Architecture of Railroad Stations in Film
Put this under the categories of "Classic - Necessary, (archetype): Melodrama/Romance/British/Postwar/Realistic/Women's/Tearjerker/Extra-Marital/Middle-Aged/Bittersweet: Trains Stations
"Brief Encounter" 1946
The definitive example of the Railroad Romance, by which I mean the many, usually doomed, romantic dramas that feature the train as a vehicle of separation, which I italicize without irony, of one good and likable character from another. As the local train is such a comprehensive representative symbol of the lives of the British bourgeoisie, with businessmen going into town once a day, housewives going once a week, standing, waiting, having tea, buying a newspaper, all the typical private/public behaviours have as their backdrop the train and its station.
The music, what would have been "popular" music at the time, is Rachmaninoff's Concerto No 2; very romantic. (This happens to be one of the pieces that first attracted me to start paying attention to the classical music I'd been regaled with all my life in the playing of my father in the living room.) http://www.amazon.com/Tchaikovsky-Concerto-No-Rachmaninoff-2/dp/B000003EUG (scroll down to the Listen To Concerto #2). But what suits the movie so well is that in 1946, the people in the theatre watching this, as well as the characters in the film, would have enjoyed this piece on the radio after dinner. I think there is a scene in which the husband actually turns down the soundtrack as he adjusts his living room radio). This is the piece that Eric Carmen stole outright in his very popular 1976 hit "All By Myself".
Watch the scene where the woman tries, offhand, to reveal to her unsuspecting husband her own sense of guilt - and fails. (She tries to sound suspicious in conversation while he reads the paper). Also the funny scene where the girlfriend on the phone, staring into the mirror, is failing to listen to what the heroine is saying to her).
Though it's full of routines and habits unfamiliar to us, they are shot in such a way as to render them universal - and so very familiar, and thus all the more sympathetic.
The 1984 "Falling in Love" with Meryl Streep and Robert De Niro is a lame near-remake.
Directed by David Lean (of the much more epic Lawrence of Arabia, Doctor Zhivago, Bridge Over River kwai
Written by Noel F*ckin' Coward
Architecture of The Powers of TenThis classic 9 minutes film by Charles and Ray Eames shows not just the powers of the satellite and the microscope in their exponentially detailed views of our world, but the power of a short film to seduce, amuse and inform us. The Eameses pretty much invented what we now call the "industrial film" and though they were interested in making information entertaining, they never stooped to mesmerizing tricks to keep our attention or using condescending language or set-ups to make us feel "smart". This film has the all the force of architecture: the power to teach us a new way of seeing.http://www.youtube.com:80/watch?v=aQ35Jd0ivU0
Architecture on Film: Maison de Verre
Pour yourself a drink and turn your speakers up a bit. This is a 24 minute film, with sound,(the confidently clipped British inflected narration). The topic is the masterwork of architect Pierre Châreau. It's just an amazing building and this is a lovely explication of why. Just keep remembering: this was the year 1928!
For those of you who worry about modern architecture lacking texture or discreet spaces or the warmth of natural materials, take a look.
We may not wish to build this now, but what a big fat lesson this is about how you might go about building AT ALL! no matter what it is: it's thoroughly considered, loving in detail and devoted to the visceral and human over the abstract and ideological.
Then, if you are inclined to the motifs of modernism - a conscious embrace of the machine, in service and in symbol, the acceptance of complex rather than comfortable settings to better reflect the difficult realities of modern life, and the paradox of a restrained ornament requiring more effort and planning to achieve than a more boisterous ornament does, this house is for you.
Even if you're just folding laundry, put this on and enjoy a worthy 24 minutes. (look at the recreations the film makers made of people walking up and down, all in period costume and hairstyles, even if you may not notice) .
