Koolhaas’s projects then, can, be complex visual and disjunctive forms, sites of multiple conflicting activities and aesthetically rich collages of colours, textures and materials. This aesthetic sensibility not only echoes the more generalised theories of Koolhaas, it is also repeated in his books. Taking the cover of a book such as Content, 1999, for example, we have a teenage boy–like collage of action heroes, politicians, female bodies and logos; a front cover that is a punchy visual commentary on contemporary throw-away culture (Fig. 7). Inside, a similar feel continues with the layout seemingly being a random arrangement of stories, graphic formats and images of different types, sizes and themes. S, M, L, XL is a combination of typefaces, images and graphics that is often difficult to read and eschews an easy sequential reading of a single theme. Both books operate as textual manifestations of the same approach and theories underlining the buildings and urban design theories of Koolhaas and OMA.
Figure 6: Seattle Public Library. OMA, Rem Koolhaas. 2004.
Figure 7: Front cover of Content. 2004.
All of these characteristics find resonances in Twyker’s Run Lola Run. Metaphorically, Twyker presents Berlin as a city in which events, actions and spaces are continually malleable and open to the layering of multiple different, repeated and altered scenarios. He also presents events, spaces and times that are fragmented and disjointed. In addition, he creates a chaotic but rich aesthetic through a complex mix of visual styles, such as animation, video, black and white and standard 35mm film stock. Just as Ruttmann’s Berlin – Symphony of a Great City paralleled Giedion’s theories of architecture and his photographic montage aesthetic in the first half of the twentieth century, it is arguable that Run Lola Run parallels issues raised by Koolhaas and OMA in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, albeit unintentionally.
Placed within the tradition of cinema’s engagement with architecture through the space-time question Run Lola Run becomes not only a film analogous to Ruttmann’s 1928 cult classic, it becomes a film that we can read in parallel with some of the most controversial and high-profile architectural themes of today. Furthermore however, just as Koolhaas’ work involves an inevitable “modernization” of the aesthetic and debates set out by Gideon, so too Run Lola Run “modernizes” the themes and aesthetic offered by Berlin – Symphony of a Great City. In doing so, it modernises its own medium’s relationship with architecture. If examined in this way, we begin to see Run Lola Run as much more than a film about love and the power of the will; much more than a film about coincidence and about chance, and even much more than a film about Berlin. We begin to see it as a film about contemporary architectural and urban theory; about spaces and events; and about the contemporary conflated, contradictory and complex urban condition. It becomes a film that takes its place in the historical lineage of its medium engagement with architecture, a film that shows us that the century-old engagement of film with architecture is still active today.
Notes
1For an extensive overview of the film, see: Majer O’sickley, Ingeborg. “Whatever Lola Wants, Lola Gets (Or Does She?): Time and Desire in Tom Tykwer’s Run Lola Run”. Quarterly Review of Film & Video. Vol. 19, 2002. p. 123–131.
2An overview of the film and a more detailed description of these flash-forward and flashback scenes is available in: Whalen, Tom. “Run Lola Run by Tom Tykwer”. Film Quarterly. Vol. 53, No. 3, 2000. p. 33–40.
3A brief feminist critique of the film’s protagonists is offered in: Bergen-Aurand, Brian. “Run Lola Run”. Radical Teacher. No. 74, 2005. p. 42–43.
4For a description of the multi-layered narrative structure, see: Bordwell, David. “Film Futures”. SubStance. Vol. 3, Issue 97, No.1, 2002. p. 88–104.
5For an in-depth discussion of the use of the soundtrack as a narrative element, see: Hexel, Vasco. “The Use of Dance Music and the Synergy of Narrative Vehicles in Run Lola Run”. The Soundtrack. No. 2, 2012. p. 83–96.
6The film’s gaming culture references are discussed in: Whalen, Tom. “Run Lola Run by Tom Tykwer”. Ibid. 33–34.
