One cannot watch the films of Alfred Hitchcock without some sense of space. When we first heard about this book, The Wrong House: The Architecture of Alfred Hitchcock (published by 010), we thought back to all the films we'd seen and in quite a few, the space, the structures, the architecture plays a primary role in the construction of the tales. In Rear Window, L.B. Jeffries (played by James Stewart) confined to a wheelchair due to a broken leg, peeks from the back window of his apartment house, the structure of the building, and where the tenants live defining the story. Or in North by Northwest the famous scene, where villains go toppling off the largest strangest monument in America, Mount Rushmore, or even in The Birds, houses are the only flimsy protections against the fatal attacks by nature.
In all of these movies, and quite a few more, Hitchcock, who worked as a set designer in the 20s, paid very close attention to the structures his stories played out in, often making them not merely plot devices, but strange and haunting characters, the Bates Motel looming at the top of the hill in Psycho; its crazed occupant leering down onto the rooms with a murderous gaze.
But if we can be momentarily expansive about the role of architecture, at the recent Festarch conference, artist Vito Acconci at a conference on the relationship between writing and architecture, simply stated that the two disparate disciplines both have a structure, both as sentences and in totality. We even use this phrase in discussing grammar: a "sentence structure." Cinema as well has a structure, one that Hitchcock was masterfully aware of, watching the below interview with Hitchcock, his sense of direction, and careful consideration of each shot, with who and where, plays directly on the psychology of the characters and the viewers, but also on a poetics of space, perhaps less emotive and nostalgic than Bachelard, but a sense of the poetic potential of not only the physical space of a story, but also the cinematic space from whence is the camera pointed and from there, where will it go, how is it showing the interior spaces filled with, a favorite Hitchcock word, suspense. Below is a clip from a very good interview, where Hitchcock, with the illustrative aid of clips, explains how he built some of the most potent scenes in Psycho.
Before that though, in case you missed it earlier, here's is the publisher's site for the book that sparked our musing. And click on the movie links, they all lead to the best Hitchcock trailers, where he personally tries to pitch the movie to the audience.
The Architecture of Alfred Hitchock
Justice - Stress
There's been some talk about this video being censored in many countries. Maybe it's because it's fucking hardcore? You can't really tell whether the people in it were aware of the taping or not, maybe it's just state-of-the-art prank, but it really does look scary. It's like the guys from La Haine got shitfaced with the Man Bites Dog crew and decided to raid the streets of Paris. As for banlieu-savvy directing the closest thing that comes to mind is this video, but Romain Gavras adds a much thicker atmosphere to it, along with tons of movie references.
Just like La Haine and The Warriors were intense cityscape crossings dealing with urban space and subcultural codes, you can't really watch these images without feeling the subterranean grain of street life. Be it Paris or New York, sometimes a moving picture can help a city keep up to its status of myth.
Shitfaced at Gallery Weekend Berlin
Here's the latest video blog from the gang at CIA. We were lucky enough to witness some real performance art at Gallery Weekend Berlin, art that challenged the boundaries of art, that toyed with government and government and good taste. Well, the performance was shit, both literally and figuratively; the real performance was the art dealers calling the local police. We think the performance was awful, but the gallerist cgetting the cops to arrest made us feel that these alleged hip patrons of the arts are nothing but tawdry merchants.
Let's not too harsh, the performers had a nice bottle trick and the dealers, I'm sure the dealers can do interesting things with bottles too.
In the height of Berlin Gallery Weekend, a man in his thirties, short hair, button shirt, blue jeans, screamed at the top of his lungs while a stylish lesbian played tambourine alongside, screeching in a regular rhythm. Clothes came off at one point as they moved from one high-end art gallery to another in the building. The woman’s shirt became unbuttoned, the man’s pants descended round his ankles, his green American Apparel undies shifted down around his thighs, he shat into his hand (not pausing in his screams) and smeared it onto his forehead. The German gallerists said nothing. But of course, called the police.
As for the shitsmearing American Apparel model, exceptions exist as with anything, but transgressive performance art more often than not is bad, boring, and shudder inducing. But not the shudder of shock and horror that the artist may be shooting for, but a shudder of pity and embarrassment.
Somehow this scene acts as a metaphor for what Berlin as a center of cultural production is going through, the old style radical and transgressive actions still weakly cling on, but are quickly squashed by the local art marketeers. The gentrifying of a city changes the space for radical action, making a world (the art world) that no matter how bad the art should have acted less reactionary (and let’s call it, fascistic) to artists.
