Great Movies of Summer: Little Fugitive [1953]

Photographer Morris Engel's classic about a little boy lost in Coney Island is hard to believe as a fiction, it's so candidly shot (with a hand-held 35mm camera).  The crowded beach scenes, steep shadows & sunlit glare, and ambient boardwalk sounds put us so square in the middle of the action you'll want to shake the sand from your shoes.

Great Movies of Summer: "Le Mepris" [1963]

Le Mepris ("Contempt") [1963]
Directed by Jean-Luc Godard
Cinematography by Raoul Coutard

Music Score by Georges Delerue

Shot in Rome and on the Isle of Capri, this seminal French-Italian New Wave film provides a vicarious, visceral immersion into the heights of summer. Much has been written on its existential meanings, its literary references, its arthouse mise-en-scène. What interests me, though, is its pure cinema - its immediate, sensual artistry.

Over the languid, churning strings of Georges Delerue's brooding, original score, under the steep, angle of a high sun burnishing the earthen-colored stucco walls, laying them bare and ablaze with scant relief of stark shade, the long tracking shots, the crack of gravel underfoot, and with back-and-forth conversations often repeated by a character translating between languages, the scenes shot outside the Cinecitta Studio buildings are heavy with afternoon heat.

Later, as we climb around the pitched, platonic geometries of the Casa Malaparte, otherworldly in its siting on the edge of a rocky cliff, timeless in its elementary architectural detail, we are treated to every kind of solar trick and treat - washing the muted red plaster in relief against the dappled refraction of cobalt sea below, hitting hot the flat, unprotected stone terrace roof above, and reflecting through raked violet shadows on the steps to get there - you can feel the sun on your neck and the sweet smell of jasmine & honeysuckle swelling the balmy air. 

Windows of Network [1976]

Extraneous Movie Quote of the Office Day

You know, there are many times when I'm drafting on Autocad and I'm reworking somebody else's work that I've taken over, and as I decide to hatch something differently (correctly!) or change a lineweight or text justification, I often say to myself, (or as is usually the case, outloud, just to bother the guy on the other side of the partition,) that immortal line spoken by Richard Dreyfuss in the movie The Goodbye Girl (1977), I'm sure you'll all remember. It's another one of those times when the content of the line matters not at all, it's all in the delivery:

"I-don't-like-the-panties-hanging-on the rod".

Architecture of Railroad Stations in Film









Put this under the categories of "Classic - Necessary, (archetype): Melodrama/Romance/British/Postwar/Realistic/Women's/Tearjerker/Extra-Marital/Middle-Aged/Bittersweet: Trains Stations
"Brief Encounter" 1946

The definitive example of the Railroad Romance, by which I mean the many, usually doomed, romantic dramas that feature the train as a vehicle of separation, which I italicize without irony, of one good and likable character from another. As the local train is such a comprehensive representative symbol of the lives of the British bourgeoisie, with businessmen going into town once a day, housewives going once a week, standing, waiting, having tea, buying a newspaper, all the typical private/public behaviours have as their backdrop the train and its station.

The music, what would have been "popular" music at the time, is Rachmaninoff's Concerto No 2; very romantic. (This happens to be one of the pieces that first attracted me to start paying attention to the classical music I'd been regaled with all my life in the playing of my father in the living room.) http://www.amazon.com/Tchaikovsky-Concerto-No-Rachmaninoff-2/dp/B000003EUG (scroll down to the Listen To Concerto #2). But what suits the movie so well is that in 1946, the people in the theatre watching this, as well as the characters in the film, would have enjoyed this piece on the radio after dinner. I think there is a scene in which the husband actually turns down the soundtrack as he adjusts his living room radio). This is the piece that Eric Carmen stole outright in his very popular 1976 hit "All By Myself".

Watch the scene where the woman tries, offhand, to reveal to her unsuspecting husband her own sense of guilt - and fails. (She tries to sound suspicious in conversation while he reads the paper). Also the funny scene where the girlfriend on the phone, staring into the mirror, is failing to listen to what the heroine is saying to her).

Though it's full of routines and habits unfamiliar to us, they are shot in such a way as to render them universal - and so very familiar, and thus all the more sympathetic.

The 1984 "Falling in Love" with Meryl Streep and Robert De Niro is a lame near-remake.

Directed by David Lean (of the epic Lawrence of Arabia, Doctor Zhivago, Bridge Over River KwaiWritten by Noel Frickin' Coward

Architectur of Chanel
This TV commercial from 1979 makes my heart beat faster, it's so sexy. The plane's shadow and the lanky man, both making their ways between the woman's legs, are hardly subtle. But in an age when most TV ads featured talking heads and product shots, this short film does nothing but evoke a mood of luxury and desire - a quick visual poem on aspiration. A novel and, ultimately, very influential approach. Directed by none other than Ridley Scott (Alien, Bladerunner). 
Check out the ad HERE

Architecture of The Powers of Ten

This classic 9 minutes film by Charles and Ray Eames shows not just the powers of the satellite and the microscope in their exponentially detailed views of our world, but the power of a short film to seduce, amuse and inform us.

The Eameses pretty much invented what we now call the "industrial film" and though they were interested in making information entertaining, they never stooped to mesmerizing tricks to keep our attention or using condescending language or set-ups to make us feel "smart".

This film has the all the force of architecture: the power to teach us a new way of seeing.

http://www.youtube.com:80/watch?v=aQ35Jd0ivU0

Architecture on Film: Maison de Verre

Pour yourself a drink and turn your speakers up a bit. This is a 24 minute film, with sound,(the confidently clipped British inflected narration). The topic is the masterwork of architect Pierre Châreau. It's just an amazing building and this is a lovely explication of why. Just keep remembering: this was the year 1928!

For those of you who worry about modern architecture lacking texture or discreet spaces or the warmth of natural materials, take a look.

We may not wish to build this now, but what a big fat lesson this is about how you might go about building AT ALL! no matter what it is: it's thoroughly considered, loving in detail and devoted to the visceral and human over the abstract and ideological.

Then, if you are inclined to the motifs of modernism - a conscious embrace of the machine, in service and in symbol, the acceptance of complex rather than comfortable settings to better reflect the difficult realities of modern life, and the paradox of a restrained ornament requiring more effort and planning to achieve than a more boisterous ornament does, this house is for you.

Even if you're just folding laundry, put this on and enjoy a worthy 24 minutes. (look at the recreations the film makers made of people walking up and down, all in period costume and hairstyles, even if you may not notice) .

click here, busters:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4973824278845805386&q=cad%20monkey%20movie%20is%20funnier