The View From the Train (20 page)

In the spaces of cinema, ‘the realized preconditions of another life' are made visible and, within the film, permanent. In everyday life, they might be glimpsed, but ultimately remain ephemeral.

Lefebvre continues:

It seems unlikely that Lefebvre intended this statement to be read as a polemic for a radical physical transformation of the built environment but, equally, he is not referring to space merely as it is socially and politically constructed. A longed-for social reconstruction of already-existing spaces, however emancipating, would not overcome their physical shortcomings. Cinematic reconstruction of everyday space might suggest the possibility of its social and political reconstruction,
²⁰
but the materiality of architectural space remains, and appears increasingly problematic.

In Part III of his
Modern Architecture: A Critical History
, published in 1980, Kenneth Frampton quotes Shadrach Woods, co-architect of the Free University in Berlin, writing in 1967:

Frampton follows this with another quotation, from Giancarlo de Carlo's
Legitimizing Architecture
of 1968, which includes:

In the decades since, ‘marvellous transistorized instruments' and similar devices have continued to proliferate. In advanced economies, reductions in the cost of consumer items, air travel and so on might suggest that nearly everyone has become wealthier since the late 1960s, but it is not difficult to argue otherwise. In 1997, a study by the UK's New Economics Foundation concluded that an index of sustainable economic welfare in the UK had risen from 1950 until the mid 1970s, but between 1976 and 1996 had declined by 25 per cent, despite an increase in GDP per capita of 44 per cent.
²²
Increases in consumption had been offset by environmental damage, increased inequality and other factors.

In retrospect, the 1970s appear increasingly intriguing, not least as the period during which computers and similar technology first became widespread for large-scale applications in industry and administration, and the personal computer was developed. Although often characterised as a decade of failure, economic stagnation and the slide into neoliberalism, in which the emancipatory promises of the 1960s signally failed to materialise, the 1970s were the period in which many aspects of our present economic reality were first put in place.
²³
We live now in a future, not as it was imagined in the 1960s, but as it was actually constructed during the 1970s. The early 1970s are also the period most often associated with the ‘shift in the structure of feeling' that separates modernity from postmodernity, since when the coherent imagination of alternative ‘better' futures has largely disappeared, so that while we might see ourselves living in a version of a previous period's future, we have no such imagined future of our own.
²⁴

The late 1960s and early 1970s were a relatively successful period for films made in the UK, so one might look in some of these for
evidence of what, if anything, has changed. In the spaces of Michelangelo Antonioni's
Blow-Up
(1966), Joseph Losey's
Accident
(1967), Lindsay Anderson's
If.…
(1968), Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg's
Performance
(1970) or even Stanley Kubrick's
A Clockwork Orange
(1971), there is a definite sense of the materiality of the period, which does seem rather luxurious when compared with that of today's landscapes and artefacts, however abundant these may be. In
If .…
, for example, roads near Cheltenham are lined with enormous elm trees, long gone, and the town centre seems in much better physical condition than it is today, though the citizens of today's Cheltenham are almost certainly more prosperous. It also seems extremely odd (in the era of penny-pinching private-sector prisons) that Kubrick should have imagined a near future in which a correctional facility might be represented by the pristine spaces of the nearly new Brunel University. Much of this feeling of material quality can be put down to the skills of cinematographers and art directors (and the manufacturers of filmstock), though these too have become scarce. An everyday landscape of 35mm cine colour images made by outstanding cinematographers
²⁵
compares very favourably with today's space routinely represented in indifferent electronic imagery. Nonetheless, the experience offered by these and other films is extremely valuable. Moving pictures offer a number of possibilities to architecture – in representing spaces that do not yet exist, or as a model for new architecture and architectural theory – but as the medium ages, one wonders if perhaps it offers most as an approach to experiencing the spaces of other times. Architecture is increasingly seen as a process structured in time. In films, one can explore the spaces of the past, in order to better anticipate the spaces of the future.

Before films were distributed on video, it was difficult to explore their spaces unless one had access to specialised equipment – an ‘analytical' projector or an editing table. The continual and often rapid succession of images that generally constitutes the experience of watching a film is not very conducive to accurate recollection, especially of anything peripheral to a narrative, and it is difficult to draw or make notes in the darkness of a cinema. Perhaps this is why, with a few significant exceptions, architects' theoretical engagement with film was delayed until recent decades. With the introduction of domestic video recorders, and the refinement of the possibility to pause and search, cinema became more accessible for architectural exploration.
¹

