Cities in Film: Architecture, Urban Space and the Moving Image

Cities in Film: Architecture, Urban Space and the Moving Image
An International Interdisciplinary Conference University of Liverpool, 26-28th March 2008
Conference Proceedings.
This conference is organised by the School of Architecture and School of Politics and Communication Studies. The AHRC-funded research project, entitled City in Film: Liverpool's Urban Landscape and the Moving Image, is conducted by Dr Julia Hallam (principle investigator), Professor Robert Kronenburg (co-investigator), Dr Richard Koeck and Dr Les Roberts.
This conference is supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and the University of Liverpool. Cover design: Richard Koeck and Les Roberts. Copyright cover image: Angus Tilston. Edited by Julia Hallam, Robert Kronenburg, Richard Koeck and Les Roberts. Please note that authors are responsible for copyright clearance of images reproduced in the proceedings.
Cities in Film: Architecture, Urban Space and the Moving Image An International Interdisciplinary Conference University of Liverpool, 26-28th March 2008
Cities in Film explores the relationship between film, architecture and the urban landscape drawing on interests in film, architecture, urban studies and civic design, cultural geography, cultural studies and related fields. The conference is part of University of Liverpool's contribution to the European Capital of Culture 2008, and aims to foster interdisciplinary dialogues around architectural and film history and theory, film and urban space, and to point towards new intellectual frameworks for discussion. It seeks to draw on the work of theorists and practitioners engaged in ideas in these areas, examining film in the context of urban design and development and exploring in particular the contested social, cultural and political terrain that underpins these practices.
Edited by
Dr Julia Hallam Professor Robert Kronenburg
Dr Richard Koeck Dr Les Roberts
School of Architecture The University of Liverpool Leverhulme Building Abercromby Square Liverpool, L69 3BX T: +44 (0)151 794 2631 F: +44 (0)151 794 2605 E-mail: [email protected]
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CITIES IN FILM: ARCHITECTURE, URBAN SPACE AND THE MOVING IMAGE
Table of Contents 1. ABSTRACTS 5 2. DELEGATE PAPERS SUBMITTED FOR PROCEEDINGS
Tuba eyda Akehir 36 A Step into the City: Use of Haydarpaa Station as a city gate in Turkish Cinema after 1960 Helena Barranha 44 Views from above: cinema and urban iconography after Google Earth Bulent Batuman 49 City, Image, Nation: the visual representation of Ankara and the making of national subjects Iris Burgers 57 Transient glamour: the filmic representation of airports and its relation to real life architectural developments Graham Cairns 64 The city, the car and filmic perception: the commonalities between Robert Venturi and Michelangelo Antonioni. Teresa Castro 70 Cinema's Mapping Impulse and the City Jessica Ka-yee Chan 77 Third Meshchanskaia and The Goddess: Crafing Gendered Space in Cinematic Modernity Maurizio Cinquegrani 83 Modernity and Colonized Otherness: Early Actuality Films of London's Exhibitions Philip Drummond 89 Space, Narrative and Iconicity in Cinematic Representations of London's East End Gordana Fontana-Giusti 95 Avant-Garde film - and Its Role in Understanding the Space of the City
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Ken Fox 102 The Three Spatialities of Los Angeles Latino/a Cinema David Foxe 107 "Know the Territory!" Bridges, Musicals, and Urbanism Karen Gaskill 115 Barge Culture - The ebb and flow of cultural traffic Tessa Maria Tan Guazon 121 Urban Decay, Redemption and the Feminized City – Filmic Articulations of Revive Manila’s renovated parks Theodora Hadjiandreou 129 Touchez pas au Grisbi (1954), Du Rififi chez les Hommes (1955) and Bob le Flambeur (1956); Discussing Criminal Paris, Spatial Representation, Memory and Modernity in mid-1950s Richard Koeck 135 Cine-Tecture: a filmic reading and critique of architecture in cities Claudia Lima 142 Filmic Narratives of the City Salvator-John Liotta 149 Tokyo: Cartography of a Cine-City: A Study about the Identity of a City and its relation with Moving Images Raymond Lucas 157 Acousmêtric Architecture: Filmic Sound Design and its Lessons for Architects Louise Mackenzie 165 From The Circular Boulevard To The Merry-Go-Round-A- Bout: The Lamentation (Tativille) And Resolve Of The Destruction And Loss Of Paris In Jacques Tati's Play Time Jonathan Mosley and Lee Stickells 171 Film/Architecture/Narrative Miho Nakagawa 178 The productions of multi-layered space in Japenese anime: Mamoru Oshii's Patlabor, Tokyo Afroditi Nikolaidou 186 Cinematic Uses of Athenian Monuments, or revisiting the ' Athenian Glory’
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Irina Novikova 193 Baltics – Images of City and Europeanness in Soviet Cinema Arbil Otkunc 200 Non-places at Cinema Ashley Perry 207 Car City: a documentary film mapping the components, modalities and malfunctions of Melbourne's regime of automobility Les Roberts 213 Cinematic Cartography: Movies, Maps and the Consumption of Place Eva Russell 221 Framing the Scene: A Cinematic Approach to a Redevelopment at the Halifax Waterfront Megan Saltzman 228 Gentrification and Spatial Tactics in José Luis Guerín’s En construcción Magdalena Saryusz-Wolska 234 Empty Spaces? The Images of Berlin Merrill Schleier 240 Harold Lloyd’s Safety Last (1923): Gendered Celebration of Los Angeles’s Modernity Lily Shirvanee 247 Mapping Narrativity in Public Space Cristian Suau and Moira Lascelles 252 One Week By Buster Keaton - Envisioning Prefab Architecture in Motion Luis Urbano 261 Films of Towns Ricarda Vidal 268 ‘A Journey for Body and Mind’? – The Urban Dreams of Modernism in Matthias Müller’s shortfilm Vacancy and in 21st-Century Car Commercials Kate Wells, Eva Nesselroth-Woyzbun and Julie Nagam 275 Projecting and Performing the contested Landscape of Toronto Through the Archive and Film
