Architectural Film

The Question of Prowess and Progress

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     When thinking of architecture on film, it might be useful to keep several aspects in mind. The shot choices that bring out the architectural, the environments deemed architecturally significant, and the critique involved in the subject’s exploration. Most films short of those set in the wilderness or the desert will feature architecture, but in most instances this remains a pragmatics of film form as it needn’t be in the theatre or the novel. A play usually focuses on a few props to suggest the interiors of a house, a pub, a cafe, and a novel needn’t describe the buildings the characters enter and exit at all. In this sense, cinema is much more indebted to architecture than any other art form. Yet that doesn’t mean because of this debt it needs to acknowledge it. Think of how many films depict an exterior shot, all the better to establish the interior space and the drama that will unfold within it. In Clash by Night, Fritz Lang shows a man entering a house and, though we see the house before he enters it for several seconds, we also notice him get harassed by a couple of kids. Though Lang films it in long shot and isn’t a director averse to the architectural (Metropolis is often invoked in architectural studies of film) he contains the house within the action. It doesn’t quite become a contemplative object — even if Lang shot the film in the fishing village of Monterey. Few would be inclined to see it as a film absorbing architecture. Equally, further down the Californian coast, Cutter’s Way is clearly set in Santa Barbara, but it pays almost no attention to its architecture even as it offers a feel for the specifics of place. We offer a 50s film and an 80s one set along the Californian coastline to say that, even when a work respects its location, this doesn’t mean it attends to any of the three elements we have introduced. Film may have an almost inevitable relationship with the architectural as other narrative forms like the theatre and the novel do not, but that needn’t lead to a film foregrounding it. When in Cutter’s Way, the title character and his friend Bone go to deliver a letter to an oil exec they believe has committed a murder, director Ivan Passer shows us a couple of times a low-angled shot of the building. It is there to suggest how imposing the place happens to be. Passer doesn’t give us time to muse over its specifics. In contrast, Alan J Pakula’s film The Parallax View opens by showing us a low-angle shot of the Indian Pioneer Square totem pole, before angling to the right and showing us the Seattle Space Needle that would seem to have replaced it as a monument to the city. The pole is presented as tall (it stands 49 feet), the needle much higher still - 605 feet. It introduces us to a film concerned with power, and it makes much of the Los Angeles Conference centre later in the film. Pakula's paranoiac drama muses over how much power resides in the locations that are built to represent it, as though the Indian Totem pole signifies power in benign form that has since turned malignant.

             The Parallax View can in some ways seem like a standard thriller, with its bar-room brawls and its obligatory 70s screeching tyre scenes. However, if it is still viewed today as a work of some import, it rests not a little on its attention to the architecture it uses. As Nathan Heller says, writing on the film: “Catwalks, Space Needles, escalators, convention centers…The seventies had ushered in a new age of branded skyscrapers. In San Francisco, the construction of the Transamerica Pyramid (completed in 1972) was attended by impassioned protests over displacement, public-land grabs, and the “Manhattanization” of the city’s skyline.” Haller adds, “In New York, similar anxieties attended the rise of the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center (completed in 1973), which the New Yorker’s longtime architecture critic Lewis Mumford called ‘purposeless giantism and technological exhibitionism.' Sleek towers always loom in the backdrop of Pakula’s films from this period, generally in contrast to a more familiar world.” (Criterion) The Parallax View was shot by Gordon Willis, and like much of Willis’s work, shows an interest in tall buildings — from Klute for Pakula to Manhattan for Woody Allen. The opening of the latter is both a hymn to Gershwin and skyscrapers, capturing a famous skyline that can indicate the terrors of the corporation or the pleasures of city living. In Klute, Willis proposes New York is subject to the former; in Manhattan it offers the pleasures of an urban centre. The city is the same; the point ,quite different. In both, however, architecture is visible.

   Willis’s assistant Michael Chapman may have said that “he’s the most wonderful example of the American autodidact that I’ve ever met. He dredged it all up out of his own head, almost entirely.” (Visions of Light) But the sort of work Willis could do in the seventies was surely influenced by what European filmmakers were beginning to do in the sixties. Here, directors were taking architecture very seriously indeed: Antonioni’s The Eclipse, Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, Resnais’ Muriel, Godard’s Two or Three Things I Know About Her and Tati’s Playtime were all interrogating modernity as architectural vision. One began to notice the presence of critique. Marc Auge reckoned that “…anthropologists are today [in the 1990s] facing, in new terms, a problem that raises the same difficulties that [Marcel] Mauss, and after him the culturalist school confronted in their day; how to think about and situate the individual.” (Non-Places) That situating often involves architectural questions and was pertinent for much of the 20th century.

    Mauss was an early 20th century thinker who may have been useful in understanding the development of the contemporary city, but it would be Henri Levebvre, Michel de Certeau and Auge himself who helped us to comprehend the modern world, if we accept the modern in this context to mean the post-war years and especially into the sixties and afterwards. The tension point we often find in the films we have just invoked is between the individual who is making consumer choices, and the societal that will contain them within the architectural. In Two or Three Things I Know About Her, the central character, Juliette, living in a modern block of flats, takes up prostitution so she can afford the consumer goods to which she and her family aspire.

           Godard’s film is an intricate account of sixties living but what we can extract from it for our purposes is that, just as more and more items come on the market as people can express their individuality, so at the same time housing becomes more homogenised as a person’s home doesn’t become their castle but looks more like a place of confinement. In some early shots, Godard shows Juliette standing on the balcony and in the background is another tower block, and on the other side of the frame older parts of the town, still showing not so much nature as the not-yet developed. It is as if Godard is saying that the more the societal dictates the dwellings of the people, the more the people will need consumer items to give the impression that they are still individuals. If Godard opens the film with images of the new town in all its impersonality, he ends it with an image of items on a lawn. These include chewing gum, cigarettes and cleaning goods, all of them packaged and all of them suggesting the advertorially aspirational, as if these are items any self-respecting citizen in the 1960s would expect to purchase. None of them indicate the boulangerie, the butcher, the fishmonger, or the grocers. They are supermarket products and Godard would go on in Tout va bien to offer a brilliant and lengthy scene of people going about their business in one. These would be people defined as Sarcellites, with Marion Schmid invoking the term and explaining thus: “Juliette Janson…becomes a ‘personification’ of Sarcellite”, a media-coined term for the social pathology of grand ensemble living.” (Intermedial Dialogues)

       Godard’s rationale seems to be that in the face of architectural impersonality, one tries to impose upon that world consumerist choice, however lacking that choice may finally be. It is the sort of choice that might not reflect much freedom but will probably lead to personal compromise, as if in trying to free oneself from the conformity of the architectural, the consumer finds themselves still more constrained. Jacques Tati may have believed that in this conformist housing “…we all are going to have the same table we're all going to have the same lamp, and we're all going to have the same chair” (WFMT). This might have been Le Corbusier’s wish, though it wasn’t quite met by customer demand. In Le Corbusier’s Unite d’Habitation in Marseille, people were doing their own thing. As Robert Hughes notes, “The flats of the Unite are crammed with plastic chandeliers, imitation Louis XVI burgers and Monoprix ormolu — just the furniture Corbusier struggled against all his life.” (The Shock of the New) In Godard’s take, the tenant won’t quite fit into the machine for living, but will instead adopt the oldest of professions.

    Godard pushes this compromise to its further limits with a scene where the client wishes that Juliette and a fellow sex worker wear over their heads bags with Pan Am and TWA, two of the world’s biggest airlines in the sixties. This is the consumer dream as personal insult — with the client capable of getting them to do whatever he wishes, since he is paying for their time. It will allow Juliette to wear clothes more in keeping with the personality she wishes to project, as Godard shows us her at one moment going shopping, unable to afford the items she wishes to purchase, and saying she will return later that day — when she will then have the money earned through an assignation. If Godard wished to explore chiefly the link between consumerism and prostitution — between the modest salaries and the consumer choices — that wouldn’t be especially our concern. What would it have to do with the architectural? But Godard makes it so by containing this story within Brutalist coordinates, as it works a little like an inverse Belle de Jour, released at the same time. In Bunuel’s film, Catherine Deneuve is a wealthy housewife looking for excitement out of a staid environment, Godard however constantly invokes the architectural to indicate a malaise of the personal.  When Juliette speaks of going with a client to the hotel, she says, “it was a funny feeling. I thought about it all day. The feeling of my links with the world.” The camera then follows her gaze in a 360-degree tracking shot that takes in what seems an infinite number of flats that look almost identical. It brings out brilliantly the architectural but also offers a critique of self in society: how Godard proposes that Juliette is seeking an identity out of architectural anonymity and that consumerism is supposed to fill the gap.

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        In Mon Oncle and Playtime, Tati is gentler than Godard in his critique: he relies chiefly on bewilderment, where Godard is more interested in despair. Tati’s Hulot is a figure of incompetence made more so by the world he is increasingly expected to live in and which he finds exasperatingly hard to navigate. In Mon Oncle, it is his sister's house and the factory where her husband finds him a job. When he pulls up a seat at her place, in the garden, he collapses into its pointless depth. Later, when falling asleep at the house, he overturns a couch to find a way of sleeping on it comfortably. At the factory, he finds a machine for making rubber tubes beyond his ken, and all the while Tati contrasts this new world with that of the old village, where he resides. The house in which Hulot lives may be confusing as he seems to go up and down and around before arriving at his friend’s door, but it is a habit he has mastered and needn’t cause him too much concern. Yet it looks like the house, the square and the market will all be giving way soon enough to even more new developments. Tati is chiefly of course a comedian and, like Chaplin before him, needs to fit critique into the context of humour, relying here on a kind of architectural burlesque. When in Playtime, someone slams into a glass door, it is the humour of slapstick meeting the notion that the material of the late 20th-century building will be glass. But how then to distinguish between walls, doors and windows, and how in all this transparency to know what is there and what isn’t? If glass can give the impression of direct access as wood and concrete do not, then we shouldn’t be surprised when people occasionally take the transparent for the non-existent and try to walk through a glass door, only be met with a thud and a sore nose. Later in the film, this transparency gag is reversed. After a glass door smashes, the doorman still pretends it is there by holding the door’s handle and miming opening and closing it when guests arrive at the new restaurant.

