The Architecture of Image: Existential Space in Cinema. . - Space in Time - book review

Architectural Review, The, Dec, 2001 by Timothy Brittain-Catlin

By Juhani Pallasmaa. Helsinki: Rakennustieto Oy, 2001. Finnish Marks 315, $52, Euro 53

I have seen many books on architectural space in cinematography but none as good as this one. Most theoreticians, particularly those from non-architectural backgrounds, soon lose the reader in ever-deepening spirals of abstract thought; a lot of Foucault, or whatever, is thrown about, and one wishes one was looking at the film instead of talking about it. On the other hand, those from an art-history perspective rarely grasp the concrete intensity of architectural reality and find it hard to link personal experience with the artifice of designed space.

This is a study of five films: Hitchcock's Rope and Rear Window; Kubrick's The Shining, Antonioni's The Passenger, and Tarkovsky's Nostalghia. All of these have been written about quite substantially before, but Pallasmaa presents each one in a fresh and direct way, properly set in the context of its synopsis and production details and with the director's descriptions of the messages the design of the film was intended to project. He is at his best with Hitchcock. The extraordinary architectural precision of the thinking behind the sets and their manipulation within the story, particularly in the case of the obsessive and theatrical Rope, provide him with his most concrete and therefore the most purely architectural ideas: the building as the monumentalization of a perceptive process, the screens of apartment windows, the flickering vignettes within, the controlled viewpoints, the changes over time, the known areas and the unknown ones; the graphic signals indicating mood, change, decay. Possibly his treatmen t of other directors is more related to architectural metaphors (in allegorical painting, for example) than to architecture-as-walls, and it may be that some of the impact of the most memorable films is derived from the way in which one's own memory goes on digesting them after viewing. But Pallasmaa's streams of simple and memorable ideas will repeatedly stimulate memories of other films, and it is entirely to his credit that one is often provoked into questioning his assumptions.

This is a superb piece of work, accessible, imaginative, provocative, unpretentious, and excellently illustrated. Tero Juuti's drawings representing scenes from The Shining are at least as effective as the video-stills provided for the other subjects. This is my personal recommendation as a Christmas present: those who read it will enjoy those old holiday-season films so much more.