These mise-en-scène minutiae are the story. from kogonada on Vimeo. “I found it weirdly comforting. One glass building is an icon, a person of significance, or a lover, a place of deep meaning and joy for Casey. Kogonada is aware of the scalar difference in class and prestige that viewers might identify in these contrasts. https://edge.ua.edu/chp2/moores-large-arch-is-godzillas-leg-bone/. Columbus What Is Neorealism? Are we losing interest in everyday life?” This discourse itself, about something as marginal as marginalia, is indeed a neorealist gesture. Kogonada is a private person (“Kogonada” is a pseudonym borrowed from Yasujirō Ozu’s screenwriting partner). She answers it the second time, but the dialogue is one-sided. “The only great problem of cinema seems to be more and more, with each film, when and why to start a shot and when and why to end it.”. The film spends as much time pausing to observe in non-monumental, messily beautiful, everyday spaces as it does in the midcentury modern sites that made Columbus famous. Columbus is duly fact and fiction, art house cinema and ethnography, feminist manifesto and metropolitics polemic. Columbus boasts a list of some 60 high profile architects who have contributed projects in the city. Selznick’s cut uses titles and a handwritten letter to increase narrative clarity and reduce thematic ambiguity. Glass reveals and conceals. But unless the viewer reads lips, her actual, semantic language escapes us. Columbus tells the story of Jin (John Cho), the son of an architecture scholar who, following the professor’s sudden hospitalization, finds himself marooned in the Midwest and unsure about his identity and future. Jin: “Yes, yes! As Baudrillard theorizes, glass is in some ways misleading. The center contention of this article is that neorealism is a filmic genre, philosophy, and style that Kogonada applies to his own work. Domandarsi cosa sia il neorealismo è domandarsi cosa sia il cinema ed è nelle differenze con altro da sé che è possibile rintracciare i possibili significati di significanti. [29] Although Columbus does feature gratuitous shots of buildings by Saarinens, Meiers, Peis, Venturis, Pelis, and Berkes, it also lingers on Columbus’s untoward urban excesses and marginalia, on the generic and anonymous aspects of what Deborah Berke herself, an architect, writer, and theorist, describes as the architecture of the everyday. Meth and modernism.” On the drug crisis connection, see Philip Nobel, “Goodbye, Columbus,” Metropolis (July 2006), https://www.metropolismag.com/uncategorized/ goodbye-columbus/. But there were additional similarities between our anthropological and cinematic projects. In nearby Bloomington, a new building to house the Eskenazi School of Art, Architecture + Design is underway, based on a recovered 1952 Miesian blueprint originally intended for the Indiana University campus. What Is Neorealism? ERNIE PARK: There are a lot of elements of neorealism … - The most interesting Kogonada so far. Figure 8. Eero Saarinen’s Miller House and Gardens, North Christian Church, and Irwin Union Bank; Eliel Saarinen’s First Christian Church; Edward Bassett’s City Hall; Michael Van Valkenburgh’s Mill Race Park; James Polshek’s Quinco Regional Mental Health Center; and Myron Goldsmith’s Republic Building, among many others, make appearances. With this move, he aspires to the ‘third form’ of critical writing imagined by Roland Barthes: one that would “subject the objects of knowledge and discussion – as in any art – no longer to an instance of truth, but to a consideration of effects” (90). In one interview, the director noted that, Some financiers said to us: “You want an Asian-American male lead? For more information, read Michigan Publishing's access and usage policy. He spent significant time researching in the city and did work in the archives. Directly following Jin’s line about buildings emotively moving human interactants, Kogonada shifts the camera into an unexpected third position: behind the glass and into the interior of Saarinen’s bank, focusing on Casey’s body language and expressions as she breaks out of tour guide mode, out of her role as “arbiter or tidbit facts,” as Jin puts it. Directly correlating with the neorealist attention to the margins, there is still another, implicit star of the movie, a real-life figure who, quite cleverly, does not show up directly in the film even once. 1950s-1970s) adapted Marxist theories to contemporary life, exploring how deep social alienation had spread in advanced capitalist societies. We don’t hear why she loves the building, but we do observe the joy and pleasure that it brings her. Casey is also a part-time librarian, so a fair amount of screen time features I.M. Chuck Carney, “IU Eskenazi School to construct building