August 03, 2020

Beyond the Frame #19: Viewfinder

August 03, 2020/ Chris Rogers

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.

Famous structures appear in the background of many films. But when an actor enters a celebrated building – Buckingham Palace, the White House, the Kremlin – they are almost always entering an illusion. Security considerations as well as the demands of the movie-making process ensure this, and the audience is happily if subconsciously complicit. Very occasionally, though, a well-known building plays itself, inside as well as out.

Cultural institutions have proven cautiously accessible to film-makers, not least because they are already accustomed to welcoming large numbers of visitors. Their position as custodians of unique and valuable objects does present its own challenges, however.

The Musée du Louvre in Paris is the most visited museum in the world, and both the earliest and the best-known films to be shot there integrate the complex into their stories beyond a simple choice of location. Jean-Paul Salomé became the first director to be given full inside access in order to shoot scenes for Belphégor, Le fantôme du Louvre. Real paintings and other exhibits were on display as his titular spirit, traditionally one of the seven princes of Hell, escaped from an Egyptian sarcophagus and penetrated the building itself before possessing a character. Five years later The Da Vinci Code told another fantastic story, with Ron Howard able to secure footage – only at night, and with no internal lighting – in the museum’s Denon wing and along its Grande Galerie. Other scenes were filmed on a studio set, where the Mona Lisa and a Carravaggio picture that plays a key part in the narrative were also simulated. The original of the latter remained safe in the Louvre where it was seen by even more visitors after the success of Howard’s film.

The most popular museum in London is the British Museum, whose Victorian building has had various additions since it opened. The title character of Jules Dassin's film Phaedra – an updating of the ancient Greek tragedy – first meets the stepson with whom she will have a doubly illicit affair in its Duveen Gallery, built between the world wars for redisplay of the Elgin Marbles or Parthenon Sculptures and to the same dimensions as the Athens temple from which they came. Filming in front of Greek antiquities whose presence in London was already controversial when the space housing them was built added a further charge; that Phaedra was played by Melina Mercouri, later elected to parliament in Greece and a prominent advocate of the Sculptures’ return, brought additional significance for subsequent audiences. The most famous architectural element of the Museum is the Round Reading Room, which before its closure was used by Karl Marx and George Orwell amongst others. As part of a sustained effort toward absolute realism during the making of The Day of the Jackal, echoing the source novel by former journalist Frederick Forsyth, Fred Zimmerman directed a short sequence within the Room. In it the titular hitman researches his intended target, General de Gaulle, in bound pages of the Le Figaro newspaper.

San Francisco's built heritage was woven into the action of Vertigo under Alfred Hitchcock, with filming in the shadow of the Golden Gate Bridge and elsewhere. A crucial scene occurs inside the city’s Legion of Honor art museum, when Madeleine Elster gazes at a portrait of the dead woman she feels a connection with. Unlike Howard at the Louvre, Hitchcock was able to work in the museum whilst it was open and employed a mix of artificial light and daylight, obtaining this via its skylight. Fittingly for a story about image and reality, the portrait was a prop that temporarily replaced one in the museum’s collection but the man interacting with actor James Stewart was an actual Legion security guard. And, given the film’s themes of death and reincarnation, it is perhaps notable that the Legion was founded to commemorate Californian soldiers who were killed in the Great War.

Buildings with governmental connections have been less amenable to use in this way but here too there are exceptions, adding weight to the films in which these moments occur.

The United Nations occupies a Modernist campus in New York, on the shore of the East River. Alongside the tower of the Secretariat is the ramp-like General Assembly Building, in use from 1952. Fifty years on Sydney Pollack was able to gain admission to its interior for the first time with The Interpreter. Sean Penn and Nicole Kidman sat in two of the 2,000 delegate seats, other actors took the speaker’s rostrum and podium and the atrium – which Hitchcock had had to reproduce via a matte painting for North By North West decades previously – bustled with extras.

Quite remarkably in view of its plot, Richard Donner was allowed to film The Omen inside and around the United States Chancery in Grosvenor Square, central London, and the director makes full use of this precious access. In a fluidly directed dialogue scene Gregory Peck, playing US ambassador Robert Thorn, is dropped off outside the building, walks in to the entrance lobby and then up to the main lobby and finally enters the lifts, all the time fending off the press. He receives Patrick Troughton as Father Brennan in the following scene, clearly shot in a north east corner office of the Chancery with the buildings of North Audley street and Upper Brook Street visible through the windows from various angles. Its coda has Brennan escorted out of the building and, on the main steps, caught in a photograph that will foretell his fate.

