the city as a character in films

THE CITY AS A CHARACTER IN FILMS

a journey through architecture and cinema

Nicolò Bertino, TU Delft, Philosophy of Image

INTRODUCTION In this essay I would like to explore the connections between cinema and architecture.

I think that the “Seventh Art” it’s useful to analyze cities in their inextricable architectural whole full of streets, bridges, pylons and buildings.

I’m interested in films in which places are treated as characters, showing us their different but proper way to act in scenes.

I apologize, first, whether the narrative is sometimes disjointed, full of references that are not always analyzed in depth, but acts only to emphasize the concepts of the script.

I will assume the method of wandering, in a position of voyageuse film, trying to recognize and analyze the sites, the landscapes of some films that actually are characters in themselves, although they have different qualities and features than human actors.

Before exploring the “world of films” I would like to begin speaking about the fathers of our contemporary culture and their creations, because I believe it’s helpful to understand more about the world in which we live.

method of vojageuse

THEORY OF IMAGE IN MOTION Walter Benjamin was one of the most influent philosopher of the Twentieth century who have raised the question of the image in our society, primarily related to the invention of photography.

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Thanks to the development of this new tool, we had for the first time the power of reproducing the work of art.

Fifty years after, in 1983, Gilles Deleuze wrote The Movement-image to analyze the structural concept of cinema in which you can create images in motion.

I think it’s very interesting to analyze the elements of the ‘urban character’ in movies, because through it architecture can be expressed in motion . Thanks to cinema, images can be represented in time, resulting in a sort of living character, in some cases, so we can draw a complete experience of it.

An important concept that exemplifies the growth of our today’s ‘worship’ of the image itself is drawn and described by Derrida, who begins to investigate, following the thought of Heidegger, the concept of the difference between the transcendental and the phenomenon.

Like Derrida, Simondon begins to express his disappointment for the Platonic philosophy: there is difference between “forming” and “format”, while there’s no difference between pre-individual and individual. The process of individuation does not happen in one moment, but it is in constant growth because it is in constant ‘in-formation’.

Finally, the most interesting findings belongs to Deleuze, who comes to express one of his most important concepts under the name of Transcendental Empiricism. It is an oxymoron expressing its rejection on Metaphysics, now useless to represent today’s changing. Deleuze’s Transcendental Empiricism expresses that the transcendent is on the surface, along with real data, so the body’s ‘deepest thing’ is its skin.

The Movement Image

trascendental empiricism

skin

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This type of thinking justifies the culture of the world of images in which we are now immersed. We believe that everything is explainable through this medium, (apart from a few isolated cases of criticism, for example Blow up by Michelangelo Antonioni), moreover, the fact that ‘the formed’ is still ‘in-forming’ affirms the importance of a description of a moving image, the only suitable paradigm for a world in continuous transformation.

The film-making tools like editing, cutting, framing make cinema becoming a metaphor of modernity compared to the new philosophy: while the metaphysical philosophy was once used to think the universal, films, such as dance and mime register the ‘whatever’ movement. As soon as you give the lot, the time becomes image of eternity, and consequently there is no real movement which is pure evolution without ceasing.

This is why I think it is crucial to analyze and make a comparison between urban architecture and cinema. These disciplines have many ‘contact points’, as claimed, for example, by Antonioni’s works.

Wim Wenders gives us another important clue to our discussion when he affirms that “…it is precisely the birth of the city that creates the need of film.” (Wim Wenders: paesaggi luoghi città di Paolo Federico Colusso, 1998). Let’s begin to see how this new phenomenon get a foothold in the society of the last century.

Michelangelo Antonioni

frame from Blow Up, (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1962) 3

FILMS PORTRAY THE CITY I choose the title “The city as a character” because in the films I’m going to speak about I will briefly note how urban elements are almost overwhelming to the actors who act. The meaning of these film can actually be traced through editing, scenes, places, to the elements of cities, which seem to recite.

I will try to list some reading keys to discover the elements of the language used by the ’urban characters’.

In the early days of cinema, the ‘panoramic films’, a genre composed of ‘scenic’ views become common practice to travel from place to place and are functional to the development of the ‘camouflage film’ language. In Italy this genre will be called ‘dal vero’. Travel films of late Nineteenth Century reveal how cinema has begun to articulate their own language by trying to achieve a form of landscape painting, which became, as discussed below, view-tracking and view-sensing practices.

