Representing Pasts – Visioning Futures

Abstract

Cinema and architecture as medium are given us more of physical realities than any other art form, both shares equality as products of culture. As series of narratives, films are cultural product better used to evoke feelings and emotions in order to perceive its message(s). There are similarities between the actual experienced architectural spaces and the viewer’s perception of a certain scene in films that use the same architectural space. Arguably, this is showing that both films and cities shared a dimension of living, both habitable lived spaces and the fantasy spaces for inhabitation. Cinema has the potential to be a comprehensive encyclopedia of architectural space and building elements and how to use them: a remarkable archive of living space and a unique reservoir of post-residential studies. Thus this research argues that through the use of film as a ‘design strategy’, architecture is temporarily dismantled from mere functionality to be able to dwell in a more purposeful, easily perceivable space. While typical architecture tends to ‘regulate’ emotions and their extreme spectrum: melancholy, joy, nostalgia, dreams, darkness, fear, and ecstasy; cinema revitalized our sense of the poetic, utilizing the entire range of emotion. Approaching architecture through films encourages architects to expand the emotional content of spaces where habitation is actual. Through exploration of 3 Indonesian movies: Janji Joni, Filosofi Kopi, and A Copy of My Mind, this paper aims to find out the relationship between architecture and cinema, how architecture acts as the background of a character and how information can be embedded in the frame and expressed in the form of a film for the viewer.