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FILM, ARCHITECTURE AND SPATIAL IMAGINATION

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Films use architecture as visual shorthand to tell viewers everything they need to
know about the characters in a short amount of time. Illustrated by a diverse range
of films from different eras and cultures, this book investigates the reciprocity
between film and architecture. Using a phenomenological approach, it describes
how we, the viewers, can learn to read architecture and design in film in order to
see the many inherent messages. Architecture’s representational capacity contrib-
utes to the plausibility or ‘reality’ possible in film. The book provides an ontological
understanding that clarifies and stabilizes the reciprocity of the actual world and a
filmic world of illusion and human imagination, thereby shedding light on both film
and architecture.

Renée Tobe, University of East London, United Kingdom

 Studies in Architecture Series
SERIES EDITOR: EAMONN CANNIFFE, MANCHESTER SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE,
MANCHESTER METROPOLITAN UNIVERSITY, UK

The discipline of Architecture is undergoing subtle transformation as design

awareness permeates our visually dominated culture. Technological change, the
search for sustainability and debates around the value of place and meaning
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of the architectural gesture are aspects which will affect the cities we inhabit.
This series seeks to address such topics, both theoretically and in practice,
through the publication of high quality original research, written and visual.

Other titles in this series

The City Crown by Bruno Taut

Edited by Matthew Mindrup and Ulrike Altenmuller-Lewis
ISBN 978 1 4724 2199 9

In-Between: Architectural Drawing and Imaginative Knowledge in

Islamic and Western Traditions
Hooman Koliji
ISBN 978 1 4724 3868 3

Architectural Projects of Marco Frascari: The Pleasure of

a Demonstration
Sam Ridgway
ISBN 978 1 4724 4174 4

Phenomenologies of the City Studies in the History and

Philosophy of Architecture
Edited by Henriette Steiner and Maximilian Sternberg
ISBN 978 1 4094 5479 3

From Formalism to Weak Form: The Architecture and

Philosophy of Peter Eisenman
Stefano Corbo
ISBN 978 1 4724 4314 4

Forthcoming titles in this series

The Practice Turn in Architecture: Brussels after 1968

Isabelle Doucet
ISBN 978 1 4724 3735 8

Global Perspectives on Critical Architecture Praxis Reloaded

Edited by Gevork Hartoonian
ISBN 978 1 4724 3813 3
Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 08:49 25 April 2017

Renée Tobe
Imagination
Film, Architecture and Spatial
 First published 2017
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2017 Renée Tobe
The right of Renée Tobe to be identified as author of this work has
been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
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Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical,
or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including
photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval
system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks
or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and
explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Names: Tobe, Renée.
Title: Film, architecture and spatial imagination / Renée Tobe.
Description: Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon ; New York : Routledge,
2017. | Series: Film, architecture and spatial imagination | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016010423| ISBN 9780754679363 (hardback : alk.
paper) | ISBN 9781315533735 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Architecture in motion pictures. | Motion pictures and
architecture. | Space and time in motion pictures.
Classification: LCC PN1995.9.A695 T73 2016 | DDC 791.43/657–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016010423

ISBN: 9780754679363 (hbk)

ISBN: 9781315533735 (ebk)

Typeset in Myriad Pro

by Swales & Willis Ltd, Exeter, Devon, UK
 Contents
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List of figures vi
Acknowledgementsix

Introduction 1

1 German Expressionist film and Heidegger’s fourfold 20

2 French moderne, modernist noir, and moderns as masters

of reinvention 37

3 The domestic front: Hollywood and post-war cinema 57

4 Swinging time in London 80

5 Positioning women in time and space 97

6 Modernist Utopia: the spirit of the future 107

7 Not thinking but questioning: Terrence Malick’s expressions of

world and ground in film 128

8 Speeding into the unfixed future in Tokyo 145

9 Fear and trembling: a study of why movies make us afraid 163

Sources and further reading 181

Index196
 Figures
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I.1 The cinema resembles Plato’s cave 5

I.2 Filters of: the world we know; diegesis; and mimesis 6

I.3 Getting cosy in the cave 7

I.4 When we leave the cave we are blinded by reality 8

I.5 The two-dimensional screen enriches our spatial imagination 9

I.6 Adalberto Libera’s Palace of the Congresses, EUR, Rome, Italy

(The Conformist, Bernardo Bertolucci, 1973) 11

I. 7 The conformist remains a prisoner, sitting by the fire (The Conformist,

Bernardo Bertolucci, 1973) 12

1.1 The student garret, with light from the window painted on the floor
(The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, Robert Weine, 1919) 26

1.2 Cesare carries Jane across the bridge (The Cabinet of Dr Caligari,
Robert Weine, 1919) 27

1.3 Houses conspiring together in Prague (The Golem, Paul Wegener, 1920) 28

1.4 Stair as ear (The Golem, Paul Wegener, 1920) 29

2.1 Coffered ceiling of swimming pool. Villa Noailles, Robert Mallet-Stevens,

1923 (photo by author) 43

2.2 Outdoor sleeping chamber. Villa Noailles, Robert Mallet-Stevens, 1923

(photo by author) 44

2.3 Terrace with film strip openings that frame the landscape. Villa Noailles,
Robert Mallet-Stevens, 1923 (photo by author) 45

2.4 Villa as stacked dice. Villa Noailles, Robert Mallet-Stevens, 1923

(photo by author) 46

2.5 Coffered ceiling in rose salon. Villa Noailles, Robert Mallet-Stevens, 1923
(photo by author) 47

2.6 Rose salon. Villa Noailles, Robert Mallet-Stevens, 1923 (photo by

author)47
2.7 Staircase behind the mastercriminal’s office (Spies, Fritz Lang, 1928) 49
 FIGURES   vii

2.8 Art Deco stair (The Black Cat, Edgar R. Ulmer, 1934) 50

3.1 The grandfather clock in Waldo Lydecker’s apartment (Laura,

Otto Preminger, 1944) 66

3.2 Waldo Lydecker in the bath (Laura, Otto Preminger, 1944) 67

3.3 Laura’s portrait watches her three admirers invade her bedroom
(Laura, Otto Preminger, 1944) 68

3.4 The parking garage was shot on location (Where the Sidewalk Ends,
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Otto Preminger, 1950) 69

3.5 Flying home after the war, three men discuss what a good future means
(The Best Years of Our Lives, William Wyler, 1946) 73

3.6 Deep focus in the bar scene (The Best Years of Our Lives, William Wyler, 1946) 74

3.7 The airplane graveyard (The Best Years of Our Lives, William Wyler, 1946) 75

4.1 Merleau-Ponty’s box (drawn by author) 84

4.2 Alison and Peter Smithson’s Economist building (Blow-up, Michelangelo

Antonioni, 1967) 89

4.3 Fashion shoot (Blow-up, Michelangelo Antonioni, 1967) 92

5.1 Cléo examines herself in the mirror (Cléo 5 to 7, Agnes Varda, 1961) 100

5.2 Cléo hangs out at home (Cléo 5 to 7, Agnes Varda, 1961) 101

5.3 Jeanne sits in the living room without moving (Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du
Commerce,1080, Bruxelles, Chantal Akerman, 1975) 102

5.4 Jeanne sits at her kitchen table in a three-minute take (Jeanne Dielman,
23 quai du Commerce,1080, Bruxelles, Chantal Akerman, 1975) 105

6.1 City 2000 (Beat Girl, Edmond Gréville, 1960) 115

6.2 Located in France, near Orléans, the monorail was constructed as a

full scale experimental line that only ran about a single kilometre
(Fahrenheit 451, François Truffaut, 1966) 116

6.3 Alton Estate in Roehampton (Fahrenheit 451, François Truffaut, 1966) 117

6.4 Gravity free 360 degree access corridor (2001: A Space Odyssey,
Stanley Kubrick, 1968) 119

6.5 Luminescent curved corridors with Olivier Mourgue designed chairs

in hotel lounge on the space station (2001: A Space Odyssey,
Stanley Kubrick, 1968) 121

6.6 Atrium interior, Marin Civic Centre, San Rafael, CA, USA, Frank Lloyd Wright
(photo by author) 123

6.7 External elevation, Marin Civic Centre, San Rafael, CA, USA, Frank Lloyd
Wright (photo by author) 124

7.1 Holly’s childhood house burning: the dolls’ house (Badlands,

Terrence Malick, 1973)  133
 viii  FIGURES

7.2 The tree house was constructed by tying together many trees and was
devised by set designer, Jack Fisk (Badlands, Terrence Malick, 1973) 134

7.3 The farmer’s house was constructed from plywood as a real house,
not just a flat (Days of Heaven, Terrence Malick, 1978) 136

7.4 The house stands as a monument against the horizon (Days of Heaven,
Terrence Malick, 1978) 137

8.1 The Babel Tower (Metropolis, Fritz Lang, 1925) 151

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8.2 Tokyo (Akira, Katsuhiro Otomo, 1989) 151

8.3 The slow visual exploration of old warehouses illustrates the nostalgic
subtext (Patlabor 1: Mobile Police, Mamoru Oshii, 1988) 154

8.4 Oil refinery (Patlabor 2: The Movie, Mamoru Oshii, 1993) 155

8.5 Industrial complex with modern high-rise (Patlabor 2: The Movie,

Mamoru Oshii, 1993) 156

8.6 The bridge looks down on the playground below

(Ikiru, Akira Kurosawa, 1952) 159

8.7 The playground, a place formed from the spaces around it, defined by
its clean white picket fences (Ikiru, Akira Kurosawa, 1952) 159

9.1 Nosferatu’s shadow creeps up the stair, which is also only in

shadow (Nosferatu, F. W. Murnau, 1922) 167

9.2 Simple objects speak eloquently (Vampyr, Carl Dreyer, 1932) 168

9.3 The mirror reflects the scene of the murder (Dead of Night,
Alberto Cavalcanti, 1945) 171

9.4 The man stands in his own 1940s flat, looks into the mirror
and sees another room (Dead of Night, Alberto Cavalcanti, 1945) 171

9.5 Rosemary’s world closes in on her (Rosemary’s Baby,

Roman Polanski, 1968) 173

9.6 The low level camera approaches the room occupied

by demonic possession (The Exorcist, William Friedkin, 1973) 174
 Acknowledgements
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This book would never have come into existence without the support and inspira-
tion of many, far more than I can list here. There are some in particular who deserve
special mention. I thank Peter Carl for inspiring me to write about architecture and
film, and for leading me in the direction that opened up my way of understand-
ing how we perceive place in film. My own thinking about our place in the world,
whether we explore and express it in built form or in moving image, has been
guided by Dalibor Vesely, who continues as a constant impetus to my understand-
ing and shines light where there are otherwise only shadows. The work on architec-
ture and film by François Penz and Maureen Thomas and the workshops they taught
at Cambridge offered guidance, insight and practical understanding of the impor-
tance of the roles of writer, editor, and director in order to create the pace, rhythm,
and reception of a film. For subject area and an opening into the different means
by which we express architecture in film, whether as ‘real’ or ‘visionary’ I extend
the most sincere gratitude to Julia Schulz-Dornburg for discussions on architecture
and film. In particular I wish to thank Patricia Losey who has generously allowed me
to visit the house on Royal Avenue she shared with Joe Losey. I show appreciation
to Tracey Eve Winton for constantly reminding me that what, for me, is film trivia
may be in fact the crux of the argument. I thank Willem de Bruijn for informing
me of the specific filmic origin of the word ‘vamp’, Christian Maurer for our discus-
sions on Siegfried Kracauer and Buster Keaton, Danny Feelgood for biting insight
on vampire films and Miho Nakagawa for her generous suggestions and comments
on the notion of en space, ma and Japanese film. My heartfelt and eternal gratitude
go to Gabriela Świtek, whose editing and support all the way through has helped
the structure of the text and provided incredibly valuable guidance, especially at
the end. David Bass, Daniel Benson, Katharina Borsi, Stephen Brown, Melissa Davis,
Gustau Gili Galfetti, Tom Hastings, Andrew Higgott, Claire Loughheed, Barbara
Mathews, Mari Hvattum, Diana Periton, Claude Saint-Arroman, Peter Salter, Pascal
Schoening, Nicholas Temple, Igea Troiani, Vanessa Vanden Berghe, Dagmar Weston,
Paul White and Dorian Wiszniewski have all contributed in different ways through
scholarly support, conversations that open up understanding, and incredibly valu-
able insight, or simply through watching films with me. Some of the chapters here
were earlier presented as conference papers, or have been reworked from other
 x  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

articles. I thank the organizers of the Primitive conference at Cardiff for inviting me
to present the information that led to the chapter on German Expressionist films,
and the Humanities in Architecture conference at Lincoln for the chapter on world
and ground in the films of Terrence Malick. The chapter on anime was presented
first at the SAH in Savannah, and then in a different, more philosophical version at
the Architecture and Phenomenology II conference in Kyoto. The chapter on scary
movies was first presented at the Architecture and Phenomenology conference in
Haifa. I could not have structured some of the chapters, in particular the chapter on
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post-war Hollywood classic filmmaking without the time spent at the Institute of
Advanced Studies in the Humanities at Edinburgh University. I am grateful for sup-
port of the Gerda Henckel Stiftung for funding at an earlier stage of the research.
Finally, my endless gratitude to Emily Andersen who has patiently waited for me to
complete this work.
 Introduction
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Films use architecture as visual shorthand to tell viewers everything they need
to know about the characters in a short amount of time. A single second suffices
to portray a room, a place, or landscape; who the characters are, whether good
or evil; whether they will advance in the world, or go down; whether or not they
will fall in love by the end of the film or suffer heartbreak, anguish, or worse, indif-
ference; whether they will engage with the world, or remain passive observers.
Contemporary film viewers recognize a home or place of business, a love interest
or a villain through explorations of mimetic representation that often originated
in the avant-garde or silent era. While these are codes of representation, they are
also haptic responses to fragments that our imaginations create into an image of
a whole.
We all see the same thing and yet each of us regards it differently. The world of
one person’s perception arises from the world required to make a film, the back-
ground world from which that film draws, through which it communicates, and
the public world that receives it. Each of us sees a fragment of film set as a whole
building. Individuals perceive this communication in wildly divergent fashions,
based on our separate experiences, yet the shared world enables meaning to be
transferred. When viewers watch a film, they have the impression they hear the
whole world when in fact they hear only the sounds picked up on the record-
ing and placed there by the director. Film re-enacts praxis (following Aristotle’s
mimesis of praxis) and by endowing it with structure, film joins the tradition
of representation to help us see better. Film forms part of the continuum of
the world that provides an arc connecting what is communicated with what is
imagined.
We, the viewers, imagine the ‘space behind the screen’ as if it is real. Images
edited together that often show only fragments in themselves become some-
thing we feel, see and understand. Our imagination becomes a vehicle of ori-
entation that captures and transforms the image shaped by spatial experience.
 2  INTRODUCTION

HOW TO USE THIS BOOK

The book’s principal aim is the description and explanation of this ontological
understanding that clarifies and stabilizes the reciprocity of the actual world and
a filmic world of illusion and human imagination. For the film to ‘work’ the back-
ground and setting have to appear lived-in as though they have had a life before
the film begins. Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s and Martin Heidegger’s evocations and
descriptions of the reciprocity between ourselves and the world we inhabit expli-
cates how spatiality is understood and experienced. The Heideggerian approach
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to the notion of ‘being’ and ‘world’ reveals being-in-the-world as dependent on

those things taken for granted everyday. ‘Everydayness’ refers not to the literal
background in front of which the action takes place, but to the deeper structure
of familiarity, the deep background, with which we relate, as to a familiar place.1
Using a phenomenological approach, this book describes how we, the viewers,
can learn how to ‘read’ architecture and design in film in order to ‘see’ the many
inherent messages. Architecture provides the setting in which film is granted
its mimetic closure and integrity. It also contributes to the plausibility or reality
possible in film.
Other writings contribute to the knowledge and understanding of architecture
in film. Mark Lamster’s collection of essays, Architecture and Film looks at different
aspects of architecture and film together.2 Another excellent resource that covers
a similar breadth of films to this discussion is Dietrich Neumann’s Film Architecture:
Set Designs from Metropolis to Blade Runner.3 Neumann’s essays explain how set
design, filmmakers’ intentions and narrative come together to create the over-
all impression of a single film. François Penz and Maureen Thomas’s Cinema and
Architecture: Méliès, Mallet-Stevens, Multimedia, is an excellent collection of essays.
It offers exemplary insight into aspects of architecture and film together, and
different ways of reading, analyzing, or creating architecture in moving image
technology.4
Steven Jacobs’ publication, The Wrong House; The Architecture of Alfred
Hitchcock, reproduces the architecture of Alfred Hitchcock’s films as if the sets
were real architecture.5 In Hitchcock’s films the interweaving between set design
and narrative establishes the scene for the enactment of mystery. Another seminal
and original interpretation of architecture and its relation to film is Giuliana Bruno’s
Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture and Film.6 Bruno’s writing presents
a personal response to aspects of art, architecture and film and how we interpret
them. Discourse on how we interpret film, and understand it from what we see and
hear has been deeply influenced by Juhani Pallasmaa’s The Architecture of Image:
Existential Space in Cinema.7 Pallasmaa applies a phenomenological approach to
how we interpret architecture in film and his book also includes architectural plans
and focuses on particular films. Katherine Shonfield’s Walls have feelings: architec-
ture, film, and the city interprets architecture and film together and covers London in
the 1960s in the chapter on Alfie.8
Jane Barnwell’s Production Design: Architects of the Screen describes how and why
films are made the way they are.9 It describes the role of the production designer in
 INTRODUCTION   3

filmmaking. Books such as Mark Shiel and Tony Fitzmaurice’s, Cinema and the City; or
Mitchell Schwarzer’s Zoomscape: Architecture in Motion and Media look at how cities
are portrayed in film.10 While there is some crossover, such as Charles Sheeler and
Paul Strand’s Manhatta, or the discussion of Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-up that
includes an analysis of London, my book differs from those on film and philosophy in
that it explains the different and almost invisible means by which we ‘read’ architec-
ture in film.11 Films such as Metropolis or Blade Runner are discussed extensively and
cleverly in other publications, so while they are seminal in the discussion of archi-
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tecture and its relation with film, I refer to them here but do not linger on analysis
better presented elsewhere.12 In particular I recommend Metropolis: BFI Film Classic,
20th Anniversary Edition by Thomas Elsaesser and Blade Runner: The Inside Story by
Don Shay.13
Films influence other films. For example, German Expressionism impacted on
Hitchcock’s employment of light and shadow to enhance suspense, and from
Hitchcock, film noir, and other influences of sound and light, the surreality of David
Lynch ensued. Tropes can be found throughout. For example, the iconic shot of
Jack Nicholson’s face looking through the door he has just broken through with
an axe in The Shining appears first in Victor Sjöström’s Phantom Carriage in 1921.14
Metropolis influenced Blade Runner, that in turn influenced Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira
and many others.15
In addition to Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, a variety of philosophers offer insight
into how we see or perceive spatiality. This book is organized into chapters, each
of which is also an essay explaining particular philosophical notions in the context of
specific films or filmmakers, styles of representing architectural themes or diverse
films from across genres and eras of filmmaking. Each chapter describes different
examples of how to interpret architecture in film. While there is a great deal of crosso-
ver of discussion, with some films and concepts appearing in more than one chapter,
for clarity of reading the chapters are arranged in approximate chronological order.
Different chapters discuss Plato’s parable of the cave, F. G. W. Hegel’s master and
slave dialectic, Heidegger’s notion of ‘world’ and of the fourfold, Merleau-Ponty’s
spatial perception, Paul Ricoeur’s tripartite mimesis, Gilles Deleuze’s movement-
image and time-image, and the Japanese concept of ma, the space in-between, as
well as Siegfried Kracauer’s explanation of how film brings forward reality. Our per-
ception of what is ‘image’ as ‘real’ is explained through descriptions of Plato’s divided
line, that takes us through what we see, what is reflected, and fantasy; Aristotle’s
mimesis of praxis, that brings human experience into representation; Henri
Bergson’s description of the ‘cinematic illusion’ that describes the filmic apparatus
that includes both the camera and the projector; and Merleau-Ponty’s description
of the dream, by which we see what feels real but know it to be fantasy. Jean-Luc
Nancy’s phenomenological description of both ‘touch’ and ‘listening’ offers insight
into the experience of watching film and how what we see and hear touches our
emotions. Jean-Luc Marion’s notion of the gift provides a platform for examining
what we receive from film.
Other thinkers offer insight into what we perceive symbolically, although
these are not mutually exclusive. Rudolph Arnheim writes on visual thinking and
 4  INTRODUCTION

Walter Benjamin elaborates on the image and history. Feminists’ description of

cinema as language producing meaning, or as a social apparatus of semiotic pro-
duction, resembles the discourse of psychoanalytic film theories.16 Judith Butler
describes Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of body/world duality as nonfeminist and
non-gender-specific. She calls for a feminist appropriation but acknowledges that
phenomenological reflection allows access to a description of the female body as
territory for both exercizing impartial juridical power and the partiality of desire.
Despite Butler’s claim that Merleau-Ponty devalues women by being non-gender
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specific and assessing only the heterosexual male subject, I return to Merleau-
Ponty’s original intention, to describe the body as an expressive and dramatic
medium.17 Iris Marion Young offers a phenomenological description of lived-body
experience that is gender specific and historicized. Young traces modalities of
feminine body comportment, the manner of moving and relation in space.18
Gilles Deleuze’ any-space-whatevers are nonrational links between shots that,
like vacant and disconnected spaces, relate to Marc Augé’s anonymous spaces, such
as waiting rooms for example. Any-space-whatevers remove us temporarily from
the place of action, where we are ‘elsewhere’ in an undefined space and time, that
according to Deleuze can also be a black screen, a white screen, or change in col-
our intensity. The any-space-whatever is an empty or interrupted space which, in
film, links any number of narratives.19 Deleuze’s movement-image and time-image
respond to philosophical as much as they do filmic discourse.
Alain Badiou, Deleuze, Jacques Rancière, Bergson and others explore relations
between time, temporality, space, spatiality, and movement as well as perceptual
understanding.20 For Bernard Stiegler film is one of the technical constructs we fab-
ricate to make sense of the world around us.

ENTER PLATO’S CAVE OF CINEMATIC DELIGHT

When we watch a film, we suspend our disbelief to get caught up in a world that
must be familiar enough to be recognized by us and into which we can situate
ourselves in our imaginations. Spatial perception combines with emplotment, or
diegesis, to help us connect the visuals into a narrative combining the haptic
with the optic through mimesis. There are many tales that engage us with visual
gameplay or that enact familiar stories, but it is the situated spatiality that ena-
bles us to get lost in these films. This is the role that architecture plays in film. It
gives us a ‘there’ in which to be. Architecture mediates the dialectics of dwelling
and remoteness, belonging and estrangement. As Stanley Cavell explains, film
acts as a screen on which our hopes and fears are projected, as well as screening
us from real aspirations and actual nightmares.21 Cavell deliberately plays with
the relationship between revealing and concealing inherent in the word ‘screen’
utilizing the double entendre of the verb (screens) as both filtering it from sight,
and presented as a backdrop against which it may be seen and understood. Film
disguises or camouflages the given world, while allowing a glimpse into more
meaningful aspects of the lives that exist within it. Although film hides given
 INTRODUCTION   5

‘reality’ and what the viewer sees is illusion, it reveals meaning in the given world,
our world.22
This is the essence of Plato’s shadow play. As our focus narrows we both find
and lose ourselves in another world. We, the viewer look at the screen, and it is as
if we are looking through a window frame, as if the screen is a window that frames
another world, and we are in fact looking at the projections on the back of Plato’s
cave. We move through these screens imperceptibly as we watch a film.
Careful investigation of the nature of the relationship of architecture and its
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representation in film grants a deeper understanding of how architecture in film

illuminates both architecture itself and the culture that produces it. The exchange
between the two, architecture and film, is grounded in mimesis. Mimesis stabilizes
this dialogue and offers insight into the phenomenon of ‘recognition’ by which we
readily recognize a particular place such as a home, a library, a private or public
space, etc. There is an accumulation of culture, knowledge and artefacts we carry
within ourselves and bring to the viewing of the film. We look at architecture,
recognize it, it looks ‘like’ things with which we are familiar. We ‘see’ it ‘as if’ it is real
and the narrative moves us along.
While I examine the conventions and innovations of film, (taking into account
formal procedures such as camera movement, framing and editing techniques)
my point of departure lies in looking not at how films are fabricated, assembled to
bring about a particular message, but at the structure of the meanings created and
how these orient the viewer in a world or situation. My interpretation draws upon,
but also differs distinctly from, the methodologies of film theory. I look through the
screen at what we ‘see’; a world we create in our spatial imaginations, fully formed,
sensual and dimensional.
In film this making of the set into a ‘world’ of its own and creating a scene con-
cocted of fragments, is referred to as mise en scène and filmmakers whose focus is
on this world as metteurs en scène. Mise en scène includes staging, direction, pro-
duction. Everyone has a slightly different definition, but agree that it ‘establishes
a relation to the world’.23 Some filmmakers build up the scene through carefully
cultivated sets based on intense historical and cultural research. Others, such as
Jean-Luc Godard, rely on existing cultural references. In Antonioni’s Blow-up, archi-
tecture and sets are used interchangeably as a visual language to play with rep-
resentation in two-dimensional film, which actually serves to emphasize the vitality

Figure I.1  The cinema resembles Plato’s cave. We look at the film screen and it
narrows our focus, so that ultimately we see only the perspective of
what is projected on the back of the cave (drawn by author).
 6  INTRODUCTION
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Figure I.2  Filters of: the world we know; diegesis; and mimesis. Seated around the
fire, it is as though we look through architecture (the world we know around us);
diegesis (the constructed world created by the filmmaker); and mimesis, (by which
what we see resembles what we understand and with which we are familiar).
Behind us, high on the wall of the cave, is a mirror that projects the mimetic
image onto the screen in front of us (drawn by author).

of 1960s London as both object and subject of representation. In another example

from earlier in the same era, Joseph Losey uses London visually in an entirely dif-
ferent manner. Set within Britain’s transition from imperial to post-war capitalist
culture, The Servant involves architecture in a dialogue with itself that brings the
viewer on a path first through the open door of an Edwardian house and all it rep-
resents, with its butler and gentleman’s club décor, and then back onto King’s Road
in Chelsea, in a full circle.24
The importance of mise en scène is that everything within the frame is selected
for inclusion by the filmmaker. Framing is an act of design, the decision what to
include and what to exclude. Architects are familiar with this kind of decision mak-
ing. Beyond the obvious function of what architecture communicates, for example
shelter, the interpretation discloses the metaphorical and antonymic expressions of
enclosure and exposure, protection and imprisonment that form the mise en scène
(everything in the frame) of place and space in film. The relation of thresholds such
as doors or windows, or structures of connections such as stairs, offers insight into
the framing of human existence. Filmmakers frame things in diverse ways to convey
a different narrative or even a different meaning within the same narrative.
Architectural elements operate on many levels and develop one aspect that gets
increasingly embodied into the everyday world where we are deeply situated. The
doorway frames us; the stair suggests either ascendance, or descent to hell and the
nether regions. The bridge ‘bridges’ disparate ideas and the city itself is a dynamic
ever changing place often best captured in the fluidity of film. Cities offer the chance
to show the protagonist in motion, the movement of time during the day, and the
city as a constantly evolving reflection of human progress.
 INTRODUCTION   7
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Figure I.3  Getting cosy in the cave. I replace the cave with a cinema,
with lounge seats and sound insulation to exclude the outside world.
We take a seat and arrange cushions around us to make ourselves comfortable.
We are cut off from all distracting sights and sounds and focus on the images
on the screen. Filmic apparatus helps us to focus better on a series of
shadow plays or stories (drawn by author).

For example, when a film opens with a landscape scene or a rural setting (often
set in or suggestive of the past) it frames the tale so it is almost like a fable. In
contrast, if the film opens with the establishing shot (the shot that establishes the
locale in which the action will take place) in a city, this positions the story in a
contemporary world, of movement, development, complexity. The kind of story
that can take place in a peaceful country setting would be entirely different in an
urban one.
Suburban settings suggest the ‘everyday’ and life as bland and repetitive as the
streets on which they are set. For example, in a scene from American Beauty a teen-
age boy looks through his suburban window and spies on the teenage girl who lives
in the identical suburban house next door. He videos her, with her knowledge, thus
creating a movie (within a movie) that gives warmth and meaning to their other-
wise disenfranchised lives. Window frames frame their lives, and the frame of the
boy’s video camera frames them again in a way that gives them meaning. The scene
depicts their mutual need to escape the confines of their restricted sameness of
suburban life, whereas if the same story happens in Manhattan, it becomes about
voyeurism and exhibitionism.
Some films are compelling when made, but lose their ‘shine’ once the story is told.
Others can continue to captivate us on subsequent and repeated viewing. Still oth-
ers become cultural artefacts or references over time, embedded within historical
context and architectural precedent.
In film, as elsewhere, the most originary is the most familiar, the closest, and
therefore, the furthest removed, the most deeply hidden. The usual structure: what
we see, expect, imagine, the simplest, is the most imperceptible. Film touches us.
 8  INTRODUCTION
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Figure I.4  When we leave the cave we are blinded by reality.

Comfortably seated within the cave we see images projected as if they are
the whole world, but after, when the film is over, we have to make an
effort to ‘break’ with that reality, and walk out of the cinema
where we are blinded by the light (drawn by author).

We do not literally put our finger on it, nor can we always pinpoint that image,
thought, dialogue or action that affects us. Yet the camera illuminates: bringing
forward a truth. This ‘moving’ image moves us, or arouses us, as Stiegler suggests.25
For Roland Barthes there is, in a still photograph, a punctum, a part of the image,
that pokes us and touches us, but in film this is always receding from our view as
we try to find it. It is often sentimental, in a manner we would not enjoy in life. As
we know, overanalysis can take away the ‘feeling’ yet the message is just as strong.
Architecture is an intrinsic and essential part of that conversation. It tells us much in
very little time.

Welcome to Plato’s cave

I begin by leading us gently into Plato’s cave, explaining how and what it is, and what
we do there. While seated comfortably, for I have replaced Plato’s chains for comfie
cinema sofas and surround sound, we watch some images passing by that tell us the
story of cinema, of ‘realism’, of darkness and light and of architecture, then a some-
thing helps lead us out of the cave.
In the cave the two-dimensional screen becomes fully dimensional in our
imaginations − we need to be comfortable for this − and then, once we have under-
stood a few things, we step ‘through’ the screen, and the other side, into a mirror
reverse world where we have to look backwards at the raked seats of the cinema,
stare the projectionist in the face, and climb back out into the world, the city street.
We incorporate what we have seen into our own experiences and return to our
own world, enriched and transformed, the ‘breaking moment’ when one enters the
pathway of everyday life.26
The Plato’s cave simile elaborates vision and sight, using light as a metaphor
for the truth.27 Plato debates whether truth appears to thought as the visual world
appears to sight. Plato presents a world of shadow and illusion, where what appears
to be real is an allegory for the enlightenment or ignorance of the human condition.28
It is worthwhile here to re-examine Plato’s allegory, which asks the reader to visualize
an underground chamber. Picture a cave, he begins.
 INTRODUCTION   9
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Figure I.5  The two-dimensional screen enriches our spatial imagination.

We don’t step out of the cave, but into the world of our imagination, fully temporal
and spatial, then through the screen and out into the world, onto the path
of everyday life that is brighter, noisier, dirtier or else more quiet and
mundane (depending on the film) (drawn by author).

The light of a fire some way off shines on passing figures and creates shadows
projected on the wall as in a puppet show.29 They play a dual role like the shadow
puppets of the Malay peninsula, of entertainer and spirit medium giving outline
to beings which do not actually exist, represented in human form in some way
distorted.30 Unaware of any other existence, Plato’s prisoners believe the shadows
they see to be the whole truth and presume the sounds they hear to be emitted
from the shadowy figures they see in front of them.31
There are two levels of shadows within the cave, those of the prisoners them-
selves, for they also see their own shadows, and those of the figures passing by, in
this case a secondary level of representations. Plato’s parable tells us that which we
see and believe to be real is only a shadow of the ideal and film takes place within
this field. The story of the cave is a drama of human finitude where enlightenment
is not reached in one move but through the process of understanding. The reciproc-
ity between light and dark, is that between truth and illusion, with film interme-
diary between them, both enhancing and obscuring reality. The prisoners’ initial
state is one of illusion about themselves and the world. The escaped prisoner, at
first blinded by the light and reality, gradually adjusts, perceives the various levels
of Plato’s divided line, first shadows, then reflections, and ultimately questions the
nature of objects themselves. When he returns to tell the other prisoners they think
him mad, and he is destroyed.
The frequent suggestion that a modern Plato would compare his cave to a cin-
ema, where the film itself is only an image of real things and events in the world
outside, approaches the literal but not figurative aspects of the allegory.32 Plato’s
description refers to the unidentified prisoners undifferentiated one from the other
as ‘people like us.’33 The allegory remains unclear as to whether the prisoners, who
mistake their own shadows for themselves, see themselves as individuals or have yet
to acquire this sense of the self.
 10  INTRODUCTION

In The Conformist, Bernardo Bertolucci visually translates the cave metaphor,

depicting the prisoners in the cave as prisoners within a given political system;
political prisoners of a fascist regime, unwilling or unable to emerge into the
brightness of enlightened emancipation.34 Bertolucci begins at the Ara Pacis
of Caesar Augustus, (an image used again by Peter Greenaway in Belly of an
Architect).35 The film travels to the EUR, Benito Mussolini’s fascist city of progress
designed in the 1930s, then crosses from Renaissance Rome on the Ponte Sant’
Angelo when, with the Castel Sant’ Angelo, designed and built by the emperor
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Hadrian as his own mausoleum, framed behind them, Clerici the protagonist and
conformist of the title, is nearly hit by a giant and symbolic decapitated head of
‘current emperor’ Mussolini. It ends in the Colosseum, symbol of ancient, pagan
and Imperial Rome.
Bertolucci adapted The Conformist from the novel of the same name by Alberto
Moravia.36 In 1930s Fascist Italy, after a sequence of scenes in Rome that enact
vignettes of conformism and fascism, a man, Clerici, travels to Paris in order to assas-
sinate his old professor, Quadri, who inspires people to think for themselves. Quadri,
who has left the cave, lives in Paris, in the light. Paris represents a place where one
can speak the truth. The professor has escaped there to escape the fascists who
imprisoned and tortured him. In Paris there is not only light but also colour, in par-
ticular pastel shades. For example, in Paris Clerici finds a young gypsy woman selling
lavender from Parma, Bertolucci’s home town.
Bertolucci plainly indicates both Clerici’s and his fiancée’s contentment in their
prison cells when Clerici visits her in her apartment where she lives with her parents.
Director of photography Vittorio Storaro created a modernist prison with the blinds,
the stripes of the fiancée’s dress and the striped lines of light and shadow. Light
is used in a sharp way; there is no harmony of shades. Clerici’s passive watching
and the fiancée’s absurd dancing show how complacent one can be when nothing
is questioned. In this scene we see the maid, described as ‘part of the dowry’ on
the right and the fiancée with her striped dress on the left, with Clerici, comfortably
bedded between them.
Prior to his trip to Paris Clerici visits both his parents, who live separately. The fam-
ily home where his mother resides represents past grandeur, decadence and decay.
The tall iron gate that encloses the house suggests that life within a prison is familiar
to him but the posts of the gate are not upright in the film frame. Strange camera
angles draw things to our notice, setting up a surreal narrative. The moving camera
draws back and the figures come forward through the fallen leaves blowing in the
wind. In film, wind is incredibly photogenic.37 It is referent of the spiritual, and of
the passage of time. Here, in this scene, introduced by the unusual camera angle
to show a world out of balance or the past not yet left behind, the sweeping cam-
era and the movement of the leaves draws our attention to time passing, a twilight
world, faded and inevitable.
The contrast of these images with the white rectilinearity of the next scene,
in which Clerici visits his father in the lunatic asylum, situates it somewhat out-
side the everyday, appropriate as a home for those who have lost their reason.
Bertolucci casts the cold marble and clinical white rooftop open air theatre of
 INTRODUCTION   11
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Figure I.6  Adalberto Libera’s Palace of the Congresses, EUR, Rome, Italy.
Individuals walk past, dwarfed by the enormous fascist symbols they carry
(The Conformist, Bernardo Bertolucci, 1973).

Adalberto Libera’s Palace of the Congresses in the EUR as a madhouse. The use of
Libera’s Palace of the Congresses suggest the madness of the EUR itself. Even if we
‘see’ the building with which we are familiar we are carried away to see this as a
place of insanity, and this affects how we continue to perceive this building.
The interior of Libera’s building becomes, in the film, the location for the Ministry
of the Interior where individuals walk past, dwarfed by the giant fascist symbols they
carry, which emphasize the theatricality, the artifice, of both the fascist regime and
the architecture itself. Sent to meet the minister, Clerici, always the interloper, spies
on him from behind a very theatrical curtain. With him, we sneak a look and find
the minister in a sensual embrace with a woman. A few minutes later, when Clerici
makes his official entrance to the minister we approach slowly, reluctantly as, like
Clerici, we feel differently about entering this grand room. Its intended grandeur has
been transgressed by our peepshow view into it as place of sexual congress.
In addition to confusing us with places (the Palace of the Congresses as a mad-
house) Bertolucci elides the characters. The woman on the desk with the minister
appears later at an actual brothel that is situated at the border between Italy and
France (the mediating zone) and again in the apartment in Paris, where, despite
being cast as quite a different character, the wife of Quadri, she is played by the
same actor, Dominique Sanda. We see Sanda twice in different personas (in a brothel
and making out on the desk of the minister) before we ‘meet’ her in Paris. She is both
the political and the sexual. This uncertainty confuses us – is it the same woman?
didn’t we see her before? – and makes her role less real, and therefore the ambiguity
and transgressive sexuality more real. Quadri’s wife contrasts with Clerici’s fiancée,
described as: good in the kitchen and good in bed and who represents old time
values, the normalcy to which he aspires.
 12  INTRODUCTION

When we first see Clerici he is sitting on a bed in a hotel room, fully dressed with
his hat and shoes on, utterly ignoring the naked woman sprawled on the bed next
to him, suggesting his own sexual ambiguities exposed later in the film. As Michel
Foucault suggests all sexuality is a play of power.38 Sexual deviance and ‘playing
both sides’ are representative of Bertolucci’s fascist state where the same building is
both ministry and madhouse.
Editing and adaptation offer insights into text translated to visual language. In
Moravia’s novel, Clerici and his wife flee the city into the country and make love
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in the snow before themselves being gunned down. Bertolucci allows Clerici and
his wife to live, but keeps the scene in the snow. In his version, Quadri’s wife tells
Clerici’s fiancée that they have a house in the country where they often ‘make love
in the woods’, suggesting sexual as well as political freedoms and, more impor-
tantly for the film, setting the scene for their later murder. At the conclusion the
professor is assassinated in the open, in the snow, and dies like Caesar, stabbed
by many.
We must remain in the cave to follow the film but when we emerge (as cultural
critics) we see not only the shadows (the film) but also how they are made (art
direction) and why. Now that we are bedded in as it were within the cave, let us
look at the scene that makes this most explicit. Analysts of both film and philoso-
phy have described this scene in detail, illustrating how it expresses the cave myth
in visuals. The best and most detailed description is from an essay by philosopher
Julia Annas.39 Film theorist Robert Kolker also refers to this scene in his book on
Bertolucci.40 As Quadri relates the story of Plato’s cave, he opens and closes the
shutters of his office in which stands a single light, corresponding to the fire, so
that the characters are in turns actors and shadows. Quadri tells the story, and acts

Figure I.7  The conformist remains a prisoner, sitting by the fire. At the end of the film,
Clerici, the conformist, returns to the cave
(The Conformist, Bernardo Bertolucci, 1973).
 INTRODUCTION   13

it out at the same time. The filmmaker brings it together in the most natural man-
ner. It occurs exactly at the midpoint of the film. At the end of the sequence the
shutters open and we see Clerici’s shadow fade in the light. Quadri has shown him
that, if he wishes, he is free.
At the film’s end Clerici sits in front of a small fire, with other misfits, in the
Colosseum. His political party is overturned, his self-delusions dashed. He remains
in the cave, resigned to his fate, and preferring to return to the fire and its shadows,
he remains a prisoner, having betrayed all the others.
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Technē and forgetting: our way out of the cave

Bertolucci describes himself as ‘growing up in cinema’ while making The Conformist.

He had played with filming ‘reality’ in earlier films such as The Spider’s Stratagem.41 In
The Conformist he carefully captures myth in filmic narrative. In contrast, his contem-
porary Godard preferred to play with presentation and representation and breaks
open the cave. In Godard’s films, such as Weekend or Pierrot Le Fou, actors speak
directly to the camera, text flashes onto the screen, and actors speak as themselves,
making us conscious of watching a film so that we see the reality of the puppet
show, although acknowledging that this in itself is a play of light and shadow of its
own.42 Godard constantly returns to this juxtaposition of myth and reality in his films
by bringing our focus onto the film itself, making us conscious of watching a film,
and of the ‘reality’ of the medium of film, and using locations to make us conscious
of what we look at. Bertolucci and Godard fell out with one another for abandoning
this question of the juxtaposition of myth and reality and it is no coincidence that
in The Conformist Bertolucci gave the assassinated professor, Quadri, the unrepent-
ant Communist, surrounded by adoring and protective young acolytes, Godard’s
own Paris address (17 rue St Jacques) although Godard may not have appreciated
the humour. The apartment interior in the film is not Godard’s but an apartment in
Rome.
Understanding how architecture helps us to form our identity shows a way out
of the cave, just as understanding some technical aspects of filmmaking helps
us understand the language that the filmmaker uses to tell the story, and why it
is so effective to our senses. In a film such as The Conformist, a city (1960s Rome)
becomes the set, that becomes a city (both Paris and Rome in the 1930s). While
there is a difference between what we see and how we see it, these are combined
through mimesis and the cinematic power of persuasion. Sometimes in a film, as
in Antonioni’s L’eclisse, the route a character takes makes sense and you can track
the story through town, and at other times different places are collaged together
for effect.43 However, does it matter to us, Plato’s slaves chained to our seats? How
do we get out of the cave? To escape from the cave we need to engage with the
world.
Watching is never passive. There is an inherent violence in viewing, described by
Paul Virilio as the vision machine but also in evidence centuries earlier. Panoramas
and dioramas of the eighteenth century presented dramatic scenes, often of battles,
with no frame, horizon, beginning or end. This form of presentation was deemed
 14  INTRODUCTION

highly appropriate for propaganda. Replaced by photography, it was never about

the scenery construction or the realist style of painting but it was about techniques
of light, of architectural construct, time and movement used to convey a message
and evoke emotion.
Athanasius Kircher details perception and projection in his Ars Magna Luce et
Umbra that includes a description of scenography, somewhat based on Vitruvius (he
quotes Book 6, chapter 2).44 He has thirteen rules of scenography.45 Like Sebastiano
Serlio, he describes the settings appropriate for tragedy, comedy and satire in addi-
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tion to a forced perspective of sets diminishing in scale as they recede.46

He uses illustrations to explain the nature of anamorphosis and how to project
an image onto a cylinder. Kircher explains the uncanny way the eyes of a portrait
seem to follow the viewer as they move with an image of an archer aiming his
crossbow at us, the reader, thus merging being looked at, with being shot at, and
the violence inherent in vision, and the frightening aspects of what we are look-
ing at, looking back at us, something that Plato’s cave keeps hidden. As Kircher
states: ‘Semper, ubiq; Suos mors inopina uidet’ variously translated as: ‘Always and
everywhere sudden Death spies his own’. 47 An hourglass with wings suggests that
tempus fugit between the hunter with his musket or the archer with his crossbow
aimed directly at us, the viewer.
While acknowledging that this is not ‘real’ life, it also acknowledges that the eye
can be fooled by tricking the optic intelligence, as the eyes in the painting seem to
follow our own. In his magic lantern, the precursor of cinema, Kircher projects an
image of death; even in the seventeenth century the intention of cinema was to
frighten.

CRITICAL APPROACH TO ‘REALISM’

The relation of film and technics relates to the discussion of realism, that also
includes social realism. Film seeks to give the viewer as perfect an illusion of reality
as possible within the current limits of technique. Realism was a dominant issue
of debate in painting, theatre and the novel in the latter half of the nineteenth
century. Honoré Balzac, Gustave Flaubert, and T. S. Eliot in literature and Gustave
Courbet and Edouard Manet in painting were early and prominent advocates of the
idea that, to be ‘real’, characters and sets must have a coherent social and historical
setting.48 In literature and the arts, realism is a style that aims to keep imagination
within bounds and to avoid embellishments, in order to keep faith with the ‘way
things really are.’ Realism, influenced by positivism and the scientific and industrial
revolutions, sought to present commonplace events in the lives of ordinary peo-
ple. This desire to create, or rather to recreate, an integral realism, a representation
supposedly freed from artistic interpretation or constraints of time, dominated the
early techniques of mechanical reproduction of reality, from photography to the
phonograph.49
Canonical texts of film theory investigate film’s relation to ‘reality’ and to the
viewer. Critics like Erwin Panofsky felt that cinema satisfied the idea of, and wish
 INTRODUCTION   15

for, a world recreated in its own image, which is the history of representation.50 The
interest in depicting reality corresponded with technical advances. The focus in film
theory on realism as an aesthetic appeared with the inception of sound in films
and developed with improved film stock that allowed for more realistic lighting.
Improved film quality meant that less extreme lighting was required and shadows
no longer needed to be painted in for effect.
Other theorists and practitioners debated the opposition between mere appear-
ances (meaning the reality of things as we perceive them in daily life and experi-
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ence) and true morality (meaning an essential truth, one which we cannot normally
see or perceive but which, as Slavoj Žižek explains, using Hegel’s phrase, is ‘born of
the mind’).51 Film is either a recreation of the world in its own image or the making
of an ideal world in the likeness of the real world where film aims to reconstruct or
reflect viewer’s consciousness and feelings.52 Kracauer describes physical reality as
the transitory world we live in, also called nature, actuality, physical existence and
material reality and referred to here as the given world. Film’s role is to record and
reveal this given reality partially formed by other visible worlds that reach within.
In Benjamin’s words, filmic imagery of the given world depicts something entirely
new.53
This conflict draws on diverse approaches to questioning the nature of reality.
Critics and practitioners have viewed film as a major carrier of the ideology of a cul-
ture and ‘realism’ has been seen not just as an aesthetic but as an ideological debate.
Whether ideology is taken to mean a representation of the imaginary relationships
of individuals to their real conditions of existence or a specific political manifesto, it
refers to the cultural phenomena. Socialist realism is an aesthetic and literary style,
endorsed and imposed on filmmakers and artists in the Soviet Union in the 1930s
as the only one suitable for communist society. Marxist filmmakers such as Sergei
Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov desired to displace the real world, which they consid-
ered a construction of bourgeois ideology, and replace it with an ideal world in the
likeness of a ‘real’ world.54
‘Realism’ in film developed into a political issue with neorealist practitioners pro-
posing that ‘realism’ depended on the portrayal of working class truths. Italian neo-
realism, a post-war movement among Italian filmmakers such as Vittorio De Sica and
Roberto Rossellini, strove for verisimilitude in black and white films deeply embed-
ded within a socio-political ideology of socialism and class struggle.55
André Bazin and Panofsky investigate the role reality plays and both theo-
rists emphasize that in film reality is not merely described or represented.56 In an
early and influential lecture on film, Panofsky described the unique and specific
possibilities of film as the ‘dynamisation of space and spatialisation of time.’57 He
alleged that, in film, things move and the viewer is instantaneously able to wit-
ness successive events. He speaks of these properties as ‘self-evident’ to the point
of triviality and, because of that, easily forgotten or neglected. In the cinema the
viewer occupies a fixed place, but as the eye identifies itself with the lens of the
camera, which permanently shifts in distance and direction, Panofsky suggests
the viewer is virtually as movable as the rooms and places presented. He describes
the spatial field approaching, receding, turning, dissolving and recrystallizing as it
 16  INTRODUCTION

appears through the controlled locomotion and variable focusing of the camera.58
By substituting the eye of the beholder for the consciousness of the character, film
is able to suggest that psychological experience is being directly projected onto
the screen.
The relationship between the viewer and the film is based on the assumption
and assertion that what is seen is ‘real’ and cannot be questioned. Film processes
‘reality’ into fictional forms to create cinematic or filmic ‘realities’. For Panofsky the
medium of film is physical reality as such, for film organizes persons and material
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things. Sixty years later, Colin MacCabe describes ‘realism’ as the language of film,
and filmic discourse as comprised of a combination of words and images, just as
linguistic discussions of ‘discourse’ focus on speaker and language.59 In a similar
vein, Leo Braudy describes film as less real than the depicted objects that are cho-
sen for filming and thereby transformed in content.60
The meaning of ‘realism’ varies with the context in which it is used.61 This con-
trast between, on the one hand, film as a projection of a previously recorded real-
ity, and on the other hand film as an event in itself, quite separate from the original,
led to debates on the role of ‘reality’ in film which continue in film theory.62 Realist
filmmaker Robert Flaherty wrote that film contains an essential human story from
within the viewer.63 Neorealist filmmaker Rossellini also felt that realist film has
‘world’ as its object, not the telling of a story.64 For both Godard and Antonioni
the subject emerges from the characters and their situation, producing a world
created by this idea.65 For Godard, the film and the reality it may or may not por-
tray are of equal relevance. He declares: ‘[s]ometimes reality is too complex for oral
communication. But legend embodies it in a form which enables it to spread all
over the world.’66 When Godard puts these words into the mouth of his character
Lemmy Caution (played by Eddie Constantine) in Alphaville he’s talking about his
own films.
Antonioni asserts that most film viewers prefer the cave and its artificial view of
the world and this is why they go to the cinema.67 It is, Antonioni feels, as if the
viewers encounter enough reality in their day to day life. Reality may be like the hori-
zon, forever receding and eluding our grasp. The power of film, Antonioni argues,
is in its ability not to represent reality, but to achieve the aura of a fable because
he feels fables are true.68 They wish to see in the cinema that which is new, that
they do not already know. Braudy analyses film as to whether it is open or closed;
others describe film as formalist or realist, full or empty. These axes of analysis are
important only in as much as they focus or encourage the viewer to contemplate the
image as an object.
In Rancière’s view, cinema takes its narrative conventions from literature but not
its philosophy, and again draws from theatre’s aspiration to ‘realism’ while rejecting
it. Film is Plato’s cave, where one is manipulated by shadow play, but in a real material
place. It is in constant dialogue with the language of images that flatten the world
created on screen. This ambiguity is the compelling attraction of film. As Rancière
states ‘the most commonplace objects’ acquire splendour on a ‘lighted screen in a
dark auditorium’.69 He suggests we don’t need to understand film theory in order to
feel the power of film that lies in the ways of putting traditional stories and emotions
 INTRODUCTION   17

into images. He gives examples, such as car headlights at night, drinking glasses glit-
tering in a bar, a hand fumbling with a door handle or lifting a curtain to see what is
behind the scenes, hidden from view.

NOTES

  1 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (London: Blackwell, 1973), § 333.

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  2 Mark Lamster, Architecture and Film (New York: Princeton University Press, 2000).

  3 Dietrich Neumann, Film Architecture: Set Designs from Metropolis to Blade Runner
(London: Prestel, 1996).

  4 François Penz and Maureen Thomas, Cinema and Architecture: Méliès, Mallet-Stevens,
Multimedia (London: BFI, 1997).

  5 Steven Jacobs, The Wrong House; The Architecture of Alfred Hitchcock (Amsterdam: 010
publishers, 2007).

  6 Giuliana Bruno, Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture and Film (London:
Verso, 2002).

  7 Juhani Pallasmaa, The Architecture of Image: Existential Space in Cinema (Helsinki:

Rakennustieto Publishing, 2001).

  8 Katherine Shonfield, Walls have feelings: architecture, film, and the city (London:
Routledge, 2000). Alfie, dir. Lewis Gilbert, UK: Paramount, 1966.

  9 Jane Barnwell, Production Design; Architects of the Screen (London: Wallflower

Press, 2003).

10 Mark Shiel and Tony Fitzmaurice, Cinema and the City (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011);
Mitchell Schwarzer, Zoomscape: Architecture in Motion and Media (New York: Princeton
University Press, 2004).

11 Manhatta, dir. Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand, USA, 1921; Blow–up, dir. Michelangelo
Antonioni, UK: MGM, 1967.

12 Metropolis, dir. Fritz Lang, Germany: UFA, 1927. Blade Runner, dir. Ridley Scott, USA: Ladd
Company/Shaw Bros, 1982.

13 Thomas Elsaesser, Metropolis; BFI Film Classic, 20th Anniversary Edition (London: BFI,
2012) and Don Shay, Blade Runner; The Inside Story (London: Titan Books, 2000).

14 Phantom Carriage, dir. Victor Sjöström, Sweden: AB Swensk, 1921; The Shining, dir.
Stanley Kubrick, USA: Producer Circle/Peregrine Productions/Hawk Films, 1980.

15 Akira, dir. Katsuhiro Otomo, Japan: Tokyo Movie Shinsha, 1987.

16 Teresa de Lauretis, Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (London: Macmillan,

1984).

17 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble; Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London:
Routledge, 1999), 17.

18  Iris Marion Young and Jeffner Allen. “Throwing Like a Girl” in The Thinking Muse: Feminism
and Modern French Philosophy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 145.

19 D. N. Rodowick, Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine (Place: Duke University Press, 1997).
 18  INTRODUCTION

20 Alain Badiou, Cinema, trans. S. Spitzer (Cambridge: Polity, 2013); Jacques Rancière, The
Intervals of Cinema, trans. J. Howe (London: Verso, 2014); Henri Bergson, Matter and
Memory, trans. N. Paul and W. Palmer (London: Zone, 1988).

21 Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979).

22 Cavell, World Viewed, 166.

23 Rancière, The Intervals of Cinema, 6.

24 The Servant, dir. Joseph Losey, UK: Elstree Studio Films, 1963.
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25 Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time 1: The Fault of Epimetheus, trans. R. Beardsworth and
G. Collins (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998).

26 André Barsacq, Architecture et Dramaturgie (Paris: Flammarion, 1950).

27 Plato, Republic, trans. Desmond Lee (London: Penguin, 2007), VII 514.

28 Plato, Republic, VII 514a.

29 Plato, Republic, VII 514b.

30 Jeune Scott-Kemball, Javanese Shadow Puppet (Great Britain: The Trustees of the British
Museum, 1970), 29.

31 Plato, Republic, VII 514c.

32 Francis Cornford, introduction, Plato, The Republic of Plato (London: Penguin, 2007).

33 Plato, Republic, VII 514c.

34 Julia Annas, An Introduction to Plato’s ‘Republic’ (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981); Robert
Philip Kolker, Bertolucci (London: British Film Institute, 1985); The Conformist, dir.
Bernardo Bertolucci, Italy/France/West Germany: Mars/Marianne/Maran, 1969.

35 Belly of an Architect, dir. Peter Greenaway, UK/Italy: Herndale Film Corporation, 1987.

36 Alberto Moravia, The Conformist, first published 1951 (Steerforth Press: Hanover, 2011).

37 Michelangelo Antonioni, The Architecture of Vision (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,

1995), 55.

38 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 2 The Use of Pleasure (London: Vintage, 1990).

39 Annas, Introduction to Plato’s ‘Republic’.

40 Kolker, Bertolucci.

41 The Spider’s Stratagem, dir. Bernardo Bertolucci, Italy, 1970.

42 Weekend, dir. Jean-Luc Godard, France: Athos Films, 1967; Pierrot Le Fou, dir. Jean-Luc
Godard, France: Films de Georges de Beauregard, 1965.

43 L’eclisse, dir. Michelangelo Antonioni, Italy: Cineriz, 1963.

44 Athanasius Kircher, Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae in Decem Libros Digesta (Amstelodami,
1671), Book 2, Part 2.

45 Kircher, Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae, 136.

46 Kircher, Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae, 139.

47 Jocelyn Godwin, Athanasius Kircher’s Theatre of the World (London: Thames and Hudson,
2007), 205.
 INTRODUCTION   19

48 Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1989), 355 and Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception; Attention
Spectacle and Modern Culture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001).

49 André Bazin, What is Cinema? Vol. 1 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 21.

50 Cavell, World Viewed, 30.

51 Slavoj Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology (Durham:
Duke University Press, 1993).

52 Christopher Williams, ed., Realism In The Cinema: A Reader (London: Routledge and
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Kegan Paul for BFI: 1980), 35.

53 Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York:
Schocken, 1969).

54 Williams, Realism in the Cinema, 21.

55 Bicycle Thieves, dir. Vittorio De Sica, Italy: PDS ENIC, 1948.

56 Cavell, World Viewed, 165.

57 Erwin Panofsky, ‘Style and Medium In The Motion Pictures’, in Film Theory and Criticism;
Introductory Readings, eds Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1999), 279−92.

58 Panofsky, ‘Style and Medium In the Motion Pictures’, 281.

59 Colin MacCabe, “Theory and Film: Principles of Realism and Pleasure,” in Theoretical
Essays; Film, Linguistics, Literature (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985), 78.

