The Architecture of the Screen

by Graham Cairns

  By contrast, the Tom Twyker film Run Lola Run, 1996, is narratively conventional and acutely goal based. However, the way in which this film evolves towards the resolution of that goal is anything but conventional, overlaying three similar event sequences in three distinct spatio-temporal strata.6 Structurally it is completely different to Russian Ark in that it opts for a literal tripartite layering of narratives, spaces and, apparently, simultaneous times. Technically, it is also significantly different, employing standard filming kit but blending animation and photo-type sequences into the overall fabric of the film. In each of its three sequences, these techniques facilitate both a unifying and a breaking of space and time that can remind us of discontinuity’s principal techniques. These ruptures, however, are secondary to the film’s circular, repetitive and mutating spatio-temporal structure that folds nuances into our reading of the sequential stories as they emerge.

  Zidane: A Twenty First Century Portrait uses seventeen cameras developed by NASA, complex diegetic sound effects, advanced zoom lenses, superimposed text and the introduction of diegetic actions in a radically experimental approach to film and its presentation of events and spaces.7 Directed and produced by Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno in 2006, it follows one man through the continuous and unbroken storyline of a single game of football. Rejecting standard narrative and plot line in favour of a “real-time experience”, it takes the enclosed space of the football pitch and fragments it through multiple extreme close-ups. Those fragments are never fully disjointed however. The proximity of the footballer’s body imposes an intense unity of space throughout. It is yet another recent film that employs both advanced technologies and radical thinking to create a spatio-temporal filmic experience that is multi-layered, intricately fragmented and complexly continuous.8

  In these films, it is possible to discern a number of analogous approaches to filmic space and time; approaches in which multiple streams of simultaneous events, movements and spaces overlap, coexist, interchange and morph. Whether it is possible to categorise them in one school is not the object of this paper. What we seek to identify in mentioning their spatio-temporal experiments is the existence of a spatio-temporal filmic repertoire. This repertoire has as much in common with Deleuzian ideas of space and time, as it does with the Derridian-like concepts of fragmentation; as found in the films cited by Bernard Tschumi in the 1980s. It is a repertoire that we will investigate through focusing on one film in particular, Mike Figgis’ Timecode.

  However, before subjecting Timecode to a Deleuzian reading of its spatial and temporal construction, we will outline how it can still operate, within limitations, as a precedent for a Deconstructive architecture that today is still operative and still associated with major architectural figures including Daniel Libeskind, Eric Owen Moss, Coop Himmelb(l)au and Bernard Tschumi himself. In doing so, we will comment on the conceptual underpinnings, plot structure and narrative content of Figgis’ film. We will then place this alongside the theoretical framework, physical structure and programmatic use of projects by both Tschumi and Eisenman, our aim being the identification of a potentially new architectural-filmic paradigm.

  Timecode and its challenge to convention

  Used to synchronise and log digitally recorded video and film, SMPTE timecoding is a technology intricately interwoven into contemporary televisual production. It replaces the manual process of logging start and end times of shots with shot logging software in computers or in cameras themselves.9 The name of this film is a direct reference to the technicalities of contemporary filmmaking. It was released in 1999 by the independent production company Red Mullet, fronted by the director of the film itself, Mike Figgis. Figgis’ thirteenth major feature film, Timecode, represented a radical challenge to the established norms of commercial cinema in both its content and, more importantly, its form.

  In terms of narrative content, it is an ironic, cutting parody of Hollywood. Based around an up-and-coming production company, Red Mullet (Figgis’ own), it offers a vicious parody of movie stereotypes that almost inevitably recalls the work of Robert Altman.10 The film’s lead, Alex, the director of Red Mullet, is losing control of his use of alcohol and drugs and vacantly watches his marriage break up as his business potentially collapses. His lover Rose tries to sleep her way into a starring role, whilst Randy, the company’s security guard, supplements his income through dealing cocaine. Katherine, the lesbian lover of Rose, becomes so obsessed with infidelity that she takes to bugging and eventually murder, whilst, at the same time, Alex’s wife flirts with a lesbian affair with Cherine, the film’s stereotypical blonde “bimbo”. Timecode is not only satirical in its criticism of Hollywood, it is ruthless.11

  Beyond its narrative content however, Timecode is also a radical experiment in cinematic production and a revolutionary departure from the notion of conventional filming. It is shot on four cameras recording simultaneously without interruption for ninety minutes. Each of these continuous “films” is presented simultaneously on a screen divided into four quadrants, which turns the standard unified filmic aesthetic into something based on juxtaposition and layering (Fig. 1). Given the nature of the filming process, the actors were obliged to perform continuously and were given little or no direction. Not only asked to improvise, they also had only a vague awareness of what their co-actors were doing in other parts of the set/city.

  Figure 1: Timecode.

  It is a form of filmic experiment that commercial cinema very rarely makes, and, for the viewer, it is a complex, multifarious visual experience that is impossible to follow in conventional ways.12 The reasoning behind this experimental approach returns us to the film’s criticism of Hollywood itself. It is explained by one of the films protagonists, Ana Pauls, a deliberately pretentious avant-garde European filmmaker played by Mia Maestro. Whilst making a pitch to Red Mullet executives for the production of her latest film, she lays bare the theoretical underpinnings of her proposal, clearly Timecode itself.

