Building the Fourth Wall ARCHITECTURE AND THE MOVING IMAGE
The small town of Columbus, Indiana, is a sleepy Midwestern locale that’s home to less than 50,000 people, yet it serves as an unlikely hub of mid-century modernist architecture, boasting a host of beautiful buildings designed by icons like Eero and Eliel Saarinen, Alexander Girard, Deborah Berke, Robert Venturi, IM Pei, and James Stewart Polshek. This place – along with the various structures that populate it – forms the setting of Columbus (Kogonada, 2017), a film exploring dual artistic media: marrying the artform of time, cinema, to the artform of space, architecture.
In making Columbus, Kogonada – a Korean-American debutant who’d cut his teeth making video essays examining the visuals of legendary filmmakers like Stanley Kubrick, Robert Bresson, Jean-Luc Godard and Wes Anderson – was out to sincerely address a pragmatic question that prompts philosophical answers: ‘Does art matter?’ It’s a grand starting point for a film that can, depending on how you look at it, feel either small or vast.
The human-made landscape Kogonada trains his camera on here is indivisible from the identity of Columbus, the city, and , the film. In the latter, architecture is not just a visual element, in both background and foreground, but something that’s present in its story, its theme, its dialogue, its drama. In studying the way designs carve up space, it permits its buildings to say something about the species that created them. Art matters, posits, not because of its financial value or social weight, but due to its connection to the individual. Kogonada sets the rough lives of people against the clean lines of buildings, contrasting humanism and modernism, the warmth of his characters permeating the film’s sometimes-frosty formalism. We see people at work among the works of art: leading guided tours around this architectural mecca, or toiling as librarians, cleaners, staff. Here, architecture can be a source of salvation – not just in terms of literal buildings in which humans can be healed, like
