THE CITY AS A CHARACTER IN FILMSa journey through architecture and cinema

Nicolò Bertino, TU Delft , Philosophy of Image

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INTRODUCTION

In this essay I would like to explore the connections between cinema and architecture. I think that the “Seventh Art” it’s useful to analyze cities in their inextricable architectural whole full of streets, bridges, pylons and buildings.I’m interested in fi lms in which places are treated as characters, showing us their diff erent but proper way to act in scenes. I apologize, fi rst, whether the narrative is sometimes disjointed, full of references that are not always analyzed in dep-th, but acts only to emphasize the concepts of the script.I will assume the method of wandering, in a position of voyageuse fi lm, trying to recognize and analyze the sites, the landscapes of some fi lms that actually are characters in themselves, although they have diff erent qualities and features than human actors. Before exploring the “world of fi lms” I would like to be-gin speaking about the fathers of our contemporary culture and their creations, because I believe it’s helpful to understand more about the world in which we live.

THEORY OF IMAGE IN MOTION

Walter Benjamin was one of the most infl uent philosopher of the Twentieth century who have raised the question of the image in our society, primarily related to the invention of photography.

method of voja-geuse

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Th anks to the development of this new tool, we had for the fi rst time the power of reproducing the work of art. Fift y years aft er, in 1983, Gilles Deleuze wrote Th e Movement-image to analyze the structural concept of cinema in which you can create images in motion. I think it’s very interesting to analyze the elements of the ‘urban character’ in movies, because through it architecture can be ex-pressed in motion . Th anks to cinema, images can be represented in time, resulting in a sort of living character, in some cases, so we can draw a complete experience of it. An important concept that exemplifi es the growth of our today’s ‘worship’ of the image itself is drawn and described by Derrida, who begins to investigate, following the thought of Hei-degger, the concept of the diff erence between the transcendental and the phenomenon. Like Derrida, Simondon begins to express his disappointment for the Platonic philosophy: there is diff erence between “forming” and “format”, while there’s no diff erence between pre-individual and individual. Th e process of individuation does not happen in one moment, but it is in constant growth because it is in constant ‘in-formation’. Finally, the most interesting fi ndings belongs to Deleu-ze, who comes to express one of his most important concepts under the name of Transcendental Empiricism. It is an oxymoron expressing its rejection on Metaphysics, now useless to represent today’s changing. Deleuze’s Transcendental Empiricism expresses that the transcendent is on the surface, along with real data, so the body’s ‘deepest thing’ is its skin.

The Movement Image

trascendental empiricism

skin

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Th is type of thinking justifi es the culture of the world of images in which we are now immersed. We believe that eve-rything is explainable through this medium, (apart from a few isolated cases of criticism, for example Blow up by Michelangelo Antonioni), moreover, the fact that ‘the formed’ is still ‘in-for-ming’ affi rms the importance of a description of a moving image, the only suitable paradigm for a world in continuous transforma-tion. Th e fi lm-making tools like editing, cutting, framing make cinema becoming a metaphor of modernity compared to the new philo-sophy: while the metaphysical philosophy was once used to think the universal, fi lms, such as dance and mime register the ‘wha-tever’ movement. As soon as you give the lot, the time becomes image of eternity, and consequently there is no real movement which is pure evolution without ceasing. Th is is why I think it is crucial to analyze and make a comparison between urban architecture and cinema. Th ese disciplines have many ‘contact points’, as claimed, for example, by Antonioni’s works. Wim Wenders gives us another important clue to our di-scussion when he affi rms that “…it is precisely the birth of the city that creates the need of fi lm.” (Wim Wenders: paesaggi luoghi città di Paolo Federico Colusso, 1998). Let’s begin to see how this new phenomenon get a foothold in the society of the last century.

