Reading Response 4 (Week 6)

While Sergei Eisenstein and Siegfried Kracauer lay impressive theoretical groundwork for an understanding of how our experiences of architecture and film inform one another in this week's readings, I found Giuliana Bruno and Joan Ockman's work more constructive. They offered useful critical terms for suggesting how the exploration of architecture within and around cinema could offer solutions to the oppressive lived realities of urban design and corporate architecture. In a manner perhaps more satisfying or convincing than the digital environments we discussed earlier in the semester, film allows us to experience existing architectures from new perspectives (as in Bruno) and offers the possibility of exploring unbuilt spaces created for film sets (as in Ockman).


I especially enjoyed Bruno's suggestion that within the private-public place of the darkened movie theater, mobility within the coded-male city is opened up to female viewers ("voyageuses" rather than "voyeurs"). Although the point is less valid now, as modes of film viewership and urban travel have evolved (I'd argue) along less starkly gendered paths, it is interesting to apply this concept to the work of filmmakers working at Jacques Tati's time. I'm especially thinking of Jean-Luc Godard, whose films demonstrate a keen and adventurous attitude towards urban spaces and architecture and invest spaces with particularly strong symbolic values. His attitude towards gendered spaces, I'd say, carries from the same ambiguity his films do in general: it's never clear to what degree the misogyny he depicts is being criticized and indulged. Similarly, Paris (and other locales to a lesser extent) figures in Godard films as a male space by definition.


As one of the first members of the French New Wave to use location shooting for films from Breathless (top image) onward, it's hard to determine to what extent Paris was gendered male before the cameras started rolling and what amount of this masculine urbanism is the result of Godard's particular cinematic gaze. From Jean Seberg walking down the Champs-Elysées in Breathless (1960) to Anna Karina forced into prostitution by the city's phallocentric urban economy of My Life to Live (1962, pictured above) to Karina's entrapment in a dangerous love triangle in Band of Outsiders (1964), and several others, Godard's female leads are often depicted as women trapped in Paris's male gaze. And yet Godard's point of view isn't completely complicit in this objectification, and he shows women negotiating the coded-male city by stopping in cafes (My Life to Live), relaxing in the privacy of their apartments (Breathless, Band of Outsiders) and, fittingly, escaping into cinemas (Breathless). This productive ambiguity in Godard's gendered treatment of space – between the organizing male gaze of the city and its buildings and the folds, cracks and blind spots it affords his female characters – echoes some of the ways of reading urban forms opened up by Bruno, and offers the added lens of auteuristic intent and evolution. Certainly, by the time he made Pierrot le Fou (1964), Alphaville (1964) and La Chinoise (1967), Godard's visions of space and architecture had already evolved radically.