The Architecture of the Screen

by Graham Cairns

  In the introduction to Learning from Las Vegas, Venturi indicates that the authors had considered making a film as part of their investigations, financial constraints preventing its realisation. What the nature of that film would have been is, of course, pure speculation. However, just two years earlier, Michelangelo Antonioni had released Zabriskie Point, a film that had offered various examples of how the cinematic medium can successfully represent the perceptual dynamism identified by the authors referenced here. In the city scenes of Zabriskie Point, Antonioni attempts to capture the experience of the driver on celluloid in two scenes starring the young protagonist Mark and his antithesis Lee Allen (playing Daria’s father, a property tycoon making millions from the suburbanisation of America). Antonioni’s first move in the construction of these scenes is to place the camera inside the car, and thus to film from the “driver’s point of view”. This means that the heads and faces of the protagonists come into the shot, and fragments of the seats, dashboard and steering wheel are seen in the corners of the screen. He then allows reflections in the rear view mirror, and on the windscreen, to superimpose themselves on our view of the car interior and the street in front. All of this disrupts any sense of unity to the images seen on screen and becomes the basis for a highly complex cinematographic collage.

  This collage is fragmented and layered even more through the inevitable sense of movement and change to the exterior views. We are thus presented with a constant stream of fragmentary images of road signs, traffic lights, pedestrians, buildings and, above all, advertising hoardings that run across the screen as the car moves through the city streets. In addition to this visually charged imagery, he layers a menagerie of sounds, both real and imaginary, on top of the main dialogue inside the car; squeals from slaughtered animals, the clanking sounds of machinery in action, and multiple snippets of street noise such as traffic passing by, beeping horns and wailing sirens. The complex visual and aural effect produced by all of this is subsequently multiplied yet again, through a series of additional cinematographic techniques: for example rapid cutting, changes of camera position, exaggerated zooms and the inevitable blurring of images produced by filming in motion. In short, Antonioni creates an exaggerated cinematic collage of a commercial city in motion.

  Clearly, the use of an artificial soundtrack, the employment of exaggerated zooms and the accelerated speed of the editing was never intended to simply reproduce the optical reality of the LA driving experience. It is a form of psychological editing and it is on these terms that it has to be judged. Produced at a time when Reyner Banham, J.B. Jackson, Kevin Lynch and Robert Venturi were all examining related themes and cities, it is a representation of our perceptual engagement with the city in motion that is far more convincing than anything produced by the architectural establishment of the day. Out of the collective investigations of that “establishment” came a realisation that architects lacked the tools necessary to investigate and represent this type of city experience. The responses that resulted, however, were limited; static collages, abstract graphic languages and continuous long-take film shots.

  The fact that none of these architects or urban planners saw the true possibilities of film in this sense suggests that not only did financial, and perhaps technical, restrictions come into play, but so too did the fact that the medium of film was not sufficiently integrated into the architectural mindset of the time. Had film been more fully understood, or simply more accessible as it is to day, one could have expected to see Venturi, Lynch and co. using it to a far greater degree. Indeed, one may have expected to see a film with the cinematographic characteristics of Zabriskie Point coming from within the field of architecture itself. As it was, it was left to a filmmaker, not an architect or urban planner, to truly investigate and capture the nature of our engagement with the “city in motion”, despite the fact that it had clearly emerged on the register of architectural theory by the early 1970s.

  Notes

  1For an overview of the director’s comments on these and other films, see: Cardullo, Bert (ed). Michelangelo Antonioni: Interviews, University Press of Mississippi, Mississippi, 2008.

  2Baudrillard, Jean. The Consumer Society; Myths and Structures, Sage Publications, London, 1998 (First published in 1970).

  3Chomsky, Noam. Necessary Illusions – Thought Control in Democratic Societies, Pluto Press, London, 1989. p. 48.

  4This and other aspects of Antonioni’s cinematography have been dealt with in detail. In particular see: Perry, Ted (ed). Antonioni: The Poet of Images, Cambridge University Press, New York, 1998.

  5The city of Los Angeles has been subject to numerous cinematographic documentations. In turn, this “documentation” was subject to study in Thom Andersen’s 2003 film, “Los Angeles Plays Itself”. For information on this film, see: Truniger, Fred. “Thom Andersen’s Los Angeles Plays Itself”. Cinema. No. 54, 2009. p. 125–133; Skonieczny, Jason Mark. “Los Angeles Documents the Virtual: Xan Cassavetes and Thom Andersen Between Docutainment and Machinima”. Post Script. Vol. XXVI, No. 3, 2007. p. 34–52; Dittgen, Andrea. “Los Angeles Plays Itself”. Film-dienst. Vol. 59, No. 2, 2006. p. 36; Arnold, Frank. “Los Angeles Plays Itself”. EPD Film. Vol. XXIII, No. 7, 2006. p. 42. In 2010, Andersen made a sequel titled “Get Out of the Car”. For more information, see: Armour, Nicole. “Being There”. Film Comment. Vol. XLVI, No. 6, 2010. p. 62; Brunner-Sung, Vera. “Along for the Ride: Catching Up with Thom Andersesn”. Cinema Scope. No. 44, 2010. p. 18–20.

