Output details

Déjà vu: Restaging Resnais’s Last Year at Marienbad

RESEARCH CONTENT AND PROCESS

--Description--

The artefact, Déjà vu: Restaging Resnais’s Last Year at Marienbad, is a critical reading of Alain Resnais’s 1961 film Last Year at Marienbad based on Alain Robbe-Grillet’s screenplay. This large architectural model interprets the physical and psychological spaces in the film, and incorporates a digital animation projected onto the model. The artefact was presented at Speculative Models, a two-person exhibition at London Gallery West, in 2009.

--Questions--

1. How do critical forms of design-led practice (drawing, model-making and digital film) blur the boundaries between architectural design and theory?

2. How can an architectural model present a critical reading of Resnais’s film?

3. How do representational techniques which combine a physical artefact with a digital projection generate and capture architectural ideas and design?

4. What are the technical considerations of working with projected light and narrative as architectural drawing?

--Methods--

The work derives from interdisciplinary enquiry involving architectural design, model-making and digital film techniques, architectural history and theory, film theory and critical theory:

1. Iterative and written analysis of the spatial arrangement of the film itself and from related literature.

2. Investigation into the connections between space, memory (or amnesia), imagination and desire in architecture and psychology.

3. Architectural historical research of Baroque and Rococo architecture in Munich, used as setting for the film.

4. Design of a new interpretative artefact, incorporating a digital film projection onto a 3D model.

--Dissemination--

The artefact has been reviewed in the Journal of Architecture. It has been the subject matter of a gallery talk; three invited seminars/workshops; and one international lecture. It is discussed in an essay for the KTHA, the journal of the KTH, Stockholm.