First published in the UK in 2013 by
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First published in the USA in 2013 by
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Table of Contents
Foreword by François Penzix
Introduction
Part I: Film reviews
The cinema of the French New Wave and the illusionism of SITE architects Les Carabiniers. 1963
The architecture of Diller and Scofidio: The screen and surveillance Das Experiment. 2001
The “cut” in the architecture of Jean Nouvel and the scenery of Ken Adam You Only Live Twice. 1967
The visual narratives of Resnais in the architecture of Carlo Scarpa Hiroshima Mon Amour. 1959
German Baroque architecture and the filming of Resnais: A fusion Last Year in Marienbad. 1961
Sigfreid Giedion, Rem Koolhaas and the fragmentary architecture of the city Run Lola Run. 1998
The aesthetics and formalism of Godfrey Reggio in the projects of Jean Nouvel Koyaanisqatsi. 1982
Boullée on film: An architectural cinematography The Belly of an Architect. 1987
Playtime: A commentary on the art of the Situationists, the philosophy of Henri Lefebvre and the architecture of the Modern Movement Playtime. 1967
Venturi and Antonioni: The modern city and the phenomenon of the moving image Zabriskie Point. 1970
Part II: Applying film to architecture
Video Installation: Hybrid Artworks
The physical experience of space and the sensorial perception of image
Performance 1. Shadows
Performance 2. Memories
Performance 3. Echoes
Incidental Legacy: A technical description
The physical experience of image and the sensorial perception of space
The world imagined by Diller and Scofidio
Performance: Jet Lag
Installation: Loophole
Architecture: The Slow House
Cinematographic architecture: Exercises in theory and practice
Cinematographic space: A study of Citizen Kane
Scene 1. Citizen Kane
Scene 2. Citizen Kane
Scene 3. Citizen Kane
Scene 4. Citizen Kane
From the contradictions of film to the creativity of architecture: Design workshop
Stage 1. Cinematographic analysis of film
Stage 2. Filming space
Stage 3. Storyboarding spaces
Stage 4. Storyboarding architectural events
Stage 5. Design proposals
Part III: Conceptual essays
The hybridisation of sight in the hybrid architecture of sport: The effects of television on stadia and spectatorship
Cinematic movement in the work of Le Corbusier and Sergei Eisenstein
The historical construction of cinematic space: An architectural perspective on the films of Jean Renoir and Yasujiro Ozu
Cinematic phenomenology in architecture: The Cartier Foundation, Paris, Jean Nouvel
Cinematic space and time: The morphing of a theory in film and architecture
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index
Index of Images
Foreword
Graham Cairns’ book is an innovative and welcome addition to the dialogue between cinema and architecture. Recently established as a field of research, this interdisciplinary terrain is relevant to other disciplines beyond architecture and film. Its influence is already evident in established fields such as history, geography and cultural and language studies, but it is also gaining ground in other areas. This book is an opportunity to explore the alternative and complementary ‘intelligence’ this field opens up, and which can be injected at various stages of creative design processes.
Particularly relevant to architects, this form of ‘cinematic intelligence’ operates at many different levels corresponding to two principal ways of exploiting the richness of the long history of cinema: through its content and its form. Indeed cinema as an agent, product and source of history (after Marc Ferro), is a formidable resource from which to draw. Although this book is primarily focused on ‘form’, its exploitation of the film’s ‘content’ is most evident in Part 1 where we are invited to visit or revisit some of the classics.
No serious study of the rise of modernism in France could avoid studying Playtime (1967) to understand both the urban fabric of the modern city and their accompanying societal changes. Jacques Tati’s filmic oeuvre is not only a humorous and gentle critique of the modern movement but also constitutes a formidable chronicle of urban transformations undergone in post-war France. Similarly, with Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point (1970) Cairns reminds us to revisit the film while re-reading Robert Venturi and Kevin Lynch, to which one could add the West coast urban theorists. As this book does, these theorists would no doubt have hailed the astonishing driving sequences in Zabriskie Point as cinema inventing new forms of perception to grasp a world – Los Angeles – for which ‘we do not yet posses the perceptual equipment to match this new hyperspace’ (after Jameson).
In other words, the ‘content’ of films is often a wonderful companion to elucidate, elicit and complement writings on urban and architectural theories at any given time. Cinema’s holistic approach provides an unrivalled form of spatial and urban modeling of the real world, encompassing weather, comfort, aspirations, dreams, nightmares, social, spatial and cultural conditions. As underlined by this book, architects and urban designers can also draw from films for site analysis and design brief elaboration. And ultimately, as often remarked by Patrick Keiller, ‘In films, one can explore the spaces of the past, in order to better anticipate the spaces of the future’.
