◡◶▿ MAPS07 | Foldable cities

🥡 If you deconstruct the city, you'd better know how to put it together again. Itten, Perec, Calvino, Alton. Plus: Lucrative Danish filmmaker residency. | Maps, Flaps, & Infinite Wallpaper Week 7

Graeme Cole

Jun 10, 2024

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Hello, old friends. Welcome, new subscribers! Unfound Peoples Videotechnic is an absurdist film school. We’re just past halfway through a module on “the foldable, flappable, and collapsable labyrinthine potential of movie set design.” This is the seventh of 12 sets of micro-essays. On that particular topic.

Missed a week? Joined late? Don’t worry about reading these lessons out of order. Each functions independently. They are sent in a sensible sequence but hardly reliant on it.

Do you remember last week’s lesson, Infinite wallpaper? Let’s quickly sum it up before we move on. We learned how:

Wallpaper is a versatile solution for all those flat surfaces in your movie.
Wallpaper can be made to look like something else, or it can ‘play itself.’
In either case, the infinite repeating nature of a wallpaper pattern lends it the power to reshape space and even the underlying physics of your movie’s universe.
Wallpaper should be wielded with care since it has strange effects on the mind.

In today’s lesson, we will discuss the city. And how:

🏙️ City design in filmmaking requires a careful balance of attention to detail, reckless copy-pasting, and smudging out of the unnecessary.

🏘️ Your movie’s city shares a space with infinite other versions (calibrations) of itself, even if you invented it just for this movie.

🗺️ A movie maps the city in which it is set; if your character should see this map, all hell could break loose.

🦠 Rather than an emblem or a map, you might evoke your movie’s city with a single cell.

“Square by square, pieces of the earth flipped 180 degrees around an axis, revealing the buildings on the other side. The buildings unfolded and stood up, awakening like a herd of beasts under the gray-blue sky. The island that was the city settled in the orange sunlight, spread open, and stood still as misty gray clouds roiled around it.” - Hao Jingfang, Folding Beijing

City concept

You can hear me deliver this lesson by scrolling up to the header and clicking Listen and/or the play ▸ button.

You know what a city is. And you know how cities tend to look. But a city needn’t look like that to still be a city. The concept of city comes before the aesthetic.

Window framework

On page 15 of Painting with Light, John Alton writes that “[w]indow frames made of plywood in many designs are used to project the effect of a window on a wall (Fig. 32).”

There are five such shadow puppets in Fig. 32. Five designs of window frame.

“To hold a tree branch,” writes Alton, “a tree branch adaptor is fastened to a heavy Century stand.”

A city is emerging.

City detail

The city is a slow gesture. Analogue and infinite and trapped in the drag of time. In other words, impossible to capture. And certainly not on the indie filmmaker’s budget. Nor with the narrative demands of the commercial filmmaker’s allotted two hours and 40 minutes of screen time.

Whether it’s real or made up, the filmmaker must instead decide the level of detail she should use to evoke the city. She must start with the everything of the city and scale down to the appropriate definition for her movie. She must find her place along the following scales:

Complex detail or spare indicative strokes.
Implication or explication.
Looping or layering.
Cacophony or monophony.
Field recording or synthesis.
Single or multiple perspective; inhabitant, visitor, or god.
- (What access does the movie have to the city? What are the known unknowns and the unknown unknowns?)
- (Does the movie remember the city, or discover it, or simply tell cold facts?)

Johannes Itten suggests that a “chaotic tangle of a multitude of features, of verticals, horizontals, and diagonals, of rectangles, windows, bridges, passages and forms of all kinds gives the illusion of a noisy city. The multitude of points of view and aspects produces a synthetic picture.”

Says George Perec: “Metropolis, the mineral universe, the world turned to stone.” Okay! That makes it easier. (As long as the movie is set in a frozen moment.)

Marco Polo first described his cities to Kublai Khan using gestures and objects. He couldn’t speak the language. Soon, he learned to describe the same cities verbally. But Khan found he could only experience them through the prism of that first visual cue.

Illustrating your city in such spare terms could prove striking and economical. A city is a slow gesture. Perhaps the filmmaker can capture a tell-tale flourish.

Share with your students, colleagues, and networks to influence filmmaking culture and the principal’s self-esteem.

Any city could be evoked with an emblem like this. But some cities are not emblematic in nature. They wear their emblems uncomfortably. They demand strata and flaps and counter-gesture.

And not every narrative within a city demands the city to be described with the same accent. One city in many movies is not many cities, but many granularities. Maybe the characters from one of those movies could see those in another if they squinted or wiped the fog off their eyes or cranked up the frame rate. Maybe they could pass messages down the line, from the densest take on a city to its simplest rendering. Messages about bin collections, rail strikes, and sightings of caped crime fighters. “Thank you for the information. We didn’t see this happen, we just saw the pattern it left.”

City map

A map is one way to know a city (unlike a house, of which the floor-plan is a mere abstraction, a titillation). The movie's 2D images are an attempt at mapping. (Intentionally or as a byproduct).

Most cities have mass-produced parts that can confuse this map. The same windows in parts of one district and another, bricks from a forgotten family manufacturer, emblematic hydrants. Only the locals can tell them apart. Or perhaps only the tourists, who walk with their eyes open. (The textbook example is Playtime (Director: Jacques Tati, 1967.)1 )

It is well known that in the 'real' world, the map is not the city. However, in a movie, the map is the city. The city exists in so far as you map it through the content and order of your shots. (Other parts of the city exist through implication; you may imply not just their existence but their nature; you may imply that the characters only know them by implication).

Even if you set your film in a real city, you may replan and remap it. City as collage. You may:

snip and paste cardboard streets together,
combine images in the frame, or
from shot to shot using the illusions of continuity editing, or
any combination of these and more.
- (Consider also the power of windows and mirrors).

When operating on a 'real' city in this way, radical remapping may infer:

fantastic geomorphing,
urban development,
subjective experience,
psychic disorientation,
unreliable narration, or
narrative compression.
- (After all, the city is supposed to be convenient; sometimes, you need a plot turn to be within a 15-minute walk.)

When your hero learns to tear a hole or - better - fold the map to connect distant streets, then he is getting somewhere.

City bus

If you really want your hero to see the city, force him to take public transport. Yes, he'll be confined to routes chosen or vetted by the city authorities (at least until he jumps off at the traffic lights for the alleyway chase). But a bus is the city compressed.

Like every ice cube is a different essay on water, every bus is its own cross-section of the city, inside and out. So you will want to design and build your bus - and the surfaces it passes - as though it were a single cell of this greater organism. Or perhaps a compartment of its mind. Probably you will start with the pattern of the seat fabric.