             It makes sense that Playtime, Tati’s most elaborate exploration of the modern, takes place at an airport. “Looking at Paul Virilio’s thoughts on architecture, Neil Leach says, “Virilio questions whether or not we now exist in a condition of 'post-architecture', whereby the way in which we engage with traditional constraints imposed by architectural elements such as walls has shifted as a result of advances in technology. Emblematic of this has been the change in how the city is entered. It is no longer the port or the railway station, but the airport that is the chief entry to the city.” (‘Virilio and Architecture’) The airport is a non-place, to offer Marc Auge’s always useful term, as the station or the port wouldn’t be. It isn’t just that the station or port is geographically specific and centred as each occupies a quay place, so to speak, in the first instance, and usually a city central space in the latter, while the airport demands usually a peripheral location anywhere at a decent distance from the urban centre. It is also that airports are transitory and self-contained in their isolation. How many people that have flown into Charles de Gaulle and gone for a wander around the surrounding area, or at Frankfurt airport, or Schiphol, even when a flight has been delayed by a few hours? Arrive at a port or train station and usually you will have a city to explore, not a village accessible only after a hazardous negotiation with a motorway. Tati thus shows us the airport as a law unto itself and the immediate environs all part of this elaboration. Whether it is the office or the restaurant, they seem adjuncts of the airport, all places that are convenient without being convivial, consumer-oriented without being people focused. Auge says “if a place can be defined as relational, historical and concerned with identity, then a space which cannot be defined as relational, or historical, or concerned with identity will be a non-place.” (Non-Places)

       In Mon Oncle, Tati contrasted place with non-place; in Playtime the non-place is all-encompassing. Offering a palette mainly of grey, blue and beige, Playtime shows people, whether at work or at play, whether in an office or in a restaurant, performing. It is as if there is no role for the sort of leisure Baudelaire or Benjamin made much of when attending to the city stroller. This is partly because work and leisure are both clearly demarcated and at the same time oddly dissolved. They are demarcated because the office and the restaurant are fully developed spaces of business and cuisine respectively. The office has its set of codes and conditions and the film plays up Tati’s misplaced purpose partly through his clothes and his demeanour. When he sits awaiting a job interview, another interviewee is seated nearby. The other man is impeccably dressed in black and grey, his socks matching his tie; his shoes matching his hat. Tati’s trousers are too short, his socks a swirl of colour and his overcoat is the baggiest of fits. Tati’s attire is not so different from what he wears in Mon Oncle, but now looks even more out of place. Sartorially, the other man has already got the job because what matters is to look the part; what counts is the habilement: a uniform of sorts that is unconsciously rather than consciously strict. While the typical uniform is, as the word proposes, standard, with the army, navy, police officers, nurses and doctors dressed within a categorical professional expectation, the office worker, the business person, has more room to manoeuvre — but also must subconsciously absorb the expected codes. The other man looks like he has mastered the codes right down to the manicured fingernails that he inspects. Hulot has not. Yet if we say there is also little difference between the world of work and leisure, it rests on this absorption of codes that aren’t so consciously demanded as we find in the militaristic and the medical. The men at the restaurant are not so differently attired from those in the offices, while a medic or cop would be expected to change for dinner. Playtime wonders what work time might be and how to distinguish them in a world that has instead of uniforms uniformity. The world becomes a non-place.  

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     Playtime is often described as detailing a hyper-consumerist world, and much of the film’s complexity rests on its mise en scene as the viewer scans the frame wondering where the critique as gag might be. In Resnais’ Muriel, the emphasis is on the historical and the form is chiefly located in montage. This makes sense as Resnais’ theme has often been exploring how the past sits in the present and can best be excavated by editing, with no film exemplifying this more than Hiroshima, mon amour. In Muriel, Resnais offers two historical pasts: the relative distant past of WWII and the recent past of the Algerian War. Set in Boulogne, the director shows a city rebuilt after WWII, with the emphasis on Brutalist architecture that the director most specifically captures in Pierre Vivien’s tower blocks: buildings Resnais frames so all four, placed at a graded distance from each other, enter the frame. But just because Vivien proposed a modern way of living in these high-rises, that didn’t mean people would live according to their designs. Central character Helene sells antiques, with the items in her modern flat contrary to the architectural expectation. Just as Hughes notes that many tenants in Le Corbusier’s Marseille block wanted to furnish their apartments anachronistically, so Helene makes a decent trade from selling objects from the past that will allow people a little bit of individualism in the present. Perhaps it is a person’s way to ward off the grand ensemble, to feel in their way that they have control over their lives — just as Godard proposed the potential false consciousness of his characters who could at least consume, even if they couldn’t have much say in their living quarters.

      Yet part of Resnais’ play with the architectural rests on a past that is invoked and another that is ignored. People in Boulogne would be well aware in the very buildings they are living in that this was a city severely bombed, and that the resultant look of the place came out of its vital status during WWII. It was defended by the British, lost to the Germans, and then bombarded by the Allies in the process of winning it back. Resnais would be drawn to such complexity: the notion of a city partly destroyed by the very people who want to defend it. While Coventry was multiply bombed by the Germans, and Dresden destroyed by the Allies, in unequivocal attacks, in Boulogne we would have had one side trying to take the town and the other attempting to liberate it. It was a tug of war so damaging that it would lead to architectural transformation. But while WWII can be remembered in the changes the city underwent, the more recent war is contained in footage on a film and in the memories of those who fought in it, most especially Bernard, Helene’s son. It seems Helene’s former lover Alphonse is the figure who unites the two events, someone who claims he had a cafe in Algeria after WWII, but who we discover has fabricated this account. He has been in the post-war years married and in France according to his brother-in-law, who chases after him, and who explains to others that Alphonse has left his wife with debts.

     But what interests Resnais isn’t so much the revelations of lies; more the ontological problem of memory: how unreliable it happens to be and how reliant it is on affect. Early in the film, Alphonse says to Helene that he met a woman at the time of the Liberation, a woman who said she had a terrible time during the war after a braggart ended up leaving her at its start. She was very unhappy, the man had been her first love; Alphonse took pity. Helene immediately responds by saying this is precisely what happened to her, and Alphonse was that man. Is he remembering incorrectly and conflating two loves, or is he so given to the lies that we later discover that his past isn’t important as a memory bank, but as a reservoir for possible fictions? Helene and Alphonse briefly argue and, out of the anger Alphonse’s comments invoke, other memories come, including Helene remembering their time in Boulogne years earlier. When they discuss the letter she sent him and which has led him to Boulogne, he asks why she sent it and Helene reckons it was something he said that gave her the idea. “If you need me. Get in touch. I will drop everything for you.” He asks did he write that; she says no — he said it. “See how much I loved you” he says, though we might wonder how much he loved her if he fails to remember what he said, and whether he’d said it or written it. When a man capable of a tissue of lies also seems to have the most confused tissue of memories, his reliability will be very questionable. However, perhaps one reason why Helene’s would be less unreliable wouldn’t only rest on her greater apparent honesty, but also her familiarity with the town in which the affair seems to have taken place: Boulogne. If memory isn’t only in our head but also in things, and that in things memories become apparent, then it would make sense that Helene would remember the affair much more vividly than Alphonse, taking into account too that Helene was the devastated teenager who had to make sense of Alphonse’s departure, while it was Alphonse doing the departing.

   While the film is fragmentary as it covers a couple of weeks in the town, and where putting the film together demands elements of speculation, what we can say with some confidence is that if memory is often unstable, then the stability or otherwise frequently rests on how much evidence we can find for it. While Alphonse is left with what appears to be tentative memory, Helene’s is much firmer, and yet she is nevertheless living in a town of memories many of which will have been obliterated by bombs and rebuilt as a Brutalist future. When things are altered, we might believe it is not memory that has become weak but that change has become pronounced. At the beginning of the film, Helene goes to the station to meet Alphonse; at the end, she rushes to the same station hoping to see him off. But the station has changed, or at least Paris trains will no longer be running through it Is this Helene’s memory playing tricks on her, or a sudden change forced upon her? The guard says you now catch the Paris station at the new station — “it’s all changed.” In a small city where there have been changes aplenty, this one carries the weight of a loss that can perhaps sum up well all the others. Here, Helene is determined to see Alphonse off (who has taken the bus), and she finds herself at the wrong place. We might say much the same though of the flat in which she lives: a modern apartment populated by those antiques that we see in a flurry of quick shots at the beginning of the film. They are there pragmatically to be sold, but they also keep her in the past too. James Quandt reckons “for all her frenzied motion, Helene remains entombed by the past, unable to change or escape.” (The Criterion Collection) But as the station proves, and much else since the end of the war, change will happen regardless. If Godard’s film astutely captured the alienation of the new suburbs, Resnais insists, through Helene, on architecture’s capacity for disorientation, with Helene living in the past in a city that is increasingly new.

  Yet the film is also haunted by Algeria. While Boulogne is evidently changing, Algeria will have changed greatly as well, with the Algerians winning the War of Independence. Bernard has fought in it and looks like he might have been as personally destroyed by it as Boulogne was devastated by the bombings. By the end of the film, he will take out a colleague he fought alongside and who appears to have been central to the torture and death of the woman who gives the film its title. “He [Bernard] is a man fractured by his inability to live in the present. He is scarred from his involvement in the torture and murder of the Algerian woman, Muriel”, Crissa Jean Chappell says. "Whenever we see him, he seems totally absorbed in his own thoughts, as if external reality is an intruder on his consciousness.” (Senses of Cinema) This is true and for a very good reason — he has no prompts beyond the footage of that torture to acknowledge the reality that has taken place, and we might wonder if there is irony in killing his fellow soldier. The man might feel no remorse, while Bernard is incapacitated by it, yet Bernard will also have removed a person who is part of the reality in which they both partook: Muriel. Marion Schmid quotes Naomi Greene, who says Boulogne’s “modern buildings and new neighbourhoods, as well as half-glimpsed ruins serve as constant reminders of the extensive damage inflicted by bombing raids of World War II.” (Intermedial Dialogues) There are no such reminders for Bernard, especially after his attic retreat goes up in flames and his film materials are destroyed, material which revealed aspects of what happened in Algeria.