3. DELEGATE LIST 281
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ABSTRACTS A Step Into The City – “Use of Haydarpaa Station as a city gate in Turkish Cinema after 1960” Tuba eyda Akehir As a result of political course and social change, in Turkey, a rapid migration was occured after 1950. Unemployment, distress of subsistence and claim for a better life were the most important reasons of this social fact. The reasons of this migration and the difficulties faced by immigrants in cities were moved to the white screen by movies produced after 1960. In almost all films, migration was to stanbul. Directors use variable forms of connections and interfere of immigrant defined at cultural and architectural dimensions with city as a background (slums, gettos ect.). The question is whether the problem in survival of immigrant in the city is himself who failed to adopt or the city / the citizen who failed to create spaces for them. Regardeless of the answer given in the end, almost all movies starts to tell their story from the same place; Haydarpaa Station. Hopeful immigrant steps into the city from this historical building. Researching the persistence of directors in using the station as background at the same time in movies is the main goal of this paper. Stations- bus-terminals, airports are “interspaces” between arrival and departure place. They are the gates of citites. Since 1908, Haydarpaa Station has connected Anatolia to stanbul and stanbul to Anatolia. The research will analyse station in terms of its historical meaning, architectural features and its location in stanbul, in depth. Answers will be given to questions like, whether it is a cliche to use Haydarpaa Station in this frequency or the peak point of the migrant’s journey to hope, bewitched by these features of the station is speacially emphasized. Even now, the traces of the station as a space in our memories, with quite the meanings mentioned above, have close relation with the senses established in movies . ___________________________________________________________________________ The construction of Urban Pastoral and the Carnivalisation of landscape through cinema Ana Francisca de Azevedo This paper explores the role of cinema in the cultural construction of the city. Particularly, it explores how the ideological construction of the urban pastoral nurtured by the Portuguese fascist regime was destilled through the filmic work of the Portuguese architect Cottinelli Telmo. Cottinelli Telmo was a central architect for the Portuguese fascist regime and several of his architectonic works are leading exponents of modernist space symbolism of Portuguese dictatorial period. But Cottinelli Telmo was also the pioneer of the Portuguese filmic comedy, the most popular filmic genre of the thirties and the forties at the national level. Has a cinematographer, he only did one film, A Canção de Lisboa (Lisbon Song), a canonical piece that reassured the politics and poetics of the ‘Portuguese city’ as a space of memory. But this work needs a careful scrutiny especially in a moment when conservative place politics awake mythic urban images and the symbolic strenghth of a landscape iconography engaged with the celebration of national and imperialistic claims for social order and cohesion. Based in a case
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study which analyses the filmic document created by the architect as a flight from his apparently political commitments, this paper shows how Cottinelli developed the scenic utopias of a dictatorial regime engaged with the use of representational space for masking the unsolved social and economic problems which lead to a dramatic outbreak of migrations of the Portuguese population. At a superficial level, the film shows how Salazar’s urban pastoral recoined the city as a pleasant space for living. But the filmic analysis opened other levels of meaning and the entrance to a second live of the film. This second live rests precisely in the complex engineerings used by the architect to construct a virtual space presented to the audiences as an object for laughter. The typical and the picturesque of the Lisbon ‘barrio- yard-street’ appear here as masks used to carnivalise urban landscape nurtured by histrionic popular voices. As a corrupted version of the pastoral, an urban peripathetics challenges linear readings of the filmic text so as it challenges linear readings of the material environment of a city. This allows differential mappings carved out through the practice of dwelling the filmic place of the city. ___________________________________________________________________________ Views from above: cinema and urban iconography after Google Earth. Helena Barranha Over the last two decades, the globalization of new media technologies has radically transformed the perception of both natural and cultural landscape. When, in 2005, Google Earth was released as a free application, the access to satellite images became