no ideas but in things

Mon Oncle
1958, 110 minutes
directed by  Jacques Tati

What a beautiful film this is. Last year this film series screened Playtime, Jacques Tati’s later, larger, and more ambitious, though not funnier, film that deals with a similar scenario: the character Monsieur Hulot and his comic interactions with his urban environment of old and Modern Paris. You can’t look up Jacques Tati and not read about his films as a critique of Modern architecture; however, I’m not going to get into that here. My foot is getting tired from incessantly kicking at the dead horse of Modernism.

What I’ve been thinking about recently are children. The title Mon Oncle means “my uncle” in French, and though there isn’t really anything that resembles a traditional plot in this film, a continuing narrative strand involves Monsieur Hulot and his playful nephew. Monsieur Hulot is himself a large child in these films, dispossessed of the sophistication and suavity to understand how to operate within Modern environments. What’s surprising to me is the poignancy of an architectural critique from the viewpoint of a child (and/or man-child, as the case of Monsieur Hulot may be). In fact, children are constantly poignant to me —be them in the published photos of James Stirling’s buildings or as a political device in the recent film by Alfonso Cuarón, Children of Men. What children could then represent is something that is imminently necessary to acknowledge in the study of architecture: that is, the presence of something beyond the reach of intellection.

Philip Nobel wrote that changes in governmental policy, among other factors, forced architects to compete with engineers in the middle of the 20th century. I agree with him to a certain extent—I think the bigger factor was the dominance of German philosophy that prioritized progress and science in the Modern era. Thus, architects had to sell themselves and their work as scientifically rigorous. But as Alberto Perez-Gomez has written, the way we know that architecture is separate from science is that architects are constantly using scientific metaphors. If architecture and science were really conjoined, there would be no need for architects to reach for flimsy scientific metaphors to justify their designs.

I’ve stated glibly many times before that “logic will break your heart,” which is a phrase partially taken from a mediocre album by The Stills, a rock group from Montreal. But the phrase succinctly (and catchily if not also reductively) sums up the theories of one of my favorite figures of late, Kurt Gödel. Gödel’s incompleteness theorems of 1931 essentially stated that in any closed system of logic there are both true and false statements that cannot be proven from within that system. Therefore, the attempt to create and justify any closed system of logic is fraught with inconsistencies and incompleteness—this is the hole that Derrida fell into in his otherwise brilliant theory of differance. This is also why the charge of arbitrary hurts Eisenman more than any other critique—he wanted his designs to be logically inevitable from within the parameters of architecture that he so painstakingly constructed.

Lately, Gilles Deleuze has taken the helm of the most inspirational writer for architects of the moment. Everybody is jumping on the Deleuzian bandwagon, and for good reason. His recently translated book, The Logic of Sensation, is amazing. His ideas of “figuration” and “sensation” are explicitly defined as something that passes beyond the brain, an “irreducibly synthetic . . . plurality of constituting domains of sensation.” In essence, the logic of sensation is distinctly different and separate from formal logic. In Deleuze’s theory, though it is ostensibly about painting, he brings into architecture those aspects that Modernism had left out: namely, the other four senses.

In that way, Deleuze is deliriously liberating. He renders null and void the need to endlessly and unyieldingly generate meaningless diagram after diagram, encourages us to break rules, play around, abandon logic, and explains why stunningly, rigorously formal architecture, like that of Ben Van Berkel and Preston Scott Cohen, sometimes ends up feeling soulless and dead. The work of great architecture lies beyond logical coherency—it lies somewhere in the realm of sensation.

(originally written March 6, 2007)

More film notes from the past:

Blowup (1966), 111 minutes

*Palme d’Or (Best Film), Cannes Film Festival
*nominated for two Academy Awards: Best Director and Best Original Screenplay
*National Society of Film Critics Award, Best Film and Best Director

“Blowup daringly suggests that an image without politics isn’t an image at all.” — Ed Gonzalez, Slant Magazine

“Antonioni’s chic study in ambiguity calls into question the notion of photographic truth, and indeed reality itself.” — Thomas Delapa, Boulder Weekly

“Antonioni is the kind of thinker who can say that there are ‘no social or moral judgments in the picture’; he is merely showing us the people who have discarded ‘all discipline,’ for whom freedom means ‘marijuana, sexual perversion, anything,’ and who live in ‘decadence without any visible future.’ I’d hate to be around when he’s making judgements.” –Pauline Kael, The New Yorker

“A great film.” –Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun Times

It’s great to read the alternating rave/pan reviews of this Italian neo-realist’s most famous movie, with some critics calling it as important as Citizen Kane while others say that it’s a bunch of pretentious crap. Like everything, it’s probably somewhere in-between. However, next time you find yourself surrounded by a bunch of hipper-than-thou modsters, simply mention that you’ve seen this movie and you’ll get instant Cool Points™ from skinny black pants wearing hipsters and film students from across the globe. It’s like an artsy-fartsy shibboleth.

This was Antonioni’s first film in English, and his first film shot outside of Italy (it was filmed in ’60’s swinging London). It caused a near-riot in its day, both winning all the top critic’s prizes and also garnering the notoriety of being banned in several countries and being officially denounced by various religions. It’s the story of a bored and cynical fashion photographer who may or may not have accidentally photographed a murder. Vanessa Redgrave turns in one of her most memorable performances, managing to hold her own against the nearly unbeatable cinematic phenomenon of two young girls rolling around naked on the ground (ever seen Girls Gone Wild? It’s like visual crack cocaine—probably what David Foster Wallace was writing about when he wrote about a movie that was so captivating it incapacitated its viewers in his novel, Infinite Jest).

But amongst the critics who do not dismiss this movie out of hand, the thing everybody talks about is Antonioni’s exploration of the relationship between image and reality, both through his own directorial decisions and through the story of the main character (the photographer as played by David Hemmings). Bear in mind, this movie came out in 1966, which is within two years of Andy Warhol’s first exhibitions of his Campbell’s soup cans (1964), Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology (1968), Peter Eisenman’s declaration of a second epistemological shift (1968), and Arthur C. Danto’s declaration of the End of Art History (1964). Most reviews also connect the photographic confusion explored in this film with the Zapruder films of Kennedy’s assassination (1963). In general, the times they were-a-changin’, and this movie was one of the harbingers of a general artistic and intellectual movement that interrogated of the role of machines and technology on our perceptions of the world. No doubt germane as we CAD-draft and Maya model our virtual worlds.