Difference and Assemblage: Towards Architectural Expression in Cinema

Abstract

With the development of information technology, the moving architectural images in film have increasingly become an important type of the discourse on architecture. The highly experiential characteristics of virtual reality have amplified people’s demand of cognitive and creative content of architecture to produce spatial associations that exceed the traditional understanding of the physical environment outside our bodies. This thesis aims to understand the form in which these emerging architectural associations are produced by analysing a salient virtual reality series of movies—the Marvel sci-fi films produced in the last decade. The thesis develops a grounded theory methodology and applies it to disentangle the narrative and expression process of their spatial compositions. The analysis is based on a theoretical framework developed around the Deleuzian concepts of assemblage and fold. Theories underlying these concepts provide instruments to interpret such a complex generation of space and its multidimensional environment. The fold theory is used to address the transformation of objects and environments, while the assemblage theory and the associated concepts of deterritorialization and reterritorialization are employed to study the material and expressive roles of the different associations of components. Based on the theoretical discussion, this thesis establishes three assemblage types of architectural scenes in movie: narrative-assemblage, material-assemblage and expression-assemblage. Taking relevant architectural scenes of the Marvel series, this enabled to describe the process of information interaction and transformation that occurs inside the material-assemblage, and between architecture and narrative. The novel spatial expressions resulted as conspicuous examples of Deleuzian assemblages where different components are associated through the process of folding-unfolding. The analysis of their process of deterritorialization-reterritorialization enables to understand the properties and relations of the different components of the assemblages realized with the integration of information enabled by the folding process.