Since the 1970s, architects have explored cinema as a source of spatial concepts applicable to architecture, but the excitement that accompanied this discovery seems to have passed. In retrospect, it seems to me – as an architect diverted into making films – that film has a more general significance for architecture as a means of developing a critique, temporal and otherwise, of actual architectural and urban space. What initially attracted – and continues to attract – me to the medium is that it offers the possibility, albeit constrained, to experience non-existent spaces, and in particular to experience spatial qualities seldom, not yet, or no longer encountered in ordinary experience. These spaces may be non-existent either because they have not yet been produced, or because they no longer exist.
‘Spaces that have not yet been produced' might exist physically, but not experientially or socially, while ‘spaces that no longer exist' may still exist physically, but not socially, or they may no longer exist at all. Films can represent physically imaginary spaces, or proposals for spaces to be realised in the future, but for me the medium's allure has always derived from its capacity to imaginatively transform already-existing space, and from the possibility it offers to experience spaces of the past to somewhat similar effect.

I would like to suggest that film space can offer an implicit critique of actual space, so that looking at and researching films can constitute a kind of architectural criticism. I would also suggest that one can make films (and I suppose I would claim to have done so) that set out to criticise architectural space rather than simply depict it (which, given the marked differences between film space and actual architecture, is much more difficult). Lastly, I would suggest that film
²
from the past that depicts urban and other architectural space of its time can offer an implicit critique of similar spaces of the present, and can inform our understanding of the ways in which urban and other landscapes change in time.

A few years ago I embarked on a project to explore urban space as it appears in films made before the mid 1900s.
³
The following paragraphs set out the context for this exploration, and identify coincident periods of transition in the histories of architecture, urban space and film.

Carrington Street, Nottingham in 2003, with inset from
Tram Rides Through Nottingham, Carrington Street
, Mitchell and Kenyon (1902)

Until the mid 1900s, most films were between one and three minutes long, and consisted of one or very few unedited takes. The Lumière company's films, for example, are typically from 48 to 52 feet long, and last about a minute. They were made by exposing a complete roll of film, often without stopping. Most early films were actualities, not fiction, and many were street scenes or views of other topographical subjects, some of them photographed from moving vehicles and boats. Cinematographers would sometimes pause if there was a lull in the ambient action, or if the view was blocked, but other kinds of editing are unusual. The reconstruction of time and space by joining individual shots together was an aspect of film-making that began to dominate only after about 1907.

Tom Gunning has called this early cinema ‘the cinema of attractions',
⁴
a reference to Eisenstein's ‘montage of attractions', conceived as a new model for theatre. Eisenstein took the term from the fairground, where his favourite attraction was the roller coaster, the Russian for which translates as ‘the American Mountains'. There is an early Biograph film
A Ride on a Switchback
(1900, or possibly 1898), which was made by mounting a camera not on a roller coaster, as early films sometimes were, but on a railway engine. A switchback was a railway engineers' device for negotiating steep gradients with a siding and a set of points, entering by one branch and backing out into the other, so as to avoid the construction of a hairpin bend. Biograph's film was photographed in mountains near Fort Lee, New Jersey, which one might imagine were
the
(or at least some) American Mountains. Films photographed from the front of railway engines were known as ‘phantom rides', presumably because of the sensation of disembodied consciousness they offer. Views from other moving vehicles – trams and, later, cars – are sometimes called phantom rides, but the term seems to have been most specific to the view from the front of a locomotive, which was then seldom encountered in ordinary experience, even by an engine driver.

As Gunning writes, after 1907 ‘the cinema of attractions does not disappear with the dominance of narrative, but rather goes underground, both into certain avant-garde practices and as a component of narrative films'.
⁵
There is a story that Andy Warhol's
Kiss
(1963) was prompted by an archive viewing of Edison's
Kiss of May Irvin and John C. Rice
(1896), and whether or not it was, the formal evolution of Warhol's films – from the hundred-foot rolls of
Sleep
(1963) and
Kiss
(1963) to the 1,200-foot rolls of the two-screen
The Chelsea Girls
(1966) – strikingly resembles that of early film.
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In narrative cinema, phantom rides appear in
films noirs
, often at the beginning of a film or in title sequences, as in Fritz Lang's
Human Desire
(1954), Mike Hodges's
Get Carter
(1971), and the car shots in Jacques Tourneur's
Out of the Past
(1947), Edgar G. Ulmer's
Detour
(1945) – looking backwards – and Robert Aldrich's
Kiss Me Deadly
(1955). Since the 1960s the cinema of attractions has emerged from underground, in films and installations by a wide variety of artists and other film-makers, most of them outside the mainstream of Western cinema. Whether in the gallery or in what used to be called art cinema, there is a tendency towards some of the forms of early film.