SFB - Sonderforschungsbereich Kulturen des Performativen

PROJECT DESCRIPTION:

Film cannot be considered an object divorced from the practice of its presentation. As a medium it must be regarded in terms of a double apparatus, one that records and one that projects. The particular quality of film as a movement image first becomes perceptible during its projection. This moment of projection determines, in turn, reception. The screening of a film takes place in two locations: on the wall onto which it is projected and in the viewer, in whom the projection is transformed into the perception of movement images. In the context of these medial prerequisites, film may be considered a performative medium: in the first place, in a trivial technical sense, in that, in order for a film (i.e. movement images) to be viewed, a film must be screened; in the second, in the utterly un-trivial sense of a theory of communication and action, that is, that the film addresses the viewer as a performative act. A performative theory of film may be conceived of as a two-term relationship: as a screening the film addresses the viewer, for only the viewer is able to perceive a given individual film image as a movement image, that is, as a film. This particular aspect of the screening situation points to two central areas of research: the site in which a screening takes place and the viewer, herself, as the locus of this event.

This topography offers the following research options:

- the first area of investigation: screening spaces:
the movie theatre, its architecture and the functional alignment of this architecture with the historically variable technologies of the apparatus (wide screen formats require a particular organization of viewers before the screen; silent films require an orchestra pit etc.); the movie theatre as part of the street, the city, the shopping mall etc.

- the second area of investigation: the body of the viewer:
the audience in its situation of dependence upon both the conditions under which a given screening takes place and under those upon which the screening of film in general depends. Theories of somatic perception are to play a central role in this area.
It is in the context of the assumption that during the cinematic experience a reciprocal constitution of external and mental space occurs, that the relationship between these two areas of investigation is to be considered

Goals
The project poses a central question: how do architectural and filmic space interact and how may the presumed conflation of spaces be translated into other symbolic spatial configurations than those of public / private? Thus the moment of transition requires more precise analysis; such moments are to be located in the kinaesthetic dimensions which both architecture and the cinema share.
Architecture constitutes itself in the eye of the beholder. The architectural totality of a given building can only be known through the various perspectives, from which the observer gazes upon it. It is only by means of the processing of these various visual impressions that a coherent image of the structure takes shape, which we would term an architectural memory image such as that of, for example, the Cathedral in Cologne or the Ducal Palace in Venice. Architecture is performative in that it takes shape and takes on importance only by means of a particular practice of observation. It is neither sufficient to look at a photograph, nor a blueprint of a building nor to analyse a computer simulation. In order to grasp a structure it is necessary for movement to take place, a movement both of the gaze and of the foot, as an experience of both spatial presence and materiality. The various points of view vary not only by means of the perspective of the position of the observer, but also through variations in the quality of the light, the angle, the position on a given story of the building etc. Mental or other images cannot be replaced by architecture, although they can only be grasped through moving perspectives (Ingarden, Arnheim). Nonetheless, architecture consists not only of these mental images and may not be entirely substituted by them. The question, whether this multiplicity of perspectives are a product of the subjective point of view of the observer, or rather are qualities of the object itself, which force themselves upon the observer, has been answered in a variety of fashions. Arnheim offered a critique of the historian Frankl, who made the claim that a coherent impression of a structure cannot be had since the 16th century, that the endless multiplicity of individual perspectives has dominated since then. The aesthetic experience of the constant alternation of a kaleidoscope-like variety of individual images has taken the upper hand, in place of a set of predetermined functions. (For further information on the kinaesthetic dimension of medieval perceptual modi see Project A1 (Wenzel), which also presumes the simultaneity of possible perspectives, implying in turn the necessity for mobility of both the observer's gaze and body.) At the heart of the project there are however no architectural-historical questions (in a strict sense) to be found. Instead, various architectural motifs that are closely related to film by way of spatial perception, such as the cinema as a structure and as a locus for film screenings or the urban space as film image will occupy that space.
Architecture shares with film the act of dividing and reconstructing space and spatial perspectives, which are finally reconstructed into an imaginary whole. The camera takes on, at least in part, the dynamism of the moving body and its gaze. As is the case in architecture, film only becomes tangible in retrospect, following the perception of movement. While the observer of architecture is in movement, the body of the film viewer is detained; movement takes place within the projection apparatus and is perceived by the viewer by means of an optical illusion. Physiologically this so-called "persistence of vision” exists by virtue of the fact that 24 individual frames are projected per second, which are not registered at that speed as individual images, but rather as movement. Psychologically the impression of movement produces the "reality impression,” analysed by Christian Metz. Architecturally the projection of movement is bound functionally to a plane, onto which the projection is made, usually onto a screen.
It is the goal of this project to examine the kinaesthetic effects that arise between the walls of the structure and the wall onto which a film is projected. The combination of architecture and film cannot only be located on the side of production, in that architectural objects and spaces are built or filmed. A peripheral link must be made to the urban environment or "life world.”
The cinema is a place in which films are screened. An audience gathers at this place called the cinema. The cinema as a space however exceeds its spatial limits as defined by its location on a lot. Passers-by stop to look at posters, the audience congregates before and after the screening in front of the cinema on the street, they queue at the box office etc. The cinema can also function as a site for dates; it is a point of reference on the street, on the square or in the shopping centre. Increasingly, the external walls of the building itself each become screens themselves, upon which electronic images are projected. The screen of the cinema is thus transported outwards; on the other hand the interior walls of the cinema are conceived of transcendentally. In science-fiction films such as Total Recall the transmissibility of the interior walls of the cinema causes its inhabitants to become wrapped up in a world of illusion, that precludes any distinction between mental and natural images. The interior walls of private spaces become walls for projections, on which the television programme actually becomes a giant panorama, through which one gazes outside, upon the exterior world.
These science-fiction worlds are less interesting to me as images of technology or dystopias but rather as a reconsideration of the realms of interior / exterior, public / private. Already in the earliest descriptions of the brightly lit palaces of cinema appears the motif of the cinema as the architectural site which brightened the whole street. Thus the entire street becomes the stage for the viewer; the diffuse public sphere of the city square is transformed into the distracted audience that goes to the cinema (Gomery). Using Chicago as his example, Gomery demonstrates how habits changed in the streets, when the first cinemas lit their signs and other large electric displays at their entrances. As the brightest points in the street the areas in front of the cinemas became classical city squares. The practices of video installation in which the image projection and architectural space are installed to interact, are another example of the conflation of natural and projected space. Bill Viola amalgamated images of a mountain with various interior spaces in his Video The Ancient of Days (1979-1981) in just such a way: in once instance as a location shot, once as a photo on a dresser, once as a giant projection onto a sky scraper in Japan among other electronic advertising boards. Dan Graham developed a sketch for a building in which the ground floor is a cinema: its screen is a pane of glass facing the street onto which the film is projected, thus making the film visible both to the audience and the passers-by outside the building; neither group of viewers is however is able to see the other. The arrangement calls LeCorbusier's Chapel at Ronchamp to mind. In this case the statue of the Madonna was placed on a mobile pedestal, upon which the statue may turn 180 degrees toward the exterior, where it collects the devout around itself. In the 1980s in his Screenplay Series the Swiss architect Bernard Tschumi attempted to challenge the notion that one acquires a coherent general impression of a given building in that he deconstructed the structures in question into a series of kinetically-motivated individual objects. His templates were, quite literally, films whose individual images were dismantled into individual abstract forms, which were then pieced together anew into structures. These in turn were based either on individual images or a series of individual images that trace particular movements and trajectories. The act of projecting the two dimensional images of both film and sketches into three dimensional space leads to the formation of a kinetic structure, which finds its aesthetic orientation by means of editing, fades and dissolves etc., that is, finds its orientation through filmic means.

