Architectural Cinema

10/12/2025

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     Discussing architecture and film, we can keep in mind two things: how architects generate the worlds that we live within, and the film language filmmakers use to explore these architectural environments. When an immigrant community or communities move into an area and transform it, we have ethnification, as in Brixton in London or Govanhill in Glasgow. When the bourgeois upgrades an area, we can think of bourgeoisification. You wouldn’t know it by watching Notting Hill, but during the 50s, many flats in these areas of London were bedsits, and the poor, both white and black, often occupied these spaces. “Subdividing a house such as 90 Kensington Park Road”, Alistair Cartwright says, “to produce something closer to number 84 Kensington Park Road — or simply renting out each room physically unaltered to a separate tenant or group of tenants — could have yielded a 75% increase in annual rental income.” (Architectural Histories) Now Notting Hill is a byword for bourgeois prosperity, and a similar process is at work when a bohemian class moves into a working-class area and thus becomes bohemianised. Areas like Rue du Fauburg St Denis in Paris, a Turkish district that is now increasingly BoBo — bourgeois bohemian.  

     All three of these urban projects might not seem much like projects at all — just organic shifts as people arrive from abroad looking for somewhere to live, and move into poorer areas of the city; middle class people noticing they can’t quite afford an established bourgeois area and notice they can get far more per square metre at a cheaper price in a more mixed district. Then there are the creative types who like the idea of an edgier locale, and where the district is full of cheaper cafes and grocery shops. But there is, importantly, a fourth category that is perhaps the most important architecturally and often strongly impacts on the other three: the developmental. This can incorporate both the public sector and private enterprise; council housing for the many; gated communities for the few. If people find themselves buying traditional properties as an alternative to the West End of Glasgow in Denistoun (in the East), it may partly rest on a £42m development of the meat market area into mid-market flats. For many years, it has been derelict waste ground, and now it won’t be. In Paris, a former space used for repairing trains and storing train equipment has been turned into a large park, with new housing surrounding it: The Martin Luther King Park. It will have helped regenerate the general area as people move into older flats that might not have seemed so appealing next to a disused part of the railway. While many might think that they are organically regenerating an area, in numerous instances, we find that renewal takes place alongside very deliberate planning. Patrick Butler and Christine Parry note “a surge in the number of wealthy incomers moving into new-build apartments in regenerated neighbourhoods appears to be radically transforming the socio-economic profile of some of London’s traditionally most-deprived areas.” (Guardian) Some of the older houses then become more attractive than they would have if it hadn't been for the developments that set in motion the change.

     Whether these transformations are for good or ill is for a much longer and perhaps quite different piece. Our purpose is to discuss cinema within the context of architecture, and this is where we need to think about how the architectural becomes present on film. Most films unavoidably show architecture unless they happen to be set in the middle of the sea or in the midst of a wild plain. But many films aren’t architectural. What makes them so is how the space is filmed, or how architecture becomes vital to explaining an aspect of the characters’ lives. To show the architectural, filmmakers use establishing shots, pans and tilts, pillow shots, lateral tracks, montages, figure/ground reconfigurations and deframings.  When a filmmaker usually shows us a building or a park, we then wait for the characters to occupy them as the architectural fades and the dramatic becomes pronounced. However, at the end of The Eclipse, director Michelangelo Antonioni shows two characters failing to turn up for an appointment and instead gives us the spaces in their absence. Whether establishing a shot of a building, tracking alongside others, panning across a space, or a quick montage of shots showing a modern block of flats, Antonioni is a master at making people disappear into the architecture that houses them. When Richard Linklater in Before Sunrise appears to pay homage Antonioni, with a montage of empty scenes in Vienna, where the characters have earlier visited, Linklater asks us briefly to attend to the places’ architectural singularity rather than their dramatic subordination. The establishing shot often doesn’t simply introduce us to the characters; it frames them within a given architectural space. The space is no less important than the characters and, on occasion, becomes paramount.