We may therefore say that the first genre films have touched the urban theme through a representation of its architecture as a setting, bringing forward the figurative path. Cinema in its origins has created a composite practice of spatiality which gave mobility to locations and turned them into landscape sites.

It’s noticed a shift from the embryonic representation of views (a kind of postcards in motion) to the simulation of travel through space. These first experiments are very interesting because directors begin to explore different tools the cinema offers like the movement of the camera, the plan, the shot, panoramic view, for

panoramic films

architecture as a setting

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example, so they start to investigate dynamic flows of large cities.

In Panorama of the Flatiron Building (American Mutoscope and Biograph Company, 1903), for example, the camera moves to follow the movement of the legs of passers-by. The flow of traffic is the protagonist of the scene here, but its urban architecture is metonymically united with human bodies, as we notice from the scene in which the camera scans the ankles of women in transit at the foot of the building.

Other films at the turn of the Twentieth Century, such as Panorama from Times Building (American Mutoscope and Biograph Company, 1905) unravel us as the journey film begins to inscribe the movement in the language of film, transporting the audience into the space, almost always in the city.

In the 20’s of last century the city became the subject of several milestones in the history of cinema, which modeled in a relevant way the structure of the cine-city.

Manhatta (Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler, 1921), Metropolis (Fritz Lang, 1926), The man with the camera (Dziga Vertov, 1929) are three examples of this sort of ‘wedding’ between cinema and urban architecture.

Urban space becoming also a genre in Italian and German ‘road-dramas’, exploring the growing relationship between the characters of the scripts and the environment in which they move.

From an architectural perspective, the city presents itself as something more (and different) than the mere subject of the film.

Metropolis and cinema are linked together as a distinctly mo-

frames from ‘Panorama of Flatiron building, (American Mutoscope Co., 1903) 5

dern production in which there is similarity between urban and cinematic space. The ‘20s, a period of fluid exchanges between architecture and film, created nexus committing to the new mechanical constraints.

In Metropolis-a sort of New York’s vision- Fritz Lang describes the functioning of the machine of the urban dream in architectural terms, where utopias and dystopias of the Machine Age unify the city and cinema.

In the age of mechanical reproduction, cinema and cities intersect themselves as reproductive machines, linked from the mechanisms and mechanics of the body. The cinema, work of art and scientific invention at the same time, was a reproducible product. As this reproducibility became the cultural dream of the modern era, the greatest dream became the reproduction itself.

As Benjamin describes in his important essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1935), it is crucial for the work of art to move closer to the masses, so the reproducibility of it through machineries is the only solution to make art available to the middle classes.

The laboratory of Metropolis prepares this utopian scheme, giving it not only an architectural form, but the whole architecture of the body.

The photography had given ability to reproduce the body, offering an identical image to our physical body. The film made it

Metropolis

frame from Metropolis, (Fritz Lang, 1926) 6

move.

In this set we can say that the ‘body’ of the city take over, not just metaphorically, the elements characterizing the human body, so the ‘mind’, summarized in a complex system of gears, rules its big body, in whose entrails it is constantly ‘fed’ by the hard and exhausting work of the workers, who could lose their life at their first mistake.

This film, strongly characterized by allegorical figures, poses on top of the script the ‘life’ of the modern city, raising it as the main character, or rather, put it on trial of capitalist society of the Industrial Revolution.

Metropolis also shows a new feature in filmography: the views of the city emphasize his being a cinematic event.

We can also highlight this aspect under the categories of cinema that Deleuze suggests: he is interested in cinema because of its nature to ‘invent’ the reality, to open up virtual worlds that are immanent in reality. Deleuze is a ‘philosopher of the event’ because he didn’t seek the conditions of reality, but he began an investigation to reveal real tangible things.

In the film The man with the Movie camera (1929) Dziga Vertov travel over the ‘urban body’ through the camera.

More than a symphony of the city, Vertov ‘s constructivist film shows that cinema moves (and moves with) the city. Opera on the promiscuous laboratory of cities and cinema, The man with

‘philosophy of the event’

Dziga Vertov

poster and frame from The man with the Movie camera, (Dziga Vertov, 1929) 7

the Movie camera passes through the history of the body. This film is thus a fascinating work of ‘radiographic’ analysis which traces an historical map of cinema and places it in the body of the city. The plot, set in the space of a cinema hall, begins with architecture. At first, the room, empty and motionless, gradually becomes being filled, it ’comes alive’ thanks to the film and the people who come to populate it. Chairs starts to move while the music fills the atmosphere and puts reality in motion. The city rhythm is composed through the architectural space of the cinema.

