Recently, surfing the net, I found the picture Gulf of Capri, which Juan Manuel Botas Ghirlanda painted in the first decade of the last century and whose reproduction attached on this text. It is curious that the pictures and almost everything, is now seen more on the screens than in reality, although the impression is not the same. When I […]
Writing about Doctor Caligari’s cabinet, I discovered The Cabinet of Caligari, an American film in CinemaScope, but in black and white, produced and directed by Roger Kay in 1962, with a script by Robert Bloch, who had written the novel in which based Psycho. His argument is conventional, a tire is punctured by the car of the protagonist who travels […]
Today the viewer is no longer a passive subject that supports what the channels emit, but he chooses his own programming, thanks to the fact that the television also receives what is broadcast by other devices. Despite this, the television receiver is still an artifact with which we live in all houses and in most public establishments. In this moment […]
A few months ago, preparing a lecture that I was going to give at the School of Architecture of Valladolid, invited by GIRAC, I was looking for more information about Albert Bela Viragh, a scenographer I had already written about, and I found an advertisement for the movie Empty Ams directed by Frank Reicher, published in several American film magazines […]
It often happens that looking for something in a newspaper or magazine, you will find something else, sometimes more interesting, than the one originally wanted. This has happened recently in the newspaper library of La Vanguardia, where I found an article that links two architects with a film and a film critic. The architects are Paolo Portoghesi and Ricardo Bofill, the film […]
It will be very difficult to forget the first time I saw The battleship Potemkin, the film directed by Sergei M. Eisenstein in 1925, was at the end of the seventies in a party organized by the newly legalized Communist Party of Spain, inside the Castle of La Luz, in what is now the Martín Chirino Art and Thought Foundation. […]
Undoubtedly, Alexandre Trauner was one of the best film set designers in history. In 1987, an exhibition with his drawings was organized at the Dau al Set Gallery in Barcelona, while the first edition of the Barcelona Film Festival was held. The La Vanguardia newspaper published an interview with the teacher, signed by Felix Flores, which reproduces some of the topics that […]
In an issue of the Glamor of Hollywood magazine of 1941, an article entitled «Girls at work for disney», was published, with the subtitle «The great cartonist opens up new careers for talented girls in his Hollywood studio». This article begins by explaining: «Until a few months ago the work of animating characters in the Walt Disney studios was purely […]
Reviewing the work of the architect Casto Fernández-Shaw, I have found that many issues of his magazine Cortijos y rascacielos are digitized and can be accessed at Memoria de Madrid. In number three of that magazine, published in the winter of 1930, one of his visionary projects was published, in this case the Monumental Cinema, of which only the illustration […]
A few weeks ago at a dinner, a friend said that despite everything that interests us and likes the cinema, we should not forget that almost all dictators had also been very fond of the seventh art; She mentioned Hitler, Mussolini and Franco, I added Stalin, without remembering then the movie El círculo del poder. Directed by Andréi Mijalkov Konchalovski […]
Entropy is described by physics as a magnitude that measures the degree of disorder of a system. The image suggested by La Ampliadora for this issue of the magazine may evoke high entropy. An ordered system only supports one possible configuration, so there is more chance that a system is messy. If we make the analogy with the cover container, […]
Today, when racism grows, supported by groups and political parties that take advantage of hatred to gain supporters and votes, today it is fundamental to remember what happened and nobody could believe that it was happening, because it could not be conceived that educated people, belonging to a advanced country, cultured and European, nor any human being, was able to […]
The CALL FOR WORKS FOR THE XI IBEROAMERICAN BIENNIAL OF ARCHITECTURE AND URBAN PLANNING IS NOW OPENO (XI BIAU). The biennial will be held in Asunción (Paraguay) in October 2019 and will show the way of living in Latin America from everyday life. Last Monday, December 17th, Casa América was presented, coinciding with the celebration of the II Ibero-American Congress […]
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Studying the cities and armored buildings against the aerial bombings, I remembered the design with a warhead shape made by Terence Verity,, the scenographer of the movie 1984 (Michael Anderson, 1956), for the London ministries, which George Orwell describes in his novel: “The Ministry of Truth: it was different, to an astonishing extent, from any other object that came to view.” […]
