Video/film

By paraphrasing Oliver Sack’s famous book title, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales, I wish to strike a note of ambivalence for this reflection on my ongoing doctoral project. I will present and try to disentangle some of the issues that have affected the work, and hopefully contribute to the discussion on doctoral education in architecture, particularly practice-oriented programs.

"El viaje es y ha sido un tema recurrente en la ciencia ficción desde sus comienzos. El viaje como proyecto, como trayecto y como límite conforman escenarios en los que la arquitectura se hace presente definiendo el carácter, la forma y el entorno del futuro. La representación de ese entorno y la vocación prospectiva que contiene la ciencia ficción, producen innumerables ejemplos distintos que imaginan diversidad de escenarios posibles en futuros lejanos y próximos. La mezcla de elementos habitables que produce el viaje, donde la ciudad, el edificio y el transporte en ocasiones son la misma cosa, se añade al reflejo de la realidad que el cineasta superpone a su propia y personal visión del porvenir. El tren llegando a la ciudad, símbolo del primer espectáculo cinematográfico, y la visión de las estrellas del pasajero de un transbordador espacial son metáforas de la fascinación del hombre por su propio descubrimiento y del deseo constante de avanzar hacia la materialización de su imaginación.
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Travel is and has been a recurrent theme in science fiction since its inception. The planning, the route and the destination of the journey shape scenarios in which architecture is present, defining the character, the form and the surroundings of the future. The representation of those surroundings, and the foresight contained in science fiction, produces innumerable different examples that imagine the diversity of possible scenarios in futures far and near. The mixture of inhabitable elements along the journey, where city, buildings and transport are sometimes indistinguishable, is added to the film director’s superimposed reflection of reality and personal vision of the future. The train arriving at the city, a symbol of the first film screening, and the vision of stars seen by the space shuttle passenger, are metaphors for the fascination of humankind for their own discovery, and of the constant desire to advance towards the fulfilment of their imagination."

While the Greek film musical enjoyed popularity and commercial success in the 1960s, introducing new discourses on tradition, Greekness and modernity, it virtually disappeared from the Greek film charts in the next decade after the fast decline of the Greek popular cinema. During the 1980s, a period of major political, social and cultural changes, the Greek popular cinema and its genres began to regain popularity. Among the films of the era, some film musicals were released, and within the blossoming direct-to-video network older musical filmmakers re-emerged from oblivion. The purpose of this article is to explore the Greek film and VHS musicals of the 1980s on the basis of the bipolar axis of introversion/extroversion or modernism/postmodernism and to describe its various articulations in terms of form and content in the light of MTV and popular American film musicals.

Gazing through phenomenological lenses, the paper will trace a possible dialogue between the Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky (1932-1986) and the Swedish director Ingmar Bergman (1918-2007), established through the spatial metaphors in their films. Taking into account that the two of them never met, nor spoke directly, albeit contemporary and highly praising each other’s works, this paper will list the fragments of indirect verbal interaction between the two, arguing that some of the gaps in their dialogue were filled through the communicative functions of spatial imagery in their films. Transgressing the factual absence of communication, these spatial metaphors, understood as visual phenomenology of lived space, position the two artists in a state of silent, yet crystalline dialogue, all the more profound in its silence and revelatory to the common nature of architectural and cinematic language.

Presentation of Works: Conventional vs Uneven: Inherent immersion

Keywords: Contemporary Art, Video Art, Film, Space, Immersion


One aspect of the debate regarding contemporary art goes through an extensive discussion on the different media in which works are presented. The relation between the different arts and their crosses leads to an improvement and a questioning of its formats in public space.
Image interpretation and its presentation expands, as well as the contact of the viewer with them, on two different generic forms, film - defending the tradition of conventional projection, and video art - welcoming different perspectives of the spatial arrangement and therefore uneven to what we have seen until now. However, there is an inherent aspect pointed to the two spatial configurations, immersion. The presence of this condition is essential to the spectator’s travel in the works. It supports the reception and perception of visual works by spectators as well as to explore new and different spaces for the enjoyment of art. Today we don’t see space just as the depository of works of art, but it integrates the viewer in art though, being part of it and calling it now also as a participant. So they establish new relations of immersion, both in cinema room with new interactive devices, such as in galleries and foundations of contemporary art that incorporate new practical features to give more and better these complex links between the artist, the work and the viewer.