Narrating the City

Mediated Representations of Architecture, Urban Forms and Social Life

Ayşegül Akçay Kavakoğlu, Türkan Nihan Hacıömeroğlu, Lisa Landrum, Lisa Landrum, Ayşegül Akçay Kavakolu, Türkan Nihan Hacıömerolu, Ayşegül Akçay Kavakoğlu, Türkan Nihan Hacıömeroğlu, Graham Cairns

• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781789382716
• eBook ISBN: 9781789382730
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

Analysing a variety of international films and, ultimately, placing them in dialogue with video art, photographic narratives and emerging digital image-based technologies, the contributions explore the expanding range of 'mediated' narratives of contemporary architecture and urban culture from both a media and a sociological standpoint. Each chapter presents an interesting critical approach to the diversity of topics with clear explanation of the contextual framework and methodology, and a consistent depth of analysis. 

In the three sections of the book, authors underline the continual role of film and media in creating moving image narratives of the city, identifying how it creates cinematic – and ever more frequently digital – topographies of contemporary urban culture and architecture, re-presenting familiar cities, modes of seeing, cultures and social questions in unfamiliar ways. This filmic emphasis is placed into dialogue with a more diverse range of related visual media, which illustrates the overlaps between them and reveals how moving image technologies create unique visual topographies of contemporary urban culture and architecture. 

In making this shift from the filmic to the new age of digital image making and alternative modes of image consumption, the book not only reveals new techniques of representation, mediation and the augmentation of sensorial reality for city dwellers; its emphasis on 'narrative' offers insights into critical societal issues. These include cultural identity, diversity, memory and spatial politics, as they are both informed by and represented in various media.

The focus for the book is on how films can produce mediation of urban life and culture by connecting the notions of identity, diversity and memory. Both the subject and the approach are gaining in popularity in recent years. This book's main feature is its dual perspective, involving both practical and theoretical stances – and it is this approach that makes it a particularly relevant and original contribution.

Primary readership will be academics, scholars, undergraduate and postgraduate students and practitioners interested in architecture and media in general, film, moving images, urban studies in particular. Also of relevance to sociologists and those interested in cultural theory.   The inclusion of chapters on urban photography and art installations may also be of interest to students and designers in these areas.

Part I

Identity in Mediated Realms

1

Looking Up, Looking Down, Looking Awry

Louis D’Arcy-Reed

Visual representation across differing media and mediums allows cities to become powerful backdrops in cinematic and television storytelling, where reality television, dystopian futures, superhero destruction and the traditional ‘house of horrors’ dominate screens. This chapter situates itself within the protagonists’ behaviours becoming distorted, thereby questioning incommensurability between themselves and their environments, interrogating urban environmental cinematography decisions and the psychological emancipation of the city.

Three main contexts of media, including reality television, such as The Apprentice, (2006 - Present) The Hills (2006-2010) and Keeping Up with the Kardashians (2007 - Present), and dystopian movies, such as Blade Runner (1982) and its sequel Blade Runner 2049 (2017), are considered in contrast to conventional horror films based in singular environments, such as The Shining (1980) and Psycho (1960). When analysing this media through the gaze of architecture and psychoanalysis, proposed by Bruno Latour, Alberta Yaneva and Slavoj Žižek, a discussion of parallaxical identities presents itself, where all incommensurability between environment and self can be alleviated, reducing the sense of tension enacted by the media’s representation.

Viewing such media representations of place affords thought-provoking perspectives between the city as a curated organism, much like film and television, and the hidden structures of antagonistic power struggles beneath the surface.

Framing the city through psychoanalysis of architectural antagonisms,¹ proposed by Žižek, enables the city on screen to act as both setting and backdrop for psychoanalytical anxieties to occur. In an era where movies and television are exposed to scandals of gender and race equality, issues of manipulation and diversity, the city on screen remains a narratively explicit arena to scrutinize. While this chapter deals with filmic and televisual fictions, the lessons from architectural narratives transcend beyond the screen, affording dialogues of urban environments and their settings to exist within the ‘real’.

Proposing the quality of parallaxical identities² within our cities, where the implementation of architecture can severely reprimand, but also transform, the identities of communities, builds upon the dichotomy of place across political and social spectrums. Transferring this notion into filmic representations, we can begin to interrogate how the city can become represented and characterized horizontally and vertically, corresponding to community behaviours and their activity, as highlighted by Latour and Yaneva’s ‘gull-in-a-flight’.³ By extension, the urban fabric, or city, ‘appears to be composed of apertures and closures, impending and even changing the speed of the free-floating actors’.⁴ In contrast, horror films such as Hitchcock’s Psycho and Kubrick’s The Shining take place between two poles. As such, Žižek’s proposal⁵ is to resolve one’s internal trauma through the creation of an architecturally utopian solution.