60 Leo Braudy, The World in a Frame: What We Seen in Films (New York: Anchor Books, 1977).

61 Cavell, World Viewed, 166; Bazin, What is Cinema? Vol. 1, 21; Panofsky, 280.

62 This is especially true with the current use of computer generated or enhanced graphics
and animation.

63 Williams, Realism in the Cinema, 100.

64 Williams, Realism in the Cinema, 98.

65 Jean-Luc Godard, ‘From Critic to Film-Maker’ Cahiers du Cinéma (Oct. 1962): 59−67.

66 Alphaville, dir. Jean-Luc Godard, France: Chaumiane, 1965.

67 Antonioni, Architecture of Vision, 251.

68 Antonioni, That Bowling Alley on the Tiber; tales of a director, translators preface by
William Arrowsmith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986).

69 Rancière, Intervals of Cinema, 5.

 1
German Expressionist film and Heidegger’s fourfold
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INTRODUCTION

German Expressionist films, with their often quite abstract presentation of both
natural and built worlds, help us to understand how, through the unfolding, an
environment emerges, one whose meaning we intuit clearly in film. German
Expressionist films provide an excellent vehicle to demonstrate the power of visual
narrative. Although there are many fascinating examples, each of which is deserv-
ing of study, I focus on particular films. These are The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, where
a psychiatric institute director masquerading as a fairground hypnotist controls a
murderous sleepwalker; The Golem, a legend of a man made of clay in medieval
Prague; and Die Nibelungen: Part 1, The Death of Siegfried, a mythic account involv-
ing magical powers and even more powerful human emotion.1
On the most basic level, specific forms of architecture − the doorway, the bridge,
the window, and the stair − are not only places of opening or transition but also
open up the discussion and understanding of philosophical concepts, in particular,
the notion of the fourfold, expounded on in Heidegger’s Poetry Language Thought.2
In Heidegger’s fourfold, being, dwelling, and building are intertwined poetically.
Heidegger’s fourfold, comprised of humans, deities, earth and sky, unify, or gather
in Heidegger’s own term, to provide a place, in which our human events, actions
and emotions may unfold.
The phenomenon of deep background acts as the fulcrum on which film and
architecture converge. Although we tend to remember the visuals, it is the under-
lying silent background, or ordering of situation that lends power to these films.
Architecture provides the stability that enables the situational understanding of the
tale told ‘as if’ real. It is part of the paradox of the nature of illusion that we can dis-
cuss the abstraction of architecture, as an example of the stability of situation that
architecture provides.3 The German term raum connotes something that cannot
be measured and is, in effect, unlimited. Actors build space with their movements
and our imagination expands the space that appears on the screen into shadows,
nooks, and crannies.4
 GERMAN EXPRESSIONIST FILM   21

German Expressionist films may be identified as such although the art direc-
tors may prefer Futurist, Constructivist, organic, or other styles of expression.5
They are distinguished not only visually by the extreme camera angles and
language of bright light and dark shadow, but through the bizarre and often
supernatural happenings that occur in the narrative. Originating from the early
history of filmmaking, German Expressionist films offer a visual manifestation
of ritual, emotion, and myth and an excellent means by which to evince the
uncanny.
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German Expressionist films exert a hypnotic effect and entrance us, and we,
like the filmic characters, get caught up by the demonic plots as if against our
will, or are ourselves gripped in a diabolical link between human and the divine.
The word ‘demonic’, that in German is dämonisch, is applied here in its Greek
sense − pertaining to the nature of supernatural power − not in the English sense
of diabolical power.6 The demons are mystical spirits. As Lotte Eisner explains, in
German Expressionist films there is no guaranteed reward for virtue, true love
often remains unfulfilled, and the path to redemption lies strewn with impassa-
ble barriers.7

GERMAN EXPRESSIONISM

The premise of the German Expressionist film is the expression of psychologi-

cal states through imagery, often distorted and closed, in the sense they refer
only to themselves, a closed world presented in film. With their exaggerated
mise en scène and use of painted or sculpted sets these films create distorted
reflections of emotional stress and imbalance. For example, oblique lines cre-
ate an entirely different metaphysical effect of anxiety and terror compared to
curves or orthogonal repetition. Depth, either of emotion or of perspective,
where perspective is both point of view and distance, and tradition are evoked
through, or rather despite, the flat painted sets.8 German Expressionism, as an art
style or tendency that developed in reaction to Romanticism, separates or
detaches itself from nature. Expressionist paintings and interiors predated
German Expressionist films, but Expressionist architecture emerged at relatively
the same time.
German Expressionist films are replete with artificialities, from painted shad-
ows to exaggerated perspective and out of scale ornamentation. As Cavell
points out, there is a difference between the counterfeit and the artificial.9 To
counterfeit is to use fake props and painted backdrops in such a manner that
they are meant to fool the camera into thinking what is revealed is reality. The
condition of counterfeiting reality is part of the status and history of film. While
with the artificial, on the other hand, the point of the fake props and painted
backdrops is explicitly their fakeness, and unreality. In films generally, besides
Expressionist, they exist to denote hallucination and fantasy sequences. The
dream sequences employed by Hitchcock in films such as Spellbound provide
excellent examples.10
 22  GERMAN EXPRESSIONIST FILM

EXPRESSIONIST ARCHITECTURE

Expressionist buildings include Erich Mendelsohn’s Einstein Tower (1921) at Potsdam.

Mendelsohn’s tower, the form of which was conceived from sketches done in the
trenches of the First World War, simultaneously reaches to the sky, while empha-
sizing its grounding on earth. Designed to hold Albert Einstein’s own astronomical
laboratory, the streamlined form of the tower expresses the purpose for which it was
built: the human striving towards knowledge, and our attempts to overcome the
limits of human finitude.11
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Another example, Rudolph Steiner’s second Goetheanum (1923) in Dornach,

Switzerland, built as a theatre and school of spiritual science, or anthroposophy,
develops from Steiner’s conviction that reality is essentially spiritual. The building
expresses itself in the concrete tendrils, expressions of earth or nature, reaching
towards the sky as a manifestation of philosophical understanding. Sculpted hand-
rails grow from the ground and wrap themselves up the stairs that themselves wend
their way from floor to floor.
Other examples include Hans Poelzig’s Berlin Grosse Schauspielhaus (1919) in
which the interiors he designed for Max Reinhardt, complete with geometric sta-
lactites were repeated in his designs for The Golem. Poelzig is also renowned for the
controversial IG Farben building (1928−30) in Frankfurt.12
In a history of set design, a direct path from Richard Wagner to Fritz Lang
comes in to view, passing through the theatrical works of Adolph Appia and
Reinhardt.13 Wagner was the first to use light to focus the audience’s attention
on the action on stage, to disguise the mechanics of scene change through the
use of steam jets that created a misty or dreamlike image. Through the pres-
entation of a unified, continuous illusion Wagner expected to bring forth the
audience’s complete emotional involvement which he felt was requisite to bring
forth the ‘truths of the unconscious.’14 Reinhart’s dictates emphasized a domi-
nance of form and suggested sets be comprised of single elements. Contrasting
light effects and innovative use of colour created depth and dynamic movement
in sets that consisted of a single column or a stage comprised in its entirety of a
stair. Minimal but select features, such as contrasting light effects and an innova-
tive use of colour, created the illusion of space.15 Reinhardt’s influence on Lang,
who takes decorative stylization even further, is most explicit in Die Nibelungen,
seen in the formal geometric framing both of crowds, and of individuals, as well
as the costumes.
Appia’s theories suggested that each production respond with patterns of
rhythm which he described as the ‘hyphen which joins time and space’.16 Appia
frequently used strong light at the chorismos or horizon; an indeterminate space
where the ideal, the sky, and the real, the earth, meet. The word chora, and thus
chorus, derives from the same place. In drama, the chorus provides the material
form taken on to transmit information that transcends the action presented on
stage. In German Expressionist films, the emotion in the narrative is often expressed
through an examination of the horizon and the ground or buildings that shape its
form. Landscapes imbued with soul thrust themselves up into the sky, while the
 GERMAN EXPRESSIONIST FILM   23

silhouette of a bridge sways above a deep abyss, or, as Eisner suggests, in F. W.

Murnau’s Sunrise the shimmering light of the early morning sun on a lake, where
previously a moon river led to imaginary dreams and misfortunes, returns to its
rightful place a world turned upside down.17 The more intense, brilliant, and mel-
ancholic the atmosphere becomes, the more powerful is its effect, creating a unity
of mood between character and place that has been sought since the origins of
film. The nature of the German Expressionist film is to suggest chthonic depths
referent of myth hidden in the shadows, in the dark corners or recesses of a town
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square, even among a concatenation of uneven rooftops where elements of com-

position combine in an emotional effect.
Film set design developed from theatrical flats, that is flat painted backdrops
with simple props added as required, but soon developed its own language. Film
set construction, tricks of light, scale, and material contribute to the context of the
overall image and impression they convey. Some film backdrops are painted and
meant to be seen as real; others, as in the Expressionistic and Constructivist sets of
Caligari or Technicolor make-believes of the Hollywood musicals, are not. Whether
expressive of the emotions of the characters or exaggerating the dramatic scene,
that which appears before us exhibits its connection to and representation of a
recognizable situation. This is true whether it appeared at one time before the
camera, or was created later, in post-production.
In the 1920s, in Faust, Murnau’s innovative camera techniques that included
multiple cameras, technically elaborate shots and a camera that was not fixed,
opened up filmmaking along with changing lighting effects, and experiments in
form influenced by avant-garde filmmakers and artists, architects, and Expression-
ist painters.18 Murnau’s camera moved in order to explore (spatially and psycholog-
ically) the settings placed before it. His films employed the vertical and horizontal
movement of the camera as an integral part of the story, presentation, and char-
acter development and influenced the future of cameracraft in studios all over the
world.19
German film directors such as Murnau, Paul Wegener, and Lang were inter-
ested in film sets that expressed the emotional angst and turmoil of the char-
acters. Linking psychology and film involved us in direct identification with the
actors and thus the film. Film sets reflect and foreshadow changes in the societies
that produce them. Eisner describes Expressionism as constructing its own uni-
verse, not adapting itself to a world already in existence.20 In Expressionist films
such as Caligari and The Golem grotesque decorative elements were designed to
not only reflect the convoluted and twisted emotions, but to entrap the human
characters.

THE FOURFOLD

I use different terms for the fourfold, interchanging earth/ground, humans/mortals,

sky/heaven spirits/divinity to emphasize the communication between them.
Mortal, for example, implies immortality, or godliness; ground implies the sky, the
 24  GERMAN EXPRESSIONIST FILM

higher and lower realms; heaven carries inferences of divinity.21 Visual manifestation
of the fourfold, clearly evident in, although not exclusive to, German Expressionist
films, lays open the situation of how we are in the world, described by Heidegger as
‘dwelling’. Film, with its visual language, provides scope to examine this exchange
between architecture and ethical understanding. In Heideggerian terms, build-
ing provides a locale for the gathering of the fourfold, the unfolding by which an
environment emerges.22 As Hubert Dreyfus states, ‘[t]he earth is represented in the
grounding of traditional practices such as meals, and gathering together that pro-
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duce, sustain, and demonstrate kinship.’23

Film language relies on the infinite supply of spatial experiences, such as how
one works, walks, sleeps, cleans or sits at a table and the time required for these
actions. This deeper horizon of claim embodies the common basis of, for example,
film, architecture and writing in the ‘always-already-there’ of culture or tradition.
In German Expressionist films the ground itself is explicit, often coming up at us
through the frame, and the sky expressed in a backdrop of twinkling stars, while
humans, the actors, encounter unearthly characters and spirits.
Although, on one hand, filmmakers’ attempts to express meaning through inven-
tive set design mean that the visuals often take precedence over the underlying
narrative, on the other, the power is in how the ‘ground’, meaning both the ground
beneath one’s feet and the Heideggerian ground that ‘grounds’ us in our worlds,
comes forward in ways that seem to put us off balance in our worlds. According
to Heidegger, one of the characteristics of the human condition is that we belong
to a world that we do not fully control, or fully understand. This underlying under-
standing, this horizon, will never be fully transparent, or intelligible. It will always,
inevitably, be partly hidden.
The fourfold is preserved in the ‘simple essence of dwelling’.24 Examples include:
the house as a dwelling where humans live; the door or gate as means of transition
between inside and outside; the window as opening to view the sky; and the bridge
as connection between two pieces of land. ‘Things’, like Heidegger’s hammer, are
like knots or webs of situations, entirely involved in a purposeful act, not primar-
ily as an ‘object’ but as part of a situation. Only when they break, do these things
become conspicuous. Filmmakers remove things from their natural setting, or focus
unnatural attention on them, and in so doing make the thing into something else,
thereby setting the tone of the situation.
The earth and sky represent nature, and supply the matter for each
Heideggerian thing. Humans and divinities represent history, and the gathering
together of these four elements makes up the meaningful context in which each
thing becomes part of a nexus of involvement. Although it is possible to examine
each building or bridge individually, it is what each reveals in its interrelations
with the whole that discloses the ontological meaning of the thing to clothe
and cloak the narrative. The jug, as an example of a gathering of the fourfold, is
formed from unformed matter; it emerges ‘out of a vast domain of still unformed
and unidentified reality’.25 Heidegger’s other example, a bridge, brings into
being the banks of the river. They emerge as banks only as the bridge crosses the
stream.26 The bridge is open to the heavens, crossed by humans and symbolic as
 GERMAN EXPRESSIONIST FILM   25

a passage that links one side with another, or as a passage over an impediment.27
The gathering of the four is present in another of the themes of German Expres-
sionist film, the doppelganger or alter ego, the shadow side.
The earth appears as the ground planes on which the characters walk, the earth
of which the Golem is constructed and, in Siegfried, not only as the forest, but also as
the complete symmetry of the sets that provide the ground plane for action, often
on many stairs or at a great height to suggest the irrevocability of fate and des-
tiny. As Eisner describes, stairs are a ‘dynamic composition and symbolic of upward
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movement, more of Werden (becoming) than Sein (being) the degrees of which are
represented by the stairs themselves.’28
The presence of shadow evokes the supernatural, the fates, and the deity
aspect of the fourfold. Shadow becomes an image of destiny, in the somnambu-
lous Cesare, the menacing silhouette of Nosferatu or, as in Siegfried, a shape that
betrays the identity of a killer.29

The Cabinet of Dr Caligari

A strange man arrives in a medieval town and sets himself up to display his fairground
attraction, Cesare, a sleepwalker. The somnambulist kidnaps a young woman but per-
ishes when pursued by the townspeople. The mountebank is revealed to be the director
of a madhouse.
In Caligari the two characters of Werner Krauss as Caligari and Conrad Veidt as
Cesare the sleepwalker move with stylized actions and a reduction of gesture that
responds to the angular sets. In contrast the two young men and the bourgeois
woman played by Lil Dagover stand in a naturalistic style, dressed in cloaks, top hats
and morning coats in a manner that makes the sets more abstract, otherworldly
and close to a nightmare.30 A narrative mise en abyme, which both introduces the
story and concludes it, frames Caligari. As a result, the characters and the bizarre
world that envelops the viewers seem to be products of the narrator’s imagination,
as if these phantoms emanate from the core of our own souls. Filmmakers and set
designers work together to create a universe that then reflects itself in the light of
this constructed world.31

Town

In Caligari, the Expressionist treatment successfully evokes the latent features of a

small mediaeval town, with its dark, twisting back alleys boxed in by houses whose
inclined facades keep out all daylight. The town is presented as a mythic place, a
single entity far removed from all else around it. Caligari offers diverse forms that,
while never seen before, are readily recognizable as a town square, a police station,
the doctor’s house, and the student’s garret.
The Cabinet of Dr Caligari opens with an image of a town that resembles Lyonel
Feininger’s crystalline imagery.32 In the way a place emerges as an unfolding, the
town square in Caligari is recognizable as such, although composed of unfamiliar
forms. Fragments such as the street, the corner of a building, and the important
 26  GERMAN EXPRESSIONIST FILM
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Figure 1.1  The student garret, with light from the window painted on the floor
(The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, Robert Weine, 1919).

street lamp are assembled to compose an image of an urban whole. Films such as
Caligari or Metropolis, illustrate this notion of what key elements are required to
‘create’ a city. For example, the street lamp with its familiar silhouette, takes us from
the most unreal world of the film set to one we recognize as our own.

Bridges

In Caligari, the bridge represents the connection between two realms, one of the
human plane and the other unearthly, again suggesting a gathering together of
material and spiritual elements. Cesare carries Jane across a precipitous bridge, as
though wishing to convey her from the waking world to his twilight existence. Gaunt
trees lend a sinister air to the scene. Significantly, Cesare may not carry her beyond
the bridge and perishes himself when he tries to go further. Later, Caligari, by cross-
ing over the same bridge, also exchanges one world for another. He then passes
through a small gate and enters the lunatic asylum. Thus the bridge has linked the
two worlds, the wild, mad one of the town symbolized by Caligari as controller of
the murderous Cesare, and the institutionalized madness represented by Caligari
as director.
When Caligari gives a lecture in his guise as professor, he is dominated by the
shadowy presence on the wall to his right, larger, and far more menacing, an ‘exter-
nalisation of [his] inner self.’33 It is as if the camera, through its supernatural power
of both projection and recording, has captured and represented the character’s
 GERMAN EXPRESSIONIST FILM   27
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Figure 1.2  Cesare carries Jane across the bridge (The Cabinet of
Dr Caligari, Robert Weine, 1919).

true nature. The distortion emphasizes the evil of the character. However, as Victor
Stoichita makes clear, since the film is itself presented as the tale of a madman, it also
suggests an underlying aspect of film, that it incarnates the madman’s fantasies.34

The Golem

In medieval Prague Rabbi Loew constructs a man of clay, the Golem. The Golem is
brought to life by the positioning of a badge on his chest that spells out the word Truth,
but the removal of a single letter (Aleph) changes the word to Death, and so when the
letter is removed, the Golem is stilled.
In The Golem, houses appear as living entities and streets seem alive and preda-
tory. While acknowledging its mythic roots, the set refers more specifically to Gustav
Meyrink’s 1913 novel The Golem. Meyrink, son of a banker and an actor who were
not married to one another, became a director of a bank in Prague and well-known
man about town. He wrote the novel based on the traditional Jewish myth of the
Golem. In 1580, as the myth runs, Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel, called the Maharal
of Prague, made a Golem, a man made of clay brought to life, to protect the Jews.
In Meyrink’s novel, the sighting of the Golem is a spiritual epidemic that spreads
through a city in the shape of a mirage that expresses a genius loci characteristic of
the place itself, a traditional spirit that yearns for physical form.35 He describes the
houses in the Prague ghetto which have sprouted like weeds and seem to have an
insidious life of their own:
 28  GERMAN EXPRESSIONIST FILM

when the autumn evening mists stagnate in the streets and veil their imperceptible
grimace (. . .) I felt as if the houses were staring down at me with malicious
expressions full of nameless spite: the doors were black, gaping mouths in which the
tongues had rotted away, throats which might at any moment give out a piercing
cry, so piercing and full of hate that it would strike fear to the very roots of our soul.36

Poelzig designed the sets to seem organic and alive so that the expressive aspects
of the story, spirit made manifest, are apparent in the spirituality latent in the
architecture. When the film was released in 1920, the architecture of The Golem
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was such an overwhelming aspect of the film that Poelzig’s name was used on the
poster to advertise the film, one of the few times a designer has been used as a
selling point for a film.37 The film was enormously successful in its native Germany
and in the US. The Golem influenced Hollywood classics such as Frankenstein.38
The architect intended his version of Prague to be a dream rather than a rep-
resentation of a town itself and desired his buildings to have an active expression.39
The leaning-together buildings are literally organisms conspiring and whisper-
ing with one another in the background, described as ‘bandits making plans’.40 To
achieve a feeling of depth the houses are constructed not from flats, but from clay
like the Golem itself. Poelzig worked with his wife, Marianne Moeschke, to design
the set of the city of Prague that looks as if it is manually carved and twisted. Within,
the houses are full of ogive curves in an organic décor.41
In Poelzig’s designs, the film aesthetic draws from human form, expressing
a physiognomy of architecture. The windows and doors become both means of

Figure 1.3  Houses conspiring together in Prague (The Golem, Paul Wegener, 1920).
 GERMAN EXPRESSIONIST FILM   29
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Figure 1.4  Stair as ear (The Golem, Paul Wegener, 1920).

access and expressions of the spirit as the buildings assume characters of their
own. The filmmaker’s intent was to produce a film in which lines and curves gave
birth to faces. Windows become angry eyes and a door a mouth. The wall around
the ghetto is like an arm. Within Rabbi Loew’s house, the staircase is like an ear
that glows as the Golem, played by Wegener himself with blank eyes and Aryan
features, is brought to life.
In The Golem, divinity is explicit and visually manifest in the spirit of Ashtaroth
that appears and brings the word of life to the man made of formless clay, like
Heidegger’s jug, shaped for use. The mortal fear of the Golem’s power suggests
the easy crushing of human life by the Golem’s earthbound and earth originated
strength. Humanity’s very frailty evokes the nature of being human in a world sub-
ject to larger powers. Filmic tropes, such as a cat walking along a roofline, emphasize
our mortal existence on earth.

Architectural elements

In The Golem, any one passing between the Emperor’s palace and the Ghetto must
cross the bridge that mediates between the earthly court and the spiritual tribunal.
This bridge appears whenever a person from one world must set off to another. The
framing explicitly depicts how it rises from the ground, and forms a ground itself.
The other side does not appear in the frame. It is like a horizon, a link between earth
and sky, the earthly and the spiritual, forever receding from view.
 30  GERMAN EXPRESSIONIST FILM

Gates perform a similar mediating function between realms and like Janus’
gate provide a bridge between past and future, history and destiny. In The Golem,
a gate of gargantuan proportions divides the ghetto and the town of Prague
proper.42 The gate is the largest feature in the ghetto, and the door was designed
to move with massive heaviness to show the great weight of its presence, and
what it divided. Although gigantic, this gate is not the only division in the film.
Just as in Heidegger’s discussion of the shoes, which become an extension of
the wearer,43 the bridge becomes an extension of the land it joins, of the person
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traversing the bridge, and of the narrative itself. This conforms to the nature and
connotative meaning of bridges, as in bridging two disparate notions, mean-
ing to cover the ontological ground, or the opposite, an unbridgeable gulf in
understanding.

Film techniques

Director of photography Karl Freund, who also worked on Metropolis, captured

the film’s special effects using the equipment of the era that included dia-
phragms for shutter dissolves, iris diaphragm dissolves, and superimpositions
that were executed in camera by running the film through the camera twice.
As an architect accustomed to working with actual buildings, Poelzig’s designs
required parallel beams of light that are only possible with sunlight. For exam-
ple, in the design of the Rabbi’s laboratory, sunbeams swirling with dust were
meant to fall vertically from the roof. To achieve this effect, Freund worked with
Karl Richter, the set designer, to place the laboratory set in the sunlight and film
during the few hours when real sunbeams could be captured. However, actual
dust particles were not sufficiently luminous and a special dust was created, pre-
dominantly from finely ground mica. This highly reflective dust was scattered
in the air, where it stayed for some time. As the dust was so reflective, a mask
was created for the lamps and spot lights, thus creating a ‘dark zone’ around the
sunbeams.44
In another scene, in which the Rabbi and his assistant raise the spirit of Ashtaroth,
requiring the whole set to be filled with dark smoke, cylinders of carbon dioxide
were used to pipe gas into the interior of the laboratory. Although transparent like
air, carbon dioxide is heavier, and so lifted the smoke to reveal the figures (actually
two dummies representing the Rabbi and his assistant) passed out on the ground,
supposedly overcome by the spiritual experience.
Filmmakers play with, and more often manipulate, the viewers’ focus and atten-
tion. Wegener did not wish to use a cut in the shot where Rabbi Loew brings the
Golem to life, as this would destroy the verisimilitude. Relying on the illusion of film
and the imagination of the viewer, the camera turns from the clay Golem to the
Rabbi who walks towards the camera, filling the frame, so we don’t see the sculpted
clay figure being replaced with Wegener covered with clay. The camera does not
move, so when the Rabbi turns back to the Golem and places the parchment with
the magic word Truth, the man of clay opens his eyes and the Golem is brought to
life, all in one shot.45
 GERMAN EXPRESSIONIST FILM   31

In a blending of film and reality, in the 1930s Wegener walked through a Jewish
community in Amsterdam, and people gathered together whispering to each other
and pointing at him. When Wegener turned to enquire what was the matter, the
man he asked shied away from him. As the whispers became louder Wegener heard
them say: ‘The Golem! The Golem!’.46

Siegfried
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Siegfried travels through the forest of Odenwald and acquires both vassals and magical
attributes along the way.
Siegfried depicts the myths of the Nibelungen in pre-Christian Germany. As Tom
Gunning has shown, Siegfried has a chequered place in the history of film.47 It has
been attacked, along with other German films of the 1920s and 1930s, as a social
artefact of the rise of the Third Reich, a view expounded in Kracauer’s book, From
Caligari to Hitler.48 Although Kracauer singles out Die Nibelungen as incorporating
the idea of the superman and says that its pageantry foreshadowed that of the rally
in Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will, Lang claimed that Kracauer’s book under-
mined his intentions. 49 Lang wished to show that Germany was searching for a past
ideal, and to counteract the pessimistic spirit after the Great War, by looking towards
a legendary heritage, not towards a particular political future.
Part 1 of Die Nibelungen, The Death of Siegfried begins in the forest in which
dwell beings, both human and magical. The trees in Siegfried, cast from concrete,
add to the atmosphere of soulful destiny; their very strength and size reveals the
earth’s sustaining power and render his tale more mythic in spirit. The fourfold are
united in the opening scene of the film that depicts life in a community of the forest,
and the relation of the humans to the deities of the woods, and of the skies. These
trees connect the sky (by reaching so high up to it that the tops of the trees can-
not be seen) with the earth (by being rooted in and growing from it). Above the
lines of the trees, the heavens cast their overwhelming power to influence the fate
of humans and deities alike. Siegfried himself, with his blonde locks, seated on
the white horse, both at one with and emerging from the forest that has been his
home, evokes elements of the fourfold. In another example, Brunhilde, a proud
independent queen of a magical realm, crosses a bridge formed by her subjects,
submerged in water up to their necks, holding their shields horizontally to create
a bridge for her to walk along, to symbolize her crossing over to become herself
subject to a loveless entrapment.
Lang was born in Vienna. Son of an architect, he also studied architecture, but
abandoned it in preference for painting. Arnold Böcklin’s, The Silence of the Forest
(1896) inspired the scene of Siegfried emerging from the trees shrouded in both
mist and shadow. At the time, UFA the film production company, did not permit
the use of exteriors and all outdoor scenes had to be shot in studios. This was both
for budget purposes and also to have total control over the set. The forest, with
its concrete trees, was constructed on waste ground around the Tempelhof air-
port in the South of Berlin. The very artificiality of the landscape ensured it was a
 32  GERMAN EXPRESSIONIST FILM

gesamtkunstwerk or total work of art. Only through constructing his own land-
scape would Lang ensure it played a dynamic role in the plot.
Siegfried himself brings together the fourfold: earth in the linden leaf; sky in the
puff of air; mortality in Siegfried himself (made more so by the linden leaf that the
last dying wave of the dead dragon’s tail has wafted onto his unsuspecting back); and
divinity represented by the dragon’s blood he tastes (endowing him with supernat-
ural powers) and bathes in (protecting him). When Siegfried leaves the forest behind
for the court of the Burgundians, the sophisticated imagery exemplifies Lang’s atten-
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tion to monumental set design. The spatial geometry and reciprocity between the
composition and the camera frame determines the placement of the actors, but also
suggests the inevitability of destiny and the structuring of space.50 When the monu-
mental set design interacts with the composition of the characters, the overwhelming
sense of design structures spaces to create the relentless progression of the narrative.
The rich geometrical compositions, like a tonal construction or composition of space,
suggest a spiritual expression of white/black, good/evil, uncertainty/fate.51
German Expressionist films present a rhetoric of images based on synecdoche,
by which a part stands in for the whole, such that not only do Nosferatu’s extended
shadowy fingers stand in for the touch of the vampire, but also the image itself, as
a single frame, represents the menace and aesthetic of the film.52

CONNECTIONS BETWEEN ACTORS AND CHARACTERS

Generally, in the closed world of the Expressionist films, characters treat the unu-
sual rake of the floor, painted shadows, or inhabitable interiors as if utterly common
place. However, Lang’s film Dr Mabuse, The Gambler, includes an unusual reference
to Expressionism itself.53 In one scene, an art collecting Count shows his paintings
and sculptures to his guests and asks Dr Mabuse for his opinions:

Count von Todd: What are your views on Expressionism, Doctor?

Dr Mabuse: 
Expressionism is just playing about. – But anyway, why not play
about? Everything is playing about today.54

The conversation then reverts to spiel, meaning to play at cards. The art collection, a
combination of primitive, Fauvist, and Expressionist paintings and masks, expresses
the turbulent emotions of the characters, and Mabuse’s hypnotic power. The film
features artificial gardens, including fake cacti with fake thorns, and sensation seek-
ers who gamble and take part in séances to communicate with spirits.
Part of the language of film is the personality of the actor. Anyone who had seen
Rudolph Klein-Rogge as the evil inventor Rotwang, in Metropolis, would know not to
trust him as Dr Mabuse. When escaping from a gaming house with the state prose-
cutor in pursuit, Klein-Rogge dons a Caligari-like cloak and imitates Werner Krauss’s
tottering walk; from behind he looks just like the madman.55 Klein-Rogge also
played King Etzel in Die Nibelungen, and Haghi in Spies.56 He had been previously
married to scriptwriter Thea von Harbou, who divorced him in 1921 to marry Lang,
 GERMAN EXPRESSIONIST FILM   33

with whom she made many films, several of which starred Klein-Rogge. Von Harbou
also wrote scripts for Murnau and Carl Theodor Dreyer. She divorced Lang in 1933,
when he left the country, and directed two films of her own. Since she also worked
with directors whose political sympathies aligned with the National Socialists she
was briefly interned after 1945, but after her release continued to write for film. Paul
Richter, who played Edgar Hull in Dr Mabuse the Gambler, was later cast by Lang as
Siegfried, and gained the status of sexual idol, comparable to Rudolph Valentino in
the US.
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The set designers on Mabuse were a collection of professional and film archi-
tects and included Carl Stahl-Urach, a trained and professional architect, and Karl
Vollbrecht, one of the most renowned film architects in Germany of the 1920s and
1930s. Although Mabuse was Stahl-Urach’s only film, Vollbrecht had worked with
Erich Kettelhut and Erich Hunte. Vollbrecht is responsible for the concrete forest
in Die Nibelungen, as well as the 20 metre long dragon that required 17 operators
to create its movement. He worked with Lang on Metropolis, Woman in the Moon,
Spies, M, and The Testament of Dr Mabuse.57 After Lang left Germany, Vollbrecht
continued to work for other directors during the National Socialist era and on
propaganda films such as Jud Süss.58 Cameraman Carl Hoffman, who experimented
with lighting effects and was first to work with the unchained moving camera in
Murnau’s Faust, also filmed Dr Mabuse the Gambler. Described as a poet of images
and master of technique he was also cameraman on Die Nibelungen.

CONCLUSION

Architecture not only forms but also embodies situations where it becomes at
once less important (background) and more important, being a part of an onto-
logical and existential articulation. Rather than examining the film and parsing
its grammatical structure, expressions of the relationship with the deeper back-
ground bring elements forward into articulacy. Visualizing verbal descriptions of
the fourfold brings forward larger, more universal themes of our human position
on earth, the relation between realms both spiritual and material, and the place of
our human emotions in the agon of drama presented as narrative.
The legacy of German Expressionist film endures in different ways. It appears in
horror films, where buildings, whether frightening gothic castles or bland suburban
homes, can create nervous tension. We see it in a style of filming that led to film
noir and others, for example, Hitchcock’s Psycho.59 Norman Bates’ gothic house sits
menacingly on top of a hill; there is something both eerie and uncanny about the
porch of this house as it extends in silhouette, like ghostly and spindly fingers, ready
to grab the unsuspecting guests at the Bates motel. The legacy of German Expres-
sionism also continues in the theatrical works of Robert Wilson, or wherever the
atmosphere of a film set, or architectural design, expresses an emotional energy in a
manner we take for granted in contemporary film and aspire to in our architecture.
Despite the inherent menace of the narratives presented here, none of the film-
makers intend to darken dwelling itself. A vision such as Kriemhild’s death’s head
 34  GERMAN EXPRESSIONIST FILM

emerging from the foliage from Siegfried does not so much portend death as rein-
force life by focusing on the inevitability of death as part of life, while referring as
well to Lang’s regret for the dying out in our current era of the realm of myth.60

NOTES

  1 The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, dir. Robert Weine, Germany: Decla, 1919; The Golem, dir. Paul
Wegener, Germany: UFA, 1920; Die Nibelungen: Part 1, The Death of Siegfried, dir. Fritz
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Lang, Germany: Decla, 1924.

  2 Martin Heidegger, Poetry Language Thought (London: Harper Perennial, 1975).

  3 Dalibor Vesely, Architecture in the Age of Divided Representation; The Question of Creativity
in the Shadow of Production (London: MIT Press, 2004), 387.

  4 Lotte Eisner, The Haunted Screen (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 122.

  5 David Robinson, Das Cabinet Des Dr Caligari (London: British Film Institute, 1997), 33.

  6 Eisner, Haunted Screen, 8.

  7 Eisner, Haunted Screen, 8.

  8 Vesely, Architecture in the Age of Divided Representation, 144.

  9 Cavell, World Viewed, 196.

10 Spellbound, dir. Alfred Hitchcock, USA: RKO Radio Productions, 1945. Salvador Dali
designed the dream sequence.

11 Vesely, Architecture in the Age of Divided Representation, 28.

12 Raymond Geuss, ‘Politics and Architecture’ in Architecture and Justice, Jonathan Simon,
Nicholas Temple, and Renée Tobe, eds (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), 269.

13 Jo Leslie Collier, From Wagner to Murnau: The Transition of Romanticism from Stage to
Screen (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1988), 3.

14 Collier, From Wagner to Murnau, 34.

15 Collier, From Wagner to Murnau, 84.

16 Collier, From Wagner to Murnau, 71.

17 Eisner, Haunted Screen, 151. Sunrise; A Song of Two Humans, dir. F. W. Murnau, Germany:
UFA, 1927.

18 Faust, dir. F. W. Murnau, Germany: UFA, 1926.

19 Paul Rotha, “The Development of Cinema”, in For Film Goers Only: the intelligent filmgoers
guide to film (London: Faber and Faber Ltd., 1934), 27.

20 Eisner, Haunted Screen.

21 Heidegger, ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’ in Poetry Language Thought, pp. 143−62.

22 Heidegger, Poetry Language Thought.

23 Hubert Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World, A Commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time

(Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1990).
 GERMAN EXPRESSIONIST FILM   35

24 Heidegger, ‘Building Dwelling and Thinking’.

25 Heidegger, ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’, 357.

26 Heidegger, ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’, 360.

27 Heidegger, ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’, 152.

28 Eisner, Haunted Screen, 15.

29 Nosferatu, dir. F. W. Murnau. Germany: UFA, 1921.

30 Puaux, Françoise, Le Décor de Cinéma (Paris: Cahiers du Cinéma, 2008), 19.

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31 Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler, A Psychological History of the German Film
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966), 236.

32 Born in the US, Lyonel Feininger worked as comic strip illustrator and moved to
Germany where he created the cathedral woodcut for the cover of the Bauhaus
manifesto in 1919 but returned to the States in 1936 after the National Socialist party
decided Expressionist art was ‘degenerate art’ in 1933.

33 Victor Stoichita, A Short History of the Shadow (London: Reaktion Books, 1997).

34 Stoichita, History of the Shadow.

35 Gustav Meyrink, The Golem, trans. M. Mitchell (Sawtry: Dedalus, 1995), 59.

36 Meyrink, Golem, 51.

37 Claudia Dillman, ‘Hans Poelzig, Bauten Fur den Film,’ Kinematograph, 12 (1997).

38 Frankenstein, dir. James Whale. USA: Universal Pictures, 1921.

39 Neumann, Film Architecture, 66.

40 Dillman, ‘Hans Poelzig’.

41 Neumann, Film Architecture, 66.

42 Dillman, ‘Hans Poelzig’.

43 Just as in Heidegger’s discussion of Vincent Van Gogh’s painting A Pair of Shoes (1886)
suggests that shoes are an extension of the wearer, the bridge becomes an extension
of the land it joins, of the person traversing the bridge, and of the narrative itself.
44 Eisner, Haunted Screen, 70.
45 This technique, of the camera ‘looking’ elsewhere is used to great effect by
Michelangelo Antonioni in The Passenger where a murder takes place as the
camera glances out the window. The Passenger, dir. Michelangelo Antonioni. Italy:
Compagnia Cinematografica Champion/CIPI Cinematografica/Les Films Concordia,
1975.
46 Dillman, ‘Hans Poelzig’.

47 Tom Gunning The Films of Fritz Lang; allegories of vision and modernity (London: British
Film Institute, 2000).

48 Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler.

49 Triumph of the Will, dir. Leni Riefenstahl, Germany: Reichsparteitag Film, 1935.

50 Gunning, Films of Fritz Lang, 41.

 36  GERMAN EXPRESSIONIST FILM

51 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1 Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (London: The Athlone
Press, 1992), 113.

52 A more dynamic vehicle of metaphor than synecdoche is metonymy, in which there is

substitution of an attributive or other suggestive word for the name of the person or
thing meant, like the book on vampires for the vampire herself in Vampyr. In metonymy,
a part stands not for a whole, as in synecdoche, but for an associated object or an idea.
The ability to convey this is one of the most powerful aspects of film and the filmic
situation.

53 Dr Mabuse, The Gambler, dir. Fritz Lang, Germany: UFA, 1922.

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54 Dr Mabuse, Lang.

55 Werner Krauss was an avowed anti-Semite who played in Jud Süss a Nazi propaganda
film commissioned by Joseph Goebbels. Later, Conrad Veidt, whose wife was Jewish,
fled Nazi Germany to work in Hollywood where he was most often cast as a German
officer, such as his role as Major Strasser in Casablanca dir. Michael Curtiz. USA, 1942.

56 Spies, dir. Fritz Lang, Germany: UFA, 1928.

57 Woman in the Moon, dir. Fritz Lang, Germany: UFA, 1929; M, dir. Fritz Lang, Germany:
UFA, 1931; The Testament of Dr Mabuse, dir. Fritz Lang, Germany: UFA, 1932.

58 Jud Süss, dir. Veit Harlan, Germany: Terra Film, 1940.

59 Psycho, dir. Alfred Hitchcock, USA: Shamley Productions, 1960.

60 Gunning, Films of Fritz Lang, 39.

 2
French moderne, modernist noir, and moderns
as masters of reinvention
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FRENCH MODERNE VS. MODERNIST NOIR

Modernism is seductive, evocative, destructive and full of contradictions. Modernism

is both dark, tech-noir, the lair of the criminal mastermind, of technological evil
and white, light, glass and steel and transparent. This chapter is about the debate
between modernism as an attitude to living, as a statement of progress and mod-
ernism as a design expression. These often overlap and film offers some significant
examples worth examining.
Modernity as light and white utopia appears in a film such as Things to Come as
expressive of moving forward away from class and myth and tradition.1 The converse
is modernism as dark dystopia, with humans subject to machines, the prototypical
example of which is Lang’s Metropolis. In Metropolis modernism and modern tech-
nology appear as monstrous and lacking in humanity, devouring individuals and
individualism.
In the true modernist film, not just the set but the plot as well, is modern.2 The
narrative and characterization are enhanced by the modernist set design, and mod-
ernist filming techniques that include split screen, double exposure, or fancy lenses.
This modern world appears in non-Western films as well. For example, although
Japanese filmmakers such as Kenji Mizoguchi were more influenced by German
Expressionist films than French moderne, a Japanese film of the same era, A Page of
Madness, utilized avant-garde narrative techniques, such as double exposure and
abstraction of image, as well as mise en abyme.3

THE CULT OF THE INDIVIDUAL

Moderns were on the go, water skiing, flying airplanes, racing motorcars, or danc-
ing all night in nightclubs. As Kracauer describes in Film 1928, moderns aspired to a
society of light and laughter, drove about in Paris or Berlin, or down to the Riviera,
dressed ‘almost exclusively in sports clothes, or full evening attire’.4 Moderns were
 38  Modernism in film

never lost in the big city, for this was their real clothing (identity). They were engi-
neers or scientists, inventing things to extend or even reproduce life, and to expand
global communication. They were businessmen or financiers, applying scientific
principles to enhance productivity and extend the reach of their control. Moderns
travelled, experienced things, but always from within the clean white flannels and
well pressed linens of their modern dress. In films, women wore diaphanous white
dressing gowns, layers of feathers and furs, while men wore black and white for-
mal suits, capes, carried walking sticks and firmly rolled up umbrellas. Moderns were
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unrumpled, and capable of carrying their entire possessions in a single Louis Vuitton
valise or a worn leather Gladstone. They slipped in and out of different countries and
languages as easily as they shed their clothes and these they shed as often and eas-
ily as their various identities. Modernism is a sign that individuals are of their times;
rooted in the present.
Filmic as well as real life characters reinvented themselves in the spirit of the age,
and this self-promotion of the individual exemplifies modernism. The background
of modernist décor becomes the foreground for progress, adaptability, change and
the new. Filmmakers and architects shared an image of the future, of the individual,
moving forward, faster, into an unknown world, one where anything, from space
travel to individual reinvention, revivification even, was possible. The rhythm and
pace of modern life were captured in film, and modern dress, sets, and plots worked
together to present an image of modernity that suggested we were moving forward
into the future faster and more assuredly than ever before. We might lose our bal-
ance, or our identity, but never our optimism. It is this irrepressibility of modernity
that we look at here in this chapter, as expressed in the films and the characters who
shaped them.
Blaise Cendrars’ poetic tract, L’ABC du Cinema (begun in 1917 and completed in
1921), states that through the cinema everything is taken in through the senses,
rather than through the mind, and that while watching a film reality disappears into
a vague insignificant mist. Cendrars attempted to create an alphabet of cinema,
reflecting comments by both Abel Gance in France and D. W. Griffith in the US that
cinema required a new alphabet of visual elements, which, for Griffith at least, com-
prised first of all the close-up and the cut-out. Cendrars’ alphabet suggests that the
first element is the location, and, like Murnau, he suggests that the moving camera
sets itself and place and time in motion. Next is the cinema, the room, where a ‘cone
of light quivers above the audience’s head’, and the spectators themselves identify
with the actions, characters and emotions on the screen, ‘emote and even cry out’
as if participating in the action.5 His third element is the entire globe, the planet,
and the Earth, that he likens to the universe of our understanding and the urban
aspect of the cinema described by Le Corbusier: the crowd leaves the cinema, into
the street, streaming out, as if it can conquer established hierarchies, making every-
one equal and free. For Le Corbusier, the cigarette was invented for this difficulty:
‘one goes to light a cigarette and the breaking moment is allowed.’6 Le Corbusier’s
interests reposed in the experience of cinema as stark contrast to everyday life, the
gap between what is seen on the screen and the life the viewer embraces on turn-
ing toward a given reality. Finally, Cendrars concludes his four elements with Z, the
 Modernism in film   39

conclusion of the alphabet, deep within the human heart, not about vision at all,
or movement of the camera, or the cinema, but the return to every day life, and
suggests that the new generation will perceive things differently, through the revo-
lution of cinema. His description of cinema greatly influenced Fernand Léger, whose
Ballet mécanique may be seen as a response to the call for a creation of a new visual
alphabet comprised of ‘rhythm, word, life’.7
The story of Ballet mécanique is the story of Paris in the 1920s. Architects,
musicians, writers, thinkers, artists come together in a single place at a single
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time. Pablo Picasso, who painted the enormous figures on the sets of the Theatre
Champs Elysée for Erik Satie, Man Ray and his lover Kiki de Montparnasse, Margaret
Anderson publisher, with Jane Heap, of The Little Review, Sylvia Beach, whose
bookshop Shakespeare and Co on rue de L’Odeon was a mecca for writers and musi-
cians such as Ernest Hemingway, Wyndham Lewis, James Joyce, Ezra Pound and
the Surrealists, Tristan Tzara and sculptor Francis Picabia, all had individual ways
of dressing, of speaking and of being seen, as distinctive as the art for which they
were known. Paris offered an opportunity to exist and create, without the seeming
necessity to support oneself. A young American writer present at the time, Bravig
Imbs, wrote that in Paris the virtue was not economy but industry, suggesting
one can live on air, so long as one is busy at it.8 In the words of another writer,
the Americans in Paris in the 1920s ‘were all young when the war was on and that
made them all very serious. Then when the war was over at last, they just had to let
off steam, and they became the modern generation. All sorts of concepts were
tumbling and shattering.’9
George Antheil, who wrote the score for Ballet mécanique in Paris in the 1920s and
then scores for Hollywood films in the 1940s, exemplifies the spirit of modernism as
well as its expression. Antheil’s ‘transatlantic’ journeying brought him to Los Angeles
from New Jersey by way of Paris, Berlin and Vienna.10 Antheil’s notions of ‘space-time’
in music corresponded to Frederick Kiesler’s notions of the Endless House, not that
it is physically endless, but that it encompasses the endless rhythm of the everyday,
where everything happens all at once. Antheil creates music like the ‘building of the
edifice’ and, in the modernist way, utterly denies the question of style.11 In Paris in
the 1920s performances of these pieces, like the projections of Man Ray’s semi-ab-
stract shorts such as Le Retour à la Raison, caused uproar in audiences, and drew the
attention of all the celebrities of the day.
Although the idea of the film and music was intended to be a joint conception
of Léger, Dudley Murphy and Antheil, each, in their own individual way, pursued
their own form of expression. In those pre-talkie days no one seemed to mind
that there was no synchronization between sound and image. Antheil’s intentions
were not to copy the rhythms or even to demonstrate the beauty and precision
of machines. For Antheil, the words Ballet mécanique were ‘symbolic of the spiritual
exhaustion . . . non-sentimental’ period between the wars.12 When his symphony
Ballet mécanique was first performed, in order to engender the requisite publicity,
Antheil arranged that it be announced in the press through a false news agency
that he was lost in the Sahara, where he had supposedly gone while rhythm hunt-
ing. At the first performance, conducted by his friend Imbs wearing a dramatic
 40  Modernism in film

colourful costume, there were five pianos on stage and loudspeakers to amplify
the electric fans that took the place of the airplane propellers. Some audience
members got up and opened and closed their umbrellas as if to protest the gale
made by the fans. Surrealist artists called for them to sit down, a riot ensued and
Antheil’s fame was ensured.
Antheil’s riotous performances became memorialized in one of modernism’s
most iconic films, L’inhumaine, for which Robert Mallet-Stevens designed two exter-
nal sets, a villa and a laboratory.13 Fashion designer Paul Poiret designed the cos-
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tumes. In L’inhumaine the inhabitant of the villa Mallet-Stevens designed is an opera

singer incapable of human feelings, just as the décor of the villa, while being the
embodiment of expression of abstraction and style, is devoid of emotional content.
The film required a riot scene in a theatre. Anderson, lover of Georgette Leblanc,
the star and originator of the film, arranged that Antheil give a concert but told
him nothing about the film.14 Apparently unaware that he was part of a location
shoot, Antheil performed three pieces, Airplane Sonata, Death of the Machines, and
Mechanisms but did not understand why there were strong flood lights, unusual in
stage performances, and why Leblanc came on stage to approach his piano. The
cameraman filmed when, as anticipated an uproar ensued and careful viewers can
spot all the celebrity artists of the day in the audience.15
Everyone wanted to be famous and to be seen with those who were and if you
weren’t yet, you needed to announce to the world your genius so that you soon
would be. F. Scott Fitzgerald described Antheil as ‘his man’ but one who has pro-
duced one (and one only) significant piece of music.16 As Antheil himself states:
‘[n]obody knows better than I what a fickle and all-demanding bitch Fame is.’17 And,
as his friend Imbs suggests ‘George knew all about the power and value of public-
ity.’18 The whole nature of the story of Ballet mécanique is of promotion and self-
promotion and the freedom and reinvention, the open manipulation of the media,
associated with modernity. Ballet mécanique was a piece of its own time, represent-
ing as it does the headfast determination of modernism and the modernists to strike
out for themselves, make a statement, experiment, take chances, and use their lack
of experience or maturity as a strength to, as Fitzgerald writes: ‘go further, faster,
reach out further for the future that is always moving further away.’19 In the 1930s,
experiencing the threat of the approaching war, the American contributors to Ballet
mécanique, Antheil, Man Ray and Murphy, returned to the US. Their time in Paris had
prepared them for the artifice of the dream machine, and they each in their own way
found gainful employment in Hollywood.

1925 PARIS EXPOSITION INTERNATIONALE DES ARTS DÉCORATIFS ET

INDUSTRIELS MODERNES

The 1925 Paris Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes
brought together Le Corbusier, Mallet-Stevens, and Kiesler and introduced Americans
like Norman Bel Geddes and Cecil Gibbons to Art Deco style and modernism. Le
Corbusier was interested in ‘cinematic architecture’ as a means to capture motifs of
 Modernism in film   41

motion and sequence. Mallet-Stevens believed that film could be used to introduce
modern architecture to the public, while Viennese poet, philosopher and designer
Kiesler was interested in exploring representation of the ‘real.’ All three participated
in the 1925 Paris Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs; Le Corbusier designed
the Pavilion de l’Esprit Nouveau, Kiesler presented his ‘City in Space’ and Mallet-
Stevens contributed the Information Tower. Tag Gronberg, in her insightful discussion
of the 1925 Paris Exposition explains this differentiation between ‘decorative’ geome-
tries of the Expo and Mallet-Stevens’ and Le Corbusier well-ordered intentions.20
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The results of the expo, as expressed in Le Corbusier’s catalogue L’Esprit

Nouveau, were profound, although little if any trace remained in Paris. Décor
became modernity and, in the US, streamlined design. Streamlining was to help
resist the gravity that holds us down to earth and to our history, so we may move
more swiftly into the future. The 1925 Paris Exposition Internationale des Arts
Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes influenced American product and industrial
designers such as Bel Geddes, Donald Deskey, Russell Wright and Walter Teague
as well as Hollywood set designer Gibbons who journeyed to Paris specifically to
see the Expo and reinvented what they saw in their own style. Gibbons’ trip to Paris
enabled him to bring Art Decoratif and Arte Moderne to Hollywood and influenced
American design for years to come. Gibbons avant-garde modernistic settings
were credited, correctly, with affecting public taste.

ARCHITECTURE

Both Le Corbusier and Bel Geddes proposed future city designs for car manufactur-
ers, the Plan Voisin (1925) and the Metropolis of 1960 for General Motors in 1936.21

Le Corbusier

The penthouse Le Corbusier designed for Charles de Beistégui in 1929 epitomized

the modernist ethos. Intended not for domesticity but for parties, Le Corbusier
designed a promenade architecturale that merged the experience of the cinema
with actual Paris monuments.22 In this way the Arc de Triomphe and the Eiffel Tower
took on the character of ‘pictures’ hung on the wall of the sky.23 Le Corbusier wittily
arranged his theme of an architectural promenade so that the Beistégui penthouse
demonstrated fascinating reversals of the natural and the artificial.24 A rotating per-
iscope (for a camera obscura) encouraged inspection of the surrounding city as if
through a camera, and as the viewer panned across the urban skyline, framed the
landscape in a kind of establishing shot as at the opening of a film. Other cinematic
paraphernalia included a pop-up film projector and a screen on pulleys.25 The top
terrace was clearly arranged as an outdoor room, a sparsely furnished living room
enclosed by four walls, with a lawn constituting a green carpet and only the ceiling
missing. Deliberately picturesque, it was inspired directly from Surrealism, Giorgio
di Chirico in particular, and Le Corbusier applied an intuitive understanding of mon-
tage whereby two images are seen side by side, or one immediately after another,
 42  Modernism in film

thus generating a new and altogether different meaning.26 At one end of the
Beistégui solarium, a false Rococo fireplace seemed to sit with the Arc de Triomphe
on its mantelpiece, like an ormolu clock from a bourgeois household, referring to
René Magritte’s Surrealist paintings with a deliberate reversal of the expected.27

Richard Neutra and Robert Mallet-Stevens

Seminal buildings in architecture that include Richard Neutra’s Lovell Health

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House and Mallet-Stevens’ Villa Noaille were and still remain emblematic of the
era and spirit of modernism. Neutra’s Health House has appeared in several films.
Mallet-Stevens Villa Noaille, the star and inspiration for Man Ray’s Les Mystères du
Chateau de Dés, and his Villa Cavrois have appeared in films since their inception
and went on to inspire film sets from 1920s to the current era.28 These modern-
ist villas exemplify architectural photogenie, a term coined by Mallet-Stevens to
describe architecture that is photogenic not only in photographs, but is designed
to be so.

Robert Mallet-Stevens’ Villa Noailles (1923−27)

Mallet-Stevens insisted that modernism was the only appropriate style of architec-
ture in film on account of the use of light and shadow, perspective, form, camera
angle, and frame. He insists that modernist architecture offers the best background
for movement and to bring a scene to life with the actors as ornaments set into relief
by regular, preferably geometric, backdrops.
Mallet-Stevens complained that modern film sets were used exclusively to
suggest louche settings, such as nightclubs or the vamp’s pad.29 Mallet-Stevens
designed an ideal film set town, complete with archetypes such as post office, town
hall, or cinema, with large spaces in between for the movement of the camera.
Mallet-Stevens’ city is less an overall urban vision in the style of Le Corbusier Ville
Contemporaine, than an ‘urban paraphrase’, that is, a scenography of the city.30 He
states that cinema should not act as a model for architects to follow but that film is
a magnificent means of propaganda to educate the public in modern architecture.
Mallet-Stevens was convinced that modern design alone could do justice to the
supreme expressive power of silent film.31 Mallet-Stevens carefully outlined the way
sets must be designed and filmed.32 He strongly advised designers and architects
not to apply film set design to realized architectural projects as the proportions and
ornament appropriate to film were not appropriate to buildings.
In 1923 Vicomte de Noailles and his wife Marie-Laure commissioned Mallet-
Stevens to create a modern villa for their estate in Hyères, in the South of France.
On completion, Noailles, who felt the house looked like a film set, commissioned
Surrealist filmmaker Man Ray to film a documentary there. Man Ray, leading expo-
nent of cinéma pur, rejected such supposedly bourgeois concepts as character, set-
ting or plot. Since he felt the cubist spaces looked like dice, he suggested Stephane
Mallarmée’s poem Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hazard as the theme and created
 Modernism in film   43
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Figure 2.1  Coffered ceiling of swimming pool. Villa Noailles, Robert Mallet-Stevens, 1923
(photo by author).

the seminal masterpiece of modernity: the 20 minute film Les Mystères du Château de
Dé.33 In Château de Dé the playfulness of Mallet-Stevens modernist villa is expressed
in the movement of the characters.
The villa does not make a statement of modernism to the outside world, but rather
frames this world for the ‘moderns’ who inhabit its spaces, in the style described by
Fitzgerald as: watching the drama unfold.34 The villa’s rectangular openings (refer-
encing film frames) frame the view of the landscape and sea beyond. Everywhere
there is the indoor-outdoor duality, including an outdoor sleeping chamber and
sequence of terraces that invite both privacy and play, for where else does one play
but the Riviera?
The most familiar image from Man Ray’s film takes place in the swimming pool
that opens onto its own south-facing terrace. Coffered diagonal rooflights create a
playful dance of light and shadow on the water of the pool. Modern, attractive, and
entirely functional the genius of the swimming pool is to be the part of the villa one
most wishes to occupy.
Embedded within the villa, the rose salon also features the diagonal geometries
of the coffered ceiling. Lit by indirect light, with no single surface excepting the
floor free from Mallet-Stevens’ creativity, the rose salon is an object of design in its
entirety. Vertical and horizontal recesses and extensions serve no purpose except to
create patterns of light and shadow and inspire sensuality in the occupant.
In contrast, the triangular parterres of Gabriel Guvrekian’s cubist garden are like
the sharp, cold and uninviting facets of a jewel. Since the villa is surrounded by its
own luxurious park, it seems redundant or even indulgent to have a garden of its
own, especially one with so little verdure. Laid out like a diagonal checkerboard, the
 44  Modernism in film
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Figure 2.2  Outdoor sleeping chamber. Villa Noailles, Robert Mallet-Stevens, 1923
(photo by author).

garden does not invite contemplation, perambulation, or romance, but, as in the

style of photogenie, is designed to be appreciated visually through the door that
frames it symmetrically.