MichelangeloAntonioni

fr ame fr om Blow Up, (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1962)

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FILMS PORTRAY THE CITY

I choose the title “Th e city as a character” because in the fi lms I’m going to speak about I will briefl y note how urban elements are almost overwhelming to the actors who act. Th e meaning of these fi lm can actually be traced through editing, scenes, places, to the elements of cities, which seem to recite. I will try to list some reading keys to discover the elements of the language used by the ’urban characters’. In the early days of cinema, the ‘panoramic fi lms’, a genre composed of ‘scenic’ views become common practice to travel from place to place and are functional to the development of the ‘camoufl age fi lm’ language. In Italy this genre will be called ‘dal vero’. Travel fi lms of late Nineteenth Century reveal how cinema has begun to articulate their own language by trying to achieve a form of landscape painting, which became, as discussed below, view-tracking and view-sensing practices. We may therefore say that the fi rst genre fi lms have touched the urban theme through a representation of its architecture as a set-ting, bringing forward the fi gurative path. Cinema in its origins has created a composite practice of spatiality which gave mobility to locations and turned them into landscape sites.It’s noticed a shift from the embryonic representation of views (a kind of postcards in motion) to the simulation of travel through space. Th ese fi rst experiments are very interesting because di-rectors begin to explore diff erent tools the cinema off ers like the movement of the camera, the plan, the shot, panoramic view, for

architecture as a setting

panoramic films

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example, so they start to investigate dynamic fl ows of large cities. In Panorama of the Flatiron Building (American Muto-scope and Biograph Company, 1903), for example, the camera moves to follow the movement of the legs of passers-by. Th e fl ow of traffi c is the protagonist of the scene here, but its urban archi-tecture is metonymically united with human bodies, as we notice from the scene in which the camera scans the ankles of women in transit at the foot of the building.Other fi lms at the turn of the Twentieth Century, such as Pano-rama fr om Times Building (American Mutoscope and Biograph Company, 1905) unravel us as the journey fi lm begins to inscribe the movement in the language of fi lm, transporting the audience into the space, almost always in the city. In the 20’s of last century the city became the subject of several milestones in the history of cinema, which modeled in a relevant way the structure of the cine-city. Manhatta (Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler, 1921), Metropolis (Fritz Lang, 1926), Th e man with the camera (Dziga Vertov, 1929) are three examples of this sort of ‘wedding’ between cine-ma and urban architecture. Urban space becoming also a genre in Italian and Ger-man ‘road-dramas’, exploring the growing relationship between the characters of the scripts and the environment in which they move.From an architectural perspective, the city presents itself as something more (and diff erent) than the mere subject of the fi lm. Metropolis and cinema are linked together as a distinctly mo-

fr ames fr om ‘Panorama of Flatiron building, (American Mutoscope Co., 1903)

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dern production in which there is similarity between urban and cinematic space. Th e ‘20s, a period of fl uid exchanges between architecture and fi lm, created nexus committing to the new mechanical constraints. In Metropolis-a sort of New York’s vision- Fritz Lang describes the functioning of the machine of the urban dream in architectural terms, where utopias and dystopias of the Machine Age unify the city and cinema.In the age of mechanical reproduction, cinema and cities in-tersect themselves as reproductive machines, linked from the mechanisms and mechanics of the body. Th e cinema, work of art and scientifi c invention at the same time, was a reproducible product. As this reproducibility became the cultural dream of the modern era, the greatest dream became the reproduction itself. As Benjamin describes in his important essay Th e Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1935), it is crucial for the work of art to move closer to the masses, so the reproducibility of it through machineries is the only solution to make art available to the middle classes. Th e laboratory of Metropolis prepares this utopian scheme, gi-ving it not only an architectural form, but the whole architecture of the body.Th e photography had given ability to reproduce the body, off e-ring an identical image to our physical body. Th e fi lm made it

Metropolis

fr ame fr om Metropolis, (Fritz Lang, 1926)

