The Architecture of the Screen

by Graham Cairns

  Faced with a multiplicity of narrative pieces, spatial fragments and temporal simultaneities when watching Timecode, the cinematic viewer develops what Ashley Word has called “distributed attention”.26 With this distributed attention, viewers are theoretically free to concentrate on whatever fragment of the multi-sensorial image and sound-scape they choose: the conversation between Rosa and Laura in the bottom left hand corner; the musings of Emma in her distracted walk along the street in the upper right; the cocaine-fuelled greetings of Randy or the sexual fantasies of Alex in the remaining quadrants.

  The viewer who tries to follow the related events is obliged to jump from one space and event to another in a continually altering and alternating “act of reading”. The narrative reading initiated by Figgis thus becomes potentially random, multiple and never ending as one image is compared against another. It is a cinematic structure that potentially sets up what may be referred to in Derrida’s deconstructive terms as a continual deferment of meaning.27 In standard post-structuralist terms, the narrative “act of reading” becomes open ended and we are presented with Roland Barthes’ notion of “the death of the author” and in Umberto Eco’s “role of the reader”; arguments according to which the author has ceded control of interpretation to the viewer.28

  In the final analysis of Timecode’s structure, however, this characteristic is not taken to the inevitably chaotic end it suggests. Figgis subtly “cues” viewers into following a preferred, if not totally controlled, narrative sequence; he fades and synchronises dialogue and sound effects throughout the film. Aural activity in one quadrant is manipulated to subtly impose itself at key moments, whether that is through an explicit increase in volume or through directing particular actors to avoid conversation at specific moments. Similarly, the image-scapes are controlled by emphasising or reducing the action taking place in the various quadrants; a directorial effect sometimes reinforced by a blurring of focus. Despite this reinsertion of author control, the visual effect remains fragmentary and overloaded and the narrative reading remains open to subversion. The reader remains free to roam across the screen constructing his or her own narrative readings.

  Form and narrative in the work of Tschumi

  In introducing the potentially open-ended narrative reading of Timecode, we find yet another analogy evident with the work of Bernard Tschumi and his approach to architecture as “event-space”. Tschumi’s event-space architectural theory was developed in the 1970s but came to prominence in the early 1980s with the publication of The Manhattan Transcripts. The Manhattan Transcripts is described as a book “of” architecture rather than a book “about” architecture; as an architectural inquest in and of itself.29 The projects it documents are not design proposals for buildings, but rather attempts to describe the experience of architecture from the perspective of events.

  The graphic format used to investigate and document these experiences is a system of photographs, diagrams and plans. Laid out as independent frames running vertically and horizontally, it compositionally echoes Timecode’s split screen. The basic supposition here is that any architectural experience involves spaces, events and movement.30 Space is represented by the plan, events by the photographs and the movement of protagonists by diagrams. The aim is not to design a building, but to explore the nature of how we experience architecture.

  Figure 4: The Manhattan Transcripts.

  The scenarios selected for analysis in The Manhattan Transcripts are, to put it mildly, extreme; a murder in a park being typical. As with Timecode however, the real importance of the Transcripts lies not in their content, but in how they are presented aesthetically and formally and, by extension, how they are read and experienced. Aesthetically, each frame tends to be characterised by fragmentation and deconstruction. The photographs are snapshots, the diagrams show conflicting lines of movement, whilst the drawings are distorted perspectives or even collages. Formally, these individual frames, set out in vertical and horizontal strips, are normally presented in groups of 12 and are thus too multifarious to take in at once (Fig. 4).