Neutra’s Lovell Health House (1929)

In the same year that Le Corbusier designed the Beistégui penthouse in Paris,
Neutra designed the Lovell Health House in Los Angeles. Neutra promised his
clients that he would give them architecture that would offer climate control,
improved health, and happiness itself.35 His book Survival Through Design most
expresses his views on environmental psychology and describes his belief that his
architecture could make a difference to the physical and psychological well-being
of the inhabitants.36 Neutra believed his architecture would guarantee his clients
 Modernism in film   45
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Figure 2.3  Terrace with film strip openings that frame the landscape. Villa Noailles,
Robert Mallet-Stevens, 1923 (photo by author).

a good sex life, produce physically, mentally and emotionally healthy children
and prevent physical distress and illness, as well as ecologically improve the
environment.
Neutra’s Lovell Health House, while espousing the International Style’s skeletal
steel structure, clad in synthetic skin, uses the language of modernism in a manner
intended to be expressive of the health of the inhabitants. Its asymmetrical composi-
tion of dramatically suspended floors and open plan layout was meant to also reflect
the ideology of the client, a physician and naturopath.37 Despite being designed to
promote good health through light and space, the Lovell Health House appears in
films in a negative context. For example, among the many films in which it appears,
in LA Confidential it becomes the abode of crooked developer Pierce Morehouse
Patchett, whose name suggests sharpness, extensive building, and cover ups.38

Richard Neutra’s house for Josef von Sternberg

Hollywood director, the self-styled Josef von Sternberg commissioned Neutra to

build a house in 1934 as a retreat. Neutra’s description of his client expresses both
the focus on control, and freedom with his life that characterizes the filmmaker,
whose ‘von’ was his own invention.39 Working with the producer meant living and
breathing with his latest films, as the architectural budget depended on the films’
success, all of which seemed, to Neutra, to depend on deciding how a character
should open a door in order to further the plot.40 Neutra expresses this narrative
aspect of the sequential nature of architecture unfolding as we experience it in his
autobiography when he states:
 46  Modernism in film
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Figure 2.4  Villa as stacked dice. Villa Noailles, Robert Mallet-Stevens, 1923
(photo by author).

. . . I myself have so very often gone beyond program requirement, fact, and physical
site, and spun a thread, woven a fabric of my own, when I began to design. An
architect can also be a storyteller; first of all he tells stories to himself, sees worlds of
his own.41

Neutra was himself no stranger to self-promotion and in the 1960s, ever the modern
man, he wrote a letter to publisher Hugh Hefner in an attempt to insinuate himself
into ‘The Bachelor Pad’ a regular column in Playboy that featured modern designs.42
The house Neutra designed for von Sternberg was enlivened by a series of
Hollywood style ‘special effects’ that extended into the landscape. These included
a white aluminium clad patio wall, like metal film reels. It frames the landscape but,
rather than bringing the outside inside through borrowed landscape, keeps the wild
landscape out, and the interiors cool and controlled within. As Neutra describes:
‘by pushing a button, the illumination changed so that the grating, together with
 Modernism in film   47
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Figure 2.5  Coffered ceiling in rose salon. Villa Noailles, Robert Mallet-Stevens, 1923
(photo by author).

Figure 2.6  Rose salon. Villa Noailles, Robert Mallet-Stevens, 1923 (photo by author).

the polaroid bedroom windowpanes, turned fully opaque and impenetrable to the
eye.’43 This stainless steel grating, so finely woven as to be practically transparent
afforded a view on the lily pond also referred to as the moat. Sternberg sold the
house just before the Second World War, and it passed through several hands before
being purchased in the 1940s by Ayn Rand who wrote The Fountainhead there. It was
demolished in 1972.44
 48  Modernism in film

Holiday House

The last Neutra house we look at brings us back to the individuals behind Ballet
mécanique. On his return to the US, Murphy was exemplary in finding both image
and substance through design, self-promotion and reinvention. Influenced by the
visual impact of Ballet mécanique, Gloria Swanson hired Murphy to create the spe-
cial effects sequences of a film about a mystic who tries to foresee the future, and
again in What a Widow for the animated titles.45 Although set in Paris, the film fea-
tured Neutra’s Lovell Health House for exterior shots, while Paul Nelson designed
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the interiors. Murphy wrote a script about Manhattan entitled Skyscraper and Cecil B.
DeMille’s company purchased it, but gave the film for development to, among other
scenarists, Rand, then working in Hollywood as a script writer.46 Although ultimately
rejected by the studio, her reworking of Murphy’s script resembled her 1943 novel,
The Fountainhead. In the 1940s, expanding on his role of ‘man about town’, where
the town is Hollywood, Murphy commissioned Neutra to design the Holiday House
intended as hotel and restaurant, a discrete Malibu getaway.47

BALLET MÉCANIQUE

Ballet mécanique exemplifies many visual aspects of modernism. Although Léger is

credited with being the director it is a collaborative work, Murphy and Léger created
the film together and many more claim credit for originating the idea. Léger, Antheil
(who composed the music intended to accompany the film), Man Ray and Pound all
claimed they originated the concept. Murphy’s interest in compositional framing, in
figure and narrative, are apparent. Léger’s love of machines, of close-up, depersonal-
ization of the human face and body, and the attempt to replicate the modern experi-
ence of reality, and the film’s iconography verify his contribution.48
Ballet mécanique features special effects, double and triple exposures, different
lenses, reverse images, pendulums, mechanisms, the female partners of the film
makers (Katherine Hawley Murphy and Kiki de Montparnasse), visual puns, dancing
mannequin legs, a parrot and fairground attractions as well as the lustrous spinning
gears of modernity.
A scene of a pendulum swinging towards and away from the viewer reveals both
the camera and the filmmakers reflected in its polished convex surface. The butter-
fly lips of Kiki de Montparnasse, lover of Man Ray, appear right side up and upside
down, emphasizing the compositional play within the frame. Like the flashing trian-
gle and circle, they act as a musical refrain. The purpose of Ballet mécanique is not to
tell a story, but to create an original visual language or new art form, innovative and
creative within the field of moving image culture.

MODERNIST NOIR

Filmmakers in the modern era established a level of experimentation and under-

standing of film set design that is still current. Film set design and modern architecture
 Modernism in film   49

have persistently influenced one another in a fashion noted carefully by both his-
torical and contemporary critics. Film set designers and architects approach particu-
lar issues in similar ways, playing with ‘background’ so as to render it at once both
special and normal. The work of both set designer and architect requires that each
understands what is required to make a stair elegant, or daunting; a room happy,
sad, inviting or frightening; or what is required to compose an image of the urban
whole. Modern architecture plays a specific role in this dialogue. For example, in
the films of Jacques Tati, especially Playtime, modern architecture teases the char-
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acters.49
Modern architecture also links the evil villains from German Expressionist films
of the 1920s, through Hollywood film noir in the 1930s and 1940s, to the James
Bond franchise, technological genius, sexually deviant, and criminally mastermind.
Films such as Lang’s Spies or Dr Mabuse emphasize the arch villain who manipulates
the mechanics of the human soul as easily as the mechanics of finance.50
Perhaps this is because both villain and modernism share a desire for global dom-
inance, exemplified when Henry Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson named the
cubist form, clean white lines, steel, glass, and concrete of Neutra, the International
Style to express its expected universality.51
In Spies the underworld is where modernism reigns. Master criminal Haghi is
identified with his modern office that includes a smooth, polished, streamlined
surface of his desk that sports a built-in control panel and a transparent 24–hour
clock. Haghi operates a hidden viewer with multiple screens that show where
any of his accomplices are at any given time. He runs an international espionage

Figure 2.7  Stairs behind the mastercriminal’s office (Spies, Fritz Lang, 1928).
 50  Modernism in film

organization and, at the touch of a button on his desk, behind him automated
doors open to reveal stairs going up and down at the same time, with people
moving about, his pawns, doing his bidding.52

Identity

Despite Mallet-Stevens’ best efforts, modernism and villainy remained inter-

twined in film. Films such as Metropolis emphasize the ambiguous role of the
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engineer in modernism, manipulator of technology, with twisted humanity, try-

ing to resurrect his love through a machine, whereas L’inhumaine features the
engineer unambiguously as the romantic male lead. On the other hand, The Black
Cat presents an engineer so unambiguously bad (he is both Satanist and World
War One traitor) he is played by none other than Boris Karloff, with the suggestive
name, Poelzig.53 He resides in a menacing modernist house that features a glass-
block wall in front of which an open tread steel staircase curls upwards, as well as
intercommunication devices.

THE WHITE MODERNE HOLLYWOOD: RICHARD DAY AND CEDRIC GIBBONS

Film set designers Gibbons and Richard Day were, along with Bel Geddes the 100
designers chosen by Herbert Hoover to attend the 1925 Paris Exposition Internationale
des Arts Décoratifs. While Bel Geddes returned from Paris to promote streamlined
design, the visual vocabulary of Art Deco and streamline moderne was brought to

Figure 2.8  Art Deco stair (The Black Cat, Edgar R. Ulmer, 1934).
 Modernism in film   51

Hollywood cinema by Gibbons and Day. Gibbons was MGM’s principal production
designer and proponent of modernism in film design. His designs were drawn in
accordance with his philosophy of clean, uncluttered, functional and often highly
stylized sets. Gibbons designed the Art Deco sets for Emerald City in The Wizard of
Oz as well as the academy award statuette itself.54
Some of the art directors also worked on small architectural projects. Lyle
Wheeler built the Beverly Hills Post Office and Randall Duell (they worked for differ-
ent Hollywood studios) designed, more appropriately, several amusement theme
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parks.55 Gibbons designed his own house in 1930 as a paradigm of modernism to

showcase his movie star wife, Dolores Del Rio. Featured in the film Twilight, the
house is described as ‘Le Corbusier’s Villa Stein gone Hollywood’.56 While ostensi-
bly telling a story about a husband and wife, played by Gene Hackman and Susan
Sarandon playing actors, the main character of the story is the architecture. The
entire house is full of framing techniques, like recessed niches over the doorways
and an inverted stairway to paradise of lights. A brushed steel staircase and modern
interiors, with their high contrast solids and voids, add elaborate stepped inden-
tations. Decorative geometric recesses on the outside, inside, around doors and
windows do not frame views but frame the inhabitants that make every walking
into a room a dramatic entrance. The bathroom (always a feature in the Hollywood
home) originally had all black fixtures and was mirrored floor to ceiling. The piano
nobile main living room is situated on the first floor for the effect of climbing the
stairs and for views.

FUTURE MODERNISM

Two British films demonstrate different means of looking at modernism in film: High
Treason and Things to Come.57 High Treason features an earlier version of Buckminster
Fuller’s Dymaxion Car, and a terrorist explosion of a channel tunnel train in a future
1940. Things to Come, a rambling story of war, destruction and social possibilities
over 100 years, ends with some seminal modernist design.
High Treason presents some remarkably moderne sets such as a distinctive Art
Deco opening cityscape situated in the 1950s and futuristic sets and costumes as well
as a ‘televisor’ that mechanically rose and retreated into a slot beneath the table.58
An ultramodern bathroom, complete with a drying machine that dispenses with
the need for towels, demonstrates touches of innovation that celebrate the spirit of
modernity. Other futuristic modernist devices include a mechanical orchestra, that
has a conductor but no musicians playing the instruments.

Things to Come

The technique of showing a set and then destroying it is used in Things to Come,
where, the Cinema in particular as symbol of modernism (both the Teague designed
Art Deco lettering and the cinema itself ) is blown apart.59 Adapted from a novel by
H. G. Wells, Things to Come presents the creation of a new world, Everytown, a bright
 52  Modernism in film

light, white streamlined world, where, although deep underground, one looks to the
sky. William Cameron Menzies’ concern with set design over, for example, dialogue
is apparent to any who have sat through this long arduous film. One breathes a sigh
of relief when we finally get to the future, and don’t really care whether the story
makes sense or not. Wells specifically requested that the future world be as opposite
to Lang’s Metropolis as possible. In his future, everyone worked together, as a com-
munity; machinery, yes, but mechanized, no.60
Menzies’ Things to Come includes Everytown of 2036 and draws on both Le
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Corbusier and Oliver Hill in a smorgasbord of modernist design that fuses both
European and American modernism.61 Here is the familiar image of flying walkways,
white, clean, streamlined horizontal ribs, transparent lifts, and trees growing on
balconies.62
Things to Come features a short film sequence by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy to show
the building of a futurist utopia. Moholy-Nagy had made a five-and-a-half min-
ute film to represent the rebuilding of the city but only a few seconds were used
and intercut with found footage of turbines. Art director Victor Korda at first hired
Léger, because of his designs for the laboratory for L’inhumaine, with their cogs and
wheels, pendulums, assistants in shiny black or white coveralls, flashing lights and
dials. Unfortunately, Wells found Léger’s sketches too ‘kinetic’ and too like Ballet
mécanique. The team next approached Le Corbusier, but when Le Corbusier read
the script, he felt that the future inhabitants of Wells’ twenty-first century city were
in themselves far too old-fashioned to occupy his Ville Contemporaine, designed in
1922. He also rejected the notion of the city underground.
At this point Korda ransacked libraries for avant-garde furniture designs,
architectural fantasies, every form of flying machine, transportation devices,
from monorails to bubble cars, and televisual communications. He drew from Le
Corbusier Vers Une Architecture the idea of the geometrically laid out garden city.
Bel Geddes ocean liner designs appeared in the airships, villa, television screen
and tanks. Korda had looked at the designs by Hill for the Exhibition for British
Industrial Design in the Home in 1933 and these influenced the furniture that
included a glass bed, while rooms and staircases resembled Serge Chermayeff
and Mendelsohn’s De La Warr Pavilion at Bexhill, built in 1935. The space gun itself
inspired others, such as Raymond Loewy and his Rocketport for the Transport for
Tomorrow exhibition at the Chrysler Motors Pavilion at the 1939−40 New York
World’s Fair.

CONCLUSION

Cities and modernity are intrinsically linked. Iconic modernist films Manhatta,
L’inhumaine, and Metropolis respond not only to the speed of the city, but to that of
a particular city, Manhattan, the most modern metropolis.63
The visual style of modernity is also exemplified in non-urban films, such as
Man Ray’s Les Mystères du Château de Dé. The Villa Noailles, designed for nothing
except pleasure, both captures and expresses Thomas Elsaessar’s thesis that the
very notion of modernity is a particular attitude to life; the increase in leisure time
 Modernism in film   53

and patterns of consumption.64 The other literary and artistic modernisms of the
1910−1920s, such as German Dada and French Surrealism, found resonance in the
experimental work of artists who were working at the interface between the avant-
garde and commercial advertising.
Modernism represented something different in the 1910s than it did post–First
World War in the 1920s and in the 1930s took on an excess in itself, correspond-
ing to the Hollywood talkies and the MGM musicals. The ‘pure cinema’ of the art
world that included films such as Emak Bakia, Le Retour à la Raison, Blood of a Poet,
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Entr’acte, Anémic Cinéma as well as Ballet mécanique devolved into the celebration
of vast consumption and the conspicuous fictions of Hollywood.65 The self-invention
of the modernist era in Paris that had enabled individuals to shed the cultural and
historical baggage in favour of selfhood and creation, transmuted to falseness in
Hollywood in the 1930s.
In this chapter there is little discussion of spatial imagination, which does not
suggest that modernist filmmaking exits the cave, but that avant-garde individuals
invent their own shadows while simultaneously being seduced by them. In sum-
mary, styles originating in art or architecture often find a platform for implementa-
tion in film. These styles, which come to represent particular social issues or cultural
conditions, gain familiarity on screen, and are then reproduced in architecture, in
order to reproduce the context in which they are portrayed. The notion of simulta-
neity and of surrounding aural and visual projections continues to influence archi-
tectural and theatrical design where a place may be many things. Films provide a
language of design reference where the intention is not to reproduce the details of
a film, but to replicate the exhibited mood or intensity.

NOTES

  1 Things to Come, dir. Cameron Menzies, UK: London Film Productions, 1936.

  2 1920s films often depict modern subject matter, such as The Wind (Victor Sjöström,
1928) in which Lillian Gish encounters the difficulties of being a single woman.

  3 A Page of Madness, dir. Teinosuke Kinugasa, Japan, 1926.

  4 Siegfried Kracauer, The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, trans T. Levin (London: Harvard
University Press, 1995), 310.

  5 Blaise Cendrars, Modernities and Other Writings, trans. E. Allen, ed. M. Chefdor (Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 1992).

  6 ‘Au cinéma, il est une chose que n’est pas encore résolue: c’est la manière don’t les
spectateurs quittent l’écran. La manière don’t ils retrouvent le trottoir de leurs pieds, le
trottoir de la vie quotidienne et banale. Ils s’en vont . . . se poussent vers le trottoir . . . Il n’y
a rien de plus! Il ne se passe rien . . . C’est désespérant de tourner ainsi le dos à l’écran en
s’en allant . . . On invente la cigarette pour cela; on sort en allumant une cigarette, et le
geste de rupture est consenti. Je crois qu’il y a là un état de choses qui reste à résoudre
dans le cinéma, un trou qui’il rest à combler.’ André Barsacq, Architecture et Dramaturgie
(Paris: Flammarion, 1950), 167−8.

  7 Cendrars, Modernities; Ballet mécanique, dir. Fernand Léger and Dudley Murphy, France,
1924.
 54  Modernism in film

  8 Bravig Imbs, Confessions of Another Young Man (New York: Henkle-Yewdale House,
Inc., 1936).

  9 Eric Mowbray Knight, You Play the Black and the Red Comes Up (Berkeley: Black Lizard
Books, 1986), 86.

10 George Antheil’s opera Transatlantic (1927) was truly transatlantic. Not only was it set on
an ocean liner, but it was the first US opera to be produced overseas.

11 George Antheil, Bad Boy of Music (New York: Da Capo Press, 1981), 127.

12 Antheil, Bad Boy of Music, 139.

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13 L’inhumaine, dir. Marcel L’Herbier, France, 1924.

14 Margaret Andersen, My Thirty Years’ War (New York: Covici, Friede Publishers, 1930), 256–8.

15 Renée Tobe, ‘The Inhuman One: The Mythology of Architect as Réalisateur’ in

Architecture and Authorship, editors Katja Grillner, Tim Anstey, Rolf Hughes (London:
Black Dog, 2007), 108–117.

16 F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender is the Night (London: Harmondsworth, 1986), 18.

17 Antheil, Bad Boy of Music, 141.

18 Imbs, Confessions, 46.

19 F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (London: Penguin, 1987), 140.

20 Tag Gronberg, Designs on Modernity: exhibiting the city in 1920s Paris (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 1998), 42.

21 Self-styled Norman Bel Geddes took his name from his first wife, Helen Belle Schneider
with whom he worked.

22 Beatriz Colomina, Privacy and Publicity, Architecture as Mass Media (London: MIT Press,
1994), 301.

23 Vesely, Architecture in the Age of Divided Representation, 344.

24 William Curtis, Le Corbusier: Ideas and Form (Oxford: Phaidon, 1986), 110.

25 Stanislaus Von Moos, Le Corbusier: Elements of a Synthesis (New York: MIT Press, 1979), 84.

26 von Moos, Le Corbusier, 256.

27 Alexander Gorlin, “The Ghost in the Machine: Surrealism in the Work of Le Corbusier,” in
Perspecta 18, 1982, 51−65.

28 Villa Cavrois appears in Holy Motors, dir. Leos Carax, France: Wild Bunch/Arte Cinema/
PierreGrisProductions, 2012.

29 The word ‘vamp’ itself originates from the era of the silent film, from Theda Bara’s
depiction of the man-eating woman in A Fool There Was (Frank Powell, 1915).

30 Fernando Montès, ‘Case vitesse et coin obscur’ in Rob. Mallet-Stevens, architecte

(Brussels: A.A.M., 1980), 64.

31 ‘Que le cinéma fasse appel davantage aux architectes modernes et cela dans tous
les pays; (. . .) que la propagande magnifique du cinéma serve plus comme moyen
d’éducation du public et moins comme modèle à reproduire par les architectes.’ Robert
Mallet-Stevens, “Le Cinéma et les Arts L’Architecture” in Marcel L’Herbier, Intelligence du
Cinematographe (Paris: Editions Correa, 1948), 290.
 Modernism in film   55

32 Odile Vaillant, “Robert Mallet-Stevens - Architecture, Cinema and Poetics,” in François

Penz and Maureen Thomas, Méliès, Mallet-Stevens and Multi-Media (London: British Film
Institute, 1998).

33 Man Ray had previously made four other Surrealist films.

34 Fitzgerald, Tender is the Night.

35 Sylvia Lavin, Form Follows Libido: Architecture and Richard Neutra in a Psychoanalytic
Culture (London: MIT Press, 2004).

36 Sylvia Lavin, “Open the box: Richard Neutra and the psychology of the domestic
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environment,” assemblage 40 (December 1999), 18. Also Richard Neutra, Survival Through
Design (Oxford: Oxford University Press,1969).

37 Kenneth Frampton, Modern Architecture: A Critical History (London: Thames and Hudson,
2007), 248.

38 LA Confidential, dir. Curtis Hanson. USA: Regency Enterprises, 1997. Also see: Renée Tobe
“Modernist Noir” in Perspectives (15:4) Winter 2007, 16−18.

39 In the context of self-invention, ‘vons’ floated around in the 1920s. George Antheil,
composer of the score for Ballet mécanique, describes a German conductor of his
symphony as Schultz von Dornburg, who was in fact, Rudolph Schulz-Dornburg.
(Antheil, Bad Boy of Music, 46).

40 Richard Neutra, Life and Shape (Los Angeles: Atara Press, 2009), 188 and 285.

41 Neutra, Life and Shape, 188.

42 Beatriz Colomina, Playboy, The Total Interior, 1953-1979, 31 October, 2013, Lecture, AA.

43 Neutra, Life and Shape, 288.

44 Lavin, ‘Open the Box,’ 81.

45 What a Widow starring Gloria Swanson as a widow in Paris, is considered a lost film. It
exists only in a few stills, and in title cards. What a Widow, dir. Alan Dwan, USA: Gloria
Productions, 1930.

46 Susan Delson, Dudley Murphy; Hollywood Wild Card (Minneapolis: University of

Minnesota Press, 2006), 77.

47 Delson, Dudley Murphy, 183.

48 Malcolm Turvey, “The Avant-Garde and the “New Spirit”: The Case of Ballet mécanique,”
October 102 (Fall 2002), 46−7.

49 Playtime, dir. Jacques Tati, France, 1967.

50 Thomas Elsaessar, Weimar Cinema and after: Germany’s Historical Imaginary (London:
Routledge, 2000), 402 and Spies, dir. Fritz Lang, Germany: UFA, 1927.

51 Kenneth Frampton, Modern Architecture.

52 Haghi is the proto-type for villainous industrialist, Zorg, in The Fifth Element
(Luc Besson, 1997).

53 The Black Cat, dir. Edgar Ulmer, USA, 1934.

54 Beverly Heisner, Hollywood Art; Art Direction in the Day of the Great Studios (London:
McFarland and Company, Inc Publishers, 1990), 39 and Wizard of Oz, dir. Victor Fleming,
USA: Loews, 1939.
 56  Modernism in film

55 Heisner, Hollywood Art, 38.

56 Patricia Leigh Brown, “A Moderne Masterpiece Revived; Producer Joe Roth Refreshes
Cedric Gibbons L.A. Home” in Architectural Digest (65: 3) March 2008, 175–82. Twilight,
dir. Robert Benton, USA: Paramount Pictures 1998.

57 High Treason, dir. Maurice Elvey, UK: Gaumont, 1929. Other notable films from the same
era include the science fiction comedy Just Imagine (David Butler, 1930) that featured an
Art Deco city, and multipurpose clothing.

58 Tim Bergfelder, Sue Harris, and Sarah Street, Film Architecture and the Transnational
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Imagination; Set Design in 1930s European Cinema (London: Amsterdam University Press,
2005), 252.

59 Bergfelder et al, Transnational Imagination.

60 Christopher Frayling, Things to Come (London: British Film Institute, 1995), 49.

61 Frayling, Things To Come.

62 This design was mirrored in Detroit’s Renaissance Centre and Los Angeles’ Bonaventure
Hotel, both designed by John Portman in 1976.

63 Manhatta, dir. Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand, USA, 1921.

64 Elsaessar, Weimer Germany and After, 390.

65 Emak Bakia, dir. Man Ray, France, 1926; Le Retour à la Raison, dir. Man Ray, France, 1923;
Blood of a Poet, dir. Jean Cocteau, France, 1930; Entr’acte, dir. René Clair, France, 1924;
Anémic Cinéma, dir. Marcel Duchamp, France, 1926.
 3
The domestic front: Hollywood and post-war cinema
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Cities in post-war Hollywood films differed from the modernist city symphonies of
the era between the wars as self-invention and focus on the individual evolved into
a retreat into social masses through either fascism or socialism in the Second World
War and then, post-war, to the individual family unit safely ensconced in the haven
of the modern appliance filled single family dwelling. Second World War films
emphasized ‘the home front’, that is the domestic life that war propaganda told
soldiers they had been fighting to protect. The films themselves open a renewed
interest in domesticity and its depiction in film, post-war fears, and expressions of
modern urban and suburban dwelling. The films discussed in this chapter feature
domestic interiors and cities as central themes of the narrative and include: Dead
End, Laura, The Best Years of Our Lives, Where the Sidewalk Ends, The Big Heat, and
The Man with the Golden Arm.1

CLASSICAL HOLLYWOOD FILMMAKING

Kracauer, for whom filmmaking itself is the essence of modernity, suggests we relax
into our cinema seat passively ‘gawking into the darkness;’ absorbed in the narra-
tive of someone else’s life. Watching the vicissitudes of others on the ‘large blue
hole’ of the screen with no distractions is a knitting together of reality and illusion.2
Directors worked with cinematographers and production and set designers to
ensure absolute integrity of the narrative, supported by temporal and spatial con-
tinuity. Films of this era are exemplified by the classical Hollywood style in which
the technique of filmmaking erases itself. The distinctive look and means of telling
a story of classical narrative space in the Hollywood style developed from silent
film, and was a reflection of developments in film stock, and other technological
advances.
Kracauer’s message suggests we see film, and, whatever its style, we recognize
reality. For Kracauer the camera does more than record, it ‘reveals things normally
unseen.’3 Close-ups, for example, provide an extra beat of emphasis on specific
 58  HOLLYWOOD AND POST-WAR CINEMA

objects or characters’ expressions.4 Close-ups focus our attention not only on

physical, but also on sociological details otherwise missed or taken for granted as
part of the background to everyday life. The camera focuses our notice on certain
aspects of the plot, lighting, or atmosphere. After this, we understand various shots
singling out the individual characters and objects for closer inspection as part of
the larger surroundings already shown. The constancy and stability of the ‘world’
depicted enables this transference of recognition to take place.
Theodor Adorno, following Kracauer, criticized classical Hollywood cinema for
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succeeding too well in its goal and described us as victims absorbed by the world
of the movie, losing our own foothold in reality. Adorno goes on to say that ‘real life
is becoming indistinguishable from the movies.’5 He felt the sound film in particular,
with its ‘relentless’ rush of fact, left no room for the imagination of the viewer who
does not see editing or technical mechanics but is absorbed by the images on the
screen. Adorno feared the mimetic power of film by which we are too played by the
film. Concerned with an oppressive ideology, Adorno was responding to the sta-
bility of situation required to create a film, a sequence of visual and aural images
in which we get lost. We become so absorbed that the details of production, or set
design become invisible and architecture provides the basis of that stability.
Types of shots, which form part of the language of filmmaking, may impart
entirely different tones in different films. For example, the 360-degree track may
enclose a character or two characters in a private world (the camera circles them);
the same shot can also create the impression of a world spinning out of control (the
camera stands in for the character’s viewpoint), or suggest an overwhelming soli-
tude (a camera circling through an empty landscape) or entrapment, as when the
camera tracks 360 degrees through an interior. Individual visual units (shots, scenes,
or sequences as well as transitions such as dissolves, fades and visual links) must
each be an essential component without which the visually conceived narrative
would not be complete.6

Reality and image

The mechanical means by which film creates ‘reality’ has its own school and fascina-
tion. In 1946, Bazin claimed film’s inventors possessed a vision of film as the medium
capable of producing a flawless representation of reality.7 Bazin called this vision ‘the
myth of total cinema,’ and predicted that, just as cinema in its history to 1946 had
added sound and colour, filmmakers would continue to search for new techniques
for making ever more lifelike reproductions of the world. Classical Hollywood nar-
rative erases the technique, making it invisible. This contrasts with the avant-garde
that brings the image and technical aspects to notice. ‘Reality’ is enabled through
the careful contrivance of artifice and is rendered ‘more real’ through aesthetic and
mechanical devices.
While filmmakers may opt for avant-garde or compositional techniques, or
harsh shadows developed in earlier filmmaking styles, they seek primarily to cre-
ate a believable spatial narrative where we do not ‘see’ the film but the ‘world’ it
 HOLLYWOOD AND POST-WAR CINEMA   59

presents.8 For example, American avant-garde films such as Maya Deren’s Meshes of
the Afternoon disrupted established notions of temporal and spatial congruence.9
The ‘realism’ of the 1940s was a result of filmmakers and their cinematographers
being influenced by the post-war Italian neorealist films. Rossellini’s, Rome, Open
City and De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves featured documentary style filming of poverty and
non-actors.10 Film noir directors were influenced by neorealism with its emphasis
on location photography and dark urban settings but not the neorealist ideology,
opting instead for their own message of the city being equated with fun, excite-
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ment and danger. While absorbed in the film our imagination becomes a vehicle
of orientation that captures and transforms the metaphoric image, shaping spatial
experience.11

Classical Hollywood narrative

Classical Hollywood films are ‘realistic’. They are comprehensible and unambiguous.
They represent life by imitating it. A description of the filmmaker’s nightmare directs
attention to the intriguing ambiguity of the cinema; not that film brings reality to
the viewer but, as Adorno warned, it conflates the distinction between reality and
illusion.
The artifice of the Hollywood hills is portrayed in Eric Knight’s pulp fiction novel:
‘It’s just a movie set. If you go around the other side of that mountain, you’ll see
nothing but two by fours holding up the canvas.’12 His manipulative director (who
could easily have been von Sternberg or many others), expounds:

“It’s because,” he whispered, “because the rest of the world is a movie. I know. I’ve
tried. I’ve made a picture in Baffin’s Bay and I made one in Sumatra. And it’s no good.
Because the places are exactly like a movie travelogue. They won’t be different.
Wherever I go the world won’t be itself. It becomes a movie set the moment I get
there. And I can’t go any further. If I go to Europe that will become a movie too.
Everywhere I went it would become a process shot or a travelogue, until there’d be no
world left. Only a movie of the world.”13

In Hollywood, centre of the culture industry, manufacturing dreams and realities,

films shape our perception of what we see in the given world; the world becomes a
movie, and the movies become the world.
In the mimetic process the reality we see becomes the world we imagine. Film is
attractive to architecture because of the way in which it embodies a possible world
mimetically grounded in the visual domain. The articulated language of filmmaking
enables film to be a medium by which meaning is communicated to us, and the
more attuned the film is to our actual life, the more this meaning resonates. Mimesis
opens the way for both type and symbol to transfer, impart, and disclose meaning.
Mimesis does not mean Platonic mimesis, understood as redoubling of presence,
but is applied to extend Aristotle’s mimesis of praxis to contemporary film. Mimesis
of praxis specifies pre-understanding of human action where to ‘be’ an actor takes
‘being’ from copying individuals.14
 60  HOLLYWOOD AND POST-WAR CINEMA

This discussion commences with an examination of how film establishes its sit-
uation by carefully investigating opening scenes. In film of the twentieth century,
mimesis belongs as part of the reciprocity of the actual world and a filmic world of
illusion and human imagination. Film is a creative product which is not reality or
illusion or even the two combined. A film may be more real than the events of the
world, in view of certain insights that only film can offer. For example, The Best Years
of Our Lives appertains to a certain place (middle America) and time (post Second
World War) and weaves the poignant issues looked at here into a larger picture.
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Film techniques

Although Kracauer criticizes details when they are treated like embellishments
rather than visual narrative and points out the codes of visual perception, he also
criticizes formal visual links that erase transition as we look at the screen. Framing
and rhyming images mean our eye is where the director wants it on the screen so
we see what is important. Kracauer is particularly critical of the ocular metaphor
by which two things are linked because they have a visual resemblance in order to
create a smooth transition in the narrative, providing a purely formal visual combi-
nation of disconnected elements.15 Visual links make transition from one scene to
another easier on the eye and therefore for the mind.16
In contrast to Kracauer’s often perceptive cultural critique, Arnheim describes
how we think in shapes such that ‘[c]oncepts tend to crystallize into simple, well-
shaped forms.’17 Arnheim describes the projection of film (composed of single
frames following one another in rapid succession) as phenomenologically charac-
terized as ‘neither absolutely two-dimensional nor absolutely three-dimensional but
something in between.’18
The film techniques established in the 1920s had become systematized and
sophisticated codes by the 1930s and 40s. In the silent era, with its machine age
veneration, it was more usual to show pistons of the express train engine (the code
for a rail journey) when the hero went traveling, while in the era of sound the whistle
of the train leaving the station and the conductor calling ‘all aboard’ was more likely.
The non-diegetic fragments (visual sequences that tell us what is happening but not
necessarily progressing the narrative), criticized by Kracauer as of ‘only ornamen-
tal significance’, became directly part of the richness of the situation established in
film.19
Kracauer’s essay Film 1928 criticizes the way the ‘world’ is presented in film. Streets,
he suggests, are constructed in such a way that it is clear they lead nowhere. While
Kracauer’s critique of film is accurate, it skims over film’s representational capacity
for ‘presenting’ reality, rather than representing it as a documentary would. We do
not need to know where the street leads, as we are focused on the action in front
of us. Does this break reality? Or does the classic narrative illusion help us overcome
it, not question it. Kracauer criticizes this verisimilitude but we, the viewers, under-
stand the code that becomes part of the narrative, like the filmmaking techniques,
and we get variations within a theme.
 HOLLYWOOD AND POST-WAR CINEMA   61

Sound is as effective as vision. In silent filmmaking it was difficult to move the

camera, although the camera could focus in different directions, and due to lighting
and film stock, the centre of the frame was predominantly where the action took
place. A different visual language was required as sound restricted changes in scale.
It didn’t make sense, for example, for the audience to be able to hear a couple having
a conversation from far away. The camera comes closer so we can ‘hear’ the conver-
sation. Different forms of editing, such as suture and cross-cutting, were introduced
to suggest the nature of a two-way conversation.
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Different storytelling techniques developed with technical advances in film­

making. In the rectangular film frame there is always a perceptual centre that deter-
mines a dominant direction and can either provide stability or suggest duplicity.20
By the 1940s, the increased sensitivity of film meant the camera could pick out two
black shapes next to one another (and not read them as a single shape), and this
allowed a reduction in the intensity of lighting. It also meant make-up could be more
subtle and opened the opportunity for different kinds of focus, not just the central
or soft focus of the 1920s but options of focus on middle ground. Multiple cameras
that allowed cinematographers to do different things were another change.
Three-point lighting establishes a background, middle ground and foreground.
Three-point lighting highlights the subject with the keylight while the back and fill
light control the highlights and shadows. Diffusion filters were translucent filters
placed in front of the lens to create that dreamy haze, often used in close-ups of
the female romantic lead. Scenes could be lit in high or low key. High key shoot-
ing, where multiple lights are used to reduce or even get rid of shadows altogether,
gives films an upbeat feel. Low key, familiar from film noir, emphasizes shadows and
contrast, but also means each scene must be carefully crafted and lit individually.
Filmmakers, working with cinematographers, choose from a selection of approaches
that include filming with tracking shots, pans, rapid cuts or long takes.
The relevance of the cause and effect temporal and spatial logic of classical
Hollywood narrative techniques becomes important when filmmakers deviate
from this, putting desire, fantasy, reality, and logic into question in their films. These
became signatures of the films of the 1960s and 1970s.

Composition of the time-image

In analysing any film, our mind and brain perceive imperceptibly a series of compo-
sitional questions, set out meticulously by the cinematographer and director. These
include: who occupies frame centre? Who is moving in the frame? What are the sig-
nificant elements in foreground and in close-up? What are the thematic important
elements in a distant plane?
We want to make sense of things out of order, so we put them in sequence, we
fill in the gaps narratively, spatially, or temporally.21 Visual illusion demands we con-
stantly test expectations. Perceptual illusion requires we participate; we don’t copy
reality but create a new model.22 No story tells all. We complete the narrative so it
makes sense to us. Just as we fill in the gaps between frames to create moving image,
 62  HOLLYWOOD AND POST-WAR CINEMA

we fill in the gaps of what we don’t see. We make inferences, draw our own conclu-
sions, based on our expectations and past experience.23 The mystery film makes the
narration more overt. In film noir, the narratives don’t even need to be that good, we
want to know what happens next because we can’t ‘see’ everything, the alley has a
bend in it, the fog obscures the identity of the character scurrying away, the shadows
evoke mystery and imagination. Unifying features include framing, narrative, tempo-
ral and stylistic devices and our visual perception explains how these work together.
The highly coded system of steep high and low angles of the 1920s silent film
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evolved as devices changed in the 1930s and 40s. Deep focus and many planes of
action in the frame, and the viewer’s more sophisticated understanding that time
and space are interconnected, allowed more experimentation in the films. While
there is a variation within this theme the technique itself becomes identified with
1940s depiction of space in the classical Hollywood style. As Nöel Burch says the
diegetic world becomes an environment – but this is not illusion or fooling the eye
but, as Merleau-Ponty suggests in the perception of space, the viewer creates an
environment through visual clues.24 The viewer identifies with the centrally embrac-
ing view of the camera and its monocular perspective.25 Our eyes’ binocular field
of vision is full of solid objects but we see this field from only one point at a given
moment.

Movement-image

While Deleuze’s books on film are more comments on philosophy than on movie
making, they differentiate between what he calls the movement-image and the
time-image in film. Deleuze’s action-image corresponds to classical Hollywood
filmmaking where movement appears as an organized set of actions segmented
in space and time.26 This also includes montage and flashbacks and how spaces
are linked in time through chains of action and reaction, as well as logical relation
of cause and effect. In the most simple terms we hear a knock on a door on the
soundtrack (cause). An actor gets up from a chair, walks across a room and opens a
door (effect). Sometimes action is hidden and disclosed only later. For example, in
Citizen Kane a man dying in a grand house mutters a word whose meaning is dis-
closed only in the final scene of the film, when his old sled, with the name ‘Rosebud’
painted on it, is thrown on the fire.27 The movement-image helps us understand
Bergson’s notion of durée; how long does it take to get up and walk across the room;
how long to stand looking at the person on the other side of the doorway before
letting them in?
If the movement-image has both temporal and spatial logic, the time-image links
thought and memory so we can move simultaneously back and forth in time as in
a hall of mirrors. The time-image relates to films such as Alain Resnais’ Last Year in
Marienbad where not only do we move interchangeably from one place to another
but we are never certain that the narrator is telling us the truth. In another example,
Hiroshima, Mon Amour we neither know nor care if the story has temporal or spatial
congruity.28 This marks developments in filmmaking discussed in the next chapter.
 HOLLYWOOD AND POST-WAR CINEMA   63

PLACES AND SPACES

The relations of systems: narrative; logic; time; space interact each with the other. For
example, interiors of hotels in particular are misrepresented, and details of social sit-
uations even more so. The hotel lobby appears as a recognizable symbol of public/
private space where one is both ‘at home’ and ‘not at home’. It is about gathering and
waiting, possibilities of the chance encounter. While Kracauer suggests that no real
hotel lobbies look like they do in the movies, we recognize and embrace this fact, as
part of the highly stylized code of filmmaking. Hotels may not look like real hotels
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do but they represent themselves. For example, in Grand Hotel, in which Greta Garbo
longs for solitude and where people come and go, the lobby stands in for all of life
itself, a centre of civilization where individuals interact but also pass without seeing
one another.29
Classical Hollywood narrative montage, in which a story is told by a sequence of
shots is an effective means to show development of character, and may condense a
great amount of information, including space and time. For montage to work effec-
tively the shots must all be similar in nature, lighting and framing. For example, in
Laura, Waldo Lydecker explains to the detective how he shaped Laura’s career and
persona through a montage depicting her meeting clients, learning to dress and
how to act. Each scene matches the other in terms of grey scale and actors set in the
middle distance.
The coded language of montage sequences such as nightclubs with their swing-
ing saxophones, swaying musicians and wild dancers becomes a familiar refrain that
encourages us to enjoy the visual formula. For example, the bar scene at Los Eisely
from Star Wars not only conforms in every manner to this visual code but also refers
to Rick’s Bar in Casablanca, a place many of us wish we could frequent.30 Casablanca,
as Umberto Eco suggests, has entered our collective consciousness through the play
of clichés.31 We wish we were Humphrey Bogart, or Ingrid Bergman, want to ask Sam
to play our favourite tune, and so this becomes a visual code for pleasure when we
recognize it in film.

INDUSTRY AND STYLE

It is a film’s job to entertain us for a set amount of time, and to take our minds else-
where, to transport us to another world. Escapism was manufactured just to do that.
Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s culture industry is not a culture that arises spontane-
ously from the masses, it is produced just for us.32 The culture industry is not about
techniques of communication (although we analyze them here) but the spirit that
puffs them up into existence. Adorno and Horkheimer replaced the phrase mass
culture with the term culture industry to differentiate it from popular culture, which
is what Kracauer responds to.33
Kracauer suggests that advertisements such as illuminated signs on rooftops were
designed to distract us from our tedium, which he describes as an urban ennui, with
our lives ‘spooling by like a filmstrip’.34 Watching films and strolling in the modern
 64  HOLLYWOOD AND POST-WAR CINEMA

city with its endless, eternally lit advertising become conflated, as we let the images
play out in front of us, and we lose track of time in their endless flow.35 We forget
about ourselves watching, and are captivated until the end. In avant-garde films we
often ‘watch ourselves watch’ but in film noir we are in thrall to a world of people and
events, real or fictive, that makes something out of nothing. While Stiegler argues
that this is the result of the technics of sound and light, and of the moving image,
Kracauer suggests it is the mimesis of praxis, the imitation of life that we recognize
as being like, but distinct from, our own.
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FILM NOIR

Film noir often employed the German Expressionist art directors or cinematogra-
phers who had moved to Hollywood after or during the war. The dark shadows,
stairs and corridors familiar from German Expressionist films reappeared in film noir
to set the noirish tone.36 Urban noir dramas, with wicked gangsters and their equally
duplicitous molls could only take place in the city, far away from the safe suburbs.
Film noir, with its dark urban streets and dangerous underbelly of crime provides the
negative side that emphasizes the benefits of the light bright suburban house and
family, where the wife is always in the kitchen waiting with dinner and a smile. The
Big Heat demonstrates how the suburbs can be infiltrated when Glenn Ford’s detec-
tive loses his wife in a car bomb intended for him. Laura demonstrates the dangers
of being an independent woman without a ‘real’ man, and Where the Sidewalk Ends
contrasts uptown with downtown. Each film has its own visual language, to do with
composition and form, as well as narrative, such as formal framing of each apart-
ment in Laura, the location shots in Where the Sidewalk Ends, and the characters who
are part of their surroundings in The Big Heat.
In film noir, the opening shot plunges us directly into the narrative. The films
typically begin ‘in media res’, or in the midst of things. A story is told from the
midpoint, rather than from the beginning, opening up dramatic action. There is
no prequel, no establishing shot or framing story. The detective walks in on the
middle of the murder investigation for example, then the story is told in flashback.
In film noir, the actor and the character are often interchangeable, for example,
Dana Andrews and Gene Tierney’s success in Laura led to them being cast again in
Where the Sidewalk Ends. And in any film, Humphrey Bogart is always himself. For
this reason, I generally refer to the actor rather than the name of character in the
discussion of these films.

Dead End

In Dead End Humphrey Bogart plays gangster Baby Face Martin returning to the
‘dead end’ streets where he had grown up, the East River tenements. Dead End shows
the speeded up pace of life in the city, where an entire drama of life and death is
played out in a single day and only the rich have time to be bored. The film focuses
on the life but also the squalor of the tenements and features an idealistic, socially
 HOLLYWOOD AND POST-WAR CINEMA   65

driven, and therefore unemployed, architect who wishes to build modern buildings
to make life better for everyone. We see the wealthy who live so high up they are
indistinguishable from one another. The rich are aloof, lacking individual identities,
untouchable and untouched.
Dead End features few interiors. It is all about the street (the title) and contrast
between the ‘dead end’ slum with its individuals and characters, and the modern
buildings that replace them, substituting humanity with faceless and inhumane
individuals. The film contrasts the tenement housing with the building of new lux-
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ury apartments such as Sutton Place at 53rd Street in Manhattan or River House,
(designed by Bottomley, Wagner, and White in 1931) used as a location shot in the
film. It begins with a tracking shot that cuts seamlessly from painted backdrop of a
Manhattan skyline that includes the Rockefeller Centre and model set of rooftops to
a stage set, then a location shot of River House, and then back to the stage set, and
then a back projection shot of the East River and the Williamsburg Bridge. In case
we have forgotten that this is really a story about a city, it finishes the same way
reversing the process.
The stage set of the East River in which the action takes place draws from the
original Bel Geddes designed stage production, with its vertical layers such as roof-
tops, balconies, and the hidden space below the wharf to demonstrate high and low
life. A triumph of modernism in its own way, Dead End conceals its artifice through
continuity and invisible storytelling, not unlike the modernist models that the film
showcases. Painted backdrop, rear projections of the Williamsburg Bridge, and loca-
tion shots of River House, blend with the tenement stage set where people sleep on
balconies, shake out carpets, and dive into the river off the wharf.
The wealthy tenants of the new modernist block are presented as superficial and
engage in revelry while murder and mayhem take place on the streets below where
people traverse the narrow lane that leads from the river, back and forth, in and out,
up and down. This is not the ‘busyness’ of a commercial city block but the crowded
tenement with old, young, men, women walking through the scene. This makes for
the dense organization of the actors and sets and emphasizes a claustrophobic feel
that suggests that for some characters at least there will be no escape.
Contrasting parallels in Dead End include the morning routines of the rich and the
poor boy. Compositionally the two scenes formally parallel one another. The diag-
onal line of the iron bedstead and the white ironing board used by the poor boy’s
mother in the one room apartment replaces the same angle of the concrete balcony
on the terrace where the rich boy breakfasts served by his maid.
The film frame is arranged to gain ‘space’ for characters to enter or to show a
gap or where a character is missing. For example, Humphrey Bogart in the centre
of the frame, leans on the metal pipe railing of the stairs that divide the expensive
modern block, with its doorman sweeping away the smallest dust, from the older
tenements. This stair delineates the worlds, frames the action and establishes a
mediated space. It becomes symbolic of the divide between the new rich East River
dwellers who live ‘above’ in their white building with white clean pressed clothes,
and those who live ‘below’ on the street. Bogart, in the centre of the frame, leans on
the railing. There is an empty space at the top left of the frame. Claire Trevor, playing
 66  HOLLYWOOD AND POST-WAR CINEMA

his old sweetheart appears in that empty space at the top left, getting larger in the
frame (and in the story) as she walks towards him. The direction of Bogart’s gaze
gives the viewer an eyeline match, that is, a guideline of where to look to see what
Bogart looks at, that is, the approach of his old flame. She enters the ‘sweet spot’
(the centre third of the frame) where Bogart notices her. This deep perspective shot
is followed by a close-framing and cross-cutting for the actual conversation whose
dialogue reveals that they have both reached dead ends.
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Laura

In Laura detective Dana Andrews investigates the murder of a young woman. Much
of the action takes place in her apartment. In the film the woman turns out not to
be dead and the plot turns on furnishings − things that the characters pick up, set
down, doors they walk through, décor that tells us who the character is. Spatial con-
figuration allows a character to enter the mise en scène and make their way unen-
cumbered to the foreground. We want to know what will happen next, so we follow
the movement, either of the character, or the camera.37

Waldo’s apartment

Waldo Lydecker’s apartment becomes a leitmotif of decorative ornament from the

opening scene of the film. The intrigue depends on a grandfather clock, the twin
of which is in Laura’s apartment. When Dana Andrews, who appears framed by

Figure 3.1  The grandfather clock in Waldo Lydecker’s apartment (Laura, Otto Preminger, 1944).
 HOLLYWOOD AND POST-WAR CINEMA   67

glass cabinets of ornaments that could be in a museum (suggesting that the owner
wishes to possess beauty and keep it on a shelf ) says: ‘nice place you have here’, the
owner responds from his elaborate bath which appears to be in an open plan dress-
ing room: ‘[i]t’s lavish but I call it home’. Whether overly pompous or subtly elegant,
décor acts as a dynamic element. The camera gives physicality to the objects, as if
looking things over, and fills out the form as it moves past. It also gives form to the
occupant. The round fluted columns of Waldo’s apartment disguise the 45 degree
angles in which the apartment sets are designed to open the space and allow free
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movement of the camera. Waldo’s apartment unfolds impossibly, expanding as the

camera (and the detective) discover it. One must walk through his extraordinarily
large bathroom in order to reach the bedroom.

Laura’s apartment

Dana Andrews looks around Laura’s apartment. As he enters her bedroom, Laura’s
portrait that dominates her apartment is framed through the doorway as if she is
watching him penetrate her intimacy. There is a similarity of style (predominant chi-
noiserie) in Laura’s apartment and that of her mentor Waldo, but Laura’s is gendered
entirely feminine. On a table sits her white Bakelite telephone. The camera picks out
the folds of drapery in Laura’s apartment where everything has frills and flowers and
walls are adorned with floral paintings. Windows in Laura’s apartment have flow-
ered pelmets, drapery and lace curtains. Tassels and ribbons abound on every frilled
lampshade. There are ornaments galore and even the book shelves are filled with

Figure 3.2  Waldo Lydecker in the bath (Laura, Otto Preminger, 1944).
 68  HOLLYWOOD AND POST-WAR CINEMA

figurines. As if part of the apartment itself, the maid wears a dress with a pattern that
matches the décor. By the door stands an elaborate grandfather clock, the partner
of which is in Waldo’s apartment.
Laura’s apartment, like Waldo’s penthouse, is constructed from forms and spaces
rather than rooms, with noted exceptions in the bedroom and the kitchen. The
importance of background lighting allows dramas to be played out on different
planes, as in the impromptu ‘welcome back’ party in Laura’s apartment.
In classic filmmaking, the dissolve often indicates duration. We see how much
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time has passed when we see what has happened, sometimes a clock has moved
forward, other times, we see a sun that has risen, or set. Other means to show time
passing include the fade-out or fade-in (where the screen goes blank). Laura has
a distinct example of durée and it marks the centre or pivot of the film itself and a
distinct change in filming that makes us wake up.
Making himself at home in what he thinks is a murdered girl’s apartment, Dana
Andrews looks at her painting, and pours himself a drink. One image of him drink-
ing dissolves into another, suggesting that he has been there a while and had a few
drinks. Dana Andrews’ head hits the back of the chair, and he falls asleep. The camera,
stepping out of its role as passive narrator zooms in on him for a close-up and then,
in the same shot, zooms out again, suggesting the passage of time. It is as if he falls
asleep – and we look at him and see him sleeping, then retreat. Although filmed in a
single shot, it suggests that he has been asleep for a while. When filmic diegesis dwells
on dramatically meaningless details or intervals, (such as a close-up of Dana Andrews
with his eyes closed on the chair), duration comes forward, as if shooting in ‘real’ time.

Figure 3.3  Laura’s portrait watches her three admirers invade her bedroom
(Laura, Otto Preminger, 1944).
 HOLLYWOOD AND POST-WAR CINEMA   69

When Laura (played by Gene Tierney) arrives, she seems to have walked right
out of her own portrait. She is framed so that the painting is always in the back-
ground, wherever she stands. Laura wears only wears plain clothes with straight
lines, no florals like her décor. The linearity of her dress (signifying her uprightness)
is emphasized by the horizontal stripes of the venetian blinds omnipresent in film
noir. As in Waldo’s apartment, it is not possible to draw out Laura’s apartment in
plan. The areas that constitute the kitchen on one side and the living and bedrooms
on the other would in fact exist in the neighbouring building if consistent with the
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external shot.

Where the Sidewalk Ends

On a concrete sidewalk, scrawled in chalk like the outline of a dead body are the
opening credits of the film, Where the Sidewalk Ends. A man’s legs walk over them.
Then a woman walks past. On the soundtrack, whistling suggests a louche street life
emphasized when, preceded by his shadow, another man’s legs appear and pause
and turn as if to admire the woman. The whistling continues. The second man keeps
walking off the pavement and steps into a flowing gutter. The camera lingers on the
water flowing down the drain, filled with the detritus of the street, follows the feet
to the river, and then returns to the sewer. Within the opening credits, we see the
whole story: men; sleaze; trash; the sidewalk that ends not at a building (destination)
or a road (journey), but at the end of the road for the flotsam and jetsam of the city.

Figure 3.4  The parking garage was shot on location. The camera is in the lift,
so that when the cars drive in we rise along with them until they reverse
out on the top floor (Where the Sidewalk Ends, Otto Preminger, 1950).
 70  HOLLYWOOD AND POST-WAR CINEMA

Following this opening scene a deep focus shot shows a city street at night. The
film frequently uses the device of the split screen to suggest duplicity, that more
than one thing is going on, as though activities or events are hidden as if behind a
screen. In the sequence following the opening credits a car faces us in the centre
of the frame as if it is parked on the street. Within the rectangular geometry of the
screen frame, the centre holds particular gravity.38 On the left of the car people walk
along the pavement away from us and traffic approaches on the right. In the next
sequence we see a mid-shot of two policemen in a moving squad car, while on the
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soundtrack the dispatcher clearly outlines a crime, followed by a litany of numbers

specifying time and place. As the car takes off, with the Holland Tunnel in the back-
ground, we know we are in the realm of film noir, in that slippery blend of fact and
fiction, the detective film.
In Otto Preminger’s film, Where the Sidewalk Ends street signs and advertisements
appear all over: on the roof of a taxi, flashing in the street, bringing us back to the
reality of the world of entertainment, where the ‘Sunlight’ soap sign (the name
of a popular soap at the time) we see at the beginning is a suggestion that the
double-dealing perfidy will be cleaned up by the end of the film.
In this film, Gene Tierney plays a model who wears Oleg Cassini’s stylish clothes,
hats, and wraps. Cassini (who was her real life husband) plays Oleg, a fashion
designer. Dana Andrews again plays a detective, but this time one with a violent
past. Classic film noir, Where The Sidewalk Ends is described as ‘drenched in the per-
manent night and rain of New York’ and as ‘moving through spaces and doorways’
with an ‘utterly pervasive sense of urban despair’.39
There are several different domestic interiors: rooming houses (for the itiner-
ant crook), apartments (for married couples and families) and hotels (for the single
man) that all come together to summarize the working class life in New York of
the era. Gene Tierney’s apartment that she shares with her taxi driver father, is tidy,
if extremely modest; has curtains of a kind of translucent material that is slightly
frilly, somewhat lacy and suggestive of a female occupant, framing a view of the
Brooklyn Bridge. Dana Andrew’s hotel on West 54th street is both tidy and mascu-
line. Everything is in its place, which also suggests that when Gene Tierney has to
stay over and sleeps on the couch with a healthy and manly New York Athletic Club
blanket over her, her chasteness will remain in place. In contrast to the domestic
interiors with their beds that don’t fit in the rooms, the lawyers’ office is in a high-rise
office building with the requisite Manhattan view, its bookshelves clean neat and
orderly as befits a man of the law. Even the venetian blinds make horizontal lines
rather than the usual diagonal shadows.
The gangster’s place of business is the massage table at the Turkish Baths where
he is naked, wrapped in a towel. Film noir gangsters are exposed, naked, physical,
threatening, and seem to always be having massages, a sign of their sensuality, or
their sexual ambiguity. In the final scene, Dana Andrews meets the gangster (played
by Gary Merrill) at the East River and is taken to a parking garage, turned into a space
with furniture, armchairs and a desk, another ambiguous gangster’s office. The film
was shot on location in Washington Heights. The parking garage, a trope often used
to great effect, offers dynamic framing, geometric and formal composition, entirely
 HOLLYWOOD AND POST-WAR CINEMA   71

different from the close framing of the film up until this point. Dana Andrews, a real
man, in contrast to the sexually ambiguous gangster, understands how to use the
gears and mechanisms against the bad guys and catches them in the industrial lift
so that their car, symbol of the getaway, becomes trapped in a box, in a parking
garage, a symbolic end to the gangster and the title of the film.