As for an understanding of ‘form’, we need to turn to Part 2 of the book. By form, I mean the components of the filmic image that entail learning through examples. In this case Cairns elicits the mechanisms by which Orson Welles and Sergei Eisenstein constructed Citizen Kane (1941) and The Battleship Potemkin (1925), respectively. As Cairns reinforces, through a process of deconstruction of the screen image, one can gather an understanding of the cinematography, lighting, editing, sound and music as well as spatial strategies employed by filmmakers.
Crucially, it is possible for architects to gather an understanding of screen language, which can be injected into the design process in at least two ways: by making direct analogies between screen language and design concepts - thinking of an architectural sequence as a series of cuts, edits, framings, dissolves, for example.
This book explores these ideas, that Cairns refers to as ‘cinematographic space’, through video installations as well as by making movies. On the latter, to learn from the near 120 years of audio-visual rhetoric, can only be an improvement on the current trends of architectural animations, in the form of ‘fly-throughs’ and ‘walk-throughs’, which have become the stand
ard means for architects and urban designers to use the moving image.
As aptly remarked by McGrath and Gardner, the current offerings of digitally animated building projects neither ‘refer to the robust history of architectural language representation techniques, or the power of moving cinematic images, the most universal of contemporary communicative languages’. I construe the introduction of cinema and architecture studies in the architectural curriculum as an essential and necessary antidote to the ubiquitous fly-throughs, and there is no doubt that Cairns’s book contributes to this effort.
In Part 3, form and content are reconciled to a certain extent. Of course, in cinema both are constantly at play and can be hard to disentangle. For example the car scene in Zabriskie Point, mentioned previously, straddles both form and content; the form – how it is made, the visual collage, the sound design etc. convey the meaning – the content. Similarly, as Cairns examines, the architectural promenade in the ramp scene of the Villa Savoye in Architectures d’Aujourd’hui (1931) is a question of both form and content – it is a narrative device that expresses cinematically a spatial concept – the form – but is also a central concept in Le Corbusier’s architecture as expressed in his writing - the content.
In this final part of the book Cairns also tackles a key issue: comparing two films from two very different cultural traditions – Renoir’s La Grande Illusion (1937) and Ozu’s Tokyo Story (1953). This raises issues of spatial translatability in cinema by exploring how films have translated Western concepts of screen language to an East Asian context, with special reference to the treatment of space. This is a complex issue, explored by Cairns, worthy of further investigation. The cultures of East and West are extremely different, reflected in the naturalism-based architectural and visual languages – and realist cinema – of Europe, and the analogism-based languages of China and Japan (after Descola). This is a reminder that in a globalised world, to gather an understanding between cultures through cinematic mechanisms, may also facilitate a broader comprehension of East and West.
Paraphrasing Mark Hellinger’s final words in his voice-over of Naked City (1948), I conclude by saying that there have been many books exploring the topic of cinema and architecture, and may there be many more to explore this complex and yet most rewarding relationship! This book is one of them.
François Penz
Cambridge, 27 February 2013
François Penz is Professor of Architecture and the Moving Image, Fellow of Darwin College and Director of Studies for Clare Hall and Darwin College, University of Cambridge, UK.
Introduction
The moment the still image was imbued with life through film, a new visual language had been born. Radical in its forms and profound in its consequences, this language represented what may now be called an “optical revolution”. Louis and Auguste Lumière astonished the first cinematic audiences in Le Salon Indien du Grand Café in 1895; and the following year Georges Méliès fragmented space and time through the optical trickery of the cut. Our view of the world had changed forever. Art now had at its disposal a new visual language. It had a new and a radical formal vocabulary. From now on, the modern eye would filter momentary and multiple stimuli. It would process a new optical experience. It would navigate a strange and complex visual world. It would learn to read – anew. The human eye was now faced with the phenomenon of movement – constantly.
This new scenario did not take long to influence architecture. Film would be fundamental to the vanguard of the early twentieth century. It would lead to a questioning of how we perceive the space around us. It offered new possibilities in our understanding and representation of buildings. It presented architects with a platform for experimentation – at the scale of the interior and of the city. Indeed, film gave rise to theories that considered the practice of cinema as analogous to that of architecture; Dziga Vertov would call himself Kino Eye – and define it as “an eye that constructs”; Sergei Eisenstein would correlate cinematic montage with architectural experience; and Soviet architects such as Vladimir Tatlin and the Vesnin brothers would propose a cinematic typology for both set design and architecture: spaces of real and perceptual movement. Architecture could now be seen, imagined and perceived not only as space but also as time and motion. Film was a kindred spirit.
Such was the influence of the cinematic medium in its incipient years – when its forms were still unfamiliar, its techniques still shocking and its effects surprising. However, once consolidated in the contemporary psyche, the formal experimentation of the medium gave way to convention. By the end of the 1930s, a system of filming had been standardised and exported across the globe. The visual language of the cut, the fade, the dissolve, and the image in movement had all been assimilated – by both the eye and the mind. Barely noticed, ignored and imperceptible behind the power of aesthetic and narrative interests, the once radical language of film now simply supported the telling of stories.
