Architecture is Ruining my LIfe

(S.S.) A little backtracking to do here...I'd like to start by talking about the fascinating lecture Merce Rodrigo Garcia gave about her research as an architect into the virtual representations of inhabited space in Japanese independent film. The idea of a Spanish architect studying Japanese independent films and scouring them for traces of inspiration about what it means to inhabit Japan is mind-boggling in and of itself. The fact that MRG can make such a coherent argument out of this practice is down right incredible. I think the key argument for her has something to do with the idea of built space versus the idea of inhabited space. Cities that change very rapidly, like Tokyo, have a lot of flexibility when it comes to the way the population uses space. There is this organic, real time, fluid approach to using space that is a model built by the everyday people that populate Tokyo and then there is this prescribed top-down model of building space which begins with some megalomaniacal architect and a lot of money and ends with a bunch of people who feel trapped by their working and/or living quarters.
 The film clips MRG showed represented both sides of this architectural dialectic. On the "built" side of things the film clips from Crazy Family (80's) and Tokyo Fist (90's) represented the suffocation of the average man by the oppressive architecture of Tokyo in the midst of an economic boom. Crazy Family told the story of an upwardly mobile family who move from the city to an American style suburban house on the outskirts of Tokyo. Once settled there, the family becomes obsessed with their individual privacy and they slowly disappear from each others lives culminating in an absurd parody of suburban life. The family leaves their home in the suburbs and takes up a nomadic existence in between two highways. In this primitive base camp, the family unites once more. The fact that their peaceful existence occurs in a space that is not recognized as a home speaks to MRG's notion that inhabited space is less suffocating than built space.
In Tokyo Fist, a Japanese version of The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, or Fight Club, a man's subjectivity is taken over by his urban environs. He mounts the platform for the subway, climbs the endless stairs to his cookie cutter apartment, and works in his cubicle like everyone else. At some point, he snaps and tries to destroy his environment. He pounds at the walls with a pipe and exasperates himself in the name of liberating himself from his oppressed lifestyle.
The built landscape of Tokyo in the 90's melts into the virtual realities of the current decade. Tokyo has become a place for fetishized subcultures to flourish. In the film Peep Show, two  seemingly unconnected subcultures function as alternative landscapes and define spaces in the city for their purposes. The first subculture is the Gothic Lolita fashion subculture, most prevalent in the Shibuya district. These women dress like Victorian dolls with Mary Jane shoes, ruffle dresses, pinafores and knee-high stockings. The effect is sexy and ridiculous at the same time. These women congregate in certain quarters of the Shibuya district providing the rest of the city with a chance to check out their world. The film explores the notion of bifurcated personas these women experience when they dress up as something or someone they may or may not really be. The notion of costumes and hiding within them in order to evade reality is a theme throughout the film. On the other end of this virtual coin are the Otaku, a real group of Tokyo-ites who are so socially withdrawn into their computer worlds that they never leave their rooms. They communicate via the Internet and find the greater physical world exhausting.
MRG sees the inhabited spaces of Tokyo as being linked to a historical and cultural process so for her, the fact that subcultures occupy virtual space is just as important to the architecture of the city as when they occupy actual space.  The fact that Tokyo shifts to accommodate new cultures and identities gives it a virtual quality as well. And when the streets are flooded with Gothic Lolita's, there is a carnival like atmosphere which exists both physically and virtually. Space is per-formative, MRG reminds us. This is very clear in the 16mm film Private Novel, in which a filmmaker shoots his life, his friends and and his surroundings over a ten year period. The city takes on a haunting quality under his gaze, especially when he films Emperor Hirohito's funeral.
In conclusion, MRG suggested that the tactics of independent film could be beneficial to architects. Viewing the way people use space, virtual or otherwise, is a more useful process than contracting to build giant space sucking monsters that only serve to oprress their inhabitants.