      Jean-Luc Godard is masterful at deframing, evident late in Two or Three Things I Know About Her when he shows us the central character in the bottom quarter of the horizontal widescreen frame and the block of flats behind her taking up most of the image. In Tout Va Bien, he shows Yves Montand and a photographer taking up a sixth of the frame, with the emphasis on the background: where we see regeneration taking place.  Godard also uses what in the Japanese filmmaker Yazujiro Ozu’s work would be called pillow shots. These are cutaways to trains arriving, to a mountain, or a vase, none of which contribute to the progression of the story. They instead invite contemplation, and Godard offers examples of this in much of his work, even if his agitational sensibility might be antithetical to Ozu’s calm. In The Last Woman, Marco Ferreri offers panning shots at low angles all the better to illustrate the potential oppressiveness of the newly built flats in Creteil, a suburb 13 kilometres southeast of Paris. In My Girlfriend’s Boyfriend, Eric Rohmer films in another suburb, this time 35 kilometres north west of Paris, in Cergy-Pontoise. If Ferreri emphasises the dystopian, placing characters small within the frame, Rohmer often suggests the opposite, indicating a breezy utopianism as the characters go to cafes, municipal swimming pools, and theatres. They may be contained by buildings that are there to shape their lives in ways a little different from city-centre living, but Rohmer doesn’t see this as especially negative. It is more a choice — one he emphasises in the earlier Full Moon in Paris, where a character is confused over whether she wishes to live in the suburbs or the city, and tries to have the best of both worlds. 

        One reason it is important to distinguish between places and how they are filmed rests on the agency of filmmakers to imagine the best or the worst in similar locations, and to indicate too that a film can be set in a grim or hopeful present, or a dystopian future. Glasgow and its surrounding area have served all three possibilities. In Death Watch, Bertrand Tavernier filmed Glasgow as science fiction, while around the same time, Bill Forsyth in Gregory’s Girl used a New Town full of fresh hope in a light comedy. Andrea Arnold made Red Road using the bleak blocks of the title that were demolished five years after the film was made. Filmmakers show that architecture doesn’t exist objectively; it can feed subjective creative needs. This matters because no space should be a given: it shouldn’t be assumed that housing estates are inevitably rundown and a luxury apartment will always remain luxurious. What modern architecture has shown us is the hubristic quality of architects assuming they can create in space objects that will remain the same through time. When Le Corbusier designed Unite D’habitation he couldn’t have imagined in 1947 what it would look like in 1980, where Robert Hughes notes that “none of the Marseillais who lived there could stand Corbusier’s plan…” (The Shock of the New) However, such a perception was not fixed. By 2012, Jonathan Meades could say of the rooftop that Hughes denigrated: “The roof of l'Unité is a transcendent work: it is as though Odysseus is beside you. In a few gestures, it summons the entirety of the Mediterranean's mythic history. It is exhilarating and humbling, it occasions aesthetic bliss. It demonstrates the beatific power of great art, great architecture.” (Museum Without Walls)

       This shows that who is looking at and living in the architectural buildings matter. It also shows that time can transform perceptions. If this is the case, then how films perceive the architectural isn’t irrelevant. Both Gregory’s Girl and Nil by Mouth are set on housing estates: Cumbernauld outside Glasgow and Ferrier Estate inside London, respectively. Both Cumbernauld and Ferrier Estate were works of grand optimism. The former was built in 1955, the latter was initiated in 1968. Both were works of a post-war housing boom. But while Forsyth sees in his new town new hope, as he offers a comedic account of a teenager looking for love, Nil by Mouth focuses partly on a teen looking for smack. Nil By Mouth proposes this is an environment that oppresses its people, as director Gary Oldman often shoots at a distance with a telephoto lens that flattens the figures. The film doesn’t make too much of the architecture within the frame, though there are establishing shots of the estate on several occasions. It is more interested in reflecting a milieu of addiction and anger, fear and desperation. It is the absence of any positive locations, rather than specifically, architecturally, concentrating on the place in which it is set, which makes us think of the architecture as  prison house of the soul. There is little of that architectural specificity we find in Antonioni and Ferreri, but there is a clear feeling that the characters are products of an environment that they, in turn, have exacerbated as a negative space. In Gregory’s Girl, the film follows Gregory as he is passed from one girl to another, while they set him up for someone they know is right for him, rather than the girl he is infatuated with. Cumbernauld is not a wealthy environment and wouldn’t have been then either — but it isn’t impoverished. Yet, of course, impoverishment isn’t only financial resources but psychic expectations: both Nil by Mouth and Gregory’s Girl are set in modern developments, but they don’t at all follow the same trajectory. 

