Junkspace Cinema and the transformation of physical space in movies

Claude Bragdon, in his book Beautiful Necessity, describes architecture as the only pure art form apart from music in that while music is experienced in time alone, architecture is experienced solely in space:

"Music, which is in time alone, without any relation to space; and architecture, which is in space alone, without any relation to time, are thus seen to stand at opposite ends of the art spectrum, and to be, in a sense, the only "pure" arts, because in all the others the elements of both time and space enter in varying proportion, either actually or by implication."

Bragdon wrote this in 1910 before cinema took off. Henri Bergson, in Creative Evolution, was the first to try to develop a philosophy of cinema, but he dismissed it as being too mechanical and not human enough. According to Bergson, human intellect works by spatializing things - we learn through symbols, concepts, abstractions, and fragmentation, and according to him, this is best done through static images such as paintings. "Movement is reality," as Bergson puts it; hence cinema which is primarily simulated movement through stitching together static images, cannot be a good representational art form compared to painting. Around 60 years later, Giles Deleuze would build on Bergson's premise to divide cinema into Movement image and Time image. Movement image being predominantly pre-World War II movies where "time was subordinated to space"—think Buster Keaton or Charlie Chaplin movies where perception immediately follows action - you see a banana peel on the floor and the character running towards it, and you know what's going to happen. Time image being post World War 2 movies that began to dwell more on the interiority of the characters, and their perception of time. The montage is a perfect example of the time image—a method of depicting a change in time or, as Rick and Morty creator Dan Harmon calls it, "a movie apologizing for reality." 

Expanding Bragdon's perspective on pure art forms in space and time, one might look at cinema as an art form that brings the elements of architecture and music together. In cinema, there are architectural filmmakers, primarily using space to tell stories, and musical filmmakers, primarily using elements of time to tell stories. While all filmmakers use both, some are purer in their approaches than others.

Michael Mann's Heat is an example of architectural filmmaking, and Damien Chazelle's Whiplash is an example of musical filmmaking. Heat opens with a shot of a brightly lit isolated train station in LA that is so stylistically shot that it looks otherworldly. Robert De Niro's lead character has next to no dialogue in the first 10 minutes. When he walks into a hospital to steal an ambulance, the droning electronic background score seamlessly fades into the sounds of the hospital, almost as if the environment inspired the score. The inciting incident in Heat, where a heist goes wrong, also has little to no dialogue and is established using space and movement alone.

Whiplash opens with one of the few wide shots in the movie. It shows Miles Teller's lead character Andrew stooping over a drum set, and he starts playing the drums as the camera zooms in on him. The camera then stays there, close up, and zoomed in for the rest of the movie. The scene is lit in such a way as to make it seem as if Andrew is under a spotlight giving a performance, an effect that is used throughout the movie. The setting and city fade into the background. Heat, meanwhile, is filmed using a telephoto lens that, while focusing on the characters, also illuminates the background to make you aware of where you are at all times. The LA in the background has an eerie and dreamlike quality. Whiplash delivers quick-tempo dialogue and hard editing to establish its inciting incident—Andrew meets the hard taskmaster teacher Fletcher and is invited to join the lead band of the school. The settings in Whiplash are drab and unmemorable rooms and hallways. Even in the car crash that sets up the movie's third act, the camera rarely zooms out, and instead chooses to focus solely on Andrew and his interiority.

It should not be surprising that Damien Chazelle wanted to be a drummer in high school before he realized he was more talented as a filmmaker. Michael Mann, in an interview, describes how since he was not trained as a visual artist, studied paintings that have directly influenced his filmmaking. A well-known example of this education is a scene in Heat, where De Niro's character is looking out of his post-modern oceanside apartment, directly inspired by the painting Pacific. Mann can't help but acknowledge his obsession with visual space throughout the movie, highlighted by Al Pacino's character's reference to his wife's apartment as "dead tech post-modernistic bullshit."

