The Architecture of the Screen: Essays in Cinematographic Space

By Graham Cairns

With the birth of film came the birth of a revolutionary visual language. This new, unique vocabulary – the cut, the fade, the dissolve, the pan and the new idea of movement – gave not only artists but also architects a completely new way to think about and describe the visual. The Architecture of the Screen examines the relationship between the visual language of film and the onscreen perception of space and architectural design, revealing how film’s visual vocabulary influenced architecture in the twentieth century and continues to influence it today. Graham Cairns draws on film reviews, architectural plans and theoretical texts to illustrate the unusual and fascinating relationship between the worlds of filmmaking and architecture.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Release date: Sep 1, 2013
• ISBN: 9781783202126

Graham Cairns

Graham Cairns is a visiting scholar in architecture and design at both Florida State University and Ravensbourne, UK.

Book preview

PART I

Film reviews

The cinema of the French New Wave and the illusionism of SITE architects

Les Carabiniers. 1963

Jean Luc Godard

Producer: Rome-Paris Films. Les Films Marceau. Cocinor. (France). Laetitia Films. (Italy).

Les Carabiniers, 1962, is one of Jean-Luc Godard’s earliest films. It captures the energy, irreverence and radical reconsideration of cinematic practice that was to characterise the whole of the French New Wave. Its aesthetic is casual and untidy, if not amateur. It eschews constructed sets in favour of the street, and employs non-professional actors who improvise rather than follow a script. Its editing is full of deliberate errors and its storyline is both absurd and lacking in narrative orientation. It is visually erratic, thematically confusing and clearly rejects the seriousness and solemnity of the French filmmaking establishment of the time.¹ In addition, it celebrates the commercial filmmaking tradition through a whole series of referential puns and simultaneously criticises the society of spectacle and consumption. In short, it is typical of Godard.²

The story itself revolves around two main protagonists: Ulysses and Michelangelo. Enlisted to fight in what amounts to a comic civil war, they are obliged to leave their partners with whom they share a broken-down shed in the country. For their female companions, their departure on a military adventure represents an opportunity to ask for all sorts of exotic and romantic gifts from their now gentlemen of war. For Ulysses and Michelangelo themselves, it represents an opportunity to steal, kill and violate every type of norm and law under the protection of the King. These comically absurd anti-heroes, dreaming about the benefits of impunity, set forth on a journey through the absurdity of a meaningless contemporary war across the cities and villages of 1960s France.

Despite this comic narrative framework however, the film is far from superficial in intent; the absurdity of the storyline itself being a central part of the film’s sociopolitical commentary. That commentary is threaded through with a typical New Wave blend of internal and external references.³ Images often function as witty asides on religion or contemporary politics, the dialogue is showered with comments alluding to the external events of the real world, and even the names of the protagonists become part of the film’s multi-referential game. It is a complex intertextual tapestry reminiscent of the work of writers such as Jorge Luis Borges and Umberto Eco, in which the viewer is obliged to enter into an intellectual game of deciphering direct and indirect references, to which, of course, they bring their own baggage as well.⁴ It is a cinematic game with what Eco calls the role of the reader.⁵

Integrated into this menagerie of associations, quotes and insinuations are references to the world of cinema itself; the most notable being the scene in which we see a screening of The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat, 1894. Another is the employment of various editing styles: for example, continuity editing to reference the Hollywood tradition and montage editing to reference the Soviet school. Yet another is the introduction of documentary footage that reminds us of the neorealist school; a reference reinforced by the setting of scenes in real locations, the use of natural illumination, the employment of handheld cameras and the lack of professional actors. Clearly echoing the aesthetic similarities of the work of directors like Roberto Rossellini and Luchino Visconti, it is another case of Godard’s cinematic self-referential intertextuality.⁶

In the cinema of the Neorealist school this realist aesthetic was intended to appear more realistic and, to a certain extent, more basic than what had become the industry norm, i.e. the tightly controlled continuity aesthetic. In Les Carabiniers however, it is used for scenes, and a story, that are anything but realistic or basic. The absurdity of the protagonists, caught up in a narrative equally as absurd means that, in spite of employing a Neorealist aesthetic style, there is an overriding sense of unreality and irony throughout the film. In fact, it could be argued that there are certain characteristics of the Neorealist style that actively augment this sensation of artificiality. For example, Godard highlights the shaking of the handheld camera, the wooden acting of the protagonists and the lack of clear lighting on his sets. In addition, he allows exterior and alien sounds to intrude over the dialogue and follows everyday actions that, as in real life, do not advance towards any sort of narrative resolution.