easier and more generalised, as any internet user could zoom into any continent, any region, any city or any block, as well as zoom out to have a full picture of the planet. This dynamic and global access to aerial views has definitely changed landscape imagery, and soon became paramount in terms of urban iconography. Views from above are, more than ever, used to shape the image of a specific city, to draw its skyline, and to highlight its monuments. Considering that aerial images influence the perception and the representation of urban space, contemporary architects and landscape designers tend to incorporate this dynamic approach into their creative methodologies. The changing image of the city through the spectacular expansion of zoom-in and zoom-out possibilities has also been explored in the cinema, namely in recent films focused on European capital cities, such as Berlin, Lisbon and London. This paper will analyse how paradigmatic films like Wings of Desire (also known as The Sky above Berlin, Wim Wenders, 1987), Goodbye Lenin (Wolfgang Becker, 2003), Alice (Marco Martins, 2005), Match Point (Woody Allen, 2005), and Breaking and Entering (Anthony Minghella, 2006) have contributed to create a new iconography of Berlin, Lisbon and London, through eloquent aerial perspectives. At the same time, the paper will observe how it is possible nowadays to replicate the experience of flying over those cities (particularly over the focal places of the mentioned films), using Google Earth and other internet resources. ___________________________________________________________________________ The City, Image Nation: The Visual Representation Of Ankara And The Making Of National Subjects Bülent Batuman
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The foundation of the Turkish Republic in 1923 was a radical attempt to construct a modern nation breaking with all symbols of the imperial past. Renouncing the Ottoman capital Istanbul, the republican cadres planned to construct a new capital, which would convey the spirit and ideology of the young nation and thus function as the symbolic locus for the republican government. Soon, the building of “new Ankara” would become a reflection of nation-building, and the documentation of this building process would turn into a major undertaking. Throughout the 1930s, government agencies photographed the city and its new environments and published albums to be distributed home and abroad. Cinema was also an important medium appropriated by the state to this end. The most significant work, in this respect, was the documentary Ankara: the Heart of Turkey (1934) commissioned to the Soviet filmmaker Sergei Yutkevich. All these works producing images of the nation’s capital were not only documenting the transformation of the old town into a modern capital, but also introducing a frame through which the city as the symbol of the republic should be seen and identified with. This process of identifying with the gaze of the state, however, was not a simple one. An important factor complicating this process was the fact that most of these images were produced by foreign specialists and/or they were produced to be circulated abroad. This was related to the intention of the republican elite to identify themselves with Western modernity, and their desire to affirm this identification through foreign eyes. Hence, this paper analyzes the visual making of power relations between the nation-state and its subjects through urban imagery, with particular consideration given to; 1. the comparison of the effects of multiple media (film and photography) on the production of such imagery, 2. the relation between the national subjects and the gaze of the nation-state which was complicated with the existence of the imaginary gaze of the Western “other”. ___________________________________________________________________________ Envisioning Urban Sustainability: Have we vision, have we courage? Shall we build, and rebuild, our cities, clean again, close to the earth and open to the sky? John Blewitt This paper will explore how urban sustainability has been communicated in film television and digital animation by comparing the aesthetic strategies employed in three “films”. The first will examine the montage techniques and mode of address of the classic documentary The City (d. Steiner & Van Dyke, USA, 1939) which articulated the emerging bioregional and garden city ideas of Lewis Mumford, urbanist, writer and cofounder of the Regional Planning Association of America. The second will examine the popular television format and personalised direct address exemplified by the BBC television series Gardener’s World using as a specific illustration “the special” on eco-developments, Building on Gardens, hosted by Joe Swift and first broadcast in 2007. The third example is 2050 – a virtual blueprint for a sustainable Melbourne (Aus, 2003) an independent production commissioned by the Sustainable Living Foundation in Melbourne featuring the off-screen informal conversation by a group of Australian planners on the possible futures for urban sustainability and illustrated by a collage of computer generated images and video footage. Each film looks to, and envisages, the future in different ways drawing on the experience of the (then) present and the aesthetic capabilities of the chosen media to communicate ideas, values and hopes in a resonant, reflective and persuasive manner. Framing the presentation will be a discussion of image ethics, the aesthetics of place and space and the notion of