  Montage and editing, cinema’s most radical techniques, she argues, have been subsumed by the commercialism of the Western film industry. What was an avant-garde approach to the fragmentation of time and space, and the basis of formalist cinema’s attempt to “defamiliarise” the real world, has become part and parcel of an entertainment machine. Cinema’s inherent technical ability to deconstruct and reassemble reality on celluloid has been put to the commercial end of creating easily readable and narratively controlled films for the masses. Her film by contrast will be a cinematographic experiment that will lead cinema out of this impasse and into a new, more revolutionary, twenty-first century.

  It will be a film that reacts to the commercial subversion of montage by using newer technologies that open up the possibility of continuity and superimposition. Her film will be recorded on four cameras and played simultaneously on one screen. It will be an attempt to go beyond the limits of the fallen avant-garde, and turn cinema once again into a challenging and liberating medium. Arguing that the ideas of Guy Debord, Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov have to be reworked, she prepares the ground for her own manifesto, “a cinema of simultaneity”. This cinema deliberately identifies and inverts formal conventions. It is a cinema that challenges the hierarchy of narrative over experiment; a cinema in which the dominance of external commercial imperatives is overturned by internal creative experimentation. In short, her film will break conventional hierarchies and assumptions associated with conventional cinema. It will create a new filmic experience and a new cinematic aesthetic of juxtaposition.

  Derrida, Tschumi and architectural convention

  The breaking of convention, the inversion of hierarchy and the criticism of staid, commercial practice at the heart of Timecode echoes with the early projects, theories and writings of Bernard Tschumi in multiple ways. Amongst his realised projects, one finds the Interface Flon Railway and Bus Station, Lausanne; the Alfred Lerner Hall Student Centre, Columbia University; and Le Frenosy National Studio for the Contemporary Ar
ts, Tourcoing. His most famous built project, however, is undoubtedly Parc de la Villette, Paris, built in the 1980s as part of President Mitterand’s grand architectural plans for the French capital throughout the decade.13

  Famously collaborating with the founder of Deconstruction, Jacques Derrida, he implemented a design methodology and a series of actual planning and building proposals that he had been working on for up to a decade. As with Timecode, the project was based on a fundamental reworking of his medium’s most basic conventions and principles. In particular, the Derridian challenges to “false hierarchies” and “prejudices” inherent in the linguistic conventions of Structuralism were key, and would remain central to Tschumi’s architecture from that point onwards.14 Derrida’s “deconstruction” of these hierarchies and prejudices involves a detailed unpacking of language at all its levels: as a synchronic and diachronic system, as a set of syntagmatic and paradigmatic relationships, and as a construct that is both langue and parole. In short, it seeks to “deconstruct” the structure of language itself. This basic principle would be Tschumi’s blueprint for a fundamental reconsideration of architecture’s principal tenets, rules and conventions; in short, its hierarchies and prejudices.

  As with language viewed through the rubric of structuralism, Tschumi’s work throughout the 1980s and 1990s suggests that architecture remains dominated by one principal convention, the hierarchical importance given to built architectural form over the free use of spaces by people. Developing his architecture of space and event equivalence, he argued, amongst other things, that there can be “no space without events, nor architecture without program”.15 Departing radically from the standard architectural mindset, he posited that the “events” which take place in spaces are as equally important as the “spaces” or buildings themselves, and in the process, challenged our most basic understanding of architecture.16

  Tied into this hierarchical dominance of building over activity, or space over event, is the tendency for most buildings to only ever facilitate one use, and thus to become restrictive environments, such as an office only allowing people to work and a church only allowing people to worship. In order to invert this underlying hierarchical convention, Tschumi playfully queried whether we could “deconstruct” this one-dimensional view of building and use. Should a church always be used for religious services? Do launderettes always need to be used for washing clothes? Do lift shafts always have to be used for moving people between floors? Tongue in cheek, he “deconstructed” conventional associations between buildings and their uses by asking questions like…“whether it would be possible to ride bicycles in launderettes or pole vault in lift shafts?”17

  By inverting the preconceptions evident in the way we associate given building types with given activities (given signifiers with signifides in Saussurean or even Derridian terms), he was engaging in a humorous, linguistically influenced deconstruction of the architectural mindset. As with Derrida’s linguistic deconstruction, and Figgis’ inversion of cinematic norms in Timecode, this rethinking of the basic building blocks of architectural thought demanded that architects look at their own preconceptions; the aim being to allow for the endless consideration of radical juxtapositions as a creative possibility.

  Developing an approach based on the juxtaposition of events and spaces, however, also led to an aesthetic of juxtaposition. In projects such as Parc de la Villette, single buildings seem to be composed of multiple different fragments, violently forced together in an architecture of aggressive asymmetry and formal rupture. In its planning too, Parc de la Villette asymmetrically superimposes one set of infrastructures on another. As a result, it represents the most emblematic Deconstructive building of the 1980s. Tschumi’s “deconstruction” of the conventions underlying architectural thought was accompanied by an aesthetic and formal deconstruction that produced some of the period’s most notable, controversial and memorable architecture (Fig. 2).

