The Eisenstein And Architectural Montage Film Studies Essay

The Eisenstein And Architectural collage Film Studies tasteFrom a lump of clay a vessel is make, what aims it useful is space within the vessel, for a room, we make doors and a window, hardly what makes a room habitable is the empty space, so while theres advantages in the tangible, it is in the intangible that theres use.1Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, c.550 BCTzu describes a space which is not empty simply which is a gap, a gap which is waiting to be trans produceed by experience. These spatial gaps atomic number 18 inherent in fragmentation. In his password Actions of computer decoratorure, Jonathan Hill focusses on these spatial gaps and discusses the Chora L. Works by Jacques Derrida and Peter Eisenman.The book is break dance into three sections. It doesnt start at the beginning nor does it end at the end. The firstborn and last sections are penetrated by nine holes whilst the middle section has only conceptual holes. Hill states the intention of this was to convey that the absence of a section doesnt mean the absence of meaning. In the book, Eisenmann and Derrida declare that solid and voids are couturierural representations of presence and absence. Voids wealthy person as much of a presence as solids in the book, as users cornerstone fill in missing words with their own meaning. montageIn Actions of computer architecture, Jonathan Hill discusses the use of collage in architecture. He uses Alvar Aaltos Sanatorium and Le Corbusiers 1931 rooftop a incisionments for Charles de Beistegui as utilizations of creates where montage was used as a strategy for architectural composition. In Aaltos Sanatorium, montage is used as a strategy to join two dis sympathetic aspects of the building which flummox no connection expect for being adjacent to each separate. Aalto achieved this by utilizing two distinct fragments.2In Le Corbusiers rooftop apartments, the architect de split from his traditionally rational design approach. Various surfaces of the apar tment are juxtaposed with elements of the surround metropolis. Important fragments of the metropolis are isolated from the rest of the urban context below with the use of mettlesome walls surrounding the perimeter of the terrace. By doing this, Le Corbusier twinned the fireplace with the Arc de Triomphe in the far distance. The architect revealed selected views of the city with sliding walls. A periscope in the centre was the only means by which the entire city could be chinkn as a spectacle.3Space BetweenHill explains montage as a spatial exercise where fragments are brought from other sites to a new location while maintaining to some extent the nerve centre of the older location. He uses film to explain this. In film, we perceive fragments by means of and by dint of with(predicate) the arrangement of components. In Baldessaris artwork, the artisan claims the process is as important as the final result. He juxtaposes unrelated components as he opposes the predictability and parenthoodarity of film.4Jose Quetglas suggests that Mies is concerned with the creation of visual perspective that acts as a guide to drift.5A Miesian plan is in the first place concerned with compositional aspects of perspective motion-picture show than that of the anti-perspective intentions of the De Stijl. Jonathan Jones, a researcher at the Applied optical enquiry Unity in Derby University found that harmonize to his research, it is impossible to comprehend a painting in its entirety at once. A single glance is not sufficient to take in allthing. Visual perception is fragmentary in personality. Our visual field is quite small so to focus on objects results in the background becoming blurred. Similarly in a film by a montage director, the world is viewed finished a series of glances.6While designing the Barcelona Pavilion, Mies drew an axial line everyplace and over from which he measured asymmetries against.7Mies orientated the Pavilion a foresighted an East West axi s. Through confines of axis and spaces, movement was diverted. Mies used this technique to formulate movement sequences.Zimmerman states movement flows on the outer of planes in contrast to the delimiting floor and ceiling planes.8Mies contrasts symmetry and asymmetry and slices space with elements of the building which is characteristic of postmodernism.9In his book Neoclassicism Architecture Rowe analyses the work of Mies. He states the centre is diminished by the international style and emphasis is put on dispersion along the axis in which Mies constitutes a composition of balanced symmetry.10The Pavilion is an example of decomposition of a volume which is deconstructed into individual planes. Through Mies Pavilion we see a focus on quaternary viewing positions as opposed to a single perspective of the classic.The positions of internal walls are find out by the use of triangulated lines. Mies aligns corners and end points of planes using this technique.11His attention was change integrity in the midst of the fragmentation of the space and the integration of visual perception through this method.The image was fragmented by The Cubist Art Movement which created multiple points of view. As discussed, in Mies Pavilion we see a shift from centrality, abstractions of geometries and facades with frontal relations.12Buildings such as this cannot be experienced or understood from a static position.Cinema montage is composition and the assembly of movement images. This comp openings an image of time.13These parts succeed each other creating a parallel alternate montage. Eisenstein criticises Griffith for what he see as the juxtaposition of parts and not a unity of production. A cell, which makes its own part by division and differentiation. Eisenstein agrees with Griffiths idea of an organic composition as an assembly of movement images to the transformed situation through the transcendence of opposition.14Deleuze