DISTRACTED ATTENTION: Filmic Architecture IV

“Architecture has always represented the prototype of a work of art the reception of which is consummated by a collectivity in a state of distraction.”

Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of its Mechanical Reproduction

This workshop concerns the relationship between cinema and architecture, and is a development of the Filmic Architecture: A House For workshops from 2014-15, 2015-16, and 2016-17 as well as Hard and Disagreeable Labour from 2015-16. We can draw parallels between architecture and many of the key theories of film. More than simply watching a few films and working back with something that resembles the production design, there are fundamental logics and understandings which come from an engagement with underlying theories of film. Montage theory, developed early in cinema’s history, underlines the art’s place in modernism. Eisenstein claims the true creative act to lie in montage, the space between frames: and this bears a relation to one of architecture’s fundamental acts: of threshold.

Similarly, narration and spectatorship can inform our understanding of architecture without resorting to overly scripted spaces; spectatorship theory discusses how we can both suture ourselves into a film, become alienated by it, or have alternative readings for different viewers. How can we manage these competing readings? Genre theory speaks to the commonly understood cues which give us swift access to the intention of a film along with providing a framework for subversion.

The aim is to develop tools to work across disciplines, using diagramming and notation to understand an artwork which is developed for other purposes and by other means. We might as easily work with philosophers, fine artists, musicians or authors. 

The assignment involves several stages of translation:

PART 1
Graphic analysis of a director’s style through storyboarding, diagramming and notation.

PART 2
Selection and development of a narrative.

PART 3
Production design / location scouting for a film that might never be made.

PART 4
Production of short film consisting of establishing shots for your world.

A list of directors will be provided for inspiration, but is intended to be wide-ranging. Drawing from film’s rich history as much as contemporary production, your choice here should go beyond those whose work you simply enjoy: but to consider who might challenge you. Directors who represent the machinery of Hollywood are as valid as avant-garde, genre, or art-house directors; and there are possibilities to investigate popular culture, national cinemas, or underground filmmaking. 

Your narrative might be a typical genre structure such as a western or film noir thriller; it might be a particular novel, short story, or true story: but something to hang your production design from. It might be that you approach an unusual or unlikely mash-up, or play it straight with an appropriate choice. What film do you wish your chosen director would make?

We will hire a cinema @HOME, Manchester in January 2018 for screening the Establishing Shots films. The workshop will be assessed as a combination of the portfolio of analysis, production design, and the establishing shots (uploaded to Vimeo).

 

Filmic Architecture Screening

We are holding a screening of Filmic Architecture work from 2015-16 and 2016-17 on Friday 9th June at 10am.  The venue is cinema 3 at HOME, Manchester.  Please book free tickets here if you are able to come along and celebrate…

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/filmic-architecture-home-tickets-35081221879

Filmic Architecture 2016-17

This year’s crop of Filmic Architecture films demonstrated a sophistication in the analysis and understanding: the focus was on notation, diagramming, drawing and mapping the various aspects of the directors in question.  Whilst I cannot show the PDFs to accompany the work here, the sophistication of the thinking underlying each film is apparent:

ALEX MACBETH: A City for Mamorou Oshii

https://vimeo.com/194247951

ROBERT WATERS: A Theatre for Alejandro G. Inarritu

http://youtube.com/watch?v=ldNhYafx-6Y 

GREGORY THORNE: A House for Paul Thomas Anderson

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC1AJZjH0EDg3Le6n2Mz0Jog

ADAM COLLINGE: A House for Hayao Miyazaki

https://vimeo.com/195129540

KARINA ABU ESHE: A House for Quentin Tarantino

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pPgPnd8y4to&feature=youtu.be

AMELIA DENTY: A Place of Worship for Guillermo del Toro

JACOB GRAVES: The City of Richard Ayoade

https://vimeo.com/195188587 

KATY KANN: A Building for Guillermo del Toro

THOMAS KIRBY: The Incongruous Pub (A House for Edgar Wright)

KRISHNA PATEL: A House for Quentin Tarantino

https://vimeo.com/195219565 

ANDREW SINGER: A House for Martin McDonagh

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EtQISY-yr0A&feature=youtu.be

RADEN BIN R NORAZARI: A House for Christopher Nolan

ROBERT MAKEY: A Motel for Nicolas Winding Refn

https://vimeo.com/195257819

 

*Any work that was password protected or sent via a non-public platform has not been included.  If you’d like it to be added, drop me a line!

**The work will be screened at a one-off showing at Home on 9th June.

***Thanks to all of this year’s students for their enormous energy and hard work, and also to our visiting speakers: Jonathan Charley, David Reat, and Richard Koeck.

