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.

Film has represented buildings in use and those that have been lost but between those states lies another: the ruin. Artists have long been attracted to the romance and aesthetic qualities of abandoned structures, whilst poets wrote of grand architecture ravaged by time, hubris or divine intervention. With the invention of cinema filmmakers, too, found inspiration in conflict, disaster and fantasy to explore the buildings man has left – or might leave – behind.

Architectural past and present are weighed in The Long Good Friday, as a gangster seeks to redevelop the deserted quays and empty warehouses of London’s docklands through a partnership with his transatlantic counterparts. Increasingly violent clashes disturb the deal when personal drama is subsumed by political reality. Another city with a seagoing past and a future of uncertainty is Venice, which provides both setting and metaphor in Don’t Look Now. Its crumbling palazzos, flood-prone canals and an old church under restoration are intimately interwoven with the fears and desires of a couple mourning the death – by drowning – of their young daughter.

The devastation wrought by war, and especially the events of World War 2, has been an obvious spur. In Saving Private Ryan and Cross of Iron, a small group of soldiers engages in combat within an everyday setting ruined by war. In a town square and a factory respectively, buildings reduced to shells and the very earth torn by explosions stand for the wider war and the experiences of the men themselves. When the fighting starts, its effect on this urban fabric anticipates the fates of many of the latter. Eventual Allied victory allowed cinema to depict the impact of war on an entire city, with one in particular attracting attention. In Berlin Express, The Train and Germany Year Zero, audiences saw at a simple, visceral level how the capital of the Third Reich had been laid waste. Yet these films can also be read as a rebuttal of the theory – practised by the Nazi regime – that buildings should be designed to decay majestically over time, to be fêted like those of past eras. Later coverage of Berlin’s architecture centred on the Cold War but continued to feature the aftermath of its ‘hot’ predecessor, with Funeral in Berlin and Wings of Desire stressing that ideology and economics left buildings and districts in a ruinous state decades on.

Extrapolating from other post-war concerns, this time those felt by the emerging ecological movement and broader counter culture, a series of films imagined the consequences of a range of environmental and socio-political disasters. Many featured the ruination of the population as much as buildings, and New York was chosen to suffer most often.

Horror parable Wolfen was shot in the South Bronx, where a church was built and demolished for the film but a decade of economic hardship, rampant crime and ‘white flight’ had left entire streets of derelict apartment blocks as ready-made ruins. Revealingly, director Michael Wadleigh left the industry after the film’s release in favour of touring the developing world and activism in sustainability. Action drama The Ultimate Warrior conjured its atmosphere of starving groups dependant on painstakingly-nurtured roof-top crops through careful framing on location and use of a more controllable California backlot set. Cyberpunk thriller Escape from New York also denudes the city of its characteristic overcrowding, acidic commentary on one of the Big Apple’s distinctive characteristics.

That film presents the Statue of Liberty as the headquarters of Manhattan Island’s militarised gaolers, a wry subversion far subtler than her severed head appearing in the pulp-ish poster. But such is the importance of Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi’s monumental sculpture that even part of her, in the right context, serves as cinematic shorthand for the brutal curtailment of the American Dream. This is true of the torch in A.I. Artificial Intelligence, the crown in Planet of the Apes (via an overhead shot to which The Day After Tomorrow later pays explicit homage) and the head again in Deep Impact and Cloverfield. Presciently, perhaps, the actual statue’s head was displayed in a Paris park a few years before being shipped to America to top the body.

Much less commonly visited in these and other films with a destructive theme is the nation’s capital and democratic centre, making appearances by Washington, DC’s own architectural icons in Logan’s Run and Oblivion all the more powerful. Pointedly, an overgrown Lincoln Memorial and Capitol, listing Washington Monument and cratered Pentagon are not merely ruined but rendered incomprehensible to those who see them, all meaning and connection with their original purpose lost. This level of symbolism may explain its rarity.

Fantasy permits speculation about civilisations real and fictional through the medium of the ruin. In Alien the abandoned spacecraft is as unknowable as the creature, formed as it is from material that is biological as well as structural. The cathedral-like architecture of its undercroft features a grim inversion - a crypt full of eggs rather than bodies. Centuries earlier an abandoned stone tower becomes the home-in-exile of the eponymous Highlander, living a hard but peaceful existence with his wife. Later destroyed in a crucial fight between his mentor and his enemy, the shattered remains thereafter emphasise the pain of immortality for Connor MacLeod. The built achievements of entire peoples in South America, the Middle East and Africa have been lost to time in Raiders of the Lost Ark and Congo. Buried temples, cities and industry await discovery by those using aircraft and computers, each shown as the advanced technology of their day.

If ruins show where man has come from, they can also help explore where he might be going. The anime Ghost in the Shell is set in a future where human consciousness can be enhanced, transferred and hacked, and yet its climax takes place in a derelict museum from the previous century but one, situated in the oldest part of town. A police officer and a walking tank do battle – she is a cyborg and it is manned, whilst the prize is another form of being altogether. Behind them all looms a great stone relief, a Tree of Life whose branches depict stages in human evolution. Will each be discarded? Where next?

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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Interiors