investigates cinema in scathe of movement, t he philosophical and the technical. Movement informs our understanding of the formation of worlds in terms of the types of information it selects and generates as new forms.Deleuze discusses cinema in terms of framing the movement image. In a relatively closed system framing, type of shot and cut are the vital aspects for the films quality creating what he calls a bent grass of values.15The speed and rhythm of the shots affects the image.Cinema MontageDleuze looks at four schools of montage. American, French, German and Soviet. Deleuze situates montage in the relation the movement of time. In the Deleuzian system, montage is the determination of the whole of the image, achieved through the techniques of cutting and creating continuities. Montaged images creates sets of images. Montage creates movement which in turn produces specific modes of time that are not fixed but events that are contextually reproduced over the passage of chronometric time. He regards montage as the coming u nneurotic of images to create a whole whose final form is in movement.He refers to the work of Bob Dylan as an example of the long preparation for creating work. To him things are made after an encounter with other things, people but also with after encounters with movement, other ideas, events, entities.Cinema is comp set upd of a number of different kinds of images, Deleuze calls this image- assemblage montage. Through connections as of yet un-thought, un-named, but intuited through things already manifested in forms and the performance of those intuited spaces. Montage makes possibilities take new forms.Eisenstein Architectural Montage.For Eisenstein, a pertinacious vertigo is determined from the architectural forms interacting with each other. Eisenstein intention was for architectural representations of space to explode into successive stages of montage from decomposition to recomposition as though it were an array of shots. From this, Eisenstein claimed the principles of mont age are embodied by architecture.In Montage and Architecture by Eisenstein, he sets out this theory. Two paths of spatial perspectives are contrasted, where the viewer follows an imaginary line created among a series of objects. Varying positions moving in front of a spectator and the architectural, where, the viewer moves through an array of carefully positioned elements which he has viewed in revisal with a visual sense.Eisenstein claims that the perspective path of the Acropolis constructed by Auguste Choisy depicts composition of the site.16He asks the reader to view it with the eye of a film maker.Eisenstein claims there are carefully sequenced perspectives here. He suggests that there is a relationship between the viewers pace of movement and the rhythm of the buildings. To him, Choisy has set up a combination of a film shot effect, producing new impressions from each new emergent shot. This creates according to Eisenstein a montage effect, where effect is gained from seque ntial juxtaposition of these shots.In the movie street Eisenstein shows his lodge in of cause and effect as a notion of movement. Shots are decomposed and recomposed. Architectural composition is compared to cinematic montage by Eisenstein in an essay on two Piranesi engravings for the early and late states of the Carceri series.The flux of form which contains the latent to explode into a series of successive statesEisensteins theory of space constructions depicted new ideas of architecture as frozen music. Eisenstein compared the basis of architectural composition, massing and the establishment of rhythmic elements to that of music, painting and cinematic montages.Montage As nippy MusicIn The Culture of Fragments Gianmarco Vergani puts forward a proposition for the unification of interdisciplinary arts to create an original art form. This is an area which offers a depth of experimentation. jibe to the cause, the merging of architecture and music can be achieved through two prin ciples, synchronic and historic expression.17He terms music as a diachronic art form as it is derived from change and continuous transformations in time. Architecture on the other hand, is synchronic, it a fixed medium consisting of structure and volumetric elements.This leads to two methodologies by which to create architecture through music. First, music must(prenominal) be reduced to its architectonic dimensions out positioning of time. Music is then seen as a synchronic structure in which it can be applied to architecture.In the diachronic approach, architecture un bend dexters through time. Space is read sequentially in time increments and is experienced through the observers movement.18This is a reversal of positions as the observer is required to move in order to experience the architectural composition unlike the hearing of music where the observer dust static whilst enveloped in music.Relationships are formed between the two elements. The author proposes that in music to ne timbre, pitch, dynamics and duration can be extracted while in architecture texture, material, light, colour, scale. These can be reverse into architectural spaces.In music the pitch is transposed into colour, tones and timbres are transposed into textures and materials. The dynamics of a piece of music can be read as contradiction and increase scale.19However, he does claim some limitations in this methodology. He states the art form is not truly liquified or dynamic as it can only become such through the participation of the observer. Architecture is static representing time in this medium cannot be fully executed. The author proposes that a truly diachronic visualization of music is needed.FoldingIn Folding in Architecture Greg Lynn declares the importance of defining compositional complexity in architecture. Gregg seeks a progression from the collage aesthetics of Robert Venturis Complexity Contradiction in Architecture and