7The cinematographer on Berlin – Symphony of a Great City, Karl Freund, had worked on Fritiz Lang’s Metropolis in 1927 and after emigrating to the United States worked on a series of commercial Hollywood films and the television series I Love Lucy. The film’s screenwriter, Carl Mayer, worked on scripts for The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari in 1920 and after a series of commercial successes throughout the decade worked with Béla Balázs on Das Blaue Licht in 1932, a film directed by Leni Riefenstahl. The following year he fled Nazi persecution in Germany and lived in London throughout Second World War.
8The early films of Ruttmann were defined as “absolute film”, a term coined to describe abstract experimentations with the moving image more akin to abstract painting than narrative cinema. Opus I, 1921, and Opus II, 1923, are typical examples. In 1935, he was assistant director to Leni Riefenstahl on the Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will. Although figurative and, to an extent narrative, it is visually concomitant to the aesthetic created for Berlin – Symphony of a Great City.
9In its focus on “documenting real life”, Berlin – Symphony of a Great City is clearly reminiscent of the work of Dziga Vertov and the Kinoks in the Soviet Union. The Kinoks argued for the “true documentation” of real-life events and people. It was through this “documentation” of “life as it is” they sought to use film as a revolutionary medium for the new century. The most famous film of the Kinok movement was another city symphony: Man With a Movie Camera, released only one year before Ruttmann’s film. For more information, see: Vertov, Dziga. “The Essence of Kino Eye”. In: Kino-Eye; the Writings of Dziga Vertov, Pluto Press, London, 1984. p. 49–71.
10As with Run Lola Run, Berlin – Symphony of a Great City constantly references the question of time in both its formal structure and through literal references to clocks that are inserted throughout both films. See: Whalen, Tom. “Run Lola Run by Tom Tykwer”. Ibid. 34–35; Stone, Rob. “Tight Shoes and the Jump-cut (Walter’s Embrace)”. Coil (1357–9207). No.5, October 1997. p. 65–71.
11For an overview of the film and its “visual style”, see: Bernstein, Matthew. “Visual Style and Spatial Articulations in Berlin, Symphony of a Great City (1927)”. Journal of Film and Video. Vol. 36, No. 4, 1984. p. 5–12.
12See: Mumford, Eric. The CIAM Discourse on Urbanism, 1928–1960. MIT Press, Cambridge. 2000.
13For an overview of this book, see: Derruí, David. “Montage and Modern Architecture: Giedion’s Implicit Manifesto”. Architectural Theory Review. Vol. 12, No. 1, 2007. p. 36–55.
14Giedion’s approach to architectural history involved the identification of “space” as a principal theme which was then actively investigated from a historical perspective in line with Mafredo Tafuri’s notion of “operative criticism” which identifies the active engagement by the historian in the “construction” of historical readings that help understand the present and the possibilities of future development. See: Tafuri, Manfredo. Theories and Histories of Architecture. Granada, London, 1980. It has been argued that Giedion was applying this approach explicitly in Space, Time and Architecture. See: Ceylanli, Zeynep. Sigfreid Giedion’s “Space, Time and Architecture”: An Analysis of Modern Architectural Historiography. Thesis. Middle East Technical University, Ankara, 2008. p. 107–111.
15Giedion, Sigfreid. Space, Time and Architecture: the Growth of a New Tradition (fifth edition), Harvard University Press, New York, 1941. p. 429–448.
16Ibid. p. 845–853.
17David Derruí has argued that Giedion used photography as a key tool in the “construction of his arguments” by deliberating juxtaposing and presenting “dynamic compositions” in his images of modern architecture. See: Derruí, David. “Montage and Modern Architecture: Giedion’s Implicit Manifesto”. Ibid. p. 46–52.
18Koolhaas identifies density has made Manhattan a “paradigm for the exploitation of congestion”. Indeed he argues that his entire book is
a “blueprint for congestion”. Koolhaas, Rem. Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan, Thames and Hudson, London, 1978. p. 10.
19Giedion, Sigfreid. Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition, Ibid. p. 817.
20Koolhaas, Rem. “Whatever happened to Urbanism”. In: R. Koolhaas and B. Man (ed), S, M, L, XL, Monacelli Press, New York, 1994. p. 959–971.
21Luís Mateo, Josep (ed). Rem Koolhaas: Urban Projects 1985–1990, Association of Catalan Architects, Barcelona, 1990. p. 38.
