The architectural essay film

Abstract

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’.

Buildings as non‐human narrators: Between post‐phenomenological and object‐oriented architectural geographies

“…Indeed, buildings’ filmic self‐narration has already been employed to display ethnographic research on the life of a building, as Haralambidou (2015) reported (see, in particular, the case of Daniel Cotton’s 2014 film Wates House ). In posthuman pedagogy, discussing the possibilities of object‐fictions and thing‐focused methodologies, Bennett (2016) proposed a shift from an extreme, speculative posthumanism that (vainly) tries to grasp the things without us towards a mild, ethical posthumanism that more modestly aims to grasp the things with us .…”

“…All of these traits, such as the internal focalisation and the female voice‐over, the sharing of emotions and memories of a personal past and of intimate and affective considerations, contribute to the characterisation of the narrator and, thus, to its anthropomorphisation. The building has a story to tell (Haralambidou, 2015, p. 240) as well as a spatial and temporal existence: it was there when the Berlin Wall divided the city and the world was separated into two parts, and it was still there when the Wall was torn down in 1989, shortly before the Potsdamer Platz, just around the corner, was completely renewed and attained its current appearance. Yet, according to Wenders’ choice, the voice of the building seems to soften, if not to forget, the discussion that emerged around its innovative design and Scharoun’s progressive plan in the broader context of geopolitical tensions and urban planning disputes on the future of the divided city (Jasper, 2020, pp.…”

Muzeum w żałobie. Architektoniczne elegie Aleksandra Sokurowa

“…W opublikowanym w 2015 r. artykule The architectual essay film Penelope Haralambidou zaproponowała pojęcie e s e j u a r c h i t e k t o n i c z n e g o: hybrydycznego gatunku, który lokuje się na granicy pomiędzy architektonicznym designem, teorią i filmem 24 . Autorka traktuje esej architektoniczny jako subgatunek eseju filmowego skupiający się na specyficznej problematyce miejskiego lub architektonicznego designu 25 .…”