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Abstract
Publications in architectural theory have predominantly taken on the form of text-based books, monographs and articles. With the rise of transdisciplinary and practice-based research in architecture, new opportunities are opening up for other forms of architectural theory, such as film-based mediums, which promises to expand and alter the convention of the written practice of theory. Two possible types of filmic theory are presented here. One follows the method of ethnographic documentary filmmaking inspired by Sarah Pink’s observational practice of direct cinema. The second follows the line of art house filmmaking inspired by Kathryn Ramey’s creative cinematographic techniques in the making of documentary or short fictional films. Building upon anthropologists’ exploration into film as a means of explaining or constructing knowledge, new discourses on filmic theory can be opened up. It is argued here that film as architectural theory is part of this new discourse which broadens the audience engagement in architecture not only through “readership”, but also through “viewership”.
Acknowledgements
The authors thank Kathryn Ramey for permission to use stills from her video here.
Notes
1 Christopher Hight, “Meeting the New Boss: After the Death of Theory,” Architectural Design 79, no. 1 (2009): 40–5.
2 Helen Castle, “Editorial” to “Theoretical Meltdowns,” Architectural Design 79, no. 1 (2009): 4–5, at 4.
3 Hight, “Meeting the New Boss,” referring to the writings of Michael Speaks.
4 Stan Allen, Practice: Architecture, Technique and Representation (Amsterdam: G&B Arts International, 2000).
5 Mark Wigley, in an interview with Stuart Mason Dambrot, consilientist and futurist; “Mark Wigley: Architectural Theory: A View of Structure,” on Critical Thought TV, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=107m4d_07yw (accessed August 30, 2016).
6 Hight, “Meeting the New Boss.”
7 Luigi Puglisi Prestinenza, “Anything Goes,” Architectural Design, 79, no. 1 (2009): 6–12. Prestinenza does give a warning, though: “However, in all cases, when we broaden the frontiers of opportunities and freedom, there is also an increase in the danger of the irrelevant, the arbitrary and the banal. The weaker the system of disciplinary rules, the more we require a strong orientation that can no longer depend on simple value judgement”; 11.
8 Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” in Image Music Text (Illinois: Fontana, 1993).
9 Gillian Rose, Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to Researching with Visual Materials, 3rd ed. (London: Sage, 2012).
10 Giuseppina Mecchia, “The Future of the Image [Review],” symploke, 16, nos. 1–2 (2008): 313–16; Jacques Rancière. The Future of the Image, ed. and trans. Gregory Elliot (London: Verso, 2007).
11 Rancière, Future of the Image, 3.
12 Ibid., 8.
13 Ibid., 11. Images differ from being a naked image (that records reality), an ostensive image (one that influences through its presence but is without signification), or a metaphorical image (one where its operation of production relates the operation of the imaginary).
14 Mario Carpo, Architecture in the Age of Printing: Orality, Writing, Typography, and Printed Images in the History of Architectural Theory (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 6.
15 Juhani Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses (Chichester: Wiley-Academy, 2005), 13.
16 Ibid., 44.
17 Stephen P. Hughes, “Anthropology and the Problem of Audience Reception,” in Made to be Seen: Perspectives on the History of Visual Anthropology, ed. Marcus Banks and Jay Ruby (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 288–9.
18 Margaret Mead with Ken Heyman, World Enough: Rethinking the Future (Boston, MA: Little Brown, 1975).
19 Hughes, “Anthropology and the Problem of Audience Reception,” 289.
20 W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 11–13.
21 Mead is recognized for bringing the word “semiotics” into common use.
22 The film theorist Barry Salt would agree that the privileging of textual analysis over the making of films in the teaching of film and media studies’ degrees polarized what was once a healthy theoretical relationship between process and product; Barry Salt, Film Style, Technology, History and Analysis (London: Starwood, 2009).
23 George E. Marcus and James Clifford, Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986).
24 Hughes, “Anthropology and the Problem of Audience Reception,” 291.
25 Ibid., 292.
26 Bill Nichols, Introduction to Documentary (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010).
27 Davis Guggenheim, dir., An Inconvenient Truth (Lawrence Bender Productions, 2006).
28 Nora M. Alter, “Translating the Essay into Film and Installation,” Journal of Visual Culture 6, no. 1 (2007): 44.
29 Williams, quoted in David MacDougall, The Corporeal Image: Film, Ethnography, and the Senses (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 15.
30 Ibid., 16–17.
31 Sarah Pink, Doing Visual Ethnography: Images, Media and Representation in Research (London: Sage, 2007[2001]); Simone Abram and Sarah Pink, eds., Media, Anthropology and Public Engagement (New York: Berghahn, 2015).