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move.In this set we can say that the ‘body’ of the city take over, not just metaphorically, the elements characterizing the human body, so the ‘mind’, summarized in a complex system of gears, rules its big body, in whose entrails it is constantly ‘fed’ by the hard and exhausting work of the workers, who could lose their life at their fi rst mistake.Th is fi lm, strongly characterized by allegorical fi gures, poses on top of the script the ‘life’ of the modern city, raising it as the main character, or rather, put it on trial of capitalist society of the Industrial Revolution.Metropolis also shows a new feature in fi lmography: the views of the city emphasize his being a cinematic event. We can also highlight this aspect under the categories of cinema that Deleuze suggests: he is interested in cinema because of its nature to ‘invent’ the reality, to open up virtual worlds that are immanent in reality. Deleuze is a ‘philosopher of the event’ because he didn’t seek the conditions of reality, but he began an investigation to reveal real tangible things. In the fi lm Th e man with the Movie camera (1929) Dzi-ga Vertov travel over the ‘urban body’ through the camera.More than a symphony of the city, Vertov ‘s constructivist fi lm shows that cinema moves (and moves with) the city. Opera on the promiscuous laboratory of cities and cinema, Th e man with

Dziga Vertov

‘philosophy of the event’

poster and fr ame fr om Th e man with the Movie camera, (Dziga Vertov, 1929)

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the Movie camera passes through the history of the body. Th is fi lm is thus a fascinating work of ‘radiographic’ analysis which traces an historical map of cinema and places it in the body of the city. Th e plot, set in the space of a cinema hall, begins with architecture. At fi rst, the room, empty and motionless, gradually becomes being fi lled, it ’comes alive’ thanks to the fi lm and the people who come to populate it. Chairs starts to move while the music fi lls the atmosphere and puts reality in motion. Th e city rhythm is composed through the architectural space of the cinema.In Th e man with the Movie camera the life of architecture is the life of someone who lives there. Fixed shots are used to paint the sleeping ‘belly’ of the city, in order to emphasize the steady movement of it. Th e sleepers are immobilized as wax dummies or portraits, waiting to be awakened by the invention of cinema. Pursuing the process, thanks to editing, the series of the mo-tionless images of the bodies receiving life shift ing themselves from pale wax sculptures to Movement-Images – using Deleuze’s expression.Here is the body of the city, once dormant, that fi nally wakes up. Th e city, as the camera, begins to move in here and there. As in the overview of the origins of cinema, camera movements are enhanced and multiplied by coupling them and the means of urban transport. Vertov in his work, unlike the previous pano-ramic fi lms, raises the image of the city, which seems truly alive, the beating heart of modern society. Th e importance of the city is underlined by the fact that there are no longer movements of

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people and masses to act as host of the scene; the main theme is expressed by the ‘movement’ of architecture. Th anks to new development of technology, the Russian director can make us feel really the dynamism of urban architecture, using superimposed images and other ‘tricks’ to convey a powerful image.Th e man with the Movie camera ‘wiggles’ us, activating the motion of phatos through urban activity’s driving force. It’s interesting to underline that all the human characters in this fi lm are shown us as a background, as a far choreography framing the main character, the ‘architectural motion’. Is this fi lm a tribute to urban studies on locomotion? It’s truly possible, I think, since it is a beautiful spectacle of kinesthesia, which raises its moving poem to the laboratory of the body of the city. Continuing our brief journey through the fi rst steps of cinema that draws on the architectural repertoire we have to mention noir fi lms.Noir cinema is tied together with architecture because its stories are depicted on urban roads, on urban panorama.Th is type of fi lms need this situation of discomfort associated with the urban condition. Noir has stamped his mark on the future landscape of the city. Th e physicality of the road in a noir like Th e Naked City ( Jules Dassin, 1948), where the director tells the story of a pur-suit. Dassin suggests the plot’s theme using the tactic of ‘ground’s height’ shoots. Th is kind of shoot will be formalized as architec-tural aesthetics through the postwar Italian Neorealismo. Th is is a movement interested in urban everyday’s stories. We can take as

film ‘noir’

architecture ‘in movement’

