Deyan Sudjic discusses the way film portrays architects and architecture.
Image from The Wrong House: The Architecture of Alfred Hitchcock, by Steven Jacobs (PDF)
Deyan Sudjic discusses the way film portrays architects and architecture.
Cinema and architecture have a relationship that goes back a long way, and is both superficial and profound. Half a century before Brad Pitt began hanging around Frank Gehry's studio and working on sustainable low-cost houses for New Orleans, Alfred Hitchcock was obsessed by architecture. He filmed it, he designed it, he evoked it.
A more plausible analogy for the architect is with the screenwriter, whose work is rewritten until everything that made it distinctive has dissolved under layer upon layer of mush.
Guardian | Also see The Wrong House: The Architecture of Alfred Hitchcock, by Steven Jacobs (PDF)
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2 things to consider if interpreting Hitchcock as 'the architect' in the films he directed.
The first is well-known enough. Hitchcock started out in film-making as an art director. His early British silent films and later-on sound show a continued interest in architecture, especially interior spaces. Even Hitch's early 'trick shots' are architectural, for example, the under the floor shot through a trick glass floor.
The interior spaces; stairs, hallways and rooms forward the plot and are excellent examples of mood in interior space making. Even the titles of many films are suggestive: The Lodger, The 39 steps and later Rear Window. And there is of course Rebecca, and Manderlay. Manderly looms as an architectural presence greater in stature than both actors Olivier and Fontaine. Only Judith Anderson holds her own but eventually succumbs.
The other films that are set pieces for architecture need only title: Rope , Rear Window, the under appreciated Under Capricorn
Second, probably more important, is the way Hitchcock designs his film, developing scenes before the film is shot from a storyboard. The illustrated screenplay is trans-formed into a a tightly designed moving composition, traveling in time and space from scene to scene. For me this is where the film as architecture comes alive and demonstrate the lessons films can teach architecture.
My four favorite Hitchcock films
STRANGERS ON A TRAIN
NOTORIOUS
SHADOW OF A DOUBT
NORTH BY NORTHWEST
eric chavkin
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