Over the last two decades, space has fallen out of favor as a medium to express style and mood. The internet and cheaper air travel reduced space to a commodity that can be consumed and reproduced endlessly in the form of social media posts and youtube videos. The heavily stylized frames of Michael Mann are competing with an iPhone. The Pacific-inspired scene mentioned earlier has probably been recreated on Instagram thousands of times. This steady decline in space as a medium to express style may also portent the decline of the James Bond brand. In a mid-20th century globalizing world, a spy who effortlessly moved between exotic locations epitomized style and created desire but does not strike the same chord when those spaces can be accessed by the average western tourist. This may be why the James Bond films pivoted to Bourne series style gritty realism with Casino Royale and Daniel Craig. Later editions like Skyfall dialed this back but still focused on Bond's inner life rather than on high-tech gadgetry and exotic locations. 

There has also been an advancement of other techniques to build a world and tell a story. While the most obvious example is CGI, I'd like to focus on examples in sound and camera. Thomas Flight's excellent video on the new Batman movie illustrates the stylized use of sound. The pattering sounds of rain, which persist throughout the movie, have a different texture depending on the scene's mood. The rain sounds more sinister in the grittier scenes, while it sounds warm and subdued in the more intimate scenes. Batman uses sound as a world-building tool.

On the other hand, Deleuze might have rethought his pre and post-World War II classification if he got to watch ˆ, a purely architectural, movement-oriented film. Top Gun: Maverick is shot from the ground, air, and from within the cockpit of the planes using cameras that can be stabilized at extremely high speeds. This lends to a highly stylized film that uses movement and space in a way audiences are not used to. This I think, points to a trend in a cinema where movies that are more architectural have to innovate more to make it appealing to the audience (more on this later). 

Over 100 years of filmmaking have also made the audience aware of the tropes of the places movies are set in. It is no longer necessary to establish the setting as New york. You can instead show a Jewish man walking into a diamond store with several characters of different ethnicities talking over each other, and you have the opening scene of Uncut Gems that, as a friend described, "can only be set in one place." Another example is Chazelle's approach to LA, the same city that Heat is set in, in his tribute to the city La La Land. Again, the setting uses elements of the city that anyone aware of Los Angeles tropes is aware of—Freeways, Griffith Observatory, and villas with undulating swimming pools in their backyard. Instead of the real yet stylized Los Angeles in Heat, the one in La La Land is more of a Baudrillardian simulation and equivalent to Los Angeles as a theme park ride. 

The tropes of cities do not have to match the actual lived environment. In fact, these days, the spaces actually inhabited by people likely looks the same regardless of the city. In his essay Junkspace, architect Rem Koolhaas describes that architecture of the 21st century does not register in people's memory like the architecture of previous centuries. He calls it Junkspace—an ever-changing, high-entropy environment that is flamboyant yet unmemorable. Junkspace, as he describes, is "post-existential; it makes you uncertain where you are, obscures where you go, undoes where you were." If you were to set a scene in a 4th wave coffee shop in LA, it would be no different than one in NYC. This universalization is a property of Junkspace. This is also a reason why movies have moved away from space as a medium to establish style and story to using more elements of time such as tempo, dialogue, and sound. Space can now get reduced to a trope instead of a stylistic choice.  

When space becomes important in a movie these days, it is usually a fantastical world that the audience would not get to inhabit otherwise - from the fighter plane cockpits in Top Gun to the alien planet Pandora in Avatar. The movie happens in an escaped reality, some which obey normal laws of physics (Top Gun) and others that don't (Avatar). Perhaps this reflects the changing nature of our relationship with our lived environment and infrastructure. In his book Non-Things, philosopher Byung Chul Han comments on our movement away from the physical world: 

"Decades ago, the media theorist Vilém Flusser remarked: 'Non-things are currently entering our environment from all directions, and they are pushing away the things. These non-things are called information.' 2 We are today experiencing the transition from the age of things to the age of non-things. Information, rather than things, determines the lifeworld. We no longer dwell on the earth and under the sky but on Google Earth and in the Cloud. The world is becoming increasingly intangible, cloud-like, and ghostly. There are no tangible and arrestable [hand- und dingfest] things."

If the world is becoming less tangible and information is dominating over the physical world, then maybe it is only natural that the art we engage in does the same.