Reality television

An expansive genre, reality TV accounts for a variety of casts spanning from ‘amateur’ to the ‘celebrity’ as the subject base for the show. These shows chronicle a myriad of typologies that take place – from workplace docu-soaps and competitions, to 24/7 coverage and scripted-situational reality dramas. The shows have mass appeal, are cheap to make and bank on the stars’ interaction, charisma and character to develop the narrative. Where complex television has increased the medium’s tolerance for viewers to be confused, encouraging them to pay attention to comprehend the narrative,⁶ reality television banks on a dedicated fandom and its formal place in scheduling as a ‘light entertainment’ show. However, reality TV is a genre of heavy-editing processes in post-production, where characters can easily be cast as the villain or hero. Most contemporary series also air a brief recap before each episode to summarize key events ‘previously on’ the series.⁷ Irrelevant of time and place, the recaps are generally crafted by series producers who choose key moments they believe relevant for refreshing viewers’ memories for upcoming storylines.⁸ This leads to an interesting dynamic within these shows where the city acts as a backdrop or setting for the entertainment to take place.

MTV’s The Hills⁹ followed several young and affluent women embarking on their personal and professional endeavours¹⁰ in and around Los Angeles (Figure 1.1).¹¹ The manipulation of place by MTV and its producers expanded upon the casts’ privileged backgrounds, adding to the idea of wealth and entitlement by making the young stars seem even more privileged.¹² Other than just possessions, the cast were seen at fashion internships, shopping and dining, thereby creating further illusions of wealth and grandeur. MTV made sufficient efforts to now proclaim its stars as celebrities in their own rights with cast members becoming household names on the internet and in tabloids and fodder for entertainment outlets such as TMZ or E! Network. Within the show, there is absolutely no reference to why such lavish resources are available to these young people, or where such objects come from.¹³ Upon first viewing, the aesthetic style of The Hills looks strangely jarring.¹⁴ Following a simple format for its running time, situations are spliced between camera quick-cuts and location filler shots, showing Los Angeles from the sky, day and night. These can immediately be categorized as montage; montage elevates an everyday, trivial object into a sublime ‘Thing’. By purely formal manipulation, it succeeds in bestowing on an ordinary object the aura of anxiety and uneasiness.¹⁵ What is often overlooked, however, is the way this transformation fragments the real into a cinematic reality, producing a surplus that is radically heterogeneous to cinematic reality, but nonetheless implied by it.¹⁶ In this instance, the surplus caused by the show’s montage acts as the backdrop for the drama, anxieties and relationship between observer and cast. The gaze upon the city as nothing but a montage equates to a gull-in-a-flight, where context could be done away with.¹⁷ Instead, viewers become invested in the emotional stakes within the fictional frame.¹⁸

Figure 1.1:Title sequence screencap of The Hills. Hisham Abed and Jason Sands (dir.), The Hills, 2006. USA © MTV.

In the syndicated show The Apprentice,¹⁹ contestants compete for either a cash investment or employment within the host’s business. In America, the show was hosted by billionaire Donald Trump (until his election),²⁰ while the UK version is currently hosted by Lord Alan Sugar.²¹ The contestants are professional businesswomen and men, firmly in the ‘yuppie’²² mould, from various sectors who have been vetted and auditioned prior to filming.²³ Much like other talent/reality shows, the participants’ egos and idiosyncrasies are cultivated through off-camera stings or candid moments during tasks, enabling the viewer to perceive contestants as antagonists, strategists or the typical yuppie. Paradoxically, the contestants are followed by the host’s ‘trusted allies’ to assess and report on the contestants’ misfortunes or lack of acumen²⁴ in a bid to ‘level down’ these (budding) upper-middle-class subjects by rendering them ordinary, denying the particular circumstances that provide the resources to access such entitlements.²⁵ Instead, the show borrows a narrative act from the producers of The Hills and constructs an arena of the relentlessly successful and entitled, yet still accessible. In this way, The Apprentice mirrors The Hills to perpetuate the neoliberal notion that individuals have access to social mobility²⁶ through being ordinary, while being able to succeed in wealth-driven tasks in ‘dog-eat-dog’ environments.

As with The Hills, The Apprentice also plays the city as setting and arena for the activity of contestants. Utilizing commercial architecture and skylines of New York and London to backdrop the competition and backstabbing, shots often pan from above, highlighting key cores of their fabric, known for wealth. Focusing on skyscrapers, luxury buildings and the feeling of exclusivity, the elitism proposed by this representation speaks of high power, high risk, greed and money. Often a new series has some kind of placement involving the newest architecture. The key factor is a disassociation between money and context. The Apprentice tells us that the only context worthwhile to our cities is the wealthiest, the newest or the phallically highest. The representation of an elitist ideology through sleek skyscrapers and exclusivity directly correlates with an incommensurability between the public and private spaces of our cities, where deprived areas become airbrushed out of urban fabric in favour of helicopter montage shots of the city’s skyline. A notion that reframes our cities and reproduces, at the level of architecture, the usual split between subjective and objective dimensio...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction: Narrative Topographies of City and Urban Culture in Moving Images in the Age of Digitalization
• Part I Identity in Mediated Realms
• Part II Narrated Diversity of Filmic Urban Culture
• Part III Narrated Memories of Mediated Urban Life
• Afterword: Neo-formalism and the Architectural Lessons of Film