Neorealismo

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example Ladri di biciclette (Th e Bycicle thief, Vittorio De Sica, 1948), a fi lm, as Andre Bazin said, in which the plot is “a walk through the streets of Rome “. Th anks to Neorealismo urban architecture becoming the structure of fi lms.Most of the neorealist works are constructed in a similar manner and can be interpreted as city walks. Th e movement of Neo-realismo, as underlined by Giuliana Bruno in the book Atlas of Emotion, developed cinematically the life of the road, bringing to light the living component of the production of space. Recognizing the role played by this genre in the construction of Movement Image, Gilles Deleuze drew attention to the ’disper-sive reality’ aesthetics, noting that “in the city in demolition or in reconstruction, the neo-realism multiplying the ‘whatever- spaces’, the undiff erentiated tissues, the fallow lands. “ Making a comparison with architecture, these words remind me the method Koolhaas described in the essay Junkspace, in which, in an uncritical way, he examines city’s empty spaces. Th e Dutch architect claims that empty spaces are the power of the city, they are not only just spaces ready to fi ll, to be completed. An important piece of ‘urban ruin’ is registered in the fi lm Germania anno zero (Roberto Rossellini, 1947).Th e fi nal scene of the fi lm, a long shot sequence of the walk of young Edmund, shows the city as an empty panorama full of rubble. Th is urban cancer reports history and reveals that traces of its ruins are left uncovered in the city to re-shape the present and draw the map of its future.

‘whatever spaces’

ruins

fr ame fr om Germania Anno Zero, (Robrto Rossellini, 1947)

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With neorealism landscape lunge at the foreground, becoming an historical and social subject in fi lms of the Italian masters. Mamma Roma (Pierpaolo Pasolini, 1962) is a fi lm about ar-chitecture as a structure of the lifestyle. Th e etymology of the metropolis-city-mother is explored by Pasolini in the lifestyle of a roman woman. Writing about architecture as character in cinema I have to mention Play Time ( Jacques Tati, 1967) in which the main fi gure of this masterpiece is Tati’s future city. It traces out Parigi’s footsteps, but to produce this fi lm Tati decided to built a sort of ‘fake’ city called Tativille, a futuristic city composed by glass and steel. In Play Time, the character of Monsieur Hulot multiply himself indefi nitely times. Hulot circulated for a metropolis of the future. Tati rebuild a city named Alphaville (now re-called Tativille) in eight acres of land granted by the City of Paris in the Bois de Vincennes. Th e director would shows us that all the metropolis are almost the same. Th e airport is the most striking example. An American woman just landed in the space airport exclaims “what a lovely Paris, it seems to be in America.”All the tourist coming to Alphaville and invading huge glass building do not care to explore the city, they just want to see it. It’s seems to be better for them the action of visiting and moving from a store to another than to observe that the images of Tour Eiff el and Arc de Triomphe can be seen only mirrored on glass architecture. Th ere are no diff erences between outside and inside of these modern buildings.

Tativille

fr ame fr om Play Time, (Jacques Tati, 1967)

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Moving through the big city in order to meet an executive from a multinational; Dr. Giff ard is the ‘sparring-partner’ of architectu-re in a comic scene in which he shows all the modern architect’s defi ciencies. Th e glass constructions betray the obsession of getting a perfect communication with the view only. Th ese big and transparent architecture are similar to an aquarium where everyone can look to the other without understanding each other and especially without meeting. Hulot went to visit a luxurious restaurant just fi nish in the city. In these scenes there are another comic shoots, in which ‘our hero’ inadvertently manages to unmask many structural defi ciencies of new architecture. Backs of chairs, for example, leave their mark on guest’s fi ne clothes, fake decorations start to melt themselves because of the heat coming from lamps, while doors are so purely crystal made that nobody could see them and they shatters. Play Time was so unsuccessful that the company created by Tati (SPECTRA Films) failed dragging the fi lmmaker into a vortex of debt. In 1956 in France a law that limited the construc-tion of urban buildings over 31 meters in height was abolished. Th is because urbanists already planned to continue the demoli-tion of many areas of the old Paris. Th e district of Les Halles is one example of that. In 1967 there were not so many buildings that are there today and people were not ‘locked’ in glass urban cages. In Play Time the fi rst skyscrapers and glass building appear, anticipating the outlines of new architectural and urban plan-ning in Paris. Tati’s fi lm becomes current twenty years later and

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certainly is more admired now than when it was commercially exploited.In a letter written by Francois Truff aut to him, he explains his thought about this fi lm: “Play Time is not like anything that already exists at the cinema: no fi lm is framed or mixed like this. It’s a fi lm from another planet, where the fi lm is running in a diff erent way. Maybe it represent the Europe in 1968 fi lmed from the fi rst Martian fi lm-maker, their Luis Lumiere? So, he sees what we can no longer see, he hears what we can no longer hear, and he shoot so diff erent from us.”