the spatial collage of Deconstructivist Architect ure.Greg terms Intricacy as a fusion of components into a tenaciousness creating a whole in which the various elements form a larger composition.20 agree to the author, this intricacy is unlike categorization or hierarchy. Instead it is the variation of components. He aims for the term to move from an understanding of detail in architecture as an isolated component. What is proposed is an architectural system where there are no details in the traditional sense. Instead the detail is everywhere continuously variegated throughout the whole.As mentioned in previous chapters, the release of structure to Greg was in favour of an infinitesimal component and displacement of a fragmentary collage.21The infinitesimal is a fragmentary approach to form. It is based on the slipping between single frames and interconnections. From a distance the form possess similarity and in a coherence of detail between varying elements that compromise the structure. According to the author, the composition of the intricate is organic, in that every component interacts and communicates simultaneously. Every instance is affected by every other instance.The outside is not a fixed limit but a moving number animated by peristaltic movements, folds and foldings that together make up an inside they are not something other than the outside, but precisely the inside of the outside.Deleuze Foucault p.96-97Le Pli, the concept of the fold, is Deleuzes architectural philosophy. In which, the fold is seen as continuous multiplicity of differentiationThus a continuous labyrinth is not a line dissolving into self-supporting points, as flowing sand might dissolve into grains, but resembles a sheet of paper divided into infinite folds or separated into bending movements, each one determined by the consistent or conspiring surrounding A fold is always folded within a fold, like a cavern in a cavern. The unit of matter, the smallest element of the labyrinth, is the fold, not the point which is never a part, but a uncomplicated extremity of the line.22The fold is the integration of elements that are unrelated into a continuous form. Deleuzes philosophy of the fold offers tenaciousness and variation in the development of a form. To him the form is the conclusion and the process.The Inflection as Delezue describes is the point at which a curve begin to form as either convex or concave. Inflection is the exemplar genetic element of the variable curve or fold. The essence of a fold is the temporal nature in which it develops from the inflection to its subsequent position. A memory is maintained of its previous position.23to unfold is to increase, to grow whereas to fold is to diminish, to reduce, to withdraw into the recesses of a world.24An example of this can be viewed in Origami. The folds of which shift from enfolding, unfolding to enveloping. After the first fold, the context begins to reduce in size. The form is unpredictable, after each fold the shapes from the previous f old leave office to exist. According to the author, in this instance memory can be enacted through unfolding.A variation of this is Kirigami. The continuity of the folds becomes obstructed by cuts in the fold. This demonstrates conflict and contradiction instead of smoothness and continuity. The folds in origami act as bounding agents between other folds, in Kirigami when a conflict arises, the folds deviate from their continuity and exhibit but not resolve the occurring confliction.In this way, Origami is like folding architecture seeking to realize conflict and contradiction whereas Kirigami is similar to Deconstructivist architecture, it exhibits them. According to Deleuze, multiple is not some(prenominal) parts. It is something that has been folded in m any ways. This becomes a unity that envelopes a multiplicity.25As a by-product of the fold, form and context become surfaces with no distinct interiority or exteriority. The continuous nature of the fold implies a dialogue betw een time and environment.Case StudiesMontage StrategiesRem Koolhaas who had involvement in cinema as a scriptwriter conveys cinematographic image in some of his plans. In his proposal for the City planetary house in The Hague, we see a transfer of the Manhattan skyline to the European City. The famous skyline which is seen so many times in film is utilized here as a movie set made into architecture. Koolhaas breaks down the overall volume into various slabs and uses a series of prisms of differing heights. From a distance, the effect appears like a series of skyscrapers compressed on a flattened image, as would be the view from the opposite side of the river in Manhattan.Since the latter decades of the 20thCentury, fragmentation has been a central issue in architecture. The many different guises of architecture today from postmodern, Deconstructivist and to all subsequent trends are based on fragmentation.A transcript of Rem Koolhaas and Sarah Whilings intercourse is quite reveali ng in this aspect.as an entire object from the exterior of a building. That is what seems to unite the biggest expulsion competitions from 1989 (Zeebrugge, ZKM and Bibliotheque). In some of the projects, the architectural language is quite unstable. The facades and the angles of Porto Case de Musica and Seattle are odd structures which no semipermanent possess a unified identity. For the most parts these projects appear more decon now than they did as part of the 1988 Deconstructivist Exhibition.26For Koolhaas, the characteristic of Deconstructivism was not in the strange forms, but in the fragmentation. According to Koolhaas, each new building insisted on assembly and integration, the construction of a new whole, which may be unstable but which remains a single entity.27An example of this are the Seattle and Porto projects which have forms that cannot be recognized as regular geometric shapes but they have in their volume a unity of