Since its invention, the cinema has offered glimpses of what Henri Lefebvre described, in another context, as ‘the preconditions of another life’.1 As the most extensive way of reconstructing experience of the world, it was also the most extensive way of getting out of it, and into another one. It's not surprising that so much of cinema was created by, and to some extent for, people with first hand experience of emigration.

The new, virtual world of cinema was typically a world transformed – by eroticism, love, solidarity, crime, war or some similarly extraordinary experience. It differed from that offered by, say, the novel in that it was visible, and in that usually the spaces of the new world were made by photographing fragments of the old one. These fragments were very
often specially created for the purpose, but in practice it seems to make very little difference whether the décor of a film is real or artificial, or even whether a film is fiction or documentary. The newness of the spaces of the cinema is a product, not of set-building, but of cinematography. It's the phenomenon of photogénie.

The earliest reference that I know of to something like this is made in
Louis Aragon's essay On Décor, which was first published in
September 1918 in Louis Delluc's Le Film. This was Aragon's first
published writing, in which he wrote:

To endow with a poetic value that which does not yet possess it, to wilfully
restrict the field of vision so as to intensify expression: these are two
properties that help make cinematic décor the adequate setting of modern
beauty.2

The first part of this statement – ‘to endow with a poetic value that
which does not yet possess it’ – anticipates Aragon's identification of
the surrealist frisson in Le Paysan de Paris, the 'new kind of novel'
based on descriptions of two of the several places in Paris that the
Surrealists had adopted:

I felt the great power that certain places, certain sights exercised over me .
. . The way I saw it, an object became transfigured: it took on neither the
allegorical aspect nor the character of the symbol, it did not so much
manifest an idea as constitute that very idea . . . I acquired the habit of
constantly referring the whole matter to the judgement of a kind of frisson
which guaranteed the soundness of this tricky operation.3

Later in the book, Aragon identifies a similar sensation as that which
accompanies the recognition of a poetic image, and it has always
seemed to me that, as a sensibility, the surrealist frisson very much
resembles the momentary insight, the instant of identification of an
image that sometimes results in a successful photograph, or an image
in a film. One wonders, even, if it was partly Aragon's experience of the
cinema that led him to the surrealist subjectivity to actual everyday
surroundings.

The second part of Aragon's statement – ‘to wilfully restrict the field of
vision so as to intensify expression’ – effectively describes film space.
Films are made of images with a field of view which is very narrow
compared with experience of actual, three dimensional space. The
space of a film is assembled from fragments, their relationship inferred
from cues in action, sound or narrative. Most film space is off-screen –
it's either remembered from preceding images, or heard, or merely the
imaginary extension of the space on screen. Because it is
reconstructed in this way, film space is always a fiction, even when the
film is a documentary.

In his essay Art of the Cinema, Lev Kuleshov describes making a
sequence in Engineer Prite's Project (1917-18):

It was necessary for our leading characters, a father and his daughter, to
walk across a meadow and look at a pole from which electric cables were
strung. Due to technical circumstances, we were not able to shoot all this
at the same location. We had to shoot the pole at one location and
separately shoot the father and daughter in another place. We shot them
looking upward, talking about the pole and walking on. We intercut the shot
of the pole, taken elsewhere, into the walk across the meadow.

This was the most ordinary, the most childlike thing – something which is
done now at every step.

It became apparent that through montage it was possible to create a new
earthly terrain that did not exist anywhere . . . 4

*

Before I ever thought of making a film, I had developed a habit of
identifying examples of what might be described as 'found' architecture,
and documenting them with colour slides. Many were industrial
structures of various kinds, including some of the types photographed
by Bernd and Hilla Becher, whose work I knew a little. I had also come
across the Surrealists' adoption of particular sites in Paris – the Tour
Saint-Jacques, the Porte Saint-Denis, the abattoirs of La Villette, the
Parc des Buttes-Chaumont and so on – the last of which is one of
Aragon's subjects in Le Paysan de Paris.