22Koolhaas, Rem. “Bigness or the Problem of the Large”. In: R. Koolhaas and B. Man (ed.), S, M, L, XL, Ibid. p. 502.
23The work of Koolhaas has been extensively documented. For an overview of projects, see: AMO OMA Rem Koolhaas. 1987–1998. El Croquis Editorial, Madrid, 1998; AMO OMA Rem Koolhaas. 1996–2006, El Croquis Editorial, Madrid, 2006.
24See: Bertelli, Patrizio and Koolhaas, Rem. (eds). Projects for Prada, Fondazione Prada, Milan, 2001.
The aesthetics and formalism of Godfrey Reggio in the projects of Jean Nouvel
Koyaanisqatsi. 1982
Godfrey Reggio
Producer: Institute for Regional Education. (USA).
Sumptuous, hypnotic and polemic, Koyaanisqatsi was the first film in a trilogy that began in the early 1980s, continued with Powaaqatsi in 1988 and eventually completed in 2002 with Naqoyqatsi. Each of the three films are quasi-documentary in style, and their particular form stems from the deliberate combination of the music of Philip Glass, the editing of Joe Beirne and the cinematography of Ron Fricke, better known as the director of Baraka. Indeed Baraka is a film that shares the aesthetic and ideological perspective underlying Reggio’s trilogy; a criticism of the economic and social process of globalisation through the continuous contrasting of northern hemisphere industrial imagery with that of the cultures and societies of the south. Although such a definition inevitably involves a level of generalisation, Reggio’s criticism of contemporary culture is even evident in the titles of the films Powaaqatsi (Life in Transformation), Naqoyqatsi (Life as War) and Koyaanisqatsi (Life Out of Balance). He describes the intention of the films as “to act as a mirror for developed societies at the end of the 20th Century”.1 That mirror is intended to show that not only has technology become something we use on a daily basis, but has become something totally ingrained in our lives and even our thinking. Reworking the idea of “the medium as the message”, Reggio argues that technology is now so ingrained in our lives that we almost assume it to be “natural”.
As with any creative work that does not use the standard and commercially dominant language of its medium, Reggio’s films have not met with any great economic or popular success. Being known and celebrated in “underground circles”, but generally unknown to a wider public, they clearly belong to the tradition of the “independent film”.2 That said, by the time of the final film of the trilogy, Naqoyqatsi, Reggio had received commercial backing from the production team at Miramax and had been publicly praised by figures such as Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas. Although still insufficient to turn his abstract form of political filmmaking into anything approaching a commercial success, it has ensured that his films have entered the consciousness of a more mainstream audience, such as that found in the world of academia where he now tours on a regular basis as a guest speaker.
In spite of this tentative success however, Reggio’s work remains both aesthetically and narratively outside of the commercial realm. Aesthetically, it can be described as conflictive; we see images of beautiful landscapes spoilt by industrial contamination, or uninhabited swathes of countryside cut through and destroyed by the construction of railway lines or electricity pylons (Fig. 1). The conflict between the natural beauty of the scenery and the ugliness of the industrialisation Reggio presents is further emphasised by the juxtaposition of images that comes with Beirne’s editing style. Placing shots of industrial contamination alongside images of sublime natural beauty, he underlines the already obvious social and political criticism found in the individual images. Narratively, Reggio’s work is also outside the canon of mainstream filmmaking, in that it is not based on any traditional sense of storyline. There is a temporal progression to his individual sequences but that progression tends to be thematic or spatial, rather than narrative. A scene may pass through several physically linked spaces for example, or may show a series of related activities, but it will not follow a given character through a sequence of narrative events that can be read as a story.
Figure 1: Nature and technology in Koyaanisqatsi.
