INSTRUCTOR: E. Keller
UA Pratt Institute School of Architecture
Since the birth of cinema, architectural and urban space and ideas of landscape have played a crucial role in the visual representation of space on screen. As contemporary discourse is reinventing the idea of landscape and providing us with the idea of multiple layers of overlapping ‘scapes’, so also has the concept of landscape evolved within cinema. One of the key hypotheses we will examine in this course is the presence and function of time within landscapes and cinema. Thinkers like Gilles Deleuze have written interdisciplinary histories of cinema-his Cinema 1+2, for example-exploring the way that fi lm functions as a highly accelerated cultural engine for the development of thinking about space and also about time. This concept will guide our approach to the concept of the
‘scape’.
Contemporary urban theories rely on concepts of networks and agents-human, ecological or economical which populate the landscapes that we work with as designers, and which can only be properly understood ‘in time’. Earlier conceptual models for landscape were drawn from a complex symbology and representational vocabulary. A well recognized lineage exists which we can trace over the past 8 centuries which parallels the way that societies construct images of themselves, build systems of control and economy, and the frames they build in the landscapes around them Many diff erent kinds of time have been theorized as human society moved from an agrarian to an industrial to a post industrial environment. Examples of time embedded within landscapes abound: geological time; genetic time; prehistorical time; cosmological time; city time vs. agricultural time; linear time or cyclical time; measured time [Chronos] and unmeasured time [Aion]; reversible time as measured by classical physics or irreversible time shown in thermodynamics and dissipative structures.
Cinema has compressed into just over one century all the representational and philosophical themes that our built environment has been driven by for over a thousand years. This evolution of fi lm has been informed, in many ways, by the history of landscape theory: moving from the primarily visual, to the compositional and symbolic, to the compositional and material, to the active landscape, then the urban montage as a landscape of image and action and fi nally to emergent landscapes: the discovery of network systems on macro and microscopic levels. Indeed, cinema has played a role in changing the way that we understand the nature of landscape as a lived fi eld spanning the scale from the microscopic to the cosmologic.
The fi lms we will survey in this seminar showcase a variety of landscapes, each of which generates different forms of time. We will track this catalog of ‘ time landscapes’ through several dozen fi lms. A wide range of genres and periods will give cinematic illustrations of each concept of landscape, and will be joined with selected examples from landscape, urbanism, and architecture. We will read from a core group of theorists and philosophers whose work addresses the themes of time, power, and space that the fi lms evidence.
We will use cinema to rethink the application of landscape as a mediated system which establishes connectivity both in terms of space and time, informed by Appadurai’s terms (techno, media, ethno, ideo, & fi nance scapes) thus adding a critical component which activates the idea of time as an agent in the discourse on landscape and the built environment. A common theme present in our screenings and readings this semester will be that in each of the varying kinds of time we see evidenced, there is a deeply political nature. In fact, these ‘Politics’ of time suggest that all experiences of this new concept of landscape are both intensely political and temporalized.