What began as a search for individual buildings gradually widened to
include all sorts of details of everyday surroundings – odd ruined
shopfronts, roofscapes, scaffolding, the spaces of the London underground
and so on. The subjectivity involved was very like that
described by Aragon, or the state of mind that Benjamin describes in
his essays about Marseilles. In the long run, the aim was to gradually
refine the practice and transform even the most familiar spaces of the
city centre – Piccadilly Circus, say, or Regent Street – but it was
difficult to progress beyond a certain point without some technique in
making images. I recovered the idea, almost inadvertantly, in making a
film about London5 over ten years later, by which time the process of
defamiliarisation had become second nature.

By then I had made a number of short films, all of which were
combinations of 16mm monochrome images of urban or rural
landscapes and a fictional voice-over. To begin with, it had been
difficult to see what one could make with sequences of architectural
images, however intriguing, other than some kind of installation. To
some extent, a sense of continuity could be achieved by making long
takes with a moving camera (the first film was 20 minutes long, but
contained only three shots) or by adopting the structure of a journey,
but I had always thought that any film I might make would involve some
kind of interior monologue. Ten years earlier, as an architecture
student, I had seen Marker's La Jetée.

The technique gradually evolved so that the films included more
montage, with larger numbers of shorter shots. They were mostly made
by undertaking journeys, but the pictures were rarely planned, and
were always subject to the unpredictability of natural light. The
narration was always written after the footage had been shot and
edited, so that the writing was determined by the picture, rather than
the picture by the writing, and if one had put the pictures together in a
different order, or had shot different pictures, some other equally
plausible fiction might have been the result. It was very difficult to write
coherent narration for an already edited sequence of brief,
spontaneous images, but it seemed a suitably modern, or even
postmodern way to approach fiction. It also resembled the method of
cinema newsreels. I found out later that other, more critically respected
documentaries had been made in a similar way, without too many
preconceptions. The combination of moving camera and interior
monologue suggested some more-or-less comic attempt to represent
consciousness, or perhaps artificial consciousness – the inner
experience of an alienated and rather unreliable artificial flâneur. This
was in homage both to Frankenstein and to the confessional voice-
overs and subjective-camera sequences of noir.

The cinematography had also developed a distinct technique. Some of
the best footage was shot directly following thunderstorms, or in windy
weather at the coast. In this clear air, shadows were very sharp, detail
was brightly illuminated, and the sky was darker, or at least not brighter
than the ground. It was possible to produce footage of unusual
sharpness and richness of detail which achieved an almost three-
dimensional quality, despite the limitations of 16mm. This seemed to
confirm the preference for monochrome, and the old idea that the
illusion of depth in photographs of architecture is often most convincing
in fine grain, high contrast, deep focus, monochrome pictures.6

On the other hand, this preference for particular kinds of daylight made
it increasingly difficult to produce pictures. The various stylistic traits –
interior monologues; the compressed writing of the voice-overs; the
reliance on atmospheric effects – also encouraged allusions to genre:
Gothic fiction, or even expressionism. The films were becoming
stylised and increasingly difficult to make. The quasi-surrealism of the
original project seemed to have been diminished in the attainment of
technique.

*

The previous three films7 had been made by going away from London
to more photogenic locations. For various reasons, it looked as if the
time had come to make a longer film, which suggested a more serious
engagement with a subject. It also suggested a longer period of
photography, which would be difficult if we had to go away. The political
atmosphere of London seemed to be changing, and it would be a
challenge to try to re-imagine familiar surroundings. I decided to risk
attempting to make a film about where I lived.

In the early 1990s, London did not seem a very promising camera
subject, especially for someone obsessed with clear air. During the
summer of 1989, when the film was conceived, the visibility along the
river was often so poor that one could stand on a bridge and find it
difficult to see the next one. On the other hand, in the absence of
traditional London fog, perhaps the traffic fumes had possibilities. I
wondered whether to make the film in colour, which might be more
suited to the haze.

It had occured to me that if the film was to be longer than its
predecessors, it ought also to be wider. In any case, a feature length
film for theatrical distribution would conventionally offer the more
extensive spectacle of 35mm cinematography, with the sharper
resolution which I sought for making architectural images. It was not
that much more expensive to shoot the film on 35mm stock. I was
worried that it would be very difficult to make monochrome images of
everyday surroundings in London – the film's documentary aspect
implied less freedom to abandon a subject if it proved too difficult to get
a decent shot out of it. Colour might not achieve the vertiginous three-
dimensionality of monochrome pictures, but it would be much less
dependent on the weather. I'd never liked the look of most 16mm
colour – for some reason, I didn't think it would produce pictures that
were sufficiently sharp or colour-saturated, but this aversion to 16mm
colour did not seem to apply to 35mm. Colour also seemed more likely
to produce pictures that were funny. Monochrome would have been too
serious. For some time, I held on to the idea that some reels might be
monochrome and some colour, like Warhol's Chelsea Girls, but in the
end, after testing various filmstocks, we decided to shoot the film on a
35mm, fine grain, daylight colour stock that had recently been
introduced by Eastman.

