Framing Space through Architecture and Film
Day: Friday 6 April
Convenors
Jessica Schouela (University of York)
Hannah Paveck (King’s College London)
Session Abstract
We experience architecture and film as media of duration that unfold in time. The encounter of an embodied spectator or inhabitant with a film or a dwelling is informed principally by motion and the succession of one frame or screen (architectonic and cinematic) to the next. These two modes of construction investigate the three-dimensional occupancy and representation of space as it relates to both bodies and objects, framed within curated and mediated spaces. Instantiating an experience of space that is far more than visual, architecture and film activate both sound and touch, the latter being a mutual and relational ‘commitment’ of the body and the world (Jennifer Barker). How have architecture and film represented each other and in which ways do they, either similarly or distinctly, frame or design space? What happens to architecture when it is filmed and how might a building be described in terms of its cinematic qualities (Beatriz Colomina)? Moreover, how can film and architecture challenge our perceptual habits? Can film convey atmosphere of space and the built environment (Gernot Böhme)? This panel explores the mutually informing link between architecture and film in an effort not only to open up the limits of these methods of representation but also to look beyond what typically gets included within the history of art. The papers address this link through a focus on the phenomenological experience of mediated spaces, film as a method of making space, and the framing and representation of interior and urban spaces in film.
Speakers & Papers
Adam O’Brien (University of Reading) Framing: The inescapable motif?
Ulrike Kuch (Bauhaus-University Weimar) In-between Space and Time: Stairs in film and architecture
Sarah Louise Smyth (University of Southampton) Framing Architecture in Joanna Hogg’s Unrelated (2007) and Exhibition (2013)
Sander Hölsgens (University College London) Blue Twilights and Monochromatic Architecture in Chantal Akerman’s News from Home (1977)
Sarah Mills (Leeds School of Architecture) ‘Cinematic Commons’: Film architecture and an infrastructure of subtraction
Carolin Kirchner (University of California, Los Angeles) The Artist-Mediated Image: Embodied experience and the vernacular cityscape in Gary Beydler’s Pasadena Freeway Stills (1974)
Anna Viola Sborgi (King’s College London) London’s Skyline in Architecture and Film
Peter Sealy (University of Toronto) Angels in No Man’s Land: The Berlin Wall in film, 1945–93