The recognition that walls of buildings were potential planes for projection and ornamentation did not only begin with the images and the block-long lettering of electric advertising, but came into being at the same time as the cinema in the work of the American architect Louis H. Sullivan. By means of the new steel girder construction technique it became possible at the beginning of the 20th century to regard walls as strata. The steel-frame took over the task of maintaining static equilibrium and relieved the interior and exterior wall of the structure of any function. Sullivan, who was Frank Lloyd Wright's teacher, ornamented these exterior walls as completely free planes. His motto, ‘form follows function' from 1896 was thus put into practice, for it was precisely because the walls were freed from any function with regard to static equilibrium, that they were made available for free ornamentation.

- Goal of this project is to the transitional moments, during which architectural exteriors and interiors (both mental and architectural) meet and possibly overlap. The investigation of such transitional moments will take place in the context of the following

- Hypothesis, is key to this project: film is, as Christian Metz argued, "speech." In that speech always also implies being spoken to, that is, addressed, it also has a performative side, which takes on topographical dimensions in the case of the screening of a film. The permanent play during the screening between public site and mental internalization within one's own body allows for the creation of particular notions of space. These in turn interact both in the natural and constructed spaces and within the conceptual basis of artificial and natural images; (I understand 'natural' images to be recorded images such as photos, photographed films, videos from surveillance cameras, x-ray images but also plaster casts etc., that is, all types of imagistic objects which contain a trace of the Real, in whatever form. This is juxtaposed with ‘artificial' images, or those which are made independently from the natural world.)
The dynamic transformation of space, as I hope to prove, is both a result of and a prerequisite for a new type of subjectivity, that is as tangible in the experience of the 'street' at the turn of the 20th century as it is on the video room installations and has led to a new notion of that which termed ‘public' and ‘private.'