These characteristics, as realistic as they may be, actually create a type of cinema that seems totally artificial.⁷ In addition to feeling artificial however, the lack of narrative drive often leads to long scenes with little or no obvious meaning; a meandering plot structure regularly criticised as inane and indeed boring. What criticisms of this type indicate is that, in the framework, film (the artificial language of the continuity system) has become what we expect and understand the medium to be; it has come to represent our cinematographic reality. This cinematographic reality is more interesting, intense and spectacular than our everyday reality, which, as Godard shows, is something that advances slowly, often without clear objectives, and does not necessarily lead to a clear and clean resolution of problems.

Our familiarity with the more intense and interesting mediated reality offered by Hollywood cinema is something dealt with, albeit from a different perspective, by thinkers like Jean Baudrillard and Umberto Eco, who at the time of Les Carabiniers were putting forward their concepts of the simulacrum and hyperreality, respectively. Baudrillard argues that through the process of reproduction, reality and unreality enter into an ever closer relationship within which the difference between both states begins to blur.⁸ Under such conditions, it becomes possible to confuse the real with the unreal and, as Eco comments with respect to Disneyland, eventually prefer the latter.⁹ Such questions are implicit throughout Les Carabiniers and are seen with most clarity in the scene mentioned earlier, in the screening of The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat. Finding himself in front of a cinema screen for the first time, the young protagonist, Michelangelo, is both stupefied and amazed by his first taste of cinematic reality.

The scene opens with the camera focused on Michelangelo. The first cut changes to a train, before cutting back to Michelangelo. The visual quality of the footage in the two shots does not change and the image of the train fills the screen we look at as viewers. By not exposing the physical context of the cinema to the viewer, and not changing the visual quality of the two images, Godard deliberately blurs the difference between our viewing of Michelangelo and his viewing of the cinema’s screen. By denying the spectator these pointers, the initial moments of the scene can be confusing. That confusion, however, is a deliberate pun on the confusion seen in the face of Michelangelo, who is totally incapable of distinguishing between the physical reality of his surroundings and the cinematic illusion on screen. In a reaction that repeats that of the first public to see The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat, at the end of the nineteenth century, we see him panic and cower behind his seat as the train arrives and threatens to break through the screen of the theatre (Figs. 1–2).¹⁰

Figure 1: The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat.

Figure 2: The fear of the hero.

Figure 3: Hyperreal postcards as the spoils of war.

What we have in this sequence is a scene that functions on various levels; it is an example of Godard’s renowned intertextuality: it is a joke at the expense of the viewing public, a witty reference to early cinematic audiences and also a parody of the real and the unreal experience of Michelangelo. In the following shots, the scene continues to develop this parody when our anti-hero watches a svelte woman taking a bath in the following short film he watches in the cinema. Given that he is still unsure as to the reality, or otherwise, of the images he is looking at, he moves tentatively towards the screen. Trying to look inside the bathtub, he finally attempts to caress the naked body of the mediated object of his desire and, in his excitement, loses his balance and falls through the screen, destroying it in the process.

This type of parody on the real and the unreal is repeated in a subtly different way in another of the film’s most celebrated scenes, the return of the two protagonists from the war. Carrying nothing but an old and worn suitcase full of postcards, they are a total failure in the eyes of their partners. For these heroines, expecting the riches and spoils of war, the loot is both ridiculous and boring. Indeed, they automatically begin to ridicule our heroes until Ulysses begins to present the postcards in a different way, as if they were not images at all, but actual objects in their own right. By the end of the scene, the two girls appear to be as excited by these representations of riches as they would have been with the real thing. Salvaging their damaged prestige through the simulacrum, Michelangelo and Ulysses offer their romantic companions a hyperreality that is more interesting, intense, and certainly more accessible, than real life (Fig. 3).