  Given both the lack of formal hierarchy in their presentation, and their independence as isolated images, they can be read in both a vertical and a horizontal sequence and, of course, randomly.31 Not only is the formal layout analogous to the screen in Timecode, but so too is the author’s intention with regard to how they are read. They are visually complex and dynamic individual frames which, as a whole, lead to visual overload and potentially open-ended narrative readings; something also identifiable in Tschumi’s most documented built work, Parc de la Villette, located on a 125-hectare site in the east of Paris. The location of a former slaughter house, it now houses a functioning Museum of Science and Industry, a music venue and the Grande Hall. The architect’s brief was to design a park for the twenty-first century replete with the trappings of the cultural industries, such as art venues, restaurants, cafes, etc. The proposal put forward by Tschumi was ideally suited to this multi-functional program and involved the juxtaposition of several, often conflicting, events and activities in one space.

  Visually, the most defining aspect of Parc la Villete is its 35 individual red buildings based on a 10.8 metre cube. Each cube, referred to as a folly, is broken into a number of conflicting components which could be removed, distorted or extended. They thus take on a compositional appearance of abstract and fragmented cubic sculptures. None of these were given any specific function by the architect; the intention being to challenge the hierarchy of events and spaces by provoking conflicts between uses, forms, activities and buildings. Dotted across the site according to a grid plan, they are visible from wherever one stands.

  Figure 5: Parc de la Villette plan.

  Aligned in this way one can clearly see the formal characteristics of The Manhattan Transcripts reappear and, if one considers Timecode, here too certain formal echoes re-emerge. However, the grid plan is not the only, or even the dominant, planning system used by Tschumi. It is only one of three systems that are superimposed one on top of the other. On top of the grid is laid the system of lines; two lineal axis pedestrian routes running north-south and east-west, together with secondary lines such as random curvilinear pathways. Further superimposed on top of the grid and the lines is a system of surfaces; different zones such as landscaped gardens, playgrounds and open green spaces (Fig. 5). It is a planning strategy that Tschumi refers to in his usual vocabulary as “disjunctive”.32

  The aesthetic result of this juxtaposition of equally valid spatial layouts was a series of violent ruptures as the walkways of the line system clashed with the follies of the grid system which, in turn, ran across the system of surfaces. Narratively too, something similar occurs. Instead of using one of these systems, and thus having a space with clearly defined pathways and used patterns, Tschumi attempts to create a movement pattern in which users can chop and change the sequence of their journey across the park. Here, when we walk along a path we inevitably cross a surface which, in turn, leads us to a folly on the grid. There is no one spatial sequence or narrative that dominates our use, and we are free to move between the parks in various spatial trajectories. Echoing Figgis, Barthes and Derrida in architectural terms, Tschumi allows users the freedom to change and move around the park according to their own preferences and decisions. He relinquishes author control.

  Timecode and the overlaying of Deleuzian space

  The analogies we find between Timecode, The Manhattan Transcripts and Parc de la Villette open up multiple possible relationships between the architecture of Deconstruction and contemporary film. There is, however, one particular difference that leads us away from the underlying ideas of Jacques Derrida and Bernard Tschumi, and directs us towards the realms of Gilles Deleuze and Peter Eisenman. It is a difference that opens up a whole new realm of development for the cinematic-architecture relationship reignited in the 1980s.

  We find in the work of Tschumi and Figgis an interest in the inversion of convention, the rejection of sta
ndard hierarchies, the loosening of author control, and an apparent aesthetic of fragmentation. However, we also have in Timecode a multi-layered presentation of events, spaces and characters that does not wholly rupture their relationship but rather allows them to blend and merge. In Parc de la Villette, Tschumi has set out three planning systems which, although independent, are deliberately intended to clash and produce violent rupture. In The Manhattan Transcripts too, the imposition of events in alien spaces is intended to provoke aggressive and fragmentary interchange. Indeed, Tschumi is explicit about this, defining his “architecture of disjunction” as a deliberate “act of violence”; a juxtaposition of time, space and event intended to produce unexpected, radical and disjunctive results.33

  Although Timecode similarly separates out time, space and events, and thus produces a visual effect definable as chaotic and fragmented, Figgis does not treat these constitutive factors as wholly independent and draws back from allowing them to “violently” clash. Partly due to his use of “cueing” techniques, and partly due to the continual simultaneity of their presentation, Figgis unifies spaces and events through layering rather than truly rupturing them through disjunction. He does not fragment so much as multiply, and thus allows his simultaneous independent narrative strands to morph and diverge fluidly at different points throughout the film.

