The Architecture of the Screen

by Graham Cairns

  17For a basic explanation, see: Bordwell, David and Thompson, Kristen. Ibid. pp. 280–281.

  18Although not a film studied in this workshop, the architectural effect proposed here drew on a filmic reference from Carol Reed’s 1949 noir classic, The Third Man. In particular, it recalls the final scene of the film in which Alida Valli (playing Anna Schmidt) approaches Joseph Cotton (playing Holly Martins) in a long drawn-out shot that follows her silently from the distance, into the middle ground and seamlessly out of shot in the foreground.

  PART III

  Conceptual essays

  The hybridisation of sight in the hybrid architecture of sport: The effects of television on stadia and spectatorship

  Introduction

  In August 2012, the twenty-first Olympic Games took place in the British capital for the third time in their history. For a two-week period, London was the centre of attention for the world’s media, and the city hosted an estimated half-a-million staying tourists and over five million day visitors from across the nation. Although the costs associated were astronomical, the country is expected to reap the benefits of a sporting and financial legacy that will inspire a generation of athletes and regenerate a flagging economy. The centrepiece of the media event was the Olympic Stadium in Stratford, images of which were beamed around the world by one of the largest broadcasting operations the world has ever seen. As a result, the architecture of the 2012 Olympics became a symbol of the Games, the city of London and the nation in general. It became the mediated icon of the sporting world.

  In this televised age, an estimated four-billion international viewers watched the opening and closing ceremonies, with even more seeing images of its events and stadia over the intervening two weeks. In addition to images of the stadia however, television viewers were presented with images of the country’s principle buildings, its iconic structures and most famous historical monuments. The Olympics was used as a vehicle for the promotion of the United Kingdom, in general. Nowhere was this more evident than in Britain itself where unprecedented amounts of media attention, press speculation, public debate and marketing events swamped the TV screens of the country.

  In this promotionally hyped mediated environment, a limited number of lucky spectators also visited the stadia themselves. These fortunate few witnessed the Games first hand and experienced the “real” event itself. They shouted and cheered with the athletes in real time, felt the visceral nature of the sporting crowd and actually contributed to the “electric” atmosphere only sampled by television viewers across the world. However, just as with their home-viewing compatriots, these “real” spectators also watched replays on the big screen, relived events from previous Olympics over the sound system or on the television screens in executive boxes. Many used specially designed apps on their handheld mobile phones to download the latest media speculation on particular athletes as they simultaneously watched them perform on the track or field. In short, their real experience was, in part, mediated.

  An overview of the commercialised and mediated sporting spectacle

  Since the establishment of the Olympic Games in its modern format with the 1896 Athens Olympics, the four-year international celebration of athleticism, sportsmanship and nationalism, that is, the modern Olympic Games, has grown into what we may safely call the major media spectacle of the modern age. In much of the literature already published around the Games, such a hypothesis is hardly original. James Larson and Heung-Soo Park have referred to the Olympics as both “an actor and a stage” for globalised, mediated politics1. Keith Sutter has defined the world’s largest sporting event as a “financial and ethical concern of international importance”2; whilst Rod Sheard refers to the type of stadia designed to hold its televised events as “huge stage sets for the presentation of heroic events”.3 Michael Rustin calls it simply “the world’s leading festival of sport”.4

  In Olympics Used for Soviet Propaganda, 1977, the journalist Jeffrey Hart linked this mediatisation of the Games to its politicisation in the 1930s and beyond,5 whilst in The Beijing Olympiad: The Political Economy of a Sporting Mega Event, 2007, Paul Close, David Askew and Xu Xin highlight the association of the Games with nationalist tendencies.6 More directly, Allen Guttmann has outlined the history of the Olympics in the second half of the twentieth century in the light of the Cold War.7 Such political readings of the Olympics belie the image portrayed by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) that their four-year celebration of athletics represents a friendly coming together of nations from around the world in a context of excellence, friendship and respect.8

  In such works, and indeed in works like The Politics of the Olympic Games (1992), Watching the Olympics: Politics, Power and Representation (2011) and Olympic Dreams: The Impact of Mega-Events on Local Politics (2001), Richard Espy, John Sugden and Mathew Burbank all paint a picture of the Olympics that is far from the innocent, pure, friendly spectacle that has become the “Olympic Product”. This notion of the Olympics as a product was first extensively and openly pursued by the IOC in the wake of the 1984 Olympics in the United States with the establishment of TOP, the exclusive club of corporate sponsors including Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, Visa and others. These corporate sponsors pay an estimated $54 million per year for basic membership and can access the right to use both the term “Official Sponsor” and the five-ringed logo.9

