Through my reading, I believe that movies and architecture are mutually influential and partly involved, although the inner structures and expressions are complex and multifaceted. The film is a new art form made up of a fusion of photography, music, painting, and architecture, while architecture always provides a prototype for a work of art. The audience is interested in the plot, the atmosphere, or merely as a means to relieve boredom, which uses the screen and the sound as a medium to produce a moving image. The spatial sequence of architecture, on the other hand, usually consists of a beginning

Continue readingReading Response: Barthes AND Benjamin & Jephcott

Barthes talks of his fascination with the experience of cinema, and how it’s aura of mystery seduces and hypnotizes him. The experience of cinema is the combination of all the elements, the delivery of sound, lighting, darkness, and the distance of the audience from the movie screen as well as the role he plays as a cinema spectator work together to transform the experience of cinema to an art form. I believe the “hypnotic” nature of cinema attributes to man’s fascination with mystery, to find out about things that they do not know about. Cinema presents us with a peek

Continue readingReading Response: Roland Barthes

Barthes’ article outlines the linkage between architecture and film. Unlike watching films on television, the dark environment of the movie theater and the film as the only light source creates a concentrated atmosphere for viewing. Moreover, while the film entirely controls the audience’s mood as they watch, they would experience other emotions when they leave the cinema. Walking through the long corridor decorated with fancy carpets and posters creates the ideal environment for thinking back about the film. The busy outside world strongly contrasts reality and the movie world. As the “after-movie” experience is so important, I developed an idea

Continue readingReading Response: Barthes and Benjamin

Did mass production take away the aura of art? This is the question discussed by Walter Benjamin in the first chapter of  The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility and Other Things on Media. He describes that the age of mass reproduction even had influence in art, changing the nature of the art from ritual to political, from secretive to public. After the reading, I, on the other hand, wanted to discuss about how we can give back the aura of art taken away by the technological reproduction, in the age where the original no more

Continue reading[READING RESPONSE] Walter Benjamin

There could be thousands of reasons why people enjoy films. Still, there is one thing in common for all of them: in a movie, everyone can experience an unrealizable life, visit an unreachable place, break the fetters from space and time, and do whatever one wants. The article by Roland Barthes embodies it as an illusory feeling. Interestingly, the author used a lot of descriptive words and metaphors when he was trying to narrate the illusion, including the surroundings in a cinema, the feelings, the atmosphere, etc., instead of expositing concepts and theories behind it directly from a scientific perspective.

Continue reading[Reading Response: Roland Barthes AND Walter Benjamin]