     The position one takes towards the material has nothing to do with producing positive images architecturally (nor categorical political ones negatively). Yet it is to acknowledge that the architecture isn’t a metonymic given: the film can extract its own signification from it. Sure, Nil by Mouth and Red Road are working as if from an awareness that the places in which they are filming happen to be unequivocally condemned: the Red Road flats were demolished, and so eventually was the housing estate in Nil by Mouth. A filmmaker can only go so far into transforming the reality out of which they are filming. Nevertheless, often the architecture reflects the sensibility, so a director can look at modern living with all the quizzical humour of Jacques Tati (Playtime), or all the quizzical despair of Godard (Two or Three Things I Know About Her). 

     Sometimes, however, this distress is hard to avoid when dealing with architecture not chiefly as regeneration but as destruction. Jia Zhangke’s  Still Life is more about the destruction of the environment around the Three Gorges Dam than it is about the engineering feat it represents. When finished in 2006, it was the largest dam in the world, but it also led, according to Encyclopedia Britannica, to 1.3 million people displaced, as well as damaging ancient sites and the natural environment. Jia said that “the changes had occurred so fast and on such a large scale, it was as if a nuclear war or an extraterrestrial had done it.” (Film Comment) Jia shows development at its most pronounced in a country that has surely urbanised faster than any other. Yet rather than illustrating that impressive growth in various manifestations, Jia looks at the area as though it is a war zone. The film resembles other works of architectural destruction, the rubble movies from German and Italian filmmakers, like Rossellini’s Germany Year Zero, and Lamprecht’s Somewhere in Berlin. While Two or Three Things I Know About Her and The Last Woman show blocks of flats being built, the emphasis lies on the housing that people occupy. In Still Life, it is about the housing that people are forced to vacate, and the workers in hazardous conditions are shown knocking down various walls. Jia makes great use of figure-ground shots that insistently place people within an environment that shows while the people are what matters to Jia, it is the development that matters to the government. In one shot, he shows us characters talking in the foreground as we see behind them a gaping hole in the building, one that illustrates numerous flats in the distance, one of which is demolished in the very frame.

         Filmmakers can make full or modest use of the formal aspects we have invoked, but it does seem that when filmmakers think of the architectural, they are usually focusing on the developmental. This is pertinent in a different way to numerous science fiction films like Blade Runner, Logan’s Run, Metropolis and Gattaca, though others play up the world we are in now to suggest collapse: Children of Men, Robocop, District 9. But this is where we can return to our opening comments about bourgeoisification, ethnification and bohemianisation in the context of the architectural: that there are many films we don’t see as architectural works because they appear to make little use of it. It is because they contain architecture within the characters’ habits and routines, making the places and spaces relatively invisible. Even if the shot choices we have proposed that make architecture apparent (lengthy establishing shots, pillow shots, figure-ground relations, etc), are indeed evident, we don't quite observe the buildings. This is often where characters wander through cities, taking in the atmosphere, while the filmmakers make us aware of the culture of a given neighbourhood. Both Amelie and I Can’t Sleep are set in the 18th Arrondissement in Paris. Yet while Amelie was criticised for failing to capture at all accurately the ethnic mix of a district that includes the ethniification of the area around Montmartre, as Frederic Bonnaud explored in a Film Comment article, I Can’t Sleep makes it central as a young woman arrives in the city from Lithuania and finds herself in a very mixed community of whites, blacks, the young, the old, the bohemian and the bourgeois. 