inspired by original 1952 Mies van der Rohe design,” News at IU (August 2019), https://news.iu.edu/ stories/2019/08/iub/releases/09-eskenazi-school-to-construct-building-inspired-by-mies-van-der-rohe.html. Elsewhere, in articulating differences between scenes, Kogonada repeats shots of movement multiple times in quick succession, and we not only see those differences but feel the vertiginous effect that his experiment’s discovery seems to have produced in him. But can a quasi-fictional feature film delve into heady architectural theory using the two-dimensional medium of the movies? Light.” Replies Casey: “This is number five on my list.”, Casey pulls out her phone and makes a call. What is neorealism? Figure 12. I argue, first and foremost, that Kogonada finds inspiration in a neorealist filmmaking style that emerged primarily in postwar, 1940s Italy in opposition to fascist political-ideological undercurrents and romantic cinematic sensibilities. Figure 4. Shortly after the bank scene Casey and Jin visit other sites in the city. Neorealism, in Kogonada’s words, “lingers on extras that we’ll never get to know” and intentionally “decenters the primary characters.” For mainstream filmmakers, “lingering on those that add nothing to the story is considered excessive, or even worse, a distraction, derailing the plot or drawing attention away from the stars. Looking through the glass of Eero Saarinen’s Irwin Union Bank (now Conference Center). Figure 6. Alternative Columbus includes local life outside of the polished downtown sector. Or almost. This building was meant to be both a literal and metaphoric bridge.”[18], Later in the day Kogonada returns to the theme of glass when Casey and Jin observe The Republic Building from across the road. As iconic as Mies’s Farnsworth House and Philip Johnson’s Glass House, the home’s rigid structural modernism finds relief in the warmth of interior designer Alexander Girard’s bold use of colors, textures, and materials. Title: What Is Neorealism? As urban formations, cities are besought with internecine boundary issues, both internal and external, as well as with ongoing contestations over identity, values, and ethos. :: kogonada: Most have been self-generated, or else coordinated. Film profile for kogonada, Director. On the one hand, Saarinen’s Miller House, as Casey’s number one and the building with which Kogonada chooses to open his narrative, is a stellar example of midcentury domestic modernism. Neorealist filmography decenters the assumption that a single narrative is required. this . What is Neorealism? Auteur in Space. Whether exploring Robert Bresson’s relationship to hands or neorealism, :: kogonada is a philosopher of the lens.” 11 (2018): 1-83. (Video 2013) 7 /10. Whereas Antonioni’s later films—e.g., L’Eclisse (1962) and Red Desert (1964)—situate modern domestic, urban, and industrial settings as sites of psychosocial malaise and alienation, Kogonada acknowledges the connection of modernity to anomie even as he entertains a more generous reading of modern forms. Baudrillard, The System of Objects, 41-43. Want to share IMDb's rating on your own site? Columbus’s J. Irwin Miller Architecture Program, which operates out of the The Republic in Columbus, is part of the Indiana University network headed in Bloomington. This 2013 video by the acclaimed video essayist kogonada, originally published in Sight & Sound magazine, is deceptively straightforward. In the last several months, :: kogonada’s work — commissioned by the Criterion Collection and Sight & Sound, among others — has grown more ambitious, inhabiting neorealism’s dead spaces (What is Neorealism? This situation makes sense given Kogonada’s intentional focus on margins and marginalia. Kogonada’s movie is not a perfect film, but what it does well is to pick up on the internal ruptures that cities, as diverse urban and social composites, wrestle with by matter of definition. Figure 3. History does have a rare answer to show us. Please contact mpub-help@umich.edu to use this work in a way not covered by the license. By my reading, Columbus belongs in the genre of visual anthropology, alongside Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson’s Bathing Babies in Three Cultures (1941), John Marshall’s The Hunters (1958), Jean Rouche’s Chronique d’un été (1961), Robert Gardner’s Dead Birds (1964), and, most recently, Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel’s immersive sensory ethnography, Leviathan (2012). Casey and Jin dialogue about James Polshek’s bridge building. In short, my ongoing project attempts to gain a first-hand understanding of the city as a progressive architectural, social, economic, industrial, religious, and political experiment. Let me focus here on just a few of Kogonada’s strategies. By letting