In this condition, the architect’s engagement with cinema and film became both narrative and aesthetic. Film was no longer a radical melting pot for spatial theories. Cinema became a site of spectacular sets. Worse still, the architecture of those sets was often mundane. It had to be discreet. Its role had changed. It foregrounded action. In the field of architecture, film lost its power to influence our conceptual understanding of space. It became a mere vehicle for visual representation. Its theoretical vibrancy had gone – replaced by aesthetic concerns.
Inspired by a return to a “pre-narrative” vision of cinema, the essays collected in this work represent contemporary engagements with the disciplines of film and architecture. We define their approach as “non-aesthetic”. It is based on an interest in cinematography, or rather, the “way of filming” over “what is filmed”. Their perspectives are intended to draw the reader’s attention to a malleable concept. We call it “cinematographic space”. It is definable as the on-screen perception of space constructed by the director and cinematographer. It demonstrates how the medium of film can alter our perception of the architecture we see, and how architecture, in its turn, can influence the way the camera “looks” at space. Our hope, in a sense, is to recapture the energy and interest of the pioneers of film and those architects inspired by it. The aim is to re-energise our engagement with the medium’s once radical visual vocabulary.
To this end, the essays in this book do not examine mise-en-scène in any great depth, nor do they dwell on films renowned for their spectacular architectural sets. Furthermore, they do not consider the role of iconic buildings or cities in the work of certain famous directors. They are a diverse range of texts written over a number of years. They probe the way film’s visual language interacts with the formal properties of architectural space, in multiple and diverse ways. They are written for readers from both disciplines, and assume a certain level of cross-disciplinary knowledge. Given their disciplined focus however, some of the terms used may be new to readers from only one of our fields. They are therefore clarified in endnotes; signposts across conflicting terrains.
Although seen as independent essays, the book is organised in a tripartite structure that categorises each essay by format rather than theme. Part 1, for example, is a collection of film reviews. Part 2 is a series of texts that cover “practical” experimentations in film, video installation and architecture. By contrast, Part 3 is composed of a number of extended academic texts that deal with disparate subjects. In one way or another, each section engages with the theme of “cinematographic space”. In each essay, the way in which this theme is dealt with varies. It may be indirect, at times tangential and, at others, even imperceptible. It is however, just beneath the surface of everything presented.
Thus, the common thread that links all the film reviews in Part 1 is not their storyline, or the architecture they present on screen, or any particular characteristic of their directors. It is an attempt to understand the “cinematic style” chosen by the director, and identify its relationship with the archit
ecture presented. This perspective reveals a number of issues. In some cases, we discuss similarities between an editing style and the “spatial effects” created by particular architects. Our commentaries on the architecture of Jean Nouvel and Carlo Scarpa focus on this. Examined through the prism of films like Hiroshima mon Amour and Kyonosqatssi, by Alain Resnais and Godfrey Reggio respectively, their work will be defined in cinematic terms.
In other reviews, we examine a particular way of filming, and how this responds to, and manipulates, our reading of the space it records. We find this in Zabriske Point and Last Year in Marienbad, directed by Michelangelo Antonioni and, again, with Alain Resnais. In some instances, we also discuss the formal characteristics of a given director’s “filming style”, as a reflection of debates concurrent in architecture. In these cases, there is an acceptance of the role played by set design and mise-en-scène, an inevitable concession evident in a strand of secondary commentaries. It is most evident in the work of Jacques Tati and his architectural set designer, Jacques Lagrange. Furthermore, it emerges in discussions on films by directors including Lewis Gilbert and Peter Greenaway, amongst others.
Through the cinematography of directors such as Tom Twyker and Oliver Hirschbiegel, we also discuss the writings and projects of some of today’s leading architects, Elizabeth Diller, Ricardo Scofidio and Rem Koolhaas. In these instances, the visual aesthetic created by them on screen, through filming and editing, interacts with the aesthetic of the architects concerned. More importantly, however, it also raises broader sociocultural questions of relevance in the architectural sphere. Despite their shared interest in how film’s visual tropes inform and enrich architectural perception, practice and theory, the essays collected in Part 1 offer diverse perspectives. Through these viewing points, we find multiple ways with which to engage with both film and architecture.
Part 2 brings together works of very different types realised in the worlds of architectural education, performance art and video installation. It centres on a diverse range of educators, practitioners and artists. It examines a range of “practical” ways in which the mechanics of film as a medium have been used in the field of architecture. It begins by very briefly discussing the semi-spatial, semi-filmic nature of video installation, through some iconic figures of the field, such as Dan Graham, Gary Hill, Bruce Nauman and Jane and Louise Wilson. These artists have all engaged with the creation of what we may call “filmic spaces” for over three decades.
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