Clearly replete with references to the ideas of Jean Baudrillard, The Situationists, Umberto Eco and others, Les Carabiniers finds multiple echoes in diverse fields. Those fields are, however, not limited to standard forms of social critique but are also found in the context of architecture, most notably, in the contemporary work of the American architects SITE.¹¹ At the time Les Carabiniers was released, SITE were developing an approach to architecture that they themselves defined as a reaction to the architecture of the modern movement. The argument underlying this reaction was their interpretation of modern architecture as insipid and based on a functional language that a contemporary public did not understand or like.¹² Resorting to what they called ancient concepts, with respect to the very definition of architecture itself, they proposed that for buildings to become architecture, they had to go beyond function; for SITE, buildings become architecture when they communicate.¹³

According to this definition, the buildings of antiquity are perfect examples of architecture in that they are immediately understandable as places of public importance. What they communicate is their own cultural significance.¹⁴ As such, SITE define architecture as special places or celebratory buildings.¹⁵ An important characteristic of this celebratory architecture is its employment of additional decorative elements whose role it is to help in the communication process. The pediment of a classical building is a prime example; not only does it help to communicate but it also makes the building more interesting. On the basis of this definition, the architecture of the Modern Movement and its rejection of decoration in favour of functionality was seen as a type of simple and mundane pre-architectural phenomenon.

Identifying this distinction makes it possible to draw parallels with some of the comments made earlier, with regard to Neorealist film. Considered to represent a basic and simple cinematic language, Neorealism and its New Wave derivatives can appear crude and boring in comparison to the hyper-intensity and hyperreality we have become accustomed to on the silver screen. From this point of view, the rejection by the 1970s public of functional modern architecture, and the concomitant development of the spectacular architecture of SITE, can be considered directly analogous to the reaction of the general public against the type of boring realism portrayed in the work of Godard.¹⁶

However, in addition to employing a language that was too basic and simple for contemporary cultural tastes, modern architecture was, according to SITE, one dimensional; the architectural profession insisting on total autonomy and independence in the realisation of architectural projects. By contrast, SITE stressed the complete fusion of architecture and art. Criticising an architectural tendency to only accept a place for external disciplines such as sculpture, if it restrained itself to a secondary role, SITE suggested that postmodern western societies showed a longing for spectacle; the incorporation of diverse decorative features in architecture and a clear sensibility towards the celebration of concepts such as ambiguity and hybridisation.¹⁷

Focusing on this concept sets up another, very different, analogy between Les Carabiniers and the work of SITE. SITE’s continual fusion of art and architecture meant that their work always incorporated references to fields outside the strict confines of architecture: sculpture, painting and graphic design, for example. Operating as a form of intertextuality, this characteristic inevitably engages the public in a game of cross–referencing, which on a surface level is similar to what one finds in Godard’s work. Taking a humoristic approach to these references however, the artistic-architectural fusion SITE employed often involved a sensorial confusion that paralleled the specifics of Michelangelo’s comic confusion as well.

The iconic works of SITE in the 1970s were often deliberately intended to play with our understanding of a building’s physicality. In The Peeling Project, 1972, this manifested itself in a design based on turning the facade of a showroom into an artificial layer that appeared to be coming away from the structure behind (Fig. 4). The brick facade of the building was designed in such a way as to literally peel away from its support, much like wallpaper may do from a wall suffering from damp. This optical illusion was created through the use of reinforced brickwork and a cement resin and was intended to give the impression that the facade could, at any moment, collapse on top of the visitor loitering underneath. Producing effects analogous to those of Michelangelo, reactions of building’s visitors ranged from curiosity to bewilderment and, at times, comic fear.

This same illusory game was repeated the following year in a project titled Indeterminate Façade (Houston, Texas); a project commissioned by the same retail client, ironically named Best Company. The facade of this building was again the principal arena of play for the architects. In this case, the facade wall projected beyond the roof of the building and its brickwork, once again reinforced, was laid in such a way that it appeared to be caught in the act of collapsing.¹⁸ In 1977, SITE experimented with another variation on this same theme in the construction of the Notch Project (Sacramento, California) (Fig. 5). In this case, the company’s customers enter through a crack in the principal block of the building, at one of its corners, because the building appears to have sheared apart, with one part of the structure slipping away from the main frame. Thus, once again the visitor wishing to enter the building has to pass under a structure that is apparently about to collapse.¹⁹

Figure 4: The Peeling Project, SITE architects, 1972.

Figure 5: The Notch Project, SITE architects, 1977.