the moment linger, De Sica shows how he values “time and place seem more critical than thought or story” (Kogonada, “What Is Neorealism”). Through its neorealist, ethnographic gaze, the film critically attends to entrenched hierarchies and divisions regarding gender, race, built artifacts, and socioeconomics. “The city is a veritable mecca of modernist architecture, and Kogonada revels in filling his frames with the monumental grandeur of landmarks like the towering red Robert N. Stewart Bridge and Eliel Saarinen’s glass-fronted First Christian Church,” writes Aline Dolinh for Film School Rejects. Casey and Jin walk the grounds of Eero Saarinen’s final project, North Christian Church. The tension between the troubled mother and the concerned, dutiful daughter, is at this moment on full display, even as the strained relationship is mediated through a complex network of glass, mobile communication technology, and friendship nodes. In some vignettes, Columbus as an applied visual-architectural theory perhaps even exceeds the abilities of theory in written, academic form. A lingering view near Casey’s place of residence. The film’s neorealism, I’d further argue, qualifies Columbus as an ethnographic project. Jean Baudrillard, The System of Objects, trans. The method is also intentionally anti-hierarchical. A Columbus native, Casey works part-time as a tour guide. Kogonada, Director: Columbus. Not only was Columbus a certified architectural anomaly; it ranked sixth in the nation for modern design according to the American Institute of Architecture. For Kogonada, what Hollywood “sees as waste and excess becomes the essence of a different kind of cinema and sensibility in which shots linger and veer off to include others, in which in-between moments seem to be essential, in which time and place seem more critical than plot or story.”[6] The textures of Pei’s honeycombed ceiling perforations and the mesmerizing shower of water flowing onto the plants takes center stage. Kogonada’s camera, for significant parts of the scene, trains not at Casey and Gabriel, the identifiable stars, but at an anonymous library staff person who is visibly into the music channeling through his headphones as he waters the plants, moving the hose nozzle back and forth, back and forth, plants shuddering, slightly, under the weight of their hydration. Through a series of events, Jin meets Casey (Haley Lu Richardson) and much of the film’s 104 minutes features the duo in deep conversation nearby or inside Columbus’s key architectural sites. Travis Warren Cooper holds a dual doctoral degree in anthropology and religious studies from Indiana University—Bloomington. Viewers hear, near verbatim, the very language that the tour guides—the city’s official urban mythologists, story keepers, and applied historians—who lead design pilgrims and architecture buffs around the city, offering commentary on buildings designed by Saarinens, Peis, Venturis, Meiers, or Fletchers. is an emotive meditation on urban space and rich visual theory of architecture, design, and metropolitics. “An architecture of the Everyday acknowledges domestic life,” she continues. Cross-Cultural Filmmaking: A Handbook for Making Documentary and Ethnographic Films and Videos, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays, Archi.Pop: Mediating Architecture in Popular Culture, The Longing for Less: Living with Minimalism, House Rules: An Architect’s Guide to Modern Life, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, Skip other details (including permanent urls, DOI, citation information), https://doi.org/10.3998/fc.13761232.0044.105, https://observer.com/2017/08/columbus-movie-review-kogonada-indiana-modernist-architecture/, https://www.theguardian.com/film/2018/oct/06/kogonada-south-korean-film-director-columbus-interview, http://kogonada.com/portfolio/what-is-neorealism, https://mubi.com/lists/visual-anthropology, https://www.dezeen.com/2017/09/01/columbus-movie-spotlights-indiana-city-modernism-kogonada/, https://news.iu.edu/ stories/2019/08/iub/releases/09-eskenazi-school-to-construct-building-inspired-by-mies-van-der-rohe.html, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/15/opinion/sunday/women-architects.html, https://www.npr.org/2017/08/03/ 540976245/-columbus-is-soulless-by-design, https://edge.ua.edu/chp2/moores-large-arch-is-godzillas-leg-bone/, https://www.metropolismag.com/uncategorized/ goodbye-columbus/, https://filmschoolrejects.com/subconscious-reflections-columbus-movie/. Columbus’s neorealism offers the filmic version of the post-Marxist turn to everyday life in academia, encapsulated in the works of theorists of cities, space, and buildings. The two agree that this instance of marginal commentary is likely the product of some graduate student. Tell me about that. A recovering drug addict, her mother represents the meth crisis that has paralyzed Heartland America and from which Columbus, utopian airs aside, is by no means immune.