Unseemly projections: cinema/architecture
2013
Transgression: verging on reversal
In The Muses, Jean-Luc Nancy reflects on the relationships between different art forms and contends that an art works only when it transgresses its limits; when it verges onto, implies and impels another art.1 At this seemingly contradictory threshold—this point of contraflexure or reversal—one art touches another without fusing, co-responds without integrating, indicates without appropriating. Expanding towards its limits, it moves toward a state of extreme opposition: it is most itself only when it begins to work against (its) `nature'; when it becomes improprietous, delinquent and unseemly. This means, for example, that cinema (the dynamic manipulation of kinematic material) only becomes itself when it opens onto radical immobility, when it spatialises. Likewise, architecture (the static manipulation of tectonic material) only becomes itself when it reverts to radical kinetics, when it temporalises.
If, for Deleuze, the ultimate deterritorialisation for language is music—if a deterritorialised language is a "becoming-musical"2—then the ultimate deterritorialisation for cinema is to eclipse temporality by `becoming-immobile’ or `becoming-architectural.’ The experience of immobility, of time passing so slowly that its passage passes unnoticed, would then constitute what is essential to cinema and at the same time what is the least kinematic. This would manifest as a sense of absolute immanence—a simultaneous presence at all times and of all times. By implication, the ultimate deterritorialisation for architecture would be to eclipse spatiality by `becoming-mobile’ or `becoming cinematic.’ The experience of multiple spatialities, of spatial systems woven together such that they produce an atmosphere of indeterminacy and hence of interminable opportunity, would then constitute what is essential to architecture and at the same time what is the least stable.
In response to the theme of Reverse Projection I would like to explore such moments of reversal in the conditions of cinema and architecture through three linked questions:
1. What are the conditions of such reversals, how is it that cinema and architecture have the capacity to produce radical otherness while remaining what they are, and what role does the motif of the uncanny play in this setup;
2. How might such reversals enable places, situations, environments and contexts—such as The Rocks—to be read differently, to have their characteristic ambiance magnified, to be experienced in a more heightened way;
3. How might such reversals contribute to the recovery and mobilisation of collective memory and practices of memorialisation; how might cinema and architecture, each in their own way, without confusion or internal contradiction, crystallise and liquefy a mnemonics of place—a fabric of memories of appropriation and erasure, presence and absence out of which place is interminably (un)made.
Reversal: cinema
If the inherent character of cinema—what cinema names—is movement, if cinema is a kinetics of the image, then its antithesis must be stasis. But a statics of the image is the business of photography, not cinema. The photograph captures a specific moment, an instant that no longer exists; hence its "funereal immobility"3, its association with death and memorialisation (if not monumentalisation). In that sense photography arrests and spatialises time, rendering it reproducible, appropriable, commodifiable. Cinema, though, must register time in its passing, or it isn't cinema. It must build its narrative around how time proceeds, flows, shifts in duration, pace and rhythm; how time is articulated through diverse temporalities, how there are slow and fast times, dense and dilated times, viscous and runny times; how several kinds of time can coexist, can be contemporaneous; how, from time to time, time is never the same; how time is always conditional and provisional, always subject to the conditions that frame it and the beings who `inhabit' and experience it. In cinema, time must slip away—because, as St Augustin observed, between the past that is no longer and the future that is not yet, it is the instant alone that is capable of representing stability and endurance in the inconstancy and fluctuations of time. Yet the instant has no definite existence since, while ever-being, it never becomes.4
Cinema does not only take place in time. It constructs temporalities. Jean-Luc Godard’s juxtapositional montage (Germany 90, 1991: Histoires du Cinema, 1988-1998) conjugates scenes from different situations and times, incorporates slow and rapid motion sequences as well as different genres (documentary, cinematic, photographic, textual) to create a multivalent and heterogeneous temporal fabric in which duration varies and becomes ambiguous, in which the time that it is at any time becomes indeterminate. This folding and imbrication, weaving and collage of different times is not indiscriminate or reckless. Rather, it enables film to eclipse the chronological sequence of historical or clock time—what the Greeks called chronos—in order to present something like a dramatisation of opportunity: what the Greeks called kairos. By overlaying and creating adjacencies between images of events that are historically separate, Godard highlights over-arching significations and meanings not necessarily discernable at the time, or in the original framing of the film sequences that he quotes. Histoires du Cinema for example is entirely constructed of citations, of clips from other films—but assembled here in a way that creates new meanings through juxtaposition, alignment and misalignment. Godard works the space in-between times and images, the margins and interstices made possible by disassociation, decontextualisation and deterritorialisation of the cinematic fabric. Temporal cause and effect are radically put into question. The present acts on the past. The resultant anachronism shifts time away from sequence and flow by folding it into itself, by densifying, centering and spatialising it. By reassembling and recollecting time and images, Godard undertakes a mnemonic manoeuvre that parallels the operations of memory and memorialisation, of recovery and recall that enable the past to be reconsidered in terms of its import and its implications.