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sustainability as a dialogue of values and experiences. The paper will conclude with some brief comments on the possibilities of developing a new visual language for, and of, urban sustainability for only through effective communication which stimulates the viewer’s imagination to conceive and perceive of alternatives will more sustainable urban environments be achieved. ___________________________________________________________________________ The city, the car and filmic perception: the commonalities between Robert Venturi and Michelangelo Antonioni. Graham Cairns This paper examines the similarities between ideas on architectural presentation and design contained in the seminal work of Robert Venturi, Learning from Las Vegas, 1972 and the cult classic of Michelangelo Antonioni, Zabriskie Point, 1970. Central to Venturi’s 1972 work was the argument that the contemporary U.S. city had been designed according to the logic of the automobile and was thus designed to be perceived in motion. From that starting point he began a reconsideration of architectural design and the tools used in its presentation. Drawn plans, sections and elevations were considered to be incapable of representing the phenomenological experience of the modern city in motion. Consequently, they did not facilitate its appropriate design. His answer was to propose the use of collage as an architectural design and thinking tool. This paper looks at Michelangelo Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point from this perspective. It argues that two years prior to the publication of Venturi’s work, this film offered an insight into the power of the cinematic medium as an appropriate representational device. More capable than drawn plans, sections or even collages at capturing the true experience of the city in motion it is argued that it went considerably further than Venturi´s seminal text in understanding cities like Las Vegas or Los Angeles, the city in which the film is set. It thus argues that by failing to make the leap from the flat static visual representation of the collage to the sequential, continuous and / fragmented representation of film, Learning from Las Vegas missed an important opportunity for advancing the use of alternative media in architectural design and thinking. It is an opportunity that has still yet to be taken up. ___________________________________________________________________________
Cinema’s mapping impulse and the city Teresa Castro Throughout this paper, I would like to argue that cinema’s approach to urban space has been closely informed by what could be called a mapping impulse. This mapping impulse would be less about the presence of maps in a certain visual landscape and more about the processes that underlie the conception of images. If we understand maps to be “graphic representations that facilitate a spatial understanding of things, concepts, conditions, processes, or events in the human world”1, our focus shifts from object – “maps”- to function – “spatial understanding”. Maps should thus be regarded as a hinge around which pivot whole systems of meaning, both prior and subsequent to their production. I will use a number of examples from different periods of film history to illustrate the formal strategies that distinguish this mapping impulse. The first is a certain topographic fascination, if not a real topophilia, in the sense of “love of place”. This feature covers different manifestations, either related to the politics or the poetics of space - from early
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cinema to contemporary examples. Such a topographic appeal often goes hand in hand with a second formal procedure: the seemingly descriptive motivation of the works in question – made evident by such camera movements as the panning shot. A third formal strategy would be drifting, or walking as an artistic practice. Again, such a method can take different forms and cover various agendas. Finally, both serialization (“maps only exist in the context of a series, of a collective production spaced out in time”2) and layering, in the sense of establishing connections and producing meaningful relationships, should also be mentioned. 1 J. B.Harley and D, Woodward, “Preface”, in The History of Cartography, Cartography in Prehistoric, Ancient and Medieval Europe and the Mediterranean. (Chicago: Chicago University Press, vol. I, 1987, p. XVI). 2 “Il n’est de carte que dans le cadre d’une série, d’une production collective qui s’échelonne dans le temps”, Christian Jacob, L’empire des cartes, Approche théorique de la cartographie à travers l’histoire. (Paris : Albin Michel, 1992, p. 465). ___________________________________________________________________________ Third Meshchanskaia and The Goddess: Crafting Gendered Space in Cinematic Modernity Jessica Ka-yee Chan This paper juxtaposes two early silent films of two national cinemas: the Soviet silent film Third Meshchanskaia (also known as Bed and Sofa) [Tretia Meshchanskaia] (1927) and the Chinese silent film The Goddess [Shennu] (1934), and looks at how the two films engage with the woman question through cinematic representation of city space and spatialization of gender politics. The similarities shared by the two films are not the result of influence, but the result of certain parallels in their historical situations. The woman question came to…