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All Too Easy: The Modernist House and Effortless Appropriation

John David Rhodes

in Spectacle of Property: The House in American Film

Takes up the modernist house as it appears in films like A Star is Born (George Cukor, 1954), House (Charles and Ray Eames, 1955), and more recent films and moving image media such as The Anniversary ... More

Takes up the modernist house as it appears in films like A Star is Born (George Cukor, 1954), House (Charles and Ray Eames, 1955), and more recent films and moving image media such as The Anniversary Party (Alan Cumming and Jennifer Jason Leigh, 2001), A Single Man (Tom Ford, 2009), and Stephen Prina’sThe Way He Always Wanted It, II (2008). The chapter also considers a strange site of coincidence between modernist architecture and the movies: the house designed by Richard Neutra for the director Josef von Sternberg that then passed into the hands of Ayn Rand, who was also working in the film industry.Less

Between the Past and the Present: Nostalgia and the Cinema of Stick and Shingle Style Architecture

John David Rhodes

in Spectacle of Property: The House in American Film

Explores in some detail the history and historiography of what architectural historian Vincent Scully has famously nominated as stick and shingle style architecture. These styles name the large, ... More

Explores in some detail the history and historiography of what architectural historian Vincent Scully has famously nominated as stick and shingle style architecture. These styles name the large, rambling wooden houses built in the late nineteenth-century whose histories are entangled with that of the colonial revival and Queen Anne styles. Nostalgia is the animating force of these architectural styles, as it is for the films that make significant use of this architecture: Meet Me in St. Louis (Vincente Minnelli,1944), Psycho, and Grey Gardens.Less

Architecture of Apocalypse, City of Lights

Marion Schmid

in Intermedial Dialogues: The French New Wave and the Other Arts

The inception of the New Wave coincided with a profound mutation of the French urban fabric: parts of historic city centers were razed in post-war modernisation schemes, while 'new towns' were ... More

The inception of the New Wave coincided with a profound mutation of the French urban fabric: parts of historic city centers were razed in post-war modernisation schemes, while 'new towns' were planned outside major cities to relieve the pressure of population growth. This chapter analyses New Wave filmmakers' diverse engagement with architecture - old and new - and urban change in both fictional and documentary genres. Themes for discussion include New Wave directors' ambivalent representation of the new forms of architectural modernity that emerged in France in the 1950s and 60s; their interrogation of the living conditions on modern housing estates; and their examination of the relationship between the built environment, affect, and memory. The chapter also considers the movement's fascination with the tactile textures and surfaces of the city.Less

Cinema’s Short-Term Tenancy: A Materialist Theory of Film Spectatorship

John David Rhodes

in Spectacle of Property: The House in American Film

In this mostly theoretical discussion I discuss some examples of American feature filmmaking, including Gone With the Wind (Victor Fleming, 1939), in order to establish the implicit problematic that ... More

In this mostly theoretical discussion I discuss some examples of American feature filmmaking, including Gone With the Wind (Victor Fleming, 1939), in order to establish the implicit problematic that race and the raced body are fundamentally bound up in the “spectacle of property,” even when no non-white bodies appear onscreen. Finally, as a means of testing some of these ideas through close formal and historical analysis, the second part of the chapter focuses in detail on a single film, D.W. Griffith’s The Lonely Villa (1909) and its representation of the house and its violation in the context of cinema’s emergence as a narrative representational medium and as an industry preoccupied by property rightsLess

Wrong Life: Bungalow Aesthetics in and against Hollywood

John David Rhodes

in Spectacle of Property: The House in American Film

Investigates the bungalow, the modern house of modest proportions, whose spaces promise an openness and a blurring of private and public and whose threshold is the site of radical possibility. The ... More

Investigates the bungalow, the modern house of modest proportions, whose spaces promise an openness and a blurring of private and public and whose threshold is the site of radical possibility. The key films discussed here are Mildred Pierce (Michael Curtiz, 1945) and Meshes of the Afternoon (Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid, 1943), but the chapter is also in conversation with Theodor Adorno’s fleeting but curious interest in the bungalow and with living spaces more broadly.Less

