PUBLICATIONS

The Fountainhead
King Vidor, United States, 1949

Based on a 1943 novel by Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead is an austere black and white film with minimal sets – sleek offices, futuristic buildings and city-scapes.

The Fountainhead employs architecture—and modernism—as a metaphorical vehicle for conveying Ayn Rand’s personal philosophy of the superiority of individualism versus collectivism, a philosophy that continues to wield contemporary influence, especially among American conservatives and right-libertarians.

The film tells the story of architect Howard Roark (Gary Cooper), an idealist who lives by an uncompromising principle of artistic integrity. Based loosely on famed American architect Frank Lloyd Wright (whose iconic Guggenheim Museum was under construction as the film was being made), Roark is a modernist whose design innovations are wilfully obstructed by a conservative establishment. Throughout the film he must constantly struggle to sustain his artistic vision. The radicality and consequences of his actions in response to his opponents become a central theme.

Roark’s determined antagonists are facilitated by a powerful media baron, Gail Wynand (Raymond Massey, bearing an uncanny resemblance to Rupert Murdoch), who ultimately pays a penalty for his misuse of power. 

Of course, there is a female protagonist—rich heiress Dominique Francon (Patricia Neal)—tormented by cultural disillusionment, her frustrated belief in the individual, and, for most of the film, her unrequited love for Roark. In a subplot that had feminists justifiably aghast, Dominique eventually finds happiness in the arms of the man who had earlier forcibly sexually overpowered her.

Viewed seventy years later amidst the profound impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, The Fountainhead is fascinating for its anachronistic vision of modernist architecture, and the notion that architecture could be such a lightning rod for hysterical public opinion and ideological debate.

— Erica Green, Director

The Fountainhead is available to stream on Kanopy.

Parasite
Bong Joon-ho, South Korea, 2019

“Glory to the holy wifi!” cries Kim Ki-teak in Bong Joon-Ho’s record-shattering Parasite. In the first offering of pithy set-related symbolism, Ki-teak’s two adult children have discovered they can connect to their neighbours’ internet if they position themselves near the toilet.

And so lays the groundwork for an entangling of two families on opposite sides of the socioeconomic divide: the affluent Parks and the less fortunate Kims.

The Kims reside in a pokey and disordered subterranean ‘semi-basement’ apartment at the end of a dead-end street in downtown Seoul, where they’re vulnerable to social and environmental hazards (drunken urination and ‘free’ pesticide spray). When eldest son Ki-woo lands a job as a tutor for the teenage Park daughter, we are introduced to the Parks’ elegant, protected and spacious architectural wonder, positioned high above the slums below.

From the moment Ki-woo is seen walking up the clean leafy street towards the Park house we know that we’re no longer languishing in the lower depths. Ki-woo crosses the threshold into a realm of refined aesthetic and polished surfaces—at once a signifier of bourgeois success and a reproach to his own family’s deprivation.

This gloriously geometric home becomes the movie’s stage as well as its house of horrors. Designed by the previous owner, a renowned architect, its the kind of bright open space that once expressed faith and optimism but now sighs taste and privilege. And we soon find that this seemingly perfect dwelling conceals and embodies the agony of the deprived and the despised when a dark, bottommost setting is revealed in the third act.

This brings me to why I selected this film. Beyond the built forms themselves—though they unequivocally stand in for the class divide—is the symbolism held within the three levels the characters are recurrently seen ascending and descending. The self-assured Park is habitually climbing the stairs of his ultra-modern home while the Kims are depicted scurrying down city steps to their own underworld dwelling, assuring the desperation in the latter’s situation hits home.

— Joanna Kitto, Associate Curator

Parasite is availble to stream on Netfilx and Stan.

Paris, Texas
Wim Wenders, Germany, 1984

Wim Wenders’ 1984 film Paris, Texas is the story of Travis Henderson (played by Harry Dean Stanton), a man who disappears and then reappears, years later, dishevelled in the desert. The film follows Travis as he is reunited with his brother Walt and son Hunter, strugging to reconcile fractured relationships and put his life back together. 

