The Architecture of the Screen

by Graham Cairns

  More specifically, however, Part 2 examines this fused realm of space and film through the work of a UK-based collaborative group, Hybrid Artworks; a consortium headed, in the late 1990s, by the author of this book. The spatial, filmic and performance pieces produced by Hybrid Artworks give way to an overview of the work of Diller and Scofidio. As with others mentioned here, Diller and Scofidio have operated in the terrain of performance, film and architecture over a number of decades. The difference in their case is the simple but significant fact that their performance and installation work engages directly, and literally, with their work as architects. These artists and groups are covered in this section so as to draw out a myriad of “real” ways in which film, moving image and video projection can be used to manipulate, and indeed create, a perception of physically inhabited space.

  In a related vein, this section of the book also discusses the use of film in architectural education, through the experimental teaching methods of tutors at some of the United Kingdom’s and Spain’s leading schools. Amongst those mentioned are François Penz, Lorcan O’Herily and Aurora Herrera Gómez, practitioners and teachers who have again been treading this terrain for a number of years. Special emphasis, however, is placed on the work of Pascal Schöning at the Architectural Association and his notion of “filmic architecture”; a conceptual idea that re-works the avant-garde challenge to the convention of architecture as physical construction.

  This overview sits alongside a more detailed examination of the teaching methodologies developed by the author of this book in the context of architecture; teaching practices that apply the ideas underlying each of the essays in this work. Central to this pedagogical practice is a theoretical definition of “cinematographic space”. This clear definition is offered in the context of a teaching programme designed to introduce architectural students to the “visual vocabulary of film”. Moreover, it is intended to initiate a process through which that vocabulary is applied to spatial design projects. Characterised again by a diversity of approaches, but also a common set of interests, these essays once more offer very different perspectives. They examine how lessons, concepts and visual effects from the realm of film are, and can be, integrated into the mindset of the spatial designer.

  Part 3 presents five more extensive theoretical essays. Some of these are similar to the film reviews outlined at the beginning of the book in that they offer relatively detailed examinations of films. They differ, however, in depth, complexity and theme. By contrast, others are considerably different to what we offer in Part 1. They engage more directly with architecture as a discipline and a practice; a practice seen to be informed, and influenced by, the phenomenon of the moving image. The first of these texts deals with a particular building type: the sports stadium. It suggests that this typology has been significantly influenced by the development of television and, as a result, represents a site for some potentially important shifts in the nature of human vision itself.

  Arguing that globalised television has turned sport into an international media event, it suggests that the architecture of sports stadia has mutated into a semi-real, semi-virtual construct. In this context, the difference between the physical structure and its mediated image has definitively blurred. Drawing upon the ideas of Paul Virilio, amongst others, it proposes that a concomitant blurring in terms of spectatorship is one of the results; the optical processing of the eye now threatens to morph and evolve as it merges with mediated visualisation.

  In the essay that follows, the work of the architect Jean Nouvel, who is referenced throughout the book, is examined in more detail. In particular, this essay examines Nouvel’s references to both cinema and phenomenology in the context of his Cartier Foundation building, Paris. Drawing on the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, André Bazin and Jean Nouvel himself, it is presented in a non-standard format that layers its arguments in a semi-narrative form. It identifies that the Cartier Foundation building is, in certain ways, one of Nouvel’s most technically ambitious works. More significantly, we suggest that it also encapsulates his interest in the nature of perceptual experience and the optical tropes of film.

  In the subsequent essay on the Villa Savoye by Le Corbusier, a related interest in the use of cinematic tropes is examined. This is done through analogies with the films and theories of Sergei Eisenstein. In this essay, the architectural promenade is analysed in terms of cinematic montage. Thus, it is an essay that examines one of the Modern Movement’s iconic structures as an inherently “cinematic construct”.

  This more historical perspective is repeated in the essay on the works of Yasujiro Ozu and Jean Renoir. Here, we argue that two of their iconic films, La Grande Illusion and Tokyo Story, reveal a deep cultural relationship between architecture and film. We suggest that these films are emblematic of their directors’ oeuvre. However, we also argue that they reveal sociopolitical issues of prime importance in moments of great historic change; they both use film and architecture in ways that seek to keep their artistic cultures alive. We therefore argue that both films echo beyond the spheres of either film or architecture as isolated disciplines.

  We end this section with an essay that links the work of the director Mike Figgis with the architecture of contemporary designers. Figures such as Bernard Tschumi, Peter Eisenman and, albeit less directly, Gregg Lynn and Thom Mayne are all referenced. The essay suggests that the visual language created by Figgis in his film Timecode potentially offers a cinematic model for today’s architectural avant-garde. It draws on the deconstructive theories of Jacques Derrida but, more significantly, focuses on Deleuzian notions such as “folding spaces”. It argues that these may be more appropriate to explaining a potentially new relationship between architecture and film that emerges from an analysis of Figgis’ work. This essay thus suggests that, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, and despite the emergence of ever newer visual technologies, the now ageing medium of film still has a new, radical and changing visual vocabulary to offer to architects and designers.