[28]. Kogonada was inspired to create the video essay while he watched the series, noticing a recurring visual aesthetic used throughout the series. On the social effects of glass and transparency in modernist forms, explored through a case study of Philip Johnson’s Glass House in New Canaan, see Kyle Chayka, The Longing for Less: Living with Minimalism (New York: Bloomsbury 2019), 57-63. I encounter these alternative readings of Columbus’s architectural projects frequently enough in the field that I have started marking them in my fieldnotes as performances of “Real Columbus” or “Alternative Columbus” (i.e., opposed to versions “Public” or “Official”). - Time and place vs plot and story. Neorealism focuses on visual marginalia and gets intentionally lost in the details happening behind the protagonists or at the margins of the frame. [19] The material’s abstractness and clarity of sight suggests transparency and openness of communication but it not always entirely the case.[20]. Kogonada will be in attendance for the Saturday, Aug. 26, 7pm screening, as well as take part in “Kogonada: The Art of the Video Essay,” a … ', Sight & Sound magazine, May 2013. Indeed, classic modernists coming out of the Bauhaus in Germany saw glass as a symbolic substance that prioritized transparency and aided in dismantling Old World social, cultural, traditional, and religious powers. Like my own academic interests, Kogonada’s Columbus delves deeply into these and other inquiries into the ontology of modernism and the influential (if implicit) influence of the built environment on everyday life. See Connie Zeigler, “Xenia Simons Miller: Prairie Modernist,” Commercial Article vol. Directed by Kogonada. In a variation on Pierre Menard, in which two texts written by two different men in two different centuries are identical, Kogonada offers here two films made by two different men on two different continents that are again identical. According to these filmmakers, “documentary conventions of character development over the course of a film are uncannily close to fictional ones.”[9] Kogonada’s neorealism corroborates such a genre-defying association. Architect Deborah Berke, recently appointed the first female dean of the Yale School of Architecture, is also one of few women who can claim to have built in the city. It may “take on collective and symbolic meaning but is not necessarily monumental.”[31] To the extent that Kogonada’s film is an ethnographic, quasi-realist project, Columbus is a decisive lesson in contrasts. Films directed by. Columbus (2017) After Yang. And that architects should be responsible.” “All the details of this building are mindful of that responsibility,” he continues, “especially since it was a structure for mental health. The city’s existence is its own form of symbolic boundary disruption. Casey: “I thought you hated architecture.”, Jin: “I do. At the end of the film, the real-life Berke is the invisible hero, of sorts, who’s generous offer aids Casey in her life-altering decision. Figure 15. [32] Is Columbus metropolitan or mundane, urban or rural? The World According to Koreeda Hirokazu. He got to know Columbus locals, learned the culture, and was enculturated into the ebbs and flows of the town. These non-human persons and personalities, in fact, have the power as built structures to influence not only people’s moods but their everyday rituals and patterns of daily life. As these words of ‘clarification’ are in fact unnecessary, this text-on-screen appears instead as a redundancy, yet another layer of repetition. Pei’s photogenic Cleo Rogers Memorial Library, the bordering city plaza, and the Avenue of the Architects. The Republic Building, designed by Myron Goldsmith (Owings, Skidmore & Merrill). “Something about the paradox of modernism and religion.” I’m currently working on a project that also focuses on the two churches. The only great problem of cinema seems to be more and more, with each film, when and why to start a shot and when and why to end it.Jean-Luc Godard. But what exactly is neorealism as realized by this contemporary director? Travis Warren Cooper, “How to Edit a Building: Fieldnotes from the North American Brasilia.” Urbanities 9:2 (2019): 52-65. “More glass,” says Jin, commenting on the building’s sleek lines and glowing radiance after dark. A cut reveals what matters and what doesn’t. Abruptly, Jin stops her mid-sentence. A more modest collection in Casey’s home. Deborah Berke, “Thoughts on the Everyday,” in Architecture of the Everyday, eds. Figure 10. In my essay, “La Caméra-stylo: Notes on video criticism and cinephilia,” I