  Whilst the aesthetic experience for the viewer may be one of distortion and apparent chaos, which can remind us of the cinema of Vertov and Eisenstein referenced by Tschumi, the cinematic footage of Figgis is, in reality, more pliable. A character may leave one quadrant as the camera shifts, but simultaneously re-emerges in another as his or her particular narrative carries on seamlessly, and apparently unaware of the camera. In these instances, the division between the split screens is not so much a line, a border or a rupture, but rather a fold in a homogenous smooth cinematic space.

  Similarly, a phone call can be made by a character in one quadrant that introduces a character in another into the dominant “attended” storyline. In these moments, the border again disappears as separate actions and spaces are given equal importance without fragmentation or rupture. They simply coexist simultaneously across a cinematic space bridged by multiple cameras. Imagery in Timecode then is not broken; it is smoothed and opened to a process of blending and divergence. Space and time are not fragmented, but rather intertwined into something equally analogous to the smooth spaces of Deleuze and Guattari, as it is to the ruptured spaces of Bernard Tschumi.34

  In a sense, Timecode merges Deleuze’s notion of the movement-image and the time-image as laid out in his two books on film, Cinema 1 and Cinema 2.35 The movement-image, inherent in the continuous filming of the events in each quadrant, is blended with the time-image as Figgis allows the past, the present and future to interpenetrate through merger; the events in one quadrant that lead to consequences in another being analogous to past events seen through flashback. Similarly, future events that result from the action in one section evolve in another quadrant as the action moves on in a separate space and time that is analogous to the flashforward.

  In her interpretation of Deleuze’s arguments on film, Claire Colebrook has argued that both the movement-image and the time-image are central to one of his principal arguments about the medium in general, that is, its ability to be disruptive to standard thought. Deleuze’s thinking on cinema, she suggests, is not concerned with explanation, but rather an open-ended examination of its “mechanisms” and, by extension, an interest in pushing those mechanisms to their limits; the aim being to instigate a reconsideration of how we think and conceive.36 Thus, when we see Timecode pushing the technical possibilities of film to their limits, and consequently instigating a reconsideration of the relationship between space and time, we see film operating in the way celebrated by Deleuze, as a medium capable of altering its own discourse and those of other fields.37

  A Deleuzian reading of Timecode is not solely based on an interpretation of its fluid representation of time and space. On the contrary, it penetrates much deeper into the substrata of some of his principal ideas. Nevertheless, in our cinematic-architectural context, it is precisely this spatio-temporal presentation that is of interest and importance. Given the way film progresses and its narratives emerge and evolve without rupture or apparent hierarchy, it may be described as forming a series of Deleuzian “plateaus”. The film’s actions evolve and morph across the multiple split cinema screen, slipping from one realm to another as if passing over smoothed out boundaries and levels, rather than hitting the borders between quadrants.

  Taking the application of Deleuze’s terminology even further, this reading of Timecode reveals spaces, times and events that are unstable but which are not fragmentary; they operate as a series of evolving “differences” which, in their continual emergence and fading, can be described as representative of the notion of “immanence”.38 Furthermore, one could use the notions of “smooth” space, “nomadic” events and even the idea of “swarming” in literal translations which help describe the narrative, visual and formal effects of Timecode’s filmic techniques and language.39 It is then, for multiple reasons, a film that is more fruitfully and fully understood through the prism of Deleuze than the fragmentary concepts of Derrida and Deconstruction.