  The establishment of the Games as a corporate, mediated and financial business in its own right, however, cannot be attributed to one event. In reality, the process towards the conversion of the Olympic Games into its current “multi-million pound spectacle” status began as far back as 1896 with private investors aiding in the finance of the first modern Games in Athens. Despite the gradual nature of this process however, a key moment did come in 1972 when the President of the previous twenty years, and staunch defender of the financial autonomy of the IOC, Avery Brundage, resigned. His successor, the moderniser, Juan Antonio Samaranch, gave the green light to the first major corporate sponsorship deals that resulted in the IOC’s bank balance going from an estimated $45 million in 1972 to $200 million by 1980.10 The explosion of corporate investment in the Games that occurred during this time, however, did not occur in a vacuum. It was intrinsically tied to the relationship fomented during the same period with international broadcasters; a relationship that would allow the Games to become the world’s biggest TV extravaganza within a matter of years.11

  The earliest precedent for the presentation of the Olympics in the medium of television or film was Leni Riefenstahl’s 1936 Olympia; a film through which it has been argued that the modern conception of the athlete as a national asset was born12 (Fig. 1). However, TV coverage as we understand it today really began in the 1950s when cameras not only filmed the events for newsreels in specific nations but also filmed them for specialist sports programmes across the globe. By the time of the 1960 Rome Olympics, the Games had become a “live” televised event, and by 1964 they were being broadcast via satellite.13 By 1968, they were broadcast in colour and were fully established as the multinational media spectacle which, just four years later in Munich, would turn them into a site for live globalised terrorism.

  Figure 1: Leni Riefenstahl: Olympia, 1936.

  By the time of the tragic 1972 Games the Olympics had become a major global tlevision event that had been at the forefront in the development of media organisations and technologies for almost two decades.14 It is a characteristic that has continued until the present day with the emergence of the Olympic Broadcasting Services, the IOC’s own in-house broadcasting unit. It is also evident in the development of online streaming, YouTube highlights, social media apps and “web widgets” to name but a few recent advances. With every passing Olympics, we witness the development of ever more advanced technology, ever more global promotion of the event and successively higher international viewing figures which, in turn, leads to continual increases in corporate sponsorship.15 As a result of television and the media then, the Games are
now a multibillion dollar industry.16

  Money, television and tourism

  Although estimations vary widely, a brief review of some “official” figures suffices to underline the importance of the Olympics to the world’s media and vice versa. With regard to the Seoul Olympics in 1988, Larson and Soo Park quote gross cumulative viewing figures of 10 billion people watching in 169 nations.17 Rod Sheard, one of the principal architects for the 2000 Sydney Olympics, quotes estimates that suggest that 90% of the world’s population with access to television sets saw at least some part of the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta; a figure that was reframed by the time of the Sydney games to some 50% of the entire world’s population.18 On the eve of the 2004 Olympics in Athens, the Spanish daily El País estimated that 4000 million people would see those Games with increases expected for the 2008 and 2012 events in Beijing and London, respectively.19

  Whatever the exactitude of these figures, the magnitude of the global television audience for the Olympic Games clearly represents an economic opportunity of enormous proportions for the contemporary mass media, and thus largely explains the financial circus that surrounds the games every four years. They are by now a phenomenon that incurs astronomic costs for all concerned. Again, figures in this regard vary according to the source and include estimations of a total cost of $10 billion for the Seoul Games of 1988, anything from a total cost of $15–40 billion for the Beijing Games in 2008 and between £15–25 billion for the London Games in 2012.20 Included in such estimates are costs of $423 million for the iconic Herzog and de Meuron Stadium in Beijing and £125 million on the Opening and Closing Ceremonies in London.21

  Despite the scale of these figures, it is seen as an investment that will be recuperated in two principle short-term ways: corporate sponsorship and, what is more significant for our arguments here, the sale of television broadcasting rights. The El País article mentioned above, for example, indicates that the Greek government’s budget for the construction and promotion of the Athens Games in 2004 was in the region of €4.5 billion, 80% of which was expected to be recuperated through the sale of television rights alone.22 In the late 1990s, the American broadcaster ABC paid around $3.5 billion for US transmission rights for the five games between 2000 and 201623, whilst Larson and Soo Park suggest that between 40 and 50% of all costs incurred by the host nations in 1992 and 1996 were recuperated by television rights alone.24

  Such figures, together with those already cited, reveal the economic importance of television to the success of the Games, not only as a multinational media spectacle but as a financial investment for the host nation and the IOC itself. Given the financial dependence this inevitably generates, it is not surprising that the relationship between television and the Olympics has grown ever stronger and has come to define the event in a number of simple but significant ways. The scheduling of events at the Seoul Games of 1988, for example, was determined by the time difference with the United States and was imposed by NBC.25 In 2000, television companies forced changes to the Olympic format by spreading certain events over more nights and by introducing new activities seen as more interesting to the television viewer.26 In 2008, the Opening and Closing Ceremonies included special effects exclusively for the television and, as is the case in 2012, were directed not by a performance choreographer, but by a film director.