Set across diverse landscapes, Paris, Texas opens in the Texan desert, desolate with dusty roads. The barren wasteland covered in scorching, oppressive sunlight is a reflection of Travis’ character at the time.

Together with Walt, he journeys from the desert to Los Angeles, crossing through well-known all-American scenes of 80s diners, motels and gas stations filled with flickering neon signs and fluorescent lighting. This journey signifies the transition back to the metropolitan life Travis had attempted to escape, nostalgic for the simplicity of the ‘old Texas’ with no roads or signage.

Eventually the pair arrive back at Walt’s modernist family home in Los Angeles, overlooking buzzing freeways and airstrips. Walt spends his days as a billboard salesman, working amongst giant steel structures housing advertisements; his lifestyle epitomises all the things Travis had sought to leave behind.

The film concludes in Houston, a city so impersonal it could be anywhere, shown as a clinical throng of concrete and glass—banks, hotels, carparks and a sea of intertwining highways and high-rise buildings. Whilst in Houston, Travis has a meaningful exchange with his estranged wife Jane (Nastassja Kinski). The conversation takes place in a small, strange room, over the phone through a one-way mirror. The two are physically divided and Jane struggles to see Travis, representative of their relationship and Travis’ convoluted means of communication.

Wenders' cinematography actively pairs the emotional and physical terrain; the landscapes and architecture poetically and subtly mimic the characters’ relationships, showing the physical distance between Travis and his son as they walk home from school on opposite sides of the road, winding highways behind them, as their complex relationship changes again.

The landscapes in Paris, Texas are frequently shown in a wide shot, displaying their vastness and shrinking the characters into inconsequentiality. As diverse and juxtaposing as the landscapes are, they share a common thread of isolation and a feeling of overwhelming emptiness devoid of human connection. Throughout the film Travis moves across landscapes of extremes, all of which emphasise his complex relationships and his fight to resolve his internal difficulties.

— Teresa Busuttil, Gallery Attendant

Paris, Texas is available to stream on Kanopy.

Blade Runner
Ridley Scott, United States, 1982

Even those who haven’t seen Ridley Scott’s 1982 science fiction film Blade Runner (or the 2007 Director’s Cut) will be familiar with the feeling the film evokes—a kind of gritty, brooding melancholy. The film opens with a wide shot of Los Angeles at night, the camera gliding high over the skyscrapers, the city’s twinkling lights, petroleum flares and flickering neon billboards seductively set to Vangelis’ stirring saxophone score.

The question that the film explores—what does it mean to be human?—is wrapped in a muscular plot that pits Deckard (Harrison Ford), an alcohol-dependent retired detective, against escaped replicants seeking to extend their expiry date. 

In Scott’s vision, Los Angeles is modelled on an Asian megatropolis: at street level the city is cramped, bustling, anonymous. Filmed entirely at night and in the rain, the city and its figures emerge into frame through plumes of cigarette smoke and steam in a chiaroscuro haze, as though they are phantasms.

The film’s dimly lit interior spaces are crowded with objects and details that richly reference Frank Lloyd Wright’s Art Deco architecture, the fantastic drawings of Italian futurist Antonio Sant Elia, and Edward Hopper’s paintings.

From Deckard’s apartment, with its ancient family photographs propped on a piano, to the maximalist wonderland where J.F Sebastian lives alone with his mechanical toys in an abandoned building, and the Egyptian- and Aztec-inspired headquarters of the Tyrell Corporation, these historically layered environments offer a refuge from the unbearable presence of the outside world.

More than its brutality, the film’s pervasive and claustrophobic nostalgia confirms Blade Runner as a dystopian vision. It signals a retreat from living.

In moments of sudden and fantastic violence in which human and android bodies are blown up, smashed through walls, exploded through panes of glass, and impaled on nails, the buildings come under destruction. Nothing good can come of this place, the film seems to say—so much so that the cautious note of optimism on which the film ends is the possibility of escape, soaring above the city.

— Anna Zagala, Curatorial Assistant

Blade Runner is available to stream on Netflix.