With colour, the camera became an instrument of criticism. A
McDonald's, for instance, photographed in monochrome, might merely
have looked a bit bleak; in colour, it got a laugh. The slightest sense of
hyper-reality in the pictures seemed to be enough to unmask their
subjects, especially if one stared at them a bit. I had already begun to
use longer focal length lenses more often, with the result that the
camera was hardly ever used without a tripod, and camera movement
had become very infrequent. With colour, the camera hardly ever
moved at all, the longer lenses were used even more, and the images
were more often of details. This seemed to corroborate another idea
one comes across in architectural photography, that colour suits
images of detail.8 It also recalled Aragon's formulation of décor – in re-
imagining something as big as London, one tended to restrict the field
of vision.

These characteristics, together with the adoption of rather stolid, often
symmetrical compositions (easy to set up in a hurry), and the 4x3
screen ratio,9 seemed to suit the spaces of London. There was an
element of self-parody in the pictures, as if there was something
inherently funny about their predictability. This quality was sometimes
used to convey irony, affection and other meanings.

With the heavier 35mm equipment, and the frequent necessity to carry
it some distance, each set-up was much more of a physical
commitment than it had been before. This encouraged a tendency to
linger, and make several shots, both with different lenses, and of
different details of the subject. Where there was a lot going on, it was
possible to assemble action sequences, which created more extensive
spaces than those of the earlier films. This was augmented by post-
synchronised background sound which, laid over a group of shots,
identified them as fragmentary views of the same location. None of this
sound was ever recorded with the picture, and it was only rarely from
the actual location. One of the sound effects in London had been
recorded for Blow-Up over 25 years earlier. We chose this, without
knowing what it was, because the level of background traffic roar was
much lower than usual. One of the film's biggest fictions was that it
reconstructed London as a quiet city, without the noise of traffic.

It was organised as the record of a period of about ten months. The
film's off-screen narrator described the work of a fictitious character
who was researching what he described as the 'problem' of London,
which seemed to be, in essence, that it wasn't Paris. There was a
document, a plan, with a large reserve of ideas for subjects and
itineraries, but the film effectively made itself up as the events of the
year10 unfolded. It was mostly photographed by a crew of two. We went
out with the camera regularly on two days in every week, and shot
some other material at night or at weekends. Apart from coverage of
particular events, the photography was nearly always determined on
the day, or at fairly short notice. Altogether, there were about one
hundred days of photography, and one hundred 400' rolls of film, about
seven and a half hours of material. We stopped when we thought we
had enough material to make the film, which was about when we had
expected. Most of the material in the film appears in the order it was
shot. It was edited and written in more or less the same way as the
earlier films, though there was more material, a lot of work post-
synchronising sound, and for the first time I worked with an editor11 in a
relationship which has survived this and the subsequent projects.

Since London, two more films of about the same length have been
made in more or less the same way12, though with tighter schedules
and itineraries. In the latest film, there is more camera movement. This
is not a satire, but an investigation of some aspects of housing in the
UK, a documentary made for television. It was shot in digital video and
includes interviews with academics and other specialists.

At the moment, it looks as if the future of this architectural cinema
depends on developing ways to assemble more extensive and
ambitious fictional spaces. London and its sequel Robinson in Space
set out to re-imagine actual spatial subjects. The latest film addresses
the difficulty of making new spaces. The next project might explore the
creation of a new earthly terrain like that of Kuleshov, a fictitious world
made from fragments of the real one.