Final Chord and ‘Die Neue Welt’: The Mise-en-scène of Aufbruch¹

Victoria L. Evans

in Douglas Sirk, Aesthetic Modernism and the Culture of Modernity

Chapter 5 ("Final Chord and 'Die Neue Welt': The Mise-en-Scène of Aufbruch")examines the only film from Sirk's German period to depict twentieth-century urban life. In the prologue that the director ... More

Chapter 5 ("Final Chord and 'Die Neue Welt': The Mise-en-Scène of Aufbruch")examines the only film from Sirk's German period to depict twentieth-century urban life. In the prologue that the director added to the existing script, two antithetical aesthetics appear to underscore the philosophical and political disparities that distinguish a democratic New York from a Fascist Berlin. Because the architectural symbolism of each of these cities may be read both positively and negatively (from a Modernist and a National Socialist point of view), after outlining the main arguments on either side, the author then attempts to resolve the vexed question of which metropolis offers the most desirable "New World" of the future, based upon the formal and narrative evidence that is provided by the film.Less

A Cinematic Bayreuth

Erika Balsom

in After Uniqueness: A History of Film and Video Art in Circulation

This chapter continues chapter six’s investigation in rarity beyond the limited edition through the example of Gregory Markopoulos and his dream of the Temenos. This chapter charts Markopoulos’s ... More

This chapter continues chapter six’s investigation in rarity beyond the limited edition through the example of Gregory Markopoulos and his dream of the Temenos. This chapter charts Markopoulos’s rejection of circulation and the development of the concept of the Temenos in his writings and correspondence from the late 1960s to its current incarnation: the quadrennial screenings of Eniaios (c.1947–91), an eighty-hour film cycle made to be projected only at the Temenos, that have taken place since 2004 at Rayi Spartias, a remote field in the Peloponnese.Less

Back to the Future: Modernist Architecture and All That Heaven Allows

Victoria L. Evans

in Douglas Sirk, Aesthetic Modernism and the Culture of Modernity

Since every stage of Ron Kirby and Carey Scott's relationship is marked by alterations in their domestic environments, Chapter 6 ("Back to the Future: Modernist Architecture and All That Heaven ... More

Since every stage of Ron Kirby and Carey Scott's relationship is marked by alterations in their domestic environments, Chapter 6 ("Back to the Future: Modernist Architecture and All That Heaven Allows") explores some of the conflicting social and cultural connotations that have been encoded into their respective dwellings. For instance, Ron's progressive renovation of the Old Mill recapitulates the history of twentieth-century Modernist architecture in reverse. The final incarnation of this structure evokes Le Corbusier's Machine Age villas of the 1920s rather than Frank Lloyd Wright's more organic mid-century Modernist aesthetic, which dissents from the dominant 1950s American view of the ideal home by suggesting a less materialistic way of life. By contrast, Carey's suburban Colonial Revival residence represents the negation of the freedom from traditional conventions that Ron's living space ultimately implies.Less

Introduction

Victoria L. Evans

in Douglas Sirk, Aesthetic Modernism and the Culture of Modernity

After describing one of Peter Greenaway's recent efforts to move beyond the limits of the cinema, Evans proposes that Douglas Sirk had already begun to dissolve the boundaries the medium by ... More

After describing one of Peter Greenaway's recent efforts to move beyond the limits of the cinema, Evans proposes that Douglas Sirk had already begun to dissolve the boundaries the medium by assimilating elements of avant-garde art, architecture and design into his mise-en-scène. She goes on to assert that Sirk's importation of a high art aesthetic into the low genre of melodrama echoed the widespread European Modernist preoccupation with the creation of a synergistic Gesamtkunstwerk or "total art work" during the period in which he intellectually came of age. Finally, the director's tendency to create "pictures" of the external landscape that the characters (and the viewer) are obliged to contemplate through the window frame is interpreted in the light of the theories of Le Corbusier.Less

From Porch to Attic: Condemned to Property in New Orleans

John David Rhodes

in Spectacle of Property: The House in American Film

Concludes by opening up again with a coda that reflecting again on the question of race.