The Big Heat

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The final film noir we look at is Lang’s The Big Heat. The Big Heat contrasts the
sophisticated modern urban life of the gangster with the suburban domestic
house of the detective. Glenn Ford’s ranch style suburban house represents a mod-
est scene of happy family life. In this house the gingham apron and the housewife’s
dress and the wall paper and the frill on the curtains are all part of the curl of his
wife’s hair. In The Big Heat, costumes coordinate with the set in which the char-
acter belongs. A gangster’s colourful (in a black and white film) suit matches the
colourful décor of the flat where he appears. Gloria Grahame, playing gangster
Lee Marvin’s moll is part of the décor of the penthouse apartment they occupy
together, with her dresses and her constant looking in the mirrored walls to adjust
her hair and make-up.
The most interesting set is Lee Marvin’s penthouse apartment – glitzy and mod-
ern with decorated pilasters that may be either marble or marbleized. The pent-
house has a feeling of spaciousness, and undefined spaces that flow one into the
other. Geometric screens stand in front of geometric wallpaper, and superficial
decoration define the spaces. The height of 1950s modernity, the penthouse apart-
ment features abstract works of art, a small Easter Island type statue, and contem-
porary furniture. Its almost impossibly high ceilings mean there can be no doors,
but instead it has elaborate marble framed doorways.40 A terrace that wraps around
the apartment on at least two sides shows it is a penthouse with a view over the
city. There are mediating spaces between the larger areas at the entrance; nothing
is defined, all flows into one another.
In The Big Heat, the spaces between the rooms seem to feature as much as the
rooms or areas themselves. In particular, the vestibule between the front room and
the area where the men play cards becomes a mirrored and marbled place of tran-
sition between the decorative Gloria Grahame and the smoky, male, gangster terri-
tory on the other side. A sliding partition, rather than a door separates the spaces.
The camera is often in one area looking at another, for example looking through
the doorway at the card players as if spying on them, or at the gangsters when they
come in through the front door behind the decorative screen with its elaborate
geometric pattern, as if afraid to greet them directly.41
On the run from Lee Marvin after he scalds her face Gloria Grahame hides in
Glenn Ford’s hotel room, whose décor she describes as ‘early nothing’.42 The blank-
ness of the setting provides the requisite blank backdrop for thinking, whereas
her decorative penthouse apartment with its focus on superficiality was meant
to prevent thinking. The film ends with the death of two women, (as well as Lee
Marvin). The cop’s wife (with whom the film began) dies behind the desk where her
 72  HOLLYWOOD AND POST-WAR CINEMA

husband died. Gloria Grahame dies in the swanky penthouse apartment where she
lived with Lee Marvin, falling between a coffee table and the sofa as though she’s
laid out like a piece of furniture in the room, hardly noticed, not in anyone’s way,
part of the furnishings to the end.

THE DOMESTIC FRONT

While film noir reflected the shadows of the presence of the Nazi regime and the
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battles that had to be fought overseas, the final two films discussed here disclose as
both subtext and overt melodrama the difficulties faced post-war by those return-
ing. The war affected Hollywood in different ways. On one hand some of the busiest
directors were involved in the war effort in ways that affected their approach to
filmmaking on their return. For example, George Stevens, known before the war for
making sophisticated social comedies and musicals, consciously concentrated on
pictures with serious themes such as The Diary of Anne Frank.43 Away at war, they
thought of the future and worried about losing the best years of their lives and
being overtaken by a new generation of filmmakers. Hollywood was in transition
when they returned, the major studios being broken up by order of the supreme
court.

The Best Years of Our Lives

Three men returning from the war find difficulties adjusting to the changes they encoun-
ter, both in the place and in themselves.
William Wyler’s first post-war film was the frank, unpretentious The Best Years of
Our Lives. Wyler’s film describes three men returned from the war. Frederick March
plays Al Stevenson, an army sergeant, Harold Russell plays Homer Parrish, a naval
officer, and Dana Andrews plays Fred Derry, an airforce bomber. One is well to do,
one middle class, and one from the ‘wrong side of the tracks’.44
Best Years of Our Lives opens with the question: Going to Boone City? This estab-
lishes where the action will take place, and that the film itself is a journey. The floor
of the airport is a whole map of the world, but the air force officer is brought down
to earth. Fred, an air force captain, tries to return home but cannot get a flight.
Emphasizing the differences and difficulties of those who had been overseas to
fight the war and those who had remained at home and prospered, a middle-aged
businessman checks in for his own flight, his bags and golfclubs carried by an
African-American skycap.45 There is a significant juxtaposition between Fred’s mil-
itary uniform and the uniform of the serving man. The mise en scène frames the two
men as they face one another directly without engaging in conversation, two men
of the same age, with different experience of service.46
As the three return to their home town of Boone City on a cargo flight, they look
out the window to see an aerial view of America that includes an airfield carpeted
with planes that were factory produced too late for use in the war, and have no
further value for what they are, a theme to which the film returns. The men return
 HOLLYWOOD AND POST-WAR CINEMA   73
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Figure 3.5  Flying home after the war, three men discuss what a good future means:
a wife, a job, and a home (The Best Years of Our Lives, William Wyler, 1946).

to the America they have fought for, represented by hot dogs, beauty parlours, and
most importantly, family. Rehabilitation after the war is a wife, a job, and a small
home. As Fred suggests, that’s all a man can hope for. The first family we see is that
of Homer, the naval officer who has lost both arms in battle. His house is the epit-
ome of the middle class home, with white picket fence, and front porch with swing,
where you literally marry the girl next door. The interior, with all its ornate balus-
trades and woodwork and elaborate and multiple ornaments on the mantelpiece
over the fireplace, expresses a surface level statement of middle class and middle
American values.
In contrast, Al (who works as a bank manager) returns to an uptown apartment
with spacious corridors, elegant furnishings, high ceilings, and wide doors in a wide
hallway, clean, modern kitchen and bathroom. It has the feeling of elegance and
achievement unencumbered by having to ‘prove oneself’ with ornament.
The last home we see is literally on the ‘wrong side of the tracks’, a timber frame
shack, under the shadow of the expressway, where Fred’s alcoholic father lives. It is a
hovel with an external burner, hanging fabric instead of doors, empty bottles on the
window sill; a home from which one would want to escape.
Best Years of Our Lives was the first film about contemporary American life Wyler
had made since Dead End ten years earlier.47 Wyler had lost his hearing while fly-
ing in bombers over Italy during the war. In Best Years of Our Lives actors wore
little make-up and store-bought clothes to emphasize the simplicity of life dur-
ing the war. Director of photography, Greg Tolland, also returned from the war,
encouraged Wyler to use unbroken shots that often lasted up to two minutes.
 74  HOLLYWOOD AND POST-WAR CINEMA
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Figure 3.6  Deep focus in the bar scene as Fred (left) makes a phone call, Al (right)
watches Hoagy Carmichael teach Homer (centre) to play the piano (The Best
Years of Our Lives, William Wyler, 1946).

Wyler made the film with long takes, in which the camera followed the action, tak-
ing the lead from the actors to tell the story, not in a showy way, but in a stripped
down and ‘honest’ manner, presenting facts as they were. The camera turned with
the actors, catching their actions and reactions. Wyler’s own emotions of what he
had seen and experienced in the war were still raw and he wove them in to the
characters.48

Deep focus

In Best Years of Our Lives Tolland used deep focus extensively to meet the require-
ments of the script. Deep focus photography allows several different planes of
action to take place within one frame so that we decide where to focus our gaze
within the frame at the events presented on the screen ‘instead of receiving it ready-
made.’49 For example, Best Years of Our Lives captures two narratives through fram-
ing, where the three men are brought together in one scene. Deep focus allows
us to watch Fred on the telephone in the background at the top left of the frame,
while in the foreground Al watches Homer play piano with Hoagy Carmichael.
A collection of long shots and long takes with deep focus alternates with the
claustrophobic (as in the drug store where Fred is ‘hemmed in’ by advertisements
and price value) or cosy (as in Al’s apartment) or suffocating (Fred’s parents’ home,
and his tiny apartment where he lives with his wife) interiors. Homer’s bedroom,
 HOLLYWOOD AND POST-WAR CINEMA   75

when he is alone with his girlfriend, shows privacy and intimacy as we, the viewer,
see what no one should see, Homer without his arms. In a direct and intimate
sequence Homer shows his fiancée what it is like to remove his arms and try to get
ready for bed. As he drops the artificial hands on the bed he says: ‘this is when I
know I’m helpless’. It is an honest and open scene that Wyler was concerned would
not pass the censor board. The deep focus and central framing and lighting that
creates a nuance of warm grey tones creates a language of comfortably emotive
narration.
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Wide-angle lenses made actual location shooting possible and were used to
terrific effect in the airplane graveyard. Haunted by his memories of the war, Fred
cannot find redemption, and therefore happiness and a future, without clearing
the past. Dreaming of his days in the skies, he visits an old military airforce base. He
pulls himself into the bomber seat of a plane and relives his war experiences. The
scene had been roughly sketched out, but not carefully scripted. Tolland, given free
range to film in the abandoned airplane graveyard at Ontario, California directed
the camera at the rows and rows of grounded planes, their engines removed. The
story is told through sound, the sounds of bomber engines until they become deaf-
ening, and the camera moving in closer and closer.
A foreman approaches and explains how the carcasses of these decapitated,
grounded planes will be used to make prefabricated housing. The technology cre-
ated for machines of war will be used to make modern homes for those returned,
and Fred is able to start working in this new industry making prefab houses from old
airplanes, building a new life from what had come before.

Figure 3.7  The airplane graveyard (The Best Years of Our Lives, William Wyler, 1946).
 76  HOLLYWOOD AND POST-WAR CINEMA

The Man with the Golden Arm

A man returns from prison and tries not to resume his life of crime and heroin addiction.
In The Man with the Golden Arm, the dominant theme (the redemption of the little
guy against all odds) endures like a musical motif as it plays with viewer anticipation
of how Frank Sinatra’s character will be tempted, offered opportunities, resist temp-
tation and the good rewarded and the bad punished.
The ‘golden arm’ of the title is both a reference to Sinatra’s ‘golden’ ability as a
dealer in poker games and to the arm of the junkie. The film, situated in Chicago ten-
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ements, features set-pieces such as the room where Sinatra lives with his wife, played
by Eleanor Parker. Everything in the one room tenement apartment is disjointed,
awkward, all piled in together; nothing fits, the bed by the wall, the sink at the other
end, the curtain pulled across to create a semblance of privacy, wood panelling and
everything everywhere. One walks directly into the bedroom, where everything is,
kitchen, dining room, sitting room. The broom leaning at an angle in Man with the
Golden Arm suggests that the place needs cleaning, rather than otherwise, and that
something needs to be swept out, but hasn’t been. Objects or spaces out of place
show social aspects out of place, thereby merging details of set design with details
of human behaviour and social situations. In film, when we see one thing out of
place, a hat on the wrong hat rack and pair of gloves neatly folded on the hall table,
or a book missing from a bookshelf, we know that something else is out of place.
Discontinuities in space and time wake us up and draw attention to something – like
a wrong note – something not quite right draws our attention to other things out of
kilter. Within the highly codified smoothness of classical Hollywood narrative, incon-
sistency in the narrative jars us from our complacency and often becomes a code
signifying moral ambiguity.
Objects in the foreground let us know what is about to take place. Black Bakelite
telephones often appear in the foreground, suggesting a phone call that could or
should be made, or that the phone is about to ring. For example, Frank Sinatra’s
shadow precedes him up the stair as his reputation as a junkie precedes him
and only when he explains that he is clean and intends to stay that way does the
shadow disappear.
Exactly at the midpoint of Preminger’s film, Frank Sinatra, with Kim Novak on
his arm, walks past the brightly lit window of a department store selling kitchen
appliances and other conveniences of the modern home. The bright lights and
stark black and white clean lines contrast sharply with the reality of his shabby
apartment, with its pre-war plumbing. Their conversation expresses their dreams
of a better life, summed up as being able to spend some money on consumable
objects, on a car, a colour television. The modern built-in kitchen suggests a bright,
clean efficiency entirely lacking in their one room tenements. In the display the
male mannequin sits at a table reading the paper while the female stands cook-
ing with an apron on. The two actors’ dialogue relates to domesticity, gender, and
mutual respect. Kim Novak, who works in a nightclub is framed to be parallel to
the female, as an image of upright domestic bliss. They imagine what a nice clean
home is like. The shop front kitchen display is larger than the dark, claustrophobic
 HOLLYWOOD AND POST-WAR CINEMA   77

tenements where they live and offers a suburban image of domesticity to which
they can only aspire. The shot of Frank Sinatra and Kim Novak framed parallel to the
mannequins in the set, dissolves into Eleanor Parker, in between the two manne-
quins, coming between them, interrupting their domestic fantasy.

NOTES
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  1 Dead End, dir. William Wyler, USA: Samuel Goldwyn Productions, 1937; Laura, dir.
Otto Preminger, USA, 1944; The Best Years of Our Lives, dir. William Wyler, USA: Samuel
Goldwyn Productions, 1946; Where the Sidewalk Ends, dir. Otto Preminger, USA, 1950;
The Big Heat, dir. Fritz Lang, USA: Columbia Pictures, 1953; The Man with the Golden Arm,
dir. Otto Preminger, USA, 1956.

  2 Siegfried Kracauer, “Film 1928” in Mass Ornament; Weimar Essays, trans. Thomas Levin
(London: Harvard University Press, 1995).

  3 Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (Princeton:

Princeton University Press, 1997), 42.

  4 Braudy, The World in a frame, 75.

  5 Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming
(London: Verso, 1997), 126−7.

  6 David Bordwell, Janet Staiger and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema; Film
Style and mode of Production to 1960 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985), 313.

  7 Bazin, What is Cinema?

  8 Stephen Heath, Questions of Cinema (London: MacMillan, 1981), 139.

  9 Meshes of the Afternoon, dir. Maya Deren, USA, 1943.

10 Rome, Open City, Roberto Rossellini, Italy, 1945; Bicycle Thieves, Vittorio De Sica, Italy,
1948.

11 Paul Ricoeur, The Rules of Metaphor (London: Routledge, 1978).

12 Knight, You Play the Black, 44.

13 Knight, You Play The Black, 235.

14 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. by H. Rackam (London: Heinemann, 1996), 1448a.

For further elaboration on mimesis of praxis see Alberto Pérez-Gómez, Built Upon Love
(London, MIT Press, 2003), 53.

15 Kracauer, ‘Film 1928’.

16 For example, the camera may move in for a close-up of a flaming brand at the end of a
scene of a couple in a nightclub in order to make a smooth transition to a fireplace in
front of which the couple have retired for an intimate moment in the next scene.

17 Rudolph Arnheim, Visual Thinking (London: Faber and Faber Ltd, 1970), 178.

18 Arnheim, Rudolph, Film as Art (London: Faber and Faber, 1958).

19 Kracauer, ‘Film 1928,’ 314.

20 Arnheim, Film as Art, 19.

 78  HOLLYWOOD AND POST-WAR CINEMA

21 Bordwell, Staiger and Thompson, Classical Hollywood Cinema.

22 Arnheim, Visual Thinking.

23 Gregory, Richard, Eye and Brain: The Psychology of Seeing (London: Weidenfeld and
Nicolson, 1972).

24 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London:

Routledge, 1994).

25 Heath, Questions of Cinema, 29.

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26 D. N. Rodowick, Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine, 68.

27 Citizen Kane, dir. Orson Welles, USA: Mercury Productions, 1942.

28 Last Year in Marienbad, dir. Alain Resnais, France, 1961; Hiroshima Mon Amour, dir. Alain
Resnais, France, 1959.

29 Grand Hotel, dir. Edmund Golding, USA: MGM, 1932.

30 Star Wars, George Lucas, USA: Lucasfilm Ltd.,1977.

31 Umberto Eco, “Casablanca, or the Clichés are Having a Ball” in On Signs ed. by Marshall
Blonsky (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), 35−8.

32 Theodor Adorno, ‘Culture Industry Reconsidered’ New German Critique 6 (Autumn, 1975).

33 Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment.

34 Siegfried Kracauer, Rue de Berlin et D’Ailleurs, trans. J.-F. Boutout (Paris, La Belle Lettres,
2013, first published 1964).

35 Stiegler, Time and Technics, 3, 10.

36 In Britain horror films had been banned from production during the Second World
War. Siegfried Kracauer, ‘Hollywood’s Terror Films: Do They Reflect an American State of
Mind?’ Commentary, (1946), 105−12.

37 Bordwell, Staiger and Thompson, Classical Hollywood Cinema.

38 Rudolph Arnheim, The Power of the Center; a study of composition in the visual arts
(Berkeley, University of California Press, 1988).

39 Jim Hillier and Alastair Phillips, 100 Film Noirs, BFI Screen Guides (London: BFI, 2009).

40 Since ceilings were implied rather than shown as the area was required for lighting,
cornices become important to suggest where the wall meets the ‘ceiling’.

41 To test camera movements, models of the sets were made but destroyed after filming as
they took too much space to store.

42 Gloria Grahame has all the best lines in the film. When asked if she has heard Vince (Lee
Marvin) talk about anything to do with the gangster, she responds: ‘Vince talks business
I go out and get my legs waxed.’ (The Big Heat, Lang, 1953). For an extended discourse
on the spaces of detective fiction and film noir, see Chapter 7, “Lonely Room/Locked
Room” in Joan Copjec, Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists (London: MIT Press,
1994), 163−200.

43 The Diary of Anne Frank, dir. George Stevens, USA: Twentieth Century Fox 1959.

44 Mark Harris, Five Came Back; A Story of Hollywood and the Second World War (Edinburgh:
Canongate, 2014).
 HOLLYWOOD AND POST-WAR CINEMA   79

45 Skycaps are uniformed porters who work for tips, to help passengers with their luggage
and check-in at airports.

46 Military regiments were segregated and there was only one African-American air force
regiment during the Second World War, the Tuskegee Airmen.

47 Mark Harris, Five Came Back; A Story of Hollywood and the Second World War (Edinburgh:
Canongate, 2014), 427.

48 Harris, Five Came Back, 432.

49 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2, The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (London: The Athlone
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Press, 1992), 108.

 4
Swinging time in London
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INTRODUCTION

In Britain the evolution of social realist, black and white kitchen sink films into the
hallucinatory colour of Carnaby Street reflected political change and the open-
ing up of the class system, as well as the increasing power of the media. Spatial
descriptions of the titles of the kitchen sink drama (already an architectural refer-
ence) in films such as Look Back in Anger, Room at the Top and The L-Shaped Room
suggest the ‘rooms’ in which we are constrained by our past.1 The titles reflect place
and both temporal and spatial discordance as ‘looking back in anger’ of the 1950s
became ‘smashing time’ of the 1960s. We ‘blow up’ or explode the codes of behav-
iour by which we understand ourselves and the later film titles reflect this: films
such as Beat Girl, Smashing Time, Blow-up and Performance express the language
of excess.2 The films illustrate both Swinging London and the North–South divide.
The films we look at in this chapter, The Servant and Blow-up provide vehicles to
understand this change.3
Both films focus on London in the 1960s. This chapter examines the culture of
image and fantasy, the mix of fantasy and illusion, delusion and desire. Antonioni’s
portrayal of the city reflects a pattern of development of the documentary move-
ment and its characteristic concern rooted in post-war realism. London of the 1960s
was one of the places in which ‘image culture’ both appeared and was celebrated
as such, especially to those observing from the outside. For Antonioni, English tra-
ditions seemed formed solely of outward signs and therefore easy to overturn. In
Blow-up, Antonioni set out to expose the barrenness of swinging London.

CONTEMPORARY POLITICAL EXCHANGES

As Benjamin argues, particular moments of international or political jeopardy con-

cern the general population, touching the nation’s social consciousness and political
self-awareness. Benjamin states: ‘to articulate the past historically does not mean to
 SWINGING TIME IN LONDON   81

recognise it “the way it really was” . . . It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes
up at a moment of danger.’4 Film has the capacity to freeze these instants and bring
them to light. The moment is a crucial one and constitutes one of those epiphanic
flashes described by Charles Taylor, where the society or nation sees itself for what
it is, although current viewers may not see the films now as they were when first
released.5 The Suez crisis, or the Profumo affair were not just background history sig-
nifying dissolution of Empire and public political scandal, but qualified the context
for building up the phenomena of the ‘crisis’ and ‘sensation’. The films of this period
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illustrate the historical background of post-war scarcity giving way to an excess of

consumption and mass media.
A film need not be a documentary to document the era in which it is made. For
example, John Schlesinger’s Darling or Desmond Davis’ Smashing Time revel in the
dominant ‘swinging sixties’ images, looks and styles while others delve into more
profound social and political themes and provide insight into the nature of ethi-
cal understanding.6 Filmmakers aim not to juxtapose appearance with reality but to
capture that metaphysical moment in which the two combine.

Image

The economic austerity of post-war Britain endured into the mid-1950s while the
British cultural horizon, (held out during the war as one of the things Britain was
fighting for) began to expand with new forms of expression. Intended to rally
national spirit in a celebration of British Culture, artists and designers of the 1951
Festival of Britain constructed this new identity through signs, billboards, advertis-
ing and media that everywhere promised happiness. As British living standards rose,
the power of media and propaganda expanded as well. Understanding the power of
position and public life, Prime Minister Harold Macmillan (1957−1963) readily used
the tools of propaganda available and coined the phrase: ‘You’ve never had it so
good’ as a Conservative Party slogan, continually telling the electorate how lucky
they were. Soon, good wasn’t enough and the Conservatives’ new slogan: ‘You’ve
had it good, have it better’ addressed consumption directly.7
The new notion of the ‘aesthetics of plenty’ (a term coined by Independent Group
member Laurence Alloway) was a reaction to the wartime and pre-war depression
aesthetics of scarcity.8 Begun in 1952 to subvert ‘high culture’ modernist debates
and to introduce popular culture and collaged imagery, the Independent Group
met at the Institute for Contemporary Art. Among others it included architects Peter
and Alison Smithson, photographer Nigel Henderson, art critic Alloway and artist
and sculptor Eduardo Paolozzi, all of whom contributed to the influential This is
Tomorrow exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1956.
Known for their Brutalist architecture, the Smithsons’ desire was to ‘drag a rough
poetry’ out of the conditions of the everyday.9 Built in 1962−1964 their Economist
building, with its raised public plaza and banking pavilion, represents a demon-
strable honesty of construction where anything else is considered as obscuring or
covering up. Similarly, Henderson’s grainy black and white photographs resemble
 82  SWINGING TIME IN LONDON

anthropological documentary depictions of life on the streets of London’s East

End.10 For Paolozzi, as for Alloway and other British artists in the Independent
Group, every still image implied a collection of stories. Richard Hamilton’s paintings
and collages, Lewis Morley’s photograph of Christine Keeler sitting backwards in a
chair, or Mandy Rice-Davies getting off an aeroplane, became images to represent
an era.
Visual art occupied a place and position in society promoted by easily acces-
sible Pop artists, including British painters David Hockney, Hamilton and Peter
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Blake. Bridget Riley, on the other hand, contributed Op art, geometric optical
illusions, highly influential on the textile designs adopted by Mary Quant and
other fashion designers. The mid-1960s was a period obsessed by the ‘look
of things’ when designers, photographers, and models assumed new status
epitomized by David Bailey’s box of pin-ups, the photographer’s collections of
portraits.11 Colour supplements and glossy magazines included photographs of
photographers photographing one another and interior designers designing
one another’s homes. For example, David Hicks, who designed the interiors of
Losey’s Royal Avenue house in Chelsea and kept a pied a terre in Albany, repre-
sented the sophistication and polish of the new aristocrats.12 As the ‘new aris-
tocracy’, the lower or more working class their birth (such as David Bailey, Brian
Duffy, and Terence Donovan), the greater the credibility of the men and women
associated with the ‘scene’.

FILM’S SELF UNDERSTANDING

Films such as Together and Nice Time juxtapose the linear narrative of con-
ventional black and white film with still images from street advertisements to
describe the city in a new way.13 The focus on images of advertising as a means
of communication parallels the films of the Nouvelle Vague in France. The text
of the billboard becomes part of the message of the film in continuity with the
self-referential irony of film’s earlier Hollywood period. Together lyrically depicts
the doomed docklands of London’s working class East End. Close-ups of adver-
tising distract from the narrative, resembling the collage of Paolozzi’s (who stars
in the film) own graphic work: Nice Time, produced by the British Film Institute,
employs a similar language to chronicle life around Piccadilly Circus on a typical
Saturday night.
While films frequently rewrite or misrepresent facts, they also bring larger cul-
tural issues into focus. If the past is to be investigated as a process and substance
of dynamic history as Benjamin suggests, the myth of the collective unconscious
provides as compelling an insight into events as other more material aspects. In the
1950s and 1960s film critics and theorists abandoned earlier phenomenological
studies in favour of poststructuralist theory. Influenced in part by the literary the-
ory of Barthes, they treated film as a speculum of desire reflecting the aims of the
filmmaker as auteur, and treated the viewer of a film as accepting or resisting the
auteur’s intentions, while sitting, placid, quiet, somnolent, watching the flickering
 SWINGING TIME IN LONDON   83

screen within the cinema’s darkened room.14 With the advent of film arose a litera-
ture that attempted to understand what film embodied, looking at symbolic rep-
resentation specific to narrative film.

Cahiers du Cinéma and the Nouvelle Vague

After the war, France was exposed to an excess of Hollywood-made films previ-
ously unavailable. The experience of watching films without following the narrative
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(which happened through watching a plethora of Hollywood films with no sub-

titles) meant that form and sense of rhythm had greater significance over nar-
rative content. In the 1950s, for a particularly film-obsessed group, the classical
Hollywood narrative became the main attraction rather than the stories that it had
been created to tell as seamlessly as possible. Robert Bresson, Claude Chabrol,
Godard, Jacques Rivette, Eric Rohmer and François Truffaut formed a group around
Henri Langlois’s Paris Cinémathèque and Bazin’s journal Cahiers du Cinéma. Referred
to as the Nouvelle Vague, they questioned not only filmic representation but that
which was represented. They perceived the ability of the individual filmmaker to
rise above studio uniformity and they recognized the visual strength of American
film’s generic patterns.15 These critics, who became filmmakers, viewed films as texts
from which a core meaning may be excavated, re-evaluated the role of the screen-
writer and the director and celebrated and analyzed film as a special narrative form
with deeply interrelated voice, text and audience. The Nouvelle Vague looked at
film as a semiotic machine for making viewers think actively about the world in a
new way, rather than as vehicles for communicating a filmmaker’s own pre-existing
ideas to a passively receptive audience. As Bresson suggests, the viewer does not
submissively receive the film as a ‘readymade’ but it comes into being through the
viewing that combines sound and vision.16
In the aftermath of the political events of May 1968 in Paris there was a major shift
in new French thought. The Cahiers writers introduced a new goal, to expose the
way films are determined by the codes of the dominant ideology, which, often taken
for granted, they assumed were already fully known.
Film in the 1960s parodied our reliance on the real, building on film as enter-
tainment for the masses, as political statement about modernity, and about
‘image’ and vision as phantasms not to be trusted. The diverse spectrum of writ-
ing that included Peter Wollen’s seminal Signs and Meaning in the Cinema, first
published in 1969, developed from a fascination with the different aspects of
performance and reproduction as they are enacted on the screen.17 At the same
time, film techniques steadily became more sophisticated and created a film aes-
thetic that transported the viewer into the fantasy of the filmmaker’s intentions,
or, as in the films of the Nouvelle Vague, brought the filmmaker more into evi-
dence. In contrast to the classic language of Hollywood filmmaking by which a
work erases itself as it creates its content, European filmmakers made the viewer
aware of the act of watching a film, revealing it as an artifice, to be perceived in
special ways.
 84  SWINGING TIME IN LONDON

SPATIAL PERCEPTION AND HALLUCINATION

In film a room is ‘read’ as a room although only two or three walls may be shown
at any one time. How much or how little suggestion of enclosure is needed to cre-
ate that illusion is dependent on our experience in watching or reading a film. As
Merleau-Ponty demonstrates this condition of spatiality anchors us within an estab-
lished setting.18 If, as Merleau-Ponty suggests, spatial perception is a structural phe-
nomenon, then we perceive a minimal amount of set as an entire room, house, world,
or universe. Merleau-Ponty’s box (in which three sides are always on view) appears
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as a cube possessing depth and dimensions, or as we suggest here, as two sides of a

room, and a floor.19 The frame of the film often cuts bodies, places and objects into
pieces, which we have no difficulty recognizing and reassembling into a whole.
The degree to which a great deal or a mere sug-
gestion of enclosure is needed to create that illusion
depends on our innate ability to see and antici-
pate an anchorage within a ‘perceptual field’.20 In
mid-shot the man pushes the front door of the ter-
race house and the actor, then, through a neat cut,
passes from exterior location shot, to interior studio
shot. We have no trouble re-establishing the real
nature of the action, and follow it as one continuous
movement.21 Like Merleau-Ponty’s cube, we construct
the surrounding geometries and spatialities around
what we see.

The likely account and the nature of illusion

Within the interplay of familiar routines and gestures,

Figure 4.1
many things remain constant. The culture of everyday life is deeply embedded
Merleau-Ponty’s
box (drawn by in its immediate social and historical setting. Reliant on aspects of continuity (by
author). which some things are ‘like’ other things), filmmakers use the viewer’s assumption
that things which resemble objects (and/or ideas) are therefore alike and should be
treated as such.22
When the stability is lost, so are coherence and continuity, so we see the film as
a contrivance or projected artifice. Design principles, or particular uses of the frame
can distinguish one filmmaker’s films from another or identify the work of a particular
director of photography. Looking beyond the design at what is depicted or at how
the framing focuses our attention on one thing or another discloses underlying mes-
sages and meanings that the filmmaker hopes to convey. The set designer ensures
that the scale of the doorway within the frame is similar if not identical from exterior
to interior shot. This consistency of scale is part of the filmic language that ensures
the viewer may follow the narrative and read the architectural space as a whole.
A studio built interior must remain convincing as an interior to a particular exte-
rior, often a location. The viewer, drawing on visual cues, such as the scale of the
door, its paneling, thickness and apparent weight, as well as the experience of
 SWINGING TIME IN LONDON   85

walking through doorways every day, perceives the scene ‘as if’ the character has
entered an exterior location shot of a previous scene. As Barrett, for example, in The
Servant opens the Royal Avenue door or Thomas in Blow-up opens the door to his
mews studio, the particular doorways suggests the whole of London as background,
a street outside, a hallway into which the door opens, rooms onto which the hallway
leads, other floors, and stairs to reach them.

The nature of truth and illusion

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Filmmakers assemble a probable or likely story from fragments. The flicker-

ing images on the screen lack corporeality and resemble Bergson’s description of
a dream: ‘I perceive objects and there is nothing there (. . .) It is all as if real things
and real persons were there.’23 Kracauer, Cavell and others compare the experi-
ence of watching a film to being in a twilight state between waking and sleeping.24
Ambiguity and contingencies (by which any number of events depend on others in
a cause and effect relationship) create the illusion, or deception, but the expression
of the reality of human emotions, makes it feel ‘true’.
Plato offers a means to follow the various ambiguous and often contradictory
strands of truth and not-truth in his discussion of ‘seeming’ and ‘being’ that examines
the Sophistic capacity to argue both sides of a question, thus creating the ‘image’ of
truth.25 Filmmakers represent things in a way that makes them appear and seem to
be true when, in fact, they are not.26 As in the Plato’s cave allegory, the image implies
the limits of what we can see. The notion of ‘image’ and ‘likeness’ relates to the dis-
cussion of ‘seeming’ and ‘being’ in which things are not always what they seem to be,
but the filmmaker reveals the ‘truth’ hidden beneath the surface.27

THE SERVANT

Tony, a young man, and Barrett, his butler, struggle for power in a Royal Avenue house in
Chelsea, London in the early 1960s.
Harold Pinter adapted The Servant from a post-war novella of the same title by Robin
Maugham.28 The changes made to the story, whether to update it, or situate the narra-
tive in a manner more appropriate to film, brought out aspects of mastery and servility
that were unchanged from the original. Pinter and Losey, as screenwriter and director,
deliberately created a film that built on the foundation of the crumbling and moribund
post-colonial culture. Pinter retained much of the original dialogue, adding to it his own
distinctive signature of repetition, pause, silence and ellipsis. Right from the beginning,
the house is established as the central character. The exteriors were filmed on location in
Royal Avenue and interior house shots filmed on set at Shepperton studios.

Opening scene

The film opens with a perspectival view of a long gravel square centred on the
Doric porticoes of Christopher Wren’s Royal Hospital.29 The simple gravel square
 86  SWINGING TIME IN LONDON

appears as a flat, unnatural, contrived place, empty and at once open and unin-
viting. The first sequence is two minutes long and plays over the opening credits.
This scene, depicting Barrett’s arrival and his interview with Tony, establishes the
pattern of fluid circular camera movement that informs the film’s visual style. The
camera tilts up, tracks backward along a row of trees, over the treetops and terrace
houses, then tilts down slowly to a busy commercial street at the opposite end of
the square and zooms in on the emblem of a royal charter until it fills the screen.
As the camera pulls back the words beneath the charter, Thomas Crapper, Sanitary
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Engineers fill the frame. As the camera draws back further, a male figure emerges
from the surrounding darkness. A double decker bus (reinforcing London as the
location) passes, on which, in full frame, appears an advertisement with a pair of
eyes and the large word ‘Look.’ The camera pans back for a long shot (used by film-
makers as the final word of reality) of a man dressed formally but somewhat shab-
bily in a suit and hat, carrying a rolled up umbrella, crossing the busy commercial
street from right to left.
Still within the same take the camera follows him down the length of the square.30
Adroitly he skirts a puddle, and approaches a small house on the west side of the ter-
race, before which stands an estate agent’s sign over which a sticker states: ‘Sold’.31
He rings the doorbell, receives no answer, and pushes open the unlocked door. As he
does so, the film cuts from location to set. He enters, moving right to left, to maintain
continuity.
This visual language communicates this man’s character; he possesses pretensions −
signified by the Royal Emblem, is of the basest origins − the estate agent is called
‘Base and Baser’ and the ‘Sold’ sign indicates that whatever bargaining there is to
do has already been completed, although we do not yet know by whom. As the
man (Barrett) enters the house, his shadow precedes him, suggesting something
Mephistophelean about the character.
We enter the Royal Avenue house as the butler enters, through the front door
and explore the house with him. A tracking camera replaces the crane shot of the
first segment. The camera shows us the house before the character himself sees it
by entering rooms first. In this comparatively long take (65 seconds), we begin in
the hall, face the door, track to the left, discover the stair, track in for a close-up on
the handrail, then reverse for a medium shot of the stair and balustrade. The figure
enters the frame and tentatively begins to mount the stair, (introducing the stair as
an active character) then stops, (suggesting he is a ‘below stairs’ person). We retreat
and the architrave of a doorway appears on both sides of the frame, through which
the figure advances, occupying the space we (the camera) have vacated.
The doorway clearly frames the stair then, as the camera continues to track
left, revealing a series of doors and frames whose vertical lines, as if bars of a cage,
emphasize entrapment. These closed doors lead nowhere, their purpose is to confer
the impression of enclosure, suffocation, and confusion in contrast with the ‘open-
ing up’ later in the film.
The mise en scène depicts a succession of three diminishing doorways and, in the
centre, suspended from the ceiling on a long wire, a bare electric bulb acts both as
focus of the frame, the punctum of Barthes, and the suggested light source of the
 SWINGING TIME IN LONDON   87

shadow just seen.32 In deep focus, in the centre of the frame, lies an inert body in
repose, like a headless rag doll, his head and feet cut off by the three doorways. This
is Tony, master of the house.
The filming deliberately discloses the relation between the two men and between
them and the house as Barrett (already one with the house as his shadow sweeps
along the walls) finds the slumbering Tony (decapitated and disabled by the house).
They are both servants, albeit of different things.
Merleau-Ponty describes how we ‘know’ where we are, how we are grounded.
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When the spatial construction operates invisibly the house forms itself around us in
our imaginations, and the attention to detail fills out the thickness of the scenes with
human experience so that no matter what scene is on the screen, we know precisely
what room we are in, and on what floor.
In the words of Richard Macdonald, the art director: ‘you’ve got to give them a
house to live in which is so secure that whichever part you are in, you know you’re
in the same house.’33 We ‘read’ the setting as a house, with three floors and a base-
ment. Whereas in fact, it is several sets all on one level with movable walls. As the
film unfolds, the house changes, progressing through three distinct and significant
stages: empty (unformed), completion (opening up) and dissolution.
The set was pre-designed before the script was completed; the term ‘pre-design’
refers to filmmaking in which sketches work out camera angles before filming.
MacDonald entered the mood and feel of Losey’s intended world with its overall
Regency atmosphere and enabled the filmmaker to conceptualize his vision.
MacDonald built the sets for The Servant in false perspective, so the doorways
diminish slightly in size to give more depth. For the most part the house plan is
based on standard Edwardian houses of the era and other houses on Royal Avenue.
MacDonald drew both plans and sections of the house as if real showing how the
first floor hall is raised to accommodate the front entrance, and the relation of
the rooms and the front door. While most of the rooms make sense spatially, the
stairs themselves do not, often going up where they should go down, or extending
into the house next door, but always in ways that lend meaning to the narrative text
of the film.34
A narrow vestibule between the hall and the master bathroom leads to the
servants’ stair that has a door at the first floor level, but not on the top floor,
as though the very stair is constituent of the closet in which the servants are
expected to reside. The gradient reveals that the height and width in plan do
not correspond in section one with the other. This creates ambiguous areas, per-
fect sets for strange or unheimlich occurrences that transpire in these spaces. The
gentleman’s dressing room conveys this feeling of dis-ease. It has the awkward
‘in between’ space. The dressing areas, approached by three steps up from the
bedroom exactly where the servants’ stair would penetrate if realized in plan and
section, must have three steps down to get back to the same level as the hall.
The three steps are in the bathroom, enabling Tony to ‘look down’ on his maid in
a scene where he interrupts her naked in the bath. Another stray three steps in
the upstairs hall possess visual assonance (and no logical correspondence) with
the three steps in the dressing room. At first they seem to account for the closed
 88  SWINGING TIME IN LONDON

area of the entrance hall, but it has a lower not a higher ceiling. Other roving
stairs include external stairs front and back, almost impossible to locate on the
plan due to discrepancies between set design and location. We rarely perceive
these inconsistencies in the plan but may sense discomfort, though the source
of this discomfort is not always recognized. This distortion increases as the nar-
rative evolves until the house feels ‘upside down’ as the master and servant roles
reverse. The subtext of latent homoerotic attraction further encloses and disori-
ents the domestic space.
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Stairs

As important ordering devices, staircases determine both plan and section. As

Dalibor Vesely suggests, the spatial situation of the staircase, whether ‘domestic
or public, simple or monumental’ suggests a precise relationship between space,
the material of which it is formed and the movement that occurs on it.35 The stair
appears in the opening scene, in crucial central scenes, in the final scene, and occu-
pies almost one quarter of the film’s running time, representing a sizeable propor-
tion of screen time. The stair acts as an indicator of class differences; a stairway to
paradise, an unlevel playing field, and at the end, a prison. The stair scene from The
Servant provides an expression of Hegel’s master and slave dialectic that exemplifies
film and architecture’s mutual expression.36
The stair game establishes the house as arena. This scene begins with the ball
flung directly at the camera – at us. It engages us emotionally and emphasizes the
players’ experience of the game as reality. Our role is essential, since, as Hans-Georg
Gadamer suggests, play is always for someone; the fourth wall of the audience com-
pletes it as a work of art.37 Tony begins in the master’s position, at the top of the
staircase and Barrett remains in the subservient position, below him. From a high
level the camera tilts down towards the front of the house. Due to the diagonal fram-
ing, the bottom four steps of the stair itself are higher than the top. Careful lighting
creates two extra players in the game, as the actor’s shadows loom on the wall like
phantom opponents. The figures move up and down their ends of the staircase,
dwarfed by their own shadows. Losey employed more than seven lights to get the
desired effect. The brightly lit balustrades form a ring of bars around the players and
cast a larger shadow image on the walls, emphasizing the sense of enclosure.

BLOW–UP

In the course of a single day, Thomas, a successful if somewhat jaded fashion photogra-
pher, has a series of experiences that make him question reality and perception.
Blow–up was inspired by a short story, ‘Las babas del diablo,’ by Julio Cortázar,
whose work is distinguished by his preoccupation with the true nature of reality.38
Antonioni’s film borrows from Cortázar’s story the idea of a crime discovered by
making a photographic enlargement.39 In Antonioni’s version, the photographer
disappears into the game of imagination, a game played without a ball, for no other
 SWINGING TIME IN LONDON   89
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Figure 4.2  Alison and Peter Smithson’s Economist building

(Blow-up, Michelangelo Antonioni, 1967).

purpose than play. The title, Blow-up, refers to the instrumental enlargement of the
photographic prints in addition to the propensity for rumours or ideas to ‘blow-up’
facts out of all proportion. Antonioni describes ‘reality’ as something that easily slips
through one’s grasp, constantly changing.

Opening scene

The opening of Blow-up intercuts between hallucinatory ‘swinging London’ and

the earlier social documentary kitchen sink dramas. Antonioni exposes viewer
expectations of ‘realist’ British documentary as he shows them to be false. As
the film opens a very noisy group of young people, in white face and dressed as
commedia dell’ arte figures, drive an open top jeep up the ramp onto the raised
piazza of the Smithsons’ Economist Building. They drive in circles around the
plaza, reach the stairs, stop, hop off and race onto St James Street. The use of
the Smithsons’ Economist Building (where ‘structural integrity’ of architecture
acquired for architects a moral authority at a cultural level) in contrast with the
irreverent clowns suggests that the honesty of self-evident truth must always be
questioned.40
From the image of raucous youth encircled by the empty face of modernity,
Antonioni cuts to a solemn and silent group of men dressed in overcoats and cloth
caps exiting a workhouse (Consort Road in Peckham, London). The drab costumes
and setting make it look as though the colour has been drained in processing. A
crane shot follows one particular man, looking rough, bare head bowed and car-
rying his belongings in a paper bag. This scene is intercut with the young people
again, now running joyously through traffic. Back in the semi-industrial area, the
man looks about furtively and runs off. In the next shot, two nuns in white habits
pass a guard in red in front of St James Palace; the wild students run past again
 90  SWINGING TIME IN LONDON

and our hero from the workhouse appears for a second time, but now driving an
open top Rolls Royce with a camera hidden in the paper bag he was carrying.41 The
man is a photographer who has spent the night with the homeless men in order to
document them. He radios in that he is ‘on the way,’ and pulls up at his studio where
fashion model Veruschka, as herself, awaits him for a photoshoot. The soundtrack
changes as well, suggesting the film has suddenly become a colourful tale about
a ‘hip’ London world.
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Fashion shoot

In the next scene Antonioni presents five female models styled to look like man-
nequins. They stand with legs splayed and arms outstretched in front of a series
of transparent screens. The space-age collection of plastic and metal outfits, cut
in geometric designs with matching goggles, helmets and veils, completes the
‘out of this world’ look worn by the models and parodies contemporary designs
by Quant and André Courrèges. Each figure (including the photographer in a
reverse shot) is split in half by a screen. Antonioni continues to play with the
notion of seeing and not seeing, of looking through the lens (as a means of shap-
ing reality) when Thomas requests the girls close their eyes. These women do
not appear ‘at home’ in the world with their robotic or overly sexual gestures.
According to Thomas they are not ‘at home’ in their world of fashion either.
Significantly, having told them to close their eyes, he departs and sets off on his
next adventure.
Antonioni applies a painterly approach to filmmaking.42 Thomas’ drive past a
string of house fronts painted red, then blue, emphasizes London’s contemporary
vivacity but just as swiftly exhibits the vacant uniformity of modernism as the row
of bright red painted terraces gives way to 1960s housing. Since the vibrant red of
the phone box (designed by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott in 1924) is associated with the
English city and Carnaby Street in particular, Antonioni repaints post boxes and tele-
phone boxes and even a street front the unmistakable red hue.43 The chance sexual
encounters that fill the film are a comment on this aspect of modern urbanity; the
city offers itself in this promiscuous way for exploration. This particular journey cul-
minates on Woolwich Road and the grassy expanse of the ex-chalk pits of Maryon
Park (where the MacGuffin appears and Thomas later disappears). 44

Painting the street

The topography of the city knits together the symbols of London as urban metrop-
olis, capital city, and repository of history. The sequence includes the Houses of
Parliament, Piccadilly Circus and Hyde Park, demonstrating the incompatible,
symbolic, and powerful roles these icons of the city play. The juxtaposition of the
Houses of Parliament in Westminster with the shots of 1960s office blocks con-
trasts the rich iconography of the past with the blank stare of modernity.45 The
grey featureless buildings to which the film cuts, slow him down, suggesting the
 SWINGING TIME IN LONDON   91

bureaucracy of the contemporary world, the dullness of routine, and the mark
of progress, which in Antonioni’s case, is always the paralysis of running to get
nowhere.
London in 1967 is shown as a treasure-trove of implements of every sort of desire,
a dress-up box of character or characterlessness which one may enter into and
emerge from as a new, changed persona, with a different costume and character,
exemplified by the antique store that is represented as an artefact which Thomas
wishes to purchase outright, as it is. This shop, in Cleveley Close, South London, just
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outside the entrance to Maryon Park, is where Thomas buys a propeller, a device that
literally propels the plot and then becomes a symbol in itself. It leads the hero from
one place to another, then, having served its purpose, it too is transformed, placed
in his studio, a static thing of beauty in its own right, a symbol that the hero wishes
to ‘fly’ but remains static.

‘I am in Paris’

A scene at a party where Thomas encounters Veruschka deliberates between the

universality of being and the meaninglessness of being in any one place.

Thomas: I thought you were supposed to be in Paris?

Model: I am in Paris.46

The scene sets us up for the ‘reality’ of both being there and not being there at the
film’s conclusion.

The montage sequence

In creating a film, the director selects the most telling scenes and, working with
the editor, cuts and edits the material to refine continuity to make it appear to the
viewer as a meaningful account.47 Antonioni turns his photographer, Thomas, into
a filmmaker when, having printed the black and white photos he took earlier in
the park, Thomas rearranges his prints into a constructed narrative. He enlarges, or
‘blows up’ some images so that, due to the grain of the black and white film they
are almost entirely abstract. The camera pans over the series of photos, sometimes
dollying in for a ‘close-up’ to produce ‘eye-line’ shots, thereby erasing the image of
the photographer himself from the screen and activating the series of stills into a
motion picture. Antonioni allows the viewer to participate passively in this process,
watching as Thomas ‘reconstructs’ events.
Antonioni describes ‘reality’ as something that easily slips through one’s grasp,
constantly changing since ‘when we believe we have grasped it, the situation is
already otherwise. (. . .) There is an instant in which reality comes forth, but then
immediately thereafter it vanishes.’48 Thomas, the photographer in Blow-up, wishes
to see things too closely, and thus discovers that, in over-enlarging, the object itself
decomposes and disappears. Thomas, the modern hero, constructs a narrative of
 92  SWINGING TIME IN LONDON

imaginary resolutions onto a projected illusion.49 Antonioni describes this as looking

for a clue in a detective novel.

Doors

For Antonioni, doors take on the meaning of separation or barrier, as a diaphragm

separating two separate worlds, one of illusion and one of reality. In Blow-up, when
Thomas goes from one door through another he enters an entirely different world.
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The studio itself (a mews house) represents a mediated space. Within the interior,
areas appear undefined; there is no dining room, kitchen, bedroom or lounge. The
only rooms ascribed to a particular purpose have to do with the processing and
developing of film and photographic prints, such as the dark room − that is, a dark
room where, by its very nature, one does not see.

Thomas’ studio

The film offers an intriguing travelogue of 1960s London but features few interiors;
the photographer’s studio, a restaurant, a house in Chelsea.
Three-quarters of the film take place in the interior of the photographer’s studio.50
Thomas’s studio in Blow-up exemplifies the structureless space that seems to have no
boundaries yet maintains an architectural logic. The major interior shooting was done
in a studio belonging to fashion photographer John Cowan who took the stills seen
on the studio walls in the films, and whose playful dynamic and graphic style epito-
mized that of the era. Cowan had studios in Pottery Lane, where Antonioni came with
the film crew.51 His studio, a labyrinth of dark rooms around a central space, is integral
to the film. It would be impossible to reconstruct this actual interior as it appeared

Figure 4.3  Fashion shoot (Blow-up, Michelangelo Antonioni, 1967).

 SWINGING TIME IN LONDON   93

in the film since it was an amalgam of two different studios cut together in editing.
The rest was filmed in an architect’s studio near Paddington. In the studio there is a
duality of vertical elements where the stair is rarely shown but the upper floor offers
the suggestion of personal space, with rooms and wardrobes for models. Along a nar-
row walkway are the two darkrooms (one for processing film, the other for printing
images) side by side. As was popular at the time the walls are painted white, as if to
create an empty canvas for the new lives the new generation was expected to lead.
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Painting nature

In Blow-up, reality and illusion converge. Antonioni manipulates the colour of the land-
scape and cityscape. He suggests that to paint the world with colour hints at possibili-
ties for expansion within the mind.52 A simple script instruction such as ‘Thomas returns
to his studio’ inspired Antonioni to colour the road surfaces a deeper shade of black so
they receded into the background.53 Thin, flat, two-dimensional, compressed, transpar-
ent, and infinitely reproducible, the moving images of film, like the surface of real build-
ings, create new possibilities for the optical imagination of space. Antonioni demanded
a terrace of houses at the edge of the park be painted white to act as a neutral balance
to the composition. The local council refused permission and Antonioni, undeterred,
requested they build a backdrop depicting the white terrace and had the grass and
fences painted green and the trunks of trees and the path a deep violet.54
Blow-up ends with a satirical game of invisible tennis. In the park at the end of
the film Thomas arrives literally where he began. This final scene of commedia dell’
arte figures who first appeared in the opening sequence and now at the end play
tennis without a ball, both mocks and emphasizes the emptiness of Thomas’ search.
This time he joins in with their illusions. Shortly after he picks up the invisible ball to
throw it back, he too disappears. The sequence ends with a high-angle shot denot-
ing a transcendent view of reality. There are various possible interpretations of this
sequence, that one creates reality by enacting it (suggested by the soundtrack that
records the sound of a tennis ball as the players act out the game) and that there is
no reality (suggested by his disappearing at the end).
What we see and what we don’t see together or separately inspire and construct
models that germinate the spatial imagination. In Blow-up we see: a dead body, a
gun, a tennis ball, we also don’t see: a dead body, a gun, a tennis ball. This makes us
question other things and invites us to examine the perception, reality and logic.
The only ‘natural’ element here is not nature as landscape, but the nature of illusion.
The film suggests that entering into play with an accepted version makes it real. In
Blow-up the profusion of confusing, misleading, or simply empty clues appear in
layer upon layer of semi-transparent layers of meaning.55

NOTES

  1 Look Back in Anger, dir. Tony Richardson, UK, 1959; Room at the Top, dir. Jack Clayton, UK:
Romulus Films, 1959; The L Shaped Room, dir. Bryan Forbes, UK, 1962.
 94  SWINGING TIME IN LONDON

  2 Beat Girl, dir. Edmond Gréville, UK, 1960; Smashing Time, dir. Desmond Davis, UK:
Partisan Productions, 1967; Performance, dir. Donald Cammel and Nic Roeg, UK:
Goodtimes Enterprises, 1970.

  3 Joseph Losey moved to Europe in 1953 as a fugitive from the House Un-American
Activities Committee (HUAC black-listed Hollywood filmmakers deemed to be
Communists or Communist sympathizers) and was denied the right to work in the US
or even to have films bearing his name shown there.

  4 Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, ed. by Hannah

Arendt, trans. by Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969), 255.
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  5 Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self,15.

  6 Darling, dir. John Schlesinger, UK: Anglo-Amalgamated/Vic/Appia, 1965.

  7 Christopher Booker, The Neophiliacs; A study of the revolution in English life in the fifties
and sixties (London: Fontana, 1970).

  8 “The Long Front of Culture”, Cambridge Opinion, 17 (1959): reprinted in Pop Art
Redefined, eds John Russell and Suzi Gablick (New York and London, 1969), 84−5.

  9 Andrew Higgott, Mediating Modernism; Architectural Cultures in Britain (London:

Routledge, 2006).

10 David Robbins, ed. The Independent Group; Postwar Britain and the Aesthetics of Plenty
(London: MIT Press, 1990), 109−14.

11 David Bailey, David Bailey’s box of pin-ups (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1965).

12 Bailey, pin-ups.

13 Together, dir. Lorenza Mazzetti, UK, 1955 and Nice Time, dir. Claude Goretta, Alain Tanner,
UK, 1957.

14 Roland Barthes, Image Music Text, trans. S. Heath (London: Fontana, 1977), 142−8.

15 Robert Philip Kolker, The Altering Eye (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983).

16 Robert Bresson, Notes on the Cinematographer, (originally published as Notes sur la

Cinématograph 1975) trans. Jonathan Griffin (Copenhagen: Green Integer, 1997).

17 Peter Wollen, Signs and Meaning in the Cinema (London, British Film Institute, 1998), first
published 1969.

18 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 280.

19 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 263.

20 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 260−84.

21 Noël Burch, Theory of Film Practice, trans. Helen Lane (New Jersey: Princeton University
Press, 1981), 44.

22 Paul Rotha, Documentary Film (London: Faber and Faber, 1936).

23 Henri Bergson, Dreams, trans. by E. Slosson (London: The Gresham Press, 1914), 17.

24 Kracauer, Theory of Film, 163; Cavell, The World Viewed, 102.

25 Plato, Sophist (London: Harvard University Press, 1996), 264b.

26 Plato, Republic, trans. and intro by Desmond Lee (London: Penguin, 1988), 515a5-6;
Sophist, 232a−236d.
 SWINGING TIME IN LONDON   95

27 Marcel Detienne, Masters of Truth, trans. Janet Lloyd (New York: Zone Books, 1996).

28 Robin Maugham, Escape from the Shadows (London: Fontana, 1972). Nephew of
Somerset Maugham, the author traces the story’s genesis back to an attempted
seduction of himself by a manservant and the latter’s attractive young ‘nephew’ who
becomes a girl in the book.

29 John Summerson, Georgian London (London: Pimlico, 1991), 63.

30 Barrett walks from right to left, a filmic convention for retrograde action since, following
the western style of reading, a book movement from left to right is a positive movement
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and right to left the opposite. A character walking along a street in more than one shot
must always walk in the same direction from one side of the frame to the other to aid
the viewer in following the action.

31 Barrett skirts around the puddle, while later, Tony steps directly in one. Losey frequently
uses the motif of the puddle and stepping into it, or not as in this case. Karel Reisz, The
Technique of Film Editing (London: Focal Press, 1953), 224.

32 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, trans. by Richard Howard (London: Vintage, 1993).

33 Vincent LoBrutto, By Design; interviews with film production designers (Westport: Praeger,
1992), 64.

34 For more information and plans of the Royal Avenue house, see: Renée Tobe, “Plato and
Hegel Stay Home” in arq (11:1), 58.

35 Vesely, Architecture in the Age of Divided Representation, 77.

36 F. G. W. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. by A. V. Miller and forward by J. N. Findlay

(Oxford: Oxford UP, 1977), § 188.

37 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (London: Sheed and Ward, 1989), 323.

38 Julio Cortazar, ‘The Devil’s Drool’ in We Love Glenda so much; and other tales (London:
Arena, 1983). The title literally means ‘devil’s drool’ a Spanish equivalent to ‘a close shave.’

39 Seymour Chatman, Antonioni (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 139.

40 Antonioni used modern architecture iconically, as in L’eclisse where the EUR stands
in for disenfranchisement and disaffection and in La Notte, where he used Pier Luigi
Nervi’s Pirelli building in Milan in the same way as a haunting presence, a stark enigma
(Katherine Schonfield, Walls Have Feelings; Architecture, Film and the City (London:
Routledge, 2000), 169).

41 Originally scripted as an Aston Martin sports car Antonioni preferred Thomas to drive
a Rolls Royce, albeit a convertible one to demonstrate the convertible character of the
‘new aristocracy.’

42 “Interview with Jean-Luc Godard,” Cahiers du Cinéma 171 (October 1965), 18−36.

43 The film was meant to begin with a shot of Thomas on Carnaby Street – the street
that more than any other typified for the public the colours of ‘swinging London’ of
the era.

44 Frederic Jameson, Signatures of the Visible (New York: Routledge, 1990), 94. A MacGuffin
is a device that sets the plot in motion, but is often forgotten in the course of events, or
perhaps never discovered.

45 Marshall Berman, All That is Solid Melts Into Air; The Experience of Modernity (London:
Verso Books, 1983).
 96  SWINGING TIME IN LONDON

46 Blow-up, dir. Antonioni.

47 Reisz, The Technique of Film Editing, 216.

48 Chatman, Antonioni, 141.

49 Jameson, Signatures of the Visible, 25.

50 Roy Huss, Focus on Blow-up (New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1971), 45.

51 Alexander Walker, Hollywood, England; the British Film Industry in the Sixties (London:
Harrap, 1986).
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52 Jean-Luc Godard, “Entretien avec Antonioni par Jean-Luc Godard”, in La Politique des
Auteurs, Cahiers du Cinéma, Éditions de L’Étoile, 1971, 55−65.

53 Chatman, Antonioni, 148.

54 The park was originally the site of chalk and gravel pits. Acknowledging the park’s place
in cinematic history, a plaque commemorating its role in Blow-up has been placed on
the wall beside the tennis courts.