URBAN FABRIC

Th e cinematographic wings of Der Himmel über Berlin (Wings of Desire, Wim Wenders, 1987) transport us in and out of the urban landscape. Wenders’s fi lm is the work of a former painter who, by his own admission, “ had only a wide interest in space: landscapes and cities ... portraits of places.” Wenders, as Anto-nioni, suff ers from a form of ‘topophilia’, a syndrome, defi ned for the fi rst time by the geographer Yi-Fu Tuan, which manifests its symptom as love of place. Wenders’s thopophila , as he himself describes it, is ‘the ability’ of the places and means always “…an elaboration of mourning, a resistance which provides energy for travel within a location to discover and describe it cinematically.”Angels, as noted by the director, refer to Th e angel of history by

topophilia

fr ame fr om Wings of Desire, (Wim Wenders, 1987)

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Walter Benjamin. In a scene of the fi lm we can hear a whispe-red reference of this book when the narrator sits in front of the globes. Th e fi lm constructs the architecture through an historical refl ection from the city of Berlin, thanks to this angelic vision in mind.Wings of Desire is now a document of a city that is no more there; it becomes ever more clearly an elaboration of mourning. We are involved in view of the city in which its centre is oft en empty. In Berlin, both for those who live there and those who visit, the hi-story was written on the white empty space, a sort of gap which was a ‘theatre of erasures’. Th e exploration opens on a close-up of an eye that beco-mes a panorama of the city, which turn ultimately as a refl ected image in the pupil through a superimposition. Th is image echoes a famous engraving of 1804 by the architect Claude Nicolas Ledoux, in which a pupil in the eye refl ects the auditorium of Besancon.Angels lead us from aerial views to the landscape of the inhabi-tants of the city. Th ey can perceive humans’ interior monologues. Moving from windows, a mobile camera guide us inside the houses, seizing and revealing the interior space of the Berliners. Just as cinema angels desire to aff ect lives.

superimposition

auditorium of Besancon,Caude Nicolas Ledoux, engraving,1804

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Th e main character Damiel whish the concreteness of human life. He fall in love with a trapeze artist and chooses to incarnate himself in order to love her. As a human character, Damiel can now recover the sense of the touch. Th at new physical reality is not just about sexuality, but about the awareness of physicality. It is represented here as the ability to leave fi ngerprints and sensing skin.So, Damiel loses his ability to fl y as an angel in order to gain a truly human sense of taste and the need to acquire a taste in fashion. Th e transformation from a holy creature to a human one is depicted in fi lmic terms as a changing in shots typology. Th is new way of seeing, fi xed to the level of the ground, has the color code. We can therefore state through Wenders that landscapes, painted through walks, echoes that genius loci depicted by Christian Nor-berg-Schulz in his book. Reality takes on a symbolic character. Th e city assume this quality in a proper way because it has to be experienced through the touch. Th anks to this human quality we can better understand urban contradictions and its values, too.Indeed angels are not able to understand Berlin in its true nature, as Wenders seems to tell us. Th ey can understand the real shape

human tastes to ‘feel’ the city

fr ame fr omLisbon Story, (Wim Wenders, 1994)

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of the city, only visible through an ‘aerial skywalk’, but they cannot feel urban ‘smells and tastes’. Th ey can only being revealed through the perception of the touch, of colors and smells.