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    Rebuilding a city after WWII can seem both an act of denial and an act of remembering. For the generation immediately after the war it can be both: a way of acknowledging the past in what is absent, and forgetting that past in the new. By the following generation, the new might just stand on its own, with no memory of the war to be accessed. In a piece on breeze-block architecture J. G. Ballard notes, “Bertolt Brecht, no fan of modernism, remarked that the mud, blood and carnage of the first world war trenches left its survivors longing for a future that resembled a white-tiled bathroom.” (Guardian) By the second generation, the war is forgotten and what matters are mod-cons, though Ballard and others might be inclined to see this as an abbreviation for a modern con; that the term couldn’t at all live up to its utopian demands. Ballard speaks of “…run-down tower blocks and motorway exit ramps, pedestrian underpasses sprung from the drawing boards of enlightened planners who would never have to live in or near them, and who were careful never to stray too far from their Georgian squares in the heart of heritage London.” (Guardian)

         Often filmmakers have expressed ambivalence over this new world, and two of the most complex takes are Michelangelo Antonioni’s The Eclipse and Marco Ferreri’s The Last Woman. Antonioni’s work is often invoked architecturally; Ferreri’s far less so — his yen for the excessive more renowned than how he frames it. However, in The Last Woman (and also the Manhattan-set Bye Bye Monkey), Ferreri muses over how people dwell, showing the macho Gerard left holding the baby in his Creteuil apartment on the outskirts of Paris, and taking up with a young woman who works at the factory nursery. Ferreri shows there isn’t a lot of difference between the refinery where Gerard works and the housing he lives in, as both dwarf his presence while suggesting material comfort. His flat is roomy and his engineering job skilled, with Gerard the epitome of a man who has been doing ok for himself in the economic boom of the post-war years and in an age of industrial development. However, Ferreri shows there are cracks in this life, as though economic gain has come at the expense of personal satisfaction or self-recognition: with progress either in the form of industrial or housing developments carrying an obscure price that cannot quite be named but can be expressed in extreme form. Gerard will remove his penis with a carving knife in the film’s notorious conclusion. It remains so important a moment in cinema not just because of its extremism but the inexplicability of the deed within the explicitness of the act. If Tati could say “geometrical lines do not produce likeable people” (The Inessential), then Ferreri might add it produces neurotic ones who cannot easily understand their neurosis.

    Ferreri has this in common with Antonioni, and both filmmakers seek not to understand the neurotic psychoanalytically but psycho-architecturally. The problem isn’t in the characters’ past; it is in the immediacy of their present, and that present is the architecture they live within. Gerard gains space, but as potentially a non-place, an apartment that isn’t small but is uniform, as though one can believe in the singularity of one’s life and the space one occupies until looking out the window reveals that everyone else is living similarly. For much of the film, Gerard keeps his net curtains closed even though it is daytime, while a nearby friend he visits tries to give his modern apartment a look consistent with Hughes’ remark and Helene’s flat in Muriel. Here, the lounge has a mahogany globe, what looks like a writing bureau and a rocking chair, as if this friend wants to stamp on the apartment he and his wife’s originality, no matter the mismatch that results. We notice too that their net curtains are closed. When the film cuts to the next shot, Gerard and his new girlfriend are pulling up outside a shopping mall as Ferreri proposes that these are lives composed of consumerist choice that can seem like little choice at all. If the flats the characters live in are uniformly dull but roomy, by the same reckoning the consumer choices seem both vast and yet limited. A shopping mall is designed to give the impression of consumer freedom but, while it might not have been quite so homogenous in the 1970s, it gives visual articulation to product that is less interested in the consumer than their capacity for consumption. If Henry Ford could say people could have any colour as long as it's black, this type of logic has become all the more pronounced yet all the more underhand. Someone now going into Next, who carries on into Gap, then pops into Victoria’s Secret, before finishing off their shopping in Fat Face, will have bought everything from the one company: Next plc owns them all. You can have any product you like, but you might not realise that you will be consuming from the same umbrella corporation.

      One of the challenges of the post-war years in the West was raising people's living standards without destroying their individuality, and the irony of the 21st-century, as opposed to the later part of the 20th, is that the individuality has remained limited, while the prosperity has become curtailed. “Although inflation fluctuated more rapidly in the 1970s, and was more stable afterwards, the damage to people’s pockets and living standards came much later.” In the UK, “in the 1970s and 1980s, real wages growth averaged at 2.9%, but fell to 1.5% in the 1990s and 1.2% in the 2000s.” (Institute of Employment Rights) The Civil Rights Movement, Stonewall, the decriminalisation of homosexuality, abortion rights and the feminist movement coincided with rising living standards in the 60s and 70s and into the 80s. Individuality and prosperity came together. Now they do too, but negatively, with their relative absence. Samuel Moon notes that 70s president Jimmy “… Carter was an exception in another sense. He inaugurated the era of human rights in this country, but now it seems to be fading. Bill Clinton dabbled in human rights while outlining a new post–cold war foreign policy, but the Democratic politician now in the White House has spurned them. Few developments seem more surprising than the fact that Barack Obama rarely mentions human rights…” (The Nation) These are isolated quotes and other people would look at things a little differently. Yet many would surely agree that putting aside enormous technological changes that allows us to have mobile phones and computers, and various other gadgets, many in the West can see that their prosperity and, even in some instances their freedoms, have become more limited.

    An important aspect of cinema in the context of the architectural during the 60s and 70s wasn’t that peoples’ lives were economically impoverished; more they were spiritually bereft and one’s identity risked being weakened. Enervation might be a better word than alienation in this context, as if it wasn’t that one couldn’t connect with others, but that the buildings were generating an affective dislocation. When Ferreri offers establishing shots of the factory and the flats, he often holds the shot a little longer than we might expect and frames the characters as small within the vastness of the structures. We might see in this the influence of Antonioni and Ferreri’s cinematographer Luciano Tovoli , who worked the previous year on the great Italian director’s The Passenger. Juhani Pallasmaa notes that “…Antonioni had a keen interest in architecture, and settings are seminal to his art, believing the location is the very substance from which the shot is made.” (The Architecture of Image) Ferreri could make a similar claim, with Gerard’s extreme act best understood not through the psychology of the character but, as we have noted, through the psycho-architectural: a behaviour that comes out of the environment a character lives within. It is more Tati than Freud, more concerned with geometrical lines making unhappy people, as well as unlikeable ones, than a childhood trauma that must be understood.

  In Antonioni’s Red Desert, Giuliana can’t cope with the factory environment around Ravenna, Antonioni isn’t simply condemning factories. “Factories are extremely beautiful. So much so that in many architecture competitions the first prize often goes to factories, probably because they are places that offer the imagination a chance to show itself off. For example, they can profit from colours more than normal houses can. They profit from them in a functional way. If a pipe is painted green or yellow it is because it is necessary to know what it contains and to identify it in any part of the factory.” (Architecture of Vision) However, he is willing to admit that “the neurosis of these characters originated directly from the environment.” (Architecture of Vision) This might suggest a contradiction, yet it needs only be a question of perspective. Not all characters will respond to the milieu in the same way and Antonioni even goes as far as to insist that “it’s not her environment that causes her crisis; that’s just the trigger.” (Architecture of Vision)

    Antonioni needs to state this because he does not want a cause and effect relationship with the milieu and character. But equally, he doesn’t seem interested in a psychological interpretation of character either. Why does he deny that the environment causes the crisis without then exploring it through the specifics of Giuliana’s past? It rests on Giuliana proving susceptible as many others are not. Her husband isn’t affected by the surroundings, and nor are most of the other characters in the film. This doesn’t mean the industrial landscape is of no importance; it is of immense significance to Giuliana and thus to Antonioni. But moving somewhere else might not be of much use, even if the crisis may not have come about if Giuliana had been living elsewhere. Antonioni can say that from a certain perspective, this is a terrible environment, and that perspective is Giuliana’s. Yet from another it is agreeable, even beautiful. It is a trigger, but does society need to be redeveloped based on the exception or do the exceptions need to see that there is beauty and meaning in what they find oppressive and distressing? “I think that if we learn how to adapt ourselves to the new techniques of life, perhaps we will find new solutions to our problems.” (Architecture of Vision) This means not radically altering our world because some can’t live within the contemporary, but subtly understanding those who struggle to live with the changes. It gives to the question of architecture its proper place, between the structural and the human, between building housing and creating jobs with the ability of the person to negotiate these apartments and industries. Giuliana can’t; others can, and Antonioni proposes this doesn’t make it Giuliana’s problem (otherwise a psychological explanation would suffice). But it doesn’t make it society’s problem either — otherwise everybody would be suffering as Giuliana does.

    Don Ranvaud quotes Antonioni saying, “I always attach a great deal of importance to my female characters because I think I know women better than men….Female psychology seems so much better able to filter reality and condense it.” (Monthly Film Bulletin) What he often found in his female characters was a greater sensitivity to the world than the men: in Red Desert, La Notte and The Eclipse, the husbands and lovers are usually more robust but less attuned and, for the type of cinema Antonioni is interested in, action is less important than perception. In action, the mise en scene becomes a functional reflection of a character’s purpose; by making characters’ purposeless, Antonioni expands the possibilities in his frame. When in a Hitchcock film a character looks out the window, their curiosity contracts to a point that can develop the story; when an Antonioni character does so, the image refuses to be contained by a character’s narrative curiosity. When Vittoria looks out of one near the beginning of The Eclipse, the tower in front of her helps explain her frustrations. But it cannot do much for the progression of the film’s narrative. Antonioni’s films are full of images that stall the story, and this is vitally what can give architecture a presence in film. The buildings don’t serve the narrative; the relative indifference towards the story creates the space for the architectural. As Antonioni said “my problem with Blow-Up was to recreate reality in an abstract form.” (Architecture of Vision). Another way of looking at this is to muse over how to make the abstractness of the architectural take precedence over the narrational expectation. Antonioni films people and buildings, but the tension between the two always remains, a figure/ground relation where one cannot take precedence over the other.

    This is partly why Antonioni’s characters cannot be explained psychologically but must be understood at least partly by the architecture surrounding them. It is also why character must be singular and not general. Many filmmakers as we will discover use buildings as a short-hand for expressing a given state. But Antonioni wants to say that this given state is in the individual and in the buildings and a complex combination produces the problem — as he explains when speaking of Giuliana. We can now return to The Last Woman and see that Ferreri works within the Antonioni problematic, though offers a higher degree of provocation. If Antonioni proposes that the architectural is often a feminine problem of oppressiveness as buildings loom large over them, in The Last Woman, it is a masculine issue; one of emasculation. It seems absurd that a man will carve off his penis with an electric knife, but there are explanations for this terrible event that a psychologically focused rather than an architecturally preoccupied film would offer. For example, David Foster Wallace opens an article on pornography by saying that “each year between one and two dozen adult US males are admitted to ERs after having castrated themselves. With kitchen tools, usually, sometimes wire cutters.” (Consider the Lobster) Wallace writes about it within the context of the porn industry. There doesn’t seem to be much of a leap between castration and adult film, and porn potentially could be the cause or the cure: with an addiction to pornography leading to a person removing their member; a sexual frustration alleviated by the pornographic might leave the penis where it should be, and not lying on the cutting room floor. Wallace’s piece is excellent but it isn’t inexplicable — Ferreri’s framing asks us to see that Gerard’s deed is somehow linked to this environment without at all indicating cause and effect. How could he if Antonioni is right that most aren’t obviously affected by the architecturally new, and that to castrate oneself on the basis of it is pretty exceptional. Though the film does offer a story of sorts and a motivation if pushed, as Gerard breaks up with his wife, is left holding the baby, picks up a lover and frets over whether the baby will be taken from him when speaking of men as “patriarchs of families that don’t exist anymore”. Nvertheless such an explanation seems too easy. Clearly Ferreri’s 1976 film has passed through the feminism of the late 1960s and early 1970s, as Antonioni’s early sixties work had not. But this still appears a secondary dimension, even if it is one that can help make sense of the difference between Ferreri’s architectural concerns and Antonioni’s. Ferreri makes far too much of the environments in which he films for us to ignore them. In one shot near the end, we see Gerard hurtling along on his motorbike at the bottom of the frame, the shot angled so that almost the entire image is taken up by the factory he is passing along. It is dusk and his bike is one small light against many we see on the factory building. The non-diegetic music competes with the sound of the motorbike, and Philippe Sarde’s tone is melancholic as the film cuts to a close-up of Gerard looking contemplative.

