Category: Lecture 1 Architecture, Film & the Modern City

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READING RESPONSE: Roland Barthes

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Roland Barthes describes the cinematic experience in his book The Rustle of Language. Powerful imagery is used as he equates the cinematic experience to hypnosis. I agree with Barthes that there is something magical about movie theaters. Movie Theaters have been designed to maximize the cinematic experience for the audience. Some tangible elements are loud speakers, the absence of light, silence, and the large screens all add to the experience. I was quite taken by this essay. Barthes ponders the reason why the cinema provides a sense of privacy and anonymity. While consuming the medium of theatre and films, the

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Reading Response: Walter Benjamin

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This article is a pure challenge for students without previous experience of reading literal and artistic works. Through the difficult words plus my guess, I have a vague feeling that the author is anti-modernization. He brags how valuable the greeks’ arts are and claims that it is all credited to the few spaces for further improvement of these works. He also devalues those ‘reproductions’ of technology. Admittedly, each essay is written with the author’s bias, I dislike his bias on the circumstance. The value of a film doesn’t decrease merely because part of it is finished by machine, human’s power

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Reading Response: Walter Benjamin

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Prior to the tutorial I found Benjamin’s reading completely tedious to read through due to its massive number of subject-specific terms and what I found to be incoherent and unfocused writing. I found that while reading through there would be certain individual paragraphs that raised interesting points the overall length and writing of the text felt redundant and failed to make or establish any significant points that stuck with me. After my first read I found his point about the increasingly two way feedback of author and audiences (due to press and internet) as well as the comparison between a

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Cat Links Lecture 1 Architecture, Film & the Modern City

Reading Response: Roland Barthes

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I have to say that I am in love with this French man’s words. “From street to street, from poster to poster, people finally bury themselves in a dim, anonymous, indifferent cube.” Inside the cube(movie theatre), people sit in the auditorium, “by their human condensation, by their absence of worldliness, by the relaxation of postures,” with other people, experience the darkness, see the “festival of affects known as a film” projected by a beam of “visible and unperceived” light glancing off people and piercing the darkness, get into a new story showed by the image and sound inside the screen. 

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Reading Response: Walter Benjamin

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I think we cannot look at the problem from a single angle. Walter Benjamin said in the article: captions become obligatory. From the perspective of art authors, adding captions to make it a mandatory requirement can express the author’s ideas more simply and clearly, so that these ideas can be accurately conveyed to the audience. From the perspective of the audience, captions can be used as a reference, but they do not necessarily follow the guidelines of captions to understand the work. As Shakespeare’s famous saying: “There are a thousand Hamlets in a thousand people’s eyes.” I also think that

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Reading Response: Roland Barthes AND Walter Benjamin

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The coordination of various senses To architectures and films,atmosphere is especially important. Films require the audiences to forget the world they are in and let their souls enter another body, so they change the light around you and use sound“to reinforce the lifelikeness of the anecdote”as ROLAND said.Is architecture only for visual aesthetics?I think we can learn something from films,think about more diverse sensory types in design. For example,in one building I saw,there was a blue pool, in which more than 200 porcelain bowls fluttered and collided with the current, making a clear sound. As for the reproduction of artworks,BENJAMIN

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Reading response: Roland Barthes

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Barthes’ expressed his irrepressible fascination with cinema in his article. To him, movie theatre serves not only an instrumental function but also a healing, erotic, relaxing “opaque cube” underlying the immersive darkness. It is the darkness that makes cinema unique from watching television at home. Indulging in this ‘twilight reverie’, the visual and audio effect of the film can be represented more vividly and lifelike, and no more distractions can severe us from the full experience of a movie. Then, we get our ‘image-repertoire’ from the movie, a unity of opposites: one totally immerses in the movie and one preserves

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Reading Response: Walter Benjamin

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In the reading, Benjamin expressed his view toward how modernisation and technology may potentially harm the authenticity and aura of an art piece. He believed that reproduction of art work will devalue the art work as the quintessence is its historal tesitmony . Howeve, I have a rather different point of view with Benjamin as I think authenticity is not the only thing that makes an art piece great. It is indeed that authenticity contribute to scarcity of the art piece and without it, the value of the work would be deprived. However, the ability to inspire people and express

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[READING RESPONSE] WALTER BENJAMIN

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Benjamin discusses the relationship between mass production and humanity in his essay. He strongly opposes modernisation, pointing out that the loss of authenticity due to mechanical reproduction of art deprives the artwork of its “aura”. This devalues the humane side of the man and the indifference in reproduced artwork would eventually lead to war. However, I could only partially agree with him. It is undoubtedly that the reproduction would threaten the uniqueness of artwork in terms of time and space. People perceive the artwork differently from the artist himself when the artwork is presented in various way. Inevitably, people’s mode

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[Reading Response] Walter Benjamin

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The excerpt discusses the implications of technology as a tool in producing (or, reproducing) art, and explores how this may alter, even damage the aura and authenticity of art arguing how advancements in technology (namely film) lead to a decay in artistic value. Interestingly, aura is described very similarly to the living language: it can be communicated, it is dependant on culture, context; it is changeable. Does this not mean that technology can become part of the scope of aura, as it evolves over time? Perhaps what worries Benjamin, is not only the influx of machines and technology, but that society is not

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