     I Can’t Sleep might have a background story about a serial killer, but what really interests director Claire Denis is exploring a changing milieu. It is there in other French films looking at how neighbourhoods are transformed, as if the architectural doesn’t designate place, but instead that people are constantly in the process of transforming spaces. Whether it is I Can’t Sleep, When the Cat’s Away, Paris 13th District, Goodbye, First Love, or Chanson de L’amour, they are all interested in how characters navigates a city, whether it is the boyfriend cycling around Paris in Goodbye, First Love, or the characters in Chanson de L’amour breaking into song at various locations that become all the more pronounced because of the artificiality of the songs meeting the concreteness of locale. We see this interest in the specifics of place in many films of what has been called the Berlin School, including Passing Summer, Places in Cities, A Fine Day,  etc. What such films show is often the tumble of ethnicisation, bohemianisation, and the bourgeoisification, well put by critic Chris Power when he says of Berlin: “It’s the classic story of gentrification but even more extreme. Particular neighbourhoods have just changed utterly – hedonistic, lawless party places at the turn of the millennium are now very well-to-do with strollers everywhere.” (Guardian) Filmmakers attentive to the ethnographic and the architectural can see that a place can be transformed by one wave of people from one social class leading to another, or becoming another, and showing this through places and spaces filmmakers explore, as much through observation as narration. As The Harvard Film Archive says of Places in Cities, and director Angela Schanelec’s work generally. “No character in her oeuvre is detached from their location. Sometimes passersby almost disappear within the movement dictated by the architecture.” This proposes more than just a respect for realism; it sees places as containing people. Thus, the frame must register this containment as well. 

       Hence, when we think of architecture and film we are really talking not only about architecture and film but also people. When we discuss the deframings of Godard, Antonioni and others, when we talk about establishing shots that are held for a length of time, or pillow shots that seem to deviate from the story and focuses on the architectural over the humanly specific, we are aware that this is not because the films are no longer about humans, but that the filmmakers are constantly recognising the people in context. By playing with figure/ground, for example, or by deframing, cinema can bring out assumptions about spaces and places in our lives. As gentrification researcher Adam Almeida says: “Of course areas always change, people are mad that Brick Lane has changed, but that area used to be a Jewish area, and there was an Irish community there, and it was the Huguenots before that. It’s completely right that area shouldn’t stay the same. There should be change, there should be dynamism to areas. The issue is that the changes are, more likely than not, for the worse, and make life more difficult for working-class people.” (London in Bits) A good example of this, before we conclude, is the Heygate Estate, a public estate where rents were modest. Demolished in 2014 despite many locals fighting for its refurbishment, it was rebuilt as a luxury housing complex with only 82 of its 2704 homes deemed affordable. This meant that many of its former tenants were removed to other areas as wealthier people moved into this part of South London. Anna Minton notes that the primary school used by many on the estate will close down. It “will be forced to close at the end of term. It is one of many inner London schools facing closure as a result of a 25% drop in under-fours in some boroughs, according to the most recent census.”  (Guardian) Presumably, in these new apartments, people are having fewer children, none at all, or are sending them to private schools. In such an instance, the developmental might feel more like an example of class war and enforced social engineering than developmental hope. 

  Cinema can explore in such an instance what gentrification means in its various manifestations, but above all else, as change and transformation, and how it impacts the lives of characters who become aware that the dwellings they occupy become for the viewer an opportunity to dwell on the architectural aspect that is vital to all our lives. This can be a chance for science fiction speculation, quirky comedic optimism, evidence of social alienation, or hopeless impoverishment. As Marion Schmid says, quoting Giuliana Bruno, “‘architexture’…in the film’s attentiveness to the effect of spaces of dwelling on forms of living and feeling become the tissue of life itself.” (Intermedial Dialogues) 

