The Brooklyn Rail

Jean-Luc Godard would never, I imagine, be invited to an architectural film festival. Not with Le Mépris [Contempt] or 2 ou 3 choses que je sais d'elle [2 or 3 Things I Know About Her]—films which construct space with an accuracy of a masterplan. Sure, they locate cinema firmly within the modernist tradition, but then they have a sense of openness to them, formal and interpretative. Yet, the very same director who constructs space so comprehensively would more than likely be beyond the discussion that claims to examine exactly that construction. The emerging genre or curatorial practice—whatever we decide to call it—are too restrictive to truly acknowledge the world he creates.

This narrowing is the problem I’d like to talk about. An “architectural film” is either the film about a building, a city, a practice, or—the perennial favorite—the son of a famous architect. Even Ila Bêka and Louise Lemoine, whose films insist on the user as the true protagonist, are treated as a subcategory.

The room is cramped and the possibilities, which are infinite, are outside. Meanwhile, architecture is in film, as ever: in Godard’s fast cuts; in the rooms of Steve McQueen’s recent Dia Beacon and Dia Chelsea installations; in John Smith’s The Black Tower, where a blank wall becomes a narrator with its own agenda.

When I set up the Film-Architecture Forum at the Architectural Association (AA) in London this summer, the aim was precisely to expand the discourse and let those possibilities in. Some guests address the field of architecture quite directly: Forensic Architecture, turning film into a forensic tool; Clara Kraft, an architect, reconstructing her journeys across Sri Lanka in search of the work of another architect.

Others—Miranda Pennell, Oreet Ashery—don’t name architecture at all, but they fold it into the grain of the work. Ashery’s film of her father’s final years, set in the charged territory of Israel, was perhaps the most architectural moment I experienced. It picked up, unexpectedly, Bêka and Lemoine’s insistence that human life and activity is what justifies the space and therefore the very act of looking.

My own creative interest is elsewhere. I’m less seduced by the “lived” or the “fragile” than by the ideas an object can carry. In Temptation of Influence, my recent film, the object is an architect: Shane de Blacam. The film opens with my conviction that a good poet always chooses one object, and that in the story of that well-chosen object will be the story of the whole place. But I also like to think that my film is not about de Blacam at all. Through his story, unspoken truths about the profession surface. One is not born an architect, nor do they discover a hidden talent for architecture at a very young age. One becomes one by working with—or more commonly for—another. Like de Blacam under Louis Kahn, or his own students—Sheila O’Donnell, Niall McLaughlin, others—learning from him.

The Dublin study where de Blacam works is a conversation in itself. Kahn’s overnight sketches on tracing paper, drawn over de Blacam’s working drawings, are framed and hung beside a complete set of plates from Andrea Palladio’s The Four Books on Architecture. Kahn and Palladio in speaking across centuries, mediated by de Blacam’s everyday life and his love for them both. Influence made spatial.

Temptation of Influence, for instance, is a collage. Multiple cameras, mismatched textures, a refusal to include a 6K drone shot. Architectural filmmaking has become showroom cinema, flattening knowledge into pure image. Also, always flattering. I want to see something more grounded, less obedient. My audiences keep telling me they didn’t expect it to look the way it does, and I take that as a compliment. Surprise is a method. Good architecture always fails to meet our expectations, I also claim in my film. So should films about architecture.

Surprise is a curatorial tool and it needs protection. I’d rather confound than confirm, but confounding only works if you make space for its aftershocks. Too much programming today confuses conversation with closure, rushing to satisfy a presumed appetite. I would rather programme Steve McQueen’s work from Dia Beacon, where color and sound reconfigure your senses, or Godard, whose spaces are cut together as deliberately as any floor plan. Let misreadings happen; resist the mirror.

But then, perhaps, talk.

A ten minute post-screening chat is a norm. But we might need actual time in which conversation can take shape, especially if there is a collective subject that folds the works together. Dialogue could be a part of the work.

If the architectural world could see film not as documentation, promotion or illustration, but as an expansive, critical tool—a way of asking large, destabilizing questions about space, time and human life—then perhaps we’d finally move beyond the genre. The conversation would stop circling the same handful of “architectural” films and start watching, really watching (and listening to), the world already in front of us. Erika Balsom, who spoke at the Forum, posed a useful question: is it time to question the imperative to dismantle cinema? In the rush to democratize the moving image by scattering it across galleries, we reasserted flatness, broke depth, let people walk around films that needed to be sat through.

For me, an object becomes cinematic when its context begins to radiate.

This is why Pascal Schöning’s pedagogical project at the AA still matters to me. I met him only once, in the AA Bar a few months before he passed away. (I was taught by his students—back to that point about influence.) When I told him I had grown up in the Balkans in the 1990s, he recalled taking his class from the AA to Sarajevo shortly after the siege. “A group of students had wandered into a minefield and had to be rescued by American soldiers,” he said, giggling. It was a reckless image but very precise: sending students into the charged terrain of history to stand inside its consequences.

Over seventeen years, his design studio, Diploma Unit 3, replaced the technical polish of architectural representation with films as an outcome, a proposal. The short works were personal, often speculative and visually experimental. He sent students to sites freighted with cultural memory—Hiroshima, Sarajevo, Gibraltar. The results were rarely “about” architecture in the conventional sense. They were about light as building material, about memory and emotion as legitimate structural concerns, and about the very term he was so committed to—“cinematic architecture.” His ambition, though modestly stated, was to bring film and architecture into direct collision. It was a provocation against the machinic neutrality of most contemporary architectural culture and a reminder that observation—not world-building—is often the more radical act.

I share that impatience. Our world is already there and we could use the medium of film to re-sequence, re-edit what is in front of us. That’s mostly what architects do, anyway. And then, we might recover something architecture itself has been in danger of losing: its role as a genuine site of cultural memory and cross-generational, cross-geographic cultural dialogue, monumentalised.