****Filmic Architecture takes a year off in 2017-18, to make way for the Hard and Disagreeable Labour of architectural drawing to return.

A Nice Find…

 

https://vimeo.com/172016440​

Well worth a watch: modest means well used, and an interesting example for the Filmic Architecture workshop. (With thanks to @kat_luc01 on Twitter for the heads-up)

 

Filmic Architecture 2015-16

The second year of the MARC Workshop in Filmic Architecture produced some fantastic results.  Below are links to the films produced by a selection of students (some were posted privately, so links are not included here).  An additional portfolio discussing the rationale and design process was also produced.

Simply put, each student is asked to select a film director and, based on their analysis of the spatial qualities of their work, design a house for that director.

JOE BENNION – A House for Stanley Kubrick

POLLY CLEMENTS – A House for Fritz Lang

MAXIME DOWNE – A House for Charlie Kaufman

LUCY GALVIN – A House for Quentin Tarantino

ALEKSANDRA GAVRIKOVA – A House for Richard Linklater

DALIA JUSKAITE – A House for Fernando Ferreira Meirelles

STEVE KIRK – A House for Rob Zombie

NICHOLAS NILSEN – A House for Anne & Georges [Michael Haneke]

JAMES O’KANE – A House for Park Chan Wook

WILL PRIEST – A House for Alejandro González Iñárritu

DANIEL ROMANO – A House for Zhang Yimou

SOTIRIS SKAROS – A House for Christopher Nolan

HUGH STANT – A House for Danny Boyle

https://vimeo.com/150937625

ROBERT STANTON – A House for Richard Ayoade

FLORENCE COOK – A House for David Fincher

ASHLIN MILTON – A House for Tarsem Singh

 

 

Filmic Architecture: MARC Workshop 2015

This post brings together the various films made for this year’s ‘Filmic Architecture’ workshop.  Participants were asked to select a director, and after analysing their spatial strategies, to design a ‘house’ (loosely defined) for them.  These were drawn and built as models – and then filmed.  Some of the results are collated below:

https://vimeo.com/119704178%20

A House for the Coen Brothers, Hannah Bellerby

A House for Jean Pierre Jeunet, Tania Croghan

A House for Joe Wright, Natalie Dossor

A House for Michel Gondry, Lina Keturkaite

A House for Jackie Chan, Daniel Rui Zhi Lee

A House for Wong Kar Wai, Peter Lee

A House for Wim Wenders, Douglas Meadway

A House for Alfred Hitchcock, Diana Muresan

A House for Zhang Yimou, Jeanne Pang

A House for Hayao Miyazaki, Mohammad Abu Bakar

Another House for Hayao Miyazaki, Shahrol Sahlin

A House for Tim Burton, Hakym Ahmad

Another House for Tim Burton, Shahrul Ridhwan Shahruddin

A House for Karl Lagerfeld, Zatul Binti Mohammad Khoiril

A House for Quentin Tarantino, Selasi Setufe

A House for Spike Jonze, Ahmad Safri Bin Shamsuddin

A House for Andrey Tarkovsky, Octavian Dragos Silaghi

https://vimeo.com/119745587%20

A House for Wes Anderson, Kathryn Valentine

Another House for Alfred Hitchcock, Annette Davis

New Police Story

Ding Sheng (Dir.), 2004

It occurred to me, in my ongoing work on film and architecture that certain more popular genres get left out. Horror and Science Fiction have their occasional Renaissance, but martial arts films – perhaps with the exception of Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Zhang Yimou’s works including Hero and House of the Flying Daggers, (possibly also Wong Kar Wai’s attempt with Ashes of Time, but more of that in another entry as it is a glorious failure of a film in many ways – and certainly no less glorious for it)which brought critical acclaim and respectability to an otherwise maligned genre. One of the undisputed masters of the form is Jackie Chan, who promotes a positive lifestyle image in his unique mix of comedy and combat.

This leads me to my primary observation: that martial arts films are essentially prefigured by James Gibson’s theory of affordances, and are also dramas built upon Tim Ingold’s assertions regarding perception of, being in, and knowledge of our environment as forms of thinking in themselves. The hero often wins through greater exploitation of the affordances of the environment.

Of course, this particular film plays against type fairly substantially in the opening act, where a series of traps are laid for Chan’s team – the very environment he would normally use is played against him in rather more grim fashion than would normally be the case. The gangs gleeful dispatch of the team is an attempt to break Chan, and is doubled with a virtual representation which glorifies and replays the events as entertainment for others,

Once broken, the everyday environment begins to play against Chan: the stairs to the bar, tables and chairs, doors.

