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22nd November 2014 // Dissertation - "Lens" Excerpt

The final investigate chapter - Lens researches filmmaking and photography upon wasteland landscapes looking to artists such as Zarina Bhimji, the Wilson Sisters and Andrei Tarkovsky.


Within the context of these films and their desolate landscapes, the architecture remains the link, a vessel, to carry the narrative and plot. Demos (2011, p30) summarises that there is no way to finalise the meaning of Bhimji's films, Yellow Patch in particular. Such is the potential of interpretations of Bhimji's generative cinema, the underpinning narrative that drives the transition between landscapes and implied events becomes clear. It is a journey she takes to explore her parents overcoming of difficult historical circumstances. It becomes more about the beauty of survival rather than tragedy of personal victimisation, where the physicality of the structures is emphasised through the sheer isolation they exist in. How filmmakers and photographers capture images of the wasteland are territorial indications of the strangeness of these lands themselves and the aesthetic and ethical problems that they pose within contemporary life (Sola-Morales, 1995, p122). Problems that are defined by their transient nature and sense of homelessness in the encompassing environment. The fact they are in near constant process of decay, abandonment and deconstruction (and also construction) gives credence to Ian Robinson's (2010, p118 Koeck) claim that a "cinematic method in examining and portraying the city in ruins must begin with the exploration of these decaying surfaces we take for granted". To renew a link between city and citizen via the filmic image, he states (2010, p118) that the unsettling superficiality of urban forms, processes and lives must exposed. Incorporating wastelands and peripheral wildernesses within cinema can be a provocative strategy to critique modern urbanised existence (Deleuze, 1989, pxi), which begs an investigation of what kind of knowledge can a filmmaker bring into architectural practice?





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