  Gerard will shortly after castrate himself but there is something in Ferreri’s approach to the architecture that proposes he is caught in a castrating environment. He might consciously believe that this is the women’s doing, that feminism has left him without point and purpose. However, the film shows much more consistently that it may well be a question of dwelling in depersonalised spaces, rather than dwelling on inter-personal relationships, that is causing Gerard problems. Like Antonioni, Ferreri doesn’t show us that everybody is affected by buildings that dwarf us and make us feel anonymous, but taking together his wife leaving, an affair with a young woman whom he fails to control, and both a work and personal environment that could make him feel very small indeed, Ferreri proposes that the ending needn’t be so inexplicable after all. It might not have the cause and effect  Wallace may propose in his examination of neutering, but part of the force of Ferreri’s film is using the size of the image all the better to show how architecture shouldn’t be ignored. Though it might appear paradoxically invisible in its visibility, buildings are so present in one's life that it might seem a blind spot in our thoughts. In searching for underlying problems, one fails to see the one right in front of us. Ferreri insists we see it.

5

         Ballard reckoned, “Modernism's attempt to build a better world with the aid of science and technology now seems almost heroic” and that at the time “architects were in the vanguard of the new movement, led by Le Corbusier and the Bauhaus design school. The old models were thrown out. Function defined form, expressed in a pure geometry that the eye could easily grasp in its entirety.” (Guardian) However, what the eye could grasp, the soul may have resisted, as if people were round pegs trying to fit into square holes. The breeze-block brutalism looked like a great idea when the buildings were empty, but occupying them meant that idealist intent was confronted by organic beings and thus to terms like Sarcellite. Writing on high-rises in Glasgow, Andrew O’Hagan notes: “it cannot be overstressed — even by people like me, who both love and hate them — just how big and complete an idea the high-rise programme seemed just after the second world war. In the Thirties, 28 per cent of all dwellings in England were public housing; in Scotland, 67 per cent. After the war, these figures climbed to 51 per cent and 85 per cent, respectively. Four million new dwellings were built between 1945 and 1969.” (Guardian) According to Shelter Scotland, now that figure is at 24 per-cent. There are various reasons for this and the most obvious is that the Conservative government allowed people to buy their council homes, though weren’t very keen for local councils to build any new ones. Over half a million homes were sold off in Scotland through the scheme. “Investment in new social housing was slashed leaving a huge hole in the available housing stock.” (Shelter Scotland)

  Our purpose isn’t to offer up the intricacies of post-war housing policy in Britain and elsewhere. Generally, such housing was seen as simultaneously architecturally significant and cinematically despondent. Most people may have been living in public housing, yet most films showing their presence emphasised the pessimistic. It might be no wonder that governments have been reluctant to build publicly when film has so often presented the ones that do exist on screen with degrees of despair. Films including Meantime, Rita, Sue and Bob Too, Raining Stones, Nil By Mouth and Red Road leave us unsurprised that in certain instances the very flats used for filming were not long afterwards demolished. “The last surviving fragment of one of London’s most notorious “hellhole” estates will be reduced to rubble by the end of the week — completing a demolition lasting more than four years…One of London’s worst burglary black-spots, it was the setting for gritty 1997 film Nil By Mouth…” (Evening Standard) Speaking of the Red Road flats, Liam Turbett said after seeing them detonated, “among the highest buildings in Scotland, the…flats were visible for miles around and became an emblem of both the successes and failures of Glasgow's postwar housing schemes. Once idealized as the future of urban living, they latterly became synonymous with social problems and neglect as the city struggled to cope with the effects of deindustrialization.” (Vice) It was the estates' synonymous relationship with social problems that Andrea Arnold focused upon in Red Road and too Gary Oldman with Nil by Mouth. How could they not when everyone knew they were places in which people would try and escape, and when authorities were talking of taking them down altogether? Tower blocks in Langley, where Loach filmed Raining Stones, were also demolished in 2010.  

  Yet there is potentially a self-fulfilling prophecy at work when filmmakers often on the left (as Meantime’s Mike Leigh and Raining Stones’ Ken Loach undeniably are), make films that play up the disaster that council housing happens to have been. It can give imagistic prejudice to a narrative that needs little encouragement as the right have always been resistant to council housing a priori, let alone when it ends up in a run-down condition. As Nick Clegg noted: “One of them [David Cameron or George Osborne] – I honestly can’t remember whom – looked genuinely nonplussed and said, ‘I don’t understand why you keep going on about the need for more social housing – it just creates Labour voters.’” (Independent) If we have noted how various European filmmakers have looked with a querying eye at post-war housing, in the British context it has often been more assertively negative. Few would want to live in the cramped high-rise that the family in Meantime occupy, as they get in each other’s way in the narrow hallway, or in the terraced housing with motorbikes on the lawn and a car raised on bricks with its wheels missing in the garden in Rita, Sue and Bob Too. Take isolated images out of these, and other similar films, and they could play as a perfect attack ad aimed at a Labour Party interested in building council property.

   Obviously, filmmakers aren’t there to conform to a party political profile, and the films mentioned are all important examinations of working class lives gone wrong, without claiming that the problem simply rests with those living in the estates shown. Someone making a film well aware that it could be co-opted by a party they are inclined to have little sympathy towards nevertheless would be wary of creating images that in so carefully avoiding that appropriation arrives at the anodyne. Meantime, Rita, Sue and Bob Too, Raining Stones and Nil by Mouth could all be read as films showing the disaster that was post-war social housing. They are all much more caustic and despairing in their account of breeze-block modernism than even Godard’s Two Or Three Things I Know About Her, and they refuse the quizzicality of Tati’s work ,or the relative luxury within atomisation apparent in The Last Woman. One could still look at these French-based films (and Muriel also) and see in the image a dream come true as readily as gone wrong. In the British examples, there is no roomy lounge, no mod-con luxuries, no sense in which characters have improved their lot, even if in the French films they have paid a psychic price for this gain.

        In Meantime and other British films  there may be no gains at all. In Leigh’s high-rise this can mean high-risk, as the film makes much of a window that needs fixing. When the wife Mavis opens it, after the hubby Frank has burnt food in the frying pan, it comes clean off its hinges and looks like it could either fall out onto the street far below, or in on the characters trying to fit it back into place. One of the problems with the post-war high-rises was they were built before the technology was in place to maximise efficiency, safety and quality. “The technology for building tower blocks has dramatically improved since the problem-prone system-built flats of the 1960s. New modular building techniques means that homes or pods in new tower blocks are often built to the same specification as modern cars,” Matt Weaver notes. “These pods are slotted into place after being assembled in factories, a process which is far more efficient than traditional brick house building.” (Guardian) But films like Meantime also suggest the buildings were high-rise for people who were socially low-priority — that the comfortably off would never have accepted such shoddy workmanship. However, Leigh shows us a family of modest expectations and resentful realisations, with both mum and dad in a constant state of low-key grievance in their high-rise flat. One can watch the film and see wasters or wasted lives. When the aspirational sister comes round and asks if Mavis has visited their mother, Mavis says she has been busy — at the bingo. When she asks the son what he has been doing, he says nothing. A person given to insisting people pull themselves up by the bootstraps will see wasters; someone more inclined to see social structures at play will witness despondency more than laziness. When a person from the council comes round to look at the windows, he comments on how small their sons’ room is and asks how they feel about sharing it. These are not young children; they are both more or less adults. Yet it is as if the smallness of the room is a reflection of the magnitude of their expectations. They wouldn’t expect anything bigger. If the French films we have discussed often indicate a trade-off between improved living standards for greater alienation, we might wonder if the British films offer even that.  

        The UK works propose both lives and housing are cramped. Speaking of shooting on the disused Bonamy Estate, Nil by Mouth production designer Hugo Luczyc-Wyhowski said that “part of the look of the film comes from the fact that we were shooting in quite small locations.” (Sight and Sound) In Red Road, the flat the central character visits in the high-rise estate of the title has mould on the window, a three- bar electric fire for heating and a lift full of graffiti. At least the lift works. Like the flats in Meantime, Nil by Mouth and Raining Stones, it is on a sink estate, an unequivocally negative term. Speaking of sink estates in 2014, Gavin Knight notes that “having spent time on some of the worst estates in Britain talking to frontline police officers, residents and members of those communities, it is shocking to see how entrenched and generational the social problems are: fly-blown, rat-infested flats occupied by small children with raw heels because their parents can’t afford shoes the right size.” (New Statesman)

     One might not like the term sink estate, but it does usefully capture the tone and mood of the British films under discussion. It wouldn’t be a useful one to describe the housing in Muriel, Two or Three Things I Know About Her and The Last Woman, as we might muse over how much this is a difference over housing policy in France versus the UK, how much a reflection of aesthetic choices made in depiction of place and character, and how much it is a reflection of the decades in which they were made. The French films were shot in the 60s and 70s, while the British ones in the 80s and 90s. Yet La Haine in the 90s is a French film whose housing project might be referred to as a sink estate, while more recently still, Jacques Audiard offered a despairing account of high-rise, social housing in Deephan, and Celine Sciamma did likewise in Girlhood. These three French films, along with the British ones, could all be described as sink estate cinema. The earlier French works resist the term. If we can see that the period of time in which the film was made, and the nation in which it was set, can’t themselves define the treatment offered, this indicates that sensibility is the thing.

