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architecture

Beaubourg, centre d'art et de culture Georges Pompidou (1977)

Beaubourg, centre d'art et de culture Georges Pompidou (1977)

#January 31, 1977

Beaubourg, centre d'art et de culture Georges Pompidou aka Beaubourg (Roberto Rossellini, 1977)

#FilmDuJour #RobertoRossellini #RichardRogers #SuRogers #RenzoPiano #GianfrancoFranchini #France #Paris #art #documentary #CentrePompidou #museum #architecture #1970s


Alphaville: Une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution (1965)

In one of the very few daytime scenes, Natacha (Anna Karina) and Lemmy Caution (Eddie Constantine) share breakfast at a small table while awkwardly sitting on the armrests of two upholstered chairs. A large television is built into the wall directly behind the table. DP: Raoul Coutard.

Alphaville: Une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution (1965)

It's July 16 and dinner's served

Alphaville: Une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution (Jean-Luc Godard, 1965)

Yes, I'm afraid of death… but for a humble secret agent that's a fact of life, like whisky. And I've drunk that all my life.

#FilmDinner #JeanLucGodard #PaulÉluard #EddieConstantine #AnnaKarina #AkimTamiroff #JeanPierreLéaud #HowardVernon #PaulMisraki #RaoulCoutard #ScienceFiction #FilmNoir #NouvelleVague #poetry #Paris #architecture #France #Italy #JacquesTati #1960s ★★★★☆


Alphaville: Une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution (1965)

Natacha von Braun (Anna Karina) and Lemmy Caution (Eddie Constantine). Lights reflected in the windowpane that shields the two characters suggest “the existence of an obscure reality” (after Baudrillard). DP: Raoul Coutard.

Alphaville: Une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution (1965)

July 16: Artificial Intelligence on #ArtificialIntelligenceAppreciationDay

Alphaville: Une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution [Alphaville] (Jean-Luc Godard, 1965)

𝛼-60: Do you know what illuminates the night? Lemmy Caution: Poetry.

Science fiction, of course, doesn't have to be driven by grandes effects, by superstar names and monumental backdrops. It can be cool, dry, colourless even. The hero, in trenchcoat and fedora, traverses a lightless city. There are few others at this time of night. The familiar landmarks of the City of Light become the voice of 𝛼-60, an artificial intelligence that presides over Alphaville.

Based on a poem by Paul Éluard, #Godard's Alphaville bears similarities with Jean #Cocteau's Orphée (1950), transported to a mirror world of sorts. It also foreshadows not only our time, but also M. Hulot's, whose #Tativille could be the simulacra of 𝛼-60's simulated, dehumanised world.

#Bales2023FilmChallenge #JeanLucGodard #PaulÉluard #EddieConstantine #AnnaKarina #AkimTamiroff #JeanPierreLéaud #HowardVernon #PaulMisraki #RaoulCoutard #ScienceFiction #FilmNoir #NouvelleVague #poetry #Paris #architecture #France #Italy #JacquesTati #1960s ★★★★☆


Le procès (1962)

Josef K. (Anthony Perkins) crossing an enormous open office space. The endless room is filled with clerks, identical desks, telephones, and typewriters. DP: Edmond Richard.

Le procès (1962)

June 23: a typewriter for #NationalTypewriterDay

Le procès [The Trial] (Orson Welles, 1962)

All these fancy electronics, they're all right in their place, but not for anything practical.

Office worker Josef K. is brought to trial and at no point told what he is accused of, if anything. Orson Welles' Le procès is an adaptation of Franz Kafka's unfinished 1914/15 novel Der Prozess. The manuscript, guarded from Kafka by his friend #MaxBrod in an attempt to keep the self-doubting author from destroying his work, was against K's wishes posthumously (re)assembled by Brod without the latter knowing the intended sequence of the loose pages nor what chapters were finished.

The story holds up in its vagueness thanks to the quirks of #Kafka's Brotberuf; Franz K. was a trained lawyer, working as an insurance agent in an impossible artifice world of reports and precise wording. Within its extended logic, a man can get perplexedly lost, either within the walls of his #office or one's bed.

#Bales2023FilmChallenge #OrsonWelles #FranzKafka #AnthonyPerkins #ArnoldoFoà #RomySchneider #JeanneMoreau #ElsaMartinelli #JeanLedrut #EdmondRichard #BookAdaptation #drama #France #Italy #WestGermany #architecture #bureaucracy #Kafkaesque #1960s ★★★★☆


The Last Man on Earth (1964)

Dr. Robert Morgan (Vincent Price) walking down the stairs of the Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana (aka the Palazzo della Civiltà del Lavoro aka the Colosseo Quadrato), with bodies scattered around him. DP: Franco Delli Colli.

The Last Man on Earth (1964)

June 2: filmed in Italy for #RepublicDayItaly

The Last Man on Earth (Ubaldo Ragona & Sidney Salkow, 1964)

Your new society sounds charming.

Rome's EUR was Italy's site for the 1942 World's Fair, and meant as a showcase for #Mussolini's then-20 year old fascist state. Due to the outbreak of World War 2, EUR was never used for the Fair. Instead, the Italian Republic restored the project after the war and – quite appropriately if I may say so – turned it into a business district.

An idealised, hypermodern interpretation of Classical Roman architecture, EUR feels alien and inhumane and serves as a perfect backdrop for the events a last man on earth may come up against.

Besides in The Last Man on Earth, EUR makes an appearance in L'Eclisse (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1962), Bertolucci's Il conformista (1970) and, Antonio Pietrangeli's Io la conoscevo bene (1965), and Peter Greenaway's The Belly of an Architect (1987).

#Bales2023FilmChallenge #UbaldoRagona #SidneySalkow #RichardMatheson #VincentPrice #FrancaBettoia #PaulSawtell #BertShefter #FrancoDelliColli #horror #drama #BookAdaptation #EUR #Rome #Italy #USA #architecture #fascism #1960s ★★★☆☆


Playtime (1967)

Playtime (1967)

March 31: spot the #Eiffel Tower on #EiffelTowerDay

Playtime (Jacques Tati, 1967)

Never was or will I be a fan of Jacques #Tati, the loveable Luddite who wouldn't be as big as he became if it wasn't for the technological wonders of the 20th century. Having said that, his Playtime (1967) holds a special place in my heart.

Tati's alter ego Monsieur #Hulot roams a hyper-modern #Paris, actually an enormous soundstage dubbed #Tativille. People, buildings and gadgets interact with and against each other, each and everyone as plotless as a prop. In unison, it becomes a perfectly orchestrated symphony of maddening modernism.

But Tati wouldn't be Tati if it wasn't for a glimpse of quiet nostalgia. A woman holding the glass-and-steel entrance door of yet another concrete office building. In the glass, a burst of warm light and colour and movement. And then it's gone, and we remember how that tower once was the thorn in the Luddite's eye, that “baroque and mercantile fancy of a builder of machines”.

I'm going to take Mr Ebert's words to heart for my long overdue revisit to Tativille:

“Playtime” is a peculiar, mysterious, magical film. Perhaps you should see it as a preparation for seeing it; the first time won't quite work.

#Bales2023FilmChallenge #JacquesTati #MonsieurHulot #TourEiffel #EiffelTower #Paris #comedy #architecture #France #Italy #1960s ★★★½