In The man with the Movie camera the life of architecture is the life of someone who lives there. Fixed shots are used to paint the sleeping ‘belly’ of the city, in order to emphasize the steady movement of it. The sleepers are immobilized as wax dummies or portraits, waiting to be awakened by the invention of cinema.

Pursuing the process, thanks to editing, the series of the motionless images of the bodies receiving life shifting themselves from pale wax sculptures to Movement-Images – using Deleuze’s expression.

Here is the body of the city, once dormant, that finally wakes up. The city, as the camera, begins to move in here and there. As in the overview of the origins of cinema, camera movements are enhanced and multiplied by coupling them and the means of urban transport. Vertov in his work, unlike the previous panoramic films, raises the image of the city, which seems truly alive, the beating heart of modern society. The importance of the city is underlined by the fact that there are no longer movements of

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people and masses to act as host of the scene; the main theme is expressed by the ‘movement’ of architecture. Thanks to new development of technology, the Russian director can make us feel really the dynamism of urban architecture, using superimposed images and other ‘tricks’ to convey a powerful image.

The man with the Movie camera ‘wiggles’ us, activating the motion of phatos through urban activity’s driving force. It’s interesting to underline that all the human characters in this film are shown us as a background, as a far choreography framing the main character, the ‘architectural motion’. Is this film a tribute to urban studies on locomotion? It’s truly possible, I think, since it is a beautiful spectacle of kinesthesia, which raises its moving poem to the laboratory of the body of the city.

Continuing our brief journey through the first steps of cinema that draws on the architectural repertoire we have to mention noir films.

Noir cinema is tied together with architecture because its stories are depicted on urban roads, on urban panorama.

This type of films need this situation of discomfort associated with the urban condition. Noir has stamped his mark on the future landscape of the city.

The physicality of the road in a noir like The Naked City ( Jules Dassin, 1948), where the director tells the story of a pursuit. Dassin suggests the plot’s theme using the tactic of ‘ground’s height’ shoots. This kind of shoot will be formalized as architectural aesthetics through the postwar Italian Neorealismo. This is a movement interested in urban everyday’s stories. We can take as

architecture ‘in movement’

film ‘noir’

Neorealismo

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example Ladri di biciclette (The Bycicle thief, Vittorio De Sica, 1948), a film, as Andre Bazin said, in which the plot is “a walk through the streets of Rome “.

Thanks to Neorealismo urban architecture becoming the structure of films.

Most of the neorealist works are constructed in a similar manner and can be interpreted as city walks. The movement of Neorealismo, as underlined by Giuliana Bruno in the book Atlas of Emotion, developed cinematically the life of the road, bringing to light the living component of the production of space.

Recognizing the role played by this genre in the construction of Movement Image, Gilles Deleuze drew attention to the ’dispersive reality’ aesthetics, noting that “in the city in demolition or in reconstruction, the neo-realism multiplying the ‘whateverspaces’, the undifferentiated tissues, the fallow lands. “ Making a comparison with architecture, these words remind me the method Koolhaas described in the essay Junkspace, in which, in an uncritical way, he examines city’s empty spaces. The Dutch architect claims that empty spaces are the power of the city, they are not only just spaces ready to fill, to be completed.

An important piece of ‘urban ruin’ is registered in the film Germania anno zero (Roberto Rossellini, 1947).

The final scene of the film, a long shot sequence of the walk of young Edmund, shows the city as an empty panorama full of rubble. This urban cancer reports history and reveals that traces of its ruins are left uncovered in the city to re-shape the present and draw the map of its future.

‘whatever spaces’

ruins

frame from Germania Anno Zero, (Robrto Rossellini, 1947) 10

With neorealism landscape lunge at the foreground, becoming an historical and social subject in films of the Italian masters.

Mamma Roma (Pierpaolo Pasolini, 1962) is a film about architecture as a structure of the lifestyle. The etymology of the metropolis-city-mother is explored by Pasolini in the lifestyle of a roman woman.

Writing about architecture as character in cinema I have to mention Play Time ( Jacques Tati, 1967) in which the main figure of this masterpiece is Tati’s future city. It traces out Parigi’s footsteps, but to produce this film Tati decided to built a sort of ‘fake’ city called Tativille, a futuristic city composed by glass and steel.

In Play Time, the character of Monsieur Hulot multiply himself indefinitely times. Hulot circulated for a metropolis of the future.