The Riesumazione of San Padre Pio
Certain devout Catholics fiercely believe that the Padre Pio's stigmata - the wounds of Jesus on the cross sometimes divinely remade on his most devoted followers - are evidence of his sanctity, others, more skeptical, assert that he acquired carbolic acid from a local pharmacist to create his wounds.
What is interesting for us is that 15,000 worshippers gathered the 24th of April at the shrine of the Roman Catholic saint and mystic Padre Pio, and a few days ago hundreds of videos uploaded by onlookers - and not - swarmed into Youtube. You can start the tour at the video above tracked from here.
His exhumed body went on display for the first time since his death almost 40 years ago.
We haven't been able to take a student in front of the glass coffin at San Giovanni Rotondo, in the Apulia Region in southern Italy. More than a million people are expected to line in front of the transparent casket between now and September 2009. Catholic practice allows for
the remains of saints to be exhumed, checked for their state of deterioration and exhibited as relics for veneration. No Check-in Architecture researchers has been there yet to investigate, but beside we are working on another pilgrimage mission, for a real missionary.
Destination: Santiago de Compostela.
Vehicle: just your feet and your
travel bag.
Trapped in an Elevator for 41 Hours
Nick Paumgarten uses as the dramatic pull for a story on the less than dramatic topic of elevators, the story of Nicholas White, a production manager at Business Week magazine who in 1999 was stuck in an elevator for 41 hours.
The video above is the security camera, fast forwarded to cover 41 hours in three minutes and thirty seconds.
Elevators make modern cities possible, without them, who'd live or work in a building over five stories. And the towering blocks of financial centers like New York, London, Tokyo, Beijing, or the insta-metropolises of Dubai, etc would simply not be possible without them. As an experience of space, social, architectural, technological, elevators are the part of the building we usually most try to ignore. Occassionally strapped to the side of the building and constructed of glass, most people want to merely teleport and not to be annoyed byt he presence of others while doing it, watching the digital numbers tick up, as if it made the machine go faster.
All these ideas and more can be found in Paumgarten's story, "Up and then Down: the lives of elevators" from the New Yorker magazine.
What is The Italian Job?
When we're researching the Travel Bags for the various missions we come across amazing videos on YouTube. The trailer for the movie, The Italian Job particularly titillated us. We're actually doing a mission recreating (as legally as possible) the chase scene. Here's a snippet from the mission script below, but really just watch this clip.
In the Peter Collinson's 1969 film The Italian Job starring Michael Caine, a gang of British crooks steal a bundle of gold bullion from Turin using three Mini Coopers. They sabotage the city's traffic control system, creating total chaos, and then escape the city in one of the best car chases in the movie history, tearing through Turin’s landmarks at breakneck speed.
As an experience, driving explores a way of encountering, conceiving and remaking urban space. It does so by investigating how different kinds of driving, at different speeds and on different roads, produce distinct encounters with cities and architecture and, hence, also produce similarly distinct political and cultural experiences.
Christiania, You Have My Heart!
Freetown Christiana started as a "social experiment," with Danish idealists trying to take the liberation talk that was circulating around the counterculture in Copenhagen and make it real. An abandoned Navy barracks five minutes from the center of the city was initially broken into by locals upset with the lack of playgrounds in their neighborhood. They were quickly followed by hippies looking to carve out a section of the city for themselves.
This video dating from 1991 is the primary documentary document of Freetown Christiania, and as beautiful as it is, a lot has changed in the intervening 17 years, including the closure by the government of the open hash trade.
We're planning a mission on it, but for now watch Christiania, You Have My Heart!, to see how one group of hippies created a permanent space for social change with all of the problems, negotiations, victories, and defeats that came out of this one effervescent moment.
Here's a link to a rather thorough wikipedia entry on Freetown Christiania.
An Anthem for Check-In Architecture
How, how he rides
Oh, the passenger
He rides and he rides
He looks through his window
What does he see?
He sees the signs and hollow sky
He sees the stars come out tonight
He sees the city's ripped backsides
He sees the winding ocean drive
And everything was made for you and me
All of it was made for you and me
'Cause it just belongs to you and me
So let's take a ride and see what's mine
Singing la la la la.. lala la la
la la la la.. lala la la
la la la la.. lala la la