6

     In this context, both Bill Forsyth and Eric Rohmer draw out an aspect of Antonioni’s claim and offer instead of the singular subjectivity of a character that shows the locale is a terrible environment for them, even though it might be acceptable to others, a positive milieu for everyone. We might call this provocative optimism, an oddly socio-political affirmation. As Forsyth proposed: “…Glasgow is or was portrayed in endless social documentaries and TV plays. So it was a deliberate attempt to show a different face to Scotland or Glasgow, and Cumbernauld is a satellite of Glasgow.” (The Arts Desk) In this sense, Andrea Arnold in Red Road falls into the conventional representation that Gregory’s Girl resists, even if some might claim that by making a comedy out of a working-class area, Forsyth ignores the sort of social problems that around the same time happened to be so evident in Meantime. But from another angle, Red Road and Meantime can seem the more conservative films as they fall into expected images of poverty. While many a work has shown how quickly post-war public housing optimism turned bleak, Forsyth insists that if the area is shown in a particular way, and if the characters act in a particular way, then there is no reason why a positive perspective can’t be extracted from the material. In Leigh and Arnold’s films there is that risk of cinematic self-fulfilling prophecies where filmmakers who may have little in common with reactionary politicians, nevertheless find themselves reaffirming the prejudices of the latter and representationally appear to insist, as we have noted, on the pointlessness of building public sector housing when the results are so disastrous. In a fine article defending public housing and high-rise flats, Andy Beckett quotes David Cameron: “Some of them, especially those built just after the war, are actually entrenching poverty … [On] these so-called sink estates … you’re confronted by concrete slabs dropped from on high, brutal high-rise towers and dark alleyways that are a gift to criminals and drug dealers.” Cameron's prejudices may well have come from films he has seen rather than a reality he has witnessed and Beckett says, after speaking to various people happy to be housed in council homes, that it was “a lingering vindication of the 20th-century British approach to social housing.” (Guardian)

    Forsyth offers a lingering vindication as Leigh, Loach, Arnold and Oldman do not, even if, especially Loach and Leigh, might seem far more politically oriented filmmakers than Forsyth. This isn’t to defend Forsyth and attack the others, and all five filmmaker have produced important works. It is to see, however, a paradox at work in the pessimists — that a politician like Cameron can appear to have a similar viewpoint to those who are diametrically opposed to him politically. Forsyth, though, seems to see in the housing an echo of the film’s story. In it, Gregory thinks he is in love with one girl, gets passed on to another when his dream girl doesn’t turn up, and by the end of the evening, and the end of the film, finds himself with a girl, Susan, he hardly noticed initially. But she has noticed him, and he accepts her affections while offering his own back with no sense of sour grapes. Equally, while there may be, as one of the film's characters says, big houses nearby, these aren’t the film’s concern as Forsyth locates it around the school and the housing estate, and suggests a strong sense of community. The houses may be modestly sized and clustered together, but this gives people the chance to connect, nicely illustrated halfway through when Gregory mimics a cat’s howl as he looks out his open bedroom window. The camera travels to a nearby house as we see Susan is in bed reading a Midsummer’s Night’s Dream. She smiles as she hears the sound, and presumably knows who is making it. In another film, this could be a moment that plays up how little space there is between one house and the next. In Forsyth’s, it shows how easy it is to live less on top of each other than in the company of others.

      Cumbernauld was one of five Scottish New Towns, a term with positive connotations that Forsyth wants to insist upon. As he says: “Even the trees in Cumbernauld are teenagers so everything fits.” (The Arts Desk) If many housing projects were labelled sink estates, and often invoked the inner cities, another term commonly used was overspill estates to describe post-war housing that replaced the crammed flats near urban centres. R. A. Henderson noted that “Cumbernauld…was expected to benefit from the industrial overspill from Glasgow, when the policy was introduced in the late 1950s.” (Urban Studies) The term needn’t have the negative connotations associated with sink estates and was one of designation rather than abuse. Nevertheless, surely anyone living in Cumbernauld would have preferred to say they were living in a New Town rather than an overspill. An overspill suggests a surplus to requirements, and that the cities were filling up and had no space for those who were moved further afield. Forsyth, however, sees instead new opportunities and a self-contained world that shows anything further afield than the New Town appears absurdly ambitious. When at the end of the film, a gormless teenager aims to hitchhike to Caracas, it is a heavy joke within the lightest of films — a gag that proposes anywhere beyond the boundaries of the place we have been in can seem impossibly far away. If many a work set on a housing estate possesses connotations of a prison, Forsyth’s connotes an idyll. Ray Newman reckoned “Cumbernauld looks positively Californian, its concrete bathed in golden hour light. Shangri-La.” (Unhomely: New Towns on Film)

        Rohmer offers similar optimism in My Girlfriend’s Boyfriend. Cergy-Pontoise was created with the same impetus as Cumbernauld. Paris was becoming overcrowded in the 1960s and several new towns needed to be built nearby and hence the notion of overspill once again. Rohmer had made a series of four documentaries on France’s Villes Nouvelles, other non-fiction works on architecture, as well as several fiction films that addressed in different ways architectural questions. Schmid goes so far as to say that, “among all the New Wave directors, it is without doubt Eric Rohmer who has engaged the city and its architecture most extensively in both his critical and artistic work.” (Intermedial Dialogues)  This might not appear to be so in his fiction films. But this is perhaps because Rohmer is viewed as a great character director, someone who tends to work with the intricacies of an individual’s emotions over playing up the spaces they occupy. This can seem like a dubious claim considering Rohmer is both known for his film’s settings and also the accuracy in which he depicts them. Whether the Cap de St Tropez in La Collectioneuse, Lake Annecy in Claire’s Knee, or Dinard in A Summer’s Tale, Rohmer is alert to locational specificity. He is also often insistent when it comes to mapping out city spaces, with Francois Penz noting that Rohmer in The Aviator’s Wife is “acutely aware of spatial issues in architecture and the city, and finds himself completely incapable of cheating the city, or even playing with it.” (Cities in Transition) Yet when we look at Godard’s images in Two or Three Things I Know About Her, and compare them with Rohmer’s in My Girlfriend’s Boyfriend, it can seem Rohmer is almost indifferent to the architectural. Yet, from another perspective, Rohmer can seem more embodied in his interests, sharing with Henri Levebvre the notion that “space exists in a social sense only for activity — for (and by virtue of) walking…or travelling.” (The Production of Space) While Godard often fixes Juliette within the frame and brings out the architectural environs, Rohmer is more inclined to show us ambulating figures.

     Rohmer isn’t only more optimistic than Godard in seeing hope in the new architecture, despite his apparent far greater conservatism than the revolutionary, he also wants to show characters who are more in charge of the frame so that the space we see is usually evident only on the basis of the characters passing through it. In Godard’s film, the ground dictates the figure, creating an oppressive force that proposes any individual act will be weak next to the architectural, and a similar relationship exists in Antonioni’s work, and in The Last Woman as well. Our purpose isn’t to claim that one is better than the other, even if someone concerned chiefly with the architecture in a film will find far more to see in those that show its force upon characters rather than characters’ relative indifference to it — as we find in Gregory’s Girl and My Boyfriend’s Girlfriend. In a few shots in Rohmer’s film, it is as if the director wants to cram the architecture into the frame aware that he doesn’t wish at all to undermine the characters who pass through these spaces. But he also offers a number of one-point perspectives: shots that show objects become smaller to a vanishing point, as if the product of an architect’s drawing. We see it, for example, when the two main characters are walking along the main promenade and it gives the impression of a plan made flesh. The opening shot in the film shows the Hotel d’agglomeration and looks again like an architect’s drawing brought to life. Rohmer’s work proposes that, just maybe, geometrical lines can make for pleasant and happy people.

7

               If both Forsyth and Rohmer offer the post-war architecturally positive against the quizzicality of Godard, Ferreri etc, and the pessimism of Loach, Leigh and others, then Kogonada in Columbus looks more specifically at a town that didn’t just accept modern architecture as a necessity. It sees it as a certain type of luxury. Named after the place in which it is set, Columbus is a small city in southern Indiana that has become famous for the number of great, modern designs built there. These include works by Eero Sarinen, Robert Venturi, I.M. Pei, Edward Basset, and such buildings as The Miller House, Columbus City Hall and North Christian Church. Columbus is a city smaller than Cumbernauld and yet while the Scottish town got no more than a multi-purpose shopping centre, “a concrete acropolis presiding over the town”, Columbus couldn’t move for architectural prowess. While in Cumbernauld “in the 2000s”, Rowan Moore says in the Guardian that “the centre started winning prizes for Scotland’s worst building (the Carbuncle award, twice) and helped Cumbernauld win prizes for worst town (the Plook on the Plinth award, also twice)”, many were visiting Columbus to see so numerous great works in such a small place. While Forsyth had to work hard to produce an optimistic account of a New Town environment, Kogonada can offer a more melancholic work. It is one nevertheless offset by the tranquil optimism of the architecture, which gives perspective and even purpose to the characters’ lives. Here, a purposeless son, Jin Lee, finds himself in the town when his renowned architecture professor father collapses and falls into a coma after giving a talk in the city. Jin Lee meets a young library worker Casey, who has a love for architecture, one that she tries to convey to him in a film that allows their conversations to unravel against the backdrop of buildings that carry a significance which can never quite reduce their chats to the mundane. Whether it is Eero Saarinen’s church spire in the background as the two characters walk, or James Stewart Polshek's Columbus Regional Hospital Mental Health Center, as Jin Lee speaks about a building whose meaning is important to him, the film proposes that the characters are contained by the architectural environment they are in.

     This is so even if Casey is fascinated by the subject and Jin Lee resentfully resistant, as if his father’s status in this world has limited his own curiosity. Casey brings it out in him just as he brings out in Casey a realisation that she should consider leaving Columbus and pursue her architectural yearnings. Casey is reluctant to leave a mother who has addiction issues, but the film emphasises Casey’s misplaced loyalty with Jin Lee’s misplaced resentment. He perhaps has to love his father a little more; she needs to consider her mother a little less. Jin Lee and Casey don’t consummate their affair, if an affair it is, but they do learn a lot about themselves in the company of each other, and in the company of some very significant architectural works.

        We have noticed that Ferreri and Godard created the presence of the film’s architecture through the framing. Koganada does likewise, but while Ferreri and Godard are asking us to see what may otherwise go unnoticed, Kogonada is well aware that many watching Columbus will be doing so for the architecture he shows in the frame. He films with an understandable awareness that these are works of architecture and not just buildings. The distinction between architecture and buildings was picked up by those practising what was called the International Style. “In utter seriousness they set up a distinction between architecture and building, after the manner of Vitruvius some two thousand years before.” (From Bauhaus to Our House) Tom Wolfe mockingly analyses the movement and says: “The International Style was nothing less than the first great universal style since the Medieval and Classical revivals, and the first truly modern style since the Renaissance.” But what has its uses, is the distinction between architecture and buildings: Ferreri and Godard are filming buildings and insisting that they be seen within the context of architecture. They are a product of a given moment in time, and that moment is post-war Brutalism and municipal (if dashed) hope. They are no less architectural explorations than Columbus; the difference is that in Kogonada’s film, the places he shoots are clearly architectural works and many of its practitioners deemed figures of the International Style, including Eero Saarinen and I.M. Pei. In most of the British films, we have seen how the architectural is absorbed into buildings and buildings absorbed into the societal. They are there to reflect social decay and, while using the housing that exists, nevertheless play up its metonymic dimension: sink estates and social problems. Ferreri and Godard more complexly propose effective buildings that nevertheless allow for anomie. They may be robustly built places. But they house not always so robustly constituted individuals, and perhaps the housing is partly responsible for this fragility of self.