  6For an overview of these themes, see: Jacobs, Jane. The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Random House, New York, 1961.

  7Jackson, J.B. Discovering the Vernacular Landscape, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1984. p. 151.

  8Banham’s contribution is discussed by: Rivera, Gamez, David. “Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Zabriskie Point”. In: J. Manuel Roig (ed), La ventana indiscreta, No. 2, Mairea Editores, Madrid, 2005. p. 48.

  9The decorated shed is an architectural typology in which the importance of space has been completely replaced by the need to visually communicate. It is a simple box accompanied by an impressive and visible sign. See: Venturi, R., Scott Brown, D. and Izenour, S. Learning from Las Vegas, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1972. p. 13.

  10Postmodernism, according to Jencks, was principally a question of communication, and thus the employment of a visual language or vocabulary that communicated messages. These messages had to be of a type that the general public would be able to decipher, and thus often involved the use of decoration, historical references and even graphic and advertising imagery; precisely what is visible in Las Vegas. See: Jencks, Charles. The Language of Post Modern Architecture, Academy Editions, London, 1977. p. 42.

  11Venturi, R., Scott Brown, D., Izenour S. Learning from Las Vegas, Ibid. p. 9.

  12Jackson, J.B. “How to Study Landscape”. In: Simon Swaffield (ed), Theory in Landscape Architecture, University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, 2002. p. 17.

  13Banham, Reyner. Los Angeles; the Architecture of the Four Ecologies, University of California Press, Los Angeles, 1971. p. 127.

  14Appleyard, D., Lynch, K., Myer, J. The View from the Road, Cambridge University Press, Massachusetts, 1963. p. 18.

  15Ibid. p. 5.

  PART II

  Applying film to architecture

  Video Installation: Hybrid Artworks

  Ever since its inception at the end of the nineteenth century, cinema has been a natural testing ground for architects examining alternative approaches to their discipline.1 Similarly, it has been a natural arena in which film directors have worked on their own particular take on spatial issues, and, in some cases, it has resulted in the development of spatial concepts as complex as those found in the work of many architects. Despite this, it is a medium in which the relationship between the moving image and physical place always remains at one remove - the screen acting as a mediator between represented and inhabited space. By contrast, video installation, a technical derivative of
cinema, and in a sense architecture, is a format in which this distanced relationship collapses through the creation of “filmic spaces” actually designed to be inhabited.2 It is, by definition an inherently hybrid spatial and cinematic phenomenon.

  On the one hand, video installation obliges film artists to give a more physical quality to their work, whilst, on the other, it forces spatial designers to apply cinematic techniques in their creation of “space”. In A History of Video Art, Chris Meigh Andrews identifies that the early years of video art in the 1960s saw continual experimentation, as the genre sought to push and explore its own boundaries. It was not until the mid-1970s, however, that it found its way into the gallery context through the installation format and thus became a practice that attracted the attention of the architectural community. The variations the video installation format has taken since then have been multiple, each one offering an alternative take on questions of architecture as place, space, sensorial experience and narrative or theme in and of itself.3

  Amongst some of the genre’s principal figures are names that have become common currency in the art world, both for their work in video and other media, for example Bill Viola, Bruce Nauman, Tony Sniden, Gary Hill and Dan Graham, to name but a few. Viola has been producing video art since the 1970s and is celebrated for his intense investigation of the human psyche and consciousness.4 However, beyond questions of theme or content, the physical installation of his work has inevitably led to a concern with spatial perception and the role that space may play in nuancing the work’s more metaphysical interpretations. In a piece such as An Ocean Without a Shore, 2007, the spatial context can even be said to become inseparable from the work’s meaning.

  Whilst Bruce Nauman has worked in a much wider range of formats, his video pieces have become some of the most influential ever and can be dated as far back as the 1960s.5 Involving a similarly inevitable engagement with physical space in their installation, many of these pieces rely on multiple projections and screens in the creation of multi-layered narrative and filmic spaces. Notable in this regard are works such as Live Taped Video Corridor, 1970; Puppets and Instructed Mime, 1990 and World Peace, 1996.6 Tony Sniden has not had the same level of international recognition for his work, but has similarly used video to take on multiple themes throughout a career that began in the 1960s and continues today. His work also inevitably engages with the spaces of its exhibition in both symbolic and practical ways as was clearly evidenced in a recent semi-retrospective exhibition, Everything Must Go; an exhibition that stemmed from a year-long residency at Durham Cathedral, 2002.7

  Gary Hill and Dan Graham have both taken on architecture, or the perception of space, more directly in their video work, with Hill’s Tall Ships, 1992, being a twelve-channel video and projection installation in which the physical architectural space completely disappears only to be replaced by one “constructed” through the projected image.8 Throughout the 1970s, Dan Graham specialised in video installations and performance in which both actor and audience were central to the works created.9 Past Future Split Attention, 1972, played on the notion of the past and the present with two actors filmed in the same space, whilst Present Continuous Past(s), 1974, used mirrors, reflections and video projections to create a filmic space in which a mirror reflects “present time”, a camera records the mirror’s continuous reflection and a monitor plays back the footage with an eight-second delay. The space becomes an active, but out of sync, recording of its self and the events it witnesses. More recently, he has produced what he calls, “pavilions”, which are architectural constructions that play with perception in similar ways to the earlier video installations, albeit without the filmic component in many cases.