Clearly intended to manipulate the perception and expectations of the public, these projects not only play with concepts of art and architecture but also with the ambiguity of the real and the unreal. As with other projects designed by SITE during this period, it was not uncommon to see visitors, normally customers, caught between states of curiosity and fear when confronted with an illusion they had never seen before. Reminiscent of the scenes of Michelangelo in Les Carabiniers, this type of public reaction to humorous commercial buildings is the consequence of an architecture conceived to confront the perceived functionality of the Modern Movement. In contrast to theories of modernism, SITE proposed that architecture had no obligation to be honest to its function. In fact, it did not even have the obligation to be real. What they proposed was that contemporary communicative architecture had to create special places and celebratory buildings through the employment of whatever vocabulary was appropriate to its society and cultural context, in this case the world of consumer capitalism.

Although SITE themselves claimed that their playful, wistful and, at times, comic architecture was a serious social and political commentary on the modernist establishment, this argument was often ignored by the architectural fraternity who ridiculed their work as a supercilious and faddish approach, as a mere reflection, rather than commentary, on the society of the spectacle. Considered as an architecture whose perspective operates in parallel to that found in Les Carabiniers however, their work may be opened up to a slightly more nuanced reading. Rather than simply representing a rejection of functionalism, and a preference for the commercial and the spectacular, it also becomes interpretable as an ironic commentary on those selfsame social preferences.

Just as the French New Wave rejected the solemnity of the French filmmaking establishment in favour of commercial auteurs, such as Chaplin and Hitchcock, so too can we read SITE as rejecting established architectural norms and embracing commercialism. Similarly, in this light, it becomes arguable to suggest that just as the New Wave’s moves in this direction only heightened their ability to criticise the commercial world, so too did SITE’s. Operating as a multi-layered meta-narrative akin to Les Carabiniers, its referencing of art, its playful inversions of architectural convention and its memorable manipulation of public expectations can all be read as an ironic criticism of a society that preferred the unreal, the hyperreal and the simulacrum over reality, and not necessarily a mere reflection of that society.

The potential power of such a reading is indeed heightened when we consider that this eye-catching, memorable architecture was operating, indeed could only operate, in the purely consumerist field of retail architecture; its multiple manipulations of norms and evidently self-referential comments about its own artificiality resonating ever more loudly in the inevitably artificial context of consumer culture. Read in this light, the work of SITE becomes not only a criticism of modernist functionalism, it also potentially operates a cutting criticism of its opposite. By filtering our reading of SITE through the ironic, critical and, at times, sardonic framework of Jean-Luc Godard’s Les Carabiniers, we can perhaps attribute to SITE a more subversive interpretation than is often credited to them from within the architectural establishment.

Notes

1 Bordwell, David, and Thompson, Kristin. Film Art – An Introduction (6th edition), McGraw Hill Publishers, New York, 2001. p. 421.

2 There are numerous texts on Godard and French New Wave. For an overview of the works of Godard, see: Brody, Richard. Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard, Metropolitan Books, New York, 2008.

3 For an overview of the historical development and context of the French New Wave and its general cinematographic characteristics, see: Neupert, Richard. A History of the French New Wave Cinema (2nd edition), University of Wisconsin Press, Wisconsin, 2007.

4 Dipple, Elizabeth. The Unresolvable Plot – Reading Contemporary Fiction, Routledge and Keegan Paul, England, 1988. p. 119.

5 Eco, Umberto. The Role of the Reader, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1979. p. 23.

6 Italian Neorealism has been documented by numerous authors. For an historical overview, see: Wagstaff, Christopher. Italian Neorealist Cinema, University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 2007.

7 In the 1920s, the continuity system developed its complex series of rules regarding mise-en-scène, lighting, filming and montage, all of which work together to produce a form of clear and coherent narration. According to these standard rules, a film should only show actions and present dialogue relevant to the development of the story; it should not have alien sounds that distract the viewer from the main action, and the lighting should clearly reveal relevant information such as the expression on the face of the principal actor. For readers unfamiliar with film, see: Bordwell, David, and Thompson, Kristin. Film Art – An Introduction (6th edition), McGraw Hill Publishers, New York, 2001.

8 These ideas were extensively developed in numerous texts by Baudrillard. In particular, see: Baudrillard, Jean. Simulations, Semiotext[e], New York, 1983.