URBAN PERCEPTION

Even Lisbon Story (Wim Wenders, 1994) expresses urban percep-tion themes. In this fi lm, the landscape is rendered through the ‘soundscape’. We are in Lisbon, and we can feel this city through a sort of atlas of sounds found in roads. We get carried away by the Fado played by Madredeus. Lisbon Story seems to be pervaded by a form of nostalgia regarding to the current state imaging technology (the director seems to be suspicious with new forms of Technicolor).I think that this fi lm is important to our discussion because it gives us another crucial sign regarding the ’language’ of the city. Sounds and noises can emphasize the role of urban reality in fi lms.Th e main (human) character in this fi lm is the phonic called Winter. His work is emblematic from this point of view: in the story he seems to understand more about the essence of cinema than his friend Friedrich, a director, who seems to has become crazy researching a pure way to produce shots. Th is method to feel cinema is explained well in the scene where Winter tests some children: he produces sounds with his

city ‘noises’

fr ame fr omLisbon Story, (Wim Wenders, 1994)

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machineries and they have to recognize the images referring to its noises. In this fi lm, as others made by Wenders, the resultant picture of the urban organism is painted by a ‘schizophrenic’ way of editing. Th e scenes are edited in a fast sequence, and you can see the who-le architectural space as a ‘kaleidoscope of images crushed’. I have found some parallelism between Wenders’ way of fi lming and the Situationist’s recognition of cities. He walks through the urban condition, apparently without a great train of thought, like the mapping method of cities adopted by Guy Debord, Constant Nieuwenhuys and other artists from the ’60. I would like to end this essay writing about the work that has impressed me more, Le Mépris (Contempt, Jean-Luc Go-dard,1963). I was excited about the way of shoots passing from the landscape through the body to the domestic landscape.Th e fi lm starts with a memorable long shot of Camille’s body (Brigitte Bardot). Paul, her husband, ( Michel Piccoli) starts to enumerate all the part of her body he loves, creating a sort of map of sentimental landscape. Th e story continues exploring their ro-mantic life. Th eir marriage is disintegrating, and the crisis is ren-

Situationism

fr ame fr om Le Mépris, (Jean-Luc Godard, 1963)

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dered in an architecturally way through the ‘fi asco-purchase’ of a house. To be able to pay the mortgage of their new apartment in Rome, Paul accepted a job off ered by an American fi lmmaker. He will rewrite the script for an adaptation of the Odyssey, directed by Fritz Lang. Th eir marriage begins to creep in contempt around the concept of home ownership. Le Mépris evolve itself in the space that belongs to the domestic realm, describing the couple’s everyday life through an architec-tural narration. Th e camera travels along a creative path through the glass door of the bathroom, passes from the kitchen to the bedroom. It captures the deteriorating relationship between the characters drawing the map on the objects of love and design. As in Antonioni’s fi lm L’Eclisse (1962) Godard involves modern architecture in his works.Both fi lms could be seen as essays about urban planning, that explores the transformation of the Italian city during the so called ‘Miracolo economico’. Th is two fi lms refl ect on the modern city ‘in-making’, paying particular attention to the ‘unfi nished’ work.In Le Mépris as we observe the eclipse in the new city in the making, it is paid particular attention to the ‘unfi nished’.Antonioni ‘s urban meditation is about buildings under con-struction, focusing on their parts as if they were already ‘rovine’. In L’Eclisse the opening and closing shoots are landscapes in

Villa Malaparte in a fr ame fr om Le Mépris, (Jean-Luc Godard, 1963)

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which architecture and cinema are articulated to each other.Th e modern transformation of Rome from an old city to a new metropolis had inspired the title of this fi lm.Th is middle class landscape is a theme depicted by Godard too.In Le Mépris we can see the transformation of the countryside in a new residential district of the city. In this sense Benjamin’s worl-ds are clearly understandable: “the new art of cinema will assume political values. It could contain an open critique to architecture, urban life and society in general.” Th is fi lm dwells on ‘various ways of marriage’ between fi lm and architecture, even through a visit to Cinecittà, the Italian fi lm studies with an evocative name.One of the sequences I have appreciated most is the shots in Ca-pri. Th is scenes bears within itself lyrical and symbolical values: architecture plays an important role in the narration as the main component of the climax of Camille’s contempt.Th e couple is just in the famous island in Naples, where their marriage continues to disintegrate. Th is location is the same location of the remaking of an Oyssey that takes shape of the diffi cult ‘navigation’ of the love of another couple. According to that, we can affi rm that this place is a sort allegorical one. Th e end of the story took place in a ‘breathtaking’ house (Villa Malaparte), in fact Camille is quite literally lead to die here. Th is marvellous location push Godard in a lyrical resolution of