  Representing a continuation on his interest in architecture and the perception of mediated space, his pavilions have much in common, spatially, with the works of younger video artists such as Jane and Louise Wilson. Throughout the 1990s and beyond, the Wilson sisters have produced a number of emotive video pieces in which architecture was both the subject of the footage and a central aspect of its presentation. Nowhere was this more evident than in their 1999 exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery, London, in which pieces such as Stasi City, Parliament and Gamma were projected in large scale to create an optical perception of inhabitable filmic space within the gallery itself.10 These video pieces show the former East German secret police headquarters, the back corridors and offices of the Houses of Parliament, and the buildings surrounding the US military base, Greenham Common, Berkshire, United Kingdom. Given that they were projected from multiple viewpoints in the gallery setting they represented a double spatial game; their subject matter was architecture and their presentation created a comlex filmic space in itself.

  Running through a number of the spatial video constructions of these and other video artists is an element of performance. In the case of Dan Graham it is explicit, whilst in the case of the Wilson sisters it comes from the movement of the audience in their “filmic arenas”; the public casting their own shadows in the filmic space and thus becoming figures that are active in the piece itself. This use of video projection for the creation of both explicit and implicit “spaces of performance” becomes central in a genre that can be considered as yet another derivative of video, multi-media theatre. In this field, the work of Station House Opera is typical, involving live projection to create filmic scenes and spaces that actors interact with on stage.11

  Another theatrical company to have relied heavily on this use of film as a narrative and spatial device on stage, or as part of the performance space, is Punchdrunk Theatre Company. More spectacular in their visual constructions, Punchdrunk have used a whole range of non-standard theatrical settings such as five-story industrial warehouses, factories, old Victorian schools, the tunnels beneath old railway stations and the parks and streets of the city.12 What all these video artists and multi-media theatre companies have in common is the combination of video and physical space as an integral factor in their work. As a result, they inevitably, and sometimes explicitly, engage in debates about spatial perception, our engagement with architecture and our reading of the real and the virtual.

  It was just these concerns that underlay the works produced by a much smaller UK-based group in the 1990s whose explicit theme was the exploration of film and video projection as a “constructor of space” or, at least, as a tool for the manipulation of spatial perception. Involving a combination of film, performance and architecture, Hybrid Artworks experimented with these issues in a number of projects over a five-year period.13 Initially concerned with applying the lessons of cinema to architecture through filming urban settings, their first cinematographic-architectural projects were simple single-track video films. In these films, camera angles, movement, composition, framing, depth of field and illumination were all used to “defamiliarise” the usual visual understanding of the space examined (Fig. 1). Later, this cinematographic take on architecture was applied to the more spatially orientated phenomenon of installation, leading to the creation of pieces that considered both physical and cinematographic characteristics in an intrinsically linked and mutual way.

  Figure 1: Defamiliarisation of space through cinematic fragmentation. Still from film by Hybrid Artworks, 1996.

  In general terms, the relationship between film and architecture they investigated in their collaborative pieces was something dealt with through the use of site-specific filming in combination with site-specific performance. This site specificity often involved the filming of performance spaces and the later re-projecting of the resulting material during the event itself; a technique that creates video spaces with which actors can actively interact. In other cases, it involved the incorporation of filmed material from non-performance locations that, when projected in the performance arena in question, deliberately attempted to manipulate the audience’s sense of image, space and action. Often using large-scale multiple and projected images, the aim of combing these phenomenon was always to chall
enge the standard distanced relationship between them.14 In other words, to question the notion of space as an empty shell within which a film is shown and actions occur and, vice-versa, to question film and action as independent entities separated from their physical surroundings.

  The project that most clearly demonstrates these concerns was one initially carried out over a one-year period, between the summer of 1998 and the summer of 1999, titled Incidental Legacy. The subject of a promotional documentary the following year,15 the origins of this project lay in a body of theoretical investigation into post-structural literary theory and architecture.16 Envisaged as three separate performances of the same basic script held in the same gallery space, the piece was based on the interplay of three principal components: (i) the script and its performance, (ii) the gallery space and its plan layout and (iii) a multitude of recorded material of which film is of central importance.

  The textual component, more traditionally defined as the “script”, was conceived as a series of independent but interrelated poems written for two voices. Read in an alternating sequence by two actors, it was composed into a lineal narrative that deals with the ambiguous nature of memory, a phenomenon seen as the blurring of reality and perception on the one hand, and as something open to constant and sporadic reinterpretation on the other. Following this script, the two actors continually repeat and re-use the same words and images in different contexts. Continuously placing the events retold in conflicting and contradictory perspectives, this narrative strategy is intended to instigate multiple different interpretations of the same basic text. This results in a narrative technique that continually destabilises any single reading of the piece.17