. Colour also seemed more likely to produce pictures that were funny. Monochrome would have been too serious. For some time, I held on to the idea that some reels might be monochrome and some colour, like Warhol’s The Chelsea Girls, but in the end, after testing various filmstocks, we decided to shoot the film on a 35mm, fine-grain, daylight colour stock that had recently been introduced by Eastman.
With colour, the camera became an instrument of criticism. A McDonald’s, for instance, photographed in monochrome, might merely have looked a bit bleak; in colour it got a laugh. The slightest sense of hyperreality in the pictures seemed to be enough to unmask their subjects, especially if one stared at them a bit. I had already begun to use longer-focal-length lenses more often, with the result that the camera was hardly ever used without a tripod, and camera movement had become very infrequent. With colour, the camera hardly ever moved at all, the longer lenses were used even more, and the images were more often of details. This seemed to corroborate another idea one comes across in architectural photography, that colour suits images of detail.7 It also recalled Aragon’s formulation of décor – in re-imagining something as big as London, one tended to restrict the field of vision.
These characteristics, together with the adoption of rather stolid, often symmetrical compositions (easy to set up in a hurry), and the 4×3 screen ratio,8 seemed to suit the spaces of London. There was an element of self-parody in the pictures, as if there was something inherently funny about their predictability. This quality was sometimes used to convey irony, affection and other meanings.
With the heavier 35mm equipment, and the frequent necessity to carry it some distance, each set-up was much more of a physical commitment than it had been before. This encouraged a tendency to linger, and make several shots, both with different lenses and of different details of the subject. Where there was a lot going on, it was possible to assemble action sequences, which created more extensive spaces than those of the earlier films. This was augmented by post-synchronised background sound which, laid over a group of shots, identified them as fragmentary views of the same location. None of this sound was ever recorded with the picture, and it was only rarely from the actual location. One of the sound effects in London had been recorded for Blow-Up over twenty-five years earlier. We chose this, without knowing what it was, because the level of background traffic roar was much lower than usual. One of the film’s biggest fictions was that it reconstructed London as a quiet city, without the noise of traffic.
It was organised as the record of a period of about ten months. The off-screen narrator described the work of a fictitious character who was researching what he described as the ‘problem’ of London, which seemed to be, in essence, that it wasn’t Paris. There was a document, a plan, with a large reserve of ideas for subjects and itineraries, but the film effectively made itself up as the events of the year (1992) unfolded.9 It was mostly photographed by a crew of two. We went out with the camera regularly on two days in every week, and shot some other material at night or at weekends. Apart from coverage of particular events, the photography was nearly always determined on the day, or at fairly short notice. Altogether, there were about one hundred days of photography, and one hundred 400-foot rolls of film – about seven-and-a-half hours of material. We stopped when we thought we had enough material to make the film, which was about when we had expected. Most of the material in the film appears in the order it was shot. It was edited and written in more or less the same way as the earlier films, though there was more material and a lot of work post-synchronising sound, and for the first time I worked with an editor10 – a collaboration that has survived this and subsequent projects.
Since London, two more films of about the same length have been made in more or less the same way,11 though with tighter schedules and itineraries. In the latest film, there is more camera movement. This is not a satire, but an investigation of some aspects of housing in the UK, a documentary made for television. It was shot in digital video and includes interviews with academics and other specialists.
At the moment, it looks as if the future of this architectural cinema depends on developing ways to assemble more extensive and ambitious fictional spaces. London and its sequel Robinson in Space set out to re-imagine actual spatial subjects. The latest film addresses the difficulty of making new spaces. The next project might explore the creation of a new earthly terrain like that of Kuleshov, a fictitious world made from fragments of the real one.
Film offers a kind of permanence to subjectivity. On a bad day, or in a bad light, even the architecture of Gaudí might lose its immediate appeal, but in a film, the transitory experience of some ordinary, everyday detail as breathtaking, euphoric or disturbing – a doorway, perhaps, or the angle between a fragment of brickwork and a pavement – can be registered on photographic emulsion and relived every time the material is viewed. On the other hand, when actual extra-ordinary architecture is depicted in films it’s often easy to conclude that something is missing, as if the camera has nothing sufficiently revelatory to add, nothing to improve on a visit to the actual building.
At about the time I first began to think about making a film, I particularly admired the architecture of Hans Scharoun, on one hand, and film noir, on the other. Until recently, it never occurred to me to look for a connection between them, other than perhaps Berlin. Scharoun’s Philharmonie, for example, and, say, Fritz Lang’s films of the 1940s and ’50s – The Big Heat, Human Desire, and so on – don’t seem to have much in common until one remembers that both architect and film-maker share a background in the expressionism of the 1920s. Quite what, if anything, this might mean isn’t clear, though it’s intriguing that Scharoun’s influence does seem to be present in the work of some present-day architects who attempt connections with the spatiality of film. The architecture of Scharoun and Hugo Häring might just be seen as confirming the rationality of the apparently eccentric (though I doubt that they saw it that way), whereas noir reveals the irrationality of the normal, so perhaps the two are in some way complementary. Certainly, both extra-ordinary experience of everyday architecture (in film, especially film noir) and everyday experience of extra-ord
inary architecture (expressionism, Art Nouveau and so on), might be sought for similar reasons. The Surrealists, for instance, admired both Gaudí and film noir. For anyone in pursuit of, let’s say, the improvement of everyday life, a medium which offers a heightened awareness of architecture – the medium of film – might be thought at least as compelling as an actually existing architecture of heightened awareness – an ecstatic architecture, whatever that might be.
7
London in the Early 1990s
In the autumn of 1989 I began to research an idea for a film about London, which was subsequently commissioned by the British Film Institute and photographed over a period of about ten months in 1992. The first print of the completed film, by then called London, was delivered in January 1994, just in time for that year’s Berlin Film Festival. It was well received in Berlin, and was released in the UK the following June, where it played in a succession of West End cinemas for most of the summer. For a film like this – without a visible cast, or even much of a narrative – to be even a minor box office proposition was extremely unusual, and its relative success was probably at least partly due to the possibility it offered audiences of finding aspects of their everyday experience represented in the cinema. The film opened at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, in the Mall, and departing audiences walked out of the cinema into the space of one of its sequences (the rehearsal for Trooping the Colour), which had been photographed from the ICA’s balcony. The film set out to document, among other things, the ‘decline’ of London under the Tories, and it offered people the morale-boosting opportunity to share thoughts that had perhaps previously occurred to them only in isolation. As a portrait of the city, it was rather critical – in those days, Londoners were proud, not so much of London, but of themselves for putting up with its physical and other shortcomings. One would not be permitted to say such things today.