With redemption appearing in the form of Officer 1667, Chan reestablishes his place piece by piece in a classic redemption narrative, and the villains are shown to be extreme sports participants do with all the skills which go along with that, of radical appropriations of space a la Borden’s now classic text on Skateboarding, Space and the City. Of course, par our and it’s ilk have been added to the canon of martial arts cinema for over a decade now, and it was inevitable that it would find its way into a Jackie Chan spectacular like this. Thankfully not with Chan as the practitioner, but he has his own scrambling style of negotiating the environment culminating in the runaway bus scene which diverts Chan from capturing the criminals.

I probably need to watch more of his classics again to finish this piece, but there’s something in the appropriation/radical use/affordances of space, but in this sense, referring back – both The Raid and Dredd conform more to this model of cinema than, say the superhero or science fiction in the case of Dredd: an interesting choice that probably lies behind the success of the film compared to the earlier attempt to transpose 1980s/1990s Hollywood action movie models to the film.

Premium Rush

David Koepp (Dir.), 2014

I hadn’t intended to watch this film, but ended up looking over someone’s shoulder on a flight, and decided it was sufficiently interesting. In short, it is a somewhat uncritical & naive celebration of the bicycle couriers of New York featuring rising star Joseph Gordon Levitt.

The film makes extensive use of a potentially hackneyed idea of showing the potential routes calculated by Levitt’s characters swoosh onto the screen as he negotiates the various hazards of Manhattan’s traffic. That these are presented as options and possibilities is not unlike certain martial arts films – Hero comes to mind with its scene in the chess or go pavilion, where the fight is played out in itse entirety mentally before being committed to; however here we have Borges’ garden of forking paths: possibilities represented one after the other, as a selection and iterative way finding activity.

The less flashy shots of the bikes fetishise the machinery of these vehicles, close ups of wheels, gears, steering, and also of street signs orienting us within the gridiron; and associating the character very much with their machines, classic fetishisation in cinema, applied to an unconventional topic, but using all of the apparatus Hollywood can muster. The courier is a hero, measured through his or her knowledge of the city – not only in a map sense of the word, but the tacit knowledge of intersecting flows.

The most eye catching element of this summery and breezily shot film is the visualisation of the map, of the grid, the literal application of Google maps to a cinematic language, a developing language – seen also in television dramas such as Sherlock or Jon Favreau’s Chef.

The application of a Google mapping style element is by no means accidental: the use of mapping and route finding as distinctive activities is embedded within elements of the plot, the competitive nature of the couriers as well as their overall camaraderie. The iconography of this most recent kind of map can be placed alongside those in films such as the Indiana Jones series where travelogue elements are dispensed with by a cutscene showing a line animated across a map (by no means innovated by those films of course). It forms a kind of continuum with other manifestations of cartography in film.

Another idea to throw into the mix is Iain Borden’s work on skateboarders’ appropriation of space, where their understanding of the world is generated by the cultural heritage of their sport as well as an embodied knowledge of textures and articulation of surface planes: what can be skated on or off is a similar question to where the bikes can go. Our hero here is of course also a bit of a stunt or trick rider, and this is shown of in very flashy circumstances during the escape from the pound sequence, where handy props are given to the skilled rider who makes the environment his own. This taking possession of, or presenting an alternative to the normative city is a related theme: dwelling in a very specifically embodied manner.

The crooked cop antagonists’ gloriously poor acting and terrible plot should be noted: the film really cannot be recommended on that front!

Architecture for Films

The great Brian Eno once made an album called Music for Films. In the album, Eno produces soundscapes and soundtracks for suggested films, hinted and oblique narratives. I have long been fascinated by production design in cinema, starting with that early, somewhat generation defining love of the Star Wars series, followed by the great explosion in science fiction films over subsequent decades. This strikes me as something worth investigating further, the idea of production design somewhat akin to Eno’s music – for films, with reference to the needs of film, but without a specific narrative in mind. I need a new project to loosen up my thinking a little, and have settled upon this one. Perhaps not restricted to architecture, but it is a nice title: architecture for films.

Trends may emerge, distinctive worlds and settings, alternative genre: and perhaps stories might be formed by this activity; but maybe not. The fabula, the excess, the firmly extra-diegetic.

Keep an eye on this page of the blog to see how it unfolds. I won’t show everything, but will try to keep it relatively interesting.

The Limits of Control

Jim Jarmusch, Dir. (2009).

The film opens with classic Marc Auge non-places: office cubicle, long conversation in an airport gate, controls of ticket check and long blank corridor before boarding a small plane. Isaac de Banchole plays the lone man, unnamed and meeting two associates at the airport. One speaks only Spanish, without subtitles. The other translates into English. The grain of the Spanish speakers’ voice is important. We focus entirely on how he says things.