Tati rebuild a city named Alphaville (now re-called Tativille) in eight acres of land granted by the City of Paris in the Bois de Vincennes. The director would shows us that all the metropolis are almost the same. The airport is the most striking example. An American woman just landed in the space airport exclaims “what a lovely Paris, it seems to be in America.”

All the tourist coming to Alphaville and invading huge glass building do not care to explore the city, they just want to see it.

It’s seems to be better for them the action of visiting and moving from a store to another than to observe that the images of Tour Eiffel and Arc de Triomphe can be seen only mirrored on glass architecture. There are no differences between outside and inside of these modern buildings.

Tativille

frame from Play Time, (Jacques Tati, 1967) 11

Moving through the big city in order to meet an executive from a multinational; Dr. Giffard is the ‘sparring-partner’ of architecture in a comic scene in which he shows all the modern architect’s deficiencies.

The glass constructions betray the obsession of getting a perfect communication with the view only. These big and transparent architecture are similar to an aquarium where everyone can look to the other without understanding each other and especially without meeting.

Hulot went to visit a luxurious restaurant just finish in the city. In these scenes there are another comic shoots, in which ‘our hero’ inadvertently manages to unmask many structural deficiencies of new architecture. Backs of chairs, for example, leave their mark on guest’s fine clothes, fake decorations start to melt themselves because of the heat coming from lamps, while doors are so purely crystal made that nobody could see them and they shatters.

Play Time was so unsuccessful that the company created

by Tati (SPECTRA Films) failed dragging the filmmaker into a vortex of debt. In 1956 in France a law that limited the construction of urban buildings over 31 meters in height was abolished.

This because urbanists already planned to continue the demolition of many areas of the old Paris. The district of Les Halles is one example of that. In 1967 there were not so many buildings that are there today and people were not ‘locked’ in glass urban cages. In Play Time the first skyscrapers and glass building appear, anticipating the outlines of new architectural and urban planning in Paris. Tati’s film becomes current twenty years later and

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certainly is more admired now than when it was commercially exploited.

In a letter written by Francois Truffaut to him, he explains his thought about this film: “Play Time is not like anything that already exists at the cinema: no film is framed or mixed like this.

It’s a film from another planet, where the film is running in a different way. Maybe it represent the Europe in 1968 filmed from the first Martian film-maker, their Luis Lumiere? So, he sees what we can no longer see, he hears what we can no longer hear, and he shoot so different from us.”

URBAN FABRIC The cinematographic wings of Der Himmel über Berlin (Wings of Desire, Wim Wenders, 1987) transport us in and out of the urban landscape. Wenders’s film is the work of a former painter who, by his own admission, “ had only a wide interest in space: landscapes and cities ... portraits of places.” Wenders, as Antonioni, suffers from a form of ‘topophilia’, a syndrome, defined for the first time by the geographer Yi-Fu Tuan, which manifests its symptom as love of place.

Wenders’s thopophila , as he himself describes it, is ‘the ability’ of the places and means always “…an elaboration of mourning, a resistance which provides energy for travel within a location to discover and describe it cinematically.”

Angels, as noted by the director, refer to The angel of history by

topophilia

frame from Wings of Desire, (Wim Wenders, 1987) 13

Walter Benjamin. In a scene of the film we can hear a whispered reference of this book when the narrator sits in front of the globes. The film constructs the architecture through an historical reflection from the city of Berlin, thanks to this angelic vision in mind.

Wings of Desire is now a document of a city that is no more there; it becomes ever more clearly an elaboration of mourning. We are involved in view of the city in which its centre is often empty. In Berlin, both for those who live there and those who visit, the history was written on the white empty space, a sort of gap which was a ‘theatre of erasures’.

The exploration opens on a close-up of an eye that becomes a panorama of the city, which turn ultimately as a reflected image in the pupil through a superimposition. This image echoes a famous engraving of 1804 by the architect Claude Nicolas Ledoux, in which a pupil in the eye reflects the auditorium of Besancon.

Angels lead us from aerial views to the landscape of the inhabitants of the city. They can perceive humans’ interior monologues.

Moving from windows, a mobile camera guide us inside the houses, seizing and revealing the interior space of the Berliners.

Just as cinema angels desire to affect lives.

superimposition

auditorium of Besancon,Caude Nicolas Ledoux, engraving,1804

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The main character Damiel whish the concreteness of human life. He fall in love with a trapeze artist and chooses to incarnate himself in order to love her. As a human character, Damiel can now recover the sense of the touch. That new physical reality is not just about sexuality, but about the awareness of physicality. It is represented here as the ability to leave fingerprints and sensing skin.

