"There are different ways to make films. Like Jean Renoir and Robert Bresson, who make music. Like Sergei Eisenstein, who paints. Like Stroheim, who wrote talking novels during the silent film era. Like Alain René, who sculptures. And like Socrates – I mean Rossellini, who creates philosophy. THE movie theater, in other words, he can be everything at the same time, judge and party"
Jean-Luc Godard [1]
It is hard to imagine cinema being made in a vacuum. Without the stage to fill each story, we cannot be transported away from our reality into the movie world we are immersed in. To Godard's list of filmmaking modes, we can add another: cinema as architecture. The interplay between cinema and architecture – “the inherent architecture of cinematic expression and the cinematic essence of architectural experience” is a complex, often multifaceted dialogue between the two disciplines. [2]
Regarding the production of these two distinct "art forms", architect Juhani Pallasmaa emphasizes that both are realized with the help of a team of experts and assistants as a result of collective effort. However, another aspect emerges: both are the author's arts, the fruit of a creator, a single artist. Let us turn our attention to this and other moments in which these arts intersect.
Set construction is undoubtedly one of those cutting edge moments. By allowing a great deal of control over shooting conditions, sets built in closed studios make it possible to get rid of limitations related to climate, lighting and any setbacks that may arise when shooting in "real" environments. Alfred Hitchcock is an example of a director who has made extensive use of sets to create spaces of tension and terror in his productions.
Another iconic example of the use of scenery in film appears in German Expressionism. Movies like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) by Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau and the Nosferatu by Robert Wiene (1922) are works in which Pallasmaa says the spaces and environments present a "fantasy architecture that hovers between dream and reality." Wiene's film Nosferatu it shows completely distorted architecture characterized by skewed angles and jagged shadows on set surfaces, establishing architecture as something outside of reality. Nosferatu's set design reproduces architectures that are realistic, however, the film's narrative charges these spaces with a dreamlike atmosphere.
The artificial spaces of German Expressionism with their forced angles, shadows and perspectives create tension and distort human perception, "repressing the very space of the observer by incorporating him into the vortex of the film". [3] Thus, films such as Caligari they produce entirely new spaces that simultaneously embrace and absorb everything on stage. In these films one perceives the setting as a protagonist in itself, not just as a setting.
" To endow with a poetic value that which does not yet possess it, to deliberately limit the field of vision in order to intensify the expression: these are the two qualities that help to make the cinema decoration the ideal setting for modern beauty. » – Aragon [4 ]
It is not necessary to only create scenarios that simulate shadows and distort perspectives. Camera movements and specific frames can create similar effects in cinema. "To shape reality in advance before facing it is to avoid the problem," writes Erwin Panofsky, "The problem is to manipulate and shoot unstylized reality in such a way that the result has style" [5 ]
Filming "real space" was the goal of directors such as Roberto Rossellini, Vittorio De Sica, Luchino Visconti and Pietro Germi, who created narratives that showed the reality of Italy in the second half of the 1940s. Films, which include famous works such as Rome, the Open City (1945), the Bicycle Thief (1948) by De Sica et al La Terra Trema (1948) by Visconti, present critical views of Italy's post-war period. As Siegfried Kracauer states: the urban space, with its streets and buildings, was both the site and the vehicle that fueled this social critique.
Representations of urban space, however, are not limited to Italian neorealist films – they are also an important part of the plot in later productions. For example, Jean-Luc Godard in his film Two or Three Things I Know About Her (1967) uses images of Paris and the transformations that the capital went through in the 1960s: with the construction of large projects in the suburbs and the suburbs themselves – as a metaphor for everyday situations in the lives of some of the characters depicted in the film. Consumerism, capitalism and globalization appear as central themes in this story, whether they refer to the city or the personal lives of the women depicted in the film. Likewise, Quentin Tarantino with Pulp Fiction (1994) depicts the periphery of a generic city as the backdrop for a series of common stories: unemployed, murderers, waitresses and roadside hotels make up a plot that fits what might be called “dirty realism” – which can happen anywhere in people. [6]
Dystopian visions of future cities also span the role of architecture in cinema. An example of this is film Blade Runner (1982) by Ridley Scott, which presents a fictional city (San Angeles) that is the product of a "new governmental society that brings together ethnicities and different architectural styles, highlighting the results of years of a hybrid use of often unsupported and waste-generating spaces." Their environments are dystopian manifestations of "postmodernism guaranteed by the capitalist supremacy of the post-industrial age." [7]
Metropolis (1927), by Fritz Lang is another case of the future depicted as a dystopia. Santos (2004) writes that "the great engine of the system is essentially represented by an oppressive and ubiquitous city, which reduces its inhabitants to mere ventriloquists manipulating gears in a clear manifestation of the fears that a new industrial city evokes." Lang's work must be seen in the context in which it is made. Produced in the late 1920s, it reflects questions about the interwar period, when Germany suffered from the defeat of World War I and other European countries experienced accelerated economic growth due to intense industrialization. In that socio-political scenario, the Metropolis it was the possibility of a dystopian future, not so far removed from reality as other German expressionist films might evoke.