| oben | Projektliste | Homepage | SUCHEN | Stand: 12/02




	B11 The Act of Screening in the Space of the Cinema
	PROJECT DESCRIPTION: Film cannot be considered an object divorced from the practice of its presentation. As a medium it must be regarded in terms of a double apparatus, one that records and one that projects. The particular quality of film as a movement image first becomes perceptible during its projection. This moment of projection determines, in turn, reception. The screening of a film takes place in two locations: on the wall onto which it is projected and in the viewer, in whom the projection is transformed into the perception of movement images. In the context of these medial prerequisites, film may be considered a performative medium: in the first place, in a trivial technical sense, in that, in order for a film (i.e. movement images) to be viewed, a film must be screened; in the second, in the utterly un-trivial sense of a theory of communication and action, that is, that the film addresses the viewer as a performative act. A performative theory of film may be conceived of as a two-term relationship: as a screening the film addresses the viewer, for only the viewer is able to perceive a given individual film image as a movement image, that is, as a film. This particular aspect of the screening situation points to two central areas of research: the site in which a screening takes place and the viewer, herself, as the locus of this event. This topography offers the following research options: - the first area of investigation: screening spaces: the movie theatre, its architecture and the functional alignment of this architecture with the historically variable technologies of the apparatus (wide screen formats require a particular organization of viewers before the screen; silent films require an orchestra pit etc.); the movie theatre as part of the street, the city, the shopping mall etc. - the second area of investigation: the body of the viewer: the audience in its situation of dependence upon both the conditions under which a given screening takes place and under those upon which the screening of film in general depends. Theories of somatic perception are to play a central role in this area. It is in the context of the assumption that during the cinematic experience a reciprocal constitution of external and mental space occurs, that the relationship between these two areas of investigation is to be considered Goals The project poses a central question: how do architectural and filmic space interact and how may the presumed conflation of spaces be translated into other symbolic spatial configurations than those of public / private? Thus the moment of transition requires more precise analysis; such moments are to be located in the kinaesthetic dimensions which both architecture and the cinema share. Architecture constitutes itself in the eye of the beholder. The architectural totality of a given building can only be known through the various perspectives, from which the observer gazes upon it. It is only by means of the processing of these various visual impressions that a coherent image of the structure takes shape, which we would term an architectural memory image such as that of, for example, the Cathedral in Cologne or the Ducal Palace in Venice. Architecture is performative in that it takes shape and takes on importance only by means of a particular practice of observation. It is neither sufficient to look at a photograph, nor a blueprint of a building nor to analyse a computer simulation. In order to grasp a structure it is necessary for movement to take place, a movement both of the gaze and of the foot, as an experience of both spatial presence and materiality. The various points of view vary not only by means of the perspective of the position of the observer, but also through variations in the quality of the light, the angle, the position on a given story of the building etc. Mental or other images cannot be replaced by architecture, although they can only be grasped through moving perspectives (Ingarden, Arnheim). Nonetheless, architecture consists not only of these mental images and may not be entirely substituted by them. The question, whether this multiplicity of perspectives are a product of the subjective point of view of the observer, or rather are qualities of the object itself, which force themselves upon the observer, has been answered in a variety of fashions. Arnheim offered a critique of the historian Frankl, who made the claim that a coherent impression of a structure cannot be had since the 16th century, that the endless multiplicity of individual perspectives has dominated since then. The aesthetic experience of the constant alternation of a kaleidoscope-like variety of individual images has taken the upper hand, in place of a set of predetermined functions. (For further information on the kinaesthetic dimension of medieval perceptual modi see Project A1 (Wenzel), which also presumes the simultaneity of possible perspectives, implying in turn the necessity for mobility of both the observer's gaze and body.) At the heart of the project there are however no architectural-historical questions (in a strict sense) to be found. Instead, various architectural motifs that are closely related to film by way of spatial perception, such as the cinema as a structure and as a locus for film screenings or the urban space as film image will occupy that space. Architecture shares with film the act of dividing and reconstructing space and spatial perspectives, which are finally reconstructed into an imaginary whole. The camera takes on, at least in part, the dynamism of the moving body and its gaze. As is the case in architecture, film only becomes tangible in retrospect, following the perception of movement. While the observer of architecture is in movement, the body of the film viewer is detained; movement takes place within the projection apparatus and is perceived by the viewer by means of an optical illusion. Physiologically this so-called "persistence of vision” exists by virtue of the fact that 24 individual frames are projected per second, which are not registered at that speed as individual images, but rather as movement. Psychologically the impression of movement produces the "reality impression,” analysed by Christian Metz. Architecturally the projection of movement is bound functionally to a plane, onto which the projection is made, usually onto a screen. It is the goal of this project to examine the kinaesthetic effects that arise between the walls of the structure and the wall onto which a film is