Showdown at Stimmann Creek

(JB) Some more on two films from yesterday's Urban Research block. Like André Werner's “Flash” from the opening evening, Berit Hummel's “Ein weites Land” (2007) is a dissection of film clichés, this time of Hollywood's male Western Hero. Unlike Werner's high-speed romp through Horror cinematography, Hummel's take on the genre archetype is rather a precise surgical undertaking, reduced to the performative reconstruction of immediately recognisable token gestures & movements. In a series of – if I recall correctly – fourteen scenes, we witness the encounters of two male figures; even though stripped from the usual iconography and plot progression, each and every interaction seems to be taken straight out of a classic Western. Which it is not, as Berit Hummel told me; but obviously, we do not have to rely on cowboy hats and tumbleweed to know our Hollywood staple heroes, even if they are clad in business suits and filmed solely on the grounds of Berlin's Potsdamer Platz.

Of course, the Potsdamer Platz & the Businessmen and the Cowboys & their homelands collide on several levels. There is the bizarre quality of the Potsdamer Platz itself – raised in no-man's land by former chief urban planner Hans Stimmann and a selection of international star architects – which echoes the fakery of the Spaghetti Western's “american” setting (while being far less entertaining, unfortunately), the slightly frivolous historicism of the post-modernist buildings and the artificial insertion of patches of a “natural” landscape, which allude to the suppressed dream of the untamed – hence natural – male conqueror expressed through the genre narrative. For which we, obviously, can find some parallels in the figure of the carnivorous yuppie businessman; we do all know that Pat Bateman is still out there, somewhere.

(On a side note - in a irritating, though interesting twist, Hummel's Film was shown in half of its original speed due to an technical mishap – which at least I mistook for intentional, as slow motion is another staple effect of the Western genre and thus seemed rather natural)

There was also a very short and very formalist film by Steven Ball – “No-Way Street” from 2007 – depicting police cordons and traffic re-routing in London, which might or might not have been shot with the 2005 London bombings in mind. On his website, he calls this a “strategy of producing public spaces of exception” – I suppose I have ranted enough on politics and public space in the previous posts, but even besides actual interferences into urban transit, there is a rather strange correlation between terror and security issues on one hand and architectural and aesthetic decisions on the other. The formal representation and organisation of dangerous or endangered spaces is something we might want to keep in mind as it affects our environment in a quite subtle but still immediate way.

OK – I'm off to the lounge again, see you later!

Cheers, JB

Be afraid, be very afraid

(JB) A couple of lines more on two other films from yesterday's opening. George Drivas' “Case Study” from 2007 is a refreshingly low-key take on surveillance and today's cities. Or tomorrow's, actually, as “Case Study” belongs to the genre of science fiction which relies on the futuristic qualities of whatever is surrounding us right now rather then constructing a projection of a possible future. Think along the lines of Nouvelle Vague Sci-Fi like Truffaut's Fahrenheit 451 or Godard's Alphaville, and of course Chris Marker's seminal La Jetée from 1962. Like Marker's film, “Case Study” is told through a series of black & white photographs.

George Drivas GR Case Study 2007, 17 min International premiere

Instead of a character-driven narrative, Drivas relies on the ornamental or abstract qualities of Berlin's architecture, using landmarks like Hugh Stubbins' wonderful modernist Congress Hall or the abysmal pseudo-post-whatever Alexa Centre, which, to my surprise, blend into a very homogeneous, beautiful & unique non-place (I suppose that the lack of colour really helps in the Alexa's case). While we basically follow the path of the protagonists through a multitude of halls, stations and staircases, there is no obvious distinction between separate buildings; the space traversed by the people in Drivas' film is not meant for anything else than transit.

Obviously, this goes well with the surveillance topic, as surveillance is to large extents based on the localization of persons within space; thus, the pristine transit spaces of Drivas' film, purged of any other connotations, make the actuality of following and being followed even more poignant. Thankfully, Drivas also abstains from the popular (or populist) polemics used by most artists working on surveillance issues. Analogous to the reduction of the city to a pure means of transit, surveillance is reduced to the acts of being watched and followed. No specific antagonism – the state watching the people, the corporations watching the people, the police watching the people – is needed here; all that's left is the both abstract and highly emotional state watching someone being watched, and, of course, participating in the “Case Study” as a viewer ourselves.

Some more notes on architecture; obviously, modernist architecture and its successors have created a very distinct tradition of fear, opposed to the fear evoked by historical or traditional architecture, which usually is connected to the notion of the past, the suppressed or the hidden; think of the house of Norman Bates and his deceased mother. Interestingly, the often-heard critique of modern architecture as inhumane stands in stark contrast with the humanist concepts of modernity itself, and has produced quite a lot of misunderstandings and outright tragedies, usually symbolized in the very concept of “social housing” (you might want to check out the Candyman movie and the sad truth behind its setting for a particularity gruesome entry into the topic).

