“The architectural landscape is the geology of modern times.”
In her paper, Architects of Time: Reel Images from Warhol To Tsai Ming-Liang, Giuliana Bruno talks about the connect of Film and Architecture on a scale of time. If architecture is a way to portray urban space and cityscapes in films, then time is what captures the essence of that era, and makes architecture timeless in the film that it is captured in. She does so by taking the example of Andy Warhol’s films like Empire, Sleep and Kiss that capture New York’s famous Empire State Building and with it, the lives of ordinary people carrying out mundane tasks and simply living their lives. Warhol’s Empire ‘remade silent black and white cinema’ by ‘connecting real time with reel time’. He studied everyday life and its production of modern space. Warhol’s films romanticize the simple act of looking out of a window by highlighting the aesthetics of boredom.
This style of film aimed at reaching the ‘zero degree of cinema’ by exploring the slow motion of architectural in every day life. Another Asian film director who achieved the same was Tsai Ming Liang. His films represent minimalistic architecture as a ‘subjective space’, almost like a state of mind, like the works of Ackerman and Antonioni. His film What Time is it There connected the lives of two people through a virtual time zone. Bruno also notices Tsai’s other small artistic details, like the addition of symbolic ‘rain’, either as an actual downpour or a woman’s tears to his films. The camera is inscrutable and yet empathetic, with the audience like a witness, always ‘lingering within the frame of the camera’.
Time for the viewer is a perception of change. Architecture documents changing times with film as a creative medium of display. It takes time to be able to observe the slow change of our everyday, and one must strive to take out some time to do so now and then.
“Something always happens when nothing does.”
By Anahita Garg (UID: 3035557856)
I definitely agree with your idea on scale of time in film and architecture. Both Warhol and Tsai have curated beautiful pieces through reel time, but at the same time, I wonder if architecture can also have its own time as it retains its physical form through different eras. You have mentioned very crucial points from the paper, but I would like to hear more about how you would start observing these changes in our everyday lives.