L’Avenir (The Future)
Claudio Zulian, Spain, 2004

L’Avenir’s stark sociopolitical telling—as mesmerising as it is—disturbs. The embodied camera tracks backwards through a highly specific although familiar deindustrialised urbanscape. We interrupt portraits that are situated in intimate built environments, yet immediately leave those settings behind as the film opens out, still backwards, onto almost deserted streets until reaching the town end. We are made conscious all the while that we trespass onto a complex, fluid narration of tenuous and uncertain futures. In conversation, filmaker Claudio Zulian mentions, “el movimiento de cámara de L'Avenir está inspirado en la IX Tesis de la filosofía de la Historia de W. Benjamin” (that the camera movement is inspired by the IX Thesis of the Philosophy of History by W. Benjamin). When confirming with my video editor, Patricia Leal, that the film was indeed shot backwards, she said, “Uau!!! Of course the Angelus Novus thesis/Klee's image of the angel looking backwards to see the catastrophes/ruins of history. Respect!!!”

As presented here, L’Avenir maintains my original access point to it: the immersive online editorial project developed by Maria Virginia Jaua since 2016. Taking Walter de Maria’s Lightning Field as its title, Campo de Relámpagos arrives in your inbox each Sunday morning. This now-substantial archive and its persistent presentation of critical essays, commissioned works and speculative dialogues builds flashpoints of in-line insights. It led me to recall one of the very first short films that I watched on YouTube in 2006, thirty years after its making. To bookend and contextualise L’Avenir, these points of internet access construct scaffolds for architectures of time-based fields of enquiry. I also give this to you:

— Narelle Jubelin, Artist, The Housing Question

L'Avenir is available to watch at Campo de Relámpagos.

24 City
Jia Zhangke, China, 2008

Jia Zhangke’s 24 City/二十四城記  is set in a former military aircraft engine factory (Factory 420) in Chengdu, southwest China. The film unfolds over the 1950s, the 1970s and the present as the transition from collectivism to individualism is charted and the factory complex redeveloped. Revolving around the stories of three women, the script was written with prominent Chengdu-based poet Zhai Yongming and combines fiction and documentary in a lyrical structure that blurs the lines between the two. The title is in fact the name of the mall and apartment complex that replaced the enormous state-owned factory which had its heyday in the 1950s, during the Korean War. 

Throughout the film, poetic language echoes across the vast expanse of the abandoned industrial interiors. An affective/sentimental soundtrack imbues the spaces with a melancholy that resonates in the unfolding monologues of fictional characters and former workers. The poetic overlay suggests the long tradition of classical Chinese poetry, but this is undercut by the modern poetic style that Zhai Yongming brings to the project and an ironic appropriation of the ‘utopian’ language of real estate sales hype. The film is made in the period between the closing of the factory in 2005 and the redevelopment of the site, so this becomes a spatio-temporal zone of memory and future possibility that resembles in some ways a utopian moment. The film’s poetic reverberations put into circulation the utopic potential of both cinematic space and architectural thought, before the realities of costs and budgets reduce hopes and dreams to the dullness of yet another mall and over-priced apartment complex. 

— Helen Grace, Artist, The Housing Question

24 City is available to stream on Kanopy.

Mon Oncle
Jacques Tati, France, 1958

Jacques Tati’s second film with the darling Monsieur Hulot sees the protagonist wittily bumble through a series of vignettes satirising mid-century France in a way suddenly and touchingly relevant. 

Mon Oncle is a tale of two cities, old and new, each ironically juxtaposed across the block from one another. Hulot lives in a hodgepodge house, shared with others, its spiralling staircases and rambling corridors speckled with unmatched, knee-high windows. It’s playful, a home beyond principles of design, sitting attune with the cobbled streets it overlooks, well-worn by a community springing with laughter and music.

Over the garden wall stands the ever-silent concrete-grey development owned by the parents of Hulot’s nephew. This big box could be said to represent something, some dynamic of architecture explained and embraced, but it now goes unlived, merely a tomb to the conspicuous consumer. A neighbour remarks, “But it’s so empty”. Well, of course: “It’s modern!” Upending furniture and getting caught in automatic doors, Hulot reveals this preening farce of manners and pretension, Tati’s choreographed comedy of absurd slapstick dealing the blow.