9 Eco, Umberto. Faith in Fakes – Travels in Hyperreality, Gruppo Editoriale fabbri-Bompiani, Sonzogno, Etas S.p.A. Milan, 1973.

10 For a brief introductory explanation of this story from the history of film, see: Whiting, Jim. Auguste & Louis Lumiere: Pioneers in Cinema Film (Unchartered, Unexplored, and Unexplained), Mitchell Lane Publications, London, 2005. p. 23–25.

11 Formed at the end of the sixties, the interdisciplinary group SITE was composed of the artists and architects Alison Sky, Emilio Sousa, Michelle Stone and James Wines. They began to build ironic, humoristic and highly polemic architectural projects at the beginning of the 1970s. See: Wines, James. SITE: Identity in Density, Images Publishing Dist Ac, New York, 2006.

12 Wines, James. Narrative Architecture, Architecture and Urbanism, E. 8612, Tokyo, December, 1986. p. 11.

13 Ibid. p. 10.

14 Sky, A., Sousa, E., Stone, M., Wines, J. (SITE). SITE Architecture as Art, Academy Editions, London, 1980. p. 14.

15 Ibid. p. 14.

16 The rejection of Modernism by the public along these lines has been put forward and developed extensively by Charles Jencks in various texts. In particular, see: Jencks, Charles. The Language of Post Modern Architecture, Academy Editions, London, 1977.

17 This argument was first put forward by Robert Venturi. See: Venturi, Robert. Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, The Museum of Modern Art Press, New York, 1966.

18 Sky, A., Sousa, E., Stone, M., Wines, J. (SITE). SITE Architecture as Art, Ibid. p. 25.

19 Ibid. p. 24.

The architecture of Diller and Scofidio: The screen and surveillance

Das Experiment. 2001

Oliver Hirschbiegel

Producer: Typhoon Films. (Germany).

Das Experiment was the directorial debut of one of Germany’s up-and-coming directors, Oliver Hirschbiegel, who later went on to direct films including The Invasion, Five Minutes from Heaven and the Hollywood success, Downfall. Hirschbiegel’s introduction to film came from his background in painting and graphic arts and, as a result, his work often has a quirky visual feel. He studied at the Hamburg University of Fine Arts, directed his first film in 1986, a TV movie called Das Go! Projekt, and won the Bavarian Film Award for Best Director in 2001 with Das Experiment. Taking the events surrounding the Stanford Prison Experiment, 1971,¹ as its starting point, Das Experiment is a psychological portrayal of the power of socially determined roles to suppress and/or augment personal psychological tendencies. It shows the human potential for violence, depicts our fall into subservience, portrays the use of humiliation in human relations and gives us an insight into power struggles between conflicting personalities. It is, by its very nature, a representation of the human psyche under pressure.²

Using the Stanford Experiment as its basic template, the film documents a prison simulation in which members of the public take on the roles of prisoners and guards in a two-week case study. Just as in the reality of the Stanford Experiment, the volunteers in Das Experiment do not know whether they will be guards or prisoners, they are told they will be isolated from the outside world for two weeks, and that, once assigned their roles, violence is prohibited. The prisoners are also assigned numbers and are referred to by that number, the aim being to heighten the sense of alienation that is central to the roles they play. In addition, all the protagonists of the experiment are relatively young men.³ Although seriously criticised, on both moral and professional grounds, the results of the Stanford Experiment were claimed by its lead psychologist Philip Zimbardo to prove his hypothesis, that is, we take on social roles and modes of behaviour that are, in many cases, stronger and more dominating than personal character traits. This is precisely the message Hirschbiegel repeats, albeit through nuancing it in his portrayal of two of the film’s principal protagonists: Tarek, prisoner number 77, played by Moritz Bleibtreu, and prisoner number 38, played by Christian Berkel, an undercover journalist and member of the German armed forces, respectively.