click here, busters:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4973824278845805386&q=cad%20monkey%20movie%20is%20funnier
Architecture of GREAT KITCHENS IN FILM A Perfect Murder
For the pleasures of a good index, I’ve compiled a list of “Great Kitchens In Film”. As the architecture of film goes, these are set designs notable not for do-it-yourself ideas, but rather for the joys of taxonomy. These constitute an architecture because they give us a new way of seeing. Their success lies less in their tastefulness than in the expressive efficiency of their structures. The list is by no means exhaustive. In Bright Eyes (1934) Shirley Temple spends a lot of time in the black and white tiled spaciousness of her single mother’s wealthy employer, who only ever comes in to give directions. Though it’s a place of unremitting labor, the gleaming surfaces and comestible abundance help the uniformed staff serve as a surrogate family, which is what Shirley Temple movies were all about. Who wouldn’t feel safe and happy with cupboards that clean and ceilings that high? The counters are a mile long. To get to the kitchen in Shampoo (1975), we first follow a long path from the driveway to the rolling lawns in back, down to the clay tennis courts and back up to the sprawling, Bel-Aire home of Lee Grant’s daughter Carrie Fisher, before finally entering. In the double door refrigerator-freezer (the Sub-Zero of its day), already prepared cold-cuts and peeled & cut veggies are arranged and waiting on a plate under Saran Wrap . It helps to define her precociousness, affluence and sense of entitlement that she can carry on a pointed argument with her mother’s lover while at the same time politely offering him a baked apple, “So, are you queer? – you want a baked apple? they’re cold, but they’re good – Well, are you?” You can just smell the central air-conditioning. That we never really see the kitchen in his studio apartment sheds much light on the manly modern artist Jimmy Stewart plays in Rear Window (1954). He’s too busy pushing the boundaries of photo-journalism to care about eating. Reflecting both his economy of means and his increasing dependence on a “perfect” woman, the kitchen is only animated by a restaurant delivery man and a girlfriend’s preparation of after-dinner drinks. It helps that the restaurant is “21”, and the girl is Grace Kelly. But in the incandescent shadows reflected off the narrow ceiling as she hums invisibly fixing coffee and cognac, we are made privy to Stewart’s ambivalence to warmth & domesticity. A Perfect Murder (1998) features an impossibly enormous renovated prewar townhouse, and though the kitchen is the ultimate scene of the crime the only thing perfect is the housekeeping. This kitchen isn’t for soiling with anything so messy as food. Even the cook’s “famous roast” comes out of the oven like an immaculate concoction. Our introductory view is disembodied as the camera slowly and coldly caresses the highest-end fixtures and furnishings, gliding across hand painted glass tile backsplash, unused brass-plated standing faucet and antique lever controls above an enormous, pristine, porcelain bib sink; copper pots for every possible purpose hang high and still over a work table big enough for a wrestling match with a stranger. The multiple entrances from various parts of the home only makes us feel more vulnerable to unexpected entry and the separate door to a service elevator can only lead to danger. If the ominous darkness wasn’t enough to make unsuspecting Gwyneth Paltrow stay miles away in the bath, you might still need the plot contrivance of a ringing phone to bring her padding in in robe and slippers. Lucky for her there was a 9 inch stainless-steel meat thermometer nearby. ______________________________________________________________________________________ Coming soon - Pantry with its sliding metal door cabinets and seltzer bottles and extra glasses (and bicarbonate of soda- how comforting) in All About Eve Mellow late night under the cabinet light (and green travertine?) in FLW’s Ennis house location for Harrison Ford in Blade Runner – augmented with a realistic-because naturally accreted- mismatch of additional lighting and cooking implements. Six Degrees of Separation has the classic late1980s glass fronted high end cabinets with interior halogen pin-point lights, and central island and granite counters – and no food. See also the first yuppie kitchen for aging boomers in the early '80s “The Big Chill” – one of the first re-examinations and exonerations of bourgeois domesticity, until then repudiated by younger versions of these same characters. See also the unsoiled fantasy of the “Father of the Bride” remakes; The cosseted retro-deco of “Alice”; The kitchen in Dinner Rush doesn't count because technically, its real (Gigino Trattoria on Greenwich Street)
ARCHITECTURE OF THE CONVERSATION
The Conversation works with sound as montage does to sight-
LAYERING: layering of sound fragments repeated over and over in discontinuous replays until we finally put it together in our heads. but listen up for trick ending- the only failure. great ending: layers of ambient and scenographic musics
Visual Abetting: Layers of reflections in phone-booth and the trolley window, its lights stopping and starting;
TRANSPARANCY: Filtering through obstacles in space, (the park,) to apprehend an ultimate composition, (the conversation.)
Visual Abetting: Blue screen hanging in studio, scrim on interior corporate office windows, the view to the murder through textured glass, the Francis Bacon smear of the view to the body through the bloody plastic shower curtain; even his rubber raincoat helps render him more vulnerable for its foggy flimsy see-throughness, whipping around in the wind as he traipses back to the envelope he’s almost brave enough to leave thrown away.
MULTIPLE POINTS OF VIEW: The conversation, recorded from different angles, listened to with different agendas and understood by different predispositions;
Visual abetting: the backward-forward view through the van window provides a cheap and easy peephole for amateurs; the easy use he puts to the surveillance camera at the convention; the view to his cell-among-others on the terrace of the hotel;
Dig the studio he works in - before “live-work” lofts;
Dig the style: Late High Modern, high corporate kingdom (embarcadero center), austere and menacing slickness of upper offices. Hard edged concrete reception desk at grade level as faceless as the Polaroid guards with neckties.
The sound technician on the movie has said the sound he used to indicate unclear parts of the recording is entirely made up and not related to any real effect of recording.
I’ve tried to figure out what if any significance there is to it being the particular scene of the Flintstones that he wakes up to in the hotel. My only and unsatisfactory guess is that Barney being in drag might echo the dissemblance elsewhere. okay it doesn’t mean anything. Better than this is how the camera contemplates the silent bucolic scenario
in the wallpaper as it fails to disclose or suggest the cataclysm it so gently masks
Scary moment: great pause by Hackman when phone rings (see his listening, disbelieving shadow in the other room.)