  Speaking about the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona, the media specialist Eric Louw has argued this point in his suggestion that these games represented a phenomenon “constructed almost entirely around the requirements of the television spectacle”.27 Emphasising the potential for host nations to use the televised coverage of the Olympic event as a sort of national advertising campaign however, he indicates that the relationship between television and sport is about far more than the sporting event itself. It is as a result of these potentially huge non-sporting benefits that host nations are prepared to invest the colossal amounts of money in the Games cited earlier. One obvious objective of this, explicitly dealt with in the El País article, is to prolong the economic growth initiated by the games through a posterior increase in tourism. It is an argument repeated in the case of the 2010 Winter Games in Vancouver, where tourism contributed to an estimated income of $463 million. In the case of the 2012 London Games, it is also evident in estimates indicating an increase in tourism in the region of six million visitors.28

  In this sense, the Barcelona Games are still considered to be exemplary. The Catalan government promoted not only the city of Barcelona but also the entire region of Catalonia as a potential tourist destination and business hub during the two-week period of the Games.29 Their promotional campaign was largely based on the architectural patronage of Barcelona city itself,30 and in this sense it still serves as a reference model today, some twenty years later.31 During the 1992 Games, the architecture of Antonio Gaudi was taken to a world audience like never before. It underlay the use of what were referred to as five “beauty cameras”; cameras set up in different parts of the city whose only objective was to capture memorable images of the city.32 Later beamed around the world as “promotional fillers” between the coverage of the sports events, these images functioned as picture postcard adverts for the region which would have cost millions had they been purchased as conventional air time.

  What such overt and explicit non-sporting objectives underline is that, although the Olympic Games may well be the world’s largest and all-inclusive sporting spectacle, and although it may involve the construction of the world’s biggest, most expensive, avant-garde and exciting sporting stadia, it is not the live sporting event, the physical building or the real spectator at the event itself that really matters. On the contrary, what dominates is the internationally mediated nature of the event and the fact that its principle spectators are not the audience in the stadia themselves. The principal audience is the public at home in front of the TV screen. What matters is the media and the way it can be used.

  Stadium aesthetics in the age of the television screen

  As television has become ever more integrated into sport, its buildings have incorporated ever more technology for the media into their very fabric. They have also become ever more visually iconic and photogenic. One building that is revealing in this regard is the Santiago Bernabéu stadium, home of Europe’s most successful football club, Real Madrid. Despite being inaugurated in 1947, in the pre-television epoch, the Santiago Bernabéu has responded to the requirements of the modern football era. Football, as with the Olympics, has been the site of amazing financial investment from media organisations which has radically altered the nature and image of the sport in recent years. In the United Kingdom, for example, Sky Sports has turned English football into a multibillion pound industry seen on television screens across the world on an almost daily basis. In countries like Spain, Italy and Germany, broadcasters such as ESPN and Canal+ have done the same thing.

  Indeed, in the case of BSkyB and Canal+, there have even been attempted takeovers of major clubs.33 One of the consequences of this is that football now imitates many of the characteristics of the Olympic Games: for example, its players are international media stars, the international press is now a central player in the running of the “business”, and the profit margins and financial investment it involves stretch into billions. At the political level, it also represents a tool in the continuation of politics in another realm; the expulsion of the Soviet team from the 1974 World Cup over their refusal to play Chile after that country’s coup d’état, and the banning of the South African National Football team during the Apartheid regime being the most obvious examples. The relationship between sport, politics and money seen in these cases also emerges in more contexts as well. The recent announcement by the Government of Madrid that it intends to use the international appeal of Real Madrid Football Club as part and parcel of its economic plan to increase tourism income is a typical example.34

  Another way in which football has followed the route set out by the Olympics in its relationship
with the media, however, is in the adaptation of its stadia to the requirements of the television industry. In the case of the Santiago Bernabéu, this is evident in its continual modifications aimed at facilitating the television industry, through the inclusion of a TV studio, press and commentary boxes, interview rooms and numerous camera gantries around the pitch. As with any modern television stage set, it is a technologically advanced and highly sophisticated multi-media complex incorporating the whole range of recent technological developments.35

  Despite being a stadium of its time, the Santiago Bernabéu is an anomaly in one regard; its aesthetic is undoubtedly iconic, but it is far from an easily consumable aesthetic for the television camera. The Santiago Bernabéu offers an aesthetic image of brutalism; a massive concrete construction that is both crude and aggressive in appearance and which seems to play the symbolic role of a fortress. From the outside, the aggressive nature of the architecture seems to communicate the cruel welcome waiting inside and, as with any “fortress”, denies any view to its interior. Inside, its steep stands, relatively close to the field of play, help in the production of an intimidating atmosphere for the visiting team. Aesthetically and formally, it belongs to what Rod Sheard has termed a second-generation stadium.36

  Once in the centre of the arena, the opposing team is surrounded and trapped in an atmosphere that, on its most intense nights, has been described like that of the Coliseum; the public demanding not only the defeat but also the humiliation of the opposition. Employing a term first coined in the Argentinean sporting press, the ex-player and trainer of Real Madrid, Jorge Valdano, has defined the psychological effect of the stadium and its intimidating atmosphere on opposing teams as “scenic fear”.37 This is a stadium whose design rational has nothing to do with being an iconic, photogenic building for the television camera and a television audience. This is a building from the pre-televised age, the stronghold of its team.