Is there a relation between Cinema & Architecture or is it an unprofessed secret? Mario Pegas Brianugraha takes us to a parade where he is digging the correlation between cinema and architecture in his video “The Element of Continuity Between Cinema & Architecture: Prelude.”
Cinema and Architecture
Although cinema and architecture seem to be distant concepts, there is a link between them, created by art and visuality. This connection is not always easy to understand. The perception of place and space that is tried to be created in cinemas, and the emotional and psychological effects that these perceptions evoke on the audience may actually seem like a small bridge of films and architecture.
The movie is the base part of a study that takes you through the history of film making to contemporary science-fiction films. The first part of this study is explaining how its perceived and conceived, how the relations between architecture and cinema are so close, what constitutes continuity, and what are the possibilities for further developments.
Sequence
Brianugraha is trying to prove it is all about the sequence and how both cinema and architecture create a space for humans, a film director uses scenes and frames where an architect uses his drawing/ model. Both are for use of function and imagination, which means each story should reflect the residents‘ dimensions, the architectural space. Both are consumed by humans and can not be isolated from people’s conditions.
When you look at the meaning of sequence, Oxford Dictionary explains it as a set of events, actions, which have a particular order. From this, we can say both cinema and architecture distributes sequence in their way, an architect speaks to his users whereas a director to his audiences. Where a director uses the scenes, editing, and artificial landscape, on the other hand, an architect draws a physical space using his experience, showing the movement. The common sense in both is the “sequence”.
Kuleshov Effect
Lev Kuleshov, the Soviet filmmaker, is the first person who established film editing (montage) which is just a position of two shots and this procured the interaction of two sequential shots. This gives more meaning to audiences as there is no gap between the shots and proves how the sequence is so important.
The Kuleshov effect method is also demonstrated by Alfred Hitchcock, in his way with the close-up shots. He explained the method as pure cinema through assembling images. Lev Kuleshov also founded the method of creating an artificial landscape which is another type of editing. This method creates an imaginary space-reality and continuous space.
The Manhattan Transcripts | Cinema & Architecture
The Swiss architect Bernard Tschumi’s theoretical drawings, which debates it’s not an accident the disconnection between spaces and their use, objects and events, being and meaning.
The transcripts extend a different view to architecture as explaining the space, movement and events are independent positions, however, have a mutual relationship with each other.
Brianugraha also refers to Bernard Tschumi’s theoretical drawings where the Swiss architect classifies the sequences in three; transformational sequence, spatial sequence, and programmatic sequence. The correlation between these sequences is very common and makes a continuity between architecture and cinema.
In this movie, Brianugraha is comparing these sequences and appliances both in architecture and cinema based on the collected literature and visual studies and observations of Tschumi’s. Each screenshot is proof of both architecture and cinema are designed for consumers. Brianugraha also simulates the common fields on a pyramid explaining how similar are these sequences in architecture and cinema, which he names the hierarchy of continuity between architecture and cinema.
Analyzing these theories will help us to find our pattern of viewing and deconstruction of the film study. An architect is a director in the real world providing homes for people within human culture and yet this is just to frame the people’s status. Who will be the next going to derive film directors to go beyond our imagination or will there be a new film technique that will enlighten the architects for our future houses?
While architecture seeks to create spaces to create certain behaviors and emotions, cinema gives these emotions through camera movements and sequences. However, both of them benefit from the presence and dynamics of the space while addressing emotions and psychology. For now, the relationship between the two can be perceived to this extent, but is more possible?
In fact, this movie, which pushes the audience to question and establish even deeper relationships, will provide many methods that are waiting to be discovered in the relationship between cinema and architecture.
References
7th June 2018, Film and Architecture. AA School of Architecture
The Element of Continuity Between Cinema & Architecture: Prelude. 31st May 2018.
