Cities and Film Seminar

Seminar

500 word response to a piece on contextual text.

The city, space and environment, needn’t necessarily be the city as much. People as a whole or the individual and there relationship with space and backgrounds. Interactions with the environment. City as a pilgrimage for those with dreams and ambitions, being novel and new, and then through the evolution and development of the modern period is very different. 

Does the city represent a civilisation and the country represent an untamed culture? 

Archtitect's who influenced skyscraper:

Walter Gropius - German Architect, founder of the Bauhaus, moved to america as the Nazi's didn't like or appreciate the modernist style of his

Frank Lloyd Wright - Guggenheim museum, megalomanic. 

Gary Cooper as Howard Roark in The Fountainhead 1949 - a book about an architect turned into a film in 1949. 

It’s interesting that art and animation you choose to go see it in a gallery or at the cinema or watch it on TV. But with architecture it’s imposed upon you, you don’t have a choice whether you see it.

Other megalomaniac architects include Philip Johnson and Le Corbusier. Le corbusier isn’t his real name, it’s the name he’s given himself and Philip Johnson modelled his look on him. 

‘Through almost seven hundred pages of elaborate plot, stilted speeches, and overwrought emotions, [Ayn] Rand’s ideological cartoon of a book (she also wrote the screenplay) pits the individual, whose undaunted ego is the fountainhead of all praise-worthy human activity, against the common man, Rand’s rabble, who, fearing the individual, attempts to destroy or reduce him to its own base level. To translate her philosophy into fiction, the author cast her hero as an architect’

Albrecht, D. (1986), Designing Dreams: Modern Architecture in the Movies, London, Thames and Hudson, page 168

Locations.

How you use environments or locations to create sensory effects.

Edward Hopper, house by the railroad 1925

Pyscho house Universal Studios.

‘Milieus and architecture have always the same role in Hitchocock’s films; they function as psychic amplifiers of the story. Characteristically his films start off in an idylic and relaxed atmosphere. Scenes and buildings reflect a somewhat naïve and amusing balance of bourgeois life. As the story begins, however, a sense of foreboding begins to convey a negative content to the buildings. The very same architecture turns gradually into a generator and container of fear, and in the end, terror seems to have poisoned space itself'
Pallasmaa, J. (2001), The Architecture of Image: Existential Space in Cinema, page 25

‘The ‘oneiric house’ described by Gaston Bachelard has three or four floors: the middle ones are the stages of everyday life, the attic is the storage place of pleasant memories, where as the basement is the place for negative remembrances, pushed outside consciousness. In the final sequences of Psycho the different floors of Bates House obtain their meaning in accordance with Bachelard’s oneiric house. Beginning her survey of the enigma of the house in the attic, Lila is forced to a panicked escape own into the basement where she finds the terrifying mummified wigged corpse of Norman’s mother’

Pallasmaa, J. (2001), The Architecture of Image: Existential Space in Cinema, page 25 - 26

The Shining, very contrasting difference between the countryside and scary/creepy music.

Then we ended with this which not only questions the idea of characters with the built up environment they are in but leads nicely onto the consumerism lecture we have next with Richard.

I think the cities texts might be the most interesting to analyse so I think I'll try look at one of them whilst it's still fresh in my mind to write the analysis on.