Mark Lewis
Children's Games (Heygate Estate)
Tenement Yard (Heygate
Estate)
Architecture formulates spatial systems which are then repeated on
the level of content: modes of behaviour, perceptions and actions can appear
to be marked by architectonic structures. The utopian edifices of the late
1960s, in particular, saw architecture less as the material realisation
of social concepts than as a responsive body reacting to its inhabitants.
Today these isolated examples of modernism are mostly seen as a failed attempt
to translate social structures into building structures. So Heygate Estate
in South East London, completed in 1974, is regarded as a symbol of that
modernist architecture which, in the final analysis, systematically failed
to meet the needs of its inhabitants.
In a previous film, North Circular, Mark Lewis took an industrial building of the 60s from the suburban no man's land of London and transferred it to the cinematographic order of visibility, redefining the building's sculptural texture in an interplay of panoramic view and zoom shot. By contrasting the modular structure of the dilapidated building, the children in its interior who only become visible as the zoom closes in, and a spinning top whose gyration concludes the film, Lewis seems to have appropriated an architecture which itself never envisioned such dynamic elements of instability. Lewis's new films, Children's Games ( Heygate Estate) and Tenement Yard (Heygate Estate), also translate the interplay of architecture as a public system of representation and an individual system of reference into the specific semantics of film. These two single-screen works create quite distinct topographies of Heygate Estate, revealing the residential complex, since earmarked for demolition, as a spatial structure that is at once hermetic and open. It is an approach which is based entirely on a cinematographic recording of space. Although the two films share a similar starting point - the buildings in Heygate Estate feature as a monumental backdrop at the margins of which can be seen children at play - the filmic perspective gives rise to totally different views. The static camera of Tenement Yard (Heygate Estate), with its central perspective and clearly defined tower block structure, contrasts sharply with the dynamism of the subjective camera in Children's Games (Heygate Estate), with its gradual exploration of the place. Whereas the former offers a closed but fragmentary image, the latter suggests an almost complete record of the overall architectonic structure. In the one we are seeing, in the other the seeing is done for us. However, the concrete blocks are only seemingly the central focus of this visual exploration. The real central motif, displaced into the background or towards the sides, is supplied by the children from Heygate Estate - playing football and badminton, roller skating and cycling - as it is they who transform this unwelcoming modernist architecture into an active living space. Such a space, according to philosopher and sociologist Michel de Certeau, is distinguished from a stable place in that it is above all a network of mobile vectors: 'A space arises when directional vectors, differing speeds and the variability of time are brought together. It is filled by the totality of movements which unfold within it (...) Space is a place which we do something with. It is for example the pedestrians who transform a street (geometrically defined by urban planners) into a space.' (i)
InChildren's Games (Heygate Estate), the travelling shot itself becomes a directional vector which converts the seemingly anonymous place into a living space. It glides across the various passages and walkways of the area, propelled by a continuous forward movement. The children whom it encounters on its path furnish additional instances of movement. Tenement Yard (Heygate Estate), by contrast, is reduced to a single static take in which the only element of movement is supplied by the children playing football in the background and thus disrupting the static quality of the place. This film approximates more closely to artistic concepts of a geometric order of the visible: a precisely composed image, with the children in the background conveying an intensity of motion. The seemingly uniform image invites contemplative observation and the discovery of details that break up the pattern of residential blocks: colourful curtains, washing hung out on the balcony. The way in which the gaze wanders over the surfaces prolongs one's subjective experience of time. Although the two films are of differing lengths, their different perspectives and dynamics seem to neutralize the time difference. Directional vectors, speeds and the variability of time produce their own views of the seemingly static architecture. Thus the filmic gaze is brought to life by the ambivalence of what it registers: dreary concrete structures and the way people use them. For Mark Lewis, the real inhabitants of Heygate Estate are the children, and they at any rate succeed in making their living area appear not as a failed utopia but as a real place which represents the reality of life.
Vanessa Muller(i) Michel de Certeau: Kunst des Handelns. Berlin 1998, p. 218
|