32 Sarah Pink, “Digital Visual Anthropology: Potential and Challenges,” in Banks and Ruby, Made to be Seen, 209–33.
33 Ibid.
34 Sarah Pink, “Approaching Media through the Senses: Between Experience and Representation,” in Media International Australia, 154 (February 2015): 2–3, http://www.uq.edu.au/mia/2015-issues#154/.
35 Ibid.
36 See Sarah Pink’s Energy and Digital Living project (2014). For full videos, see http://energyanddigitalliving.com (accessed August 30, 2016). Due to the inclusion of participants who we were unable to contact, we have not been able to include a sequence of stills from Pink’s videos.
37 See http://energyanddigitalliving.com (accessed August 30, 2016).
38 Pink, “Digital Visual Anthropology,” 215.
39 Kathryn Ramey, “Productive Dissonance and Sensuous Image-Making: Visual Anthropology and Experimental Film,” in Banks and Ruby, Made to be Seen, 256–87.
40 Ramey, “Productive Dissonance and Sensuous Image-Making,” 257; see also Catherine Russell, Experimental Ethnography: The Work of Film in the Age of Video (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999). “In her 1999 tome Experimental Ethnography, Catherine Russell purports to connect experimental and ethnographic film through textual and comparative analysis, showing how some experimental filmmakers work is ethnographic and how some films by anthropologists are experimental or can be viewed through an avant-garde lens.”
41 Ramey, “Productive Dissonance and Sensuous Image-Making,” 258, 259.
42 Arnd Schneider and Caterina Pasqualino, eds., Experimental Film and Anthropology (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 1.
43 Ibid.
44 See http://rameyfilms.com/movies.html (accessed August 30, 2016).
45 Richard Koeck and Les Roberts, eds., The City and the Moving Image: Urban Projections (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); Richard Koeck, Cine-scapes: Cinematic Spaces in Architecture and Cities (London: Routledge, 2012).
46 Lei Yuan Bin, dir., and Lilian Chee, exec. prod., 03-FLATS ( 13littlepictures, 2014); Lilian Chee, “Domesticity + Home: Reframing Narratives, Reforming Boundaries,” in Lilian Chee and M. S.-M. P. Park, eds., Home + Bound: Narratives of Domesticity in Singapore and Beyond (Singapore: Center for the Advanced Studies in Architecture, National University of Singapore, 2013); Lilian Chee, “The Public–Private Interior: Constructing the Modern Domestic Interior in Singapore’s Public Housing,” in G. Brooker and L. Weinthal, eds., The Handbook of Interior Architecture and Design (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 199–212.
47 Patrick Keiller, dir., London (1994); Robinson in Space (1997); The Dilapidated Dwelling (2000); Robinson in Ruins (2010). See also Patrick Keiller, Robinson in Space (London: BBC Printers, 1999); idem, The Possibility of Life’s Survival on the Planet (London: Tate Publ., 2012); and idem, The View from the Train: Cities and Other Landscapes (London: Verso, 2014).
48 The word “essay” derives from the French essayer, “to try” or “to attempt.” In English “essay” first meant “a trial” or “an attempt,” and this is still an alternative meaning.
49 Alter, “Translating the Essay into Film and Installation,” 44.
50 Hans Richter, “Der Filmessay: Eine neue Form des Dokumentarfilms” (The Film Essay: A New Form of Documentary Film) [April 24, 1940], in Schreiben Bilder Sprechen: Texte zum essayistischen Film, ed. Christa Blümlinger and Constantin Wulff (Vienna: Sonderzahl, 1992), 195–8.
51 Nora M. Alter, “Memory Essays,” in Stuff It: The Video Essay in the Digital Age, ed. Ursual Biemann (Zurich: Voldemeer, 2003), 12–23, at 14. See also Timothy Corrigan, The Essay Film: From Montaigne, After Marker (Oxford: Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2011); and Laura Rascaroli, The Personal Camera: Subjective Cinema and the Essay Film (Wallflower, 2009).
52 Barbara Glowczewski, “Lines and Criss-Crossings: Hyperlinks in Australian Indigenous Narratives,” Media International Australia, 116 (2005): 24–35. at 28.
53 Tara Blake and Janet Harbord, “Typewriters, Cameras and Love Affairs: The Fateful Haunting of Margaret Mead,” Journal of Media Practice, 9, no. 3 (2008): 226.
54 MacDougall, quoted in Pink, “Digital Visual Anthropology,” 221.