Anxious Modernisms (film series)
I organized this film series and facilitated post-screening discussions, looking at the various ways in which American, Italian, and French directors treated modernist architecture as a stand in for the failed promise of modernity writ large, and in doing so, anticipated or echoed many of the ways in which modernism was blamed for moral decay within the realms of discourse and criticism. I would like to do something like this again, and would probably add or remove a few films to sharpen the point and incorporate films from non-white-male-european viewpoints, as well.
Thematic Introduction (given before the first screening of the series)
This series focuses on how a number of filmmakers appropriate the existing modernist built environment, often the banal modernist built environment, as symbols for anxiety, doubt, existential dread, and cultural malaise. In some cases, we might argue, they frame the built environment in moral terms, using the implied failure of the modernist dream for universal better living through better design as a metonym for the failures of the societal, economic, or political systems presumed to have given rise to them. Part of my contention in setting up this series is that some of these films in fact either predate, predict, or parallel the charges of moral failure vis-à-vis the built environment’s social role that were leveled at modernism by the postmodernists. This is a topic for ongoing conversation, I think.
The films we will be watching are not specifically about architecture, architects, design, planning, etc., These are films in which there is architecture, there is a built environment, and in which the designed world plays a role. You might even say that these films have a perspective or a point of view or an agenda as far as the built environment is concerned. But these films are primarily about other topics, mainly relations between people, and of course existential dread.
Secondly, these are films that, as the series title suggests, deal with modernist architecture. And in this case we are primarily dealing with modernism as a style, not as a mindset. Once we get into the films we can question whether or not the filmmakers are charging the architects of their modernism with some kind of moral failure, or if the architecture should be read as springing from deeper societal or aesthetic currents of thought. However at the outset the unifying principle is that these buildings and landscapes—which I would argue are both sets and more than sets—look a certain way which we would call “modernist”, “high modernist”, “brutalist,” etc.
Another distinction I need to make here is that I’ve chosen films that deal with modernism, rather than modernity. Naturally, more or less all of these films can be read as essays on the modern condition, on modern life, but I want to stress again that in this case I feel in these films that modernity is inherently linked with the modernist built environment. It’s for this reason that this series does not include films such as Modern Times, Metropolis, Safety Last, Rear Window, or La Dolce Vita. These are great films, all expressing appropriate amounts of anxiety about the modern condition, and they all make great use of the built environment, Rear Window and Safety Last being exemplary in this regard, but they don’t use modernism symbolically. Of course, there has to be the exception that proves the rule, and in this case it’s Persona, but as it is perhaps the film that most exemplifies 60s existential dread, I couldn’t bear to leave it out and for better or for worse I have a hunch it will charge our final discussion in some way. It’s also just an outstandingly well designed movie.
Which brings me to my final point about the series and my final point before we roll film on Hiroshima mon Amour: each of these films is a great lesson in design. And I don’t necessarily mean in purely formal terms either. They contain some stunning cinematography with excellent compositions, wonderful lighting, and—in the case of at least some of the color films—great color design. But many of the films are deeply, carefully, exactingly constructed. Whether it is the haunting, intoxicating draught of memory that is Hiroshima mon Amour, the giddy, terrifying paranoia of The Conversation, the white-hot heat of Persona, or the warm, humanity and quiet rhythms of the exacting sight gags of Jacques Tati, there is much that these films can teach us about design. And while the topic of this seminar may be modernism and anxiety, I hope that we will dive fearlessly into these greater depths as well, seeking to understand not only what these films can teach us about the consequences of design, but also about the act of designing itself.