In this sense, both the real experiment and the film version of it bring up ideas found in the work of Jean Paul Sartre some decades before; particularly, the idea central to Being and Nothingness, that our engagement with socially determined roles is often a way of avoiding responsibility.⁴ Perhaps the more obvious theoretical reference made by the film is to the ideas of Michel Foucault who, in Discipline and Punish, 1975, offers his archaeological-like analysis of the changes to the penal system at the beginning of the 19th century. Foucault’s principal argument is that the shift from public execution and torture to gentle punishment, and finally to the prison system, was not so much a result of an enlightened age, but rather the result of a shift in emphasis in the tactics of control and power; the imposition of discipline being seen as more effective than punishment.⁵ One of the key aspects of this was observation; a characteristic that was to take very literal form in Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon prison, with its central concern for the concept of total observation (Fig. 1).⁶ Being constantly observed, obliged to follow strict and all-encompassing rules and denied all freedom of action, it was expected that the architecture of the prison would help indoctrinate prisoners into appropriate forms of behaviour. As identified by Foucault, it became a model for military buildings, schools, hospitals and workhouses, all of which were engaged in the development of docile bodies.⁷

Applied on a wider social scale, the creation of docile bodies through observation and the imposition of strict behavioural rules were seen as a perfect social system for the creation of a docile majority that would work in factories, fight in wars, toil in the fields, vote (or not) according to convention, and generally behave in accordance with the desires of the ruling classes. The genius of Bentham’s idea, however, was not in its physical layout per se, but rather the psychological effects it was able to induce. In the Panopticon, control does not have to be direct, it is simply implied; prisoners would never know whether they were actually being watched or not and that they would, in consequence, practically discipline themselves, as the possibility of being seen is a sufficient deterrent to miscreant behaviour.⁸ By denying the inmates access to this knowledge and keeping them constantly under the threat of surveillance, this revolutionary piece of architecture became a metaphor that was used by Foucault to describe the implicit forms of control practiced by the contemporary state upon its members; a metaphor that remains in common usage today, particularly in the context of buildings and urban environments monitored by CCTV.⁹

All of these issues are dealt with in Das Experiment, which, in addition to documenting the psychological effects of the role-playing experiment, reveals multiple and complex aspects about observation and its influence on both human behaviour and, to an extent, architecture. One could argue that in Das Experiment we are witness to a five-way game of surveillance: the normal filming of scenes in which we, the audience, observe the action on screen; the observations of the scientific team who monitor both the guards and prisoners through CCTV; the physical and CCTV surveillance of prisoners by guards; the psychological observations carried out on the participants before the experiment that we see in video interviews; and the black-and-white images from the hidden camera smuggled into the prison by Tarek, the film’s anti-hero and agent provocateur. Here, the centrally designed Panopticon, has been replaced by a multi-layered video monitoring system.¹⁰ The effects on behaviour of this level of surveillance are literal. The experiment team become complacently reliant on complete technological coverage; the prisoners speak in hushed voices, sneak messages to one another and hide from nothing but a camera; whilst the guards, knowing they too are observed in given locations, adapt their behaviour as necessary depending on the space.

Figure 1: Bentham’s Panopticon.

Set in an institutional office building, the film shows us various architectural layers; the offices of the building itself, its underground service spaces, the false walls and ceilings of the mock-up prison and the interstitial spaces behind its fake construction. Designed for filmic observation at a meta-level, Das Experiment shows the onstage spaces of the set and its backstage artificiality. This complex and layered presentation of the space is multiplied even further by the forms of filmic observation at play. Using different film stock, standard 35mm film, CCTV video footage and black-and-white hidden camera footage, we get a complex visual mix; the CCTV footage often gives us oblique angles, or overhead shots, and is generally interlaced with footage from other CCTV cameras. The footage filmed from Tarek’s hidden camera, located somewhere in his eye glasses, creates the effect of a moving camera that is sometimes jerky in its movements and quick to change its angle of view. Similarly, the standard 35mm footage often employs wide angle lenses, distorting pans and zooms and a number of other unusual movement techniques (Figs. 2–3). The result of intermingling the set’s intricate arrangement of spaces (that at one point Hirschbiegel reveals in a physical model) with this visually rich cinematographic tapestry is a complex spatio-visual web that is characteristic of his work. Multiplying our reading of the space, it echoes some of the hybrid filmic and architectural projects of Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio.

