ATLAS OF EMOTIONS

ATLAS OF EMOTIONS

                        GUILIANO BRUNO

A BOOK REVIEW

Giuliana Bruno, in her book ‘Atlas of Emotions’, invites the reader to a journey to the history of film and architecture. During this travel she provides the knowledge of how those two fields have been developing each other in a mutual relationship.

In her introduction-prologue- she demonstrates a map of the travel story she offered. She briefly informs us about the possible experiences which are waiting us to discover as we are wandering in that very Visio-spatial story. By the help of etymologies between motion and emotion, and the metaphors between anatomical amphitheater, movie house and architectural space; the author gives clues about how kind of a destination this journey will lead to. It is a destination that will produce a mental map of complex relations between film, architecture, geography and the body as an end product in our minds.

The crucial issues to understand this complex history, which she mentioned in her prologue, are important shifts between some concepts that affected both architecture and film. Namely these important shifts are from optic to haptic, sight to site and perspective gaze to motional viewing.

Through out the text she makes the reader deeply experience those processes by writing in a narrative manner. She is explaining the movies in such a way that the article itself becomes something ‘haptic’, haptic as its Greek etymological connotation of ‘being able to contact with’ as she also mentions.

In the first part called ‘Site-Seeing: The Cine City’ by a ‘erroring’ of words ‘sight’ and ‘site’ she tries to emphasize the transformation of the perception of the space from a defined path to a wandering around. This transition is very much related with the passage from Lacan’s voyeuristic film spectator to Bruno’s spectator as a voyageur.  Then she relates this shift from passive to active with the very basics of ‘modernity’, modern way of urban life and modern architecture. So we enter her cine-city as an active voyageur excited and allured with the motion of the urban life. We are ready to be transported to unexpected narratives of the street walkings through the sites and viewpoints we have never experienced before. We are the ‘mechanical eye’ of Vertov, sometimes on a bike, sometimes on a train and sometimes just wandering around on foot. In this wandering arounds, she takes us to the sequential development of the movie genres in relation to the changing character of the urban life, metropolis or the cine-city. We walk with a woman trying to find her own space in this modern life, we run through the undergrounds of a dark city, and then we feel the emptiness of post war space of Berlin. Bruno, by choosing really proper examples and by successfully visualizing them in our minds, constructs the very deep relation between the narration of a film and the experience of the architectural space. She also mentions how the camera blurred the boundaries between private and public, home and world, interior and exterior. We are really in a surgical operation of the city itself, the architecture and city becomes a tangible body that we cut sections through still images and move them to inhabit them.

Bruno, after discussing the film and architecture at a very theoretical level, juxtaposes them in her comparison between Keisler’s movie house of silence and Loew’s Paradise Theatre at Bronx. Bruno defines the first as saying ‘…architecture must nearly shut-up-and shut itself down. The movie house is the house of silence. As a reader this striking definition makes the boundaries between architecture and film very blur in my mind. The architecture houses the film as it is also housed by the film. Whereas in the latter, the movie house is itself a simulation of urban motion, and it gives relatively narrow space to the movie itself.

In the second part of the article called A Geography of the Moving Images’ she constructs her argument basically on the Eisenstein’s article ‘Montage and Architecture’ putting emphasize on the similarity between montage process and the sequential experience of an architectural ensemble. She relates that pioneer article of Eisenstein with the contemporary tendencies towards the filmic character of architecture. By mentioning Tcshumi’s Parc de la villette and its ‘cinematic promenade’ she points out how architecture embodies the effect of the cinema. This concept is also very much related to Le Corbusier’s architectural promenade and Vertov’s mechanical eye.

Then she connects all keywords that she has been throwing at our faces throughout the text. We are defined as the ‘tourist’ who is wandering around the architectural space as practioner and consumer of the space and we are inhabitants of a narration, we are a character in a film and the city is our stage. So through the blurring boundaries between film and architecture we ‘extend beyond our physical boundaries. After our journey in the Atlas of Emotions we push the limits of all physical and social boundaries and we are embodied with motion and experience. Over it is hard to talk about the relations, similarities or differences between film and architecture anymore. They became a unified body under the concepts of motion and experience in our cognitive maps.