55 For example, the neon sign that seems to spell out certain letters, but in fact signifies
nothing.
 5
Positioning women in time and space
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In Speculum of the Other Woman, Luce Irigaray retells Plato’s cave allegory. She
writes ‘[t]he other, and the move from the female one to the other, are forgotten
upon this theatre of representation where light, which lets us see, holds centre
stage.’1 Irigaray describes the entrance to the cave as a passage like a neck, that
joins two spaces together. She notes that Plato’s prisoners are gender unspecified
(people like us) and that all their heads turn the same way, the wrong way. They
stare not at the object but at the illusion. Truth, for Irigaray becomes a pawn in
the game. All of the prisoners have to see the same way, share the same illusions.
This is as true in the polis as it is in the cave, she writes.2 Irigaray likens the cave to
a womb. Irigaray suggests that exiting the cave is a one-way path with no return,
that is, birth.
In our analogy, in the cinema, we ask ‘who is telling the story?’ and what hap-
pens when it is a woman’s voice creating sound and shadows? To investigate, we
look at two feminist filmmakers, Agnes Varda and Chantal Akerman. The films
examined include Cléo de 5 à 7 and Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080,
Bruxelles.3
The first defines Cléo, a pop singer, by time, le cinq à sept. For Cléo it is a time
in which she has to wait for results to find out if she has terminal cancer. The film
emphasizes the progression of time through a series of chapters that are titled
by their duration, and by the point of view of the characters. The film is also a
love affair with Paris, and the 14 chapters of the film correspond to the 14 Paris
arrondissements. The second defines Jeanne by the address at which she lives in
Brussels. More than three-quarters of the film takes place in her apartment and
the film is typified by the static camera and long takes, up to three minutes, so that
they resemble stills in which Jeanne sits without moving. Again the film is divided
into chapters by time. The film takes place over three days, Tuesday, Wednesday
and Thursday, each of which comprises a single chapter.
Although both filmmakers have denied being feminist filmmakers or even
that there can be a ‘woman’s cinema’ different from men’s, they respond to social
 98  POSITIONING WOMEN IN TIME AND SPACE

changes from the second wave of feminism beginning in the 1960s. Both film-
makers were influenced by events such as the combination of general strikes
and student occupation of the universities in Paris in May 1968. The phrase ‘May
1968’ became resonant with civil unrest, revolution and the feeling of being at
a turning point in history. Of the same generation as Chris Marker and Resnais,
Varda was associated with the Left Bank Group, filmmaking friends who were
somewhat removed from the Nouvelle Vague of Godard and Truffaut. Her films
often have a political theme, pro-Communist, opposition to colonialism, and
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anti-war and develop a strong female cinematic voice. From a later genera-
tion, Akerman, living in New York in 1972 was influenced by Andy Warhol, Stan
Brakhage, Michael Snow. At this time, she developed her style of long takes that
abstract the mise en scène in direct contrast to Varda’s dynamic cinematographic
expression.

FEMINIST THINKING IN FILM

In This Sex Which is Not One, Irigaray discusses mimesis and women.4 For Irigaray
femininity is to pretend. Women play with mimesis to recover their place of
exploitation (by men). That is, a woman plays at being feminine without allow-
ing herself to be reduced by it or reduced to it. In the first part of Cléo, the pro-
tagonist plays with hats, flirts with her public on the streets and in the cafés of
Paris, and with herself in mirrors. She later abandons this ‘caprice’ for her ‘real
self’. There is a playful crossing over from one side of the mirror to the other
in an interchange between the side of infinite repetition to the empirical
haptic side.5
Irigaray writes that narrative is never neutral and the screen is not a mirror or
projection screen, but a membrane across which we move back and forth, that
which is projected and that which is observing. It is, as she describes, ‘represent-
ative of female identity’.6 Feminist film theory often describes the body of the
woman as object or victim of male desires. There are infinite numbers of ways
to interpret feminism and space in film. For example, woman as closed space,
described by Teresa de Lauretis, and expounded by Patricia White in her discus-
sion of the uncanny in which doors, mirrors, staircases and portraits are never
what they appear to be.7
As Irigaray, Nancy, Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger and others state: what we see
we experience and by experiencing with our bodies we ‘know’. Irigaray refers to
the female response to the space in between viewer and viewed – we ‘feel’ or are
touched by the closeness or associated closeness of the desired body and our own
bodies respond. In Heideggerian terms, this ‘density of air’ is not an emptiness
between us and the object or the world around us, but a thickness with which we
relate to the world. From a phenomenological point of view, we are ‘closer’ to the
image when we have an association with it – we ‘feel’ the distance, and the close-up
brings us closer, more intimately into what we see, drawing us in. The stillness of
the long takes evokes an intimacy.
 POSITIONING WOMEN IN TIME AND SPACE   99

Écriture féminine, expounded on by French feminists such as Hélène Cixous,

parsed the discourse on the female body and differences of female expression
through language and text as though sieving it through cultural and psychological
analysis. Cixous applies jouissance to the expression of female pleasure that inte-
grates intellectual, emotional, physical and even spiritual aspects of feminine expe-
rience. The spiritual aspect suggests a mystical communion in which the explosion
of pleasure is limitless, effervescent. Without jouissance, according to Cixous, the
woman has no originary creative power, nor a fully empowered voice. In écriture
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féminine, jouissance is not a physical lack (of the phallus) but an excess (of pleasure)
both inside and outside the body.

CLÉO DE 5 À 7

A pop singer has two hours to wait for results from a cancer test.
Although the title indicates two hours, specifically the cinq à sept, the after-
office-hours rendezvous a man enjoys with his mistress, its running length and the
diegetic time are only 90 minutes. The film emphasizes the progression of time.
There are two times in the film, subjective time, how things feel to us, and objective
time, the ticking away of the clock. Varda wished the two to come together, and
marks each chapter this way by time. The film works in real time and real distance.
This made it difficult to film. Varda’s assistants timed the distance it took to travel
between rue Rivoli and Parc Montsouri as it had to be precise, as if it would fit into
real time. On the street and in cafés, clocks in the background constantly remind
us of the time as it passes. All the watches and clocks on the street had to be set
to match the time of the narrative and the editing had to reflect this as well. The
careful observer notes that all the clocks, even when reflected in mirrors, tell the
right time for the narrative. In contrast, Cléo’s apartment contains many clocks, all
of which have a different time on their faces.

Stairs

After having her tarot cards read and seeing both death and change in her future,
Cléo descends the stairs at 58 rue de Rivoli. Cléo, played by Corinne Marchand, is
shown descending three times, in a triple repetition of the same clip. Stairs fea-
ture in all of Varda’s films. In Jungian symbolism, descending a stair is symbolic
of descending to the unconscious mind. In contrast, her model friend Dorothée
who, unlike Cléo, is ‘at home’ in her body, departs from the narrative by quickly
ascending a stair at rue des Artistes – carefully chosen by Varda for both the loca-
tion and the name. Cléo’s descent may have symbolic resonance but it is the archi-
tectural satisfaction of the image of the stair that we remember and that changes
our perception. The movement of the image transforms our perception. Woman
descending or ascending a stair is a theme in visual arts whether in painting, such
as Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2 (1912), or, in Wong Kar-wai’s In
the Mood for Love the reprise of Maggie Cheung’s ascents in her cheongsam, the
 100  POSITIONING WOMEN IN TIME AND SPACE
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Figure 5.1  Cléo examines herself in the mirror (Cléo 5 to 7, Agnes Varda, 1961).

elegant, but restrictive and tight fitting dress worn by Chinese women in the early
twentieth century.8

Mirrors and hats

Cléo enters a hat shop and tries on a variety of hats, eventually purchasing one
and having it sent to herself at her home. At a midpoint of the film Cléo symbol-
ically removes her wig to reveal her natural hair, indicating she is ready to play a
new role, that of herself.9 Later, she gives the hat to her friend Dorothée.
Cléo constantly admires herself in mirrors as she passes her reflection on shop
windows, or mirrored walls in cafés. In the first part of the film she defines herself
by how others see her. Cléo walks the streets backgrounded by people going about
their everyday lives and to whom she is oblivious. In the middle of the film there is
a clear cut and sharp change. In the second half of the film, after she removes her
wig and reveals her true nature to herself, she is able to see and respond to others.
Suddenly, she is ‘part of the world’ as Hannah Arendt describes it: ‘the polis is not the
city-state in its physical location’ but the structures that arise from individuals speak-
ing and acting together so that its ‘true space lies between people living together’.10
It is the space where others appear not merely as inanimate objects.

Domestic interior

Almost as a relief from the bustle of the Paris streets and cafés, Cléo’s loft apartment
is designed as a bright empty space, a white stage against which she acts like the
kitten with whom she shares the apartment. Its size, spaciousness and whiteness
strike us after the busyness of the Paris streets and cafes. It is a stage set for Cléo.
 POSITIONING WOMEN IN TIME AND SPACE   101
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Figure 5.2  Cléo hangs out at home (Cléo 5 to 7, Agnes Varda, 1961).

Film techniques and actors

In a mise en abyme, Cléo and her friend look through a cinematographe at a short
silent film clip that features Godard and his then wife Anna Karina, and also fea-
tures stairs and their descent, glasses and seeing, life and death, black and white.
Michel Legrand, who wrote the score for the film itself, plays Cléo’s pianist, Bob.
Marchand who plays Cléo, did all the singing herself. In Parc Montsouri Cléo walks
down stairs to the park, as if descending on a stage set, then meets a soldier on
his way to Algeria and they talk about what it is like to know death may not be
far away. Varda wanted the scene to appear soft, unreal, as if the reality expresses
Cléo’s fear. In order to get the effect she wished for, she filmed with a green lens
on the camera so that the lush green of the lawn behind which they sit appeared
pale, cool, like snow. This gives a chill to the scene.

JEANNE DIELMAN, 23 QUAI DU COMMERCE, 1080, BRUXELLES

A woman entertains clients in the afternoons while her teenage son is at school.
The film describes three prototypical days in the life of Jeanne Dielman, who
lives at the address of the title. The 200 minute length is an essential part of the
film. Jeanne, played by Delphine Seyrig, is a widow, living a controlled life. To make
ends meet she receives men between 5 and 5.30 each day. Jeanne’s actions, filmed
as if in real time, suggests the regularity of her day. The film is divided into three
chapters, each of which marks a single day. There are no gaps but at the end of the
second day her controlled life starts to unravel.
Akerman describes her filmmaking as fighting against idolatry, which is why she
shoots straight on, a one to one collision with the audience. The first four minutes
 102  POSITIONING WOMEN IN TIME AND SPACE
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Figure 5.3  Jeanne sits in the living room without moving (Jeanne Dielman,
23 quai du Commerce,1080, Bruxelles, Chantal Akerman, 1975).

tells us what we need to know. The low level of the camera frames the kitchen; we
are at the level of the kitchen table. Jeanne stands on the left of the frame at the
cooker. In the centre is the table waiting for serving, waiting to be laid. The door-
bell rings. The film cuts to the hallway, shown in split screen, with the long hall
leading to the bedroom on the left. The composition of the film is entirely recti-
linear, comprised of strict regimentation. The earth doesn’t move in this place – at
least not yet – the camera is static, and so are the characters. When Jeanne says to
her visitor that she will see him next week, we recognize the routine. We observe
the transfer of money and immediately understand the story.
So what happens in the next 196 minutes? We understand that she has had sex
on top of the bed when she enters the bedroom and sweeps off the towel lying
there and throws it into the laundry bin. Then she has a bath – again framed in the
tiny room, the tub at the midline – a horizon revealing and disclosing – this is not a
bath in which to luxuriate. Crouched in shallow water as if cold she scrubs herself in
real time. The bath scene takes three minutes exactly (as opposed to the 15 seconds
of the encounter with the john).
We only discover she is a widow after 25 minutes. We first see her as a housewife,
then a sex worker, then a mother, then a widow, in that order. And order is what she
is about. The apartment unfolds in the same way, the view of the kitchen, the hall,
the bedroom the bathroom, the dining room. When we see a different view of the
dining room that shows us a new wall it is as if the narrative has shifted. Within the
frame are now a plant and a landscape, suggesting other horizons, appropriate for
a scene in which the son reads from a book by Charles Baudelaire. A half-hour into
the film we haven’t left her apartment. Seyrig has been in each frame, except when
she walks in or out of it before or after turning off or on the light. We leave the
apartment at the thirty–minute mark when Jeanne and her son have their evening
 POSITIONING WOMEN IN TIME AND SPACE   103

constitutional, but then, before we know it, we, and they, return. And after 40 min-
utes or so it’s marked: End of the First Day.
The next day we watch her making her bed and laying the heavy sensual duvet
on the clean sheets. She then puts a towel on top and we know why. About an hour
in we get an outdoor daytime shot as Jeanne does her errands, including a visit to
the post office, suggesting airmail and a world outside her own. After her visit
to the post office she dons a headscarf printed with brightly coloured images of
postcards suggesting travel, another world, escape, holidays.
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After her outdoor excursion we accompany Jeanne home. Ninety minutes into
the film Jeanne has a crisis, she has burned the dinner she prepared and we watch
her as she wonders what to do. We get to ride up with her in the lift again when she
comes back with the potatoes after burning them the first time. Her hair is tangled
and she is unnerved – a hot potato – presaging other disruptions to come.
Two hours into the film we’re at the end of Day Two. On Day Three the dining
room table becomes reflective like a mirror – we haven’t seen this before – and we
see Jeanne reflected in it. She awakes before her alarm, goes out for her daily errands
so early that the shops are not opened yet. She stands in front of a shop front whose
metal door slides up before her. Painted on the entrance is the number 23, but this
is not her home but the butcher’s shop.
For three minutes we watch her knead meat into meatloaf. She sits in the kitchen
for one minute. She makes coffee but either the coffee is bad, or the milk has gone
bad and even sugar cannot sweeten it, nothing is going right that day. She needs to
replace a button – symbolically – but can’t find the right one despite looking every-
where for it and when she goes to her favourite restaurant someone is sitting in her
usual seat.
When her client of the day arrives, we get to watch them in bed together. Jeanne
lies utterly inert with the man moving above her, but he does find her ‘button’ and,
after 180 minutes, Jeanne orgasms. She gets up from the bed, gets dressed, and
while he lies there she stabs him with scissors. The film ends with a five-and-a-half
minute take as Jeanne, still wearing the white silk blouse covered with blood, sits at
the dining room table.
Throughout the film the camera does not move. Nor does Jeanne’s gaze meet
others. We don’t see the woman whose baby she minds, even though they have a
long conversation through the open doorway. Each time Jeanne moves from one
room to another she passes through the hallway, she opens a door, turns on a light,
turns off the light, closes the door. The spaces are entirely separate one from the
other. When her neighbour calls they speak through the doorway but we never see
the neighbour – the camera has no curiosity. It remains static at all times, although
it can be displaced, as it has different places in different rooms, sometimes for the
best shot and sometimes to show different parts of the room, as in the dining/
sitting/bedroom. In mid- to long-shot, as if the camera is constrained by the space
of the apartment as well as editing or censoring what we see, Jeanne’s daily rituals
unfold. When her client comes to the door, the camera films him in mid-shot, so
that we do not see his face, and only see his full figure when he walks away from us
down the hall so that discretion is kept at all times.
 104  POSITIONING WOMEN IN TIME AND SPACE

Akerman’s filmmaking takes the roles of women, generally played out in a private
space, and makes them visible, through the variations within a theme that mark
the day and that change a life. The order of her life is matched by the cinematic
structure of the film.11 While the film includes three-minute takes in which Jeanne
remains sitting in the same position without moving, either at a table or on a chair
in the sitting room, it elides more potentially interesting events. For example, on
Day One she invites a man into a room and closes the door, the light changes to sig-
nify time has passed and then she and the man emerge from the room. She hands
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him his coat and hat and he hands her money and they agree to meet the following
week. The change in light and shadow emphasize the notion of durée more than
real time.12 We fill in the gap in time and action with our imagination, projecting
what we think happens in that room.
As Jeanne’s audience, we observe that she works from home as a prostitute. This
is part of the narrative construct. As filmic observers, we are in fact invited to watch
Jeanne sit, or peel potatoes, but what happens ‘behind closed doors’ remains there
until Day Three, the day of the orgasm. The camera, pre-set in height and position
throughout the film, comments directly on what is important in Jeanne’s life. As
Cavell describes: ‘[w]ith this knife with this blade, sitting in this garment at this
table, with this heap of potatoes from this bowl, within these walls under this light
at this instant . . . the woman knots herself into the world’.13
Akerman stated that she wished that, for the audience when they watched
Jeanne peeling a potato, it was as if they were watching all women peel potatoes.14
Deliberately casting Seyrig as representative of all women she played on Seyrig’s
deeply resonant filmic persona. Seyrig brought with her all the characters she had
played, including the mysterious A in Last Year in Marienbad.15 Seyrig produces a har-
monic and stylized performance. Jeanne is entirely integrated within her place and
space and the objects around her. Even when she walks on the street, whether in the
day, or at night when she walks with her son on their evening stroll, she is integrated
with the shop fronts, and the pavement.
Akerman states that the durée is an intrinsic aspect of the film. She intends for us
to incorporate the time that it takes while Jeanne sits, the time it takes for the water
to fall from the coffee filter, the time it takes for Jeanne to scrub each part of her
body when she bathes after seeing her client. This temporal register, is, she suggests,
the means by which we experience the same physical experience through the time
used in each shot. This physical experience unfolds in us, and in this time the film
enters us. Faced with this, the physical experience is also linked with the emotional
experience as well as the mental one.16
Jeanne stabs her client after she has an orgasm because her last freedom was not
taking pleasure in sex. The orgasm, the sexual pleasure that is extracted from her,
represented her surrender to the male. Akerman, who was 24 when she made the
film, discussed this with Seyrig, who was over 40 and insisted that a woman, hav-
ing experienced pleasure would wish to do so again. Akerman insisted that ‘fighting
against pleasure is Jeanne’s form of resistance, it is her way of existing, her jouissance
in relation to the obligation of pleasure’ which was the received knowledge at the
time of making the film.17
 POSITIONING WOMEN IN TIME AND SPACE   105

The film is almost entirely comprised of hallways, corridors, narrowness, lifts,

rooms that frame and constrain. The shot of the apartment and the lift and corridor
in particular reveal it as a prison. Doorways are open or closed, and used to reveal
or to hide. As Jacobs points out, rooms, domestic interiors and notions of dwelling
have enormous importance in Akerman’s works.18 Jacobs demonstrates the archi-
tectural integrity of the space of the film through his reconstruction of the plan of
Jeanne’s apartment. The film represents what Wollen calls a single set film in which
we build up our own expectations of what will happen in each place as the films
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unfold.19 As Jacobs acknowledges, in Akerman’s film the camera positions and edit-
ing suggest the space exists outside of the film despite the formal abstraction of
the space. For example, the framing of the corridor establishes it as a hallway but
also as a composition of coloured lines within a rectangle. In Structural films such as
Sailboat by Joyce Wieland, despite showing the horizon that cuts sky and sea in half,
the film frame flattens the space depicted, and the flickering of the projector makes
us conscious of watching a film.20
As Jacobs describes, open doors and windows suggest a world but never reveal it.
Domestic space is associated with women. But Jeanne does not seem particularly at
home in her own home, (like Cléo who is more at home in Paris than her own studio
where she ‘puts on an act’). Jacobs draws a plan of what Jeanne’s apartment would
look like as an architectural plan. It demonstrates both the logic and the illogic of the
space. It is difficult to see how her apartment can be one of many within a block. How
would it fit into the other apartments? The front room faces the street; the kitchen
with its balcony onto a back courtyard. But what of that long corridor along which
there are no other doors? And what a large vestibule for such a modest apartment;
it is as large if not larger than the kitchen. The hall to the lift is as far on Jeanne’s floor
as it is on the ground floor, although this would not be the case in a real building.

Figure 5.4  Jeanne sits at her kitchen table in a three-minute take (Jeanne Dielman,
23 quai du Commerce,1080, Bruxelles, Chantal Akerman, 1975).
 106  POSITIONING WOMEN IN TIME AND SPACE

It is set up so that the linearity and constraint of the hallway can take place at both
levels, at street level and at apartment level.

NOTES

  1 Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. C. Porter (Ithaca: Cambridge
University Press, 1985), 260.
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  2 Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, 265.

  3 Cléo de 5 à 7, dir. Agnes Varda, France, 1962; Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080,
Bruxelles, dir. Chantal Akerman, Belgium/France, 1975.

  4 Luce, Irigaray, This Sex Which is Not One, trans. C. Porter (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
1985).

  5 Irigaray, This Sex Which is Not One, 77.

  6 Irigaray, This Sex Which is Not One, 77.

  7 Teresa de Lauretis, Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (London: Macmillan, 1984)
and Patricia White, “Female Spectator, Lesbian Specter: The Haunting” in Sexuality and
Space, ed. Beatriz Colomina (New York, Princeton Architectural Press, 1992), 131−62.

  8 In the Mood for Love, dir. Wong Kar-wai, Hong Kong: USA Films, 2000.

  9 <sensesofcinema.com/2002/great-directors/varda/>

10 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1958), 198.

11 Ivone Margulies, Nothing Happens; Chantal Akerman’s Hyperrealist Everyday (London:

Duke University Press, 1996), 65.

12 At this time both Andy Warhol and Michael Snow were making films that worked within
the constraints and freedoms of ‘real time’. When we watch a film in real time we get
bored, are more conscious of ourselves, sitting there in the cinema, watching the film,
what else are we doing, scratching our head, crossing or uncrossing our legs, waiting for
the scene to change, the camera angle to be adjusted.

13 Stanley Cavell, Cavell on Film, ed. by William Rothman (New York, State University of New
York Press, 2005), 256.

14 Margulies, Nothing Happens, 144.

15 Margulies, Nothing Happens.

16 Vivian Sky Rehberg, “Tant Qu’il Est Encore Temps/While There is Still Time” in Chantal
Akerman; Too Far, Too Close (Antwerp: Ludion, 2012), 51−72.

17 Chantal Akerman and Elizabeth Lebovici, “Losing Everything That Made you a Slave” in
Chantal Akerman; Too Far, Too Close, 100.

18 Steven Jacobs, “Semiotics of the Living Room: Domestic Interiors in Chantal Akerman’s
Cinema,” in Chantal Akerman; Too Far, Too Close, 73−87.

19 Peter Wollen, Paris Hollywood: Writings on Film (London: Verso, 2002), 214.

20 Sailboat, dir. Joyce Wieland, Canada, 1967.

 6
Modernist Utopia: the spirit of the future
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INTRODUCTION

The utopian film suggests a suspension of ‘place’ that situates a specific question:
wherein lies our humanity? Modernist precepts suggest that we will achieve a bet-
ter world by putting the past behind us. Utopias or dystopias, seemingly opposites,
have been, in film at least, interconnected since the advent of modernity, exem-
plified by films such as Metropolis and Things to Come, whose titles suggest the
subject matter: the city and the future. Futurity suggests a time ahead of us, in
French l’avenir. The proposition, since the Enlightenment, is that one day, in the
future, the world will be a better place, and that situation is coming. We don’t know
what it will look like but it will be different from this one. Utopian visions promote
this option for change; that things, whatever they are like now, do not have to go
on as they are. Dystopias, on the other hand, offer a warning of what will happen if
we do not change in the present. Coexisting with the feeling that ‘this world is bad’
is the notion that there is an ideal; somewhere, somehow there is a better world,
although this can not be discerned.
Filmmakers interested in making films that depict the world as irrational and
not good give their films a negative theodicy; that without evil we would have no
need to aspire to goodness. The utopian socialist discourse questions whether we
are individuals all contributing to the betterment of the community or rather cogs
in a machine that keeps modern society turning. Popular technological develop-
ments include creating automata that improve our life but suck out our humanity.
This juncture of technology and control is a theme from Metropolis to now. Since the
modernist films of the 1920s, science fiction often depicts the loss of individuality,
and the threat of knowledge, social control, one-dimensional characters. The films
examined here include Beat Girl, Fahrenheit 451, Barbarella, 2001: A Space Odyssey,
and Gattaca.1
Science fiction films do not always have the same ‘look’. For example, while
Lang’s 1920s Woman in the Moon takes its style from the popular culture and pulp
novels of the era, his Metropolis features the controlled environment, robots, and
 108  MODERNIST UTOPIA

modern architectural design that remains the prime referent for modernism in film.
Metropolis presents a dystopia, humanity enslaved by and turning into machines. In
contrast, the smooth white curves of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey signify
aspirational perfection, where humans are secondary to robots and happy in their
role.
Futures can be either utopian or dystopian. Dystopian worlds, epitomized by
such films as Blade Runner, are film noir dark, full of smoke, rain, kingpins of
crime, double-crossing women and industrial wastelands. Dystopian worlds are
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postmodern, peopled with flawed individuals at odds with their society. While dys-
topia suggests that our present actions have destroyed our potential for positive
growth, utopia anticipates that there will be a future but suggests we should appre-
ciate the vicissitudes of the present. Utopian worlds are ultramodern, clean, white,
smooth, curved and stylish. Utopian worlds are populated with perfect communi-
ties where everyone is in agreement, has perfect skin, perfect designer clothes, and
perfectly agreeable ideas.
The artificial, well-lit utopian world, where there is no shadow, presents a neu-
tralized humanity, with no individual foibles. This utopia employs urban design as
a political discourse.2 Plato’s Republic, Thomas More’s Utopia, Arendt’s description
of the polis and Richard Sennett’s conscientious urban gaze help us to understand
the relation of society and community. Filmic utopias realize visually different pos-
sible ‘ideals’ within an actual situation. They can also present an explicit order that
questions the validity of a particular ideal through elimination of specific evils, such
as crime, money, immorality. These visions pose the question of whether this offers
a better life, or just an artificial one, and questions as well just where our humanity
fits in.

UTOPIAS: SOCIAL HARMONY AND SPATIAL ORDER

The 1960s is the era of the Pill, the war in Vietnam, the events of Paris in May 1968.3
It is the time of Pop art and Op art. Utopian thinking was everywhere. It was an
era of naiveté and optimism. The contraceptive pill that allowed ‘free love’ that is,
sexual congress between men and women without the fear of the consequences
of pregnancy, became in film the converse; free love was neutralized sex, by which
a pill would replace actual physical engagement, while allowing or even enhanc-
ing pleasure in both parties. In many utopias pleasure is neutralized or controlled.
Some science fiction stories combined sex with politics and presented humans
made sterile by atomic radiation, or in an effort to get rid of war, to reduce human
emotions. In the ‘what if’ of 1960s films, neutralizing reproduction through taking a
pill transmuted to neutralizing physicality and touch. We look at these two aspects
separately, first at the political situation and next at the individual and the role that
sex plays in the utopia.
Since Plato’s Republic and More’s Utopia, perfection has been equated with
ordered control, standardized behaviour and commodities. Utopias are ambigu-
ous politically but often specific architecturally. Plato’s Republic does not delineate
 MODERNIST UTOPIA   109

the form of the polis or city-state but commentators interpret the ring structure
city plan as concentric circles.4 Plato’s description of the ideal or model city of
Atlantis, the prototypical totalitarian state, describes specifics of geometric lay-
out and dimensions. Increasingly large concentric rings, alternating between land
and water, surround a city centre consisting of buildings constructed of white,
black and red stone, and ornamented with copper and bronze.5 To the North of
the city a massive grid of canals renders the natural landscape into geometric
abstraction.
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More’s Utopia depicts a money-less economy and communal habitation. It also

describes a model for a happy life and rules for living well. In More’s Utopia privacy
is abolished. More states: ‘[e]very house has a front door to the street and a back
door to the garden. The double doors, which open easily with a push of the hand
and close again automatically, let anyone come in.’6 Streets are constructed 20 feet
across and laid out both for use by vehicles and for protection from wind. Gardens
are communal and homes, built in parallel rows of three storeys of stone or brick
with glass windows, are exchanged every ten years.
In the twentieth century, political events meant that in literature the socialist
utopias of shared wealth and property came to be associated with Stalinism and
lack of individual identity rather than the community described by More.7 The
social utopia is inherently a spatialized, material expression of totalitarian author-
ity and control. Although the theory is that what is good for the individual is good
for the whole and vice versa, the ambiguity of the utopia is that the ideal purity
of the perfect system might not be appreciated by its subjects and so is imposed
by force.
Frederic Jameson enters the utopian fray to comment on the socialist aspect.
Rather than setting out, Jameson suggests, someone’s idea of a perfect society,
utopias create an aporia, an unanswerable question, whose function is to provoke
a conscious awareness of the uncertainty itself.8 Films offer a visual expression to
these alternative ideals: a world of genetic purity; a world of no war; a world where
thought can be controlled and crimes anticipated. There are several themes: space
travel as escape from the confines of the Earth, genetic perfection, effects of atomic
bombs and radiation poisoning, neutralized individuality and also neutralized
sexuality. The utopian world is by its very definition a closed one. Utopias help to
answer the question, what would our lives be like ‘if’? For example: what if we lived
in a world where we were always at peace; what if we were all sterile; what if we
lived in artificial worlds; what if we had achieved genetic perfection. In films these
questions manifest themselves in different ways.

CITY OF THE FUTURE

Ideals for social justice and urban life may be both quantified and qualified but it is
the architect’s role in the utopia to imagine change and determine how this change
would be made manifest.9 The model of the ideal city became a paradigm that
replaced culture through practicality carried out in the context of well-being.
 110  MODERNIST UTOPIA

Products as vehicles for expression of perfection introduced the commonplace to

utopian and idealist fantasies to the everyday. Industrial designers such as Teague
were striving for ‘wholeness’ in products in order to sell the notion of ‘wholeness’ in
people’s lives; that building the new world would be the creation of ‘order in a disor-
derly world.’10 The modern conveniences of everyday life (whether cars or kitchens)
were industrially designed into open-ended fantasies of desire, disguised as free-
dom. Industrial design, an engineering of lifestyle, was actualized through newly
discovered techniques of persuasion. Streamlining represented the visual optimism
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of modernism to move forward with no frictional impediments.

Le Corbusier’s Ville Contemporaine (1920) pictured a super scale grid of high-rise
multi-use skyscrapers around a transportation hub, and separated from traffic and
pedestrian access. Bel Geddes, with his advertising and theatre background devel-
oped Le Corbusier’s 1920s ideal city in a distinctively American manner with an adver-
tising campaign to promote the automobile. Designed for Shell, the Metropolis City
of 1960 featured streamlined teardrop-shaped cars on a multilayered multi-laned
intersection of streamlined high-rise modernist buildings.11
The following year Bel Geddes produced the Futurama for the General Motors
pavilion at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. The Futurama was entered through a dra-
matic streamlined sweep of a wall, and long curving ramp. Visitors seated in mini-
cars looked down on a scale model of a modernist city of the future while a low
recorded voice detailed how efficient the city of the future would be. When the visi-
tors finished they emerged in a life-size model of the city they had been ‘flying’ over.
The Fair’s theme was the World of Tomorrow, symbolized by Wallace Harrison and
F. André Fouilhoux’s Perisphere. Entering from an aerial bridge just below the radius
of the Perisphere, visitors looked down to view the Democracity projected on the
walls of the sphere. Democracity was designed by conscientious industrial designer
Henry Dreyfus. As Vivian Sobchak notes, Dorothy’s visit over the rainbow, another
place that transcends time and place, took place the same year as the 1939 New
York World’s Fair with its Trylon and Perisphere and Bel Geddes’ Futurama fantasy of
a 1960s city.12

ARCHITECTURE

Streamlined architecture from the 1930s reappears in the 1960s and again in the cur-
rent era. The soft curved white plastic forms of the 1960s came to represent the opti-
mism of disengaging from the present into an unknown future. There is an aesthetics
of utopia – it is neutralized, shadowless, and white. Filmic utopias are monochrome,
constantly lit, and minimalist in architectural expression – a tendency shared with
socialist architects and the Stalinist blocks of the Soviet era architecture. There are two
aspects of the utopia, the ordered, controlled, geometric urban grid of Le Corbusier’s
1925 Plan Voisin and the open plan domestic interior, with free-form internal spaces
where there are few rooms, and even fewer right angled corners. Free-flowing spaces
with curved walls define the utopian home. This look still represents utopian archi-
tecture and controlled environments in science fiction films.
 MODERNIST UTOPIA   111

Futuro

Futuristic houses are often raised from the ground. Verticality suggests defying
gravity, striving and stretching into an unknown. Two Scandinavian designs, the
Futuro and the Villa Spies exemplify these ideas in curved form. Matti Suuronen
designed the Futuro, a ski cabin, with the prospect of mass production in 1965. The
first prototype was white and called cabin no. 000. Circular in plan and elliptical in
section, ellipse-shaped windows repeated the curvature of the exterior.
Entrance was through the moulded access door hinged from the bottom that
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pulled out to serve as the front steps.13 It was called the bubble house, and what
the Daily Mirror referred to as ‘Finland’s notion of a weekend lake house, but our
idea of a flying saucer from outer space.’14 Warhol was photographed with one and
Christo even wrapped a Futuro. It featured in men’s lifestyle magazine Playboy and
the Museum of Modern Art in New York includes photographs of the Futuro in its
collection. It remained a commercially unfeasible enterprise as it was considered
too quirky and expensive. The oil crisis of 1973 that changed car design to produce
smaller and lighter cars, and increased interest in solar, wind and other renewable
energies, also ended building design such as the Futuro that relied on petroleum
based products like plastics.

Villa Spies

The Villa Spies was completed in 1969 and remains largely unchanged today. The
house originated in a competition in 1967 arranged by a Danish travel agency
and charter airline, to represent the ‘spirit of the times’; the brief was to create
new concepts for holidays. The competition was won by Staffan Berglund who
proposed a house made entirely of plastic; adaptable to any site, whether beach
or ski slope.
Situated just south of Stockholm, it has two floors, in a bowl-shaped base of
cast in situ concrete. The exterior is formed of prefabricated plastic elements that
make up both ceiling and roof to form a shallow self-supporting dome. The main
floor is a large open plan from which a dining table rises from below, and then
recedes again when no longer required. All the fittings upstairs are white, includ-
ing the wall-to-wall carpet. The sole exception, a red control panel, controls the ris-
ing dining room, monitors the window shades, or projects images onto the white
walls, floor and ceiling simultaneously. One may programme music, birdsong, or
just the sound of waves to move around the house from the 25 invisible speakers
mounted along the outer perimeter of the dome. The house itself was meant to
be an experience.

URBANISM AND UTOPIA

One of the most distinctive qualities of utopias is the manner in which they reflect
contemporary culture and conditions. As in More’s original book, the utopian vision
 112  MODERNIST UTOPIA

suggests what could be, in order to critique what is. The events of Paris 1968 engen-
dered a whole generation of literary utopias. Rather than a prediction of tomorrow’s
reality, utopias shed light on the political and social issues of the era in which they
are made.15 Utopias are a dialectic reaction to what we see in our current worlds, so
we project visions of what could be.16 Growing fears of nuclear self-destruction and
domestic unrest related to government control inspired visions of a utopian peace.
Fears of overpopulation, food shortages, and pollution inspired visions of sterility,
artificial foodstuffs, and obsessive cleanliness.17
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The city

Distinctions between: public and private; necessity and freedom and the social and
the political, help define the role of the citizen in the modern city. Positive aspects
of city life include its promise of anonymity and community.18 Part of modern life
is to be one among many, a positive contribution, Arendt suggests, so long as one
is an active member. Arendt’s reflections on personal and political judgement and
the importance of symbolic public acts became extremely influential in the new
social movements of the 1960s. For Arendt, existential loneliness frames the human
condition in modern society and she explains the prime condition of modern cities,
impersonality and anonymity, as positive values.19
Sennett questions whether cities are places where people come together, look-
ing for something they have in common, or whether they no longer look at one
another but seek an explanatory image, a vision of themselves that unites a com-
munity of strangers. Urbanites dash about their business always in a rush, aware
of one another in an impersonal way that acknowledges the other without neces-
sarily getting to know them, not unlike the cinema audience ‘bent towards some
flashing scene’.20
The dual strands of an approach to community well-being and happiness in
achieving personal goals indicate a distinction between public and private life of
individuals in society.21 In the utopia there is no ‘behind closed doors’ and the pri-
vate is inherently public; More’s Utopia has no locks or keys and people may wander
in and out of one anothers’ homes at will.

Escape from planet Earth

1960s thinking suggested contradictory notions about this ‘artificial’ world we make
for ourselves. While one way of thinking suggested we are ‘at home’ on ‘Mother
Earth’, the launch of artifical satellites such as Sputnik also launched the desire to
break free from the bonds of gravity that ‘imprison’ us on Earth, escaping Earth’s
‘confines,’ being able to escape restrictions of place and time, leaving behind class,
background, language and everything that limits us. It also meant living in entirely
artifical environments, breathing artifical air, and eating artifical foodstuffs. As
Arendt suggests, creating this off world life-sustaining environment is less a techno-
logical than a political problem.22
 MODERNIST UTOPIA   113

Everyday conveniences and robots to reduce domestic labour and improve

the private life form part of the utopian dialogue.23 The artificial refers not only
to constructed space stations, but also to homes full of modern conveniences
that reduce labour in the domestic interior. This puts a fundamental aspect of the
human condition, the wish to be liberated from toil and trouble, at stake. With no
labour all men and women are free to live equally, creating a void. More’s Utopia
circumvents this, by suggesting that all citizens rotate tasks so that all engage in
manual labour. Science fiction films offer alternative suggestions for how to fill
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that void: with parties, narcotics, and artificial realities.

Utopia is spectacular and provocative; a ‘no-place’ that is also ‘every place’ entirely
suited to the medium of the imaginative, contrived, controlled world of film.24
De-situated in time the utopia presents a moment as if ungrounded, in the world of
‘what if’. In the 1960s, fantasy provided an escape into the classless society promised
by the media. At the opposite end of the spectrum from imaginative fantasy worlds
lies the material world of making and confronting the ‘here’ and ‘now’ of given real-
ity. Some science fiction films, such as 2001, present wholely artificial worlds while
others are filmed entirely on location in the present and require only one or two
things out of place to make them recognizable as ‘the future’.
To a certain extent all science fiction films are about space travel whether they
feature space ships or not and the exploratory journey is as likely to be internal
as it is to be blasting off to outer space. They rely on the premise of the passage
into the unknown and across those defined boundaries of time and space that
give identity to the world and to ourselves. Science fiction, like critical theory, has
portrayed the mass media as a pacifying force, an opiate. Addiction to media cul-
ture, as Marshal McLuhan suggests, is a natural evolutionary state that extends
and empowers our perception of ourselves into unseen and expanded spatial
dimensions.25
Science fiction films often present the future as bleak and hopeless (if quite styl-
ish) with power decentred so it is everywhere and nowhere. Utopian films depict a
world where individuality is repressed or at best neutralized. There is no redemp-
tion in the science fiction film, but an ongoing exploration into the unknown. The
hero or heroine is most successful when they do not return. The real ‘hero’ of the
science fiction story is the plot, which is often an abstract social premise.

BEAT GIRL

An architect lives in a modern house with his rebellious teenage daughter.

Although distinctively not a science fiction film, Beat Girl, enters into our dis-
cussion as it features a proposal for a modernist utopian city. While in the interwar
period Le Corbusier’s Ville Contemporaine and Bel Geddes’ Metropolis City of 1960
represented a brave new world, in the actual 1960 they represented a sterile city,
lacking humanity and warmth.
Beat Girl compares modernism with lack of ‘life’ and Gillian Hills, who later
romped with Jane Birkin and David Hemmings in Blow-up and again with Barbara
 114  MODERNIST UTOPIA

Scott and Malcolm MacDowell in Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange plays the teenage
daughter who describes the house her father designed as ‘a morgue’.26 The mod-
ernist house features metal handrails, sliding doors in panelled walls that open
to reveal the television, the bar, and a ‘hi-fi’. Twelve painted panels of geometric
abstraction cover an entire wall and abstract sculptures are placed about the living
room.
Prominently placed in one corner stands a large black box, echoing the com-
ment on the morgue. Inside is the model of City 2000, a white grid around a cir-
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cular centre combining the Ville Contemporaine with Brasilia. Within the narrative
of teenage rebellion, modernity and in particular the modern city are critiqued,
with their white grids, lack of neighbourhoods and expressions of total conform-
ity. In Beat Girl, the protagonist’s father, a modernist architect, is more in love with
City 2000 than anything else. He describes the rows of featureless, identical tower
blocks laid out in a grid around a circular centre of taller curved buildings:

I call it City 2000 – grime filth poverty noise, hustle and bustle, these things will be
unknown, an almost silent place, sound proofed with the use of lined bevelled walls
of concrete which also serve to cut wind and rain.

Psychologists think that neuroses are caused by too much contact with other people,
now in my city, you’ll feel as alone as if you are ten thousand miles from anyone in
the country.27

The films casts modernity as the source of all ills, where one encounters nothing
ambiguous or unexpected.28

FAHRENHEIT 451

In the future, firemen no longer put out fires, they burn books. Watching television
has replaced reading as a form of taking in information. Individuality is neutral-
ized. A fireman named Montag reads a book secretly and discovers that it offers a
window to another world, one of the intellect. He leaves his official life and joins
rebels who live outside the law, each of whom represents a book that he or she has
memorized.
On one hand a fireman burns books (rather than puts out fires) while on the other
he puts out the flames of ideas, and individual thinking. By dampening knowledge,
and imagination, he also dampens desire, expressed in the film both physically and
through desire to know. The film equates addiction to tranquilizers and to television,
both presented as sedatives. The twinning of Montag’s wife and the book girl (both
played by Julie Christie) and other visual and narrative rhymes in the film disclose
the hermetic world depicted. The film opens with images of television aerials as if
they are both transmitting and receiving the film credits that are read out verbally,
as text is outlawed. It sets a tone of surreality to the film, emphasized by cinematog-
rapher Nic Roeg’s use of colour and framing.
Truffaut’s intention in filming a science fiction film was to create a world in
which the everyday looked out of place and the out of place looked everyday.
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Figure 6.1  City 2000 (Beat Girl, Edmond Gréville, 1960).

 116  MODERNIST UTOPIA

To achieve this, his script instructions include directions to fit in details, such as IBM
machines; and to position designed or ‘futuristic’ elements of the everyday in the
background. Truffaut described this latter as: ‘daily scene in an unusual context and
unusual scene in a realistic setting.’29
Even the fire station was just outside the editing suite in Pinewood. Truffaut had
the set designer construct a simple wall, paint it bright red, and put a red painted
post box in front, in which informants could post letters with the names of those
with books. From behind this red wall a red fire engine resembling a children’s toy
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emerged when the siren sounded. The simplicity of the film underlines the depth of
meaning of the film.
Like Godard’s Alphaville, made the previous year, Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451 is his
only venture into science fiction and uses modernism as set. As soon as we see the
firemen and their costumes, the stylized fire truck and the monorail we know we are
in a different time, but also one that references our own.
Truffaut prefers to film on location, even in a science fiction film. The real life
setting restricts the camera location but it also suggests that a particular action is
called for in a particular place. As Truffaut suggests: ‘[i]n genuine settings you’re
obliged to simplify; there is no longer anything but the image’.30 Simple everyday
interiors, created at Pinewood studios, are made both contemporary and futur-
istic with the addition of white transparent Victor Vasarely inspired geometric
screens.
Filmed in the Alton Estate in Roehampton (designed in 1958 by London County
Council and inspired by Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation), the white modernist
housing stock is cast as the bleak and controlled future. A long row of white bun-
galows at 45 degrees, juxtaposed with eleven-storey slab blocks, contrast with the
green lawns that surround them. The concrete modernist columns of the housing
blocks become, in Truffaut’s film, an alternative reality.

Figure 6.2  Located in France, near Orléans, the monorail was

constructed as a full scale experimental line that only ran about a single kilometre
(Fahrenheit 451, François Truffaut, 1966).
 MODERNIST UTOPIA   117
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Figure 6.3  Alton Estate in Roehampton, designed in 1958 by London County Council
(Fahrenheit 451, François Truffaut, 1966).

Film techniques

While the fireman’s uniform is designed to resemble Nazi uniforms (a reference to

Truffaut’s childhood in Paris under German occupation), the white coverall for the
one holding the fire hose (and thus starting the fire) is all white, like nuclear pro-
tective clothing. It also resembles that of an executioner, or a monk. In order to cre-
ate the streamlined smoothness as Montag dons the uniform, Truffaut employs a
Hitchcockian technique of filming the clothes being removed, and then showing
the film in reverse. The film is full of Hitchcockian influences, such as stretching the
perspective and moving a picture to find something hidden.
The use of irising (where a circle of image is surrounded by black) and other
graphic techniques emphasizes the dominant colours of the film, black and white,
like black text printed on a white page, highlighted with red and green to both stop
the viewer and help them progress. In contrast the books present a variety of colour,
form and texture. Many of the books that the firemen burn are French (including
a Cahiers du Cinéma) as Truffaut had brought them himself from his own library in
Paris. The film ends in the snow, where the world turns white and the only colour is
the human ‘books’. The book people who live outside the law are an aural pun that
works only in French, homme libre – homme livre – free people. Ray Bradbury, who
wrote the original short story from which the film derives, describes film as bom-
barded with images and details emphasized with special effects. As a surprise to the
author, his collection of short stories, The Martian Chronicles is included as one of the
books that is saved through being memorized.

BARBARELLA

In the future Barbarella is sent to rescue Professor Durand to prevent his weapon, the
positronic ray, from falling into the wrong hands. After a series of picaresque adventures,
 118  MODERNIST UTOPIA

Barbarella finds Durand but he tries to destroy her. In the end Barbarella is saved by her
innate goodness.
Famously opening with a gravity free strip tease, Roger Vadim’s Barbarella fea-
tures Jane Fonda as a comic strip character not unlike Losey’s stylized Modesty
Blaise.31 Both films grew out of the bande dessinée into film and feature Op art and
Pop art locations and set design. Losey’s film situates itself in a constructed real-
ity, like the stylish Italian science fiction film The 10th Victim, in the juxtaposition
of Pop and Op art geometries with both city and landscape locations.32 In contrast
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Barbarella’s ‘cheap and cheerful’ space ships, or ice ships with their fake fur and inflat-
ables resemble a baroque twentieth century boudoir.

Sex

Since it is not a utopian film, but presents a somewhat dystopian future, the baroque
excess of colour and fake fur of Barbarella contrasts with the ultra smooth white neu-
trality of other futurist films of the era. In Barbarella’s future, actual sexual congress
on Earth has been replaced by exaltation transference pills so that the heart and
mind may be synergized in perfect harmony. It is taking the Pill in reverse; rather
than freeing the female from concerns of unwanted pregnancy it freed people from
unwanted emotions as if body secretions were unnecessary human messiness.
However, after experiencing actual sex with the Ice Man, Barbarella is ‘unfrozen’. She
determines that real sex is much better and, her libido awakened, she proceeds to
share this knowledge with an angel, thereby curing his depression and enabling
him to fly.
Later, Barbarella herself is trapped in an Exaltation Machine, the intention of
which is to cause death by orgasm. As if in parody of Sandro Botticelli’s Birth of Venus
(1486) that shows the love goddess emerging from the waves of a sea shell, the
Exaltation Machine itself resembles a giant undulating clam shell, operated by being
played like an organ. Since Barbarella is a 1960s heroine, her capacity for pleasure
exceeds the Exaltation Machine’s limits and she breaks the machine.

Fashion

For Barbarella fashion designer Paco Rabanne produced pirate-style leather boots,
combined with vacuum moulded plastic see-through halter tops and capes, and
a striking green and blue body suit that seems to be made exclusively of mosaic
tiles. The look was referenced in the transparent cape and torn tights in 1980s Blade
Runner, another baroque design dystopian futuristic film. Rabanne’s costumes both
integrated and absorbed what he felt was the current of eroticism of the era.33
Rabanne, who had originally studied architecture at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris
and apprenticed in the 1950s with Auguste Perret, began his career in fashion design-
ing buttons. He created see-through dresses that merged chain mail with the mini.
His distinctive see-through ornamental garments took the button design into linked
chain mail like capes, frocks, or neck and waistbands. Metallic squares or circles were
 MODERNIST UTOPIA   119

linked to form garments that transmuted the protection of armour, with the invitation
of transparency inviting one to see what was underneath. For Rabanne, eroticism is
not nudity but ‘that which veils it, then allows it to become unveiled’.34 He suggests
the search for a brave new world is a noble and unending one. Influenced by the
proposals of Fuller’s domed and air-conditioned cities, Rabanne suggested that in
the future women’s clothing would be entirely ornamental and fanciful. Since there
would be no need to protect us from the elements, clothing would be transparent,
coloured gasses that cling to the body, like a halo of light that will change colour
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with the movement of the sun, or with emotion.

2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY

In 2001 a man travels in a series of spacecraft and space stations to the Moon. This
launches a trip to Jupiter on which two astronauts travel in deep sleep. They awake and
communicate both with Earth and with their onboard robot HAL, who tries to kill the
two men but is disconnected by removing the circuits that supply his ‘brain’. The mission
succeeds. The second astronaut travels out in time and space, gains all knowledge and
returns to Earth as an all-knowing foetus.
The synopsis of the film does not even come close to capturing the style of
Kubrick’s film, in which each widescreen frame conveys a controlled, relaxed, styl-
ized elegy to form and space travel. Classical music suggests grace and the rhyming
visuals create a poetic symphony of light. There is an elegance that suggests we are
already on an inevitable trajectory to our future.35
Although the opening scene of the film depicts the ‘dawn of man’ we begin with
the visual link that opens the future; a bone tossed in the air cuts to an elegant
space station rotating slowly in space. After this, 2001 is filmed entirely in artifi-
cial worlds that start with a journey to the Moon, then follows a series of space
craft that develop from jet-style to circular space stations to globes that resemble

Figure 6.4  Gravity free 360 degree access corridor (2001: A Space Odyssey,
Stanley Kubrick, 1968).
 120  MODERNIST UTOPIA

bathyspheres to spherical craft with extended tails housing fuel, suggestive of a

long journey. The final craft is an ergonomically designed single person pod with
prosthetic arms.
Kubrick situates his film in the space race for the ‘conquest’ of space, launched
by competing artificial satellites − the USSR’s Sputnik and the US’s Explorer − in the
1950s. In the 1960s, Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin flew the first manned space
mission in 1961, and in 1969 American Neil Armstrong walked on the Moon or,
in the rhetoric of the time, it was ‘all mankind’ who took that step forward. This
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‘conquest’ of space, as Michel Chion puts it, provided the background for Kubrick’s
film and for the dialogue of peace.36 Kubrick’s theme, that the Earth is a cradle from
which we must at some point escape, echoes Arendt. She asks why, if the Earth,
cradle of civilization, offers us all we need, do we feel ‘trapped’?37 Is gravity free
space travel the natural development? Are we escaping our humanity or actually
going somewhere?

Spheres

Circular space stations that rotate slowly in space represent variations on a theme.
The film is full of white globular spacecraft. The spherical pod that lands on the
Moon descending gracefully, lit by the light of the sun, is pure white, but as it
descends into shadow, presaging events to come, it grows dark and the horizontal
strip of viewing windows become menacing eyes. The scene of the flight attendant
walking on the ceiling, or rather, walking around the circumference of the round
tunnel to demonstrate life in a gravityless interior, establishes different time and
space dimensions.38

Corridors

Informed by both Pop art and Op art, the film’s look and design set the tone of the
1960s; white, low curved corridors, scattered with red designer furniture and a mod-
ernist transparent concierge’s desk situate us in a Hilton hotel of the future. But lest
we think that space travel is only for the elite a Howard Johnson’s sign demonstrates
that space travel is also available for the budget traveller. The Moon appears through
the windows rotating in the background while floors and ceilings and walls are lit for
luminescence.
Smooth white corridors that curve up so we don’t see an end and suggest circu-
larity and gravity free space, and the scale and perspective of the spaceship interiors,
give the feeling of an entirely enclosed self-sufficient place. In Kubrick’s films, sets
give off their own light and white, as Chion states, is always found in Kubrick’s films
in scenes of importance.39 The all white shadowless interiors were created by filming
with the camera aperture completely open for both interior shots and models, to
give the effect of high luminosity objects in space and the walls of the sets seem irra-
diated by light. The second, more important colour is red. The low curve of the space
foyer, with its red Olivier Mourgue designed Djinn chairs set out on the curving ‘floor’
 MODERNIST UTOPIA   121
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Figure 6.5  Luminescent curved corridors with Olivier Mourgue designed chairs
in hotel lounge on the space station (2001: A Space Odyssey,
Stanley Kubrick, 1968).

in the white luminescence of the Hilton lobby of Space Station 5 were created by set
designer Joy Cuff (the only woman working on the set of the film). The spacecraft
look is by Harry Lange who had been developing spacecraft designs for NASA where
he met Arthur C. Clarke who then introduced him to Kubrick.

Human vs robot

Contact with Earth is through a sequence of screens, diminishing in size as the film
progresses. Family is acknowledged, although as something ‘everyday’ but increas-
ingly distant. As the astronauts journey further away, their worlds get smaller until
the lone survivor is in a small single person pod, round, with a round window and
artificial arms.
The most ‘at home’ character of the film is HAL, the paranoid computer whose
‘eye’ observes and monitors every aspects of the spacecraft. Close-ups of HAL’s ‘eye’
and close-ups of the astronauts’ faces contrast with the scale of the space stations
rotating in space to the music of Johann Strauss II’s The Blue Danube. Kubrick often
presents us with ‘Hal’s eye view’ of the scene, by using a fish eye lens so that we
‘get in the mind’ of the computer. Kubrick wished to portray the perfect automaton,
easing our labour, anticipating our every need, providing meals, navigation, main-
tenance, checking itself and communications. In 2001, humans move and speak
with a cool efficiency, often acting like emotionless robots, as if they themselves
are appendages of the technologically sophisticated, well-ordered world. The actors
acted without the voice of HAL but with the director himself sometimes voicing the
dialogue. To increase the sense of disconnection the entire dialogue for the voice of
HAL, the perfect robot, was recorded in a single weekend without the actor, Douglas
Rain, having seen a single image from the film.40
As the film progresses, to symbolize the increasing distance from contact with
Earth, spaces get smaller and increasingly claustrophobic, such as at the very centre
 122  MODERNIST UTOPIA

of the spaceship where suddenly, instead of an endless and featureless expanse,

the character, in gravityless space, seems to swim in orange and yellow light, as he
disconnects Hal’s brain.

Fashion

The costume design established the atmosphere for the interiors and set the tone
for the style of the film. The space-age fashion that dominated Paris in the 1960s was
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short lived and in direct contrast with Savile Row couturier Hardy Amies’ all white
costumes for the female flight attendants and simple suits for the men. In order to
understand what fashion might be like 33 years in the future, Amies looked at how
fashion had changed in the previous 33 years, saw that no radical change in style
had taken place and felt that the more futuristic designs were, the more they would
seem dated. Determined that fashion would not be that different from what it was at
the time, which was 1968, he predicted that men would still wear suits, and women
recognizable clothes. He chose single colour looks, and heavier fabrics because of
the zero gravity of the space craft.41
Amies designed many outfits, including a mother and child in a playground,
and a ‘man in a crowd’ that were deleted from the film. In Kubrick’s film, there is no
‘everyday’ and so only the artificial remained, the scientists and diplomats on the
space station and on the Moon, the astronauts themselves, and the flight attend-
ants on the different spacecraft between Earth and the Moon. Amies designed the
captains’ uniforms as referent of airline pilots of the 1960s and flight attendant
uniforms that were simple and practical. Hat designer Frederick Fox created the
immaculate white suede hats.

