CINECITY 2015: RISK! Coming Soon!
Thursday, January 8, 2015
THE REPRESENTATION OF ARCHITECTURE IN FILM and THE CINECITY PROJECT
By Louise Mackenzie & Sarah Breen Lovett
This article originally appeared in the Australian Insitute of Architects NSW journal Architecture Bulletin
In
the Cinecity Project participants are asked to submit one minute films
exploring spatial ideas. It exists in both cyber space and physical space. This
year the theme is MAKING [1]. Over seventy films were submitted
which the curators shortlisted to thirty. These 30x 1 minute films make the
touring 2014 Cinecity Project. In the following text the curators, Louise Mackenzie
and Sarah Breen Lovett, discuss the representation of architecture and
different ways that MAKING architecture can be thought through the moving
image.
The representation of architecture is often
taken, it seems, for the thing itself; that is we profess to know and even to
love buildings we have never been to, but we speak of them as if we have. This
is the power of the image, both the representative and mental. We are able to
create buildings in our minds through representative images, such as
photographs and drawings. The moving image, contributes another layer of complexity
to representation, continuing and extending relationships between the physical and
the fictive.
The Oxford dictionary’s definition of representation suggests, that an object
being represented described “in a particular way.” [2] This is an instance of the real and ‘not
yet’ real intersecting. That is, each particular representation adds another
layer to our understanding, of the thing being described. The moving image, itself allows for this
exploration. Typically, one might
understand exploration of space/land
in a colonial context, but here we can also think about it as an exploration
through the time and space that the filmmaker constructs for us, in this case
we’re “travel[ling] through,” [3] time and space, not only to
experience the film but to understand something more, or different about
architecture and city, in terms of our relationships to it and our experience
of it. This is taken in its broadest
possible sense, to quote sociologist and film theorist Lorraine Mortimer,
“But
we do not get far if we do not try to understand what we call the political,
economic, cultural and the historical are intertwined with what we call the
imaginary, the emotional and indeed the somatic.” [4]
Here Mortimer is discussing conflict between and
within nation states, but this can also extend to other kinds of understanding.
In understanding architecture one must necessarily, in this view consider, amongst
other things the rational and irrational, the material and immaterial, the
imaginary and indeed the very human body. It is this diversity of
representation and understanding of MAKING
architecture that The Cinecity Project produced in 2014. This can be seen in films where various
aspects of making architecture were explored, such as an interchange between building
materials and the reflected image; making life; light making architecture;
architecture making social constructs, and the making of cinematic architectural
space.
The winning film from this years’ Cinecity
Project was SOUND AND VISION by Francis Matthews. This film explores how the
architectural environment is made up of layered, reflected and refracted
images. How we are unconsciously embedded within, and constructed by these
images, caught in a cross-fire of their existence. The intrigue of the ‘making’
of architecture in this way, is communicated in the ‘making’ of the image,
where ones mind enters the representative space, but in the end one is sharply
returned to the image
space, and the construct of the representation.
A
more personal, absent and off camera experience of architecture making life is
evident in DUNWICH FISHING by Eleanor Suess. In this film, the stillness of the
camera highlights the slow and timely movement of the fisherman. The lone
fisher suggests contemplation. This architecture without architecture also
suggests conviviality, if any fish are caught,
which set against the redundant looking wench and up turned boats points
to a past industry – making a living this way is no longer sustainable, against
the fished out sea. This film implies a solace and through the colours,
especially, a beauty, in this life lived. The shed we see is a kind of
architecture but to this film it is not as important as the architecture which
remains unseen - that which is off screen where the fisher lives – the
buildings and town which makes his life and memories, that which works with
both a material and immaterial context.
In contrast, Sabine De Schutter, in SENSING
SPACE, also uses a still camera, but with an ‘un-changing’ scene. The image
appears to hum in its stillness, pregnant with potential. A representation of
this kind alludes to the thick, dense experience of light in architecture,
which, while transient and temporal has a heaviness. The fact that ‘nothing
happens’ in Sabine’s film is the beauty of it, like architecture itself,
appearing static, unchanging and un-moving conversely is full of movement
imperceptible by the human eye.
Through a sea of yellow raincoats and
orchestrated movement TWINNING by Lena Obergfell alludes to a more ‘active’ and
socially constructed architecture. How
people and their relationships across space and time can create the experience
of architecture. How the transient, temporal aspects of urban environment have
just as much hand in creating our urban and architectural environment, as the
bricks and mortar of its physical construction.
Using the moving camera, SPINE by Susan Chan
at once shifts the representation of a ‘bridge,’ to be an image space
experience for the spectator. Through camera movement spines of the bridge pass
overhead, wrap around the viewer, making one simultaneously aware of the
construction of the bridge, and the construction of the moving image in
relation to the space of the spectator. In this way, SPINE, and many other films in The Cinecity Project: Making, are not only
the representation of architecture, but the construction of architecture,
through the reception of the moving image. In doing this, through these
explorations, the films make new ideas, bringing new understandings.
END
NOTES
[1]The Cinecity Project
is a fringe event aligned with the theme of the National Architecture
Conference and in 2014 the Creative Directors theme was MAKING.
[2]Representation:
[noun]
2. The description or portrayal of someone or something in a particular way
[3]Explore:
[verb] 1Travel through (an
unfamiliar area) in order to learn about it:
[4] Lorraine Mortimer Terror and Joy: The Films of
Dusan Makavejev, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2009 (Page
188).
Cinecity 2014_Eleanor Suess_Dunwich Fishing
Cinecity 2014_Francis Matthews_Sound and Vision
Cinecity 2014_Lena Obergfell_Wasteland Twinning
Cinecity 2014_Sabine De Schutter_Sensing Space
Cinecity 2014_Susanne Chan_Spine
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