The Bartlett
Faculty of the Built Environment
History and Theory Course
subject: Film and Architecture
Tutor: Christophe Gerard
Course Brief:
Architecture in film is often reduced either to the references set design makes to architecture or to documentary films on architecture. Scholars of film and architecture thus become rather like train spotters with a dubious historicist agenda.
Undeniably, there is also a desire from both film-makers and architects to link the two practices, to see genuinely that architecture, commonly described as the most public of all art forms, meets cinema, commonly described as the most popular of all art forms. Yet it is not by using 2D screens to create exciting, flexible, 3D backgrounds in our future domestic environment that the two art forms will use each other's potential.
film+architecture is a discipline not yet precisely defined. It is a discipline in-between two disciplines. It deals with the pollution, the contamination of each discipline, film and architecture, by the other. It looks at the way architectural space and film space collide, inform and reconfigure one another.
film+architecture will draw on students' research and on personal research and experience as a film-maker and as an architect and a set designer. The aim of the seminar is to show how film as a medium can develop the conception (both the mental picture and the act of conceiving) of architecture.
The seminar will introduce students to tools for analysis and include group discussions and presentations of work in progress. Each student will choose and analyse a film they find relevant. The findings will be translated into diagrams, aphorisms, storyboards...etc, directly usable for the questioning and the making of architecture.
Indicative bibliography
It is a fact that the relation film:architecture is generally misunderstood and the following list has to be taken as background reading for the purpose of research. It has been reduced to the essential and a star rating system - as in film reviews - will help the student to distinguish the unavoidable readings from those necessary to complement a general knowledge.
Bernard Tschumi, Architecture and Disjunction, The MIT Press, (1996) *****
Bernard Tschumi, The Manhattan Transcripts, Academy Ed, (1981) *****
Jacques Aumont, The Image, BFI, (1998) ****
Bill Viola, The nature of images, Will There be Condominiums in Data Spaces? and The Sound of One Line Scanning in Reasons for Knocking at an Empty House, T&H, 1995 ***
Richard Taylor, The Eisenstein Reader, BFI, 1998 ***
Roland Barthes, Rhethoric of the Image and The Third Meaning in Image Music Text, Fontana Press, 1977 ***
François Penz & Maureen Thomas, Cinema & Architecture, BFI, 1997 **
Maggie Toy (ed), Architecture and Film, AD No 64, 1994 **
Bob Fear (ed), Architecture + Film II, AD No 70, 2000 **
Katherine Shonfield, Walls have feelings, Routledge, 2000 **
Dietrich Neumann, Film Architecture, Prestel, 1996 **
Slavoj Zizek, Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Lacan (But were afraid to ask Hitchkock), Verso, 1992 **
László Moholy-Nagy, Painting, Photography, Film, (BauhausBuch 8, 1925), The MIT Press, 1969 **
David Pascoe, Peter Greenaway, Museums and Moving Images, Reaktion Books, 1997 *
filmography
more than 60 mins
Jean-Luc Godard, Le Mépris, France/Italy, 1963 (click HERE to download)
Jean-Luc Godard, Alphaville, France, 1965 (click HERE to download)
Jean-Luc Godard, Histoire(s) du cinéma, France, 1988-1997 - not released on VHS or DVD (click HERE to download)
Alain Resnais, L'année dernière à Marienbad, France, 1961 (click HERE to download)
Bertrand Blier, Buffet Froid, France, 1979 (click HERE to download)
Frederico Fellini, Casanova, Italy, 1976 (click HERE to download)
Andreï Tarkovski, Stalker, Soviet Union, 1979 (click HERE to download)
Dziga Vertov, The Man with the Movie Camera, Soviet Union, 1929 (click HERE to download)
Peter Greenaway, The Draughman's Contract, United Kingdom, 1982 (click HERE to download)
Peter Greenaway, Drawning by numbers, United Kingdom, 1988 (click HERE to download)
Lars Von Trier, Europa, Denmark, 1991 (click HERE to download)
Kenchi Iwamoto, Kikuchi, Japan, 1990 - difficult to find
Eric Rohmer, The Lady and The Duke, France, 2001
between 30 mins and 60 mins
Chris Marker, La Jetée, France, 1962 (click HERE to download)
Michael Snow, Wavelengh, Canada, 1967 (click HERE to download)
Thierry De Mey, Rosas danst Rosas, Belgium/Germany/France/Netherlands, 1997 (click HERE to download)
under than 30 mins
Zbig Rybczynski, Tango, Poland, 1980 (click HERE to download)
Zbig Rybczynski, Imagine, United States, 1986
Raoul Ruiz, Un couple (tout à l'envers), France - difficult to find
Brian McClave, Fossil, United Kingdom, 2001
paper films
Sergei Eisenstein, The Glasshouse, 1927
László Moholy-Nagy, The Dynamics of The Big City, 1927
Tutor Profile:
Christophe is an architect and a filmmaker. For Ian Ritchie Architects, he has been responsible for projects such as the Bruce Nauman retrospective and the Sonic Boom exhibition both held at the Hayward Gallery, London. He applies the same processes to the making of his fiction films and to architecture. His interests lie in the 'in-between' within and outside each discipline, and in film+architecture - a discipline of the 'in-between'. He is also carrying out research into comics.
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