© Tony McKibbin

Tony McKibbin

Architectural Cinema

     Discussing architecture and film, we can keep in mind two things: how architects generate the worlds that we live within, and the film language filmmakers use to explore these architectural environments. When an immigrant community or communities move into an area and transform it, we have ethnification, as in Brixton in London or Govanhill in Glasgow. When the bourgeois upgrades an area, we can think of bourgeoisification. You wouldn’t know it by watching Notting Hill, but during the 50s, many flats in these areas of London were bedsits, and the poor, both white and black, often occupied these spaces. “Subdividing a house such as 90 Kensington Park Road”, Alistair Cartwright says, “to produce something closer to number 84 Kensington Park Road — or simply renting out each room physically unaltered to a separate tenant or group of tenants — could have yielded a 75% increase in annual rental income.” (Architectural Histories) Now Notting Hill is a byword for bourgeois prosperity, and a similar process is at work when a bohemian class moves into a working-class area and thus becomes bohemianised. Areas like Rue du Fauburg St Denis in Paris, a Turkish district that is now increasingly BoBo — bourgeois bohemian.  

     All three of these urban projects might not seem much like projects at all — just organic shifts as people arrive from abroad looking for somewhere to live, and move into poorer areas of the city; middle class people noticing they can’t quite afford an established bourgeois area and notice they can get far more per square metre at a cheaper price in a more mixed district. Then there are the creative types who like the idea of an edgier locale, and where the district is full of cheaper cafes and grocery shops. But there is, importantly, a fourth category that is perhaps the most important architecturally and often strongly impacts on the other three: the developmental. This can incorporate both the public sector and private enterprise; council housing for the many; gated communities for the few. If people find themselves buying traditional properties as an alternative to the West End of Glasgow in Denistoun (in the East), it may partly rest on a £42m development of the meat market area into mid-market flats. For many years, it has been derelict waste ground, and now it won’t be. In Paris, a former space used for repairing trains and storing train equipment has been turned into a large park, with new housing surrounding it: The Martin Luther King Park. It will have helped regenerate the general area as people move into older flats that might not have seemed so appealing next to a disused part of the railway. While many might think that they are organically regenerating an area, in numerous instances, we find that renewal takes place alongside very deliberate planning. Patrick Butler and Christine Parry note “a surge in the number of wealthy incomers moving into new-build apartments in regenerated neighbourhoods appears to be radically transforming the socio-economic profile of some of London’s traditionally most-deprived areas.” (Guardian) Some of the older houses then become more attractive than they would have if it hadn't been for the developments that set in motion the change.

     Whether these transformations are for good or ill is for a much longer and perhaps quite different piece. Our purpose is to discuss cinema within the context of architecture, and this is where we need to think about how the architectural becomes present on film. Most films unavoidably show architecture unless they happen to be set in the middle of the sea or in the midst of a wild plain. But many films aren’t architectural. What makes them so is how the space is filmed, or how architecture becomes vital to explaining an aspect of the characters’ lives. To show the architectural, filmmakers use establishing shots, pans and tilts, pillow shots, lateral tracks, montages, figure/ground reconfigurations and deframings.  When a filmmaker usually shows us a building or a park, we then wait for the characters to occupy them as the architectural fades and the dramatic becomes pronounced. However, at the end of The Eclipse, director Michelangelo Antonioni shows two characters failing to turn up for an appointment and instead gives us the spaces in their absence. Whether establishing a shot of a building, tracking alongside others, panning across a space, or a quick montage of shots showing a modern block of flats, Antonioni is a master at making people disappear into the architecture that houses them. When Richard Linklater in Before Sunrise appears to pay homage Antonioni, with a montage of empty scenes in Vienna, where the characters have earlier visited, Linklater asks us briefly to attend to the places’ architectural singularity rather than their dramatic subordination. The establishing shot often doesn’t simply introduce us to the characters; it frames them within a given architectural space. The space is no less important than the characters and, on occasion, becomes paramount.