Reversal: architecture
In the typology of the Arab bathhouse (hammam), the interior world is radically sequestered from the city. Its spatial organisation is cellular and divided into rooms with water contained in different ways and kept at different temperatures.5 Interiors are reverberant; the air is saturated with moisture and has a viscous grain. The masonry fabric of thick walls, vaults and domes is perforated by small unglazed opening in various geometrical shapes. There are no windows. The interior is normally dim, depending on ambient light conditions. Natural light enters the spaces through the roof either as sky illumination or direct solar rays. The net effect of this, much like the camera obscura such as is evident in the Baňos Almirante (Valencia, 14th C), is to slow time down, to lengthen or dilate it. It is maybe less a question of conveying a sense of eternity than of producing interstitial, solsticial or tidal durations in which chronology is suspended. Ambient conditions are thus converted into a kind of interminable twilight where the undecidability of the time it is renders possible and accessible a sense of time itself, of its fluxion and pacing, its rhythm and tempo.
Depending on external conditions, the space becomes a camera, transmitting images from the outside world onto wall and floor surfaces—the blue of the sky, passing clouds and muffled sounds. Together these qualities displace the rooms from the city and suspend them spatially and temporally from the ambient milieu. As time passes light rays produce, on the floor and walls of the bathhouse, an inverse trace of the sun’s apparent movement in the sky. As the light outside grows bright or dim the interiors respond by very slowly pulsing so that the space itself appears to expand and contract, to grow and reduce in scale, to oscillate between extremes of brightness and gloom. These various qualities soon begin to conjugate into complex effects that radically alter both the temporality and spatiality of the interior—time slows and speeds up, space grows and shrinks. The interior's remoteness from the vibrant city streets, the relative evenness of its illumination, the acoustic effect of mass construction and the extremely slow movement of light patterns and changes in light intensity combine to stretch chronological time and bring it to a near standstill. After a long time of remaining with the space and being attentive to changes that interminably manifest within it, the sun’s path tracing itself incrementally and imperceptibly across the room becomes discernable as a moving line, before giving way to a palpable sense of the earth’s mass and rotation.
The Arab bath does not simply engage with the ambient world, becoming receptive to changes of time and light. It fundamentally transforms the existential conditions and coordinates of one register of temporality into another. It effectively brings time into perceptibility, enabling an entirely different regime of attentiveness to become possible—a regime in which visuality is initially present but from which it eventually withdraws in favor of kinesthetic and psychosomatic modes of reception that are better calibrated to a sense of the languid and of the infinitesimal detail. This fundamental alteration of temporality prompts a change from the calculated wakefulness of everyday experience into pensive reflection on the fluxions of memory and the minor geographies of place. A surprising turn of events takes place here. Though effectively sequestered from their context the attentiveness that these rooms enable produce a heightened focus on the sensory conditions of the ambient environment. Subtle changes in light levels, muffled sounds of the city, and other qualities brought into relief by the very isolation of the interior, convey an acute sense of the circumstantial spatiality and temporality of place. The outside is projected inside, the distant becomes proximate, the unseen noticeable, the absent present, the known unknown and the ordinary extraordinary.
Unseemly projections
The moment an art verges on another—when architecture temporalises, or when cinema spatialises—something significant happens, something approaching the uncanny: a condition at once familiar and strange, reassuring and unsettling. The atmosphere of the uncanny prompts reflection, recollection, consideration—therefore solicitude and care—within an ethics of encounter. In the uncanny, things are never what they seem; encountering the uncanny can be a troubling and liberating experience. By dramatising temporality and duration—by promoting concernful attentiveness and awareness of ambience and atmosphere—architecture can frame and foreground the characteristic qualities of place, putting place it into relief, magnifying or raising it to a higher power.
If Bernard Stiegler is correct that at its origins the city (polis) constitutes an apparatus for collective and psychic individuation, for reconstituting an “associated milieu”—a polity, politeia or civitas—then, like all techniques and technologies of grammatisation and memorisation, such as writing, informatics, cinema and the televisual,6 architecture can also be regarded as a mnemotechnical framework capable of recovering, registering, storing, mobilising and transmitting knowledge and collective memory.
