The following piece is a continuation of a series, Behind the Frame by Chris Rogers, which analyzes how the built environment has been represented on the big screen. Interiors will post future pieces on INTJournal.com.

Reality is usually crucial for a building to be represented on screen. But architecture in film can be less than real – can in fact be altered, warped or wildly distorted – and still convince.

Just a few years after cinema began, the Expressionist movement emerged in Germany. Explicitly subjective, it sought to show the emotional effect of a mood, thought or act in its art and frequently twisted norms to achieve this. Films made within this aesthetic were no exception, and the newly-invented horror genre showcased the style fully. Robert Wiene's The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and F. W. Murnau's Nosferatu both showed buildings with unrecognisable perspective or tilted planes to depict out-of-kilter situations and individuals. Indeed the architecture in such scenes often appears shaped to fit the person featured, further enforcing the link between interiors of structures and interiors of the minds of those who inhabit them. Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, though slightly later and in a different genre, is undoubtedly aligned with this school of thought; its titular city is drawn from contemporary urban planning, the skyscrapers of Modernist architects and the perspectives of architectural delineator Hugh Ferris but is exaggerated and clearly the vision of its technocratic master Joh Fredersen.

Much fantastic architecture in film is based on literature. From the world of children’s books The Wizard of Oz and Mary Poppins are obvious examples, with the setting of the latter based on the ideas of Australian-born P.L. Travers and especially American studio head Walt Disney. The homely Cherry Tree Lane, impressionistic cathedral steps and sepulchral City bank thus comprise an idealised representation of London in Edwardian times. Jim Henson’s dark teenage dream Labyrinth might have been such a book. In its key scene heroine Sarah seeks to retrieve her baby brother from an impossible staircase that – channelling Dutch graphic artist M.C. Escher – both connects and separates the siblings, as Goblin King Jareth enjoy her torment.

Exploration of the id and the ego in adult novels has permitted more subtle alterations of the built environment for the cinema. Francis Ford Coppola looked to the battle for hearts and minds that is Bram Stoker’s Dracula, giving it a background that is highly artificial yet relevant. His Castle Dracula is modified from a print by Symbolist artist František Kupka that was itself inspired by a Poe poem in which a pilgrim journeying through a desolate land finds a giant statue of Night on a black throne. A more relatable though still telling edifice features in King Vidor’s adaptation of The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand. Espousing her philosophy of “man as a heroic being” who acts in his own interest, bullish architect Howard Roark refuses to compromise for clients, planners or the public, eventually going on trial to defend his beliefs. At the climax – a fitting word, give the obvious Freudian reading – Roark awaits his lover atop the colossal Wynand Building, his greatest triumph. Famously egotistical architect Frank Lloyd Wright has been suggested as Rand’s model for Roark; he was certainly approached to design the buildings for the film but demanded too high a fee.

New treatments of classic comic book characters have formed a sub-genre that treads a line between attractive fantasy and gritty reality. Tim Burton began the trend with his version of Batman, engaging British production designer Anton Furst to create a dark, looming Gotham City from real-world sources. The overall form of the Flugelheim Museum is based on the ARK Nishina Dental Clinic in Kyoto by Shin Takamatsu but with its circular window copied from the skylight of Wright’s Guggenheim Museum in New York. A staircase owes much to Belgian Art Nouveau architect Victor Horta. The exposed iron girders in Vicki Vale’s apartment reference that city’s buildings from the early 20th century, including Penn Station. The feel might be termed Machine Gothic but Furst himself described this “as if hell erupted through the pavement and kept on going.”

Sometimes what is seen on screen reflects a director’s personal take on a particular city. To ensure the thoughts of his lead characters were to the fore in One From The Heart, Francis Ford Coppola fashioned a heightened Las Vegas almost entirely from studio sets, miniatures and painted and neon-lit backgrounds. Walter Hill consciously brought together the film beats he most enjoyed to make the plot but also the urban setting for Streets of Fire, whose elevated trains, diners and nightclubs merge aspects of Chicago, Los Angeles and New York. That city is the setting for Eyes Wide Shut, but Stanley Kubrick’s aversion to international travel and the psychodrama of the source novella saw carefully selected and suitably modified London streets and a large backlot set, repeatedly re-dressed, depict a very subjective ‘reality’.

Of other cities, two films view successive periods of post-war London through a stylised lens to give renderings that accord more with myth than fact. The culture of jazz and coffee bars is realised for Julien Temple’s Absolute Beginners through dreamlike sequences and a reproduction Notting Hill built on the backlot of Shepperton, complemented by sets and costumes just the wrong side of garish. The ‘Swinging London' seen in the opening musical number of Jay Roach’s Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery is a knowing confection made from perceived imagery of the era and another backlot set that is obviously of New York, used with little more than pastel paint and a sprinkling of London icons.

Both bear as much resemblance to the architectural truth of the British capital as the works of those German Expressionists did to their own cities. But when the results are immersive, powerful and memorable, who is to say which is the more real?

Chris Rogers writes, speaks and creates tours about architecture and other aspects of visual culture. He has written three books, including How to Read London – A crash course in London architecture (Ivy Press, 2017), a publisher's best-seller. His work and thoughts on architecture, film, art, design and television can be found at www.chrismrogers.net

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