A Representation of the Architectural Space in Cinema through the Phenomenological Approach (A Case Study: Nostalgia Movie)

Document Type : Research Article

Authors

1 Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Architecture, Qazvin Branch, Islamic Azad University, Qazvin, Iran.

2 Assistant Professor, Department of Architecture, Qazvin Branch, Islamic Azad University, Qazvin, Iran.

3 Associate professor, Department of Film and Theater, Art University, Tehran, Iran.

Abstract

Problem statement: There are certain historical and social ties between architecture and cinema, the seventh art, which is the outcome of other arts, including literature, painting, and architecture. Among them, architecture plays a more active role in cinema. Cinema granted the man’s ability to experience a new world from a fresh view and a fresh landscape. This possibility that movies (cinema) could reveal a direct experience of the relived space is an issue that is worth being examined from the point of architecture. The medium of cinema especially autobiographical movies for representing the living space and the memory of experiencing that space from the view of the director to understanding the mechanism of spatial memory in the mind of addresses (viewers) and architecture attaches great importance. Andrei Tarkovsky’s movies, have been based on the biography of the director and express the poem of his existence; Nostalgia Movie, have been put forward as a case study. The query of the research is how the meaning and spatial memory have been transferred through the medium (movie as a visual representation of the place of life) of the autobiographical movie of Andrei Tarkovsky.
Research objective: This study attempts to investigate the meaning and spatial memory and living spaces in the Nostalgia autobiographical movie from the phenomenological view.
Research method: The method of research is qualitative and also descriptive-analytical and phenomenological. Phenomenology deals with the animation of cinematic films rather than interviews. The present study of films is based on studying “descriptive-visual phenomenology” of the experience of the space.
Conclusion: The studies show that from the point of phenomenological, architecture through the medium of cinema in Andrei Tarkovsky’s autobiographical movie, when the producer has a deep understanding of space and architecture, and the space of movie is the outcome of his life, these meanings would be understood, decodified, and experienced by the addressee. The subject of the Nostalgia movie is homesickness and eagerness for a childhood home. The house is the first place that contributes to experience in the first years of life and stays in human spatial memory. The way of evaluating other spaces somehow depends upon this early view. With a glance at this movie, Tarkovsky’s shining pure poetical architectural images are a solution to the stammering language of architecture in contemporary era, which ignores the expansive man’s emotions.

Keywords


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