Set up in 1979, the studio of Diller and Scofidio joined forces with Charles Renfro as a partner in 2004 and have begun to move away from early provocative video installations and performance art projects to focus more exclusively on standard architectural projects; albeit projects in which visioning technologies still have a significant role to play.¹¹ One example of their more experimental engagement with architecture and film was their 1998 exhibition Para-Site at MOMA, New York. For this piece, Diller and Scofidio placed video surveillance cameras in three distinct locations, including the entrance of the gallery, and linked them to real-time projectors in the display spaces inside. The piece had a very literal political or social message regarding the level of surveillance in contemporary societies, but also raised questions regarding our reliance on the camera and the conversion of real everyday actions into objects of art or entertainment. Here, simple, mundane and unintended actions were automatically associated with art, and the everyday activity of CCTV surveillance is turned into the artistic act of creation. More importantly in the context of this essay, our engagement with physical space became mediated and blurred as sites of action dislocated but reunified through the lens and the screen.¹²

This blurring was not only seen in the intentions of the artists and the nature of the piece, but was also evident in the behaviour of the public. Once visitors to the gallery were aware of the artistically orientated surveillance they were subject to, their behaviour immediately became more self-conscious. Echoing the effects underlined in Das Experiment, in a less intimidating context, people looked and looked away, moved out of view or, alternatively, turned their backs. Some openly performed for the camera and, in doing so, displayed a reaction also portrayed by Hirschbiegel whose characters initially play and taunt the guards through the surveillance equipment of their mock-up cells. One could say that, finding themselves under surveillance, both the prisoners in Das Experiment and the visitors to the MOMA exhibition ceased being subjects in an experiment or visitors to a museum, and momentarily became actors; the artifice of science and art blurring with the reality of the everyday on a variety of levels.

Figure 2: Standard 35mm footage.

Figure 3: Split screen CCTV.

Similar cinematic dislocations and reunifications of architectural space, on the one hand, and concomitant modifications to behaviour, on the other, were repeated in Jump Cuts, a Diller and Scofidio installation staged at a more conventional architectural location: the Cineplex complex in San Jose (California, 1995) (Fig. 4). Again, this piece involved the use of cameras to monitor the public. Video cameras were placed on the building’s interior and a series of twelve TV screens were hung from a temporary framework on the building’s exterior facade. The internal cameras were positioned above, or to the sides, of the multiple escalators located on the inside and consequently filmed people from above, but also in profile. As with Para-Site, behaviour within the architectural set was conditioned by the use of cameras as a surrogate for physical observation, visitors either hiding or performing. Beyond questions of behaviour, and the conversion of physical space into a cinematographically observed phenomenon, however, we see here the creation of a literal and visually complex cinematic architecture.

By effectively turning the facade into a screen, Diller and Scofidio electronically turned the building inside out and upside down, before reconfiguring it as a series of images on the outside.¹³ The screen effect was one of horizontal and vertical movement in a lineal format on the facade, as the screens were arranged so that the movement of the people always flowed in the same direction, whether it had been filmed from above of the side. Mixed with images from films, the building was animated by a series of moving human images that turned the static physical object into a complex mediated rearrangement of its interior space. Just as with the MOMA installation and, to an extent Das Experiment, Jump Cuts creates a complex, intermingled cinematic architectural aesthetic, a hybrid physical and mediated experience, and, in addition, invokes specific changes to behaviour that raise broader questions about the nature and effects of video surveillance in contemporary cultures.

A less adventurous design that involved a similar combination of filmic imagery and physical building was their conversion of the Brasserie restaurant at the foot of Mies Van de Rohe’s Seagram Building, New York.¹⁴ After the destruction by fire of Philip Johnson’s original design in 1995, the completely new Diller and Scofidio project was opened the following year. Occupying a solid concrete shell with no windows to the outside, the restaurant basically turns its back on the exterior. In the Diller and Scofidio project, this characteristic is turned into the design’s principal feature. By setting up a mediated interaction between the inside and the outside through, what for them is, a very typical use of CCTV cameras, they set up another mediated interaction with architectural space. Video cameras are placed outside the building to monitor the street and entrance to the restaurant, and the resultant footage is relayed on a bank of fifteen monitors placed behind the bar on the inside.

Figure 4: Diller and Scofidio Jump Cuts: cinematic architectural facade.

Given the positioning of the cameras, the interior monitors tend to show images of guests who are about to enter the restaurant and, as a result, the public again become aware of surveillance as their arrival is announced on the inside. The same self-consciousness, documented in their other projects, inevitably follows whilst, visually, the exterior is again reconnected, and blurred, with the interior. As with the Jump Cuts installation, their playful use of visioning technology literally turns the building inside out and creates the type of dual engagement between physical space and filmic image that characterises all their work and finds clear resonances in Das Experiment; just as