François Penz

Spatial dialectics: montage and spatially organised narrative in stories without human leads

Abstract This article analyses and formulates mechanisms for creating meaningful and engaging narrativity in interactive movies not based on character, where the dialectic relationship between architectural space and the rules that govern montage shape the narrative structure. Formalist analysis of Dziga Vertovs film Man with the Movie Camera (USSR, 1929) highlights two significant terms which play a centralrolein the formulation of the rhetoricalargument of the moving image. ‘Punctus-contra-punctum mon-tage’(‘counterpoint montage’) describes a technique that exploits analogies in form or content between adjacent clips, to produce meaningful thematic sequences; while Lev Kuleshovs ‘artificial landscapes’—the imaginary, creative geographies constructed of moving images that exist only on the screen—offer a way of arranging media spatially. A proof-of-concept, prototype production, Cambridge City Symphony (Alifragkis & Penz 2006), where these approaches are instantiated as rule-sets, and handled by the computer, illustrates how these produce engaging interactive narrativity.

A monitoring exercise for a school atrium

At a time when great importance is being attached to making more efficient use of resources, there is a strong case for considering ways in which buildings may be improved and extended to meet new and changing requirements. The Martin Centre investigated the potential which was offered in these respects by the addition of glazed roofs to existing courtyards and lightwells. The investigation aimed at carrying further the current knowledge of the environmental performances of glazed courts and so revealing the potential of the glazing of existing courts. The work was carried out in collaboration with Essex County Council and the emphasis was on school buildings. Part of the study involved the monitoring of a primary school fitted with a glazed courtyard. This paper presents an analysis of the temperatures recorded both in the atrium space and in the adjacent classes. The stratification phenomenon is discussed as well as the effect of natural ventilation on overheating conditions.

Narrative expressive space

Drama and Narrative Narrative is fundamental to the way humans understand, remember, describe or imagine the world in literature in literature and in film [4][5][20][8][3]. Drama is an important engine for narrative [30][11]. Broadly speaking, drama results from the friction generated between the goals and actions of the constituents of a dynamic system instantiating emotional relationships. These relationships are usually based on the development of characters [29][17]. Such relationships, even when they are to do with inter-character conflicts, are located in specific places. This means that they are interlinked with and depend upon the spatial definition and functionality of the objective or subjective fictional representations of the world where they occur and through which they are presented.

The architectural promenade as narrative device: practice based research in architecture and the moving image

This paper aims to make transparent the new and complex field of practice-based research within the context of architecture and the moving image. Following some general considerations derived from the wider context, it concentrates on a case study of a particular example: the architectural promenade as moving image narrative device. The paper cites the case historically and theoretically, and covers pertinent issues of narrativity and space within moving-image practice. It then describes the central experiment, analysis, testing and trials, and formulates conclusions regarding the use of plan and section in moving image architectural exploration and representation and the importance of the human eye. It also emphasises the key role of the human body in composing the storyline.

The Cinema in the Map – The Case of Braun and Hogenberg’s Civitates Orbis Terrarum

This essay explores a possible pre-cinematic reading of Braun and Hogenberg’s Civitates Orbis Terrarum (1572–1617) by considering filmic notions such as the role of actors, the relationship between time and space, movement as well as aspects of screen language, in particular montage and continuity editing. Such general considerations of cinematic mechanisms applied to maps are then further considered in a case study, that of William Smith’s perspective map of Cambridge in 1575. A narrative layers methodology is applied to William Smith’s subjective rendering of Cambridge and reveals that it prefigures contemporary developments of the city in the twenty-first century.

Cinematic Urban Archaeology: The Battersea Case

The ‘cinematic urban archaeology’ approach provides the starting point for the exploration of material from Battersea films alongside the Survey of London’s (SoL) research, in an attempt to answer the question raised by Raban; how do feature films reveal the ‘soft’ illusions, myths, aspirations and nightmares of city dwellers? Directors and cinematographers use space to express character and atmosphere; interiors and exteriors are selected, lit and shot to communicate the cultural environment incisively. How are Battersea and its people depicted? Locations also speak for themselves, recording people’s homes and how they inhabit them, the iconic elements emphasised by set decorators. They show public buildings, centres of commerce and entertainment, and the flow of people and traffic. The two volumes on Battersea published by Yale University Press by the SoL (2013) offers a counterpoint perspective on the films under consideration.

Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera: Thoughts on the Computation of Style and Narrative Structure

ABSTRACT This article proposes a way for producing cinematic representations of contemporary urban environments based on the close study of Dziga Vertov’s mechanisms for story and plot development as instantiated in Man with a Movie Camera. Our investigation of screen cities and the way the image of the modern metropolis is constructed in cinema focuses on the examination of, and the experimentation with, the screen language of the “city symphony” film genre. This is pursued in two parts that tackle distinct - but to a certain extent complementary - aspects of the research. The first part of the article - the analytical segment- summarizes the results of the shot-by-shot formal analysis and the statistical processing of the accumulated metadata for Vertov’s cinematic text with the aim of mining relevant concepts for an informed discussion on aspects of film form and style for “city symphonies.” The second part of the article - the experimental one - attempts to transliterate the results of our analysis into the novel language of nonlinearity for the digital, interactive screen. This is deemed particularly important because, as this article suggests, a better understanding of the “city symphony” form will enable the production of more immersive filmic constructs about current urban phenomena.

Context Design and Cinematic Mediation in Cuthbert Hall Virtual Environment

This poster briefly describes the motivations behind the architectural decisions taken in the design of Cuthbert Hall virtual college and gives an example that demonstrates how cinematic mediation techniques can contribute towards dramatized interpretation of the environment.