MILF:05 “The Best Things In Life Are Free”: Selections of Feature Films from the Internet Archive

Le voyage dans la lune (dir. George Méliès, 1902)
This short film from the earliest days of the cinema follows a group of astronomers on a journey to the moon.

Das Kabinett des Doktor Caligari (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari) (dir. Robert Wiene, 1920)
The great Expressionist classic with Werner Krauss as Caligari, the fairground showman who hypnotizes his servant (Conrad Veidt) into committing murder at night.” Facets Multimedia

M (dir. Fritz Lang, 1931)
“A series of schoolgirls are murdered by a psychopath who terrorizes a large city and is hunted by the police through a network of beggars. Inspired by the real-life 'vampire of Dusseldorf,' