Architecture, city and cinema: avant-Gardes and imaginary

Author(s)

Denise Lezo

• Document type: Master's Dissertation
• Press: São Carlos.
• Institution: Universidade de São Paulo (USP). Escola de Engenharia de São Carlos (EESC/SBD)
• Defense date: 2010-05-10

Examining board members

Carlos Alberto Ferreira Martins; Ricardo Marques de Azevedo; Ruy Sardinha Lopes

• Advisor: Carlos Alberto Ferreira Martins

Abstract

In the first decades of the twentieth century, in the cultural context of the European Avant Gardes, architecture, city and cinema had established between themselves different forms of dialogue, including the creation of fictional architectures and cities destined exclusively for the films. Through the analysis of three films - Aelita (Yakov Protazanov, USSR, 1924), Metropolis (Fritz Lang, Germany, 1927) and Things to Come (William Cameron Menzies, 1936), this work seeks to identify the ways that these cinematographic architectures and cities, developed for the European cinema in the interwar period, had reflected, reformulated and released for the masses such issues as: the life in the metropolis and the ambiguities and contradictions imposed to the metropolitan inhabitant; the new technologies, and the ways they impacted the daily lives and incited the imagination; the formal experimentations of the avant-gardes and the pursuit of overcoming the boundaries between art and life; the new conceptions of architectures and cities, and its intention to create new logics of space and urban organizations, which could contribute to the creation of a new man and a new society. (AU)

• FAPESP's process: 07/02082-3 - Architecture, city and cinema: avant-gardes and imaginary
• Grantee: Denise Lezo
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Master