materials on the outside. In terms of metropol itan scale, Koolhaas has said,A city can obtain a coherence in its planned composition through a system of fragments.28This is evident in his large scale urban projects where he strives to achieve coherence. According to Koolhaas when a building gets beyond a certain size, it becomes a big building. The volume can no longer be articulated by one architectural gesture nor a combination of gestures. It is this which initiates the self-sufficiency of its elements. This is not fragmentation as the elements remain committed to the overall building.To establish links between self-directed elements, Koolhaas relies on the weapons platformmatic hybridizations, frictions, overlaps, proximities and the superimpositions that are possible in a building of large scale. Montage itself was founded to organize relationships between independent elements. As Maholy-Nagy stated in 1929.The technique of montage is present as efficient in many fields of design. It can be found in methodology, in text , writings and in painting through collage.29In Soviet avant-garde cinema, Lev Kuleshovs idea of montage can be viewed as an analysis, a dissecting into parts, with the aim of reintegration or as he stated,Montage is a two way operationMontage is the basis of cinema. It enables us to fragment and to reconstruct and finally to remake the material.30DualitiesKoolhaas utilizes these methods of montage in the urban preparation and architectural projects his office undertake. A dualism is present in his use of montage. A decomposition and a reintegration. For example, in Lille Congrexpo, there are three independent sections. The zenith, the conference and the expo which are all juxtaposed without any articulation as though the three sections had been cut from one complete form.The CCTV HQ project in Beijing can be viewed as a single skyscraper which has been divided up into six parts which contain functionally different divisions. In these examples the concept was to concentrate all the activity and program into a single system.The Hyper Building in Bangkok is an assemblage of a series of pieces that maintain their independence in the final building. This is both sculptural and architectural. The building was designed by Koolhaas as a veritable city that groups a vast array of programs together giving the essence of a hybrid building on an urban scale. According to Koolhaas, several buildings fuse together into a larger singular whole which brings together the coexistence of real space and cyberspace, of electronics and real facilities. To him the montage consists of material bodies and immaterial flows.Montage as a strike Urban ComplexityKoolhaas compares the work of an architect with the cinematic montage. Im certain the work of a screenwriter and the processes of an architect are methods based on editing, in creating programmatic, cinematographic or spatial sequence31The complexity of urban conduct such as infrastructural congestion is the central themes to ma ny of Koolhaas projects. He highlights these elements through the collision of contrasting elements. As with Eisenstein32, this collision sometimes occurs at several scales in Koolhaas projects, from the urban scale down to the encounter between materials.The Kunsthal in Rotterdam is an example of this issue. The concept was a square with two routes crossing it. The collision between these routes gives rise to the project. These two infrastructures also cross over other collisions, crossing between ramps and staggered planes, and between these and the horizontal planes.A similar instance can be found in The Euraille project. A tower was placed over the TGV identify, this solution was the symbol of infrastructural and programmatic congestion that characterized the architectural operation. Similarly with Eisensteins films, through collisions, the visual and mental conflict gnarled in this montage is what expresses the concept.In The Hague, a service tunnel comprising of a subway wit h a station at either end and two car parks with pedestrian entrances, was not designed by Koolhaas to resemble a tree like system. Instead it is a hybrid project, building and infrastructure. The different program elements interpenetrate spatially and form an assemblage in which the flow and the visuals are participants an altering but not segregated perception. The strategy utilized here is that of the montage in which collisions between constituent environments and elements give rise to a richer and clearer spatial experience.The Villa Savoye marked a high point in Le Corbusiers promenade architecturale As a critic explains The movement, in one sense, is more virtual than real, to progress through the building you must engage your imagination33and if entertainment is associated with the displacement of the viewer, then the house becomes the source of that entertainment. It does this by choreography there is no fixed image but a series of overlapping images. This architectural eff ect is distinctly associated with cinema34SequencesThere are three relations in an architectural sequence. The first deals with the working method. Secondly, outside relations where spaces are juxtaposed and thirdly the program.The mode by which architects traditionally draw implies a transformational sequence. Layers of impartial paper are placed on top of each other. Each has a variation about a theme.An open system of sequencing sees transformation through the addition of new elements which are juxtaposed according to criteria such as narrative or programmatic.However, not all architectural sequences are linear and comprised of spatial additions. Fragmented montages produce structure where meaning is found through order of experience rather than the order of the composition. Mies Pavilion as discussed in previous chapters is an example of this fragmentation of space. Its sequence is organised around a thematic structure and variations.