GATTACA

In an undefined future, a government sanctioned eugenics policy creates children who

are genetically perfect. A genetically flawed man assumes the identity of a genetically
perfect man in order to pursue his lifelong dream of space travel.
Gattaca was written and directed by Andrew Niccol who also wrote The Truman
Show, a film about controlled life under an artificial dome. Gattaca uses the 1950s
expressions of futurity in a cynical (if beautifully rendered) comment on perfec-
tion and human imperfections, the very basis of what makes us human. Sex has
not been neutralized but it has been removed from reproduction through DNA
manipulation. The director, Niccol, created a world using metaphor and allegory.
It was intended from the beginning that architecture would be a character in the
film. Buildings were chosen because of what they said and what they indicated
either in terms of the story line, or in terms of the individual character. In Gattaca
the long corridors and curves of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Marin County Civic Centre
(1957–70) become a transit station to outer space and an escape from the limits of
Earthbound identity.
 MODERNIST UTOPIA   123

Frank Lloyd Wright’s Marin Centre as Mission Control

Gattaca, with its retro design standing in for ‘some time in the future’, demonstrates
that science fiction can take place in the past, present or future. For example, the
space travellers wear 1960s style suits for travel, and drive cars that would have been
appropriate for the era in which the civic centre was built, such as the detective’s
Ford Anglia, or the 1973 Citroen DS23 Chapron convertible. The repetition of curved
forms of the Marin Civic Centre in San Rafael, California provides a perfect setting.
The Marin Civic Centre is a long thin building with four different lozenge shaped
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atria along its length and a circular pod at one end that houses a library on the top
floor, capped by a roof with a low vault reflecting the shallow arches of the facade.
The atria grow slightly wider at each floor as they rise, a technique Wright also
used in the Guggenheim, suggesting an opening up, a reverse of the perspective

Figure 6.6  Atrium interior, Marin Civic Centre, San Rafael, CA, USA,
Frank Lloyd Wright (photo by author).
 124  MODERNIST UTOPIA

that brings things closer as they are further away and a breaking free from gravity.
The barrel vault skylight runs the length of the building. The circular motif is contin-
ued on the terrace. The shallow arch and endless circles repeat themselves on doors,
signage, furniture and ornamentation to the most minute detail.
Wright’s interiors are full of anodized aluminium framed glass doors, alternating
small round ceiling lights and larger circular light wells. The smooth curves and circle
motif are suggestive of hope. This architecture of optimism, that suggests that all
things are possible, expresses itself in the film’s theme of triumph of the individual
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over eugenics, symbolized by the ability to break with the Earth’s gravity and travel
through space. This theme is expressed through a repeating shot that acts as a motif
through the film, of a rocket ship that leaves every day, seen through the rooflight
of the Civic Centre. While exteriors were shot on location, interiors were recreated
and shot on set. Semicircular stainless steel desks in rows fill the atrium of the build-
ing, as if in keeping with Wright’s design.The single set was used for all the interior
scenes, in different ways in the film, from an exercise room to the computer room
and the launch room.
The title is derived from the G T C A letters that make up DNA sequencing. The
double helix of the molecular structure of DNA became an architectural motif
throughout the film. The film is full of spiral stairs with open treads, like the structure
of the DNA molecule. The stair at the geneticists’ practice is in the double height
lobby of the 17 storey International style Department of Water and Power in down-
town Los Angeles, designed by Albert C. Martin and Associates in 1965. Intended as

Figure 6.7  External elevation, Marin Civic Centre, San Rafael, CA, USA,
Frank Lloyd Wright (photo by author).
 MODERNIST UTOPIA   125

a celebration of both water and light, the building was described by Rayner Banham
as gracefully lifting the spirit.42 The Great Western Forum, designed by Charles
Luckman in 1967, was used for the DNA sampling centre because the exterior is
curved. In Gattaca there is no home to be at home in, and the hero must leave home
and travel to space. At the conclusion of the film, the space travellers, wearing black
and white suits and ties, enter the space craft through a round green lit portal, as if
stepping up into the time tunnel.
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CONCLUSION

In traditional literature, as well as film, the worst thing that can happen to a char-
acter isn’t necessarily death, or disease, but giving up hope. Definitions of the
word hope suggest it is both a feeling and a belief that the world, our world, the
one we live in, build in, inhabit, will and should improve. Unlike the ideal, hope is
perceived as achievable. Hope implies that there is a future. If we long for some-
thing, we expect that there will in fact be a time to come in which these things
will take place. In film, these actual buildings and sets provide the locus where
this will happen.
So, where has the hope gone? Was there ever any freedom? Our societies have
not evolved in the direction envisaged in these designs and perhaps we may be
glad of this. For although daydreams are necessary for progress, a realized utopia
can easily become a dystopia – something to be feared rather than desired. The
ultimate goal is the pursuit of a higher ideal, not its actual attainment. The domestic
houses discussed are designed for remote sites, even, or especially, the Futuro. The
paradox of this family house as spaceship is that, while suggesting accommodation
in the furthest reaches of outer space, and most decidedly outside the bounds of
community, it somehow stands for all humanity.
Whether architecture is meant to embody the spirit of the future, a similar theme
or quality appears. The old future is no longer a relevant future. Yet, ideas taken from
the past about how we might live in the future affect how we design now. Forms and
surfaces and 1960s themes characterized by flexible volumes appear in recent pro-
jects. Blob architecture, soft shell and single surface architecture reveal an expres-
sion of form that historically represents futurity and progress.
A curved white wall is all we need to see in order to know we are ‘in’ a future reality
recognizable if different from our own. Buildings, modes of transportation (whether
individual cars or a monorail) and people in smooth white egg-like forms and
smooth white egg-like surfaces signify the futuristic film set and suggest renewal
or a utopian time to come. Freedom, a constant fantasy of the ideal city, was often
based on the reduction of labour, while large open white areas of cities, with con-
trolled geometries and a profusion of right angles, designate lack of humanity and
lack of originality with little or no face to face social relationships.43 Film can be a
utopia, a closed and ordered world, in which all energies, (art, labour and society)
work together symphonically.44 Film ‘moves’ us, even when we are not convinced by
it, or in agreement with the filmmaker’s political views.
 126  MODERNIST UTOPIA

NOTES

  1 Beat Girl, dir. Edmond Gréville, UK: Renown Pictures, 1960, Fahrenheit 451, dir. François
Truffaut, UK/USA/France: Anglo Enterprises/Vineyard Film, 1966; Barbarella, dir. Roger
Vadim, France/Italy: Dino de Laurentiis Cinematographica/Marianne Productions, 1967;
2001: A Space Odyssey, dir. Stanley Kubrick, UK/USA, 1968; and Gattaca, dir. Andrew
Niccol, USA: Jersey Films, 1997.

  2 David Pinder, Visions of the City; Utopianism, Power and Politics in Twentieth-Century
Urbanism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005).
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  3 Events in South East Asia sparked the Peace Movement and satirical films, typified by
the title of Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.

  4 Mark McPherran, Plato’s Republic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

  5 Plato, Critias, trans. Robin Waterfield (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 113d−116.

  6 Thomas More, Utopia, eds George Logan and Robert Adams (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2002), 46.

  7 Arendt, Human Condition, 61.

  8 Frederic Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future; the desire called utopia and other science
fictions (London: Verso, 2005).

  9 Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1990).

10 Walter Dorwin Teague, Design This Day; the technique of order in the machine age
(London: Studio Publications, 1947), 31.

11 After the first day of opening, on reaction from the visitors, Bel Geddes and his crew
added churches to street corners.

12 Vivian Sobchak, ‘Cities on the Edge of Time; The Urban Science Fiction Film’ in Liquid
Metal, the Science Fiction Reader, ed. Sean Richmond (London: Wallflower, 2004), 78−87.

13 Marko Home and Mika Taanila (eds), Futuro; Tomorrow’s House from Yesterday (Desura Oy
Ltd, Helsinki, 2002).

14 Home and Taanila, Futuro.

15 Arendt, The Human Condition.

16 Linda Williams, ‘Dream Girls and Mechanic Panic; Dystopia and its Others in Brazil and
Nineteen Eighty-Four’ in Sean Redmond (ed.) Liquid Metal, 64−73.

17 Sobchak, ‘Cities on the Edge of Time’, 83 and Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future, 76.

18 Richard Sennett, The Uses of Disorder (London: Faber and Faber, 1970).

19 Richard Sennett, Conscience of the Eye (London: Faber and Faber, 1990), 202 and Arendt,
Human Condition, 89.

20 Sennett, Conscience of the Eye.

21 Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum, eds The Quality of Life (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1995), 279.

22 Arendt, Human Condition, 3.

 MODERNIST UTOPIA   127

23 Arendt, Human Condition, 131.

24 Williams, ‘Dream Girls’.

25 Annette Kuhn, Alien Zone II; the spaces of science fiction cinema (London: Verso, 1999),
198 and Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, The Medium is the Massage (London:
Penguin, 2008).

26 Beat Girl, dir. Gréville.

27 Beat Girl, dir. Gréville.

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28 Sennett, Uses of Disorder, 219.

29 François Truffaut, Truffaut by Truffaut, trans. R. E. Wolf (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc.,
1987).

30 Truffaut, Truffaut by Truffaut, 217.

31 Modesty Blaise, dir. Joseph Losey, UK: Modesty Blaise, Ltd., 1966.

32 The 10th Victim, dir. Elio Petri, Italy/France: Compagnia Cinematografica/Champion,

1965.

33 Jean Clemmer, Canned Candies; The Exotic Women and Clothes of Paco Rabanne (London:
Charles Skilton, 1969), 9.

34 Clemmer, Canned Candies, 9.

35 Kubrick’s film coincided with the Apollo space missions and he was concerned that if life
was discovered in outer space his film would become immediately outdated.

36 Michel Chion, Kubrick’s Cinema Odyssey, trans. Claudia Gorbman (London: British Film
Institute, 2001), 2.

37 Arendt, The Human Condition, 2.

38 Chion, Kubrick’s Cinema Odyssey, 19.

39 Chion, Kubrick’s Cinema Odyssey, 79.

40 Chion, Kubrick’s Cinema Odyssey, 14.

41 Hardy Amies, Still Here; An Autobiography (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1984), 142.

42 Reyner Banham, Los Angeles The Architecture Of Four Ecologies (New York, Harper and
Row, 1971).

43 Sennett, Uses of Disorder, 23.

44 Rancière, The Intervals of Cinema, 6.

 7
Not thinking but questioning: Terrence Malick’s
expressions of world and ground in film
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Film may present images of architecture and landscape in a manner both detached
and powerful, a ‘given’ world into which we (and the characters of the film) are
‘thrown’, in Heideggerian language. There are hardly any films that do not include
images of architecture. Even when buildings are not actually shown in the film,
the framing of an image, or the definition of scale or illumination, imply the estab-
lishment of a distinct place. Architecture mediates the dialectics of dwelling and
remoteness, belonging and estrangement. The image of architecture is only part of
the whole culture it embodies. 1 We distil the essence of ‘home’ from all the shelters
we have ever known, whose walls are constructed from memory, of shadows, and
offer the illusion of comfort or the opposite.2 Architecture in the films of Terrence
Malick shows our temporary human habitation, whether as timber framed farm-
house, modernist suburban houses, glass and steel skyscrapers or symbolic silhou-
ettes against the sky. In film, the image of the horizon is a powerful one, implying
deep focus. The line that divides earth and sky, the ground on which we dwell,
stretches out beyond our imaginations and provides a limit to our ‘world’. As Simon
Critchley describes, Malick presents the world, the world is ‘given’ to the viewer
accepting it as a ‘thing in itself’ whether it shows us a past narrative, a present one,
or the entire history of creation. Malick’s films are not interested in ‘how the world
is’ or what happens to be true, but ‘that it is’.3 Malick’s films, such as Badlands, Days
of Heaven and The Tree of Life, offer a vehicle to examine notions of dwelling.4 Each
film presents nature in opposition to culture (Badlands), to nurture (Days of Heaven)
or to grace (The Tree of Life).

EXPRESSIONS OF WORLD AND GROUND

Malick studied philosophy at Harvard University under Cavell. Film is self-reflective,

Cavell argues. Since it responds to questions as it raises them, film makes a legit-
imate contribution to philosophical discourse while simultaneously becoming
its subject.5 We respond to what we see while watching a film; this is part of the
 NOT THINKING BUT QUESTIONING   129

experience of cinema. Malick hopes the film will give the person looking at it a
sense of things but states that ‘you can’t film philosophy’.6 Nor, as Critchley points
out, can one philosophize through film.7
As if in proof of this statement, two philosophy students made a documentary-
film-essay entitled The Ister,8 presented through a series of chapters, each of which
is introduced by a philosophical guide. Nancy and Stiegler, among others, take the
viewer on a journey up the Danube, and through history, war, cruelties, and in the
end, humanity itself. Watching the film is an experience comparable to Heraclitus’
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description of the river; we can’t step in the same river twice, since each time the
water that passes over us is different and so are we.9 Each viewing of The Ister
offers different insight into the filmic and philosophical experience, just as each of
Malick’s films must be seen as a ‘thing in itself.’
Malick originally intended to do a doctorate in philosophy at Oxford on the notion
of ‘world’ in Ludwig Wittgenstein, Søren Kierkegaard, and Heidegger. Wittgenstein
suggests the unsayable limit of the world, Kierkegaard that our primary access to real-
ity is through our involved action. Malick describes Wittgenstein’s ‘world’ as a ‘form of
life’ and Kierkegaard’s notion of world as the ‘sphere of existence’.10 In Malick’s films, the
Wittgensteinian world may be interpreted through the voice-over that names things
or feelings that are not expressed visually. Malick taught philosophy at Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, and when professor of philosophy and Heideggerian phe-
nomenologist Hubert Dreyfus went to France on study leave, Malick took over his
philosophy lectures at Harvard. In 1969 Malick translated into English Heidegger’s
The Essence of Reasons.11 Malick’s translator’s introduction quotes a letter Heidegger
wrote to Edmund Husserl: ‘What is the nature of being in which ‘world’ is constituted?
This is the central problem of Being and Time.’12 In The Essence of Reasons Heidegger
traces and establishes the lineage of the concept of ‘world’. ‘World’ is not the totality
of things, but the terms in which we understand them and give measure and purpose
to our human actions. ‘World’ describes how and why we share certain notions about
the measure of things, their validity and purpose. ‘Entering the world’ is not an event
that takes place within (or outside) the realm of being but something that ‘happens
with’ being. Malick enters the world through filmmaking.

PHILOSOPHY

Architecture in film may be examined from the point of view of architectural his-
tory, but that is not obligatory and in fact is quite rare. To get the look and feel of
his films, Malick ‘quotes’ the photographs of Dorothea Lange or the classic paint-
ings by Andrew Wyeth and Edward Hopper, who capture the look and silence of
the midwestern American landscape. Hopper’s etching, American Landscape
(1920) resembles scenes from Malick’s films in both the handling of light and the
empty landscapes, as well as the objects depicted: a field, a farmhouse, a horizon.
Malick’s films also make explicit this theme of isolation everywhere, and aliena-
tion combined with destination (and destiny) that is also familiar from Wyeth’s
paintings.13 Wyeth’s timeworn interiors, the bare walls of a farmhouse, the old timber
 130  NOT THINKING BUT QUESTIONING

window frame, the blind half drawn, the barely seen transparent thin lace curtains
blowing in through the open window through which a field can be seen, and an
ominous pale grey sky are also Malick motifs. Each film is full of gauzy curtains
blowing in through windows – a Malick trademark.
Malick shows a close visual correspondence to films of the silent era that initi-
ated the notion of a universal language in instrumentalized form.14 Film as a medium
began in silence and the mute role is expressive. In silent films gesture, dramatic
action, and visual expression replace spoken dialogue. The cinematic language of
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look, gesture, cut, and frame extends possibilities for reading and interpretation of
expression. Through colour, codes of filmmaking, and mise en scène, what can’t be
described, such as strong emotions, regret, longing, despair, or the passing of time,
may be presented on screen.
Malick employs what Laura Mulvey describes as the formal characteristics of style,
where words, text, or dialogue are less appropriate, or even inadequate to the emo-
tional burden of the subject matter. Fate rather than heroic transcendence offers
a resolution to the drama.15 Characters in his films (and the actors who play those
characters) represent forces rather than people as they respond to rather than con-
trol or attempt to understand their circumstances.
All three films use voice-over, not to drive the story forward or to fill in the gaps,
but to create a dialectic with the visuals. In Badlands the voice-over often contra-
dicts the visuals; in Days of Heaven it was entirely unscripted and added later; and in
The Tree of Life the susurrus of whispered voices expresses longing, questioning and
faith. The traditional function of voice-over is to comment on the plot in order to
advance it, or to clarify the circumstances or events portrayed. Malick’s voice-overs
however, function as interior comments intended as expressions of the inner mental
life of the speaker.

Reciprocity of filmic and given world

Heidegger’s concept of ‘world’ suggests the limits of our knowledge; we can never
‘know’ the whole world.16 We only have access to our own worlds. This is the hori-
zon of our understanding. The less we ‘know’ the more we are ‘in’ the world. This
investigation of Heidegger’s notion of ‘world’ offers an insight concerning the stabil-
ity of the filmic situation, and its role in the phenomenon of ‘recognition’ by which
we readily recognize a particular place such as a home, a library, a private or pub-
lic space, etc. It emphasizes the many levels at which architecture operates, how
we are in the world, our sense of belonging, of being ‘of’ the world around us, or
not.17 ‘Being’ suggests not that the sky is blue, in an object/subject relationship but
that these subjects ‘are’, and must ‘be’. In Heidegger’s description, the world brings
itself before itself.18 The visual richness and saturated colours of Malick’s films give
visibility to material that evades conscious articulation. The images of the sky, the
horizon, the wheat, the fire, even the locusts, ‘are’. Non-diegetic scenes of nature, or
of the moon rising, fill out the world of the film. Editing these non-diegetic shots is
like musical rhythm or building up a symphony. The sounds of nature, wind, water,
 NOT THINKING BUT QUESTIONING   131

insects, fire, and the images of nature form the world of Malick’s films.19 There is a
sense of things being looked at; just being what they are, rock, tree, bird, bat, what-
ever it is, yet the seemingly neutral camera, the objective observer, is not so.
The careful editor relies on our ability to draw from experience and imagination.
Cavell argues ‘if a person were shown a film of an ordinary whole day in his life, he
would go mad.’20 Malick is less interested in a correspondence between ‘truth’, ‘reality’
and ‘meaning’ than with the moment when subject and object, particular and uni-
versal, transient and timeless, intersect and fuse.21 In this sense, the film is a complete
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fiction, but precisely because of this it holds a truth for now. Reality may be like the
horizon, forever receding, and eluding our grasp. Malick wishes his films, although
they may be set in different eras, to resemble fables, rather than documentary ver-
sions of the period they depict. Malick plays with how to express the ineffable; wind,
for example, is symbolic of deity and spirit. The power of film is in its ability not to
represent reality, but to achieve the aura of an allegory and thereby approach ‘truth’.22

Situation

Interconnected with the notion of world is that of situation. A situation is a particu-

lar embodiment of the universal world, in film the inevitable structure of narrative
and aesthetic unity. That is, the film must look consistent all the way through in
order to tell a comprehensible story. From the opening shot, this situation must
be strictly adhered to no matter whether it is surreal, abstracted, minimalist, takes
place in the past, or is science fiction. The structuring of place, space, situation, and
scale characteristic of architecture, that includes the framing of human existence,
infiltrates every filmic expression.
It is hard to know a situation since we may not take immediate appearance as a
whole truth. The very idea of situation suggests subjective inclusion and hence the
impossibility of objective knowledge, that is, we are ‘in’ the film, feeling and experi-
encing it, rather than observing and judging it. The familiarity of everyday life veils
activities taken for granted but utterly relied on at every moment.23 Filmic situations
provide unfamiliar or unexpected outlines to accustomed and often overlooked
things. Karl Jaspers describes stability as that which is real and present, understood
through the involvement of situation, grounding and understood only with refer-
ence to being-in-the-world.24 Situation has overtones of spatiality in that situations
always occur at some time in a particular place.25 To be ‘in’ a world is also to be ‘in’
a situation and allows for the representation on the screen of a filmic world and
filmic situation. We refer to being ‘in’ a situation, the ‘there’ which is disclosed on the
screen, where a room is ‘read’ as existing as such although it may have no ceiling, or
only two or three walls at a time may be shown.

Horizon

The horizon limits what we can see within our situation. A line that both separates
and joins the horizon represents infinity as well as the limit of our understanding.
 132  NOT THINKING BUT QUESTIONING

Horizon is also our point of view or that of the characters in the film, and expands
with change and experience in the course of the narrative. Malick’s films offer mate-
rial to further the discussion of horizon and fourfold introduced in Chapter 1.

Dwelling

The places of dwelling in his films disclose how earth sky divinities and mortals enter
into a simple oneness into things ordered by the concept of ‘house’.26 Malick states
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that in order to have a difference of opinion on what is required to furnish a house or

a place to make it a home, we must first agree on our understanding of ‘dwelling’.27
Malick’s films present stability of the world in the very ephemerality of representa-
tions of family and home he conjures.28 These include makeshift homes such as hay-
stacks, trains, cars, a tree house, and barns. He rarely shows four walls that enclose a
family but when he does, it is in a specific way for a definite purpose.

Temporality of involvement

Our experience and trust in the filmmaker is subject to hermeneutic circularity,

through which our perception adjusts as the plot unfolds. This narrative is as much
the story of the film, as it is the ‘story of our lived existence’ or temporal horizon.
Temporality of involvement is the time it takes something to happen, for some-
thing to ‘come into being’ or the time ‘in’ which we live and act. Temporality requires
an involvement with something, which includes a nexus of associations and possi-
bilities mediated through the indirect discourse of narration. This refers not to how
much time has passed or how long a particular action takes, but to participation
with unfolding events. Temporality of involvement is human interaction as we go
through life, walk through a city, or how we live within our homes, but more impor-
tantly, how we are ‘at home’ in the world and the world we create for ourselves.
This is the world of repetitions and continuity, of praxis or action, which calls for
narration.29

BADLANDS

Kit, a 25 year old man, and Holly, a 15 year old girl, travel across the American Midwest in
the 1950s killing people who get in their way.
The film is based loosely on actual people, Charles Starkweather and his girl-
friend Caril Ann Fugate. Badlands’ title suggests an evil inherent in the ground itself.
Badlands is a dry arid place in South Dakota, described by Lakota legend and the
settlers who first saw them as bad lands, impossible to cultivate and difficult to
cross. Badlands is narrated from the perspective of Holly, played by Sissy Spacek,
whose seemingly naive statements, full of phrases and notions gleaned from popu-
lar romance magazines, create a tension with the violent, dispassionate killing of Kit,
played by Martin Sheen.30 The moral intensity of Malick’s film presents both nature
and culture with a cinematic richness of texture. We take it in through our senses,
 NOT THINKING BUT QUESTIONING   133

rather than watch and analyze. The film’s lack of judgement of the characters’ actions
does not reveal them as inhuman, but rather discloses the fragility of our own values
against the forces of nature.

Dwelling

Kit and Holly dwell in several homes: Holly’s childhood home; the makeshift tree-
house where she lives with Kit after he kills her father and burns down her home;
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and the rich man’s house. When the two decide to run off together, Kit enters Holly’s
home where she lives with her father. He goes through drawers and cupboards in
her bedroom and puts items he finds into a bag. In order to hide the murder of
Holly’s father and disguise their own escape as a double suicide, Kit sets fire to the
home that appears most completely when it is burning. A close-up of the burning
dolls’ house, representing the destruction of home and childhood innocence, sums
up in miniature the inferno that surrounds it as the house burns. Malick uses fire and
flames in all three films to suggest both creation and destruction.

The tree house

On the run from the authorities, Kit and Holly hide in the woods as if playing house.
Holly experiments with make-up and puts curlers in her hair. This particular expres-
sion of dwelling has a ‘play house’ aspect, rather than a thorough being-in-the-world
of nature.31 Although the tree house seems the most ‘authentic’ home in the film,
and the happiest for both Holly and Kit, this inhabited wilderness sums up the sub-
urban nature of their dwelling. Maxfield Parrish’s print Daybreak (1922) features
significantly in Badlands. This painting is first seen hanging in Holly’s home, then

Figure 7.1  Holly’s childhood house burning: the dolls’ house

(Badlands, Terrence Malick, 1973).
 134  NOT THINKING BUT QUESTIONING

Holly sneaks it out the back door when Kit sets the house alight, and then it becomes
the suburban décor to the inhabited wilderness of their tree house refuge. Set
designer Jack Fisk created the tree house by using platforms and ropes to connect
different trees.32 It was not scripted but his own inspiration, and itself inspired the
way the actors inhabited the space. In these scenes they speak in hushed voices as if
in a great hall but in fact they are out of doors.

The rich man’s house

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Playacting ‘house’ continues when, in order to avoid the inconvenience of shop-

ping for food when they have no money, Kit and Holly enter the house of a wealthy
man, intending to raid his icebox. They make themselves ‘at home’ holding the
owner and his maid prisoner for an unspecified amount of time until a stranger
comes to the door. The caller, played by Malick himself wearing a beige suit and
a straw hat, carries a large cardboard drawing tube under his arm, as if to consult
the rich man on some plans. When he leaves, the couple realize their sojourn in the
house is over. Dressed up like children playing ‘house’, with Kit wearing the rich
man’s hat and seer-sucker jacket and carrying a silver trophy while Holly wears a
shawl over her head and shoulders and carries a handbag, they steal the rich man’s
Cadillac and drive off across the badlands to their fate.
They head across the lands of South Dakota to the mountains of Montana ‘liv-
ing off the land’ by running over cattle for food and stealing fuel from pipelines. Kit
assumes his James Dean Christ pose. Holly puts her hair in curlers even though she
describes this as ‘living like animals’ out on the plains. When Kit decides a football is
‘excess baggage’ he shoots it with his gun, rather than simply tossing it out of the

Figure 7.2  The tree house was constructed by tying together many trees and
was devised by set designer, Jack Fisk (Badlands, Terrence Malick, 1973).
 NOT THINKING BUT QUESTIONING   135

car, as if childhood, games, or fair play itself, are excess baggage that he shoots so
no one else can use it.

Sound

Malick presents a dialectic of sound and image. Captive and silent in their own home,
the rich man and the maid are held in a room in which all the furniture is covered by
dust covers, muting both sound and colour. This contrasts with the rich sensuality of
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materials and furnishings from earlier scenes in the same house.

Holly’s distorted view of the world she shares with Kit differs from what we see. In
Badlands, the broad, flat Texas accent of Sissy Spacek’s voice-over, as much as what
she says, lends depth to the visuals.33 Her inner dialogue offers insight not into the
film, but into another world, one of feeling and emotion, of imagination, and spe-
cifically, adolescent fantasy. She is both present and absent from the events taking
place around her. She wonders where she would be at that moment if she had never
met Kit. She has a profound indifference to Kit’s gun, or as Malick refers to it, his
‘magic wand that takes away things that bother him’.34 She decides to leave him not
because of the killing but because she wants an easier life.
When Holly describes her growing discomfort at being with Kit as like ‘feeling that
you are sitting in a bath after the water has all run out’, we know what she means,
and suddenly the rich painted landscape through which they drive seems less inviting.
They head off to that magic land of the ‘mountains of Saskatchewan’ (the flattest of the
Canadian prairie provinces) and she silently spells out whole sentences on the roof
of her mouth with her tongue although she doesn’t tell us what these sentences are.
Words are the means by which we name things − language can have many expres-
sions and words meanings. The ‘senselessness’ of the statements that Holly makes
suggest a dialectic between the visuals and what she says about them. There is an
incoherence that can be meaningful.35 In Badlands, after a directionless journey to the
freedom offered by Canada to the North, Kit marks his place in the world with a dimin-
utive cairn of stones, and rises into the sky in a helicopter, leaving the ground behind.
Significantly Holly and Kit are together (yet worlds apart) as it takes off for the sky.

Techniques of filming

Rather than setting out the scene, Malick responds to what he sees. He films in a deep
connection to place, and encourages his actors to do the same. His directorial sugges-
tions to the actors were to ‘just have fun with it’.36 Rather than following a schedule
the film took the time that it did. As the filming progressed, the set decorators had to
paint the leaves green because the season had changed and the leaves were turning.
This unconventional filmmaking – going with the flow − is described by the actors as
not acting but being. Many of the scenes are filmed in Malick’s trademark ‘magic hour’
when the sun has left the sky but light still remains. To give an authentic feeling of really
looking around, set designer Fisk placed things where he felt they should be so that
the actors didn’t know what they would find in the drawers when they opened them.
 136  NOT THINKING BUT QUESTIONING

DAYS OF HEAVEN

Three migrant workers, a man and woman, posing as brother and sister and the actual
younger sister of the man, become involved with a farmer in the northernmost part of
Texas in the period just prior to the First World War.
The title, Days of Heaven37 is from a line in the Old Testament and is only one
of the many Biblical references, from a man passing off his wife as his sister,38 to
the locusts.39 The film ends with the death of the two male protagonists, played
by Richard Gere as the migrant worker, and Sam Shepard as the farmer, while the
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women, the female lead played by Brooke Adams, and a younger sister of the male,
played by Linda Manz, strike out for parts unknown.

Dwelling

In Days of Heaven the farmer sits with his bookkeeper outside the house, in period
furniture, of a high quality, brought outside into a field of overgrown grasses. As in
the tree house scene in Badlands, nature or the world out of doors, is furnished with
the accoutrement of dwelling, signifying that we do not need four walls to be at
home in the world. Here, a sofa, table and typewriter are the pieces of humanity that
create a clearing that also demonstrates human ownership of the world, that we can
occupy the world and make it ours, while still being occupied by it.
Viewers only get a glimpse of the actual interior of the farmer’s house when one of
the characters invades it as a usurper. When the farmer and his new wife are absent,
Richard Gere pokes and prods through the house, like both an interloper and a thief.
The basic out of doors existence of the migrant workers contrasts with feelings of
material comfort and leisure pleasures such as the piano and record player (machines
that produce not only sound but music) in the interior of the farmer’s house.

Figure 7.3  The farmer’s house was constructed from plywood as a real house,
not just a flat (Days of Heaven, Terrence Malick, 1978).
 NOT THINKING BUT QUESTIONING   137

Nature

The promotional tagline for Days of Heaven read: ‘Your eyes . . . your ears . . . your
senses . . . will be overwhelmed’.40 Lush rich colour, sounds of nature and images of
the change of seasons feature as narrative in Malick’s film. The horizon that separates
earth from sky, the limits of human understanding, appears in almost all scenes. The
workers in the fields of Days of Heaven resemble Winslow Homer’s The Cotton Pickers
(1876). The line of the horizon separates earth from sky and against it actors and props
appear as theatrical silhouettes that suggests an unresolved dominance of land and
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ground over human habitation. Natural cruelty in Days of Heaven arrives in the form of
the locusts, as if from a biblical plague, who consume the wheat (planted by humans)
that is in turn consumed by fire. In Days of Heaven, fire and water are the elements that
bring about the conclusion and the death of the two male protagonists. The fire that
consumes the wheat fields metaphorically represents the emotions of the farmer and
brings about his death, while Richard Gere’s character perishes in a stream.

Film techniques

On the hour long drive from the hotel where the crew and director stayed to the
wheat fields where the shoot was, cinematographer Nestor Almendros, art direc-
tor Fisk, and filmmaker Malick talked and discussed the film, and often determined
what they might shoot that day and how. Interesting ideas developed as they went
along, and the shooting schedule changed with the weather, as well as their frame
of mind. Almendros saw his job as to simplify and purify all effects. The ‘old guard’
Hollywood crew were often distressed by this divergence from the call sheet, as they
were by the main characters being filmed in shadow.

Figure 7.4  The house stands as a monument against the horizon, filmed in the
‘magic hour,’ while in the foreground the workers resemble gleaners
from a nineteenth century painting (Days of Heaven, Terrence Malick, 1978).
 138  NOT THINKING BUT QUESTIONING

The ‘magic hour’, the mythic afterglow in the sky after the sun has disap-
peared from the horizon, famous in Days of Heaven, is actually about 20 minutes.
It is quite hard to film against this as figures are silhouetted and appear black. To
expose for the shadow means overexposing for the sky, and losing the colour,
so Almendros opened the lens a stop halfway between the luminosity of the
sky and of the actor’s faces. The faces were a bit underexposed and the sky a bit
overexposed. Malick used this time in Badlands, when a full moon hangs against
the sky against which the characters seem insignificant, and also in The Tree
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of Life.
The guidelines Malick laid down for all to follow were to stick as close to reality
as possible. Malick traditionally eschews all special effects rather than adding them
in post-production. In Days of Heaven he often uses a single source of light as in the
early days of film. Daytime interiors show sideways light, as in Johannes Vermeer
paintings, and exteriors invoke Wyeth or Hopper, or even photomontage as in the
opening sequence.
Hopper’s painting House by the Railroad (1925) provided a model for the house in
Days of Heaven, not just in architectural form, but also in lighting, framing, and an
honest and authentic way of setting itself in the landscape. This ‘quoting’ affords the
film a cultural authority, although built in an entirely different part of the country
since the Hopper house is in New England while the film is situated in Texas. While
putting the paintings and the film stills side by side may create a visual game of like-
nesses and similarities, it also emphasizes the artists’ visually expressed and shared
concern for the effects of modernity on the relationship between humans and the
environment.41
Fisk built a real mansion, with exterior and interior, from painted plywood, not
just a façade as was usual. For authenticity the white curtains were washed in tea for
the look of unbleached cotton. The wheat fields were in Alberta, Canada, in Hutterite
country. The Hutterites reject all modern developments, including recent hybrid
wheats, and use instead an older, unadulterated wheat that grows taller. As a result,
the actors appeared smaller in the fields. To film the swarming locusts, helicopters
dropped seeds and peanut shells that swirled around in the wind from the helicop-
ter blades. Actors walked backwards and tractors drove in reverse. That way, when
the film was reversed everyone moved forwards and the ‘locusts’ looked as though
they were swarming up from the wheat fields.

Visual narrative and voice-over

There is a tension, as a repeated motif, between the narrative and the voice-over,
between day and night, white and black, angel and devil, growth and harvest, life
and death. Rather than drawing us in, this tension distances us so that we watch it
neutrally, the narrative unfolding without judgement as to outcome, as when the
secret couple scheme to accept the farmer’s marriage proposal so they can inherit
the farm after his death. The characters act because they must with an unquestion-
ing expression of feeling and we are caught up in ‘being’ in Malick’s world.
 NOT THINKING BUT QUESTIONING   139

In the two years Malick took to edit Days of Heaven, he edited out scenes of heavy
dialogue and thereby re-emphasized the visuals and image. Because he had cut
out such a great deal of talking between characters the narrative required clarifica-
tion, so Linda Manz’s unscripted voice-over was added in post-production. She was
encouraged to say whatever came into her mind as she watched the completed film
for the first time, and her ‘streetwise’ accent lends authenticity to her statements.

THE TREE OF LIFE

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An architect muses on the relation of nature and grace through memories of his idyllic
childhood in the 1950s in Waco, Texas.
The Tree of Life, whose title refers to the Garden of Eden and the book of Genesis,
also contains a reference to human suffering and the power of faith. Sean Penn, play-
ing architect Jack O’Brien, is Job whose faith is tested through suffering. Voice-over
narration describes the difference between nature represented by his father, played
by Brad Pitt, striding across the ground and Grace represented by his mother, an
ephemeral and literally floating Jessica Chastain. While nature here is human nature,
the film is steeped in the natural world.
The power of nature is shown in the majesty of the falling water or in the sunlight
coming through the trees. Through visually transcendent images, the film celebrates
and questions birth, life, connection to nature and true existence. Unquestioning
youth represents true being-in-the-world as opposed to standing apart, looking at
it, rebelling against it, asserting power over it, and finally, achieving mastery through
creating entirely artificial worlds that reflect the true nature of reality.

The symbolism of the tree

The film is all about trees, tree houses, and glades of trees, with patches and patterns
of shadow. The eponymous tree of the title is an oak, transported to the location
with its root ball intact. The spreading branches invite one to climb up into them.
It is doubly rooted into the ground as a ladder leans against it, supporting it, but
also supporting those who wish to climb into it. The ladder is an invitation and sug-
gests communion with higher and lower spirits, communication between the earth
and the divine through entering into its branches. The tree represents the uncor-
rupted state of childhood and is left behind when the family move from one house
to another, also leaving behind the innocence of youth. The Biblical tree, a metaphor
for memory, remains locked in the Garden of Eden.

Non-linear narrative

Unlike the other films The Tree of Life has a non-linear structure. Inserted into the
narrative of the family growing up is a 20 minute visualization of creation. Different
from others of Malick’s films, this one features cities, the majesty of human creation,
 140  NOT THINKING BUT QUESTIONING

and the contemporary world as if in completion of the creation sequence. Mapping

the poetic flow of the film’s structure opens up understanding of Malick’s expres-
sions of world, ground and dwelling.

Young boys run in high grass, at one with the world and connected to the ground.

A telegram is delivered to a woman in a different house, and we understand that time

has passed and that one of the boys has died, possibly in Vietnam.

A middle-aged man (whom we understand to be one of the boys, grown up) wakes
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up in a modernist white house, all white rectangles and glass, and double height
spaces that link upper and lower floors. Here there are spatial connections, rather
than rooms, and a sense of openness but also of structure and form. The man lights
a blue candle (that we infer is a memorial to the brother who died) and this conjures
childhood memories.

In the present, the camera tilts up as if in wonder at the glass and steel high-rise office
buildings the way it looks up at trees and the sky in earlier scenes and throughout the
film. The mirrored surface of the façade reflects a sky filled with clouds. As in the man’s
contemporary home, open spaces and places open out into others, glass boxes within
enormous atria that themselves are open to the top of the building. Everything is white
until we enter a boardroom – which is a discrete room, timber-lined and with leather
chairs, evoking a sense of power, decision making, being on top. But the meeting is not
taking place here; the man is in transit. The story is not about his external present.

A lift rises on the outside of a building and the city flashes past, like a collection of
cathedrals as, on the soundtrack, the man apologizes to his father as he ascends.
Glass and steel structures possess and demonstrate elegance, openness and grace.
On the ground plane, in what looks like an unfinished plaza, a tree stands among the
buildings, a single piece of constrained nature within the unnatural environment.

Looking up – modernism at its most ... elegiac, assertive, modern, clean, high,
affluent, controlled leaving the past behind to create a new future.

In contrast the past is full of artefacts, furniture, decoration, pianos, guitars: a

controlled suburban domesticity. It also acknowledges the personal, the intimate, the
home, that is nowhere in the present where all things personal are erased.

A 20 minute long segment of the creation of the Universe revels in the magnificence
of creation. Galaxies form from cosmic matter.42 We see the evolution of the Earth
and its atmosphere and the crust of the earth exploding upwards. The origins of
life, from cells to small fish to amphibians that emerge from the water, walk on
land and breathe oxygen. Biology class was never so beautiful. Dinosaurs walk the
earth, spirals of stained glass are built in chapels. Water cascades powerfully down a
waterfall.

The next sequence is a linear narrative outlining the birth, babyhood and childhood
of the brothers as they develop a sense of themselves in the world. They leave their
family home with its tree behind; the boys bury a time capsule of memories at the
base of that tree before they go.

Jack, in the present, rises up again in the symbols of modernity and the city, the
tower, glass and steel; shades of The Fountainhead and its paean to modernity.

The blue candle and its flame fill the screen, now taking Jack on a different journey,
inwards, or upwards, or into the future.
 NOT THINKING BUT QUESTIONING   141

Jack walks through a stone and timber doorway into a desert landscape. The
doorway suggests not where we end up but the way that we go through life. It is less
about the vision than about the journey.

A sequence follows that includes the origins of the Earth, candles and an
otherworldly landscape (filmed in Goblin Valley State Park, Utah) where Jack (Job)
now encounters his younger self.

Jetties, gates, and ladders transport us to a sandbar, where Jack kneels at the bare
feet of his mother. The dead brother and others from his childhood are also there.
Waves pound on the shore, signifying life above and below the surface. These scenes
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are filmed in twilight, so that the faces are dark, and figures are almost silhouetted.

A sequence of natural monumentality (an eclipse, a powerful waterfall, the setting

sun) frames a scene of Jack’s father expressing pride in his son’s accomplishments in
life and an embrace from his dead brother.

A field of sunflowers.

At the conclusion, back in the present, the glass elevator descends, and Jack is on a
concrete plaza outside a building. He stands firmly and contentedly on the ground
looking around him and smiles. The mirrored buildings reflect the sky in an elegiac
way; sky, light, life, form, modernity! Hurray!

The final shots include a bridge, (does anyone who doesn’t know the fourfold ‘get’
this? It doesn’t matter) and a flame.

The film ends.

Dwelling

The homes in all Malick’s films are particular and specific. The childhood homes of
The Tree of Life, filmed on location first in Smithville, Texas, with their comfortable
furnishings and 1950s modernist décor are stylized and expressive of their era. In
the first house, an attic space appears as if it is the garret where Gaston Bachelard’s
Poetics of Space suggests we store our memories of our first home.43 We know it is
a poetic daydream or reverie because the image appears at different points in the
film, first empty, then with a single chair and finally inhabited by a man too tall for
the room, dressed in a clown suit.
The connection to the earth and the ground is emphasized in the low camera
angle and the camera, that rises from the ground plane, tilts up, to the canopy of
trees overhead and cuts to a stained glass spiral – looking up into a church or cathe-
dral roof vault (filmed on location in the Chapel of Thanksgiving in Dallas.) Next,
shadows dance on the ground. Trees feature boldly in this film, creating inhabitation,
spatial awareness, enclosure, while houses themselves are shown to be no place of
refuge – they are glass from which one inside can be seen by one outside, and offer
no protection from the delivered telegram of death.
In the present, the contemporaneity of our world ‘hits’ us. There is something
uncanny about being in the contemporary world in a Malick film. Most of the
cityscape is Dallas and Houston, including the architectural practice in which
Jack works, which is filmed in the Page Office in the central business district
 142  NOT THINKING BUT QUESTIONING

of Houston, with its distinctive eight-story glass lobby. The office (and camera)
looks down on the 32 storey Esperson Building, a 1920s office tower that is
both Italianate and neoclassical, designed by theatrical architect John Eberson.
Johnson and John Burgee’s 1975 Pennzoil Place, with its mirror image double
trapezoid form and reflecting bronze surfaces, also makes an appearance. From
an architectural point of view, we have the battle of the styles, modernism,
postmodernism, and contemporary architecture combined together to create
an urban myth of Howard Roark-like questing.44 Architects play a particular role
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in films, designing houses, modern skyscrapers, or cities; they are busy ‘making
worlds’.
Jack, as architect, at the redemptively dialectic conclusion, synthesizes the two
ways − nature and grace. The Tree of Life begins with the question that the deity asks
Job: [w]here were you when I laid the foundations for the earth?45 Meant to demon-
strate the weakness and insignificance of Job against the power of the divine, in the
context of the film the question suggests the actual foundations for creation, how
we ‘are’ in the world, and how we feel divine grace upon us in our command over
nature. Youth is shown as full of grace and light, golden, connected to the ground,
at one with the fourfold. The film ends triumphantly in the majesty of built form,
modernism, leaving the past behind, yet still connecting earth and sky, humans
and divinity.

CONCLUSION

The first two films represent a tension and a dialectic, from dark to light, bad to good,
hell to heaven. It is as if the journey of ‘the bad lands’ of the earlier film, that ends
with the male protagonist dying in the electric chair, ‘on a warm Spring night’, leads
to the days of heaven, in the wheat fields of Texas. While there is death in the later
film as well, it ends on a positive note, with Linda, the narrator, setting off on a jour-
ney of her own, following railroad tracks (suggestive of direction and destination,
if an unknown one) in the spirit of another American hero, Huckleberry Finn, who
‘lights out for the territory.’46 In The Tree of Life the world is created, expands to a
nebula, diminishes to a cell. The father expresses the nature of being human, while
the mother plays unquestioning grace. At the conclusion, Jack, pondering mortality
(humans and divinities) examines the world he constructs for himself: towers that
grow from the earth and reflect the sky.

NOTES

  1 Svetlana Alpers et al, “Questionnaire on Visual Culture” in October 77 (Summer 1996),

25–70.

  2 Gaston Bachelard, Poetics of Space, trans. M. Jolas (Toronto: The Orion Press, 1964), 15.

  3 Simon Critchley, ‘Calm – On Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line’ in David Davies, ed. The
Thin Red Line (London: Routledge, 2009), 11−28.
 NOT THINKING BUT QUESTIONING   143

  4 Badlands, dir. Terrence Malick, USA, 1973; Days of Heaven, dir. Terrence Malick, USA, 1979;
and The Tree of Life, dir. Terrence Malick, USA: River Road/ Plan B Entertainment, 2011.

  5 Cavell, World Viewed.

  6 Critchley, The Thin Red Line, 17.

  7 Critchley, The Thin Red Line, 17.

  8 The Ister, dir. David Barison, Daniel Ross, 2004.

  9 Heraclitus was a pre-Socratic philosopher whose writings remain only in fragments

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quoted by others such as here by Plato: ‘[n]o man ever steps in the same river twice, for
it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man’ and ‘. . . all things move and nothing
remains still’. Plato. “Cratylus” 401d in Plato in Twelve Volumes, Vol. 12 trans. Harold N.
Fowler (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; London: William Heinemann Ltd.
1921).

10 Terrence Malick, Translator’s Introduction, in Martin Heidegger, The Essence of Reasons,

trans. Terrence Malick (Northwestern University Press: Evanston, 1969), xv.

11 Heidegger, The Essence of Reasons.

12 Malick, Translator’s Introduction.

13 Rolf G. Renner, Hopper (Germany: Taschen, 2006), 146.

14 Laura Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989), 17.

15 Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures.

16 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson
(London: Blackwell, 1973), §63 ¶ 14.

17 Dalibor Vesely refers to this as the ‘latent world’, the silent background that lacks explicit
articulation, but is natural conditions mediated by cultural tradition. Vesely, Architecture
in the Age of Divided Representation, 378−9.

18 Heidegger, Essence of Reasons, 89.

19 James Morrison and Thomas Schur, The Films of Terrence Malick (Westport: Praeger,
2003), 107.

20 Cavell, The World Viewed, 165.

21 Peter Brunette, The Films of Michelangelo Antonioni (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1998).

22 Antonioni, That Bowling Alley on the Tiber, translators preface by William Arrowsmith.

23 Béla Balázs, Theory of The Film (London: Dennis Dobson Ltd., 1958), 93.

24 Karl Jaspers, Philosophy Volume 1, trans. E. B. Ashton (London: University of Chicago

Press), Introduction.

25 Jaspers, Philosophy, 279.

26 Karsten Harries, ‘Lessons of a Dream’ Chora 2. (1996), 91–108.

27 Malick, Translator’s Introduction, The Essence of Reasons.

28 Adrian Martin, ‘Things to Look Into: The Cinema of Terrence Malick’ in Rouge, 10. http://
www.rouge.com.au/10/malick.html. Accessed 20 August 2015.
 144  NOT THINKING BUT QUESTIONING

29 Arendt, Human Condition, 175−9.

30 Martin Sheen was 32 when he played the 25-year-old Kit and Sissy Spacek was 23 when
she played the 15-year-old Holly.

31 Andrew Wyeth was taught by his father, N. C. Wyeth who was taught by Howard Pyle
who also taught Maxfield Parrish.

32 Jack Fisk art directs and production designs all of Malick’s films. He also art directs
(and production designs) for David Lynch. Fisk and Cissy Spacek met and fell in love
on Badlands, married and are still married. Her brother-in-law is David Lynch and she
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helped finance his first film Eraserhead, dir. David Lynch, US: American Film Institute,
1977.

33 Adrian Danks, ‘Death Comes as an End: Temporality, Domesticity and Photography

in Terrence Malick’s Badlands’ Senses of Cinema, http://sensesofcinema.com/2000/
terrence-malick/badlands/ Accessed 6 August 2015.

34 Martin Sheen, DVD notes, Terrence Malick, Badlands.

35 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford:

Blackwell, 1997), §500.

36 DVD Commentary, Days of Heaven (Terrence Malick, 1979) Criterion Collection.

37 Deuteronomy 11: 21.

38 Genesis 12: 11−13.

39 Exodus 10: 13.

40 DVD commentary, Days of Heaven, Malick, 1978.

41 John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: Penguin Books, 1974), 135.

42 Malick worked with Douglas Trumbull, who had produced the effects for classics such as
2001, in order to represent classically unrepresentable things like deity.

43 Gaston Bachelard, Poetics of Space.

44 http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/t/Tree_Of_Life.html#.VXbXdqa262w.accessed
12 May 2016.

45 Job 38:4.

46 “I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she’s
going to adopt me and sivilize me, and I can’t stand it. I been there before.” Mark Twain,
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Tom Sawyer’s Comrade) (New York: Charles L Webster and
Company, 1885), 148.
 8
Speeding into the unfixed future in Tokyo
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INTRODUCTION

This chapter looks at what happens when cities or places are broken asunder
(whether materially or spiritually) and how they may be joined together again. The
films looked at are all situated in Tokyo and include anime Akira, Patlabor 1; Mobile
Police and Patlabor 2: The Movie, and live-action Ikiru.1 Tokyo crumbles to be rebuilt
anew in Akira, there are more explosions in Patlabor, then the Yokohama Bay Bridge
blows up in Patlabor 2. This brings us again to a bridge in an earlier time or recon-
struction, from Ikiru. The chapter concludes as the film does, with a bridge, sym-
bol of unity or disunity, leading from past to future, looking optimistically down at
the present below, both domestic and part of the city. This chronological inversion
reflects the change from post-war optimism to postmodern destruction.
The principle emblematic architectural symbols of the films include bridges and
spaces in-between. The space in-between means not only that we can be both
inside and outside at the same time, but also that we can look simultaneously both
backwards and forwards in time. An engawa is the timber or bamboo strip under
the eaves of traditional Japanese houses. Both inside and outside, it provides a place
where one sits, with one’s home at one’s back, to look out in contemplation at a gar-
den or other view. The engawa is a space that is not one thing or another, but given
form by that which it touches.
Specific to Tokyo is the lack of identifying landmarks and the lack of orienting
buildings to centre the focus. In western films, Tokyo is often depicted as difficult
to navigate, both spiritually and geographically. Different filmmakers use the urban
space as a function of their distinctive styles. For example, Yasujiro Ozu’s wide-an-
gle lens flattens urban space into gridlike patterns while Mizoguchi’s lateral tracking
shots in films such as Street of Shame situate the viewer in the three-dimensional
space of the city.2 In contrast, in Otomo’s Tokyo, motorbikes have replaced the omni-
present trains, subways and trolleys that take a commuter to work and back again.
Film can touch us emotionally. The engawa touches both inside and outside, as
well as that which is at once inhabited and deconstructed. The writings of Nancy
 146  THE UNFIXED FUTURE IN TOKYO

describe how a place can be both interior and exterior, and our perceptions can
simultaneously perceive it as part of and apart from that which it depicts and
describes.3 The engawa can be a covered outdoor space, exposed to the elements
so that it is inside and outside, like a veranda, but it can also mean an empty space
created by the buildings around it, known as ma.4 Ma is the vacant space between
buildings, an ‘in-between’ space that is of emptiness and nothingness, but also
dynamic and pulsating.5
The essence of the good filmic narrative is that it so often describes individual
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determination in the face of large, often faceless, evil, whether the threat of nuclear
holocaust brought on by the uncontrolled thoughts of a lost little boy in Akira, the
robots out of control or controlled by viral information networks in Patlabor, or the
confounding red tape of bureaucracy of Ikiru. In this chapter I begin with a bang,
then travel along a river, and conclude in a child’s playground in the snow. While this
discussion does not represent a chronology in terms of when the films were made,
it discloses the nature of how what we see in films reveals the essence of the city,
invisibly presenting us with a host of information that we take in unconsciously, and
that clothes (giving form and substance to) and cloaks (disguising the overt mean-
ing of ) the narrative. It gifts us with the universality of the tale as it unfolds. Rather
than debating the Japaneseness of anime (as Susan Napier and Helen McCarthy
have done so eloquently) we look at the universality of the message that transcends
the visuals and the narrative.6

TRANSIENCE AND THE ATOMIC BOMB

Traditional to Japanese culture is acceptance of impermanence and perpetual

change. Notions of completeness, wholeness and impermanence coexist with one
another in a natural harmony. This concept of transience creates (rather than other-
wise), feelings of stability and additive growth.7 While western cathedrals and chap-
els have histories, the Shinto Ise Shrine, east of the ancient capital Nara, has a cycle
of destruction and renewal to sustain the same shape eternally. As Kisho Kurokawa
suggests, to characterize western culture as materialist and eastern as spiritualist is
to ‘fall victim to the evils of dualism.’8 Renewal and growth (often represented in film
as a child) are built into the images of vast destruction. The destruction in August
1945 of Hiroshima and Nagasaki brought the atomic bomb into the visceral and
visual imagination often expressed in film. Tokyo has undergone a ritualized form of
cinematic destruction since the release of Godzilla in 1954.9 The city is always under
attack, from various forms of aliens, supernatural enemies, or viral infections. Tokyo
is imagined as easily collapsible and just as easily reinvented.

GIVENNESS AND THE REVEALED

Marion’s description of how the phenomenon that shows itself, that accedes to its visi-
bility only by way of a givenness, expresses the subtle yet complex means by which film
 THE UNFIXED FUTURE IN TOKYO   147

‘touches’ us, the viewers, through sound and image, in a manner that builds on other
phenomenological explanations of how we ‘see’ spaces and places in film. According
to Marion, the film screen is also that on which one projects and filters expectation.
As Marion describes it, the gap between what is seen and what he terms the ‘original
invisible’ can be interpreted as the difference between the phenomenon and the thing
in itself.10 There are two aspects that we do not see: that which is physically behind us
and that which we feel, emotion. Like the dark side of the moon, we know it is there,
it gives the orb fullness and dimension and helps us to read it as three-dimensional,
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although we never see it from our own vantage point. And this vantage point, our per-
spective and our experience, is what we bring to the films; we draw on it in watching
them, disclosing the other aspect of the invisible that these films gift to us. We do not
see emotion, or enlightenment, or spiritual awareness, or redemption although we
may be looking at the symbols of it. These emotions and levels of awareness in the
characters are invisible, yet the watching of the film, the careful crafting of each frame,
and the expressions of the actors in the live-action film, are presented as the gift to
us by the filmmaker. This message, though invisible, is as clear as the narrative allows.

CITIES

In all the films, the city asserts itself as the true protagonist. Cities grow old, bear
the signs of passing time, give birth to new playgrounds, extend into bridges.11 The
inhabitants weave their way through them, constantly remapping and reasserting
ownership over new routes and land, making the city for humans, humanizing it,
and taking it away from bureaucratic interweavings (in Ikiru) and from digitalized
network pathways (in Patlabor), and from imperialistic military scientists (in Akira).

PERSPECTIVE

Japanese painter and media artist, Takashi Murakami, suggests that since the
atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki old identities have been
destroyed; there is no perspective on the future and a lack of individual vision is
the new identity of Japan.12 In anime, the oscillation between aerial city views and
the pedestrian view is dissolved in formal perspective. The eye of the camera tradi-
tionally gives a subject/object position. Non-perspectival depiction implies a ‘pres-
ent’ that is everything, everywhere at once. Anime are renowned for their realistic
depiction of space and of the characters in that space. As Miho Nakagawa explains,
the layering of traditional depiction of space in Uki-e, one of the styles of Japanese
woodcuts, appears in anime.13 Anime director Mamoru Oshii depicts the city with
foreground, middle ground and background to represent past, present and future.
As a layer of the city slips past, the perspective does not change, and the characters’
dialogue comes forward to our notice.14
Without careful attention to lighting and depth, characters in both live-action
and anime may easily become unmoored and float away against depthless or
 148  THE UNFIXED FUTURE IN TOKYO

incompatible backgrounds.15 Animated space has the potential for free form crea-
tion into which the animator delineates the world. Like live-action, it is full of distor-
tions that make it real, presenting it to us with the monocular lens of the camera to
create formal compositions that play with the binocular way we see. In visual terms,
it can be difficult to discriminate between depth and dimension in anime. In Akira,
Otomo plays with our expectations, by ‘focusing’ on something in the foreground,
then on something in background, and drawing the first object as if out of focus.
Some animators smooth out the relation between foreground and background and
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thus impart a sense of ‘real’ depth and of ‘real’ movement in and out of it. As Marion
suggests, the visible gives itself to be seen.16 The invisible comes into being in our
knowledge of the depth, perspective and gravity that hold things to the earth. It
gives weight to material objects such as bridges and buildings, holds the action and
pulls it into a consistent narrative.
In the same manner, in the live-action sequence, the scenes we don’t see, that
form part of an ellipsis, or that we imagine, bring the story into narrative enactment.
While anime confound us with visuals, they may also enwrap our imaginations with
nuanced humanist tales of redemption. Rather than thinking about how to tell a
story or even what the filmic narrative is, Marion’s discussion of the crossing of the
visible and the invisible brings to our notice that which we see, and how we feel
about it, as an invisible but meaningful gift or discourse on modernity, and on us, as
cognizant cogs in the networked mechanical conurbation of constant movement,
transition, and potentially dehumanizing cities we construct for ourselves. These
cities are exemplified by Tokyo, a city that in film at least, is often presented as only
created so that it can be destroyed.