      Jean-Luc Godard is masterful at deframing, evident late in Two or Three Things I Know About Her when he shows us the central character in the bottom quarter of the horizontal widescreen frame and the block of flats behind her taking up most of the image. In Tout Va Bien, he shows Yves Montand and a photographer taking up a sixth of the frame, with the emphasis on the background: where we see regeneration taking place.  Godard also uses what in the Japanese filmmaker Yazujiro Ozu’s work would be called pillow shots. These are cutaways to trains arriving, to a mountain, or a vase, none of which contribute to the progression of the story. They instead invite contemplation, and Godard offers examples of this in much of his work, even if his agitational sensibility might be antithetical to Ozu’s calm. In The Last Woman, Marco Ferreri offers panning shots at low angles all the better to illustrate the potential oppressiveness of the newly built flats in Creteil, a suburb 13 kilometres southeast of Paris. In My Girlfriend’s Boyfriend, Eric Rohmer films in another suburb, this time 35 kilometres north west of Paris, in Cergy-Pontoise. If Ferreri emphasises the dystopian, placing characters small within the frame, Rohmer often suggests the opposite, indicating a breezy utopianism as the characters go to cafes, municipal swimming pools, and theatres. They may be contained by buildings that are there to shape their lives in ways a little different from city-centre living, but Rohmer doesn’t see this as especially negative. It is more a choice — one he emphasises in the earlier Full Moon in Paris, where a character is confused over whether she wishes to live in the suburbs or the city, and tries to have the best of both worlds. 

        One reason it is important to distinguish between places and how they are filmed rests on the agency of filmmakers to imagine the best or the worst in similar locations, and to indicate too that a film can be set in a grim or hopeful present, or a dystopian future. Glasgow and its surrounding area have served all three possibilities. In Death Watch, Bertrand Tavernier filmed Glasgow as science fiction, while around the same time, Bill Forsyth in Gregory’s Girl used a New Town full of fresh hope in a light comedy. Andrea Arnold made Red Road using the bleak blocks of the title that were demolished five years after the film was made. Filmmakers show that architecture doesn’t exist objectively; it can feed subjective creative needs. This matters because no space should be a given: it shouldn’t be assumed that housing estates are inevitably rundown and a luxury apartment will always remain luxurious. What modern architecture has shown us is the hubristic quality of architects assuming they can create in space objects that will remain the same through time. When Le Corbusier designed Unite D’habitation he couldn’t have imagined in 1947 what it would look like in 1980, where Robert Hughes notes that “none of the Marseillais who lived there could stand Corbusier’s plan…” (The Shock of the New) However, such a perception was not fixed. By 2012, Jonathan Meades could say of the rooftop that Hughes denigrated: “The roof of l'Unité is a transcendent work: it is as though Odysseus is beside you. In a few gestures, it summons the entirety of the Mediterranean's mythic history. It is exhilarating and humbling, it occasions aesthetic bliss. It demonstrates the beatific power of great art, great architecture.” (Museum Without Walls)

       This shows that who is looking at and living in the architectural buildings matter. It also shows that time can transform perceptions. If this is the case, then how films perceive the architectural isn’t irrelevant. Both Gregory’s Girl and Nil by Mouth are set on housing estates: Cumbernauld outside Glasgow and Ferrier Estate inside London, respectively. Both Cumbernauld and Ferrier Estate were works of grand optimism. The former was built in 1955, the latter was initiated in 1968. Both were works of a post-war housing boom. But while Forsyth sees in his new town new hope, as he offers a comedic account of a teenager looking for love, Nil by Mouth focuses partly on a teen looking for smack. Nil By Mouth proposes this is an environment that oppresses its people, as director Gary Oldman often shoots at a distance with a telephoto lens that flattens the figures. The film doesn’t make too much of the architecture within the frame, though there are establishing shots of the estate on several occasions. It is more interested in reflecting a milieu of addiction and anger, fear and desperation. It is the absence of any positive locations, rather than specifically, architecturally, concentrating on the place in which it is set, which makes us think of the architecture as  prison house of the soul. There is little of that architectural specificity we find in Antonioni and Ferreri, but there is a clear feeling that the characters are products of an environment that they, in turn, have exacerbated as a negative space. In Gregory’s Girl, the film follows Gregory as he is passed from one girl to another, while they set him up for someone they know is right for him, rather than the girl he is infatuated with. Cumbernauld is not a wealthy environment and wouldn’t have been then either — but it isn’t impoverished. Yet, of course, impoverishment isn’t only financial resources but psychic expectations: both Nil by Mouth and Gregory’s Girl are set in modern developments, but they don’t at all follow the same trajectory. 

