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.

The events of most films take place in a wide range of settings, from different types and sizes of inside spaces to a variety of outdoor ones. But in some productions the narrative is structured in part around, biased toward or indeed confined entirely to a handful of rooms. This restriction, and the manner in which it is handled, brings a new concentration on architecture and its ability to enhance cinematic drama.

We encounter the rooms of our home more often than those of any other building. The home represents safety and contentment, though many films have questioned those assumptions by treating the spaces within in particular ways. This includes limiting characters’ movements, contrasting their existences and disrupting the sanctity of that home.

Three women from three different periods who are nevertheless linked by a Virginia Woolf novel are compared in The Hours. The lives of a California housewife in the 1950s, a New York editor in the 2000s and Woolf herself in 1920s suburban London are decades apart but director Stephen Frears frames them within a single day and focuses on the mundanity of their domestic circumstances – a developer’s tract house, the dullness outside the British capital, baking a cake – to help construct a shared sense of entrapment and monotony. In Chris Gorak’s thriller Right At Your Door, a bioweapon attack occurs whilst a suburban couple are separated. Fearing contamination the husband seals their house with plastic sheeting and, when his wife returns, refuses to let her in. As each pleads for the other to yield to their perceived truth in an unclear situation the barrier is repeatedly broken, mended and moved. It and the spaces it creates or modifies function as metaphors for the security of their relationship as well as their home. A twist ending emphasises this.

Visitors impinge and intruders despoil, so murder within the home might be deemed the ultimate violation. The real-life killings supposedly by Albert DeSalvo that are fictionalised in The Boston Strangler all took place in the victims’ homes, and director Richard Fleischer underlines this by a careful and particular use of the split screen technique in vogue at the time. With the screen displaying simultaneous views of the victim, her home and the approach of DeSalvo, the very ordinariness of the women and their vulnerability is made patent. Including, too, the moment of discovery for each victim and the reactions of those who find them adds to the horror despite the measured gaze of these sequences (in which one screen is often, if briefly, black).

Residences can take other forms, and some of these are seen in films that feature multiple spaces that are all alike – apartments, guest rooms, prison cells. Writers and directors treat this identicality like a picture frame, allowing the characters of those inside to emerge.

Luxury apartments within a single building are the target for a gang of burglars in Sidney Lumet’s The Anderson Tapes. The same from the outside, they prove to be diverse within; their owners too are different, being compliant, aggressive, outgoing or resourceful. That this is paralleled by the criminals themselves, who are identically-clad and -masked but with very variant personalities, adds a further layer of meaning and for both, the deviation later proves significant. The hotel is a cliché of anonymity, which makes the shocks concealed behind the door of room 237 of the Overlook so exceptional in The Shining. Danny’s free-flowing tricycle journey through the public corridors beforehand, courtesy of Garret Brown’s innovative Steadicam work, sets up the impact of its being opened in Stanley Kubrick’s claustrophobic film. When FBI profiler Will Graham interviews imprisoned serial murderer Hannibal Lecktor in Manhunter, the similarity between the two men is brought out not only through the killer’s taunting of the investigator but by director Michael Mann ensuring the bars of Lecktor’s cell appear in the same position in each shot whether the subject is Graham or Lecktor.

Contraction of a film’s scale usually occurs organically and closes-in the action momentarily, albeit often achieving effects out of all proportion to that duration. With the Cohen brothers’ No Country For Old Men, for example, key scenes of confrontation and violence occur in increasingly enclosed spaces: motel rooms, vehicles, even air conditioning ducting. Fantasy, however, generally permits a more stylised and unrelenting check on freedom of movement, sustaining the effect.

Depiction of the impersonal workplace is taken to its logical extreme in the black comedy that is Terry Gilliam’s Brazil. Downtrodden ministerial employee Sam Lowry settles in to a tiny, dark but available office, only to discover that what seems to be a two-legged desk secured to the wall is in fact the standard item whose other half is being used by the occupier of the office next door. The battle to claim as much of this movable status symbol as possible that follows satirises the popular perception of the office where every paperclip is fought over but also echoes the more serious theme of psychological escape at the core of the story.

Literal escape is the intention of two films where spatial compression and oppression enable and enrich the action. For the eponymous THX 1138 in George Lucas’s expansion of his student film, the sterility of white corridors, concrete tunnels and industrial facilities presents an airless, stifling conformity even before an overlay of social and governmental control; that the city itself proves to be underground further makes the point. Characters in The Cube, directed by Vincenzo Natali, find themselves inside a life-sized puzzle box composed of a seemingly endless number of cube-shaped rooms, identical save for being one of five colours. With no clear path let alone exit, the discovery that many of the rooms contain lethal mechanisms drives the quest to new heights.

Dreams, fears and desires, notions of trust, betrayal and compromise; all can be revealed in architectural close up.

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

Think Pieces

Beyond the Frame #18: Close up

Interiors