  PART I

  Film reviews

  The cinema of the French New Wave and the illusionism of SITE architects

  Les Carabiniers. 1963

  Jean Luc Godard

  Producer: Rome-Paris Films. Les Films Marceau. Cocinor. (France). Laetitia Films. (Italy).

  Les Carabiniers, 1962, is one of Jean-Luc Godard’s earliest films. It captures the energy, irreverence and radical reconsideration of cinematic practice that was to characterise the whole of the French New Wave. Its aesthetic is casual and untidy, if not amateur. It eschews constructed sets in favour of the street, and employs non-professional actors who improvise rather than follow a script. Its editing is full of deliberate errors and its storyline is both absurd and lacking in narrative orientation. It is visually erratic, thematically confusing and clearly rejects the seriousness and solemnity of the French filmmaking establishment of the time.1 In addition, it celebrates the commercial filmmaking tradition through a whole series of referential puns and simultaneously criticises the society of spectacle and consumption. In short, it is typical of Godard.2

  The story itself revolves around two main protagonists: Ulysses and Michelangelo. Enlisted to fight in what amounts to a comic civil war, they are obliged to leave their partners with whom they share a broken-down shed in the country. For their female companions, their departure on a military adventure represents an opportunity to ask for all sorts of exotic and romantic gifts from their now “gentlemen of war”. For Ulysses and Michelangelo themselves, it represents an opportunity to steal, kill and violate every type of norm and law “under the protection of the King”. These comically absurd anti-heroes, dreaming about the benefits of impunity, set forth on a journey through the absurdity of a meaningless contemporary war across the cities and villages of 1960s France.

  Despite this comic narrative framework however, the film is far from superficial in intent; the absurdity of the storyline itself being a central part of the film’s sociopol
itical commentary. That commentary is threaded through with a typical New Wave blend of internal and external references.3 Images often function as witty asides on religion or contemporary politics, the dialogue is showered with comments alluding to the “external events” of the “real world”, and even the names of the protagonists become part of the film’s multi-referential game. It is a complex intertextual tapestry reminiscent of the work of writers such as Jorge Luis Borges and Umberto Eco, in which the viewer is obliged to enter into an intellectual game of deciphering direct and indirect references, to which, of course, they bring their own baggage as well.4 It is a cinematic game with what Eco calls “the role of the reader”.5

  Integrated into this menagerie of associations, quotes and insinuations are references to the world of cinema itself; the most notable being the scene in which we see a screening of The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat, 1894. Another is the employment of various editing styles: for example, continuity editing to reference the Hollywood tradition and montage editing to reference the Soviet school. Yet another is the introduction of documentary footage that reminds us of the neorealist school; a reference reinforced by the setting of scenes in real locations, the use of natural illumination, the employment of handheld cameras and the lack of professional actors. Clearly echoing the aesthetic similarities of the work of directors like Roberto Rossellini and Luchino Visconti, it is another case of Godard’s cinematic self-referential intertextuality.6

  In the cinema of the Neorealist school this “realist aesthetic” was intended to appear more “realistic” and, to a certain extent, more “basic” than what had become the industry norm, i.e. the tightly controlled continuity aesthetic. In Les Carabiniers however, it is used for scenes, and a story, that are anything but realistic or basic. The absurdity of the protagonists, caught up in a narrative equally as absurd means that, in spite of employing a Neorealist aesthetic style, there is an overriding sense of unreality and irony throughout the film. In fact, it could be argued that there are certain characteristics of the Neorealist style that actively augment this sensation of artificiality. For example, Godard highlights the shaking of the handheld camera, the wooden acting of the protagonists and the lack of clear lighting on his sets. In addition, he allows exterior and alien sounds to intrude over the dialogue and follows everyday actions that, as in real life, do not advance towards any sort of narrative resolution.

  These characteristics, as “realistic” as they may be, actually create a type of cinema that seems totally “artificial”.7 In addition to feeling “artificial” however, the lack of narrative drive often leads to long scenes with little or no obvious meaning; a meandering plot structure regularly criticised as inane and indeed boring. What criticisms of this type indicate is that, in the framework, film (the artificial language of the continuity system) has become what we expect and understand the medium to be; it has come to represent our “cinematographic reality”. This cinematographic reality is more interesting, intense and spectacular than our everyday reality, which, as Godard shows, is something that advances slowly, often without clear objectives, and does not necessarily lead to a clear and clean resolution of problems.

  Our familiarity with the more intense and interesting mediated reality offered by Hollywood cinema is something dealt with, albeit from a different perspective, by thinkers like Jean Baudrillard and Umberto Eco, who at the time of Les Carabiniers were putting forward their concepts of the “simulacrum” and “hyperreality”, respectively. Baudrillard argues that through the process of reproduction, reality and unreality enter into an ever closer relationship within which the difference between both states begins to blur.8 Under such conditions, it becomes possible to confuse the real with the unreal and, as Eco comments with respect to Disneyland, eventually prefer the latter.9 Such questions are implicit throughout Les Carabiniers and are seen with most clarity in the scene mentioned earlier, in the screening of The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat. Finding himself in front of a cinema screen for the first time, the young protagonist, Michelangelo, is both stupefied and amazed by his first taste of “cinematic reality”.