architecture inluences feeling

Villa Malaparte in a fr ame fr om Le Mépris, (Jean-Luc Godard, 1963)

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shoots. Th ere are some sequences of the fi lm based on sea sights visible through the windows of the house.Th is landscape is infl uenced by architecture, by the structure of Villa Malaparte. Th is was the real home of the novelist Curzio Malaparte, designed with the help of Adalberto Libera. Th e hou-se is built along the entire length of a narrow promontory, on top of a cliff that extends over the Mediterranean Sea.Villa’s feature is the giant staircase, placed in dialogue with the topography of the island. Godard enjoyed himself fi lming it. Th e result of the sequence is a sort of idealization of the stair-case, which assumed a sense of monumentality through a shoot from the top of the ramp. Th e long-take used for fi lming the entire house from the outside give to it a sort of ‘fl uidization’ of architecture. Th is way to fi lm steps remind me the same sense of ‘falling water’ Michelangelo gave us describing his staircase in Biblioteca Laurenziana. Finally we have discovered another element of the language of architecture in fi lm: its symbolic aspect. Villa Mala-parte, through the way it is fi lmed reveals an emotional climax

Michelangelo

staircase of Biblioteca Laurenziana, Michelangelo, 1571

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that gives us the same sensations as Brigitte Bardot feels for her husband. We have quickly analyzed the fi lms that go closer to architecture, giving only a few examples of diff erent relationships between this two arts. Starting from cinema’s birth, we have observed that the constant growth of urban reality in fi lms leads to technological and social development.We virtually passed through architecture as background in fi lms, to its role of making atmosphere in the narration. An important step was Neorealism, in which ‘urban character’ became the structure of the plot. We have mentioned Antonioni and Wenders’s work, in which we have understood that we have to get closer to reality in order to really ‘taste’ urban smells, noises and colors.In conclusion I totally agree with Renè Clair who argues that “…the art makes me think more to cinema is architecture”. Th is is true because they are both related to space activities. As architecture, cinema can be defi ned as a ‘spatial prac-tice”. It ‘a form of ‘street art’, a factor in the construction of city views. Th e landscape of the city has to interact closely with fi lmic representations, so the city is not only an architectural construc-tion, but it’s a fi lmic one, too.I think the best expressions of this nexus are realized when archi-tecture ties itself to the character’s nature. Some scenes in the history of cinema showing us this beautiful union. I would like to end the narration reminding the famous scene in La dolce vita (Fellini, 1960), in which Anita Ekberg looses her hat from the top of S. Peter church. Th is lyric shoot gives us the

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idea that from the top of the basilica we can control the whole Rome. Th e city can really ‘act’ as a character, thanks to these directors that have developed a sort of ‘language’ for it.

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Selected References

Walter Benjamin, Th e Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (Princeton Press, 1935).

Giuliana Bruno, Atlas of Emotion: journeys in art, architecture and fi lms, (VERSO, 2002)

Paolo Federico Colusso, Wim Wenders: paesaggi luoghi città (Testo & Immagine, 1998)

Gilles Deleuze, Th e Movement-Image, (University of Minnesota press, 2001)

Gilles Deleuze, Cinema and phylosophy, ( John Opkins Univer-sity press, 2008)

Mario De Micheli, Il disagio della società e le immagini ( Jaca book, 1982)

Rem Koolhaas, Junkspace, (Quodlibet, 2006)

Cristian Norbert Schultz, Genius Loci, (Electa, 1992)