projected. The combination of architecture and film cannot only be located on the side of production, in that architectural objects and spaces are built or filmed. A peripheral link must be made to the urban environment or "life world.” The cinema is a place in which films are screened. An audience gathers at this place called the cinema. The cinema as a space however exceeds its spatial limits as defined by its location on a lot. Passers-by stop to look at posters, the audience congregates before and after the screening in front of the cinema on the street, they queue at the box office etc. The cinema can also function as a site for dates; it is a point of reference on the street, on the square or in the shopping centre. Increasingly, the external walls of the building itself each become screens themselves, upon which electronic images are projected. The screen of the cinema is thus transported outwards; on the other hand the interior walls of the cinema are conceived of transcendentally. In science-fiction films such as Total Recall the transmissibility of the interior walls of the cinema causes its inhabitants to become wrapped up in a world of illusion, that precludes any distinction between mental and natural images. The interior walls of private spaces become walls for projections, on which the television programme actually becomes a giant panorama, through which one gazes outside, upon the exterior world. These science-fiction worlds are less interesting to me as images of technology or dystopias but rather as a reconsideration of the realms of interior / exterior, public / private. Already in the earliest descriptions of the brightly lit palaces of cinema appears the motif of the cinema as the architectural site which brightened the whole street. Thus the entire street becomes the stage for the viewer; the diffuse public sphere of the city square is transformed into the distracted audience that goes to the cinema (Gomery). Using Chicago as his example, Gomery demonstrates how habits changed in the streets, when the first cinemas lit their signs and other large electric displays at their entrances. As the brightest points in the street the areas in front of the cinemas became classical city squares. The practices of video installation in which the image projection and architectural space are installed to interact, are another example of the conflation of natural and projected space. Bill Viola amalgamated images of a mountain with various interior spaces in his Video The Ancient of Days (1979-1981) in just such a way: in once instance as a location shot, once as a photo on a dresser, once as a giant projection onto a sky scraper in Japan among other electronic advertising boards. Dan Graham developed a sketch for a building in which the ground floor is a cinema: its screen is a pane of glass facing the street onto which the film is projected, thus making the film visible both to the audience and the passers-by outside the building; neither group of viewers is however is able to see the other. The arrangement calls LeCorbusier's Chapel at Ronchamp to mind. In this case the statue of the Madonna was placed on a mobile pedestal, upon which the statue may turn 180 degrees toward the exterior, where it collects the devout around itself. In the 1980s in his Screenplay Series the Swiss architect Bernard Tschumi attempted to challenge the notion that one acquires a coherent general impression of a given building in that he deconstructed the structures in question into a series of kinetically-motivated individual objects. His templates were, quite literally, films whose individual images were dismantled into individual abstract forms, which were then pieced together anew into structures. These in turn were based either on individual images or a series of individual images that trace particular movements and trajectories. The act of projecting the two dimensional images of both film and sketches into three dimensional space leads to the formation of a kinetic structure, which finds its aesthetic orientation by means of editing, fades and dissolves etc., that is, finds its orientation through filmic means. The recognition that walls of buildings were potential planes for projection and ornamentation did not only begin with the images and the block-long lettering of electric advertising, but came into being at the same time as the cinema in the work of the American architect Louis H. Sullivan. By means of the new steel girder construction technique it became possible at the beginning of the 20th century to regard walls as strata. The steel-frame took over the task of maintaining static equilibrium and relieved the interior and exterior wall of the structure of any function. Sullivan, who was Frank Lloyd Wright's teacher, ornamented these exterior walls as completely free planes. His motto, ‘form follows function' from 1896 was thus put into practice, for it was precisely because the walls were freed from any function with regard to static equilibrium, that they were made available for free ornamentation. - Goal of this project is to the transitional moments, during which architectural exteriors and interiors (both mental and architectural) meet and possibly overlap. The investigation of such transitional moments will take place in the context of the following - Hypothesis, is key to this project: film is, as Christian Metz argued, "speech." In that speech always also implies being spoken to, that is, addressed, it also has a performative side, which takes on topographical dimensions in the case of the screening of a film. The permanent play during the screening between public site and mental internalization within one's own body allows for the creation of particular notions of space. These in turn interact both in the natural and constructed spaces and within the conceptual basis of artificial and natural images; (I understand 'natural' images to be recorded images such as photos, photographed films, videos from surveillance cameras, x-ray images but also plaster casts etc., that is, all types of imagistic objects which contain a trace of the Real, in whatever form. This is juxtaposed with ‘artificial' images, or those which are made independently from the natural world.) The dynamic transformation of space, as I hope to prove, is both a result of and a prerequisite for a new type of subjectivity, that is as tangible in the experience of the 'street' at the turn of the 20th century as it is on the video room installations and has led to a new notion of that which termed ‘public' and ‘private.' \| oben \| Projektliste \| Homepage \| SUCHEN \| Stand: 12/02