“A minor architect is a minor destructive character, handyman and hacker, journalist and editor, alter ego and subordinate. Who is skilled at fixing, can also sabotage, and knows how to dismantle as well as assemble”. Jill Stoner, Towards a minor architecture. Architecture can no longer be limited to the art of making buildings, it must also invent the policy of undoing […]
A spaceship of the airline Bread Am (Bread American World Airways) crosses the terrestrial orbit, transports only a passenger and is sleeping, in the support of the seat that has ahead there is a flushed screen, similar to those who have the current planes, is the Doctor Heywood Floyd and course goes to the Space Station V. What can turns […]
Since his release of The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries in 1957, Ingmar Bergman has been one of the leading figures in international cinema. In a career that spanned 60 years, he wrote, produced, and directed 50 films that defined how we see ourselves and how we interact with the people we love, through works like Persona, Scenes from a Marriage, and Fanny and Alexander. Before his death in 2007, Bergman […]
Sometimes in the department store of provinces unsuspected findings take place. It does very little visiting increasingly limited section of videoes of one of them, I found a jewel buried between enormous boxes of popular series, the edition that they have done the Film library of Catalonia and Cameo with Jacinto Esteva‘s work. A really very elegant, exquisite edition – […]
Josep Lluis Sert, un sueño nómada Josep Lluís Sert was the first Spanish architect of international reputation. “Apostle of the rationalism in Spain”. Apostle of the rationalism in Spain and Dean of the Faculty of Harvard’s Architecture during almost two decades, Sert was also a man full of contradictions. A rebellious spirit. Free verse in a world dominated by the […]
Since seekers of effective surprises our creative capacity can remain reduced by the existence of too many caps of information. Impeded by a dense coverage of unconscious hypotheses, inherited concepts and not expressed ideas. Only we manage to liberate ourselves in an effective way when, from the practice of a lateral thought, we are capable of preventing the preconceived valuations, […]
After expiring more than one century, the cinema, the seventh art called and more young woman of all of them, the most ancient has been related by other six, between them the Architecture, possibly. Relations that enough times have been analyzed and from diverse points of view, though always new someone arises, for example, might propose impertinent studies him as: the […]
In the previous post he was speaking about the first cinematographic set designers. In these days I am updating the list of the movies in which there appears a personage who appears to be an architect, one of the topics of my book The supposed image, which movies is gathered in one of the first income from my blog, and […]
The investigator Mexican Elisa Lozano, whom already I mentioned immediately after the publication of his fundamental book on Manuel Fontanals, has said to me does so that there is finishing his work about Lucero Isaac,, the first cinematographic Mexican art director. The certain thing is that in the area of the scenery for the cinema the same thing has happened that […]
“The trip is the meeting of something that we cover searching, without knowing what is with accuracy. It is the search of a language with which to be capable of drawing the shades of our ideas. Moving in the space and in the time, the trip is not but the history that pirates us; it is the expansion of our […]
In the book Talking Movies: Contemporary World Filmmakers in Interview, it was written by Jason Wood in 2006, there is an interview with Susanne Bier in the one that counts that first he studied compared religions and later architecture and «I was interested very much in elements in the line of the movies, as the design of sets. Then I was […]
And I remained amazed. The first thing that happened to me was: “Architects, architects, what ready we believe ourselves, and we sink before a faucet!” “It Takes already”. “To seeing if we learn”. And I thought about the eternal polemic strictly between ourselves and the engineers. The architects we are in the habit of leaving the problems to way resolving, […]
On Sunday, the 12th of October, 1924, the Deutschland German transatlantic moored in a wharf of the West Side of Manhattan, between his passengers they were the Erich Mendelsohn architect and the filmmakers Erich Pommer and Fritz Lang, , apparently, it annotated the latter in his diary that it had seen «a street, illuminated, as if it was by day, for neons, all of them aggressive, […]
I have just read a good phrase of Rem Koolhaas in the blog Cosas de Arquitectos. The holder says: “The architecture for definition is a chaotic adventure”. The phrase completes I do not copy it in order that this way you do a visit to these boys, who deserve it, (Frasecica). To do architecture is to coordinate aspects that at first are not […]
The cities, in spite of all his blemishes and disadvantages, are the most original, creation notable and typical of the human beings. It does not fit the minor doubt that today the life of our species on this planet might not understand without these built-up environments where we develop our lives. The populations are like the alive organisms: they are […]