The trip in to Madrid from the airport is familiar from my trip there last autumn, the slight dreamlike haze of such journeys from airports through the most nondescript hinterlands towards the city itself always has that effect, even on a shorter haul flight.

Arrival at the hotel (or apartment) is certainly not a non-place. It is a peculiar design, idiosyncratic with flashes of colour, bold geometry and strange materiality. The room is strange, oddly shaped and furnished, not reflective of the circular exterior, drum upon drum, but with a mixture of ramshackle 1950s furniture. The palette is carefully constructed, the room has frosted glass and contrasting green & red tones, layering very much a feature of the great Christopher Doyle’s cinematography. Clarity of shot is optional, and frequently inappropriate. The camera does not need to move, can cut mid glance, and linger on an impassive face.

I approve of his coffee habit. Perhaps there is an essay in this – I am reminded of The Guard with Don Cheedle’s habit of placing sugar; and of course Jarmusch’s own Coffee and Cigarettes.

The specificity of his demand defines the character: two espressos in separate cups. Coupled with his language difficulties, this underlines the interaction in a simple cafe: the frustration of the wrong order, the oddness of his demand and the insistent nature of his order. He needs them now. He breaks the social contract of the cafe a little, but is in control of the situation – going so far as to place the wrong double espresso back on the waiter’s platter. He is clearly delighted when he returns, and the correct coffee is ordered more swiftly. Even more so when Tilda Swinton turns up, tries to drink his second coffee, and is set right by the waiter. The Lone Man establishes his rules, the cafe conforms to him.

This is the Lone Man’s power in the film, to push his surroundings into conforming to him. In small, but significant ways, he demonstrates his presence in the environment through the repeated coffee ritual, regardless of his context: plane, cafe, train.

Starkness and strangeness is played up. The Reina Sofia museum with its flashes of red and consultation of the plan seem to speak of his specificity. The Lone Man knows which cubist painting he wants to see, and he studies it carefully. He is directed there by his codes, later taking in a nude, carefully disposing of the paper by eating it and washing it down with his coffee.

The girl who frequents the room appears to represent conscience, and the city: the lone man resists it’s / her temptations whilst flitting from scene to scene, dingy bar to slick club.

The train conversation is hypnotic, as though a dreamt half remembered conversation takes us to Seville rather than a form of transportation.

The room here is traditional, fabric, tiles, somewhat institutional in character, the tones are paler, the lighting softer.

Establishing shots rarely implicate the character so much. Here the lone man walks, glancing, eyes flicking upwards and sideways. He is unavoidably present, utterly lacking in stealth: much like the incidents with the coffee, he is always fully present in a scene. His agency is clear, like the camera that makes its presence felt, but which attempts to erase itself in classic Hollywood filmmaking.

The film is a travelogue, smuggled under the guise of a vague criminal conspiracy that is happening. The chance encounters, strange surroundings, and jump cuts emulate the likes of Marker’s Sans Soleil: but with a dramatic narrative. Other characters walk with a different purpose and sense of urgency: when John Hurt’s character makes his arrival, he uses the city in a different way.

The encounters are formulaic.

Do you speak Spanish?
Are you interested in films/sex/science/art?

Each character gives a little of their worldview in turn, providing the next clue in the formulaic and playful or even satirical rendering of the plot line. The diegesis, the actual plot, is fed piece by piece, with a small sense of tension rising as to what the job actually is, but it makes a minimal footprint. We have no way of guessing, we are rarely surprised by how the story progresses. The film is performance, setting, props (the subtly shifting hue of the lone man’s suit – changing for each location), atmosphere, and all those other things; but the idea of plot is deliberately subverted or even circumvented. It is like a building without purpose in a way, one which can be inhabited however one likes to.

Gael Garcia Bernal’s Mexican character reinforces the theme of presence: the reflection is more present than everything else. Are you interested in hallucinations?

The isolation of the final hillside compound is stark, contextualised by the journey through scrub and desert to get there: this is no-place. How can one make ones presence felt here, how can one demand the agency so carefully constructed throughout the rest of the film? Even here, temptation follows. Returning to his whitewashed house, white dust sheets on the furniture and paintings, the line man finds the nude once again for a final exchange of matchboxes. He continues the job, performs his exercises one more time surrounded by white drapery.

What feels like a jump cut back to Seville finds the lone man in his target’s office. The line is startling: I used my imagination. I understand subjectively. Reality is arbitrary.

The bohemians, the film makers, musicians, and scientists all contribute to the final act: eliminating the American.