     The position one takes towards the material has nothing to do with producing positive images architecturally (nor categorical political ones negatively). Yet it is to acknowledge that the architecture isn’t a metonymic given: the film can extract its own signification from it. Sure, Nil by Mouth and Red Road are working as if from an awareness that the places in which they are filming happen to be unequivocally condemned: the Red Road flats were demolished, and so eventually was the housing estate in Nil by Mouth. A filmmaker can only go so far into transforming the reality out of which they are filming. Nevertheless, often the architecture reflects the sensibility, so a director can look at modern living with all the quizzical humour of Jacques Tati (Playtime), or all the quizzical despair of Godard (Two or Three Things I Know About Her). 

     Sometimes, however, this distress is hard to avoid when dealing with architecture not chiefly as regeneration but as destruction. Jia Zhangke’s  Still Life is more about the destruction of the environment around the Three Gorges Dam than it is about the engineering feat it represents. When finished in 2006, it was the largest dam in the world, but it also led, according to Encyclopedia Britannica, to 1.3 million people displaced, as well as damaging ancient sites and the natural environment. Jia said that “the changes had occurred so fast and on such a large scale, it was as if a nuclear war or an extraterrestrial had done it.” (Film Comment) Jia shows development at its most pronounced in a country that has surely urbanised faster than any other. Yet rather than illustrating that impressive growth in various manifestations, Jia looks at the area as though it is a war zone. The film resembles other works of architectural destruction, the rubble movies from German and Italian filmmakers, like Rossellini’s Germany Year Zero, and Lamprecht’s Somewhere in Berlin. While Two or Three Things I Know About Her and The Last Woman show blocks of flats being built, the emphasis lies on the housing that people occupy. In Still Life, it is about the housing that people are forced to vacate, and the workers in hazardous conditions are shown knocking down various walls. Jia makes great use of figure-ground shots that insistently place people within an environment that shows while the people are what matters to Jia, it is the development that matters to the government. In one shot, he shows us characters talking in the foreground as we see behind them a gaping hole in the building, one that illustrates numerous flats in the distance, one of which is demolished in the very frame.

         Filmmakers can make full or modest use of the formal aspects we have invoked, but it does seem that when filmmakers think of the architectural, they are usually focusing on the developmental. This is pertinent in a different way to numerous science fiction films like Blade Runner, Logan’s Run, Metropolis and Gattaca, though others play up the world we are in now to suggest collapse: Children of Men, Robocop, District 9. But this is where we can return to our opening comments about bourgeoisification, ethnification and bohemianisation in the context of the architectural: that there are many films we don’t see as architectural works because they appear to make little use of it. It is because they contain architecture within the characters’ habits and routines, making the places and spaces relatively invisible. Even if the shot choices we have proposed that make architecture apparent (lengthy establishing shots, pillow shots, figure-ground relations, etc), are indeed evident, we don't quite observe the buildings. This is often where characters wander through cities, taking in the atmosphere, while the filmmakers make us aware of the culture of a given neighbourhood. Both Amelie and I Can’t Sleep are set in the 18th Arrondissement in Paris. Yet while Amelie was criticised for failing to capture at all accurately the ethnic mix of a district that includes the ethniification of the area around Montmartre, as Frederic Bonnaud explored in a Film Comment article, I Can’t Sleep makes it central as a young woman arrives in the city from Lithuania and finds herself in a very mixed community of whites, blacks, the young, the old, the bohemian and the bourgeois. 

