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30 January 2015 | By Davide Rapp

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Cinema and architecture share common languages and challenges writes

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Davide Rapp whose Elements film was a mesmerising highlight of the 2014
Venice Biennale
A woman sleeps deeply on the third floor of a mansion in the middle of
Manhattan. The camera moves away backward and turning down slowly
pans into the void of the stairwell all the way to the kitchen below. In the dark,
beyond the steel window railings, a man emerges from a van and approaches
the house. The camera moves towards the front door and without cuts
enters the keyhole where, on the outside, the man inserts a key. The lock does
not turn. Moving backwards, the camera comes out of the keyhole and again
shows the window; a second man joins the first. The two walk away from the
camera which, pivoting 180 degrees, crosses the kitchen dodging coffee pots
and aluminium Navy Chairs to the rear entrance. One of the men grapples with
the locked door, then climbs a flight of external stairs while the camera follows
his ascent with a smooth vertical movement, through the timber joists and
panelled floor of the first storey, to a second door, also locked. The man
continues his climb towards the roof, always followed by the camera that glides
though the houses structure up to an oval skylight as the mans shadow appears
through the glass. The camera then turns downwards and finally enters a
services room, showing a metal trapdoor that is suddenly wrenched open from
the outside with a crowbar: the house has been violated. It has been violated by
the robbers and by the camera that, by challenging the solidity of the
architectural body and the laws of physics, renders a dynamic vision, complex
and complete, of the domestic space: this happens in the film Panic Room, by
David Fincher (2002).
A magnificent long take combining live shooting and CGI, shows the
relationship between different levels, stairs and entrances in a way that would
otherwise be invisible to the human eye, breaking the conventional
relationships of scale and showing a fictional space which is both abstract
and concrete, intimately credible. It is an invitation to experience the scene
through the eyes of the house itself.
In cinema it is the camera that reveals architectural space. This space can act as
a backdrop for the action, or it can become its protagonist, as it assumes
scenographic or symbolic values, depending on the scene. The gaze of the
camera, both in art films and in commercial ones, is always selective the
elements of the scene are included or excluded alternatively from the frames, at
the service of narrative and expression. Cinema cuts and cuts again in portions

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of different sizes that which is not filmed by the camera might be suggested
by its movements or by the final montage. The complexity of space, of both
studio sets and real locations, reassembles in the mind of the spectator
throughthe juxtaposition of multiple points of view, coherently with the action
and the position of objects and actors. The succession of three single points of
view: Jack Torrance overlooking a scale model of a labyrinth, a birds eye view
of the labyrinth itself, and the steadycam shot of Wendy and Danny navigating
the maze, introduces and explores the labyrinth in Stanley Kubricks The
Shining (1980) through a series of approximations like a sequence of
architectural drawings: a scale model, a plan and an interior perspective.
In Montage and Architecture (1937-40) Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein,
director and pioneer of cinematic montage, underlines the multiple analogies
between cinema and architecture. According to Eisenstein, who was the son of
an architect and himself a student of the Beaux Arts, architecture incarnates
and anticipates the principle of montage: by moving physically through the
architectural space, the human gaze defines and orders different points of view,
thus realising a mental assembly similar to that of the cinematic experience.
Vice versa, in a cinema, the spectator mentally rebuilds a fictional space
through the sequence of portions shown by the film.

Architecturally designed space is conceived through a series of partial

representations: plans, sections, elevations, models and views define the
material and tri-dimensional unity of the built form in a necessarily incomplete
way. A transversal and selective reading of drawings and images, taken out of
the context that has produced them, allows for the narration of unlimited
stories of architecture, telling us about typologies, functions, spatiality,
languages, elements and materials. Is it possible for cinema to proceed in a
similar way? In a 90-minute film there are around 129,600 frames, 24 per
second, grouped on average in 400-500 single shots ordered by a narrative
sequence. What would happen if we took away the sequences describing the

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spatiality of the scene from the final montage? Decontextualised from the
narrative flux, these scenes continue to appear as significant portions of space,
which can be analysed singularly.
In Mon Oncle (1958) by Jacques Tati, returning to the old house he lives in,
Monsieur Hulot appears and disappears through the multiform windows of the
facade, cut out from walls of different materials and positioned to suggest or
dissimulate the presence of internal staircases. Straight-on camera angles reveal
the orthogonal geometry of facades, walls and objects, that become theatrical
wings of the scene; vertical and horizontal lines parallel or diagonal to the
borders of the frame highlight tones, colours, textures and sizes; the presence
of doors and windows divides the frame into a secondary order of borders
revealing depth and layering.
In Martin Scorseses Taxi Driver (1976), Travis Bickle does push-ups on a floor
of multi-coloured linoleum cut-outs, a patchwork of lozenges and flowery
patterns while the camera hovers above him taking in his activity and the
condition of the apartment he lives in. The birds-eye view allows the camera to
break through the ceilings, showing a rooms plan. In The Raid (2011), director
Gareth Evans enhances the tension of hunted policemen hiding from gangsters
behind a false wall by positioning the camera high above revealing the relatively
flimsy wall structure concealing the heroes.
Through close ups, surfaces are stretched, amplified with the use of macro
lenses while sound is used to render the acoustical variety of materials when
they are walked over, touched or caressed by hands and feet; the joints, the
textures and graphical patterns of the walls materials change scale, cut out by
the frame. As if directly playing with the authenticity of material representation
on screen, a construction worker in Oliver Stones Wall Street (1987) staples a
layer of fake brick made of polyurethane foam to a timber frame onto which
someone has written the words brick here.
Finally in sequence shots space reveals itself progressively, at a human level, in
a continuous promenade architecturale. In Prachya Pinkaews The Protector
(2005), a young fighter named Khan moves through the five levels of a circular
stair a sort of evil New York Guggenheim battling men and interacting with
balustrades, doors, partitions and furnishings enveloping the audience in the
complex space.
Outside the narrative context that has generated them, single scenes take on a
new meaning and suggest multiple readings; the simple act of juxtaposing

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comparable shots of stairs, facades or floors evokes connections that would be

otherwise invisible. The spaces of fiction coexist simultaneously in countless
imaginary architectures, generated by possible new montages to be
experimented with. It is a matter of editing.

By London-based illustrator and designer Charlie Davis

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