What strikes so thoroughly now is the sense of isolation desired by those modern homemakers, locked behind gates only ever opened when they are sufficiently groomed. Many find ourselves now wanting to interact and connect in a way we’re used to—however immaterial that was—and that brings into focus how Tati performs his tricks. He does not point to any design principle necessarily but to the contrivance behind them, twisted to suit a false sense of self-sufficiency enamoured by the suburban sprawl, and the resulting pangs of loneliness.

– Alex McKenzie, Mercury Cinema

Mon Oncle is available to stream on SBS On Demand. 

High-Rise
Ben Wheatley, United States, 2015

High-Rise opens with those eponymous towers, lingering on the horizon and bathed with an orange glow—a new dawn for Tom Hiddleston’s Laing, a high-strung physician hoping for a clean slate. Bold concrete blocks stack to the sky, tessellating lines and corners mirrored within the apartment’s striking interiors and from room to room across the building’s forty stories.

These are spaces open to interpretation, each an equal opportunity within a fully enclosed self-sufficient design marvel, the architect’s desired “crucible for change”. But of course one can only change as much as they are able to: from above, the wealthier residents spread out with access to rooftop gardens, decking their pads with white furs and black leather, riding horses like Bianca Jagger through rococo-disco parties; families below are confined to the lower levels, some underground, as utilities are left to trickle down. As scarcity sets in and consciousness and tensions arise, a building designed for independence feels like a prison primed for madcap rebellion. 

Director Ben Wheatley, with writer and frequent collaborator Amy Jump, set J.G. Ballard’s dystopian novel to the time of its writing, elaborating on the modernist and sometimes vague ideals of the UK’s post-war Brutalist movement. In photographing these exemplary megastructures with awe, we have a sense of how alluring the idea of designing the future could be. The following downward spiral can only be said to damn designs without principles; that if the past is allowed to repeat itself, they’ll be left standing as ironic monuments to failure, rendered in cold, utilitarian stone.

Offsetting excess cynicism, Wheatley wrings the film through darkly comedic outbursts featuring a band of strange, unsettling characters charmingly performed by the ensemble cast (including Elisabeth Moss, Sienna Miller, Jeremy Irons, and Luke Evans). A slick delivery dampens grim portent in a time of exceptional caution, with a reminder that collapse needn’t be an inevitability. 

– Alex McKenzie, Mercury Cinema

High-Rise is available to stream on Stan.

Last Year in Marienbad
Alain Resnais, France, 1961

Nouvelle Vague titans Alain Resnais and Alain Robbe-Grillet craft a hypnotic mystery, an open-ended experiment in ambiguity that sees a nameless man pursue a nameless woman (Giorgio Albertazzi and Delphine Seyrig respectively, both decked in gorgeous outfits by Coco Chanel), convinced they met the year prior. She denies any encounter, one which becomes more sordid and repellent as the man becomes more insistent. In seeking to upend the traditions of cinematic storytelling, the truth seeps through a non-chronological elliptical structure, replicating the sensation of a repressed memory, as if waking up from a nightmare.

Central to obscuring reality from the viewer is the space in which this entanglement unfolds—a grand baroque hotel situated within a sweeping manicured garden, all laid out without any clear relationship of one place to the next. A hall of mirrors, a shooting gallery, a ballroom and bar, several statues, and a plush bedroom seem to shift, to move around and grow, designed for an oppressive atmosphere where comprehension is impossible. 

In shooting, multiple locations were chosen and stitched together to create a single building which does not and cannot exist; on a soundstage the size of rooms would change from one scene to the next. Architectural anomalies create uncertainty, question our sense of what we’re seeing and our trust in the narrative, and the experiment could not be complete without it.

Rightfully regarded as a masterpiece of film design, Last Year At Marienbad is a disorienting rule-breaker which dispenses with a concrete sense of space and time and eerily progresses with a gripping sense of unease. Inspiring to a raft of master filmmakers including David Lynch and Peter Greenaway, this is the type of unique and ground-breaking cinema rarely seen.

– Alex McKenzie, Mercury Cinema

Last Year At Marienbad is available to stream on SBS On Demand.