      In this sense, the architecture of Columbus, the film proposes, assuages its characters, a point Jin Lee may make about Polshek’s hospital — though we might find it in numerous other buildings as well. It is there, of course, in the tranquil Miller House, but also the library where Casey works, designed by Pei. What Kogonada wishes to give to modernism is the calm that many of the architects would have hoped to convey, rather than power or powerlessness that is often used by filmmakers in their exploration of modern architecture. It is the latter that we see so forcefully in Pakula’s power trilogy of the 70s (Klute, The Parallax View and All the President’s Men) and this isn’t to attack the director; more to see how prevalent is this perception of the architecturally modern and how Pakula harnesses it for showing anonymous power — just as Loach, Leigh, Arnold and others do it to register despair, well aware that poverty can without difficult be conveyed in shots of high-rise, concrete housing estates. In Pakula’s case, and the British filmmakers’, this isn’t at all a shorthand approach to the image. They don’t sum up a perception in an easy shot. Yet they do propose along with the prevailing cultural assumption that the skyscraper conveys power, while the high-rise quickly registers poverty. Kogonada does more than most to recuperate architectural modernism and wishes to see in the buildings an optimism that might be all the easier to achieve than in Gregory’s Girl and My Girlfriend’s Boyfriend because he has in front of him work by Pei, Polshak, the Saarinens and Venturi. But no other film has so consistently sought in the architecture used, a communing with the modern. Wolfe may believe “after 1945 our plutocrats, bureaucrats, board chairmen, CEOs, commissioners and college presidents undergo an inexplicable change. They become diffident and reticent. All at once they are willing to accept that glass of ice water in the face, that bracing slap across the mouth, that reprimand for the fat on one’s bourgeois soul, known as modern architecture.” (From Bauhaus to Our House) Yet Columbus, as both town and film, proposes that the modern can be a warm bath rather than that glass of ice water.

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      Wolfe’s point is that, in the past, the architect served their paymasters and notes that “…those who commissioned and paid for palazzi, cathedrals, opera houses, libraries, universities, museums, ministries, pillared terraces and winged villas didn’t hesitate to turn them into visions of their own glory. (Bauhaus to Our House). Wolf says that Napoleon’s architects gave him the Arc de Triomphe and the Madeleine, while his nephew Napoleon III persuaded architects to give him the Paris Opera and many new boulevards. Give the architects all the power and what do you end up with? According to Wolfe, places that the people occupy with suffering and that others look at with pity. There is in Wolfe’s claim a reactionary stance: that he who pays the piper has his say, but also that old buildings are so much better than anything new. However, the inverse stance offered by The Fountainhead can seem no less troublesomely right-wing, with the book written by Ayn Rand — a writer associated with hardline libertarianism and Neo-Darwinian thinking. In the film, Howard Roark is the struggling architect who just won’t compromise, as he offers an extreme version of the architect that Wolfe deplores. In the film’s most outlandish moment, he arranges for a block of public flats to be dynamited because they weren’t put up according to his specifications. This has nothing to do with safety laws, as we find in The Towering Inferno, but with aesthetic ones. Roark is a modernist who won’t have any truck with neo-classical nonsense. Try and stick a portico on the front and expect the worst, which means no housing for the poor and a bomb blast in the city.

      The Fountainhead is as crazy a film as classic Hollywood has produced, a messy mix of Freudian symbolism: phallic when Roark handles a power drill, and neurotic when the heiress becomes as fractured as the broken marble fireplace she damages when she becomes fixated on Roark. The film takes artistic integrity to an absurd level by focusing on the most socially pertinent of art forms and allows Roark to act as if he were painting canvases. The artist who destroys a painting a rich benefactor insists he touch up might seem a tad melodramatic. But when this is a housing project for hundreds it seems beyond the realm of acceptable sanity. Yet the film at no point questions the megalomania of its leading character, and takes the phallic obsessions of many a twentieth-century architect, and insists we take them very seriously indeed. Writing on the yen for architects reaching for the sky, Will Self says “sometimes a cigar may be just a cigar, but a skyscraper is always a big swaying dick vaunting the ambitions of late capitalism to reduce the human individual to the status and the proportions of a submissive worker ant. Architecturally skyscrapers are the most meretricious of structures; predicated not on the possible realisation of any aesthetic ideal, but on the actualisation of specific construction technologies.” (Guardian) The Fountainhead would suggest what is wrong with the phallic if it proves the prowess of its architect?

        Roark is based loosely on Frank Lloyd Wright, with Merrill Schleier noting that “Roark's pitched battle with architectural conservatism loosely mirrors the career of Wright, whose innovative architecture and heroic personality Rand admired. This battle is couched in elevated ideological and moral terms: a mediocre building is not merely aesthetically objectionable, but constitutes a crime against democratic institutions.” (Society of Architectural Historians) Wright was initially interested in working on the film, though Roark’s work shares few similarities with Wright’s, which are often low-slung and using circular and complicated angular designs, like the Guggenheim and Fallingwater. Roark wants great height and little ornamentation, and though Rand may have spent much time researching modern architecture, it was always going to serve an ideological project. She wanted from Wright his genius; wanted from high-rises the willy waving. ”The theme Rand most admired in Wright's An Autobiography (1932) was his abiding belief that the architectural calling was the struggle of genius against an uncomprehending and mediocre mob.” However, “when the film came out Wright called it, a “treacherous slant on his philosophy.” (Society of Architectural Historians) Rand’s script and King Vidor’s direction emphasise the need for the individual to do whatever they like no matter how detrimental this might be to the majority. The architect has the absolute right to put up his buildings any way he wishes: only the small-minded and petty, the mediocre and the unimaginative, are inclined to disagree. The film offers the perversely pious, a piety that plays like an inversion of a Capra film when Roark takes to the stand and defends himself after getting taken to court over his wilful action. He calls no witnesses and makes a defence based on saying “the mind is an attribute of the individual, there is no such thing as a collective brain. The man who thinks must think and act on his own. The reasoning mind cannot work under any form of compulsion; it cannot be subordinated to the needs, opinions or wishes of others. It is not an object of sacrifice.”

    This is all beside the point in a court of law, given that the jury has been expressly asked to focus on the facts, finding Roark guilty or otherwise of blowing up the housing project. But no, Roark is Rand’s mouthpiece, and the jury finds him innocent even if the best they could have properly claimed was that he was guilty for a good reason. The Fountainhead doesn’t care much for rational thinking and when Roark speaks, the more cogently minded, let alone those given to a smidgen of sympathy for the poor who have lost their homes just as they were about to move into them, might wonder if a mind so self-absorbed as Roark’s couldn’t benefit from a little of the collective to straighten out his thinking. There is also, of course, the contradiction that though he insists the mind isn’t an object of sacrifice, this is the very thing he seems to think: he risks sacrificing his career, reputation and freedom after blowing up the building. He is surely doing it for higher principles and falls into a grand Hollywood tradition of Christ-like figures who are willing to undergo great hardships, well aware they are right and just. But the Capra figure is right too, and not just because he has the people on his side in Meet John Doe, Mr Smith Goes to Washington and It’s a Wonderful Life. They are not hymns to individualism, even if Capra can often seem conservative in his love for small-town living. He shows that community matters and that strong individuality meets with the collective, without being beholden to it. In The Fountainhead, Roark doesn’t draw his power from the people but only expects from them their ability to concur when they know such a singular person is correct. “I’m not afraid of public opinion one way or another” he says. It is why Roark is contrasted with the newspaper tycoon who thinks he has power because he sells many newspapers. But this is the mob, and they can turn against him easily because they don’t have individual minds. When the demagogic theatre critic speaks to a large crowd, telling them that the individual should always be sacrificed to the majority, that this is the self-sacrifice that matters, the camera pans from the critic standing on the stage to the crowds taking in the speech without an individual in sight. In the film’s philosophy, there isn’t a collective mind working for a common good, but a mindless mass incapable of thinking for itself.

    From a certain perspective, the film has a point, and there have been plenty philosophers who have emphasised in different ways the sovereign right of the ego (Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Sartre). But The Fountainhead bypasses the intricacies of such a position and arrives at the blindly narcissistic. We don’t have to be Kantian to understand that the individual has to be subordinate to the collective; we need only to see that in many instances it is inevitable — whether it happens to be fighting for one’s country when invaded, or paying taxes to have decent roads. In this sense, architecture seems more than most to be an enterprise far greater than the individual. It isn’t just that many people are involved in such a project, including bricklayers, welders and electricians, but also in those deciding to finance it; public sector committees, corporations and so on. One might potentially admire the film’s determination to propose an absolute principle of individuality by premising it on so social an endeavour, one that makes such a claim harder to argue for than if someone were to do so by centering on a painter or a writer. But it doesn’t then make its case; it hyperbolises the position, like someone losing an argument who grows louder in defending it.  

     Most of this essay has been about architecture over architects but it would seem a little remiss to eschew their presence altogether, even if we might find when presented in fictional form the films pay little attention to the profession, or present it in exaggerated terms — with Roark the great example of the latter. Viewers may not recall that Tom Hanks is an architect in Sleepless in Seattle, Woody Harrelson in Indecent Proposal, and Michelle Pfeiffer in One Fine Day. Few would remember that one of the main characters in Les Biches is an architect, though we might make note of the friend in Chabrol’s Just Before Nightfall’s profession since he has designed the odd house the leading character lives in. The title of The Belly of the Architect will likely keep the profession in mind in Peter Greenaway’s film. It also seems far from incidental that Sandro in L’avventura is an architect, however compromised. Sometimes the films show the profession has a clear diegetic function; often it doesn’t, which is why 2024 wasn’t a bad year for the architect on screen, with the figure’s centrality in both Megalopolis and The Brutalist. But those looking to understand architecture from a professional’s angle are more likely to go to documentaries — My Architect, How Much Does your Building Weigh, Mr Foster?, Sketches of Frank Gehry, Antonio Gaudi and Frank Lloyd Wright: The Man Who Built America.