*

Film offers a kind of permanence to subjectivity. On a bad day, or in a
bad light, even the architecture of Gaudi might lose its immediate
appeal, but in a film, the transitory experience of some ordinary,
everyday detail as breathtaking, euphoric, disturbing – a doorway,
perhaps, or the angle between a fragment of brickwork and a
pavement – can be registered on photographic emulsion and relived
every time the material is viewed. On the other hand, when actual
extra-ordinary architecture is depicted in films it's often easy to
conclude that something is missing, as if the camera has nothing
sufficiently revelatory to add, nothing to improve on a visit to the actual
building.
At about the time I began to think about making a film, I particularly
admired the architecture of Hans Scharoun, on one hand, and film noir,
on the other. Until recently, it never occured to me to look for a
connection between them, other than perhaps Berlin. Scharoun's
Philharmonie, for example, and – say – Fritz Lang’s films of the 1940s
and ’50s – The Big Heat, Human Desire, and so on – don’t seem to
have much in common until one remembers that both architect and
film-maker share a background in the expressionism of the 1920s.
Quite what, if anything, this might mean isn’t clear, though it’s intriguing
that Scharoun’s influence does seem to be present in the work of some
of the contemporary architects who attempt connections with the
spatiality of film. The architecture of Scharoun and Häring might just be
seen as confirming the rationality of the apparently eccentric (though I
doubt that they saw it that way), whereas noir reveals the irrationality of
the normal, so perhaps the two are in some way complimentary.
Certainly, both extra-ordinary experience of everyday architecture (in
film, especially film noir), and everyday experience of extra-ordinary
architecture (expressionism, art nouveau and so on), might be sought
for similar reasons. The Surrealists, for instance, admired both Gaudi
and film noir. For anyone in pursuit of, let's say, the improvement of
everyday life, a medium which offers a heightened awareness of
architecture – the medium of film – might be thought at least as
compelling as an actually existing architecture of heightened
awareness – an ecstatic architecture, whatever that might be.

24 January 2001

1 see The Production of Space, translated and edited by Donald Nicholson Smith, Blackwell,
Oxford, 1991, pp 189-190.

2 reprinted in The Shadow and its Shadow - Surrealist Writings on Cinema, edited by Paul
Hammond, British Film Institute, London, 1978, pp 28-31.

3 Paris Peasant, Louis Aragon, translated by Simon Watson Taylor, Exact Change, Boston,
1994, pp 113, 115.

4 reprinted in Kuleshov on Film - Writings of Lev Kuleshov, translated and edited by Ronald
Levaco, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1974, pp 51-52.

5 London (85 minutes, 35mm colour, 1994) BFI Films, Connoisseur Academy Video

6 see, for instance, the writings of the architectural photographer Eric De Maré.

7 These were The End (18 minutes, 1986), Valtos (11 minutes, 1987) and The Clouds (20
minutes, 1989), the first two independently produced with support from the Arts Council of
Great Britain, the third made for the British Film Institute.

8 see again De Maré

9 Until the 1950s, cinema screens were 'Academy' ratio – 4x3 or 1.33:1 (the ratio of many of
Turner best known works, usually 48"x36"). With the advent of television, which used the same
ratio, wider screen formats were introduced. These were initially achieved using anamorphic
lenses which 'stretched' the entire 4x3 frame laterally. Gradually, however, all films were made
to be projected at wider ratios, typically 1.75:1 or 1.85:1. Most films are now made with
conventional lenses, with the frame masked to achieve the wider ratio. A large proportion of the
frame is not used, and the image has to be magnified more in projection. To avoid this, and to
enable the cinema, television and video versions of the film to be the same, the older Academy
ratio was used. Also, as all the prints were made from the original camera negative, the picture
was unusually sharp.

10 1992: the film documents IRA bomb damage; the General Election; the problems of the
royal family; the ERM crisis and the parliamentary debates about the Maastricht Treaty, and
two big demonstrations that followed the government's announcement of pit closures.

11 Larry Sider, also known for his work with Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, and the Quay
Brothers.

12 Robinson in Space (82 minutes, 35mm colour, 1997) BBC Films, distributed by BFI Films
and Connoisseur Academy Video, and The Dilapidated Dwelling (78 minutes, beta sx, 2000)
an Illuminations production for Channel Four Television.

The essay 'Architectural Cinematography' published in This Is Not Architecture, ed. Kester Rattenbury (Routledge, 2002).

The essay 'Film as Spatial Critique' published in Critical Architecture, eds. Dorrian, Fraser, Hill, Rendell (Routledge, 2007).