A civilian prison was maintained on Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay for thirty years, during which period none of its prisoners was ever proven to have escaped. This fearsome reputation and its list of notorious inmates ensured many films were set there, but it was only after the gaol closed in 1963 that shooting could take place at the location itself. Point Blank, The Enforcer, Escape from Alcatraz and, rather later, The Rock were all photographed on the island or inside the cellblocks. Such authenticity, aided by the decay which was a contributory factor in that closure, preserved Alcatraz’s undeniable atmosphere even when empty, especially for the releases before the island was opened to the general public.

If the Iron Curtain represented the ultimate barrier to filming, so fundamental was the division brought about by the Cold War, then Walter Hill’s action thriller Red Heat, made over a year before the fall of the Soviet Union, is a milestone. In it, by-the-book Russian police officer Ivan Danko (Arnold Schwarzenegger) travels to Chicago and forms an awkward partnership with brash American street cop Art Ridzik (James Belushi) to extradite a murderous drug dealer; each, inevitably, learns something from the other during what follows and they part as friends. The final shot contains the film’s coup de cinema: Schwarzenegger salutes the camera, walks off screen and reveals himself to be in what is unquestionably Red Square in Moscow, complete with a dusting of snow. The film was the first Western production permitted to shoot in this heavily symbolic location, although its other Eastern Europe exteriors were filmed in Helsinki.

These rare occurrences represent a return to the beginning of film, when its stories were told in the real places that people knew.

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

July 21, 2020

Los Angeles 2019: Book Preview

July 21, 2020/ Oliver Carmi

The following piece is a preview for the new book, Los Angeles 2019: The City of Blade Runner, written by Oliver Carmi. The book is available now on Amazon.

Blade Runner is more than a film, it is a universe.

Inspired by Philip K. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, it is a story about humanity. Far from Hollywood’s binary oppositions of good and evil, Blade Runner does not give any answers, rather, it asks questions: what makes us human? In a world environmentally and socially devastated, annihilating capitalistic consumerism reigns uncontested. Things, however, start to change when four Replicants, bioengineered androids, descend on earth, where they have long been ruled illegal, from the Off-world colonies. In the quest to meet their maker, Eldon Tyrell, the most powerful man of Los Angeles 2019, they will face Rick Deckard, a Blade Runner, a cop specifically trained to hunt them down. He, in turn, will face Rachael, a Replicant different from all others. Each character, in his own existential plight, grows conscious of himself and of those around him, contributing to a collective awakening.

The world of Los Angeles 2019, so real and so true, is genuinely designed in all its aspects, it is not simply a proscenium for the story, it is the story. Environmental apocalypse has left behind a world drenched in perpetual darkness and acid rain. Architectural neglect has left behind a world of decaying ruins and explicit patches. And finally, mass extraterrestrial migration has left behind a world of little people. A world, visually, emotionally and intellectually, as authentic as our own.

From a distance, the city appears to be a living hell, forever sprawling in the dark horizon. As in a Dantesque vision, slowly rising up towards the heights of the sky, the spaces become purer, cleaner, emptier, in what seems a heavenly ascent. So as Virgilio guided Dante from the depths of hell, to the heights of heaven, passing through purgatory, the book acts as a guide in this similar journey, from the apparently infernal underworld, to the apparently sacred over-world, passing through the “land” in-between.

However, only after a closer look, in the crevices of the textured reality that Los Angeles 2019 really is, do we realize that everything is upside down. The gold and white heaven is really an aseptic hell, and the fiery Inferno is simply earth, as it has always been, alive, delirious, chaotic. As fallen angels, from the sky above, the Replicants land upon the fiery earth in a desperate search for more life, but all they seem to find is death. However, their mortal descent is not in vain, for their vital force has shaken the base of the technocratic power and has brought a spark, or better, a drop, of life to the infernal city.

Now more than ever, in a world of violence and fear, can the urban vision of Blade Runner, serve as an insight of our own society, of the direction we are taking, and of the architectural implications that will arise. An architectural and social analysis of the spaces of the city of Blade Runner.

Oliver Carmi is the author of Los Angeles 2019: The City of Blade Runner.

July 08, 2020

Beyond the Frame #18: Close up

July 08, 2020/ Chris Rogers

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.

