More Bruno, under "Fads of Noir"

"Moving along with the history of space, cinema defines itself as an architectural practice. It is an art form of the street, an agent in the building of city views. The landscape of the city ends up interacting closely with filmic representations, and to this extent, the streetscape is as much a filmic 'construction' as it is an architectural one." (27)

Site Collision in the Subways

Now here's another idea...

What about every time, when we're sitting in the 4, 5, 6, crossing the 20's, and other 4, 5, 6 suddenly cross paths, creating a visual collision of windows and indiscernable faces? It'd also be great to contact mic the windows.

Giuliana Bruno on Filmic Architectonics

"To build a theoretical map of an architectonics as mobile as that of motion pictures, one must use a travling lens and make room for the sensory spatiality of film, for our apprehension of space, including filmic space, occurs through an engagement with touch and movement. Our site-seeing tour follows this intimate path of mobilized visual space, "erring*" from architectural and artistic sites to moving pictures. Haptically driven, the atlas finds a design for filmic space within the delicate cartography of emotion, that sentient place that exists betwen the map, the wall, and the screen." (16)

*Bruno refers to erring as straying from a path

Reality - Space & Time

"Reality assumes presence, which has a priviledge position along two parameters, space and time; only the here and now are completely real. By its very existence, the narrative suppresses the now (accounts of current life) or the here (live television coverage), and most frequently the two together (newsreels, historical accounts, etc.)." p.22

Metz, Christian. Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema, University Of Chicago Press, 1990.

Going down the road, literally

Today during my Film Architecture class at Brown, I began thinking about another film that could further "explore" my thoughts on mobility, action in space, and the experiential effect that film could attribute by depicting moving through a physical stretch.

The idea is a personal narrative. Here is the story:

When I was eighteen, I got into USC's School of Cinema and Television on a full scholarship. Being the only child of my household, my slightly spendy father bought me a brand new 2006 Toyota Solara, fully equipped, and so on. So on "Move-in Day," my family (which consisted of my father, my mother, and I) drove down from Sunnyvale, CA (near San Jose) in two vehicles to go to USC. My father drove the van, which was full of my "stuff," and my mother and I followed in my new car behind him.

Right after we passed Los Banos, which was about 2 hours down, my father had a seizure at a rest stop. My mother had to go to the bathroom, which was why we pulled over at a roadside diner at the first place. So when I pulled up next to the minivan, what I saw was my father rolling down the window, convulsing. I ran into the diner, screaming for help, and soon after, my father was loaded into an ambulance.

Before I realized what time it was, it was getting dark out. Los Banos was kind of in the middle of nowhere, so the ambulance drivers asked my mother and I to tail the ambulance. We drove two cars, which would normally not be an issue, except for the fact that my overprotective father did not allow my mother drive on freeways, fearing that some type of inate incompetence (yes, how could he imagine?) would take over and she would get into an accident. So there she was, driving in on a long stretch of freeway, in the dark, by herself. I drove in front of her.

There were very few cars around us on the freeway. To our left and right, there was nothing. Barren, unlit fields, maybe. It felt like the edge of the earth. We soon, somehow, lost the ambulence, and I was just driving, down the dark road. Not knowing where I was, in the strongest state of panic that I have ever endured. For maybe the first time, I felt like things would not be alright, that there are stronger forces out there, taking me over, and my father was not there to protect me.

Out of the entire experience of my father's passing away, this moment was the most memorable. I distinctively remember my feelings at the time, and have as a result marked it the most painful.

The work that I want to do, as informed by this moment, is a video loop of the road. The space that contained this experience was very abstract and very infinite, no less very immersive in that it felt as if the disappearing vantage point in front of me was literally sucking me in. I want to retrace this physical path, film my point of view, and project it in a way that it expresses this experience filmmically and visually.

"Walter Benjamin's description of the theatrical character of the townscape of Naples is an exact picture of the combined stage and auditorium in Rear Window: "'Buildings are used as a popular stage. They are all divided into innumerable, simultaneously animated theatres. Balcony, courtyard, window, gateway, staircase, roof are the same time stage and boxes.'"

From Pallasmaa: "Geometry of Terror" p. 147 on Walter Benjamin in "Reflections" p. 167

"The field of vision has always seemed to me comparable to the ground of an archeological excavation."

Paul Virilio. L'horizon negatif. p.1