Recent advancements in digital technology, have not only deeply transformed the production of film and architecture but brought the two disciplines closer than ever before. The digital has allowed ground-breaking, if not hasty, changes in the way that architecture is not only produced, but also designed and conceived. In contrast, however, to the extensive use of computational design to interrogate the formal, material and structural possibilities of architecture, this article explores how new time-based media and computer generated imagery in film can unlock the story-telling, political and philosophical potential of architecture. I will focus on three projects – Agit-Prop (2014) by Liam Davis, Wates House (2014) by Daniel Cotton and my project Déjà vu (2009) – which combine techniques and tropes from both cinema and design as a means for reflection and commentary in architecture.Originally coined by the German artist Hans Richter in the 1940s, the term ‘essay film’ describes an intimate, allusive and idiosyncratic genre at the margins between fiction and documentary. Richter poignantly suggests that the essay film makes the invisible world of thoughts and ideas visible on the screen; it produces complex thought-reflections that are not necessarily bound to reality, but can also be contradictory, irrational, and fantastical. Dealing with political and philosophical issues, the essay film is cinema at its most engaged and liberated.Examining the three projects in comparison to examples of essay films that reflect on architecture or the city, such as Dziga Vertov’s, Man with a Movie Camera (1929), Wim Wender’s, If Buildings Could Talk (2010), and Alain Resnais’s, Toute la mémoire du monde (1956), my aim is to propose a new hybrid genre lying at the boundaries between architectural design, theory and film, what I call: the ‘architectural essay film’.
At the back of a dimly lit room at the north-east wing of the Philadelphia Museum of Art the visitor may, or may not, discover an old, weathered Spanish door. Approaching this unlikely sight, a concealed view behind the door becomes noticeable as a result of light emanating from two peepholes. The act of looking through them transforms the unsuspected viewer into a voyeur and reveals a brightly lit three-dimensional diorama: a recumbent, faceless, female nude, holding a gas lamp and bathed in light is submerged in twigs in an open landscape where a waterfall silently glitters [1a, 1b]. The explicit pornographic pose of the splayed legs and the exposed pudenda is dazzling. On careful inspection, this startling view is only possible through another intersecting surface; between the viewer and the nude stands a brick wall on which an irregular rupture has been opened – as if by a violent collision – making the scene even more unsettling. Defying traditional definitions of painting or sculpture Marcel Duchamp's enigmatic final work is a carefully constructed assemblage of elements, with an equally enigmatic title: Etant Donnés: 1°la chute d'eau, 2°le gaz d'éclairage… (Given: 1st the Waterfall, 2nd the Illuminating Gas…), 1946–1966.
This essay discusses Marcel Duchamp’s Étantdonnés: 1° la chute d’eau, 2° le gazd’éclairage … (Given: 1. The Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating Gas …), or Given as a camera obscura. It focuses not on the brightly lit assemblage, but on the door that separates it from the viewer and the dark space immediately in front of it, the space outside Given. Through a methodology of ‘redrawing’ Given, it argues the image making abilities of the piece, defines this boundary between its interior and exterior as a ‘Looking Door’,and suggests that the hidden significance of Given might lie not behind the door, but in front of it.
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