distinguished (very broadly) between two modes in recent videographic work: the explanatory and the poetical. Casey reflected in the glass façade of the bank. Is it a haven for progressive values or industrial-capitalist center? “He was writing something on the Saarinen churches,” Jin relays to Casey. But while the explanatory register emphasizes difference, the poetical register highlights similarity. Very few of these principals are women. Kogonada, UK, 2013. [7] Social sciences training notwithstanding, Kogonada checks all the ethnographic boxes. The building is second on Casey’s list of favorites. The Oasis scene is neorealism embodied. See, for instance, “Visual Anthropology,” MUBI, https://mubi.com/lists/visual-anthropology. But Kogonada perhaps focuses on this point because it is what he takes as his model: the neorealist strategy of poeticizing what appears simply to be ‘fact’ or ‘truth’. The basic tenets of neorealism enable the systematic approach to studying shifts in state behaviour. [30] In this direction, the director’s neorealist style is again in dialogue with architectural theory. Likewise, writers, scholars, and commentators on Columbus are just starting to pay attention to the role that Xenia Miller played in the city, rather than focusing exclusively on her influential husband and patron of modern architecture, J. Irwin Miller. Kogonada fue conocido en primer lugar por sus video-ensayos sobre cine. from kogonada on Vimeo. Jin seems oblivious to the family drama that has just played out in front of him through the wall of The Republic. Jin reports to Casey what he knows about Polshek’s architectural theory from a book he found in his father’s hotel room. Casey’s inaudible monologue filmed from the bank’s interior through the glass wall. The effect of the uncanny – of qualities of doubling and repetition – is dizzying. Figure 16. Unlike French director Jacques Tati’s films, especially Mon Oncle (1958) and Playtime (1967)—films which creatively cast buildings as actors and personalities but found humor and awkwardness in the foibles of modernism—Columbus takes modernist architecture seriously. As a cinema experiment: would you get if you pitted the director of The Bicycle Thieves against the producer of Gone with the Wind, and turned them both loose on the SAME raw movie material? Figure 13. From an urban studies perspective, Kogonada’s Columbus offers both a visual meditation on the contested ideological-political fabrics that constitute cities as well as an applied filmic critique. Jin continues his interpretive commentary: “Transparency. Apropósito de Kogonada, quien este año estrenó su opera prima “Columbus”, la cual está cosechando grandes críticas y una muy buena recepción por parte del público. Baudrillard, The System of Objects, 42; Chayka, The Longing for Less, 62. Kogonada tells us it is not the films’ similarities that are important here, but their slight differences, which are in fact profound. Alternative Columbus involves life “on the other side of the tracks,” to use a figurative colloquialism that in the case of historic Columbus applies literally. Oliver Jones, “Quiet ‘Columbus’ Crafts a Cinematic Love Story for Mid-Century Modernist Architecture,” Observer (August 2017), https://observer.com/2017/08/columbus-movie-review-kogonada-indiana-modernist-architecture/. [23], In its subtext, the film thinks about equity in terms of gender as well as race. Kogonada compares the introductory sequences of both versions, noting that Selznick always preferred shorter takes – but also showing that the producer who made a reputation adapting literary works is more bound by the word than his Italian auteur. [8] In their Cross-Cultural Filmmaking: A Handbook for Making Documentary and Ethnographic Films and Videos, Ilisa Barbash and Castaing-Taylor deconstruct the false ideal of “objectivity” in documentary film and celebrate the similarities of ethnographic and fictional movies. Kogonada, Director: Columbus. On the origins of the globally influential Italian, referred to as “rubble films” due to their radically unglamorous and unedited depictions of life in crumbling, postwar European cities, see Mark Cousins, The Story of Film (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2004), 188-193. In the middle of all the mess, in this fucking strip mall, there was this . In one particularly memorable Columbus scene, Casey and her librarian coworker, Gabriel (Rory Culkin) are lost in discussion about the details of some extensive stretch of marginalia he found in one of the library’s return materials. Armed with their primary method of thick-description ethnography, anthropologists, like neorealists, focus on social and cultural minutiae. Twitter. Walking around on foot I was duly impressed and bewildered by