FIRST LOVE

The movie Columbus, shot on site in the Indiana city, is about a young woman who has trouble leaving her home and her hometown, where she’s tantalized by the celebrated modern monuments around her. When a well-known professor of architecture is hospitalized there, his son and his protege visit, befriend her, and hatch a plan.

The movie is shot almost entirely in one-point perspective, an optical scheme in which all orthogonal lines meet at a fixed point on the horizon, so the viewer is always looking flat onto a surface or deeply into a space. It’s a vantage that gives the city’s iconic twentieth-century buildings a grave formal beauty. The landscapes, lush late-summer lawns and ancient hardwood trees, are rendered similarly. The scenes, firmly and quietly composed, hold the buildings and grounds still so the characters can roam freely in front of them.

The story unfolds slowly with generous spaces and silences that are unusual in an American film. We see that the young woman does not feel secure, the son does not feel loved, and the protege stifles any feelings that might arise. We see that all three characters are slightly unmoored and slightly enamored of one another. They move together and then apart, until they reach a kind of social detente.

Columbus is the only movie I know that shows what it’s like to love a building. Not to find supreme beauty in it, but to be sustained by it. Each night the young woman leaves the home she shares with her mother and drives to Deborah Berke’s Irwin Union Bank, a small, elegant building with a bold parti and deceptively banal detailing. At night its upper floor – a glowing cantilevered bar – casts a cool blue light across the lot below, where the heroine sits on the hood of her car. This building is the only one part of her world that makes sense, that is correctly ordered, that gives her a home. This is a power of architecture, to hold one together, that’s rarely expressed.

Deborah Berke Partners, Irwin Union Bank, Columbus IN, 2009

May 05, 2020 by Nalina Moses

December 22, 2011 by Nalina Moses

Years ago, for a second-semester project in architecture school, I drew the interior perspective of a cafe space with saucers and cups on each table. My critic was so shocked when she saw it that she started laughing. An architectural drawing is supposed to be the facts of the building, a description of what it is, and nothing more. It’s up to the architectural rendering, which has crasser, more commercial, connotations, to present the image of the building, a projection of what the life inside it is like. The drawings of the late modern American architect Ralph Rapson, who lived and worked in Minneapolis, dance in the gap between the two. While they’re accurate dimensionally and proportionally, like proper drawings, they also capture all-at-once the mythology of the building.

Repson’s drawings are cartoon-like but held in check by the conventions of architectural drawing – standard hatch patterns to indicate materials like wood and stone, and carefully constructed perspective lines – that describe the structures with a designer’s clarity and certainty. His drawings have more life, more joy, than conventional architectural renderings, especially contemporary, computer-generated renderings, with their elegant, hyper-real chill. Rapson has a heavier, more sensual hand than an architect. Every line carries substance and shadow. Unlike Le Corbusier’s renderings, for example, which are only populated by abstract, big-limbed scale figures, like Le Modulor, Rapson’s are populated with ladies and gentleman, children, animals and vehicles, all going about their business. They’re brimming with activity. It could reflect a distinctly American, suburban, postwar joy. And it could be the pleasure of drawing.

December 16, 2011 by Nalina Moses

Architects will say that the only way to represent a building is through film. I’ve always liked the way Michael Mann shows contemporary buildings, particularly in Heat. They’re pictured in seductive, dynamic perspectives that show exteriors and interiors to their best advantage. Watching his last movie, Public Enemies, on DVD, I was tempted to switch off the sound and watch it drained of its narrative. In A Dangerous Method David Cronenberg does things quite differently, framing views simply, flat-on, with no middle ground, and puts what’s important – a boat with red sails, the Statue of Liberty, and, unforgettably, a bay window – right in the center of the screen, to dramatize it. It’s a strategy that’s also alluring.

And it’s a strategy that fist beautifully with the subject of the film, the earliest subjects of psychoanalysis. Freud’s case histories remain powerful stories even today because they understand the objects of everyday middle-class life – a hat, an alarm clock, a train – as the stuff of personal mythology. When the movie closes in on something it gives it an instant emotional and sexual charge. It frames elements of the period-perfect architecture – a long hallway, the front facade of a house – just the same way, and then it moves on. Without fetishizing the architecture, the movie mythologizes it. Although the setting is Germanic, the lucid, stripped-down sensibility of the interiors is Scandinavian. (The minimalist setting might also be because the movie was adapted from a stage play.) It’s not so much that the views are packed with symbols, but that they’ve been stripped of all that’s superfluous. The scenes (with the exception of those in Freud’s apartment and office, which are significantly overstuffed) are enervated, ripe to receive meaning. The movie offers a clarity about things, including architecture, that’s not there in real life.

August 11, 2011 by Nalina Moses

I have a lower-than-average tolerance for art films, particularly foreign ones. With very few exceptions, I cannot sit back and enjoy the black and white masterworks of directors like Godard, Bergman and Satyajit Ray. I appreciate the formal beauty, the thematic depths, and the emotional clarities, but I just can’t get involved in the goings-on. So I’m surprised that I fell so hard for “Killer of Sheep,” Charles Barnett’s 1978 movie about a family in Watts, Los Angeles. Shot in black and white, structured like a collage, studded with too-long close-ups, and strung together with stilted dialogue, it’s basically an American-made foreign art film. Many have compared it to Italian neo-realist cinema from the 1950’s, particularly “The Bicycle Thief.”

But this movie felt far more immediate to me. It might be that it’s in English and that it was filmed in Los Angeles. It reminded me of other American movies like “Mean Streets” that capture a small, personal world in great fidelity. Everything is framed tightly, beautifully but not statically. This gives the whole movie a low, constrained perspective that might be the perfect way to suggest the world of a child, and, perhaps, the world of a working class black family in Watts in the 1970’s. There are hard-to-forget glimpses of everyday things: a girl playing with a doll, two men drinking tea, a husband and wife dancing together in their bedroom. It’s not fantastically bleak (like “Precious”) and it’s not artsy either. Even the movie’s eponymous final image, of the father leading sheep to slaughter in the abbatoir where he works, isn’t forced. Each scene in this movie shows only and exactly what is there.