June 09, 2020

Beyond the Frame #17: Fisheye Lens

June 09, 2020/ Chris Rogers

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?

May 01, 2020

Beyond the Frame #16: Director's Cut - Lewis Gilbert

May 01, 2020/ Chris Rogers

Lewis Gilbert, who died two years ago aged 97, directed some of Britain’s best-loved films, including Reach for the Sky, Alfie and Educating Rita. Always humane and often featuring wry humour, his work was also distinguished by an unusual sensitivity to place. Whether at home or abroad, on location or the backlot, Gilbert’s interiors and exteriors play an integral role in his films.

The sub-genre called film noir originated in America during the 1940s but was quickly taken up by the Old World (a Frenchman coined the term). The British national character – reserve to the point of repression, a dry sense of humour – was well-suited to these sardonic thrillers, whilst global conflict justified the presence of guns. In The Good Die Young four men come together in a pub, each needing a thousand pounds and one proposing a robbery to obtain the money. This is executed in a night-time scene introduced by a slow crane down into a city street and in which a bridge and the façades of buildings are used by Gilbert to define his arena. Though clearly studio-bound, Gilbert nevertheless conjures a coherent urban realm through an understanding of atmosphere, evident in the wet streets, fog and shadow. When – inevitably in such narratives – the robbers’ plan disintegrates, the subsequent chase employs a genuine location shot with the same aesthetic. The white spire of a church looms out of the darkness, the rails of the London Underground gleam with damp and the wages of sin are earned.

The war itself was the setting for Carve Her Name with Pride, the story of English Special Operations Executive agent Violette Szabo and her undercover missions in occupied Europe. Gilbert begins by shooting outside Szabo's actual family home in a south London street, establishing a reassuring domesticity, before the action shifts to France. Here, when Szabo walks nervously through a deserted village at night, Gilbert again shows his skill as the sequence was in fact filmed in England at Pinewood studios or the neighbouring Black Park, yet it convinces utterly whilst adding a sense of menace.

A secret agent of a very different type whose own exploits would be simulated with vastly greater resources was the subject of no fewer than three films Gilbert directed in Eon productions’ James Bond series; each is noteworthy for its treatment of architecture and the built environment.

His first, You Only Live Twice, is perhaps best known for its villain’s headquarters concealed inside a volcano, bringing to life an extravagant backlot set by Ken Adam (see BTF #3). But the film was also one of the earliest Western productions to be shot in Japan and only the second Bond film to use the widescreen Panavision process, and Gilbert exploited both with élan. He contrasted the lush, green, natural landscapes of Himeji Castle and Mount Shinmoedake with the hard, gleaming surfaces of Tiger Tanaka’s high-tech train and the Modernist architecture of Osato Chemicals, ‘played’ by the then-new Hotel New Otani Tokyo (Gilbert repeated this juxtaposition when he returned to the country some years later – with members of the Bond crew – to make Seven Nights in Japan, a romantic drama).

A decade on, Gilbert’s The Spy Who Loved Me was shot in eight different countries, more than any Bond before or since, and the director continued to show his innate feeling for shooting architecture throughout. Night shooting featured prominently once more in the almost Expressionistic Great Pyramids sequence. This runs for a full five minutes with almost no dialogue, relying instead on camera angles, colour and the built forms of ancient tombs to create tension as protagonist and antagonist stalk each other as the nightly son et lumière plays out. Retained for the follow-up film, Moonraker, Gilbert again smoothly integrated complex sets representing highly artificial environments with location shooting around the world. This is seen in the dream-like quality that suffuses James Bond’s discovery of a spacecraft launching facility inside a Mayan jungle temple, another dialogue-free moment.

Before this pair of fantasies Gilbert told another true wartime story – the British-Czech plot to assassinate Nazi leader Reinhard Heydrich. The audacious mission succeeded, albeit at grievous cost, and the strength of Gilbert’s version lies in the truth of its locations. Much of the film was shot in an autumnal Prague, locus of the mission; the climax, in which German forces besiege the hiding place of the Czech agents, commences outside the very place where the events depicted actually occurred, the Chrám svatého Cyrila a Metoděje church. A dolly shot that follows soldiers running down a rain-wet street in raking late afternoon light demonstrates Gilbert’s empathy for the cinematic city; accurate recreation of the crypt air vent, which aperture sealed the agents’ fate, confirms it.

Showing a rare talent when filming everyday and exotic places, Lewis Gilbert knew what could lie beyond the frame.

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