Decades later, the modern city was masterfully ironically represented in the movies Mon Uncle (1958), Play Time (1967) and Traffic (1971) by Jacques Tati. Technology and modernization, embodied by the most eccentric artefacts, devices and buildings contrast with the symbolic figure of M. Hulot, a subject who simply does not fit the new lifestyle imposed by the accelerating process of urban modernization. Out of place, he tries in vain to adapt to the new reality that promises ease and comfort, but presents only obstacles and resistance.
Another interesting point that Pallasmaa comments on would be to investigate whether cinema architecture, freed from the constraints of practical functions, construction technology and cost "has acquired any artistic advantage over the actual architectural plans of the architects of these remarkable buildings" . Away from its specific limitations, would the architecture of the cinema have advanced further than the architecture that creates our natural environment? Hints of this can be seen in works by set architects such as Paul Nelson's Maison Suspendue, in which "environments are suspended in a steel and glass cell like bird's nests". [8] We can only imagine what buildings these set designers would have made had they not devoted themselves to cinema. Architect Robert Mallet-Stevens notes:
"It is undeniable that the cinema has a significant influence on modern architecture; in turn, modern architecture brings its artistic side to the cinema... Modern architecture not only serves the cinematographic set [decor], but leaves its stamp on the directing [set ], escapes from its frame; the architecture "dr. »
Robert Mallet-Stevens [9]
These intersections can also happen in reverse: just as architecture builds scenes in films, so cinema can, with light, shadows, scale and movement, construct spaces. For filmmakers with studies or an academic approach to architecture, such as Sergei Eisenstein, the absence of specific physical constraints (gravity, functionality, etc.) allows cinema to go even further than architecture (understood here as the practice of designing and constructing buildings ) in terms of spatial experiments.
- 1. GODARD, Jean-Luc. Godard to Godard. New York: Da Capo Press, 1986. p.208.
- 2. PALLASMAA, Juhani. THE Architecture of the Image. Existential space in architecture. Helsinki: Rakennustieto Publishing, 2007. p.14.
- 3. VIDLER, Anthony. The Explosion of Space: Architecture and the Filmic Imaginary. Assemblage, No. 21 (Aug., 1993), pp. 44-59, Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1993. p.47.
- 4. ARAGON, Louis. "Du decor", Le Film 131, 1918, pp. 8-10. In: VIDLER, Anthony. The Explosion of Space: Architecture and the Filmic Imaginary. Assemblage, No. 21 (Aug., 1993), pp. 44-59, Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1993. p.50.
- 5. PANOFSKY, Erwin. Style and Medium in motion pictures. Bulletin of the Department of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University, 1934. p.32.
- 6. TOORN, Roemer van. Architecture Against the Architecture – Radical criticism in hypermodernity. Available at: http://www.roemervantoorn.nl/architectureagai.html. Accessed on: 04/05/2010. Page 9.
- 7. SANTOS, Fábio Allon dos. The architecture as a film actor. Vitruvius – Arquitextos, 2004. Available at: http://www.vitruvius.com.br/revistas/read/arquitextos/04.045/616 Accessed 25 June 2014.
- 8. PALLASMAA, Juhani. THE Architecture of the Image. Existential space in architecture. Helsinki: Rakennustieto Publishing, 2007. p.17.
- 9. MALLET-STEVENS, Robert. Le Cinema et les arts: L'Architecture, Les Cahiers du Mois-Cinema, 1925. In VIDLER, Anthony. The Explosion of Space: Architecture and the Filmic Imaginary. Assemblage, No. 21 (Aug., 1993), pp. 44-59, Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1993. p.46.
Written by Romulo Baratto | Translation Matthew Valletta
*Cover photoy: attribution via VisualHunt / CC BY-SA. Image montage by John Cunniff via Visual Hunt / CC BY