     I Can’t Sleep might have a background story about a serial killer, but what really interests director Claire Denis is exploring a changing milieu. It is there in other French films looking at how neighbourhoods are transformed, as if the architectural doesn’t designate place, but instead that people are constantly in the process of transforming spaces. Whether it is I Can’t Sleep, When the Cat’s Away, Paris 13th District, Goodbye, First Love, or Chanson de L’amour, they are all interested in how characters navigates a city, whether it is the boyfriend cycling around Paris in Goodbye, First Love, or the characters in Chanson de L’amour breaking into song at various locations that become all the more pronounced because of the artificiality of the songs meeting the concreteness of locale. We see this interest in the specifics of place in many films of what has been called the Berlin School, including Passing Summer, Places in Cities, A Fine Day,  etc. What such films show is often the tumble of ethnicisation, bohemianisation, and the bourgeoisification, well put by critic Chris Power when he says of Berlin: “It’s the classic story of gentrification but even more extreme. Particular neighbourhoods have just changed utterly – hedonistic, lawless party places at the turn of the millennium are now very well-to-do with strollers everywhere.” (Guardian) Filmmakers attentive to the ethnographic and the architectural can see that a place can be transformed by one wave of people from one social class leading to another, or becoming another, and showing this through places and spaces filmmakers explore, as much through observation as narration. As The Harvard Film Archive says of Places in Cities, and director Angela Schanelec’s work generally. “No character in her oeuvre is detached from their location. Sometimes passersby almost disappear within the movement dictated by the architecture.” This proposes more than just a respect for realism; it sees places as containing people. Thus, the frame must register this containment as well. 

       Hence, when we think of architecture and film we are really talking not only about architecture and film but also people. When we discuss the deframings of Godard, Antonioni and others, when we talk about establishing shots that are held for a length of time, or pillow shots that seem to deviate from the story and focuses on the architectural over the humanly specific, we are aware that this is not because the films are no longer about humans, but that the filmmakers are constantly recognising the people in context. By playing with figure/ground, for example, or by deframing, cinema can bring out assumptions about spaces and places in our lives. As gentrification researcher Adam Almeida says: “Of course areas always change, people are mad that Brick Lane has changed, but that area used to be a Jewish area, and there was an Irish community there, and it was the Huguenots before that. It’s completely right that area shouldn’t stay the same. There should be change, there should be dynamism to areas. The issue is that the changes are, more likely than not, for the worse, and make life more difficult for working-class people.” (London in Bits) A good example of this, before we conclude, is the Heygate Estate, a public estate where rents were modest. Demolished in 2014 despite many locals fighting for its refurbishment, it was rebuilt as a luxury housing complex with only 82 of its 2704 homes deemed affordable. This meant that many of its former tenants were removed to other areas as wealthier people moved into this part of South London. Anna Minton notes that the primary school used by many on the estate will close down. It “will be forced to close at the end of term. It is one of many inner London schools facing closure as a result of a 25% drop in under-fours in some boroughs, according to the most recent census.”  (Guardian) Presumably, in these new apartments, people are having fewer children, none at all, or are sending them to private schools. In such an instance, the developmental might feel more like an example of class war and enforced social engineering than developmental hope. 

  Cinema can explore in such an instance what gentrification means in its various manifestations, but above all else, as change and transformation, and how it impacts the lives of characters who become aware that the dwellings they occupy become for the viewer an opportunity to dwell on the architectural aspect that is vital to all our lives. This can be a chance for science fiction speculation, quirky comedic optimism, evidence of social alienation, or hopeless impoverishment. As Marion Schmid says, quoting Giuliana Bruno, “‘architexture’…in the film’s attentiveness to the effect of spaces of dwelling on forms of living and feeling become the tissue of life itself.” (Intermedial Dialogues) 


© Tony McKibbin