THE CUT AS SPATIAL REALITY

Since time is granular and discontinuous, spatial reality may also share a similar structure. We have framed this as a temporal aspect, in terms of montage and the cut, however films also consist of sets, props, and actor, and therefore the cut makes it possible that we can frame the contemporary spatial structure of the world through cinematic logic.

In privacy and publicity, Colomina argues that modern architecture is neither ‘inside nor outside, private nor public’. She states how modern buildings lined with glass panes are dominated by the view outside – the window is no longer a viewpoint out of the wall but acts as a movie screen. The outside (the public) becomes as present as the private inside the interior. In this way, we could say the cinematic cut acts as a boundary or threshold and becomes structurally the boundary of what is private and what is public. If the cinematic cut does indeed work as a psychological device that through blinking, joins separate perceptions and thoughts to create mental narrative, then the difference between an individual’s identity can be created by cutting between the private self and public display – an individual cuts between the private and public.

This viewpoint does have backing in history and reality. Adam Curtis’ documentary The Century of the self (detailed later) walks the viewer through how the masses were systemically manipulated and indoctrinated using Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis. In 1946, the American government signed the ‘National Mental Health Act’, with the aim to deal ‘with the invisible threat to society’. Following Edward Bernays’ public relations work of the 20’s, the American suburb became the model for all of America, believing the masses needed to be ‘guided’ from above. Therefore, under Colomina’s view, there is no distinction between the private and the public - everything the individual is has been rendered public. Everyone becomes as repressed as the other, society becoming a singular mass.

Not only is the individual rendered public inside of modern architecture, but the structure of modern architecture also becomes a form of mass media. Colomina’s most radical point claims that modern architecture is designed to be photographed – as lighting is used to optimise image capture, furniture is arranged like a film set, and circulation is choreographed for the camera. She states that “the photograph becomes the primary site of architectural experience”. Colomina uses the metaphor of a camera to describe the window – the inhabitant is framed inside ‘as though through a viewfinder’. The modern home becomes a form of surveillance, as transparency is no longer openness, but becomes a new form of control over what is allowed to be seen (Colomina, 1996).

Throughout the book, Colomina reflects on Le Corbusier’s, one of the leading pioneers of modern architecture, who writes of the ‘fabulous development of print’. Le Corbusier describes how the advent of media in printed form allows ‘everybody to know everything of everything’, that the advent of so much information has flooded our minds. Hito Steyerl talks of this in her Wretched of the Screen. In her introduction, Steyerl explains “the seductive force of simulation transformed physical forms into vanishing images, submitted visual art to viral spreading, and subjected language to the fake regime of advertising”. We can see here the clear link between Le Corbusier and Steyerl, that the digital replaces the physical. The print was at least somewhat physical and has some intractability, now the digital almost entirely replaces the original public space. There is no longer a need for an authentic experience of the real. This only reflects Baudrillard’s seminal writing over thirty years earlier, fully exemplifying the third stage of simulation.

This spatial theory highlights the potential of the cut, that the cut has rendered even our own spatial realities as discontinuous – the modern building or home no longer serves us for its immediate use, instead for some other time or audience. The modern window becomes a cut, a boundary that is neither here nor there. Building on Colomina’s thinking, the combination of buildings in sequence reflects montage. It begs to asks that what happens to culture, to the way we interact with one another in the public, when each public building we interact with shifts our perception like the Kuleshov, or feels like a kind of ‘filmic collision’ as described by Eisenstein? I propose that this way of interacting with the public has only been furthered by the advent of digital information.