The overlay of timeframes in cinema or of spatial orders and dynamics in architecture produce folds and shadows within an apparently dominant system; creating multiple interleaved layers that, the more marginal the discrepancies between them the greater the sense of wavering and shimmering, the more disturbing and troubling the affect. The many discrepant alignments in Peter Markli's sculpture gallery La Conjuinta (Giornico, 1992) illustrate this condition. The plan, section and concrete materiality of the building incorporate, within apparently straightforward basilican symmetry, a variegated network of misalignments that charge the fabric and spaces of the building. If there is a resultant restlessness it is not in any obvious formal gymnnastics, visual dynamism, literal mobility or manipulability. The building remains resolutely gathered and stable. It does not waver from its normative architectural condition, its gravity, its extreme ordinariness. And yet the inbuilt discrepancies unsettle it from within and mobilise it in a very different sense, in an uncanny sense, whereby it appears at once stable and on the verge of disestablishment.7 These kinds of discrepancies contribute a further, more fundamental value to the architecture. The sense of a double, antinomical bind—between coherence and collapse, order and crisis—is a pivotal condition in the idea of the `tragic'; a quality that figures in the sculptures by Hand Josephson that the gallery makes place for, and in the dramatic Ticinian landscape, caught between Switzerland and Italy, in which the building is sited. The building resembles nothing of its landscape or its contents, and yet it manages to essentialise, intensify and encompass Josephson's monumental sculptures and reliefs as well as the place made for them. In an uncanny way, La Conjiunta produces a reverse projection of the landscape, which is itself inflected in the sculptor's work. It functions to decoct and condense that landscape while at the same time declining any direct engagement with it. In this way the building can be said to memorialise or recall the place in which it stands, conveying to every visitor, as in dream, something like an immemorial horizon.
By reversing their normative conditions of stasis (architecture) and kinesis (cinema) the two arts verge on transgression—the one, architecture, becoming-kinetic, the other, cinema, becoming-static. In each case there is a deterritorialisation, a fundamental change of register. But in the examples I have given above, this transgression is not outwards to an `expanded' field that would violate the borderline between the arts, but resolutely inwards, each into its own proper systems and processes. It is not achieved by a literal adoption in each one of antinomical qualities that belong to the other—that is, geometries of time and flux for architecture or parameters of space and stasis for cinema. Rather, it involves an intensification and densification of the inherent tectonic or compositional and material fabric in each case. For architecture this means the overlay and densification of spatial systems that eventually build up complex assemblages within a stable and simple overarching framework. The coexistence of complex and simple, multiple and singular produces a self-contesting system that tends to a state of crisis and disestablishment, experienced as a sense of the uncanny. Simultaneously familiar and alien, reassuring and disturbing, this experience mobilises the architecture, dissolving or liquefying its material presence, while at the same time reinforcing its withholding capacity and radical stability. At the same time, the intensification produces a kind of archive: a repository of spatial parameters, systems, patterns and narratives that are potential and, as it were, encoded or stored within the architectural fabric. This archive constitutes an incorporated `memory' within the architecture itself that can trigger processes of retrieval, recollection and memorialisation. In this way architecture remembers and conveys its memories through the attentive engagement, curiosity and experience of those who encounter it.
Notes
1. Nancy, J-L. (1966). The Muses (P. Kamuf, Trans.). Stanford: Stanford University Press.
2. Deleuze, G. & Parnet, C. (1996). Dialogues. Paris: Flammarion: 42.
3. Barthes, R. (1982). Camera Lucida, Reflections on Photography (R. Howard, Trans.). London: Vintage: 78-9, “For the photograph's immobility is somehow the result of a perverse confusion between two concepts: the Real and the Live: by attesting that the object has been real, the photograph surreptitiously induces belief that it is alive, because of that delusion which makes us attribute to Reality an absolute superior, somehow eternal value; but by shifting this reality to the past ('this-has-been'), the photograph suggests that it is already dead.” See also Sontag, S. (2002). On Photography, Harmondsworth: Penguin: 15: “All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.”
4. St Augustine, The Confessions, Book 11, Chapter 11. Retrieved from http://www.ourladyswarriors.org/saints/augcon11.htm#chap11.
5. See Telmissani, M. & Gandossi, E. (2009). The Last Hammams of Cairo. A Disappearing Bathhouse Culture. Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press.
6. Stiegler, B. & Ars Industrialis (2006). Réenchanter le Monde. La Valeur Esprit Contre le Populisme Industriel. Paris: Flammarion: 45.
7. Michael Tawa, M. (2010). Agencies of the Frame. Tectonic Strategies in Cinema and Architecture. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing: 258-309.