Wes Anderson

Here come the dandies. Always ready to use their wit to change clichés and commonplaces. For them, nothing is quite so serious – except banality . Welcome to an aesthetics in which poses matter more than gestures, sensations implode ideas, and masks mean more than reality.
In “Useless, frivolous and distant: in search of the dandies”, André Antônio Barbosa, Denilson Lopes, Pedro Pinheiro Neves and Ricardo Duarte Filho revisit the history of dandyism and the sparkling constellation of writings on this fascinating phenomenon in order to understand the survival of a dandy sensibility in contemporary cinema. In the pages of this book, Baudelaire and Beau Brummel rub elbows with Bertrand Bonello and João Botelho, and Oscar Wilde’s aphorisms shine a light on the work of Wes Anderson and Philippe Garrel.
At the center of this study, we find the dandy spirit in a collection of recent Brazilian films made by the collectives Surto & Deslumbramento, Distruktur, Osso Osso and by multi-artist Sosha. These films are, generally speaking, little seen and even less discussed by critics and academia; their productions and exhibitions take place at the margins of the mainstream; they are made with tiny (or non-existent) budgets and minimal crews, but display a keen eye for the beauty of details, a taste for irony and a surplus of charm and the most exquisite frivolity.
Employing the mythic figure of the dandy as a prism, the authors analyze these films as proponents of an aesthetics of artifice, sidestepping a western tradition of privileging art as interpretation and documentation of reality.

Within this thesis study, based on the idea that cinematic spaces do also possess the perception and the meaning likewise architectural spaces; the phenomenon of representation in cinematic spaces has been discussed in relation to the method of semiology. Besides, referring to the notions like homelessness, temporality and belonging, this thesis further focuses on spaces that have been frequently encountered and analyses three selected hotel spaces and their surroundings from the movies; The Shining (1980), Kış Uykusu (Winter Sleep, 2014) and The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014). Thus, semiological approach is deployed on these movies in order to analyze the spatial and ambient features as well as characteristics of cinematic spaces.
In this context, the first chapter of this thesis describes the goal and the scope of the study. That is followed by the description of the methodology chosen to analyze the cinematic spaces.
In the second chapter of the work, the relationship between architecture and cinema is analyzed in terms of various aspects, which can be listed as: different definitions of space; type of spatial organizations and development; and finally the interaction between architecture and space. This descriptive sub-chapter is followed by a brief introduction about the perception of space in the context of this thesis, based on the differences between the notions of the static cartesian space and the more dynamic phenomenological space. In addition to these, the interdisciplinary characteristics of the study is also stated within this chapter. In this context, first, the notion of interdisciplinary approach is defined, then the disciplines that architecture is interacting with, as well as its relationship with cinema and the conceptual layovers that the architecture and cinema shares are provided.
Moreover, examples of cinematic spaces and architectural products that illustrate how cinema affects the concept of architectural space through the cinematographic techniques and visionary power, and how architecture shapes cinematic spaces through creating spaces with perception have been discussed reciprocally within this chapter.
The third chapter of the thesis debates the cinematic spaces in the physical and conceptual context. In this sense, how the cinematic spaces are designed, and the ways of creating and using these spaces through examples of movie scenes have been discussed within this chapter.
In the fourth chapter, entitled ‘‘Spatial Coding in Cinema’’, how the ideology and the prominent message in cinema are conveyed through cinematic spaces has been analyzed in relation to the basic concepts and understandings of semiology. In fact, this is the dominant spatial analysis methodology of this thesis work.

The fifth chapterof this thesis work includes the scene analysis of the selected hotel- based movies mentioned below “The Shining” (1980) of Stanley Kubrick, “The Grand Budapest Hotel” (2014) of Wes Anderson, and “Winter Sleep” (2014) of Nuri Bilge Ceylan, which share the consistent ideology and use of space, as well as providing general references. The background information and the plot of each movie is introduced together with the directors’ approaches as well as their styles. A sub-chapter that reflects the spatial analysis of the movie commences with identifying the spaces and spatial components included in the analysis of each movie, which has been pursued by the selection of physical and social-cultural design elements that are prominantly used within the movies and acting as effective expression tools of the directors. In the third phase, the communication effects of previously identified visual design elements are examined, which have been further followed by the identification of conceptual, sensorial, and semantic conclusions that these effects have been resulted in.

As a conlusion, the analysis section is summarized, and it is concluded that the architectural design can act as a tool to create meaning in cinematic spaces. The movies have been comparatively read in terms of their similarities and differences in their spatial indicators and interpretations. Finally, it is observed that each director conveys their messages through cinematic spaces and attaches different meanings to these spaces. Thus, semantic variety may differ according to each movie, even though they may all share a common dominant space of hotels and its surroundings.

Keywords: Cinematic Space, Spatial Vision, Spatial Analysis, Semiology, Hotel Space