Architecture and cinema

ARCHITECTURE IN CINEMA

Cinema is a multi-dimensional art form as Jean-Luc Godard states: "There are several ways of making films. Like Jean Renoir and Robert Bresson, who make music. Like Sergei Eisenstein, who paints. Like Stroheim, who wrote sound novels in silent days. Like Alain Resnais, who sculpts. Like Socrates, Rossellini I mean, who creates philosophy. The cinema, in other words, can be everything at once, both judge and litigant.'4 Godard's list of the alternative ways of film making could be expanded by one more specific mode: cinema as architecture."(Pallasmaa, 2001)

The interaction of cinema and architecture

The inherent architecture of cinematic expression, and the cinematic essence of architectural experience is equally many sided. Both the art forms are brought about with the help of a host of specialists, assistants and co-workers.

Both architecture and cinema are arts of an author. The relationship between the two art forms could, for example, be studied from a multitude of viewpoints: how different directors depict a city, as "Walter Ruttman in Berlin, der Sinfonie der Grossstadt (1927) or Fritz Lang in Metropolis (1927); how buildings or rooms are presented, as in German Expressionist films with their fantasy architecture suspended between reality and dream"(Pallasmaa, 2001)

"An architect who made superb projects both as a designer of buildings and set designer was Paul Nelson. His project Maison Suspendue (1936-38)" (Pallasmaa, 2001)

It consisted of a house in which each room was suspended like bird nests within a steel-and-glass cage, a fantastic idea expressed through projected illusion. 

one could never speculate on the kind of buildings the wizards of cinema architecture would have built if they had not decided to devote their architectural talent to the service of the illusory art of cinema.

Architecture exists, like cinema, in the dimension of time and movement. One conceives and reads a building in terms of sequences.  In the continuous shot/sequence that a building is, the architect works with cuts and edits, framings and openings.

The Architecture of Cinema

There are hardly any films which do not include images of architecture. This statement holds true regardless of whether buildings are actually shown in the film or not, because already the framing of an image, or the definition of scale or illumination, implies the establishment of a distinct place.

On the other hand, establishing a place is the fundamental task of architecture; the first task of architecture is to mark man's place in the world. Through architecture we transform our experience of outsideness and estrangement into the positive feeling of domicile. The structuring of place, space, situation, scale, illumination, etc, characteristic to architecture the framing of human existence  seeps unavoidably into every cinematic expression. In the same way that architecture articulates space, it also manipulates time.

Lived space is not uniform, valueless space. One and the same event a kiss or a murder is an entirely different story depending on whether it takes place in a bedroom, bathroom, library, elevator or gazebo.

An event obtains its particular meaning through the time of the day, illumination, weather and soundscape. In addition, every place has its history and symbolic connotations which merge into the incident. Presentation of a cinematic event is, thus, totally inseparable from the architecture, although often unknowingly. It is exactly this innocence and independence from the professional discipline of architecture that makes the architecture of cinema so subtle and revealing.

The Mental Reality of Place

The event and place, mind and space fuse into a singular experience; the world exists through the mind and the mind is in the world.
  

In architecture of cinema the event ,characters, and architecture interact and designate each other. 
Architecture gives the cinematic episode its ambience, and the meanings of the event are projected on architecture. The cinematic narrative defines the boundaries of lived reality.The realities of material and lived image are fused.

The Logic of Emotions

We place our fears, desires and feelings in buildings. A person who is afraid of the dark has no factual reason to fear darkness as such; he is  afraid of his own imagination, or of the contents that his repressed fantasy may project into the darkness. 

The great mystery of artistic impact is that a fragment is capable of representing the whole.
The reader constructs a building or a city from the suggestions of the writer, and the viewer of a film creates an entire epoch from the fragmented images provided by the director. 
A work of art, however, cannot give the viewer emotions stored in its layers. The work receives the emotions of the viewer. A work of art does not reflect the affections of the artist; the subject lends his own emotions to the work. When experiencing a work of art, we project ourselves onto the object of our experience.

Yet even buildings are devoid of emotion; a work of architecture obliges us in the same way as literature and cinema to lend our emotions and place them in it. 
The buildings of Michelangelo do not mediate feelings of melancholy, they are buildings fallen into melancholy. 
Cinema and architecture, as all art, function as alluring projection screens for our emotions.

REFERENCE:

Ucalgary.ca, (2015). in situ: Lived Space in Architecture and Cinema. [online] Available at: http://www.ucalgary.ca/ev/designresearch/publications/insitu/copy/volume2/imprintable_architecture/Juhani_Pallasmaa/index.html [Accessed 23 Nov. 2015].

Pallasmaa, J. (2001). The Architecture of image. Helsinki: Rakennustieto.