In the case of Koyaanisqatsi, the employment of an abstract visual language sits perfectly with the soundtrack of Philip Glass. As with Reggio’s aesthetic approach, Glass does not use a structure of sequential narrative development, but rather employs simple and repetitive melodic themes that develop and advance by becoming gradually more complicated through continual superimposition. The combination of editing and music is so effective that, at times, they seem inseparable and, at their best, manage to intensify each other’s associative themes and moods. One clear example of this standard cinematographic-editing trope is a sequence in which Reggio presents the viewer with images from a factory; the fabrication and packaging of fast food on a production line. The repetitive and continuous movement of the line is highlighted by accelerating the film speed, but is also emphasised by Glass’ soundtrack, which is both chaotic and repetitively frenetic. When the production line images are interspersed with similarly accelerated shots of people eating this food, the speed of our lives, both at work and play, is comically and dramatically brought into light.3
For all its use of juxtaposition, however, Reggio’s cinematographic games go way beyond simple techniques of fragmentary and multiple editing; they involve a very particular and intelligent approach to pictorial composition. A typical example of this compositional thinking is seen in the very first scene of the film. Beginning with a totally black screen, some diffuse forms gradually become distinguishable as the camera slowly moves backwards. Revealing a series of isolated sparks and flames, the camera’s continued slow movement subsequently brings into shot some sort of industrial structure. Apparently in flames, this structure is only revealed as a space shuttle launch pad when the camera has moved sufficiently far from its starting point. Playing with our perception of what appears on screen, through the strict control of the subject and point-of-view relationship, Reggio reveals just how important composition is going to be to the cinematic experience that follows.
He varies the trick in a subsequent scene filmed from the air. Employing one long take, the camera is positioned inside a helicopter, or plane, and is pointed straight down towards the floor. Filming in medium shot whilst travelling at great speed, the image of the floor that appears on screen is blurred and out of focus. Once the camera, that continues filming at exactly the same altitude and speed, passes over a cliff, the on-screen image immediately changes from medium to long shot. The sudden increase in distance produces a scale change and also a much clearer image (Fig. 2). Using the natural characteristics of the landscape to play with viewer perception, Reggio manages to simulate a cut without, in reality, resorting to anything other than continuous filming. Something similar occurs in one of the film’s most memorable sequences, which has as the subject of its long take filming, the complex navigation of aeroplanes on the runway of an airport. Initially, the static camera captures, in extreme long shot, the movement of various planes that pass by one another, and across the screen, in a slow but coordinated sequence of movements (Figs. 3–5).
Figure 2: The transition to a long shot through manipulating the ground plane.
Figures 3–5: Objects in different depth planes interacting.
One of these planes, whose reflection is seen on the floor, slowly moves forward towards the camera. Gradually filling the screen as it approaches, the plane is eventually seen in a medium shot, and finally, in medium close-up. At this point, when the plane’s nose an
d cockpit fill the frame, it turns and leaves shot-left, allowing the viewer’s eye to run across the width of the screen. Whilst the eye follows the slow but incessant progression of the plane to the left, another aircraft emerges in the distance repeating precisely the same actions and gradually becomes the focus of attention. In this case, the transition of the scene’s theme is not achieved by mimicking a cut, but rather by mimicking an effect akin to a slow dissolve.4 The visual beauty and choreographic subtlety of each of these scenes is achieved without recourse to a cinematic trope at any time, other than continuous filming. In each case however, a cinematic transition effect is mimicked through an understanding of moving compositions arranged in sequence.
A number of important visual and cinematographic characteristics emerge from these scenes. Reggio demonstrates an aesthetic based on contrasting images of natural beauty with images of industrialisation and pollution. He reveals an interest in the formal sequencing of individual shots rather than a conventional narrative development of plot, and demonstrates how the visual language of film can be mimicked through the manipulation of physical objects and spaces. Each of these features find echo in the work of an architect already mentioned in this series, Jean Nouvel. Whilst it is the stated aim of Reggio to juxtapose nature with industrialisation in order to criticise the latter, the combination of natural elements and built architectural form that emerged in Nouvel’s work in the 1990s is very different in intent. For Nouvel, rather than see an inherent ugliness in an image of a train line crossing open countryside, he sees an inherent beauty. Indeed, he calls such contrasts poetic events. Echoing the aesthetic and poetic sensibilities of the Futurists, and their celebration of the destructive beauty of war, Nouvel sees the violence of nature’s conflict with man as inspirational and even at times, sublime.
The Architecture of the Screen Page 9