TOKYO

As usual in film, Tokyo stands in for the nation of which it is capital. Film, whether
live-action or animation, provides a reference system for architectural signs.17 The
rich imagery and detail of Japanese anime create another Tokyo in a constant cycle
of destruction and renewal. Tokyo in film appears as an ‘illustration of itself’ and a
metaphor for continual change.18 The destruction Tokyo experienced twice in the
last century, first in the 1923 earthquake and then again in the Second World War,
when Tokyo was almost entirely destroyed by air raids, becomes a template for the
destruction we see in the films.19 Osamu Tezuka, creator of Astro Boy, the boy robot,
describes the destruction of the city as allegorical of the collapse of the technology
saturated or spiritually deplete environments, or emblematic of the evaporation of
whole ideologies.20

Metabolists

Architects such as Kenzo Tange began their work in the wake of destruction after the
Second World War. Tange tries to find a ‘Japanese’ way, not through copying old-style
forms or materials but through traditional use of new materials to see the forms that
 THE UNFIXED FUTURE IN TOKYO   149

suit them best. In master planning the Olympic complex Tange applied principles
of town planning that anticipate expansion and future reorganization of the urban
area to the South of Yoyogi Park into an orderly system. He worked with existing
structures and set out a north-south axis running parallel to the main approach to
the Meiji Shrine to the north.21
The generation of architects that followed Tange includes Metabolist architect
Kurokawa. The formative years of the architects who later became the Metabolists
were marked by the sudden tragic devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by atomic
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bombs and the virtually total reduction of cities and buildings to ash. Metabolism
is an architecture of growth that promotes urbanization and building as a living,
autonomous life force. Metabolism is both a translation of shinchintaisha, meaning
exchange of materials and energy between organisms and the exterior world, and a
pun on ‘meta-Buddhism,’ suggesting that cities could be conceived as undergoing a
series of life cycles, of constant growth and death.22

AKIRA

As the film opens, a teenage motorcycle gang happen upon some unusual looking chil-
dren who possess psychic powers. Tetsuo, one of the gang, acquires super powers of his
own, which soon become out of control. An entity called Akira sleeps beneath the old
Olympic Stadium and, when awakened by Tetsuo, appears as a young boy and the two
wreak havoc on the already damaged city, and then unite into a single pure energy; a
fusion of light and dark, good and bad, hope and despair.23
Filmmakers often describe the physical environment as foreground and narrative
environment as background. Akira’s foreground and background describe the late
twentieth century shift from idealistic hope to bleak future, signified by an urban
chaos in a constant state of apocalypse.24 The film begins with Tokyo destroyed by a
mysterious atomic blast and it ends in the same way with the same human bioweapon
that caused the original destruction in the ascendant but with a suggestion of renewal.
Akira opens with a silent white flash that destroys the cityscape leaving only an
impact crater. Science fiction films that bear witness to the mass trauma over the
use of nuclear weapons enable us to overcome and exorcise fears of future nuclear
wars.25 Akira expresses these anxieties of 1980s modernity that suggest collective
incineration and extinction could come at any time, and without warning.26
In Akira public spaces fall apart explosively then re-emerge in an urban throne
room, an engawa, a space in-between. Akira depicts a neo-Tokyo of the future when
‘little boy’, the nickname given to the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945,
is brought to life, or awakened in the form of a real little boy, whose very thoughts
brought about another world war. Tokyo is both the background against which
action takes place and principle character of the film, tearing itself from the depth of
the visual as ‘gift’ to the viewer.
Although Akira begins with a bird’s-eye view of Tokyo, we never again get such
an ‘image’ of the urban whole. Nor is it necessary for us to be able to ‘locate’ our-
selves, since the images of the city that include the Olympic stadium, the school,
 150  THE UNFIXED FUTURE IN TOKYO

and motorways provide the sort of familiarity that grounds us, wherever we go. Akira
takes place in neo-Tokyo in the near future after a fictional third world war. Akira
began in 1980 as a manga, and the anime simplifies the narrative in order to tell a
story in a set amount of time.27 This means curtailing the multiplicity of characters
and subplots some of which I reintroduce here to contextualize the architecture and
its use.
The serial nature of manga allows a narrative to take as long as it likes to play
out. For example, the Lady Miyako character in the film is a sort of comic street
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preacher with her band of robe-clad monks, while the original manga character
and her Buddhist-like monks represent, more than any other, the ‘old’ Japan, the
world of tradition, belief, spirituality. They occupy Tange’s Olympic Stadium and
thus refer to this more optimistic part of Japan’s historical past. Lady Miyako is one
of the experiments herself, but her spirituality has allowed her to reach a natural
maturity, while the psychic children remain in their childhood state. The children
are ‘wizened’, with physical features and knowledge beyond their years, haunting
images of postnuclear mutants.28 At the end of the film they destroy the corrupt
world.
Films work aurally as well as visually, and the striking drum beat with which
Akira opens not only refers to the same chord in Blade Runner but lets us know
that something momentous is about to take place and we pay attention. A pref-
ace follows, and we see Tokyo appear, in its familiar guise, and then disappear
beneath a mushroom cloud. What reappears is neo-Tokyo, in which the action is
set, a crisscrossing of landfill across Tokyo Bay, in which modern skyscrapers con-
trast with the decay and poverty at street level. Constantly throughout the film,
giant blocks of buildings loom up in the middle ground, a convention of Uki-e
woodblock prints.
Large skyscrapers, looming gigantically and out of scale in the distance, replace
the massive presence of Mt Fuji that we see only at the beginning of the film. In Akira
the traditional Edo of alleys, neighbourhoods, and families, familiar to western audi-
ences from films such as Tokyo Story, is replaced by a monolithic mass of enormous
buildings, faceless and identical.29
As buildings loom up in middle ground as well as the distance, we traverse the
city as the teenage motorbike gangs do, making it our own.30 The music in the back-
ground moves us forward, onward, pacing the scene as the motorcyclists traverse
their city. These scenes are not narrative driven, that is, they do not move the story
along, but take us along on the journey that these young teens are about to experi-
ence. Akira ends with a scene of ultimate redemption, the city rebuilt and our heroes
speeding off into the future.
The destruction in Akira combines the 1923 earthquake with the atomic bomb.
Buildings topple over, and the ground beneath one’s feet starts to fall apart, crack,
and great fissures open up in the kind of cracking lines we associate with earth-
quakes in film, combined with the incredible wind associated with nuclear explo-
sions. In the style as well as the monumental scale of the architecture, a line of
influence runs from Metropolis to Blade Runner a film that took its look from Tokyo,
but also influenced the look of Tokyo in Akira.31
 THE UNFIXED FUTURE IN TOKYO   151
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Figure 8.1  The Babel Tower (Metropolis, Fritz Lang, 1925).

Akira was one of the first anime to ‘animate’ Tokyo. When the film appeared it
didn’t ‘look’ like anything ever seen before. The warm orange colours Otomo uses
for Akira are taken directly from Blade Runner’s polluted haze. The design of Blade
Runner was inspired by districts in both Tokyo and Hong Kong, specifically the
ever-present signage, narrow streets, and total absence of nature or any kind of nat-
ural space, such as a park.32 Both from the 1980s, Blade Runner and Akira express a

Figure 8.2  Tokyo (Akira, Katsuhiro Otomo, 1989).

 152  THE UNFIXED FUTURE IN TOKYO

dsytopian cynicism towards the union of human and technology. In a direct filmic
reference to Blade Runner Otomo sets Akira in the same year, 2019, and the city-
scapes of neo-Tokyo draw on the iconography of Blade Runner’s Tokyo/Los Angeles
metaphor for urban decay.33
The only existing landmark that Otomo includes from present day Tokyo is
Tange’s Olympic stadium, an important symbol. The manga depicts the Olympic
complex explicitly, while in the anime the stadium becomes Tetsuo’s throne room.
The Olympics themselves represent an optimistic spirit of peace and equality
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between nations.34 The Olympic site symbolizes something that is both ‘hope’ and
the destruction of that hope. In Akira we see it literally destroyed, both by bombs
and by Tetsuo.
Metabolism’s intentions can act as an explanation of the plot of Akira; a city as a
biological entity where human society is a vital process, a city so flexible in its con-
nections that its parts could grow, transform themselves and die while the whole
animal went on living. There is, however, a striking contrast between the propos-
als Kurokawa makes and the images Otomo presents. Otomo offers a criticism of
Metabolists’ optimistic vision of a New Urbanism where design and technology
denote human vitality. Tetsuo, in constant organic change, is metabolism gone
wrong. Tetsuo metamorphoses into a destructive mass of protoplasm and metal.
Tetsuo’s very name (tetsu means iron) is a play on his changing status in the film.35 He
is able to generate a new arm when SOL, the military satellite and cynical metaphor
for the Rising Sun of the Japanese Empire, burns away his right arm.
As Tetsuo, the ‘iron man’ hybrid of human and technology, struggles to come to
terms with his powers, public spaces fall down, fall apart and decay, then re-emerge
into a throne room. One of the most striking images of the manga is the small boy,
Akira, dressed in the uniform of a school boy, but with a red cape, and a sash across
his chest, like an Emperor. The throne sits not in the chamber of a royal palace, but
an engawa, a space in-between.
By setting the throne on a ‘ground’ of disaster and setting Akira on that throne,
Otomo creates a criticism both of empire and of lack of empire. The irony of the
image of the child emperor on his throne in the ruins of the city he has destroyed at
least once, and will do again, was particularly powerful in 1980s Japan, which was
at an economic and productivity height before the recession of the later twentieth
century.
Tetsuo, also clad with the red cape, sits in the destroyed Olympic stadium on a
throne, the back of which is decorated with the rays of the sun, crowned by the
Olympic laurel wreaths and the Olympic symbol. Tetsuo is a metaphor for Tokyo as
a machine in which people have been so thoroughly fused with the urban metabo-
lism that they become organic cells that keep the city running. Tetsuo represents a
nation haunted by postnuclear mutation, and Akira, in his schoolboy uniform repre-
sents the irrepressible memory of past innocence.
At the conclusion of the film, Tetsuo, the distorted power, full of hate, out of con-
trol, with organic and technical matter combined in a horrific growth that encom-
passes even his closest friends, combines with the more ‘pure’ power of Akira, to
create an embryonic ‘spirit’ and the film concludes on an optimistic note.
 THE UNFIXED FUTURE IN TOKYO   153

As Kaneda and his friends race around on their motorcycles the city, destroyed
by Tetsuo and Akira, noiselessly returns to its former state, rendered in painstaking
detail with Otomo’s characteristic realism. The conclusion presents a new dawn on
Tokyo, the ever changing city. This rebuilding suggests nanotechnology, organic
forms, spontaneous growth, the end of the ‘old order’ as well as the destruction of
temples, in favour of a new Tokyo speeding into the future, in a reversal of the anni-
hilation of the atom bomb.
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PATLABOR

Patlabor 1: Giant Labors building an enormous Ark in Tokyo Bay go on the rampage
and destroy Tokyo.

Patlabor 2: Giant Labors used for civil and military operations are controlled by a
criminal mastermind.
As in Akira, the films start with an establishing shot of Tokyo Bay. Patlabor 1 opens
with a great ‘pan’ over the large landfill site in the bay, showing the Labors (superhu-
man colossus of Greek myths, or Heidegger’s notion of both labour and the tool, and
of technē) both above and below the water line, at work on the enormous Ark that is
55 metres long (a city block) and 150 metres above the waterline, that is, about the
height of a 50 floor building.
Oshii, director of the Patlabor films, comments on the eloquent destruction of
Tokyo in Akira and his personal perception of the metropolitan experience and
urban expansion. He is astonished that Otomo can destroy Tokyo so easily. If you
depict a city, he suggests, as something that you won’t even miss if destroyed, made
from steel and concrete with no ‘neighbourhoods’, destroying it will not accomplish
anything.36 Cities, he suggests, are not only depositories of memory but places
where, if one looks carefully enough, one finds ‘scenery which you are very much
attracted to. It can be the evening at the train crossing, or it can be scenery of some
vacant land (. . .) We have scenery we love inside of us.’37
As Oshii points out, anime is a world unto itself.38 While the world of anime occupies
its own space, not necessarily coincident with the inherently more representational
space of conventional live-action film, animated space has the potential to be con-
text free, although grounded in a world we know and with which we are familiar.39
Oshii refers to anime as mukokuseki meaning stateless or essentially without a
national identity. Oshii suggests that not only are the anime stateless, but that ani-
mators do not possess a furusato; meaning that they lack a hometown, a native place.
This stateless aspect of anime arises in Oshii’s conversations, as an expression of what
he perceives as a problematic cultural identity at the start of the twenty-first century.

Waterways

In Patlabor 2, two characters travel on a boat past an industrial shoreline on which

piles of rubbish are as clearly delineated as oil refineries, in a respite from the graphics
 154  THE UNFIXED FUTURE IN TOKYO

of the robotized city with which we have been presented. As in Patlabor 1, these
boat journeys are markers in the film. The music on the soundtrack changes, the
pace of the tale slows, and they are explanatory, rather than narrative driven. That
is, the characters slow down and tell us things, the filmmaker letting us know his
or her point of view. While discussing how Japan has changed in post-war years
the two characters pass the blown up Yokohama Bay Bridge. This symbolic jour-
ney provides a lyrical and elegiac scene that may seem at first at odds with the
frenzied action and battle sequences of anime.40 ‘Elegiac’ refers to elegies, poems
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written about death, often in the style of a lamentation. Here the reference is to a
mood of mournfulness and melancholy mixed with nostalgia. This wistful mood
is also a cultural expression of the vanishing of tradition, seen in Tokyo Story for
example. It links with the long lyric tradition in premodern Japan in which poetry
and romance celebrated the beauty of transience and the bittersweet pleasure that
can be derived from the passing of love, youth and beauty, as expressed in tradi-
tional literature.41 This feeling of transience is often linked with the natural world,
the seasons and sadness, and is associated with water imagery. For example, in
Patlabor 1 and 2 journeys on water show reflections of nature and tradition and
Oshii deliberately has his two men talking about change and the past in an overtly
nostalgic manner while floating slowly by the ghostly shells of abandoned industry
as if watching a film. Water imagery in Patlabor is an important element. Patlabor
begins in Tokyo Bay, filled in with the Ark, an artificial construct where we later find
Noah reincarnate as a young woman, piloting one of the gargantuan colossus-like
Labors. The scenes that take place on the canals that run through Tokyo are also
coded to carry different messages, the music is different, and we hear the sound
of nature, things move along at a different pace, and there is no dialogue. Acoustic

Figure 8.3  The slow visual exploration of old warehouses illustrates the
nostalgic subtext (Patlabor 1: Mobile Police, Mamoru Oshii, 1988).
 THE UNFIXED FUTURE IN TOKYO   155

and visual identities enhance one another. Oshii suggests that while visuals are of
course important, they are easier to judge than sound. Sound accounts for half of
the movie and allows for the exploration of more possibilities.
As the characters travel through the canals of Tokyo, seeing all the old buildings
there, the music changes. We see reflections in water, a bird flying overhead. This
comment on nature and perhaps on the cynicism of nature worship recalls other
pastoral scenes from other films. The dialogue suggests that machines are no better
than those who make them, and that the all-powerful Operating System is conceived
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and coded by humans with humans’ frailties. The virus they seek is a technological
metaphor for spiritual ennui.
The disparate realities that merge in the hybrid and composite worlds of Patlabor
1 and 2 and Akira typify contemporary cities by presenting urban reality as messy
and sprawling, a mixture of sanitized virtual spaces and loci of physical decay and
anarchy.
Oshii suggests that people are still not ‘waking up to reality’.42 Oshii wishes his
films to be a call to begin thinking critically, especially about the power structures of
religion and technology.43 The film is rife with biblical symbolism, and it is Babel (that
hubristic human attempt to approach the divine, and the reliance on communication
to get anywhere) that takes over the central computer mainframe. The overt religious
symbolism in Oshii’s films (that includes the Ark, Babel and references to 666, the
sign of the beast) does not propose direct conflict with religious belief, nor a nega-
tion of religion, but instead, the main characters are able to effect positive change
through their interaction with and manipulation of these mythological structures.
The opening sequence, first introduces us to the Ark project, with its further myth-
ical and biblical references to the Babel/Babylon myth familiar from Blade Runner a
film whose influence on Oshii and other anime directors is explicitly acknowledged.44
Representing the zenith of technological advancement, the Ark turns out to be the
source of resonance that will destroy Tokyo when the next typhoon hits.

Figure 8.4  Oil refinery (Patlabor 2: The Movie, Mamoru Oshii, 1993).
 156  THE UNFIXED FUTURE IN TOKYO
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Figure 8.5  Industrial complex with modern high-rise. While the two characters
discuss war and peace they pass industrial images (Patlabor 2: The Movie,
Mamoru Oshii, 1993).

In the scene when the two characters examine the broken Yokohama Bay Bridge,
the background imagery becomes urban, real, full of the detritus of life and referent
of mid-twentieth century technology. A long line of symbolic iconic emblematic fac-
tories, chimneys and wire fences move past right to left as the boat moves along the
shore. This much remarked on sequence offers a poetic elegy for our contemporary
cities. At the top of the screen the sky is a pale grey and the horizon line divides the
frame, with two thirds above the line and one third below it.

Birds

Freedom, or lack of it, appears in the form of the birdcages that appear in each of
the 24 places the god complex programmer of Patlabor 2 lived. Some of the houses
that we see in Patlabor resemble the traditional city house in which the protagonist
of Ikiru lives. This house that we see from both inside and outside, becomes an issue
of domesticity and ownership, class, and modernity. The narrow and steep stairway
becomes emblematic of the constraints with which the inhabitants exist within it. In
Patlabor the modesty of the house is exposed through the dialogue as well as the
contrast between it and the rest of the over-computerized world of the program-
mer who lived there. This visual litany of industrial terrain vague concludes with the
iconic image of a crane hovering low over the river, reflected perfectly on the surface
of the water. The recurring bird related symbolic imagery, representing both free-
dom and entrapment, also conjures up notions of transcendence.

Image and text

In Patlabor, characters frequently speak their subtext. Dialogue discloses an

overt message about human intelligence and courage, as opposed to robots and
 THE UNFIXED FUTURE IN TOKYO   157

operating systems. Oshii creates a visual play so that everyday objects are scaled
to the colossal Labor size, and brings forward the city as world in itself, the invis-
ible brought to visibility not only by exposure (there are no figures in front of it)
but implicitly suggesting that the action is merely a pretext for commenting on
our modern existence, with its expressions of technical being. It is interesting to
look at the mise en scène of the city. Watercolour backgrounds present the old
‘Edo’ district of Tokyo in the middle ground while tall high-rise offices tower in
the background.
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IKIRU

When Watanabe, an aging civil servant, discovers he has terminal cancer he looks for
meaning in life and finds it by creating a playground in a slum area of Tokyo.
A concrete motorway bridge in Kurosawa’s 1952 film Ikiru, out of scale with its
surroundings, seems to forget to look down to see the small community it passes
over, a space in-between the past and the present or future. The title of the film,
Ikiru, means ‘to live’ and the film depicts a man discovering meaning in his own life
through creating a better one for future generations. Ikiru contrasts the pre- and
post-war generations in Japan. The proposed playground site with its row of tradi-
tional houses is referent of older Japan, while situated beneath a motorway in the
shadow of modernity. The tall concrete bridge of the motorway takes cars quickly
past this area, as if from one time into another, while leaving this small quiet neigh-
bourhood behind to transform itself into a children’s playground, symbol of youth,
optimism, and the future.
The opening sequence of Ikiru is dense with informational elements that set out
the ensuing course of action. It also establishes an initial directionality, not out-
wards, speeding off to the horizon, but inwards, towards interiority of the spirit. The
crux of the film is the playground but we only see the site itself after Watanabe’s
death at the end of the film. The film does not begin with the narrator saying: here is
a playground, how did it come about and it was the action of one man. It begins by
saying: here is the space of death and this is what it looks like. We get to know the
interior of this protagonist before we even know what he looks like from the outside.
We know that the cancer eating him is synonymous with the emptiness of his life, in
which all nourishment gets rejected, and that the cancer is too advanced to excise.
This is an inner journey, and, since we are told from the outset that there is no chance
of reprieve, we focus on outward manifestations of both the illness and our hero’s
manner of dealing with it.
Watanabe, the rubber stamp man, exemplifies the civil servant. In his office piles
of paper, tied up with string, and the long corridor and door in front of which he waits
for the civic authority depict bureaucracy. Two parallel strands carry the narrative. In
the first a group of local women dressed in traditional kimonos try to transform the
terrain vague outside their houses into a playground. One by one they visit the rele-
vant authorities in order to find someone who will clean it up as it is a health hazard.
The other strand explores Watanabe’s inner journey through his experiences of com-
ing to terms with his cancer. This involves meeting his own personal Mephistopheles,
 158  THE UNFIXED FUTURE IN TOKYO

complete with hat and cape who leads him through bars and pachinko parlours. His
relation to his son and daughter-in-law and his failed attempts to find love culmi-
nate when the two strands combine. The women succeed in bringing Watanabe to
the site, and, standing in the rain, his feet in a puddle, he realizes the direction and
fulfilment for which he has been seeking; to create a children’s playground from the
mosquito infested patch of wasteland. The space is leftover, forgotten, meaningless,
like him and he is inspired to energetically transform it into something vital.
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Passing of time like the flowing of water

In the first act of the film, a montage sequence depicts the attempts of the neigh-
bourhood women who wish the playground to be built being passed from one
bureaucratic office to another. The chief, Watanabe, the rubber stamp man whose
stamp is required to approve the playground, has been away from work due to his
illness.
In each scene of the montage sequence the clothes of the women communi-
cate the amount of time that has passed as they experience the different forms of
bureaucracy. In the heat of the summer a perspiring desk clerk swats away flies, but
then their light clothes give way to tweed jackets and autumnal rains. Water, that
has been present throughout the film, either in the perspiration of the clerks, or in
the reference to stagnant water of the area designated for a playground, appears in
the second half of the film much more directly in the form of an incessant rainfall
that deluges the area designated for the playground, and in which the hero walks
without noticing that his feet and ankles are already soaking wet. It presages the
snow we see at the end of the film, when the water has washed away all the stag-
nation, and fresh snow with its redemptive qualities, in which shadows are lighter
than surface, blankets the scene.
Kurosawa’s statement that the films an audience really enjoys are the ones that
were enjoyable in the making suggests another source of the invisible, that the
pleasure in the work can’t be achieved unless you know you have put all of your
strength into it and have done your best to make it come alive.45 Cinematic beauty,
he describes, can only exist in the moving image and when it is well expressed,
one experiences a particularly deep emotion while watching that film.46 It is this
quality, Kurosawa suggests, that draws the audience to watch a film, in hope of
attaining this quality that inspired the filmmaker to make his film in the first place.
This, he suggests is the essence of cinematic beauty. The medieval Noh actor and
playwright Zeami said that one must ‘watch with a detached gaze’, and Kurosawa
suggests that while directing he sees every detail, not by direct scrutiny, but by
gazing elsewhere so that the action and scene are in his peripheral vision, and
that way one becomes more aware of it.47 In lighting a film, it is important that the
shadows come out right. The quality of the set influences the quality of the actors’
performance. If the plan of a house and the design of the rooms are done properly,
the actors can move about in them naturally. It restricts the shooting, but encour-
ages that feeling of authenticity.
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Figure 8.6  The bridge looks down on the playground below (Ikiru, Akira Kurosawa, 1952).

Figure 8.7  The playground, a place formed from the spaces around it, defined
by its clean white picket fence (Ikiru, Akira Kurosawa, 1952).
 160  THE UNFIXED FUTURE IN TOKYO

Kurosawa’s and Oshii’s comment on music echo Bresson’s suggestion that sound
and image come together in a manner that cannot be sundered like acquaintances
who meet on a journey, they are together until it is over. They suggest the sound be
accompanying, that is, sad music for a sad scene, or it can provide a counterpoint of
sound and image as opposed to the union of sound and image. In other films, each
character has their own musical motif.
In the iconic image with which the film ends, our hero Watanabe, sits on the
swing in the playground he has brought about himself. He is framed by the climbing
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frame, that both holds him back, imprisoning him, and keeps him caged, unable to
break free while it is also referent of structure, scaffolding, building for the future as
he sits and sings to himself. The scene begins as a young man from the office who
always supported Watanabe, (the ‘alternate’ son) enters the frame from the top left.
We recognize him by his stance, his hat and his way of walking. The bridge is framed
black in silhouette. The camera moves downward to show us the playground filled
with an extraordinary number of happily playing children, the white picket fence
of the playground winding its way along the site, adapting itself to the space so
that the playground, looking tidy, clean and safe seems to emerge as if it always
belonged there. The space has been leftover from building the motorway bridge,
and is both inside and outside in that it is an external expression of safe domesticity,
just outside the houses, as we see when a mother calls her child in for dinner. The
contemporary playground, where children, happily engaged with daily life, stand
and swing, or wait in line for the slide, is a small gesture of both humanity and mod-
ernism. The playground rhymes in an antonymic manner with the adult play of the
jazz clubs, and strippers Watanabe encountered earlier in his heroic journey Tokyo’s
dark side.

NOTES

  1 Akira, dir. Katsuhiro Otomo, Japan: Tokyo Movie Shinsha, 1987; Patlabor 1; Mobile Police,
dir. Mamoru Oshii, Japan: Headgear/Studio Deen/Tohokushinsha Film Corporation,
1988); Patlabor 2: The Movie, dir. Oshii, Japan: Headgear/Studio Deen/Tohokushinsha
Film Corporation, 1993; and Ikiru, dir. Akira Kurosawa, Japan: Toho Studios, 1952.

  2 Street of Shame, dir. Kenji Mizoguchi, Japan, 1956.

  3 Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural, trans. R. Richardson and A. O’Byrne (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2000).

  4 Gunter Nitschke, From Shinto to Ando (London: Academy Press, 1993).

  5 Kisho Kurokawa, Each One a Hero; The Philosophy of Symbiosis (London: Kodansha
International, 1997), 326.

  6 Helen McCarthy, Anime; A Beginners Guide to Japanese Animation (London: Titan

Books, 1993) and Susan Napier, Anime from Akira to Howl’s Moving Castle: Experiencing
Contemporary Japanese Animation (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).

  7 Jerome Shapiro, Atomic Bomb Cinema; The Apocalyptic Imagination on Film (London:
Routledge, 2001).
 THE UNFIXED FUTURE IN TOKYO   161

  8 Kisho Kurokawa, Metabolism in Architecture (London: Studio Vista, 1977), 374.

  9 Godzilla, dir. Ishiro Honda, Japan, 1954.

10 Jean-Luc Marion, Crossing of the Visible, trans. J. K. A. Smith (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 2004).

11 Kurokawa, Each One a Hero, 206.

12 Takashi Murakami, Superflat (Tokyo: Madora Shuppan, 2000).

13 Miho Nakagawa, ‘Mamoru Oshii’s Production of Multilayered Space’ in 2D Anime in

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Animation, an Interdisciplinary Journal, 8(1), 65–83.

14 Nakagawa, ‘Mamoru Oshii’s Production of Multilayered Space’.

15 Marion, Crossing of the Visible, 34.

16 Marion, Crossing of the Visible, 44.

17 Roger Connah, How Architecture Got its Hump (New York: MIT Press, 2001), 153.

18 Catherine Russell, “Tokyo, the Movie” in Japan Forum, (14: 2), 2002, Routledge, 211−44.

19 Russell, ‘Tokyo, the Movie’, 213. Japanese cinema was introduced to the West with the
international distribution that followed the success of Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon
(1951) at the Venice Film Festival in 1951. Producers tried to use cultural and historical
motifs that were marked as traditionally ‘Japanese’ and often inspired by Noh or Kabuki.
These influences are still seen in manga and anime.

20 Napier, Anime from Akira to Howl’s Moving Castle.

21 Arata Isozaki, ‘Wayo Style: The Japanization Mechanism’ in Visions of Japan (London:
Victoria and Albert Museum, 1991).

22 Kisho Kurokawa, Metabolism in Architecture, 27.

23 Most of eastern philosophy rejects the dualism of the West; either/or, good/bad etc.

24 John Beard, ‘Science Fiction Film of the 1980s; Fin de Siècle before its time’ in Journal of
Popular Culture, 32:1, 1–14.

25 Katsuhiro Otomo expresses deep feelings in the manga one character tells another:
‘Now, nothing makes sense. It’s like the disaster swept everyone’s principles away, and
everyone just keeps killing each other.’

26 Susan Sontag, ‘The Imagination of Disaster’ in Redmond, Liquid Metal, 40−47.

27 Anime refers to a style of animation developed in Japan, characterized by stylized art,

futuristic settings and themes, robots, violence and sex. Manga are paperback comic
books.

28 Napier, Anime from Akira to Howl’s Moving Castle, 42.

29 Tokyo Story, dir. Yasujiro Ozu, Tokyo, 1953.

30 Michelle Le Blanc and Colin Odell, Akira (London: British Film Institute/Palgrave
Macmillan, 2014).

31 Isolde Standish, ‘Akira, Postmodernism and Resistance’ in Redmond, Liquid Metal,

249−59.

32 Otomo deliberately banished green from the film along with nature worship and
nationalist sentiment. In the manga, Tetsuo explicitly says to the US forces ‘Get out of
 162  THE UNFIXED FUTURE IN TOKYO

my country’ and he and his friends set up the ‘neo-Tokyo Empire’ of what appears to be
ultranationalists from the era when Japan was closed. His union with Akira transcends
these material debates. The anime edits out this entire episode, as well as reducing the
Lady Miyako and her neo-Buddhist monks to figures of fun who worship Akira, just as
the humans in the Planet of the Apes series of films that emerged from the 1960s fear of
the ‘bomb’, worship the missile they have buried under the earth and that caused the
reversal in evolution.

33 The manga is set in the year 2030.

34 The summer Olympics in 1964 were the first Olympic games held in Asia. In the manga
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Otomo is much more explicit about the nature of the Olympic development. The ‘new’
proposed Olympics are to be sited on the crater that was the epicentre of the Akira
bomb.

35 The film inspired Shinya Tsukamoto’s Tetsuo: Iron Man (1989), a live-action film about
a man whose body, starting with the right arm, begins to transmute to mechanistic
robotic biohybrid.

36 Dani Cavallaro, The Cinema of Mamoru Oshii; Fantasy Technology and Politics (London,
McFarland, 2006), 126.

37 Mamoru Oshii, ‘Around the Movie Patlabor 2: To Put an End to the Era’ (Dialogue:
Mamoru Oshii versus Hayao Miyazaki), 1993 Animage, 184.

38 Napier, Anime from Akira to Howl’s Moving Castle, 26 and McCarthy, Anime; A Beginners
Guide to Japanese Animation.

39 Napier, Anime from Akira to Howl’s Moving Castle, 24.

40 Napier, Anime from Akira to Howl’s Moving Castle, 31.

41 Napier, Anime from Akira to Howl’s Moving Castle, 276.

42 Carl Gustav Horn, ‘Anime’ in Japan Edge: The Insider’s Guide to Japanese Pop Subculture,
ed. A. Roman (San Francisco: Cadence Books, 1999), 176.

43 Brian Ruh, Stray Dog of Anime; The films of Mamoru Oshii (London: Palgrave Macmillan,
2004).

44 Cavallaro, Cinema of Mamoru Oshii, 125.

45 Akira Kurosawa, Something Like an Autobiography, trans. Audie E Bock (New York: Knopf,
1982), 177.

46 Kurosawa, Something Like an Autobiography, 193.

47 Kurokawa, Each One a Hero, 143.

 9
Fear and trembling: a study of why movies
make us afraid
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INTRODUCTION

Sometimes we watch a film and lose ourselves in it, while in other films the
filmmaker has created something that makes us feel uncomfortable, aware of our-
selves watching a film, but unable to turn away. The most affective scenes are often
those in which something puts us on the edge of our seat and a chill creeps up our
spines even when we don’t why.
Kierkegaard describes how fear consumes our inner life and strength.1 He ques-
tions what our faith will lead us to do. While this is an increasingly important question
we look at it here in a different way, in regard to our faith in the filmmaker to take us
safely on a frightening journey. Kierkegaard suggests faith is founded in belief in the
absurd. The absurd, which is contradictory to reason itself often provides the basis
for the scary movie, the horror film, the tale of suspense. We suspend our disbelief to
get caught up in a world that must be familiar enough to be recognized by us and
into which we can situate ourselves not necessarily psychologically or spiritually, but
in our imaginations. This is the role that architecture plays in the frightening film. It
gives us a ‘there’ in which to be.
Kracauer, (like Arnheim, Bela Balázs, Eisenstein, and others) describes what film
can do that no other medium can. His 1960 book, Theory of Film shows aspects of
reality that film can redeem, whether abstractions or emotional expression. Miriam
Hansen demonstrates that this ‘redemption of physical reality’ explicates film’s
contingency, indeterminacy, and endlessness, with the ‘fortuitous, fragmentary,
ephemeral and ordinary’.2 Film is less about ‘realism’ than it is about experiencing,
encountering, and discovering the world.3
This redemption of physical reality, exposed and expressed by Kracauer in Theory
of Film, highlights the entire history of film through how it draws from, reflects
and makes real the world around us. Film brings forth reality through close-ups of
things that would normally pass unobserved; durée or how we experience the pass-
ing of time, or the actor as character. Whether history or fantasy, silent, or sound
film, we respond to what we see and hear. Kracauer’s scrutiny of filmic composition
 164  WHY MOVIES MAKE US AFRAID

and the avant-garde, with its focus on rhythm and expression, explains how, while
not being ‘real’ even the most abstract, nonfigurative film can still be expressive of
reality in a poetic sense. This is how we ‘experience’ the world around us. Different
kinds of narratives can present different forms of stories, some of which repre-
sent reason, others destiny or the attempts to cheat destiny, or motifs such as the
underdog against the establishment, the flow of life in the city, the Hitchcockian
thriller. According to Kracauer the whole sleuthing process indulges the sense of the
uncanny in the interplay between moods and surroundings, inner excitation and
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the look of objects.4 In the Hitchcockian thriller small objects such as a wristwatch
or the glowing tip of a cigarette can have deep meaning.
As Kracauer suggests, the penchant for sensationalism differentiates the genuine
horror film from a film of people violently hacked to death. The everyday evokes fear
because it feels real to us. Nowhere is this more relevant than in relation to the horror
film in which our awareness of reality, deep in our beings, brings forth genuine fear.5
Film touches us, and returns our focus to the physical world.
Social, political and historical events situate the motifs of the horror film in the real
world. Kracauer situates events of the 1940s in film noir: ‘[t]he weird, veiled insecurity
of life under the Nazis is transferred to the American scene. Sinister conspiracies incu-
bate next door, within the world considered normal − any trusted neighbour may turn
into a demon.’6 In another example, in the 1960s and early 70s in the US, events at
Kent State, at Altamont, and the Manson murders in 1969 and images of horror seen
on the news from the war in Vietnam prepared Americans for tales of creepy demonic
possession such as The Exorcist or slashfests such as The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.7
Transcending history, however, and as endlessly popular as his eternal life sug-
gests, is the vampire. In each era, vampire films abound, often reflecting popular
themes, the AIDS crisis, social exclusion or political dictatorships. The more ‘real,’ the
more scary films frighten us and affect us on a visceral level. They affect us because
they can be uncanny (the vampire) or everyday (Lynch is insidious in exposing fear
in our own home) or they play to the anxiety of current events. Film screens us from
our real fears, as well as acting as a screen on which our fears are projected.8
Architectural tropes of scary movies include the mirror, the stair (either up to
the garret or down to the cellar), the secret or hidden door: we don’t know what is
behind that door and that is the point, we may never see it (until it is too late) and
that makes it scarier. Mirror reflections of horror are an end in themselves.9 Mirrors
imply duplicity, even more deceptive than the cinema screen, an additional layer
of manipulation in Plato’s cave. The vampire is frightening because we look in the
mirror and he isn’t there, which suggests we have conjured him up from our imagi-
nations. At other times the mirror reflection shows more than we wish to see.
Each architectural description develops one aspect that gets increasingly embod-
ied into the everyday world.10 The doorway frames us; the stair suggests either
ascendance, or descent to hell and the nether regions, depending on our cultural
understanding. The modest suburban house refers to the everyday, where we think
we feel safe, and the white picket fence to keeping out mythic evil, the strange, the
latent unknown that lies within. The phenomenon of deep background is the ful-
crum on which film and architecture converge.
 WHY MOVIES MAKE US AFRAID   165

Filmmaker Dreyer said ‘imagine that we are sitting in an ordinary room. Suddenly
we are told that there is a corpse behind the door. In an instant the room we are
sitting in is completely altered [. . .] through they are physically the same. This is
because we have changed.’11 We feel there is someone behind us but we dare not
look round; this way he gives us the feeling there ‘is a corpse in the next room’.

BLIND SPOTS OF THE MIND

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In the scary movie, the close-up brings us close to that from which we wish to keep
our distance. Filmmakers draw our attention to details using close-ups. The close-up
corresponds to our natural perception when something comes forward to our
notice. Slow motion shots or what Kracauer refers to as temporal close-ups seem
less natural because we contrast them with our own time and speeded-up time con-
founds our perception.
The situation is the ‘there’ disclosed on the screen. As the camera pans we see
different things, and sometimes in different ways. We take the familiar for granted.
Strange camera angles draw things to our notice. When two people talk, if the cam-
era moves out and pans around the room it changes the situation. We feel there is
something around the characters and something around us as well. Someone might
be looking at the characters, and thus at us too. This not only evokes the question of
who is doing the looking, whose eye is the camera, but also ‘creates’ an area around
us, evoking spatial perception, an undefined boundary of area of which we are aware.
It enlivens the area behind our back we cannot see, another ‘blind spot of the mind’.12
The most frightening scenes are those in which the filmmaker has created the
sense of threat, without suggesting the origin, or basis of that threat, the ‘where’
from which that threat emerges. In these films, we, the viewer, have lost orientation
although we are in a familiar, even mundane world that has, either all at once, or
slowly without our realizing it, become strange.
Even supernatural thrillers suggest a sense of everyday life, existing around and
beyond the particular of the story being told.13 Homes where people live must have
the look and texture of daily life, as though someone lives there before the film
starts.14 For a film to work we must see it as if it is real, although fully aware it is not.
The characters, of course, don’t know they are in a film, so they go up into the attic,
down to the cellar, check into the motel, open the door unwittingly to strangers,
ignore the locals’ warnings, and in every other way show they are inhabitants of
the modern world, reliant on logic and science. Whether they go about their daily
routine in surreal landscapes such as Eraserhead, or find themselves in a strange sit-
uation in homely landscapes, such as when Cary Grant (as Roger Thornhill) finds
himself attacked in a field of corn in North by Northwest, the protagonists encounter
each new drama as best they can with practical common sense.15
In Wait until Dark, first one thing happens − a blind woman receives a doll as a gift −
and then another − a man with squeaky shoes comes to visit − and we find ourselves
in a situation where we don’t know the rules.16 Alan Arkin, the villain, uses an every-
day object in a treacherous way when he opens a refrigerator door, letting the little
 166  WHY MOVIES MAKE US AFRAID

incandescent light illuminate his way. It is one of the most frightening moments in
the film, where we, the viewer, have been trained by Audrey Hepburn (playing the
blind woman) in her capability to trust in dark for safety. The mimetic circle closes
when we appropriate what we see into our own understanding of the world.

VAMPIRES

There are two kinds of vampires in film, the first is the spectral vampire, who sucks
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our blood and whose frightening image is made more so by his shadowy existence.
The other is the seductive vampire, whose very corporeality is emphasized by his
lack of reflection. This vampire only appears in the flesh, as it were, and can’t be cap-
tured in the mirror’s silvered image. Mirrors and windows often provide convenient
if less conventional means of ingress for the vampire to enter our everyday world.
The vampire inhabits a liminal world, of doors, corridors and stairs.17
A vampire bite-fest of films includes: the shadowy Nosferatu; the famous Bela
Lugosi version Dracula; the female Vampyr; Christopher Lee as the vampire in the
Hammer Horror version, Dracula; Catherine Deneuve as a lesbian vampire in The
Hunger; vampires as misfits in Near Dark; Gary Oldman in costumes by Eiko Ishioka
in Bram Stoker’s Dracula and the remake of Murnau’s classic with Klaus Kinski as Max
Schreck.18 Brakhage suggests that in the original Nosferatu Max Schreck was not a
player from Reinhardt’s company, as some have suggested, nor Murnau himself, as
others have rumoured, but was in fact a real vampire.19 A film about the making of
Murnau’s Nosferatu as a documentary, Shadow of the Vampire, depicts Max Schreck
as a real vampire playing the role of Nosferatu.20 Sneaking in to the film set late
at night to watch the dailies, Willem Defoe playing Max Schreck/Nosferatu stares
directly into the projector, watching himself projected on film, living forever. This
is a filmic comment on how film takes the life from those it films, as well as on how
nothing is real unless it appears in film.
Later vampire films include commentary on what happens when the old world val-
ues adapt to contemporary media culture and include the satirical Nadja and, from the
same year and adapted from the novel of the same name, Interview with the Vampire.
Underworld and Night Watch present parallel universes in which medieval struggles
between good and evil are enacted on city streets or beneath them.21 At the same
time, the preponderance of vampire films such as the Twilight Saga, another adap-
tation from a series of novels, and television shows (True Blood, The Vampire Diaries)
presents vampires as the family next door, misunderstood and different from us but
trying to find community and integrate into the social fabric of American society.

NOSFERATU

The menacing form of the undead stalks a young woman.

To discuss corporeality and embodiment in the realm of architecture, we examine
Nosferatu, a classic adaptation of Bram Stoker’s novel. This vampire may be captured in
 WHY MOVIES MAKE US AFRAID   167

the mirror, framed in doorways, or arches, but often arrives hand first. In Nosferatu, the
shadow represents the spectral form of the vampire. The iconic image of Nosferatu is
the shadow of the vampire creeping up the stair, long thin fingers, menacing, curved
like knives. His overlarge fingers with their distended nails appear disembodied, mov-
ing as if on their own, or we see the shadow of his hand clutching the heart of a vic-
tim. Our imaginations start to place that disembodied hand on our own shoulders or
even at the end of our own arms. The dismembered hand has its own legacy in horror
films. First in 1924, in The Hands of Orlac, and in a 1935 remake with Peter Lorre playing
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the evil surgeon, a concert pianist unknowingly has a murderer’s hands grafted to the
ends of his arms.22 Count Orlock is also the name of the vampire in Nosferatu. The hand
with a mind of its own has also been used to great comic effect by Kubrick in his 1963
satire Dr Strangelove; or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, where Peter
Sellers’ hand keeps trying to give the Nazi salute.23 Ghost Story features four old friends
in New England telling one another ghost stories, one of which features a roving hand
that hides in a drawer and gets into a house by the simple expedient of knocking on
the door, then scampering in unseen when it is opened.24
In Nosferatu, the vampire disappears through a double exposure and, as he
becomes slowly transparent, a window in the wall behind him appears through
him. This is more eerie than if it were a chair or solid object we see rather than that
framed unknown outside. Through the body of the vampire, we see space unfolding,
limitless. Several scenes in Nosferatu are filmed out of doors and the use of the nat-
ural world was intended to make the film more eerie, as if set in reality, as if it could

Figure 9.1  Nosferatu’s shadow creeps up the stair, which is also only in shadow
(Nosferatu, F. W. Murnau, 1922).
 168  WHY MOVIES MAKE US AFRAID

happen to us. To increase the feeling of the uncanny, in a location shot Murnau adjusts
the film so that the forest is in negative; black is white and white is black in this world.

Stair

The use of the staircase is essential to show the transition from one spiritual plane to
another with the emotion (of fear) in the viewer as the completion of the equation.
We don’t see Nosferatu on a level plain, but on a stair, in the hall, a ship, in a place
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inbetween, like when he gets lost in the mirror. Nosferatu creeps up a stair so mini-
mal it is little more than a backdrop on which to project the shadow, in a scene that
has become iconic of fear, suspense, and predatory evil. In film, the shadow often
enters the frame first either suggesting menace, or belying the human scale, as in
The Third Man where a large and menacing shadow appears, cast by the ‘innocent’
character of the balloon man.25

VAMPYR

A young man visits a village under the curse of a vampire, an old lady who controls the
village doctor.
Vampyr, partly inspired by Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla, from In a Glass Darkly, is
full of contradictions.26 For example, its second title, The Strange Adventures of David

Figure 9.2  Simple objects speak eloquently (Vampyr, Carl Dreyer, 1932).
 WHY MOVIES MAKE US AFRAID   169

Gray suggests the most mundane and grey, colourless story.27 The protagonist in
Dreyer’s world, a young man in a well cut suit, wanders from scene to scene in a
vague, dreamlike manner and everything glides along in a fog of uncertainty.28 As
Gray explores the inn where he stays Dreyer’s camera moves left to right showing
the lace curtain blowing in the breeze of an open window, a skull, then the candle,
another skull. The camera pans from left to right as if it is the eye of the man who
looked in through the door. We think we follow his gaze, but then he walks in from
the right of the frame. So who is doing the looking?
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The film was not made to frighten, but to make the viewer ‘aware’ as when the
camera takes the coffin’s eye view to create a first person ride to the grave as the
protagonist has a long fantasy of being buried alive. It is as if we stare blankly at
the sky.29 When the character splits, he doesn’t just show that he is both alive and
dead, but envelops us in the double that steps out of David Gray into our imagina-
tion. We take his place and see what he sees. Or rather he sees what we see, we are
him, he is us. Vampyr is full of shadow play and reflections in water, where characters
meet their shadows, then go off together. A dance hall is empty except for the shad-
ows of couples dancing to the shadow band.

Film techniques

Dreyer presents a world greyed and blurred, often without focus, where there is no
absolute black, but ‘photo-smoke, mists, blacks-of-dress, shadows, underexposures’
and every subjective detail as if about to be encroached by dark.30 To get this effect,
the director of photography filmed through a fine black gauze that lent greyness to
all the filming and excluded sharp black shadows. Expressing Heidegger’s sugges-
tion that evil lurks not in the shadows but in the light, at the conclusion, the evil doc-
tor dies in a choking, blizzard-like flurry of white, crushed by flour in the steel cage of
a flour mill.31 The inspiration for this came about when Dreyer chanced upon a plas-
ter factory after a day of searching for the right bog or mud bath that would give the
effect of killing the character without actually drowning the actor. He drove past a
building that had windows and doors covered with white, as if burnt by a white fire.
Inside were men covered with white dust grinding chunks of plaster to powder. This
white eeriness set the tone for the whole film which became a white ghostly night.
Art director Hermann Warm, who had also worked on Caligari, created the sets.
All those acting, the rooms, the objects are as close to everyday reality as possible
within a film. For example, the opening scenes at the inn are shot in the little rooms
of a real inn and the scenes with the gliding, dancing shadows in the great white
hall were taken in a deserted and derelict ice factory. Although the film has a home
movie quality, the cameraman Dreyer chose was Rudolf Maté, cinematographer par
excellence who was able to film in the fog, and make every well directed shot look
crude while each prop was somehow filmed so that it looked like a flat. Evening
shots, to add to the confusion, were filmed at dawn.
In addition to filming on location, Dreyer used nonactors for many of the roles
in the film in order to lend authenticity to his supernatural story. The evil doctor
 170  WHY MOVIES MAKE US AFRAID

was played by a Polish journalist living in Paris, the pure, innocent, weak Gisèle, was
played by a Parisian nude photographic model, and the protagonist, David Gray,
through whose eyes the viewer experiences these strange happenings, is played by
the film’s financial backer, Baron de Gunzburg, under the pseudonym Julian West, a
suggestion of the setting sun from which the vampire arises.32 De Gunzburg wan-
ders through the scenes somewhat stiffly. Undeterred by his lack of acting ability,
Dreyer determined that he was meant to be the impersonal dreamer, the audience’s
silent representative in the film.
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DEAD OF NIGHT

An architect arrives at a small country house. He disturbs the people he finds there by
suggesting they are characters of his recurring nightmare and that dark events will
befall when one of them drops his glasses. Thereupon each person tells an uncanny story
of their own.
In Dead of Night a group of people are brought together by a sequence of seem-
ingly random events.33 The architect explains that none of them is real; they are all
characters in his dream. Inspired by his imaginative story, each of the guests tells
their own supernatural story about ghosts who occupy rooms in stairways hidden
in closets, alternate rooms that appear in mirrors. Spatial incongruities in the film
correspond to temporal incongruities and the film itself ends where it began, with
the architect arriving at the house.
The scripting of the main character who sets off the sequence of events as an
architect points us to the spatial importance of the house and the different places in
the narrative. He arrives, purportedly to design two new rooms to the old farmhouse
in Kent, new rooms that come into existence in the storytellers’ stories, such as the
room behind the mirror, or a secret room in a stair hidden in a cupboard. Like the
undead, the architect also exists in a world between worlds. Dead of Night presents
a means of mixing past, present, memory, invention, mise en abyme, within a single
narrative. By situating a narrative as part of a tale within a tale, as a mise en abyme,
director Alberto Cavalcanti draws on a time that seems to be inbetween past and
present, part myth, part bedtime story.

Mirror

In one tale, a man stands in front of a mirror in the cool interior of a modernist flat and
sees himself reflected in a timber panelled room complete with roaring fire in the fire-
place, but when he turns from the mirror he stands amidst simple contemporary décor.
The mirror, a gift from his wife, had previously hung in a room where a woman was
murdered. It ‘recorded’ the violent act and compels anyone reflected in it to commit
the same murder (until the mirror is broken). These effects, the mirror image, where a
murder ‘witnessed’ by the mirror becomes re-enacted whenever anyone looks in it, or
where the vampire’s reflection does not appear, are created by constructing a mirror
image room on the other side of a frame holding a single sheet of glass.
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Figure 9.3  The mirror reflects the scene of the murder (Dead of Night,
Alberto Cavalcanti, 1945).

Figure 9.4  The man stands in his own 1940s flat, looks into the mirror and
sees another room (Dead of Night, Alberto Cavalcanti, 1945).
 172  WHY MOVIES MAKE US AFRAID

Hidden staircase

In another story a young girl playing hide and seek in a country house finds a
hidden stair behind a door. Following it up to the top of the house she finds an
attic room where a small boy asks her to put him to bed. After singing him a
lullaby she returns to the main floor of the house only to find that there were
no overnight guests and the boy was an invalid who had died there centuries
ago. It is as if these extra ‘rooms’ are designed by the architect’s fantastic imag-
inings that create more imaginary tales within tales so that reality becomes
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questioned.

The dummy

By far the most frightening of the stories is that told by the psychiatrist who
expresses the most scepticism and scientific disbelief of the architect’s dream. It
is his glasses, symbol of double vision or second sight, that bring on the cataclys-
mic events. In his story a ventriloquist loses his identity to his dummy, Hugo. The
dummy, an uncanny inanimate object that is imbued with a spirit, acts on its own
volition, bites him during a performance, and sneaks into a competitor’s room.
The episode ends with the ventriloquist in a straightjacket in an insane asylum, his
identity utterly lost to the dummy.34

PSYCHO

A woman checks into a room at a motel but is violently stabbed in the shower. First a
detective and then her boyfriend and sister come to investigate her death.
Classic Hitchcock horror, Psycho begins dully, almost prosaically in Phoenix,
Arizona where administrative assistant, Marion Crane, played by Janet Leigh,
ducks out of the office for a midday assignation with her lover.35 The everyday
motif of the streets, the motel (where she meets her paramour) and the office
itself belie the nature of the gothic horror to come. She absconds with the cash
she is meant to deposit. Lost on the highway in the pouring rain at night, she
exits to find refuge in the now infamous Bates Motel. She chats with the propri-
etor (played by Anthony Perkins) as the camera moves slowly about his office.
In Psycho the camera moves about slowly so that we see first the stuffed birds
of prey, (Perkins’ character’s taxidermy hobby) and then Marion, who will soon
be his prey. When we see the silhouette of the Victorian house on the hill we
feel firmly in the icy grip of the pathological horror suggested by the film’s title.
The transparency of the shower curtain, the stabbing knife, the close up of Janet
Leigh’s wide open eyes, and the blood curling down the drain combine with
Bernard Herrmann’s score to create a scene of unparalleled creepiness. The cli-
max of the film takes place in the cellar, a dark room at the bottom of the stair
through a door, where a single electric light bulb swings over the desiccated
body of Mrs Bates.
 WHY MOVIES MAKE US AFRAID   173

Mirror

Before going down to the fruit cellar, the sister of the murdered girl goes up to the
mother’s bedroom in the Bates house to look around for clues. While bending over
to examine what appears to be a carving of two clasped hands a movement behind
her makes her jump. She looks around and is startled to catch herself reflected over
and over again in the mirrors of the mother’s dressing table.36
In Douglas Gordon’s version, 24 Hour Psycho the film is slowed down to 1/16
speed.37 We see the relations between things in a different way, bringing out their
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inherent spatiality. The area between the characters and the objects grows, changes,
moves, and becomes more threatening, along with the growing shadows and
Anthony Perkins’ nervousness.

ROSEMARY’S BABY

An actor and his young wife move into an apartment and their encounters with their
neighbours bring on sinister events.
Over the opening credits of Rosemary’s Baby, the camera floats above the distinc-
tive gothic roofline of the Dakota as the voice of Mia Farrow, who plays Rosemary,
sings an eerie lullaby on the soundtrack.38 The Dakota, a nineteenth century gothic
apartment block in upper west side Manhattan, was designed by Henry Hardenbergh,
who also designed Central Park’s Plaza hotel. As the film opens, a couple played by
Mia Farrow and John Cassavetes playing an actor, look at an apartment hoping to
move in. Behind a heavy cabinet they find a closet, inside of which is a hidden door
to the neighbours’ apartment.
They paint the apartment white and brighten and open it up, then make love on the
bare floorboards. Rosemary’s world is bright light colours, white and yellow. However,

Figure 9.5  Rosemary’s world closes in on her (Rosemary’s Baby,

Roman Polanski, 1968).
 174  WHY MOVIES MAKE US AFRAID

as the narrative develops the apartment closes in on Rosemary, framing her within
doorways, as she herself is framed. In contrast to the increasing claustrophobia of the
film, walking on the streets of Manhattan represents freedom. The plot of the film turns
on a conversation we neither see nor hear. A view through the doorway shows only
lazily drifting smoke from cigars as a conversation we can only imagine progresses.

THE EXORCIST
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An exorcist is called in when a young girl exhibits signs of demonic possession.

The Exorcist takes place in specific locations, predominantly the unornamented,
stolid mass of an utterly bourgeois house in Georgetown, Washington, DC.39 In the
film, Ellen Burstyn (playing an actor) rents a house for the duration of filmmaking
while her own home is being ‘done up’.40 The vacant house invites possession.41 The
iconic shot is not of the demonic possession but of the arrival of the exorcist played
by Max von Sydow as, in silhouette lit by a streetlight, he steps out of a taxi carrying a
prosaic but suggestive black bag. Like a painting by Magritte the street lamp creates
an illuminated pool of light surreally suggesting an outer world of darkness. Several
days, a combination of lights, and a complex assembly of fog machines, and other
props, such as the large black hat worn by von Sydow, were required to give this
scene its evocative and powerful effect.
Prior to making The Exorcist, director William Friedkin was known for his documen-
taries and as someone who could give a film a sense of reality.42 Inset shots, such as
when a gust of air inflates the habits of two nuns walking along the street, introduce
wind as godhood but also prepare us for the view into the courtyard of a Catholic
cloister (where we will meet the priest). A visual rhyme with children in Halloween
masks that precedes the shot of the nuns augments the sinister atmosphere.

Figure 9.6  The low level camera approaches the room occupied by
demonic possession (The Exorcist, William Friedkin, 1973).
 WHY MOVIES MAKE US AFRAID   175

Some images acquire a metamorphosing or manipulating power from extreme

or unusual camera angles. For example, the low angle of the camera when viewing
the closed door of the room, the scene of the ‘possession’, suggests the child’s view
but is also at the level of our viscera, and we begin to feel unsteady, uprooted, off
balance. The Exorcist is an extremely visceral film.
In order to get the effect Friedkin desired, of the demon sapping all life and
warmth from the environment, the set of the bedroom where the exorcism takes
place was actually refrigerated. He wished to have condensation emerging from the
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actors’ mouths to show how cold it was.43 Large industrial air conditioning units were
attached to the room, and left on all night so that, during the filming, the tempera-
ture of the room was below freezing. Actually lowering the temperature in the room,
(rather than digitally adding the steam as would be done today) not only gave the
right effect, but meant the actors were benumbed, their faces were cold and less
mobile, and their limbs clung to their sides in a manner that would have been diffi-
cult, or at least less natural looking, to act.