  Figure 2: Parc de la Villette.

  Figure 3: House V.

  Peter Eisenman and the architecture of defamiliarisation

  The deconstructed and juxtaposed aesthetic evident in both the architecture of Tschumi and Figgis’ Timecode was also manifest in the aesthetic developed by Peter Eisenman in his early architectural projects. A writer, theoretician and architect, Eisenman was born and educated in the United States but has worked across the globe and is still considered one of architecture’s leading intellectuals. As with Bernard Tschumi, he collaborated closely with Jacques Derrida in the 1980s and developed a challenging, unconventional approach to architecture that was categorised as “deconstructive”.

  His early theoretical texts challenged the entire humanist tradition upon which, he argued, twentieth-century architecture was based. In particular, he proposed the rejection of a “universal” thinking that he associated with Neoclassicism.18 In this regard, Eisenman draws upon the Derridian rejection of logocentrism and its apparent dominance at the heart of Western philosophical thought.19 He also echoes Bernard Tschumi in his examination and rejection of architectural conventions and clearly foreshadows Figgis’ analogous reaction to cinematic convention in Timecode.

  Nowhere is this more evident than in his earliest important buildings: the experimental houses documented in the 1987 publication, House of Cards. With texts by Rosalind Krauss, Manfredo Tafuri and Eisenman himself, House of Cards documents Eisenman’s early works and uncovers the theoretical logic threaded through their formal experimentation with the architectural language of the Modern Movement. Each author underlines the architect’s attempts to “wake architecture from its slumber” through a series of projects that defamiliarise our engagement with dwelling and indeed, space itself.20

  In Houses I–V, Eisenman takes the formal and structural vocabulary of architecture apart. In short, he “deconstructs” it. Walls are pulled apart from each other, partitions hover above the floor, floors in turn expand and contract beyond the edges of the building, and stairs lead to the emptiness above ones head. Columns hold up nothing, then twist, crank and distort whilst beams play semantic rather than structural roles. It is an architecture that remains inhabitable, but which requires a fundamental double reading of its vocabulary and use (Fig. 3). Krauss describes it in the formalist terms of the European avant-garde, whilst Tafuri resorts to linguistics and defines it as “a semantic game which brings the syntactic system (of architecture) to the foreground”.21

  Eisenman does not shy away from either of these descriptions but places particular emphasis on the propensity of both readings to turn architecture into a self-referential game with its own formal, structural and aesthetic tropes. It is a strategy that he sees as leading architecture away from the external impositions of rules, laws and conventions into an autonomous, experimental and freely creative discipline. Indeed, he has described his architectural investigations as examinations of architecture’s “interiority”, an examination of its own discourse.22 This internal deconstructive discourse clearly echoed Derrida and Tschumi at the level of architectural theory, but it also produced the fragmentary, disjunctive aesthetic that we have highlighted in Tschumi’s Parc de la Villette and Figgis’ Timecode. The work of all three of our major authors can be said to gravitate around a radical rejection of convention on the one hand, and the establishment of a fragmentary aesthetic on the other.

  From formal properties to narrative in Timecode

  The confrontational and disjunctive aesthetic of Timecode is, at its most basic level, produced through its division of the screen into four quadrants. Simultaneously presenting multiple continuous films, Figgis creates an optical experience that is inherently ruptured and even chaotic. This sense of optical fragmentation, however, is supplemented by a number of other characteristics and traits. The cameras used are hand-held and, as a result, the images produced are shaky. This random movement means that the composition formed in each quadrant is constantly changing as the camera twists from one angle to another in ways clearly analogous to
Tschumi’s and Eisenman’s formal disjunctures. Furthermore, there tends to be a significant amount of movement by the actors themselves in each quadrant; a characteristic that leads to the creation of a film in which visual complexity and apparent randomness dominate the overall visual effect.

  These formal properties not only produce a multiple, fragmentary and overloaded visual effect on screen, but they also allow Figgis to play with multiple spatial and temporal simultaneities. For example, we are privy to mobile phone conversations of two protagonists in geographically different spaces, presented together on screen. These give us alternative forms of shot-reverse-shot sequences that are played out in double as conversations intertwine and move between quadrants. We also get multiple examples of the same actions seen from conflicting points of view by different cameras, all, of course, in different parts of the screen.23

  These layered simultaneities question the authority of the normally dominating sole camera viewpoint and replace it with what has been called a “distributed gaze”.24 It is a multi-focal viewing approach that creates a multi-faceted image and sound-scape, a landscape that is impossible to absorb in all its detail in a single viewing. Instigating a viewing experience that involves the obligatory “selective attention” of the viewer, it reminds us of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s arguments in the Phenomenology of Perception. Arguing that the perception of any phenomena involves our concentration on an “object of attention”, and the concomitant lack of attention on secondary stimuli, Merleau-Ponty identifies that much of the data in our sensorial field gets “backgrounded”, that is, relegated to a secondary level of attention.25 It is a perfect description of the viewing experience required by Timecode.