Film Machine
by Michael Eng, 2003

The longstanding question of architecture’s relation to cinema (Can architecture be thought of and designed cinematically? Does a cinematically designed architecture produce a new architecture, or place “architecture” itself into question? Does cinema follow an architectonic program?) has received a variety of responses, ranging from the provocative to the banal. Much of the efforts seeking to unite the two forms have been motivated, at least on the architectural side, by an interest in ‘freeing’ architecture from its overarching entanglement in the static. They are efforts at rearticulating the proper object of architecture as not space so much as time, at producing an ‘architecture in motion,’ it is said, an ‘architecture of the event.’ The fact that today a good bit of architectural design and theory employ animation software in order to overcome what is deficient as well as contradictory in the cinematic model—the static film frame—must be seen as a distinction without a difference, for the notion of movement remains, even to the most optimistic, nothing more than a metaphor.

If these attempts have failed, or at least come across as unconvincing, it is not primarily because of the weakness of the metaphor of the movement of space. They are failures, rather, because they seek to create a connection between two phenomena that already share a common origin, which is not the production of space but its organization. The object proper to architecture, that is to say, is not space or the experience of space, but the conditions of experience, the conditions of the formation of the subject itself.

In fact, most leading reflections on the relation between architecture and cinema, including those of Paul Virilio, focus on the famous passage in Walter Benjamin’s Artwork Essay in which, following Moholy-Nagy, he suggests that the cinema provides access to an “unconscious optics” of space in a manner not unlike the access provided by psychoanalysis to the unconscious in general (the link between the birth of cinema and the birth of psychoanalysis no doubt not being lost on him). Yet one of Benjamin’s more penetrating claims occurs three years later in “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire.” There he notes that today (1939), “technology has subjected the human sensorium to a complex kind of training. There came a day when a new and urgent need for stimuli was by the film. In a film, perception in the form of shocks was established as a formal principle” (Benjamin, Illuminations, 175).

Here, then, in Benjamin one finds support for Foucault’s claim in Discipline and Punish asserting a systematic link between the architectural and the optical, which he describes with the term discipline. Such a link, Foucault is quick to note, is not unique to the Panopticon, for the Panopticon is simply the ideal realization of “a mechanism of power” (Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 205). It is in the intersection of Benjamin’s and Foucault’s texts, interestingly enough, that the lie is then given to the presumptions of a Bernard Tschumi. His use of the cinematic metaphor in his work (such as Parc de la Villette, Le Fresnoy) has been directed at unhinging architecture from its modernist legacy, as a resistance to form. Yet the appeal to the cinematic is in all actuality a continuation of the project of modernity, that is to say, the formation of the modern, observing subject. If it is postmodern, it is so because the ‘discontinuity’ introduced by Tschumi serves in training the subject in the fragmented series of advertising images that constitute what Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno have called “the Culture Industry” and which Fredric Jameson now names “the consciousness industry.”

The pun on the term observer begins in Foucault, but then gets taken-up decisively in Jonathan Crary’s Techniques of the Observer. The type of observer at stake in the line running from Benjamin to Foucault and then to Crary is one whose limits of perception are conditioned by certain techniques of the body. The observer’s body is not hers or his—or rather, ours, mine—but an artifact of certain rules for seeing to which s/he willingly submits, hence the active/passive sense of the pun.

Silva’s Film Machine as a result is not original in the architectural sense, for it obviously reproduces Le Corbusier’s ideal of a “promenade architecturale.” The observer ‘activates’ the work in her or his descent and ascent along the stairs, and his or her movements between the wooden observing tubes dictate the ‘narrative’ conveyed by the action taking-place on the street outside. But it turns Le Corbusier right-side-up, saying, against him, that the object being determined is not ‘architecture,’ but ‘you.’ It’s a joke, in other words. Depending on how close the observed are to the building as they pass, this determines how much of their bodies one sees. The building provides the material support for a machine for looking, a machine à voir, so to speak, not unlike Le Corbusier’s “machine à habiter.” Yet as one moves from tube to tube, learning the to and fro of cause and effect, just whose body is being normalized here? Just who is performing for whom?

It is important to note, of course, that Film Machine is, among other things, a site-specific work. Installed as part of the exhibition, “Detonation,” at Anthology Film Archives at Second Street and Second Avenue in New York City, the work references the prior history of the building, before it was renovated by Raimund Abraham and Kevin Bone, when it was Manhattan’s Second Avenue Courthouse. The five observing tubes constructed by Silva mimic the five prison-bar lattice structure of the courthouse window. Still, the technology of observation that the work expresses points to the building’s role in a certain history of cinematic ideology as well, recalling the work of Peter Kubelka, one of the founders of the Archives, whose “Unsichtbare Kino” (Invisible Cinema) (itself mimicked in recent work by Renée Green), attempts to produce the conditions of an ideal, cinematic spectatorship.

Silva’s Film Machine, I would submit, is an articulated redundancy, just as the building in which the work was installed is an architectural redundancy. Architecture, in other words, need not be a prison or have a judiciary program in order for it to be a disciplinary apparatus. Film Machine restores, as it were, the ideology behind architecture as a disciplinary optics, as well as cinema as an architecture of discipline. What exactly is the gesture of the work, then? How is it possible to maintain a distinction between ‘properly’ disciplinary gestures and architectural, cinematic, and, in general, aesthetic ones?

(This text was first published online at: http://www.anamnese.pt).

Works Cited

Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken, 1985.

Crary, Jonathan. Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century. MIT: Cambridge, Mass., 1990.

Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage, 1979.

Michael Eng teaches philosophy and architectural theory at Pratt Institute, as well as in the Department of Gender Studies at Rider University.