So, Damiel loses his ability to fly as an angel in order to gain a truly human sense of taste and the need to acquire a taste in fashion.

The transformation from a holy creature to a human one is depicted in filmic terms as a changing in shots typology. This new way of seeing, fixed to the level of the ground, has the color code.

We can therefore state through Wenders that landscapes, painted through walks, echoes that genius loci depicted by Christian Norberg-Schulz in his book. Reality takes on a symbolic character.

The city assume this quality in a proper way because it has to be experienced through the touch. Thanks to this human quality we can better understand urban contradictions and its values, too.

Indeed angels are not able to understand Berlin in its true nature, as Wenders seems to tell us. They can understand the real shape

human tastes to ‘feel’ the city

frame fromLisbon Story, (Wim Wenders, 1994) 15

of the city, only visible through an ‘aerial skywalk’, but they cannot feel urban ‘smells and tastes’. They can only being revealed through the perception of the touch, of colors and smells.

URBAN PERCEPTION Even Lisbon Story (Wim Wenders, 1994) expresses urban perception themes.

In this film, the landscape is rendered through the ‘soundscape’.

We are in Lisbon, and we can feel this city through a sort of atlas of sounds found in roads. We get carried away by the Fado played

by Madredeus. Lisbon Story seems to be pervaded by a form of nostalgia regarding to the current state imaging technology (the director seems to be suspicious with new forms of Technicolor).

I think that this film is important to our discussion because it gives us another crucial sign regarding the ’language’ of the city.

Sounds and noises can emphasize the role of urban reality in films.

The main (human) character in this film is the phonic called Winter. His work is emblematic from this point of view: in the story he seems to understand more about the essence of cinema than his friend Friedrich, a director, who seems to has become crazy researching a pure way to produce shots.

This method to feel cinema is explained well in the scene where Winter tests some children: he produces sounds with his

city ‘noises’

frame fromLisbon Story, (Wim Wenders, 1994) 16

machineries and they have to recognize the images referring to its noises.

In this film, as others made by Wenders, the resultant picture of the urban organism is painted by a ‘schizophrenic’ way of editing.

The scenes are edited in a fast sequence, and you can see the whole architectural space as a ‘kaleidoscope of images crushed’.

I have found some parallelism between Wenders’ way of filming and the Situationist’s recognition of cities. He walks through the urban condition, apparently without a great train of thought, like the mapping method of cities adopted by Guy Debord, Constant Nieuwenhuys and other artists from the ’60.

I would like to end this essay writing about the work that has impressed me more, Le Mépris (Contempt, Jean-Luc Godard,1963). I was excited about the way of shoots passing from the landscape through the body to the domestic landscape.

The film starts with a memorable long shot of Camille’s body (Brigitte Bardot). Paul, her husband, ( Michel Piccoli) starts to enumerate all the part of her body he loves, creating a sort of map of sentimental landscape. The story continues exploring their romantic life. Their marriage is disintegrating, and the crisis is ren-

Situationism

frame from Le Mépris, (Jean-Luc Godard, 1963) 17

dered in an architecturally way through the ‘fiasco-purchase’ of a house. To be able to pay the mortgage of their new apartment in Rome, Paul accepted a job offered by an American filmmaker. He will rewrite the script for an adaptation of the Odyssey, directed

by Fritz Lang. Their marriage begins to creep in contempt around the concept of home ownership.

Le Mépris evolve itself in the space that belongs to the domestic realm, describing the couple’s everyday life through an architectural narration.

The camera travels along a creative path through the glass door of the bathroom, passes from the kitchen to the bedroom. It captures the deteriorating relationship between the characters drawing the map on the objects of love and design.

As in Antonioni’s film L’Eclisse (1962) Godard involves modern architecture in his works.

Both films could be seen as essays about urban planning, that explores the transformation of the Italian city during the so called ‘Miracolo economico’.

This two films reflect on the modern city ‘in-making’, paying particular attention to the ‘unfinished’ work.

In Le Mépris as we observe the eclipse in the new city in the making, it is paid particular attention to the ‘unfinished’.

Antonioni ‘s urban meditation is about buildings under construction, focusing on their parts as if they were already ‘rovine’.