  The scene opens with the camera focused on Michelangelo. The first cut changes to a train, before cutting back to Michelangelo. The visual quality of the footage in the two shots does not change and the image of the train fills the screen we look at as viewers. By not exposing the physical context of the cinema to the viewer, and not changing the visual quality of the two images, Godard deliberately blurs the difference between our viewing of Michelangelo and his viewing of the cinema’s screen. By denying the spectator these pointers, the initial moments of the scene can be confusing. That confusion, however, is a deliberate pun on the confusion seen in the face of Michelangelo, who is totally incapable of distinguishing between the physical reality of his surroundings and the cinematic illusion on screen. In a reaction that repeats that of the first public to see The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat, at the end of the nineteenth century, we see him panic and cower behind his seat as the train arrives and threatens to break through the screen of the theatre (Figs. 1–2).10

  Figure 1: The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat.

  Figure 2: The fear of the hero.

  Figure 3: Hyperreal postcards as the spoils of war.

  What we have in this sequence is a scene that functions on various levels; it is an example of Godard’s renowned intertextuality: it is a joke at the expense of the viewing public, a witty reference to early cinematic audiences and also a parody of the real and the unreal experience of Michelangelo. In the following shots, the scene continues to develop this parody when our anti-hero watches a svelte woman taking a bath in the following short film he watches in the cinema. Given that he is still unsure as to the reality, or otherwise, of the images he is looking at, he moves tentatively towards the screen. Trying to look inside the bathtub, he finally attempts to caress the naked body of the mediated object of his desire and, in his excitement, loses his balance and falls through the screen, destroying it in the process.

  This type of parody on the real and the unreal is repeated in a subtly different way in another of the film’s most celebrated scenes, the return of the two protagonists from the war. Carrying nothing but an old and worn suitcase full of postcards, they are a total failure in the eyes of their partners. For these heroines, expecting the riches and spoils of war, the loot is both ridiculous and boring. Indeed, they automatically begin to ridicule our heroes until Ulysses begins to present the postcards in a different way, as if they were not images at all, but actual “objects in their own right”. By the end of the scene, the two girls appear to be as excited by these “representations of riches” as they would have been with the real thing. Salvaging their damaged prestige through the simulacrum, Michelangelo and Ulysses offer their romantic companions a hyperreality that is more interesting, intense, and certainly more accessible, than real life (Fig. 3).

  Clearly replete with references to the ideas of Jean Baudrillard, The Situationists, Umberto Eco and others, Les Carabiniers finds multiple echoes in diverse fields. Those fields are, however, not limited to standard forms of social critique but are also found in the context of architecture, most notably, in the contemporary work of the American architects SITE.11 At the time Les Carabiniers was released, SITE were developing an approach to architecture that they themselves defined as “a reaction to the architecture of the modern movement”. The argument underlying this “reaction” was their interpretation of modern architecture as “insipid and based on a functional language that a contemporary public did not understand or like”.12 Resorting to what they called ancient concepts, with respect to the very definition of architecture itself, they proposed that for “buildings” to become “architecture”, they had to go beyond function; for SITE, buildings “become” architecture when they “communicate”.13

  According to this definition, the buildings of antiquity are perfect examples of architecture in that they are immediately understandable as
places of public importance. What they “communicate” is their own cultural significance.14 As such, SITE define architecture as “special places” or “celebratory buildings”.15 An important characteristic of this celebratory architecture is its employment of additional decorative elements whose role it is to help in the communication process. The pediment of a classical building is a prime example; not only does it help to communicate but it also makes the building “more interesting”. On the basis of this definition, the architecture of the Modern Movement and its rejection of decoration in favour of functionality was seen as a type of simple and mundane “pre-architectural” phenomenon.

  Identifying this distinction makes it possible to draw parallels with some of the comments made earlier, with regard to Neorealist film. Considered to represent a basic and simple cinematic language, Neorealism and its New Wave derivatives can appear crude and boring in comparison to the hyper-intensity and hyperreality we have become accustomed to on the silver screen. From this point of view, the rejection by the 1970s public of functional modern architecture, and the concomitant development of the “spectacular” architecture of SITE, can be considered directly analogous to the reaction of the general public against the type of “boring realism” portrayed in the work of Godard.16

  However, in addition to employing a language that was too basic and simple for contemporary cultural tastes, modern architecture was, according to SITE, one dimensional; the architectural profession insisting on total autonomy and independence in the realisation of architectural projects. By contrast, SITE stressed “the complete fusion of architecture and art”. Criticising an architectural tendency to only accept a place for external disciplines such as sculpture, if it restrained itself to a secondary role, SITE suggested that postmodern western societies showed a “longing for spectacle”; the incorporation of diverse decorative features in architecture and a clear sensibility towards the celebration of concepts such as “ambiguity and hybridisation”.17