     However, before leaving the architect to one side, we can say a few words about The Towering Inferno, another pulp account of the profession, but with potentially a reverse message to The Fountainhead. Paul Newman may not be the most likely figure to seem architectural. This might only partially reside, though, in his general screen presence and even more on the role he plays within the film: here he is a more concentrated action hero than implicated designer of a building that is increasingly going up in flames. Like Cooper, Newman usually carried a blue collar aspect that other actors often escaped: Robert Redford, Robert Duvall, Gregory Peck, Michael Douglas and Jack Lemmon. He is more likely an architect than John Wayne, Clint Eastwood or Charles Bronson (who astonishingly played one in Death Wish), but hardly ideal casting. Yet the film is well aware that Newman’s character Doug Roberts is only a minor feature in the overall design. There is the building’s owner who wanted the tallest high-rise in the world to assuage his ego and to impress his daughter, and we have, too, the owner’s son-in-law who has taken a few risks with the safety, saving money as his stepfather Jim Duncan (William Holden) wished. We also have the fireman (Steve McQueen), who tells Doug at the end of the film that they were lucky only 200 died. One of these days it will be 10,000, he says, and that he will keep swallowing smoke until they start asking people like him how to build these towers.  

     The Towering Inferno was released not so long after the World Trade Centre’s Twin Towers were opened, and two years after the completion of the Trans-Am building in San Francisco, where the film is set. At the time, The Trans-Am was the 8th tallest building in the world and San Francisco a city of great prosperity and liberal hope. As Rebecca Solnit says, “I used to be proud of being from the San Francisco Bay Area. I thought of this place in terms of liberation and protection; we were where the environmental movement was born; we were the land of experimental poetry and anti-war marches, of Harvey Milk and gay rights,

of the occupation of Alcatraz Island that galvanised a nationwide Indigenous rights movement as well as Cesar Chavez’s farmworkers’ movement in San Jose and the Black Panthers in Oakland." (London Review of Books) But she also acknowledges that “over the past twenty years, ranks of glass towers have risen up just south of the city’s old downtown. The second tallest building west of the Mississippi River is San Francisco’s Salesforce Tower, whose resemblance, thanks to its curved sides and blunt edges, to a dildo or penis is often noted. It’s certainly a monument to hubris. It’s so tall that its isolated tip can be seen from many vantage points in the Bay Area.” The Towering Inferno may have been just one of many disaster films released in the mid-seventies (The Poseidon Adventure, Hindenburg, Earthquake, The Cassandra Crossing), cashing in on catastrophe after the success of 1969’s Airport. Yet it more than most seems pertinent to our times if we accept that the skyscraper has become ever more sky-scraping, and that watching it now many will have in mind the events of the 11th of September 2001, the last word, one hopes, in towering infernos.    

     What Solnit sees in the changes to the city she loves is the increasing corporatisation of it, and skyscrapers are nothing if not a monument to corporate prowess. Will Self’s remark on the phallic dimensions of tall buildings, resembles Solnit’s penis comparison, but we shouldn’t forget Self’s claim too that the skyscraper contains “the ambitions of late capitalism to reduce the human individual to the status and the proportions of a submissive worker ant.” (Guardian) While the high-rise metonymises alienation or poverty, the skyscraper illustrates greed and ambition, even if Doug seems someone who has little interest in either. Early on, Duncan’s daughter says to her husband, that Doug used to wrestle grizzly bears out in Montana. This might be an exaggeration, yet it is more plausible than Newman as an architect — and the film is predicated on Newman’s escape from the city back to the countryside. He looks more like a man keen to build a log cabin over another monument to the human’s over-inflated self-importance. As he says at the end of the film: “maybe they ought just to leave it the way it is, as a shrine to all the bullshit in the world.” There are now numerous buildings more than 500 metres into the sky, including Lotte World Tower, Shanghai Tower, Warisan Merdeka Tower and the tallest, Burj Khalifa. They are hymns to capitalism and no doubt the cathedrals of our age. Roland Barthes, speaking of the Eiffel Tower, and of those in the 19th century who dreamed of structures of great height, proposed that “art is always dream and function, expression of a utopia and instrument of convenience” (The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies) If Doug and the fireman hoped that this might be the end of pointlessly tall buildings, instead we have seen their endless proliferation. Not even the collapse of the Twin Towers could put a stop to phallic ambition and capitalist prowess.

        That last word could seem like a typo - that progress was surely the word one was looking for. But as living standards for many Americans stalled at precisely the same time as the Towering Inferno’s release (with the Opec oil crisis) and has never properly recovered, prowess seems appropriate. Capitalism might like the maritime metaphor of a tide lifting all boats, but that would fall under progress. Prowess is less interested in a tide that rises for all than an image of hierarchy, and what better an image than a skyscraper to register such a belief? That low angle near the end of The Towering Inferno with the building ablaze is a common enough shot without the flames, an awareness of the individual small against corporate structures, a smallness that has become ever more evident as structures have become ever taller. “High-rise buildings have also been shown to elicit feelings of oppressiveness…” researchers have found. “These feelings of oppressiveness have been theorized to cause an invasion of space and invoke feelings of stress and anxiety…(‘Exposure to High-Rise Buildings Negatively Influences Affect’)

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            Nowhere has this corporate transformation been more evident than in the Docklands area of London, and in no country more than China, which leads us to two films central to this exploration: The Long Good Friday and Still Life. Roger Lee notes that “Docklands has become a kind of Urban Disneyland — a world which invites a temporary suspension of disbelief” and the exemplification of Britain moving from a highly industrialised society to a service sector one. As Lee says, quoting a further source, “By 1955 Britain was one of the most highly industrialised economies the capitalist world has ever seen”, adding “between 1959 and 1981 employment in services in Britain grew by nearly 23 per cent compared to a fall of over 26 per cent in production industries and over 14 per cent in Transport and Communications.” (London Docklands: The Challenge of Development) This shift is exemplified by the Docklands development, what is now known as Canary Wharf.  It was always a project seen from on high, so to speak, with the enormous towers going up despite numerous reservations by many in the community. As Gillian Rose says, “ever since its inception, the LDDC [London Docklands Development Committee] has faced fierce opposition from local community groups…it realised that commercial constraints and its obligations to satisfy the needs of developers were bound to produce continued conflict between itself and the local communities.” (London Docklands: The Challenge of Development) The LDDC was set up the same year The Long Good Friday was released, and few films have been more prescient. When Harold Shand (Bob Hoskins) stands on the docks saying this is his opportunity, or talking on the yacht, with Tower Bridge behind him, about how he wants to return the Thames to greatness after its earlier history as a key maritime port, he is a man who understands the future even if doesn’t quite comprehend the present. Occasionally films benefit from hindsight just as others lose a dimension as a consequence of their erroneous assumption. When a sci-fi predicts flying cars but not the mobile phone, we might watch with a wry smile. When we watch Hoskins predicting the future in The Long Good Friday, it is astonishing how much he gets right.

     It gives to the film an added irony in a work that makes much of Harold’s inability to understand what is going on around him. Without detailing the complexities of the plot, Harold hasn’t been aware his second-in-command has been sending money to Ireland and there has been a mix-up which leads the IRA to start picking off members of his gang. He assumes it must be other gangs behind it and for the first two-thirds of the film is at a loss to see things any other way. When he discovers the truth, he then takes on an organisation that is more concerned with politics than profit, and it will lead to his almost certain demise. If The Long Good Friday is a rare modern tragedy, it is augmented by the economic history that unfolded in the decades after its making. When we look at images of the film and what Docklands looks like now, Harold represents a rare combination of blindness and vision. He can’t see that his right-hand man isn’t being honest with him but he can see that in the near future there are enormous sums of money to be made through capitalist regeneration. We might not care for the money Harold might have made but it is a tragedy when someone has a better understanding of what the future will bring than what the present demands. When in another rare modern tragedy, Chinatown, detective JJ Gittes says to the super-rich Noah Cross, what all his money can buy that he doesn’t already have, Cross replies, “the future Mr Gittes, the future.” Chinatown is a story about incest and Cross has a daughter he abused and a granddaughter he has fathered as he tries to guarantee the future on his own terms in terrible and manifold ways. In The Long Good Friday, Harold and his partner have no children, and at the end of the film they will have no future, as they are driven in two IRA cars going in different directions.

    But during the film, while it might be anticipating what will happen to London, it is also very good at presenting the English capital as it was at the beginning of the 80s. Whether showing Harold in Brixton or in Mayfair, people in the East End boozers or coming out of churches, the film offers a London that Harold could feel was entirely his patch, a city that someone with enough ambition and ruthlessness could half-run without losing his accent or his particular set of ideals, no matter if international money had already intruded. Yet as he says, “the days when Yanks could come over here and buy up Nelson's Column, a Harley Street surgeon and a couple of windmill girls are definitely over!” Harold is a patriot who reckons people can invest in London if they want, but the country belongs to the Brits. Were he to look at who owns much of the UK now he would no doubt be turning in the grave that the IRA had very likely put him in. (The writer Barrie Keefe wrote a sequel where Shand survived but seemed almost relieved it wasn’t made.) Whether it is football teams or political donations, mansions along The Bishops Avenue or chunks of Britain’s communications and energy sectors, Shand would have witnessed a country selling out.

       Harold is a post-war child made good (or bad), someone who might not have got much of an education but could bag a bird with a classy background who is fluent in French. Victoria lends the firm some class but it was partly because of the class system breaking down enough in the post-war years that Harold could become so successful. When he meets again the American gangster whom he is hoping will invest in his project, he says isn’t it amazing what they have made of themselves: the boy from New Jersey; the boy from Stepney. Stepney is in Tower Hamlets, and its former mayor noted that “…in Tower Hamlets we have one of the highest numbers of high rises in the country.” (Inside Housing) We might not know where Harold was brought up precisely, but he would have been living in or a stone’s throw away from these municipal flats. They may not have quite offered the utopia many would have wished. But for a while they helped a generation live in relative comfort and warmth. Harold would have been born during the war (Hoskins was born in 1942) and been part of this legacy. Yet the future he sees was going to be quite different. Instead of a landscape made up of high-rise municipal housing; it would become concentrated skyscrapers around the Thames.