In L’Eclisse the opening and closing shoots are landscapes in

Villa Malaparte in a frame from Le Mépris, (Jean-Luc Godard, 1963) 18

which architecture and cinema are articulated to each other.

The modern transformation of Rome from an old city to a new metropolis had inspired the title of this film.

This middle class landscape is a theme depicted by Godard too.

In Le Mépris we can see the transformation of the countryside in a new residential district of the city. In this sense Benjamin’s worlds are clearly understandable: “the new art of cinema will assume political values. It could contain an open critique to architecture, urban life and society in general.”

This film dwells on ‘various ways of marriage’ between film and architecture, even through a visit to Cinecittà, the Italian film studies with an evocative name.

One of the sequences I have appreciated most is the shots in Capri. This scenes bears within itself lyrical and symbolical values: architecture plays an important role in the narration as the main component of the climax of Camille’s contempt.

The couple is just in the famous island in Naples, where their marriage continues to disintegrate. This location is the same location of the remaking of an Oyssey that takes shape of the difficult ‘navigation’ of the love of another couple. According to that, we can affirm that this place is a sort allegorical one.

The end of the story took place in a ‘breathtaking’ house (Villa Malaparte), in fact Camille is quite literally lead to die here.

This marvellous location push Godard in a lyrical resolution of

architecture inluences feeling

Villa Malaparte in a frame from Le Mépris, (Jean-Luc Godard, 1963) 19

shoots. There are some sequences of the film based on sea sights visible through the windows of the house.

This landscape is influenced by architecture, by the structure of Villa Malaparte. This was the real home of the novelist Curzio Malaparte, designed with the help of Adalberto Libera. The house is built along the entire length of a narrow promontory, on top of a cliff that extends over the Mediterranean Sea. Villa’s feature is the giant staircase, placed in dialogue with the topography of the island. Godard enjoyed himself filming it.

The result of the sequence is a sort of idealization of the staircase, which assumed a sense of monumentality through a shoot from the top of the ramp. The long-take used for filming the entire house from the outside give to it a sort of ‘fluidization’ of architecture. This way to film steps remind me the same sense of ‘falling water’ Michelangelo gave us describing his staircase in Biblioteca Laurenziana.

Finally we have discovered another element of the language of architecture in film: its symbolic aspect. Villa Malaparte, through the way it is filmed reveals an emotional climax

Michelangelo

staircase of Biblioteca Laurenziana, Michelangelo, 1571 20

that gives us the same sensations as Brigitte Bardot feels for her husband.

We have quickly analyzed the films that go closer to architecture, giving only a few examples of different relationships between this two arts. Starting from cinema’s birth, we have observed that the constant growth of urban reality in films leads to technological and social development.

We virtually passed through architecture as background in films, to its role of making atmosphere in the narration. An important step was Neorealism, in which ‘urban character’ became the structure of the plot.

We have mentioned Antonioni and Wenders’s work, in which we have understood that we have to get closer to reality in order to really ‘taste’ urban smells, noises and colors.

In conclusion I totally agree with Renè Clair who argues that “…the art makes me think more to cinema is architecture”. This is true because they are both related to space activities.

As architecture, cinema can be defined as a ‘spatial practice”. It ‘a form of ‘street art’, a factor in the construction of city views. The landscape of the city has to interact closely with filmic representations, so the city is not only an architectural construction, but it’s a filmic one, too.

I think the best expressions of this nexus are realized when architecture ties itself to the character’s nature.

Some scenes in the history of cinema showing us this beautiful union.

I would like to end the narration reminding the famous scene in La dolce vita (Fellini, 1960), in which Anita Ekberg looses her hat from the top of S. Peter church. This lyric shoot gives us the

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idea that from the top of the basilica we can control the whole Rome. The city can really ‘act’ as a character, thanks to these directors that have developed a sort of ‘language’ for it.

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Selected References

Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (Princeton Press, 1935).

Giuliana Bruno, Atlas of Emotion: journeys in art, architecture and films, (VERSO, 2002) Paolo Federico Colusso, Wim Wenders: paesaggi luoghi cittĂ (Testo & Immagine, 1998) Gilles Deleuze, The Movement-Image, (University of Minnesota press, 2001) Gilles Deleuze, Cinema and phylosophy, ( John Opkins University press, 2008) Mario De Micheli, Il disagio della societĂ e le immagini ( Jaca book, 1982) Rem Koolhaas, Junkspace, (Quodlibet, 2006) Cristian Norbert Schultz, Genius Loci, (Electa, 1992)

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