  The emergence of Deleuzian space in the architecture of Eisenman

  Clearly, reading Timecode as a morphing of spatio-temporal phenomena rather than as disjunctive fragmentation begins to open up a significant distance between our understanding of this type of film and the spatial effects created by Bernard Tschumi. However, it also begins to pull us closer to the later work of Peter Eisenman who, after drawing heavily on Derrida in the early part of his career, began to reference Deleuze and Guattari with ever more regularity in the 1990s. As with Derrida, Tschumi and Figgis, Peter Eisenman has always shown an interest in the reappraisal of his discipline through a reworking of its language. In his case, this is manifest in his use of the “diagram”; a representational format he has defined as “unstable and in perpetual disequilibrium”.40 Compared to the “drawing”, a fixed and completed form of representation, it is seen as opening up the possibility of a freer mode of thinking.

  In the 1990s however, this “internal” reconsideration of the architect’s thinking and design tools began to move beyond the recognised boundaries of the discipline itself. Jettisoning standard drawing techniques, Eisenman began to employ the methodologies, and peculiar generative logic of computer modelling. He called this use of “external” systems “the conceptualising of other methods”.41 The computer, he argues, conceptualises and draws differently to the human mind and hand. As a result, it produces an architecture that cannot be created by designers working and thinking through traditional tools. Computer programming then, displaces architecture from its traditional fields and places it in a realm that has allowed Eisenman to develop a new architectural vocabulary; one based on notions of morphing, self-generating randomness and, what we may call, a form of “immanence”.

  In projects such as the Max Reinhardt Haus (Berlin, 1992), Haus Immendorff (Düsseldorf, 1993), the BFL Software Headquarters (Bangalore, 1997), and the Church for the Year 2000 (Rome), he has used the computer to develop a visual architectural vocabulary of folds, waves, bends, transgressions and transformations. In the Haus Immendorff project for example, the generative power of the computer was used to simulate soliton waves which, due to abrupt changes in depth or subterranean seismic patterns, form non-linear interactions.42 Imitating the way soliton waves undergo constant change within singular aqueous forms, the algorithm simulated an architectural form that seamlessly blends and randomly morphs (Fig. 6).

  Figure 6: Haus Immendorff project.

  Here, walls, floors, ceiling and roof merge in a non-humanly controlled generative process; a process that does not produce the formal juxtapositions and architectural fragmentations that characterise the work of Tschumi, or the earlier deconstructive projects of Eisenman himself. W
hat Eisenman creates is a fluid, evolving and blending series of volumes that aesthetically and formally have more in common with notions of smooth space and merging plateaus.43 In these later projects, the fragmentation of Deconstruction and its cinematic analogies found in Soviet Montage are replaced by Deleuzian notions of “immanence”, “nomady” and “deterritorialisation” which, in turn, find visual echoes in a Deleuzian reading of the fluid multi-screen simultaneity of Timecode.

  The same formal properties are evident in the Church for the Year 2000 project in which an analogy with liquid crystals is used to explain its folding form (Fig. 7). Gradually distorting as it emerges out of the ground, rises and moves along the floor, it is an architecture of multiple layers and overlaps said to reflect the “phased distortions of a liquid crystal in its nematic state”.44 Repeated in the BFl Headquarters project, this liquid crystal metaphor is combined with an interest in the mandala to create an algorithm that results in another folding, overlaid and interlapping series of spaces and forms.45

  Figure 7: Church of the Year 2000.

  The analogies here with Timecode are twofold. First, we see the evolution of a fluid, folding aesthetic and sequences and, second, we have a process in which the author has once again “relinquished” complete control. In Figgis’ case, this occurs in the more open-ended readings he is prepared to countenance, but it is also seen in his generative technique. The employment of four simultaneous camera shots sets up an inherently complicated and multi-faceted filmic algorithm of its own, over which the director can never have complete control.

  Consequently, what we see emerging is a new architecture-filmic analogy in which questions of aesthetics, form, and form generation are all reframed in Deleuzian terms.