TWIN PEAKS

A seventeen year old schoolgirl, Laura Palmer is found murdered by the riverbank of a
small community. Dale Cooper, an FBI Special Agent, links the girl’s death to previous
killings elsewhere. A series of bizarre revelations and visions reveals Laura Palmer’s mur-
derer to be ‘Bob’, an evil spirit who has consumed Laura Palmer’s father. He later murders
Laura’s lookalike cousin, Madeleine, in the Palmers’ living room.
The everyday is the basis for fear in Lynch’s films. Eraserhead sets mundane hap-
penings in a surreal black and white world of light and sound. In Blue Velvet Lynch
exposes a host of macabre events in a midwestern US setting.44 In the television
series Twin Peaks, Lynch presents the viewer with a paragon of a stereotypical sub-
urban house.45 Mulholland Drive evokes the surreal atmosphere of the twilight filmic
world of Los Angeles.46 The very title of Lost Highway denotes both direction and lack
of direction.47 On a lost highway, we don’t know where we are, or even where we are
going, but we are moving there quickly on a direct trajectory.
Simple things speak eloquently and the confrontation with objects familiar to us
from having been an intimate part of our childhood or adolescence is particularly
stirring.48 A camera angle and controlled lighting can depict an unusual picture of
a familiar object, such as Laura Palmer’s school portrait on the mantelpiece in Twin
Peaks, or the ordinary made extraordinary.
In television and film, contemporary settings, dramatic action and social realism
create a convincing sense of the real. Filmmakers manipulate viewer expectation of
the mythic, placid suburb meant to be the most peaceful manifestation of domestic
bliss and security. Suburbia, the spatial boundary between city and country where
faceless society and conformity are paramount, becomes a locus of evil. In Twin
Peaks, locations remain anonymous and unspecified, like the Roadhouse − neither
road nor house, but venue for meetings of those who may not, for whatever rea-
sons, meet in their own homes. Another significant nonlocation is the intersection
 176  WHY MOVIES MAKE US AFRAID

frequently used to begin or end a scene. In film, the road represents virility as self-
discovery as well as anonymity.49
Showpiece of the suburban house, the contemporary living room developed from
the place of the family to the space of the representation of family values. Viewers tend
to live in a mirror image home of those they watch. Devoid of individuality and per-
sonality, the living room is like a decorator’s showroom, more House and Garden than
homely. Furniture is arranged to create a theatrical backdrop against which the murder
takes place. Large and rectilinear, the living room is entered on its transverse axis. Long
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windows in several sections dominate the walls at the ends. As in most conventional
television living rooms, where the room has only three real walls, most of the filming
in each scene is from one direction only. There is no television in this living room, only
the camera that occupies the remaining wall. The camera gives the viewer a complete
understanding of the room, as it pans slowly over the objects on the mantelpiece, and
the furniture layout. The layering of objects in the foreground that include a screen
builds up the suggestion of concealedness. Each object in the room is imbued with
meanings and references whose whole purpose is not to give meaning but to be rec-
ognized by the viewer who then feels included in the intentional irony. Lynch conveys
intense discomfort through the camera remaining at a low level, when characters are sit-
ting or standing. It is intimate yet nonintrusive and brings the viewer in as a participant.
During the attack of Bob on Madeleine, the extreme close-up conveys a sense of
calamity that breaches the safe complacency of the living room. The transparency of
the window glass is denied by the chiffon curtains that block any view in or out and
frame the action. The mirror reflects the window, focusing attention on the interior
rather than external elements. When Madeleine walks into the living room the lighting
changes to signify the presence of evil. She attempts to run away but is caught in the
hall. This hallway is a closed space, and a door at the end signifies that there is no escape
for Maddy. The door itself was designed in forced perspective in unusual proportion so
that the entire door appears through the door of the living room. The hall, a small ante-
rior space of closed door and a staircase, offers no escape. The camera remains in the
living room and the characters return, locked in a struggle, while the camera roams the
room freely now, circling the room with the characters. The arrangement of the furni-
ture affords space for this chase scene. The extreme close-up brings the viewer into the
scene itself. The intimacy of the camera and manipulation of light and sound disrupt
the barrier of viewer objectivity to push this scene into a realm of increased reality,
intensifying both emotional discomfort and emotional levels in general.
The production designer created interior spaces where perceptions of inside
and outside are conflated.50 Attempts to draw the Palmer house in plan and sec-
tion demonstrate those areas that don’t work in plan (in that the house is not large
enough to house the elongated living room) or in section (with the upstairs and
downstairs layout not corresponding one to the other). In the grey areas where the
logic of the house does not work, are the mirror from which Bob\Leland appears, the
hall in which she cannot escape and other places of obfuscation.
The pictures that appear on the walls and above the mantel (in earlier scenes)
are landscapes and seascapes. One depicts pleasant rolling hills with a stag staring
proudly at the viewer in the foreground. Along the top are printed the word ‘Missoula
 WHY MOVIES MAKE US AFRAID   177

Montana’, Lynch’s home town. This deceptively innocent image becomes a dark and
menacing weapon as Bob smashes Madeleine’s head into both the picture and the
camera/television screen. When queried as to Madeleine’s abrupt disappearance,
Leland replies that she has gone to Missoula. These are the clichés sown by Lynch
through the scenes, which invite the viewer into the game of detection. By framing
itself entirely within the insulation of the television soap opera, Lynch’s work proffers
a view into the horror behind the curtained alienation of the North American suburb.
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RINGU

The combination of watching a mysterious videotape and answering a ringing tele-

phone causes sudden death.
The teenage mantra for dissembling fear in a scary or horror film is to repeat over
and over again: it’s only a movie, it’s only a movie, or else to carefully look at how the
effects are done, dissembling the shot, and acquiring a scientific, objective stance.
Scary movies and film itself work because they transfer information not as facts or
reality, but through their expression of being and our own very personal ways of
being-in-the-world.
Nikata Hideo’s Ringu couples Virilio’s vision machine, with the suggestion that we
can’t protect ourselves from the horror film with the mantra: ‘it’s just a movie’.51 As
Virilio suggests, what we see and have seen can never become unseen.52 At the time
in which it was made, films like Ringu were watched more at home on video than in
the cinema. So the viewer looks around their own home for comfort, but what they
see in reality mimics what they see on the screen, making it less reassuring.
The opening scene is filmed in a simple suburban house, with deep shadows,
claustrophobic shots down hallways, or else with some object in the foreground
interrupting the view. While doing homework in one of their bedrooms, two teen-
age girls discuss a video, the watching of which causes the death of the viewer in
one week. A telephone rings (part of the lore of the videotape) and as one school
girl leaves the room to answer it, the camera follows. It is dark, and takes away from
the substantiality of the place; the shadows allow things to enter. We notice simple
things: the wall mounted phone, the staircase, the contemporary house. We look
around the frame and the very blandness of what we see is more chilling by its lack
of character, of individuality, of substance. We start to project spirit into the shad-
ows, for after all, if a videotape, the cheapest, most empty of media, can house a
spirit, why not the refrigerator door, the wall behind the stair, or the narrow hallway.
Like the spectres that go away when we turn on the light and return as soon as the
light is off or the door closed, this is technology coupled with vision.

THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT

Three student filmmakers disappear in the woods while making a documentary about a
local legend known as the Blair Witch.
 178  WHY MOVIES MAKE US AFRAID

Some films are frightening when made, but become only interesting artefacts
over time. Others can scare us only once and lose their power on subsequent view-
ing. However, even films from the silent era can still make us afraid, since they draw
deeply on the black water of myth and situate us in the domain of architecture. They
continue to inspire filmmakers. For example, many of the most frightening effects
of The Blair Witch Project stem from much older ideas that include the engagement
of the viewer with the eye of the camera, the haunted, abandoned house complete
with darkened mysterious staircase, and the mystery that exists in the imagination
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and is never seen.53 Blair Witch was one of the first films to use hand-held camera.
The film ends within an empty house that resonates with shadows of previous ten-
ants, lives lived within it, or activities that have taken place there. Shadows suggest
presence; that something is, or has been there. The emptier the house is (of furniture
or pictures on the wall) the more frightening it is. The stark camera work and black
and white photography emphasize the texture of the wood, the peeling, faded wall
paper (as if covering up other lives), the bare floorboards, the empty stair with bro-
ken treads inviting us to fall through, the stonewalls of the cellar, dark and damp.

CONCLUSION

In conclusion, for an audience to experience terror it must be able to identify with

characters of its own world and time. Films from other cultures may have different
associations, such as Noh theatre or indigenous folklore. Different cultures have
different forms of fear: the vampire film carries power and takes place in Europe;
while the fear in North American films tends to be of a more home grown, suburban
variety. 1970s US zombie and other horror movies refer to the war in Vietnam and
Japanese frightening films, while they draw on the North American version, have a
different relation with technology and the power of the atomic bomb that haunts
many generations. Film provides a ‘safe’ way to assimilate terrifying world events
into our cultures. The situated spatiality of the films looked at here expresses a deep
embeddedness of culture, myth, and narrative, in architectural details and form.
We bring to the viewing of the film the accumulation of culture, knowledge and
artefacts we carry within ourselves. Spatial perception combines with emplotment
to help us connect the visuals into a narrative combining the haptic with the optic
through mimesis. Scary movies are not a substitute for really frightening things but
provide a safe escape from that which genuinely scares us.
If film is itself the shadows on the wall of the cave, then the shadows that this cre-
ates are at a deeper level, below Plato’s divided line, an expression of the inner angst
of the viewer. The sun that enters through the window, destroying the vampire, is
also the lights of the cinema turned on, bring Plato’s cave into the brightness of day.

NOTES

  1 Søren Kirkegaard, Fear and Trembling and The Sickness Unto Death (New York: Doubleday
Anchor Books, 1954).
 WHY MOVIES MAKE US AFRAID   179

  2 Miriam Hansen, Preface, in Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film, Redemption of Physical

Reality (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997).
  3 Miriam Hansen, Cinema and Experience, Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and
Theodor W. Adorno (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 254.
  4 Kracauer, Theory of Film, 277.
  5 Kracauer, Theory of Film, 59.
  6 Kracauer, “Hollywood’s Terror Films,” 132−136.
  7 The Exorcist, dir. William Friedkin, USA, 1973; The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, dir. Tobe
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Hooper, USA: Vortex, 1974.

  8 Cavell, The World Viewed.
  9 Kracauer, Theory of Film, 306.
10 Heidegger, Being and Time.
11 David Rudkin, Vampyr (London: British Film Institute, 2005).
12 Kracauer, Theory of Film, 53.
13 Joel Siegel, Val Lewton: Reality of Terror (London: BFI, 1972), 30.
14 Paul Wells, The Horror Genre: From Beelzebub to Blair Witch (London, Wallflower Press,
2000), 75.
15 Eraserhead, dir. David Lynch, USA: American Film Institute, 1977; North by Northwest dir.
Alfred Hitchcock, USA: MGM, 1959.
16 Wait Until Dark dir. Terence Young, USA: Warner Seven Arts, 1967.
17 Stoichita, A Short History of the Shadow, 152.
18 Nosferatu, dir. F. W. Murnau, Germany: UFA, 1921; Dracula, dir. Tod Browning, USA, 1931;
Vampyr, dir. Charles Theodor Dreyer, Germany/France: Carl Theodor Dreyer Filmproduktion/
Tobis Filmkuns, 1932; Dracula, dir. Terence Fisher, UK: Hammer Film Productions, 1958; The
Hunger, dir. Tony Scott, UK: 1983; Near Dark, dir. Katheryn Bigelow, USA, 1984; Bram Stoker’s
Dracula, dir. Francis Ford Coppola, USA: American Zoetrope, 1992; Nosferatu, Werner Herzog,
Germany: Werner Herzog Produktion/Gaumont/20th Century Fox, 1979.
19 Rudkin, Vampyr.
20 Shadow of the Vampire, dir. E. Elias Merhige, Luxembourg/UK/USA: BBC Films/Madman
Films/Saturn Films, 2000.
21 Nadja, dir. Michael Almereyda, USA, 1994; Interview with the Vampire, dir. Neil Jordan,
USA, 1994; Underworld, dir. Len Wiseman, USA, 2003; and Night Watch, dir. Timur
Bekmanbetov, Russia: Channel 1 Russia/Bazalevs Company, 2004.
22 The Hands of Orlac, dir. Robert Weine, Austria, 1924; The Hands of Orlac, dir. Karl Freund,
USA, 1935.
23 Dr Strangelove; or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, dir. Stanley Kubrick,
USA: Hawk Films, 1963.
24 Ghost Story, dir. John Irwin, USA, 1981.
25 The Third Man, dir. Carol Reed, UK/US: London Films, 1949.
26 Sheridan Le Fanu, “Carmilla” in In a Glass Darkly (first published 1872) (London: R. Bentley
and Son, 1872).
27 Vampyr, dir. Carl Dreyer, Germany/France: Tobias/Klingfilm, 1932.
 180  WHY MOVIES MAKE US AFRAID

28 Rudkin, Vampyr.
29 Stan Brakhage, The Brakhage Lectures; Georges Méliès, David Wark Griffith, Carl Theodore
Dreyer, Sergei Eisenstein (Chicago: The Goodlion, 1972), 72.
30 Brakhage, The Brakhage Lectures, 71.
31 Dreyer took the death of the doctor, suffocated in white, from D. W. Griffith’s A Corner in
Wheat.
32 Although meant to represent everyman, David Gray is played by the financer of the film,
Baron Nicolas de Gunzburg, who was an exiled Russian aristocrat whom Dreyer met at a
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masquerade ball in Paris in 1929 and who later became a senior editor of Vogue.
33 Dead of Night, dir. Alberto Cavalcanti, UK: Ealing, 1945.
34 Richard Attenborough remade the episode as a feature film, Magic (1978) starring
Anthony Hopkins as the ventriloquist.
35 Psycho, dir. Alfred Hitchcock, USA: Shamley/Alfred Hitchcock, 1960.
36 Tom Cohen, Hitchcock’s Cryptonymies; Vol. 1. Secret Agents (London: University of
Minnesota Press, 2005), 70–71.
37 24 Hour Psycho, dir. Douglas Gordon, UK, 1993.
38 Rosemary’s Baby, dir. Roman Polanski, USA, 1968.
39 The Exorcist, dir. William Friedkin, USA: Warner/Hoya, 1973.
40 Actors in film are like mediated spaces; questioning what is real and helping to create
the uncanny.
41 Tracey Eve Winton, “Locus Suspectus: Haunted Buildings” in Projects Review Exhibition
Catalogue, (Waterloo: Riverside Architectural Press, 2011).
42 Peter Biskind, Easy Riders Raging Bulls (London: Bloomsbury Paperbacks, 1998), 198.
43 Conversely, when filming outdoor scenes where it actually is so cold that steam comes
from the actors’ mouths but it is not meant to, actors hold ice cubes in their mouths while
they speak so that their breath is already cold and does not condense in the cold air.
44 Blue Velvet, dir. David Lynch, USA, 1986.
45 Twin Peaks, dir. David Lynch, USA: Panavision Lynch-Frost Productions/Propaganda
Films, 1989.
46 Mulholland Drive, dir. David Lynch, USA: Les Films Alain Sarde/Asymmetrical
Productions/Babbo Incorporated/ Canal+/The Picture Factory, 2001.
47 Lost Highway, dir. David Lynch, France/USA: Ciby 2000/Asymmetrical Productions, 1997.
48 Kracauer, Theory of Film, 56.
49 Renée Tobe, ‘Frightening and Familiar: David Lynch’s Twin Peaks and the North American
Suburb’ in Visual Culture and Tourism, ed. David Crouch and Nina Lubbren (Oxford: Berg,
2003), 245.
50 Martha Nochimson, ‘Twin Peaks: Desire Under the Douglas Firs,’ Film Quarterly 46 2 (1992), 26.
51 Ringu, Nakata Hideo, Japan: Omega/Ace, 1998.
52 Paul Virilio, The Vision Machine (British Film Institute: Indiana University Press, 1994).
53 The Blair Witch Project, dir. Daniel Meyrick, Eduardo Sanchez, USA: Haxan Films, 1999. For
those who saw Blair Witch in the cinema, the hand-held camera added to the feeling of
fear, anticipation and nausea.
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 S OURCES AND FURTHER READING   185

Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Truth and Method. London: Sheed and Ward, 1989.

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FILMOGRAPHY

The 10th Victim (Elio Petri, 1965)

24 Hour Psycho (Douglas Gordon, 1993)

2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968)

Akira (Katsuhiro Otomo, 1987)

Alfie (Lewis Gilbert, 1966)

Alphaville (Jean-Luc Godard, 1964)

American Beauty (Sam Mendes, 1999)

Anémic Cinéma (Marcel Duchamp, 1926)

Badlands (Terrence Malick, 1973)

Ballet mécanique (Fernand Léger and Dudley Murphy, 1924)

Barbarella (Roger Vadim, 1968)

Beat Girl (Edmond Gréville, 1960)

Belly of an Architect (Peter Greenaway, 1990)

 192  S OURCES AND FURTHER READING

Beneath the Planet of the Apes (Ted Post, 1970)

The Best Years of Our Lives (William Wyler, 1946)

Bicycle Thieves (Vittorio De Sica, 1948)
The Big Heat (Fritz Lang, 1953)
The Black Cat (Edgar Ulmer, 1934)
Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982)
The Blair Witch Project (Eduardo Sanchez, Daniel Myrick, 1999)
Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 08:49 25 April 2017

Blood of a Poet (Jean Cocteau, 1930)

Blow-up (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1967)
Blue Velvet (David Lynch, 1986)
Bram Stoker’s Dracula (Frances Ford Coppola, 1992)
The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (Robert Weine, 1919)
Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1942)
Cléo de 5 à 7 (Agnes Varda, 1962)
A Clockwork Orange, (Stanley Kubrick, 1971)
The Conformist (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1969)
A Corner in Wheat (D. W. Griffith, 1909)
Darling (John Schlesinger, 1965)
Days of Heaven (Terrence Malick, 1979)
Dead End (William Wyler, 1937)
Dead of Night (Alberto Cavalcanti, 1945)
Dr Mabuse the Gambler (Fritz Lang)
Dr Strangelove; or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (Stanley Kubrick, 1963)
Dracula (Tod Browning, 1931)
Dracula (Terence Fisher, 1958)
L’eclisse (Michelangelo, Antonioni, 1963)
Emak Bakia (Man Ray, 1926),
Entr’acte (René Clair, 1924)
Eraserhead (David Lynch, 1977)
The Exorcist (William Friedkin, 1973)
Fahrenheit 451 (François Truffaut, 1966)
Faust (F. W. Murnau, 1926)
The Fifth Element (Luc Besson, 1997)
A Fool There Was (Frank Powell, 1915)
Frankenstein (James Whale, 1931)
Gattaca (Andrew Niccol, 1997)
 S OURCES AND FURTHER READING   193

Ghost Story (John Irwin, 1981)

The Golem (Paul Wegener, 1920)
Grand Hotel (Edmund Goulding, 1932)
The Hands of Orlac (Robert Weine, 1924)
The Hands of Orlac (Karl Freund, 1935)
High Treason (Maurice Elvey, 1929)
Hiroshima, Mon Amour (Alain Resnais, 1959)
Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 08:49 25 April 2017

Holy Motors (Leos Carax, 2012)

The Hunger (Tony Scott, 1983)
Ikiru (Akira Kurosawa, 1952)
L’inhumaine (Marcel L’Herbier, 1924)
Interview with the Vampire (Neil Jordan, 1994)
The Ister (David Barison and Daniel Ross, 2004)
Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080, Bruxelles (Chantal Ackerman, 1975).
Jud Süss (Veit Harlan, 1940)
Just Imagine (David Butler, 1930)
The L-Shaped Room (Bryan Forbes, 1962)
LA Confidential (Curtis Hanson, 1997)
Last Year in Marienbad (Alain Resnais, 1961)
Laura (Otto Preminger, 1944)
Look Back in Anger (Tony Richardson, 1959)
Lost Highway (David Lynch, 1997)
M (Fritz Lang, 1931)
Magic (Richard Attenborough, 1978)
The Man with the Golden Arm (Otto Preminger, 1956)
Manhatta (Charles Sheeler, Paul Strand, 1921)
Meshes of the Afternoon (Maya Deren, 1943)
Metropolis (Fritz Lang, Germany, 1927)
Modesty Blaise (Joseph Losey, 1966)
Mulholland Drive (David Lynch, 2001)
Les Mystères du Château de Dé (Man Ray, 1929)
Nadja (Michael Almereyda, 1994)

Near Dark (Katheryn Bigelow, 1984)

Die Nibelungen: Part 1, The Death of Siegfried (Fritz Lang, 1924)

Nice Time (Claude Goretta, Alain Tanner, 1957)

Night Watch (Timur Bekmanbetov, 2004)

 194  S OURCES AND FURTHER READING

North by Northwest (Alfred Hitchcock, 1959)

Nosferatu (F. W. Murnau, 1921)

Nosferatu (Werner Herzog, 1979)

A Page of Madness (Teinosuke Kinugasa, 1926)

The Passenger (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1975)

Patlabor 1: Mobile Police (Mamoru Oshii, 1988)

Patlabor 2: The Movie (Mamoru Oshii, 1993)

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Performance (Donald Cammel and Nic Roeg, 1970)

Phantom Carriage (Victor Sjöström, 1921)

Pierrot Le Fou (Jean-Luc Godard, 1965)

Planet of the Apes (Franklin J. Schaffler, 1968)

Playtime (Jacques Tati, 1967)

Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960)

Rashomon (Akira Kurosawa, 1951)

Le Retour à la Raison (Man Ray, 1923)

Ringu (Nikata Hideo, 1998),

Rome, Open City (Roberto Rossellini, 1945)

Room at the Top (Jack Clayton, 1959)

Rosemary’s Baby (Roman Polanski, 1968)

The Servant (Joseph Losey, 1963)

Shadow of the Vampire (E. Elias Merhige, 2000)

The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980)

Smashing Time (Desmond Davis, 1967)

Spellbound (Alfred Hitchcock, 1945)

The Spider’s Stratagem (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1970)

Spies (Fritz Lang, Germany, 1927)

Star Wars (George Lucas, 1977)

Street of Shame (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1956)

Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (F. W. Murnau, 1927)

The Testament of Dr Mabuse (Fritz Lang, 1932)

Tetsuo: The Iron Man (Shinya Tsukamoto, 1989)

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (Tobe Hooper, 1974)

Things to Come (William Cameron Menzies, 1936)

The Third Man (Carol Reed, 1949)

 S OURCES AND FURTHER READING   195

Together (Lorenza Mazzetti, 1955)

Tokyo Story (Yasujiro Ozu, 1953)

The Tree of Life (Terrence Malick, 2011)

Triumph of the Will (Leni Riefenstahl, 1935)

Twilight (Robert Benton, 1998)

Twin Peaks (David Lynch, 1989)

Underworld (Len Wiseman, 2003)

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Vampyr (Charles Theodor Dreyer, 1932)

Wait until Dark (Terence Young, 1967)

Weekend (Jean-Luc Godard, 1967)

What a Widow (Alan Dwan, 1930)

Where the Sidewalk Ends (Otto Preminger, 1950)

The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming, 1939)

The Wind (Victor Sjöström, 1928)

Woman in the Moon (Fritz Lang, 1929)

OTHER

Sound Recordings and Interviews

Antheil, George, Transatlantic. [Opera in 3 Acts] Frankfurt. 1927.

Glenway Westcott ‘Americans in Paris in the 1920s’ BBC recording, (1959).

Gorton, Assheton. Interview 16 April 1999.

Sheen, Martin, “Interviews with the Cast and Crew” in Badlands, dir. Terrence Malick. USA:
Warner Home Video, 2003.

Websites

http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/t/Tree_Of_Life.html#.VXbXdqa262w accessed 14
May 2016.
 Index
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10th Victim, The (1965) 118, 127n32 Arizona, Phoenix 172

24 Hour Psycho (1993) 173, 180n37 Arkin, Alan 165
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) vii, 107, 108, Armstrong, Neil 120
113, 119–22, 126n1, 144n42 Arnheim, Rudolph 3, 60, 163
Art Deco 40, 41, 50–1
Adams, Brooke 136 art director 21, 51, 52, 64, 87, 137, 169
Adorno, Theodor 58, 59, 63 Ashtaroth 29, 30
advertisements 63, 70, 74, 82, 86; advertising Astro Boy (anime and manga) 148
28, 53, 64, 81, 82, 110 atomic bomb 109, 146, 147, 149, 150, 178
Akerman, Chantal 97, 98, 101–2, 104–5; see Attenborough, Richard 180n34; see also Magic
also Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai de Commerce, attic 141, 165, 172
1080, Bruxelles Augé, Marc 4
Akira (1987) 145, 146, 147, 148, 149–53, 155, avant-garde 1, 23, 37, 41, 52, 53, 58–9, 64, 164
160n1, 162n32, 162n34
Alfie (1966) 2, 17n8 Bachelard, Gaston 141; Poetics of Space 141
Alloway, Laurence 81, 82 background 1, 2, 21, 28, 33, 38, 42, 49, 58,
Almendros, Nestor 137, 138 61, 68, 69, 70, 81, 85, 93, 99–100, 110, 112,
Alphaville (1964) 16 116, 120, 143n17, 147–50, 156, 157, 164
American Beauty (1999) 7 Badiou, Alain 4
Amies, Hardy 122 Badlands (1973) 128, 130, 132–35, 136, 138,
Anderson, Margaret 39, 40 144n32
Andrews, Dana 64, 66–8, 70, 71, 72 Bailey, David 32
Anémic Cinéma (1926) 53, 56n65, Ballet mécanique (1924) 39–40, 48, 52, 53,
anime x, 145–57 55n39
Annas, Julia 12 Balzac, Honoré 14
Antheil, George 39–40, 48, 54n10, 55n39; bande desinée 118
‘space-time’ 39; Transatlantic 39, 54n10, Banham, Rayner 125
Airplane Sonata 40; Death of the Machines Bara, Theda 54n29
40; Mechanisms 40; see also Ballet Barbarella (1968) 107, 117–19
mécanique. Barnwell, Jane 2; Production Design:
Antonioni, Michelangelo vii, 3, 5, 13, 16, Architects of the Screen 2
35n45, 80, 88–93, 95n40, 95n41 see also Barthes, Roland 8, 82, 86
Blow-up; La Notte; L’Eclisse Baudelaire, Charles 102
anxiety 21, 164 Bazin, André 15, 58, 83
Apollo space missions 127n35 Beach, Sylvia 39; see also Shakespeare and Co.
aporia 109 Beat Girl (1960) 107, 113–14, 115
Appia, Adolph 22 Bel Geddes, Norman 40, 41, 50, 52, 54n21,
Arendt, Hannah 100, 108, 112, 120 65, 110, 113, 126n11; Futurama 110;
Aristotle 1, 3, 59 Metropolis City of 1960 110, 113
 I NDEX   197

Belly of an Architect (1990) 10 Casablanca (1942) 36n55, 63

Benjamin, Walter 4, 15, 80, 82 Cassavetes, John 173
Bergman, Ingrid 63 Cassini, Oleg 70
Bergson, Henri 3, 4, 62, 85 Cavalcanti, Alberto 170, 171; see also Dead
Berlin 22, 31, 37, 39 of Night
Berlin Grosse Schauspielhaus 22 Cavell, Stanley 4, 21, 85, 104, 128, 131
Bertolucci, Bernardo 10–13 Cendrars, Blaise 38; L’ABC du Cinema 38
Best Years of our Lives, The (1946) 57, 60, 72–5 Chabrol, Claude 83
Bicycle Thieves (1948) 59 Chastain, Jessica 139
Big Heat, The (1953) 57, 64, 71–2 Chermayeff, Serge 52
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Birkin, Jane 113 Cheung, Maggie 99

Black Cat, The (1934) 50 Chicago 76
Blade Runner (1982) 3, 108, 118, 150, 151, Chion, Michel 120
152, 155, Chirico, Giorgio di 41
Blair Witch Project, The (1999) 177–78, Christie, Julie 114
180n53 Christo 111
Blake, Peter 82 cigarette 38, 53n6, 164
Blood of a Poet (1930) 53 cities 3, 6, 52, 57, 112, 119, 125, 139, 142,
Blow-up (1967) 3, 5, 81, 85, 88–93, 96n54 145, 147, 148–49, 153, 155, 156
Blue Velvet (1986) 175 Citizen Kane (1942) 62
Böcklin, Arnold 31; The Silence of the Forest 31 city 6, 7, 8, 10, 12, 13, 26, 27, 28, 38, 41, 42,
Bogart, Humphrey 63, 64, 65, 66 51, 52, 57, 59, 64, 65, 69, 70, 71, 80, 82, 90,
Bond, James 49 100, 107, 109–10, 112–13, 114, 115, 118,
Botticelli, Sandro 118; Birth of Venus 118 125, 132, 140, 141, 145–57, 164, 166, 175;
Bottomley, Wagner and White 65 cityscape 51, 93, 141, 149, 152; city-state
Bradbury, Ray 117; The Martian Chronicles 100, 109; see also polis
117 Cixous, Hélène 99
Brakhage, Stan 98, 166 Clarke, Arthur C. 121
Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) 166 classical Hollywood cinema 58; classical
Braudy, Leo 16 Hollywood style 57, 62; classical
Bresson, Robert 83, 160 Hollywood narrative 58, 59–63, 76, 83
bridge 6, 20, 23, 24, 26–7, 29, 30, 31, 35n43, Cléo de 5 à 7 (1962) 97, 98, 99–101
110, 141, 145, 147, 148, 157, 160; Brooklyn Clockwork Orange, A (1971) 114
Bridge 70; Williamsburg Bridge 65; close-up 38, 48, 57, 61, 68, 77n16, 82, 86, 91,
Yokohama Bay Bridge 145, 154, 156 98, 121, 133, 164, 165, 176
Britain 6, 80, 81 communist 13, 15, 94n3, 98
British Film Institute 82 Conformist, The (1969) 10–13
Bruno, Giuliana 2; Atlas of Emotion: Journeys Constantine, Eddie 16
in Art, Architecture and Film 2 Corner in Wheat, A (1909) 180n31
Burch, Nöel 62 corridor 64, 73, 105, 119, 120–21, 122, 157,
Burstyn, Ellen 174 166; see also hallway
Butler, Judith 4 Cortázar, Julio 88; Las babas del diablo 88
Courbet, Gustave 14
Cabinet of Dr Caligari, The (1919) 20, 23, 25–7, Courrèges, André 90
31, 32, 169 Cowan, John 92
Cahiers du Cinéma 83, 117 Critchley, Simon 128, 129
camera angles 10, 21, 87, 165, 175 Cuff, Joy 121
camera movement 5, 78, 86 culture industry 59, 63
Canada 135; Alberta 138; Saskatchewan 135;
see also Hutterites Dagover, Lil 25
car 17, 37, 41, 51, 52, 64, 69, 70, 71, 76, Darling (1965) 81
95n41, 110, 111, 123, 125, 132, 135, 157 Day, Richard 50–1
Carmichael, Hoagy 74 Days of Heaven (1979) 128, 130, 136–39
 198  I NDEX

Dead End (1937) 57, 64–6, 73 editing 5, 12, 58, 61, 93, 99, 103, 105, 116,
Dead of Night (1945) 17–72 130
Defoe, Willem 166 Eisenstein, Sergei 15, 163
Deleuze, Gilles 3, 4, 62; any-space-whatever Eisner, Lotte 21, 23, 25
4; movement-image 3, 62; time-image 3, Elliot, T. S. 14
4, 61, 62 Elsaesser, Thomas 3
Del Rio, Dolores 51 Emak Bakia (1926) 53
Democracity 110 Entr’acte (1924) 53
Deneuve, Catherine engawa 145, 146, 149, 152
Deren, Maya 59; see also Meshes of the Eraserhead (1977) 144n32, 165, 175
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Afternoon eroticism 118, 119; see also sex

De Sica, Vittorio 15, 59; see also Bicycle everyday 2, 6, 7, 8, 10, 39, 81, 110, 113, 114,
Thieves 116, 121, 122, 157, 164, 165, 166, 172,
Deskey, Donald 41 175
destiny 25, 30, 31, 32, 129, 164; see also fate everyday life 9, 38, 58, 84, 100, 131
Diary of Anne Frank (1959) 72 everydayness 2
diegesis 4, 6, 62, 68, 99; non-diegetic 60, 130 Exaltation Machine 118
director of photography 10, 30, 73, 84, 169 Exorcist, The (1973) 164, 174–75
Dr Mabuse, The Gambler (1922) 32, 33, 49 Explorer 120
Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Exposition of British Industrial Design in the
Worrying and Love the Bomb (1963) 126n3, Home, 1933 52
167 Expressionist 20–36, 37, 49, 64
documentary 42, 59, 61, 81, 82, 89, 129, 131,
166, 173, 177 Fahrenheit 451 (1966) 107, 114–17
domesticity 41, 57, 76–7, 140, 156, 160 Farrow, Mia 173
Donovan, Terence 82 fashion 40, 70, 82, 88, 90, 92, 118–19, 122
door 3, 6, 7, 17, 24, 28, 29, 30, 44, 45, 50, 51, fate 13, 25, 31, 32, 130, 134
62, 66, 68, 71, 73, 84–5, 86–7, 92, 98, 103, Faust (1926) 23, 33
104–05, 109, 111, 112, 114, 124, 134, 157, Feininger, Lyonel 25, 35n32
165–67, 169, 172, 175; hidden door 164, Festival of Britain 81
173 Fifth Element, The (1997) 55n52
doorway 6, 20, 51, 62, 67, 70, 71, 84, 85, film noir 3, 33, 49, 59, 61, 62, 64–72, 108,
86–7, 103, 105, 141, 167, 174 164
Dracula (1931) 166 film set 1, 23, 26, 33, 42, 125, 166; film set
Dracula (1958) 166 design 23, 42, 48, 49; film set designer 50
Dreyer, Carl Theodor 33, 165, 168–70, Fisk, Jack 134, 135, 137, 138, 144n32
180n32 Fitzgerald, F. Scott 40, 43
Dreyfus, Henry 110 Fitzmaurice, Tony 3
Dreyfus, Hubert 24, 129 Flaherty, Robert 16
Duchamp, Marcel 53, 99; see also Anémic Flaubert, Gustave 14
Cinéma; Nude Descending a Staircase No. Fool There Was, A (1915) 54n29
2 99 Fonda, Jane 118
Duell, Randall 51 Ford, Glenn 64
Duffy, Brian 82 Foucault, Michel 12
durée 62, 68, 104, 163 Fox, Frederick 122
dystopia 37, 107–8, 118, 125 France 38, 42, 82, 83, 116, 129
Frankenstein (1931) 28
Earth 109, 112, 118–22, 124, 140, 141 Freund, Karl 30
earth 20, 22–5, 29, 31–3, 38, 128, 132, 137, Friedkin, William 174, 175; see also The
139, 140, 141, 142, 148, 162 Exorcist
earthquake 148, 150 Fugate, Carol Ann 132
Economist Building 81, 89; see also Alison Fuller, Buckminster 51, 119
and Peter Smithson furusato 153
 I NDEX   199

futurity 107, 122, 125 Essence of Reasons 129; fourfold 20–36,

Futuro 111, 125 141, 142; Poetry Language Thought 20;
world 3, 128, 129, 130; see also bridge
Gadamer, Hans-Georg 88 Hemingway, Ernest 39
Gagarin, Yuri 120 Hemmings, David 113
Gance, Abel 38 Hepburn, Audrey 166
Garbo, Greta 63 Heraclitus 129, 143n9
Garden of Eden 139 Herrmann, Bernard 172
gate 10, 24, 26, 30, 141 Hicks, David 82
Gattaca (1997) 107, 122–25 Hideo, Nikata 177; see also Ringu
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Georgetown, Washington, DC 174 High Treason (1929) 51

Gere, Richard 136, 137 Hill, Oliver 52
German Expressionism 3, 21, 33 Hills, Gillian 113
Germany 28, 31, 33, 35n32; Nazi Germany Hiroshima, Mon Amour (1959) 62
36n55 Hitchcock, Alfred 2, 3, 21, 33, 117, 164, 172;
Ghost Story (1981) 167 MacGuffin 90, 95n44; see also Psycho;
Gibbons, Cecil 40–1, 50–1 North by Northwest
Gilbert Scott, Sir Giles 90 Hitchcock, Henry Russell 49
Gish, Lillian 53n2 Hockney, David 82
Godard, Jean-Luc 5, 13, 16, 83, 98, 101; see Hoffman, Carl 33
also Alphaville; Pierrot le Fou; Weekend Hollywood 28, 36n55, 39, 40, 41, 45–6, 48,
Godzilla (1954) 146 50–1, 53, 57–79, 94, 137; filmmaking style
Goebbels, Joseph 36n55 49, 82, 83; musicals 23, 39, 53, 72; see also
Goetheanum 22 classical Hollywood cinema
Gogh, Vincent Van 35n43; A Pair of Shoes Holy Motors (2012) 54n28
35n43 Homer, Winslow 137; The Cotton Pickers 137
Golem, The (1920) 20, 22, 23, 27–31 Hong Kong 151
Gordon, Douglas 173 Hoover, Herbert 56
Grahame, Gloria 71–2 Hopkins, Anthony 180n34
Grand Hotel (1932) 63 Hopper, Edward 129, 138; American
Grant, Cary 165 Landscape; House by the Railroad 129
Griffith, D. W. 38; see also A Corner in Wheat horizon 113, 16, 22, 24, 29, 102, 105, 128–30,
Gronberg, Tag 41 131–2, 137, 138, 156, 157
Gunning, Tom 31 hotel 12, 48, 56n62, 63, 70, 71, 120, 121, 173;
Gunzburg, Baron Nicolas de 170, 180n32 hotel lobby 63
House Un-American Activities Committee
Hackman, Gene 51 (HUAC) 94n3
hallucination 21, 84 Hunger, The (1983) 166
hallway 73, 85, 102, 103, 105, 106, 176, 177; Hunte, Erich 33
see also corridor Husserl, Edmund 129
Hamilton, Richard 82 Hutterites 138
Hands of Orlac, The (1924) 167 Hyères 42; see also Villa Noailles
Hands of Orlac, The (1935) 167
Harbou, Thea von 32–3 Ikiru (1952) 145–47, 156, 157–60
Hardenbergh, Henry 173; Dakota 173; Plaza illusion 2, 5, 8, 9, 14, 20, 22, 30, 57, 59–62,
hotel 173 80, 82, 84–5, 92, 93, 97, 128; Bergson’s
Harrison, Wallace and Fouilhoux, F. André cinematic illusion 3
110 Imbs, Bravig 39, 40
Heap, Jane 39; The Little Review 39 Independent Group 81–2
Hegel, F. G. W. 15; master and slave dialectic Institute for Contemporary Art 81
3, 88 International Style 45, 49, 124
Heidegger, Martin 2, 3, 24, 29, 30, 98, 153, Interview with the Vampire (1994) 166
169; being-in-the-world 2, 131; The In the Mood for Love (2000) 99
 200  I NDEX

Irigaray, Luce 97–8; Speculum of the Other LA Confidential (1997) 45

Woman 97; This Sex Which is Not One 98 Lamster, Mark 2
Ise Shrine 146 landscape 1, 7, 22, 31, 32, 41, 43, 45, 46, 58,
Ishioka, Eiko 166 93, 102, 109, 118, 128, 129
Ister, The (2004) 129 Lang, Fritz 22, 23, 31, 32–34, 37, 49, 52, 71,
Italy 10, 11, 73 107, 151; see also Dr Mabuse, The Gambler;
Metropolis; Nosferatu; Testament of Dr
Jacobs, Steven 2, 105 Mabuse; Woman in the Moon
Jameson, Frederic 109 Lange, Dorothea 129
Japan 147, 150, 152, 154, 157, 161n27, Lange, Harry 121
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162n32; Hiroshima and Nagasaki 146–47, Langlois, Henri 83; Paris Cinémathèque 83
149; Nara 146; see also atomic bomb; Last Year in Marienbad (1961) 62
Metabolism; Tokyo Laura (1944) 57, 63, 64, 66–69
Jaspers, Karl 131 Lauretis, Teresa de 98
Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai de Commerce, 1080, Leblanc, Georgette 40
Bruxelles (1975) 97, 101–06 L’eclisse (1963) 13, 95n40
Job 139, 142 Le Corbusier 38, 40–42, 44, 52, 110, 113,
Johnson, Philip 142, 149 116
jouissance 99, 104 Lee, Christopher 166
Joyce, James 39 Le Fanu, Sheridan 168; Carmilla; In a Glass
Jud Süss (1940) 22, 36n55 Darkly 168
Just Imagine (1930) 56n57 Legand, Michel 101
Léger, Fernand 39, 48, 52; see also Ballet
Kabuki 161n19 mécanique
Karina, Anna 101 Leigh, Janet 172
Karloff, Boris 50 Les Mystères du Chateau de Dés (1929)
Kar-wai, Wong 99; see also In the Mood for 42, 43, 52; see also Villa Noailles;
Love Man Ray
Keeler, Christine 82 L’Esprit Nouveau 41; see also Le Corbusier
Kettelhut, Erich 33 Lewis, Wyndham 39
Kierkegaard, Soren 129, 163 Libera, Adelberto 11
Kiesler, Frederick 39–41; Endless House 39 lighting 15, 23, 33, 58, 63, 68, 75, 78n40,
Kinski, Klaus 166 88, 138, 147, 158, 175, 176; three-point
Kircher, Athanasius 14 lighting 61
kitchen 64, 68, 69, 73, 76, 92, 102, 103, 105, L’inhumaine (1924) 50, 52
110, 111 Loew ben Bezalel, Rabbi Judah 27, 29, 30
kitchen sink (film) 80, 89 Loewy, Raymond 52; Chrysler Motors
Klein-Rogge, Rudolph 32–3 Pavilion 52; Rocketport 52; Transport for
Knight, Eric Mowbray 59 Tomorrow 52
Kolker, Robert 12 London 2, 3, 6, 80–96; Alton Estate,
Korda, Victor 52 Roehampton 116, 117; Carnaby Street
Kracauer, Siegfried 3, 15, 37, 57, 58, 60, 63–4, 80, 90, 95n43; Chelsea 6, 82, 85, 92; East
85, 163–4, 165; Theory of Film 163–4; From End 82; Hyde Park 90; London County
Caligari to Hitler 31 Council 116, 117; Maryon Park 90, 91;
Krauss, Werner 25, 36n55 Paddington 93; Peckham 89; Piccadilly
Kubrick, Stanley 108, 114, 119–22, 127n35, Circus 82, 90; Pottery Lane 92; Royal
167; see also 2001: A Space Odyssey; A Avenue ix, 82, 85, 86, 87, 95n34; Savile
Clockwork Orange; Dr. Strangelove or: How Row 122; Westminster 90; Woolwich
I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Road 90; see also Economist Building;
Bomb Festival of Britain; Independent
Kurokawa, Kisho 146, 149, 152 Group; Institute for Contemporary Art,
Kurosawa, Akira, 157–60, 161n16; see also Whitechapel Gallery
Ikiru; Rashomon Look Back in Anger (1959)
 I NDEX   201

Los Angeles 39, 44, 175, 152; Department Menzies, William Cameron 52; see also Things
of Water and Power 124; Great Western to Come
Forum 125 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 2, 3, 4, 62, 84, 87,
Lorre, Peter 167 98
Losey, Joseph 6, 81, 82, 85, 87, 88, 94n3, Merrill, Gary 70
95n31, 118; see also Modesty Blaise; The Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) 59
Servant Metabolist architecture 148–49, 152
L-Shaped Room, The (1962) 80 Metropolis (1927) 3, 26, 30, 32, 33, 37, 50, 52,
Luckman, Charles 125 107–8, 150, 151,
Lugosi, Bela 166 MGM (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) 51, 53
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Lynch, David 3, 144n32, 164, 175–77; see Milan: Pirelli building 95n40
also Eraserhead; Blue Velvet; Lost Highway; mimesis 3–6, 13, 59, 60, 98, 178; mimesis of
Mulholland Drive; Twin Peaks praxis 59, 64, 77n14; mimetic circle 166
mirror 6, 62, 98, 99, 100, 164, 166, 167, 168,
M (1931) 33 170–73, 176
ma 3, 146 mise en abyme 25, 37, 101, 170
MacCabe, Colin 16 mise en scène 5, 6, 21, 66, 72, 86, 98, 130, 157
McCarthy, Helen 146 Missoula, Montana 176–77
Macdonald, Richard 87 Mizoguchi, Kenji 37, 145; see also Street of
MacDowell, Malcolm 114 Shame
McLuhan, Marshal 113 Modernism 37–56, 65, 90, 108, 110, 113, 116,
MacMillan, Harold 81 140, 142, 160; see also International Style
Magic (1978) 180n34 Modesty Blaise (1966) 118
Magritte, René 42, 174 montage 41, 62, 63, 91–2, 138, 158
Maholy-Nagy, Laszlo 52 Montparnasse, Kiki de 39, 48
Malick, Terrence 128–44; see also Badlands; Moon 119, 120, 122; moon 23, 130, 138, 147
Days of Heaven; The Tree of Life Moravia, Alberto 10, 12
Mallarmée, Stephane 42; Un coup de dés More, Thomas 108, 109, 111–13; Utopia 108,
jamais n’abolira le hazard 42 109
Mallet-Stevens, Robert 40–47, 50; Villa Morley, Lewis 82
Noailles 42–44, 45, 46, 47, 52; Information Mourgue, Olivier 120, 121
Tower 41; Villa Cavrois 42, 54n28; see also mukokuseki 153
L’inhumaine Mulholland Drive (2001) 175
Manet, Edouard 14 Mulvey, Laura 130
manga 150, 152, 161n19, 161n25, 161n27, Murakami, Takashi 147
161n32, 162n33, 162n34 Murnau, F. W. 23, 33, 38, 166–68; see also
Manhatta (1921) 3, 52 Faust, Nosferatu, Sunrise
Man Ray 39, 42–3, 48, 52, 55n33; see also Murphy, Dudley 39, 40, 48; see also Ballet
Emak Bakia (1926); Le Retour à la Raison mécanique
(1923); Les Mystères du Chateau de Dés Murphy, Katherine Hawley 48
(1929) music 39, 40, 48, 111, 119, 121, 136, 150, 154,
Man With the Golden Arm, The (1956) 57, 155, 160
76–7 musicals 23, 39, 53, 72
Manz, Linda 136, 139 Mussolini, Benito 10
Marchand, Corinne 99, 101 Mystères du Chateau de Dés, Les (1929) 42, 43,
Marion, Jean-Luc 3, 146, 147, 148 52; see also Villa Noailles
Marker, Chris 98 myth 13, 21, 23, 27, 31, 34, 37, 58, 82, 155,
Martin, Albert C. and Associates 124 170, 178; Greek myth 153; urban myth
Marvin, Lee 71, 72, 78n42 142; see also Plato’s cave allegory
Marxist 15
Maugham, Robin 85 Nadja (1994) 166
Mendelsohn, Erich 22; Einstein Tower 22; De Nakagawa, Miho 147
La Warr Pavilion 52 Nancy, Jean-Luc 3, 98, 129, 146
 202  I NDEX

Napier, Susan 146 Paris 10–11, 13, 37, 39, 40–1, 44, 48, 50,
NASA 121 53, 55n45, 83, 91, 97, 98, 100, 105, 108,
National Socialist 33, 35n32; see also Nazi 112, 117–18, 122, 170, 180n32; 1925
Germany Paris Exposition Internationale des Arts
Near Dark (1984) 166 Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes 40–1, 50;
neorealist film 16 May 1968 83, 98, 108, 112; Parc Montsouri
neorealist filmmakers 59 99, 101; rue de Rivoli 99
Nervi, Pier Luigi 95n40 Paris Cinémathèque 83
Neumann, Dietrich 2 Parrish, Maxfield 134, 144n31; Daybreak 134
Neutra, Richard 42–48, 49; Holiday House Passenger, The (1975) 35n45
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48; Lovell Health House 42, 44–5; Survival Patlabor 1; Mobile Police (1988) 145–47,
Through Design 44; von Sternberg House 153–57
45–7 Patlabor 2: The Movie (1993) 145–47, 153–57
New Urbanism 152 Penn, Sean 139
New York 70, 98; Manhattan 7, 48, 52, 65, Penz, François 2
70, 173, 174; East River 65, Museum Performance (1970) 80
of Modern Art 111; River House 65; Perkins, Anthony 172, 173
Rockefeller Centre 65; Sutton Place 65; Perret, Auguste 118
Washington Heights 70; see also Brooklyn Phantom Carriage (1921) 3
Bridge; Williamsburg Bridge Picabia, Francis 39
New York Worlds Fair (1939–40) 52, 110; Picasso, Pablo 39
World of Tomorrow; 110; Trylon and Pierrot le Fou (1965) 13
Perisphere 110; see also Norman Bel Pinter, Harold 85
Geddes; Wallace Harrison and F. André Pitt, Brad 139
Fouilhoux; Raymond Loewy Planet of the Apes (1968) 162n32
Nibelungen: Part 1, The Death of Siegfried, Die Plato 59, 85, 108–9, 143n9; divided line 3,
(1924) 20, 22, 25, 31–3, 34 178; cave allegory 3, 4–13, 14, 16, 97, 164,
Niccol, Andrew 122; see also Gattaca; The 178; Republic 108–9
Truman Show Playtime (1967) 49
Nice Time (1957) 82 Poelzig, Hans 22, 28, 30, 50; Berlin Grosse
Nicholson, Jack 3 Schauspielhaus 22; Marianne Moeschke 28
nightclub 37, 42, 63, 76, 77n16 Poiret, Paul 40
Night Watch (2004) 166 polis 97, 100, 108, 109
Noh 178 Pop art 82, 108, 118, 120
North by Northwest (1959) 165 Portman, John 56n62; Renaissance Centre
Nosferatu (1921) 25, 166, 168; Nosferatu 32 56n62; Los Angeles Bonaventure Hotel
Nosferatu (1979) 166 56n62
Notte, La (1961) 95n40 Potsdam 22
Nouvelle Vague 82, 83, 98 Pound, Ezra 39, 48
Novak, Kim 76 Prague 20, 27, 28, 30
production designer 2, 51, 144n32, 176
Oldman, Gary 166 praxis 1, 132; see also mimesis of praxis
Op art 82, 108, 118, 120 Preminger, Otto 66–70, 76
Oshii, Mamoru 147, 153–57, 160; see also Psycho (1960) 33, 172–73
Patlabor punctum 8, 86; see also Roland Barthes
Otomo, Katsuhiro 3, 145, 148, 151–53
Ozu, Yasujiro 145; see also Tokyo Story Quant, Mary 82, 90

Page of Madness, A (1926) 37 Rabanne, Paco 118, 119

Pallasmaa, Juhani 2 Rain, Douglas 121
Panofsky, Erwin 14, 15–16 Rancière, Jacques 4, 16
Paolozzi, Eduardo 81, 82 Rand, Ayn 47, 48; The Fountainhead 47, 48,
Parker, Eleanor 76, 77 140; Howard Roark 142
 I NDEX   203

Rashomon (1951) 161n19 Shadow of the Vampire (2000) 166

Ray, Man see Man Ray Shakespeare and Co. 39
realism 8, 14–17, 59, 80, 153, 163; social Shay, Don 3
realism 14, 75 Sheeler, Charles 3; see also Manhatta
Reinhardt, Max 22, 166 Sheen, Martin 132, 144n30
Resnais, Alain 62, 98, see also Last Year in Shepard, Sam 136
Marienbad; Hiroshima, Mon Amour Shepperton Studios 85
Retour à la Raison, Le (1923) 39, 53 Shiel, Mark 3
Rice-Davies, Mandy 82 Shining, The (1980) 3
Richter, Karl 30 Shinto 146
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Richter, Paul 33 Shonfield, Katherine 2

Ricoeur, Paul 3 Signs and Meaning in the Cinema 83
Riefenstahl, Leni 31; see also Triumph of the silent film 42, 54n29, 57, 61, 62, 101, 130
Will Sinatra, Frank 76, 77
Riley, Bridget 82 situation 5, 20, 23, 24, 33, 36n52, 58, 60, 88,
Ringu (1998) 177 91, 108, 130, 165; definition of 131
Rivette, Jacques 83 Sjöström, Victor 3, 53n2; see also Phantom
Roeg, Nic 114 Carriage and The Wind
Rohmer, Eric 83 Smashing Time (1967) 80
Romanticism 21 Smithson, Alison and Peter 81, 89
Rome 10, 11, 13; Ara Pacis 10; EUR 10, 11, Snow, Michael 98
95n40; Palace of the Congresses 11 Sobchack, Vivan 110
Rome, Open City (1945) 59 socialism 15, 57
Room at the Top (1959) 80 sound 1, 7, 8, 9, 15, 58, 60, 61, 75, 97, 111,
Rosemary’s Baby (1968) 173–74 130, 135, 136, 137, 154–5, 163, 175,
Rossellini, Roberto 15, 16, 59; see also Rome, 176
Open City sound and image 39, 83, 135, 147, 160
soundtrack 62, 69, 70, 90, 93, 140, 154, 173
Sailboat (1967) 105 South Dakota 132
Sanda, Dominique 11 Soviet era architecture 110
San Rafael 123, 124; see also Marin County Soviet Union 15; USSR 120
Civic Centre space and time 4, 62, 63, 76
Sarandon, Susan 51 space in-between 3, 145, 152; see also ma;
Satie, Eric 39 engawa
scenography 14, 42 ‘space-time’ 39
Schlesinger, John 81; see also Darling Spacek, Sissy 132, 135, 144n30
Schreck, Max 166 spatial perception 3, 4, 84, 165, 178
Schwartzer, Mitchell 3 Spellbound (1945) 21
science fiction 107, 108, 110, 113, 114, 116, Spider’s Strategem, The (1970) 13
118, 123, 131, 149 Spies (1927) 32
Scott, Barbara 113 Sputnik 112
Second World War 47, 57, 60, 79n46, 148 stability 20, 58, 61, 84, 130–32, 146
Sellers, Peter 167 Stahl-Urach, Carl 33
Sennett, Richard 108, 112 stair 6, 20, 22, 25, 49, 50, 64, 65, 76, 85–89,
Serlio, Sebastiano 14 93, 99–100, 101, 156, 164, 166, 167, 168,
Servant, The (1963) 6, 80, 85–88 172, 177; staircase 29, 50–2, 88, 98, 168,
set designer 25, 30, 33, 41, 49, 50, 57, 84, 116, 176–78; hidden stairs 164, 170, 172
121, 134–35 Stalinism 109, 110 see also Soviet era
sex 11, 45, 102, 104, 108, 118, 122, 161n27; architecture
sexual pleasure 90, 104, sexual ambiguity Starkweather, Charles 132; see also Caril Ann
12, 49, 70, 71; sexuality 109; see also Fugate
Exaltation Machine Star Wars (1977) 63
Seyrig, Delphine 101, 102, 104 Steiner, Rudolph 22; see also Goetheanum
 204  I NDEX

Stevens, George 72; see also Diary of Anne True Blood 166
Frank Trevor, Claire 65
Stiegler, Bernard 4, 8, 64, 129 Truffaut, François 83, 98, 114, 116, 117; see
Stoker, Bram 166 also Fahrenheit 451
Stoichita, Victor 27 Truman Show, The (1999) 122
Storaro, Vittorio 10 Trumbull, Douglas 144n42
Strand, Paul 3; see also Manhatta truth 8, 9, 10, 15, 22, 27, 30, 62, 85, 89, 97,
Strauss, Johann 121; The Blue Danube 121 131
Street of Shame (1956) 145 Tsukamoto, Shinya 162n35; see also Tetsuo,
suburban 7, 33, 57, 64, 71, 77, 128, 133, 134, Iron Man
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140, 164, 175–78 Twain, Mark 144n46; Adventures of

Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927) 23 Huckleberry Finn 144n46
Surrealism 41, 53; Surrealists 39, 40 Twilight (1998) 51
Suuronen, Matti 111 Twilight Saga (2008–12) 166
Swanson, Gloria 48 Twin Peaks (1990–1991)
Switzerland: Dornach 22
Sydow, Max von 174 UFA 31
Uki-e 147
Taylor, Charles 81 uncanny 14, 21, 33, 98, 141, 164, 168, 170,
Teague, Walter 41, 51, 110 172, 180n40
technē 13, 153 Underworld (2003) 166
telephone 67, 76, 90, 177 US 28, 33, 35n32, 38, 41, 48, 120, 175, 178,
television 52, 76, 114, 166, 175, 176, 177 USSR 120; see also Soviet Union
temporality 4, 9; temporal and spatial Utah 141; Goblin Valley State Park 141
congruence 59, temporal and spatial utopia 37, 52, 107–27; see also Thomas More
continuity 57; 62; temporal and spatial
discordance 80; temporal and spatial Vadim, Roger 118; see also Barbarella
imagination 9; temporal and spatial vampire 32, 36n52, 164, 166–70, 178
logic 61, 62; temporal incongruities 170; Vampire Diaries, The 166
temporal register 104; temporality of Vampyr (1932) 166
involvement 132 Varda, Agnes 97–101; see also Cléo de 5 à 7
terrain vague 156, 157 Vasarely, Victor 116
Testament of Dr Mabuse, The (1932) 33 Veidt, Conrad 25, 36n55
Tetsuo, Iron Man (1989) 162n35 Vermeer, Johannes 138
Texas 135, 136, 138, 142; Dallas 141; Vertov, Dziga 15
Houston 141, 142; Esperson Building Veruschka 90, 91
(architect John Eberson) 142; Pennzoil Vesely, Dalibor 88, 143n17
Place (architects Philip Johnson and John Vienna 31, 39
Burgee) 142; Smithville 141; Waco 139 Vietnam 108, 140, 164, 178
Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The (1974) 164 Villa Spies 111; Staffan Berglund 111
Tezuka, Osamu 148; see also Astro Boy Ville Contemporaine 42, 110, 113, 114
Things to Come (1936) 37, 51–2, 107 Virilio, Paul 13, 177
Third Man, The (1949) 168 Vogue 180n32
Thomas, Maureen 2 Vollbrecht, Karl 33
Tierney, Gene 64, 69, 70 von Sternberg, Josef 45–6, 59
time and space 22, 62, 97–106, 113, 119, 120;
see also temporality Wagner, Richard 22
Together (1955) 82 Wait Until Dark (1967) 165
Tokyo 145–162; Yoyogi Park 149 Warhol, Andy 98, 106n12, 111
Tokyo Story (1953) 150 Warm, Hermann 169
Tolland, Greg 73, 74, 75 Weekend (1967) 13
Tree of Life, The (2011) 128, 130, 138, 139–42 Wegener, Paul 23, 28–31
Triumph of the Will (1935) 31 Wells, H. G. 51, 52
 I NDEX   205

What a Widow (1930) 48, 55n45 Woman in the Moon 33, 107
Wheeler, Lyle 51; Beverly Hills Post Office 51 World of Tomorrow 110; see also New York
Where the Sidewalk Ends (1950) 57, 64, 69–71 Worlds Fair (1939–40)
White, Patricia 98 Wren, Christopher 85
Whitechapel Gallery 81; This is Tomorrow 81 Wright, Frank Lloyd 122–24; Guggenheim
Wieland, Joyce 105; see also Sailboat Museum 123; Marin County Civic Centre
Wind, The (1928) 53n2 122–24
window 51, 72, 74, 76, 100, 105, 109, 114, Wright, Russell 41
120, 166–67, 169, 176, 178; round or Wyeth, Andrew 129, 138, 144n31
elliptical 111, 121; window frame 5, 7, Wyler, William 72–5; see also The Best Years of
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130; window shade 111; window sill 73; Our Lives

windowpane 47
Wittgenstein, Ludwig 129 Young, Iris Marion 4
Wizard of Oz, The (1939) 51
Wollen, Peter 83, 105; see also Signs and Zeami 158
Meaning in the Cinema Žižek, Slavoj 15
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