            The Long Good Friday explores what we might describe as the pre-developed while most of the films we have focused upon have shown the consequences of development. Like many a London film of the late seventies and the eighties, the city is shown in a process of transformation and, whatever one’s take on Thatcherism, its presence as a neologism is unequivocal, and matched Margaret Thatcher’s impact on the country. Some neologisms have little weight and others have a secondary significance. Corbynism was a project that never came to pass and will probably slip into oblivion, just as few recall that Grexit was a precursor to Brexit, neologistically, because Greece remained in the European Union as the UK did not. Blairism was impactful but because many saw it as a continuation of Thatcherism, in ameliorated form, it lacks the power of the prior term. One way of looking at The Long Good Friday is to see it as early-stage architectural Thatcherism that would become expanded under architectural Blairism. Indeed, many of the tallest buildings in Canary Wharf were built during the Blair years and not during Thatcher’s, including 8 Canada Square and 25 Canada Square, 40 Bank Street and One Churchill Place. Many more have gone up since, under fourteen years of further Conservatism. But the point is that Blair continued Thatcher’s economic architectural legacy, and the shift from building public homes for people became very much secondary to buildings that accommodated private sector finance. While all these skyscrapers were being built, “the official data shows that the Blair and Brown governments built 7,870 council houses (local authority tenure) over the course of 13 years.” (Full Fact) Far more were put up during the Thatcher era. “New Labour built an average of 562 council houses per year. And Mrs Thatcher's Conservatives? 41,343.” (Full Fact) If O’Hagan emphasises in the post-war years that what mattered was getting people into homes and showed a government happy to build them, then we can see that from an architectural point of view there isn’t much to distinguish between Thatcherism and Blairism. Thatcher was galvanising: allowing right-to-buy so that people could purchase their council homes, and deregulating Britain to make it more accessible for international finance, thus turning Canary Wharf into a skyscraping powerhouse. But Blairism was far from a contrary force to the Thatcherite. A figure like Shand may have benefited from the post-war consensus, but he wasn’t going to settle for it, and few films are better than The Long Good Friday at registering a type of ambition that was in the air. As one of the actors in the film, Paul Freeman, proposed: “It was the beginning of the Thatcher years and there was this interest starting to emerge in self-made men who had international aspirations.” (Cinephilia and Beyond)

     Shand’s aspirations and Thatcher and Blair’s promotion of, or capitulation to, finance in architectural form can seem weak next to China's during the 21st century. No filmmaker has been more determined to chronicle aspects of this shift in the country than Jia Zhangke. Speaking of a documentary project he sought to make, Jia says, “Chinese society was going through this dramatic transformation of urbanization and urban planning, with a lot of streets and buildings being demolished, redesigned, and rebuilt. I had found quite a few architects and city planners that would be perfect for the project, but they didn’t seem to want to share on camera the things I wanted to capture, so we postponed the project.” (Hyperallergic) This hasn’t stopped him examining these shifts in fictional and semi-fictional form - in showing how buildings have moved a country from the agricultural to the hyper-urban in a matter of years. “…You go from having 5,000 years of agricultural history to, in one generation, having this break or gap as a result of urbanization.” (Hyperallergic)

      In Still Life, Jia offers what looks like a documentary account of the Three Gorges Dam. Concentrating on the small town of Fengjie on the Yangtze River, Jia shows a place being reduced to rubble and other parts preparing to be submerged by the project. Rather than making a film about the progress and prowess of China, Jia muses over lives lost to the country’s hyper-development. He shows people bewildered and bemused, exploited and impoverished, and often frames people and places as though trying to find a visual language that counters the promotional video, one that instead of claiming a country’s dreams are being met, shows instead its nightmares becoming evident. Still Life suggests in its English language title that Jia is saying this is still life as opposed to a still life. If the latter traps in time the bowl of fruit, the dead pheasant, the former is closer to bare life. This is Giorgio Agamben’s notion: “The term originates in Agamben's observation that the Ancient Greeks had two different words for what in contemporary European languages is simply referred to as ‘life’: bios (the form or manner in which life is lived) and zoē (the biological fact of life). His argument is that the loss of this distinction obscures the fact that in a political context, the word ‘life’ refers more or less exclusively to the biological dimension or zoē and implies no guarantees about the quality of the life lived.” (Oxford Reference) Is China concerned not with its citizens’ lives but chiefly their functional purpose as they contribute to astonishing levels of growth, while many are left living substandard existences? In Still Life, we notice the contrast between the two main characters, a blue-collar worker in search of his wife, who ran away many years earlier, and a nurse who is looking for her husband, someone who has hardly been in contact in the last couple of years. The worker finds his old neighbourhood has been flooded and lies underwater, while the nurse discovers that her husband has become a successful businessman and has been sleeping with someone investing in his interests. Jia proposes that the person in China has a choice between making do or making something of oneself, but to do the latter means taking advantage of others; to do the former is to risk having nothing at all. This might make the film schematic, but Jia would be more likely to say it is the country that is creating these limitations. His purpose is to film them. “I see movies as a tool to record memory. In China memory is not really valued or treasured, so it’s really important for these movies to record what has transpired.” (Meniscus) Partly what interested him around the time of Still Life was the ambivalently architectural: “right now in China there’s a lot of construction and destruction, and there’s all these relationships that I’m really interested in” (Meniscus). Such ideas, found their way into Still Life and also his later 24 Hour City. Jia wouldn’t doubt there have been many opportunities in the new China, with the World Bank noting that “since China began to open up and reform its economy in 1978, GDP growth has averaged over 9 per cent a year, and more than 800 million people have lifted themselves out of poverty.” But there has also been plenty of new opportunism as well, and this is often what interests Jia, just as he is concerned with communities being destroyed to make way for progress. Both are strongly present in Still Life, and anyone who sees Jia as simplistic in his take on the country would be undermining the exaggeration that has taken place in the country. Jia’s style is usually understated, a quiet despair over a noisy anger, with A Touch of Sin a rare and deliberate exception.

      What he shows in Still Life is a quiet horror as people’s lives are destroyed and their work in preparing for the dam dangerous: one of the characters dies when a wall collapses on him. Marriages are shown to be difficult to sustain and communities literally submerged as economic progress trumps all. In an essay on A Touch of Sin, Jiwei Xiao says “In Jia’s earlier films Still Life and 24 City, explosions were tied as much to destruction as to construction, thereby often evoking loss and hope at the same time. Now, unequivocally chilling and menacing, explosions establish the key tone of A Touch of Sin: a mix of bursting rage and grim despair.” (Film Quarterly)

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      It is this question of hope versus despair, construction versus destruction, that is central to understanding the architectural in film and how little place it has in cinema as a concern. We have noted how rarely architects are present on film and how rarely when creating them as characters films attend to their concerns. However, is it not also because cinema is much more concerned with destruction than construction? Scenes like the housebuilding sequence in Witness might not be exceptional, but it isn’t common, while buildings are getting blown up on screen all the time. As David Thomson says, “in the practice of film-making, explosions have become a sport and a craft - nearly a cult…crews love those moments when care relaxes and they can blast order to hell.” (Screen Violence) Yet it is rare in film for that disorder to contain an element of the mournful — as we might find looking at all those post-war UK estates, suggesting the obliteration of hope in the destruction of apartment blocks. Whether it is Red Road, the Ferris Estate, housing in the Gorbals or in Leeds, one looks on seeing a post-war dream of municipal living literally reduced to rubble. Only occasionally does film tap into this type of melancholy, and perhaps it thus makes sense to end on the filmmaker who more than any other has shown an interest in the architectural and cinema, as we speak once again of Antonioni.

       While in The Eclipse, La Notte, L’avventura and Red Desert, Antonioni shows how people live within the architectural, in Zabriskie Point he ends the film with an inexplicable explosion. He didn’t explode the actual house, which can be found in Arizona, resembles work by Frank Lloyd Wright, and probably has its closest movie equivalent in North by Northwest. A point sometimes noted. Antonioni rebuilt it in a studio backlot. From numerous angles, he shows the building exploding and in increasingly surreal images offers what might be the buildings’ contents or may just be consumer items exploding in the desert landscape, all to the sounds of Pink Floyd. What Antonioni makes clear is that this falls into what we might call an alternative history of the explosion, with films creating a meditative relationship with an image usually given over to the immediacy of excitement. Other examples of this meditative quality can be found in the house going up in flames in Badlands, the opening sequence in Apocalypse Now, and the scene near the end of The Sacrifice when Alex sets fire to his home. Yet of the four films, it is only Antonioni who addresses the architectural and the consumerist and, within the film’s troublesomely complicated politics, we might wonder if the hippie who stares at the building might be doing so with the intent of an Adam Roark, but for reverse reasons and without practical application. She wishes for the building’s destruction just as Roark wills the collapse of his. But with Roark, it is because he cares little for the poor if the building doesn’t match his egoistic demands; for the hippie, it is consumerism that she wishes to undermine in a world where the architectural is given over to the luxurious. We might return to earlier remarks on the International style (buildings versus architecture). But from the perspective of poverty versus riches. In the years after WWII, numerous countries in the West focused on building for the many over prioritising luxury for the few. This wouldn’t only be an issue of public housing but also public buildings, with Columbus a consequence of private largesse determined to improve the public sphere. The reason Columbus, Indiana became an architectural Mecca was because: “J. Irwin Miller, a Columbus native and the chairman of Cummins Engine Co., wasn’t a fan of bland post-World War II buildings. So he challenged his hometown to do better. To encourage the use of some of the world’s best-known architects, his company established a fund that covered the design fees for dozens of public projects.” (Cleveland.com) In different ways, we might include the numerous New Towns of the fifties and sixties, in Britain, France and elsewhere, and the South Bank and Barbican centre in London, as well as public housing projects in the US, as examples of municipal hope.

     This municipal zeal was announced dead at 3.32pm, in St Louis, Missouri, on 15 July 1972. Robert Venturi made the claim more specifically about the death of modernism, but it was as if a certain branch of it concerned with the public good had been demolished too. The reason Venturi chose this specific place and date was because it was deemed the moment housing estate high-rises (in this instance Pruitt-Igoe) were seen to have failed. They began to be blown up and knocked down, no matter if more would still go up, including in the UK Grenfell Tower, built in 1974 and an exmple of high-rises still going up in flames long after the World Trade Centre. The architect who designed Pruitt-Iago was Minor Yamasaki, who had just finished the WTC when Pruitt-Igoe was detonated, and was long since dead when the latter went the way of the former, if for completely different reasons. If Pruitt-Igoe put an end to the dream of large scale public housing, the destruction of the Twin Towers as we have noted led to an emboldening in architectural ambition, with capitalism and creativity coming together to produce ever higher buildings in the sky, and often in places that wouldn’t have been likely a century earlier — in Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, Dubai and China. Western hope gave way to Eastern promise, and while the decline of the west might have been the title of a famous book over a century ago, others might see it more pertinently explored a century later through architecture that proposes money imposes itself on ambition — and that deregulation takes precedence over public planning for the general good. Obviously, the buildings put up for that general good just weren’t good enough, substandard materials, generic designs and hasty production all frequently present, as Adam Curtis explores in The Great British Housing Disaster. Yet it seems that the consequence is an architecture for the few, and buildings, if people are lucky, for the many. When Godard, Ferreri and others saw that the impersonality of post-war dwellings could lead to the alienation and atomisation evident in the coinage Sarcellite, many would now be happy with a modest amount of architectural anomie in return for a roof over their head. That is far from enough, but it can be a useful start, and we might look at how film shows architecture in various lights to understand that it is a question that concerns us all.

© Tony McKibbin