Judy Schlesinger, female lead of Flash by André Werner with sound supervisor Daniel Schubert

Let's stay on the darker side for a while. As I have worked on modern horror cinema for my MA thesis, André Werner's “Flash” (2008) seems a bit too close to home. Nevertheless, this is a very witty pastiche of modern horror techniques (especially, as the title suggests, the lighting) and trappings in just about 15 minutes. As far as I noticed, each of the base ingredients was included – the nuclear family, the possessed child, the animal, the locked doors, the archive, the asylum, the secret experiment ... well, it might have lacked the stooped figure with her face hidden by long hair, but I'll have to take a closer look during the second screening next Wednesday. It's sure to be there, somewhere. The fun part is that every element might be read in various ways to get one of n possible coherent narratives – you just have to re-build the missing links between the ingredients. So, what was the thing with the dog about, now?

See you this evening for what looks as about fifty more films -

Best, JB

This is a public service announcement

Jacob Birken and Sabrina Small, the blog writers at Directors Lounge

(JB) Hi everyone, the Directors Lounge 08 has started yesterday and it's time for some first impressions & introductions. First of all, I'm Jacob Birken and will be blogging here for the next ten days. I've been living and working in Berlin for a couple of years now, but have studied at the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Karlsruhe and finished there with an MA in art theory & philosophy. As I've been usually working on visual arts on the one hand and popular cinema on the other, indie film-making is kind of new to me, but, well, it's moving images plus it's art so maybe I'll work this out.

As I've been told that yesterday's movies will be shown again during the regular screenings, I'll just pick out a couple for now. There was an interesting juxtaposition of two movies earlier the evening - Zhenchen Liu's “Under Construction”, and Jean-Gabriel Périot's “200 000 phantoms”, both from 2007 – which both analysed the destruction of urbanity and it's connection to what we might call cultural memory. Zhenchen Liu is a young chinese artist currently living in France. “Under Construction” is about Shanghai, though, and about the destruction of the historical parts of the city, which are radically remodelled to suit the conditions of a brand new capitalist China. While the preservation of historical buildings & quarters might seem a socio-political issue in Europe, too (think of the Palast der Republik in Berlin), the destruction of the historical quarters in Shanghai or Beijing directly concerns the living space and livelihood of the – often poor – inhabitants. The methods and effects of so-called urban planning have been a topic for Chinese Artists for some time; you might want to check out the earlier works of Zhang Dali, for example. While Zhang Dali chose a rather traditional way of urban protest – Graffiti & direct interventions –, Zhenchen Liu uses the images of the demolished buildings in a purely aesthetic and thus maybe even more radical way. The flattened cut-outs evoke a disturbing decadent pleasure, reminiscent both of theatrical scenery & the voyeuristic beauty of war photography; their ultimate flatness remains the same as the tableau of the Vanitas still life in European painting. The third dimension re-surfaces only in the very end, with the skyscrapers of a shiny new Shanghai appearing as a backdrop for the ruins of the old.

Interestingly, Jean-Gabriel Périot uses a similar technical metaphor in “200 000 phantoms”, a movie created entirely from images of the former Industrial Promotion Hall in Hiroshima, a ruin left standing after the atom bomb explosion in 1945. The art deco building, built by an Czech architect in 1915, might or might not have survived subsequent architectural fashions or urban redesign; partially & irrevocably damaged, it has been stripped of its function as a building and now exists purely as a memorial for the city's tragic past (some more photos via Wikipedia). Périot has assembled images from 1914 to 2006, ranging from early picture postcards to photographs of Hiroshima after the bomb, from political rallies to, finally, picture postcards of the illuminated ruin nowadays. As with the ruins in Zhenshen Liu's film, the restriction to two dimensions in Périot's film echoes the absolute objectification of the building, via representative postcards, via commemorative snapshots, via strategic & military decision. The building as a artefact of history can't be granted a third dimension.

(You can watch a low-resolution video of “200 000 phantoms” on the website of the Japan Media Art award)

Check back later for some more impressions - JB