the concentration of rectilinear, modern, avant garde, and glass-façade buildings I had spied in a matter of mere blocks. The background score swells in this moment, perhaps to compensate for the sudden sensory deprivation and lack of Casey’s audible voice due to the camera’s containment behind the glass. Filmmaker Ernie Park, who goes by the name Kogonada, compared the two films in a video essay for the British Film Institute. I sort of weirdly became obsessed with this building after that,” she continues. Since the 1940s, the city has drawn movers and shakers from the top echelons of the design world. Super-edit by Kogonada Filmmakers Kogonada unpick what defines the Golden Age of Italian cinema with a side-by-side comparison of two edits of the same film, one according to Italian director Vittorio De Sica, and the other according to Hollywood producer David O Selznick. Kogonada’s move in the introductory voice over of ‘fictionalizing’ this historical event – claiming it initially as an imagined ‘experiment’ involving a time machine – establishes a kind of Borgesian atmosphere that persists even after the claim of experiment is retracted. Consider the interchange between Casey and Jin that occurs next to Eero Saarinen’s Irwin Union Bank, one of the first modernist, glass-walled banks in American history. Is the city ideologically-politically red or blue? Kogonada has went on the record about how in the filmmaking process for Columbus he fought strong resistance from potential producers who opposed his decision to star an ethnic minority as one of the film’s leading characters. "What is neorealism?" See Allison Arieff’s op-ed, “Where Are All the Women Architects?” The New York Times (December 2018), https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/15/opinion/sunday/women-architects.html. “An architecture of the everyday may be banal or common,” “vulgar or visceral,” Berke writes. World War II Global Trauma Italian Neorealism Post-WW II Film movement After World War Kogonada is a director and writer, known for Columbus (2017). On the other hand, this home filled with art, sculptures, and custom Eames furniture contrasts Casey’s humble domestic space in its shingled vernacular exterior and cozy yet tasteful interior. Henri Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2003); Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988); Steven Harris and Deborah Berke, eds., Architecture of the Everyday (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1997); Sadler, The Situationist City; Coverly, Psychogeography. Meanwhile in France, the left-leaning, Catholic, film theorist Andre Bazin was busy writing. – Jean-Luc Godard. Fast forward several years, I now spend time in Columbus on a regular basis, conducting ethnographic research in the architourist circuits that fuel the city’s economy, observing interactions between tour guides and tourists, interviewing architects, city officials, designers, artists, educators, and residents. Trick or Truth. The cicadas’ persistent ringing—both beautiful and irritating in its own way—is the lyrical drone that serves as the soundtrack to many of these everyday visuals. D. Medina Lasansky (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014), 123-138, and Jon Yoder, “Vision and Crime: The Cineramic Architecture of John Lautner,” in Archi.Pop, 45-58. Kogonada made a name for himself after dropping out of a doctoral program in film studies to focus on making short, experimental films about directors and cinematography. But in 2017, first-time director Kogonada’s feature film, Columbus, produced by Oscilloscope Pictures, brought the Midwestern city to the attention of art house and independent cinema audiences across the world. To further unpack this philosophy, one might describe neorealism as a form of methodological and stylistic resistance against the standard filmmaking techniques that weigh each scene’s productivity and efficiency in carrying the linear narrative forward. The low, hurried tone of his delivery evokes a quality of contained urgency, as if he’s sharing with us some secret, previously undiscovered, uncanny correspondence between two different films. It was first outlined by Kenneth Waltz in his 1979 book Theory of International Politics. Her domestic architectural endeavors have been especially fruitful sites for exploring design principles of this quotidian, lived sort. As Jean Baudrillard describes the substance, the metaphysics of glass “the material used and the ideal to be achieved, both end and means.”[14] In the modernist purview, glass has symbolically been associated with purity, hygiene, transparency, fluidity, and openness.[15]. “I don’t know. Travis Warren Cooper, “Moore’s Large Arch is Godzilla’s Leg-Bone.” Culture on the Edge (August 28, 2019).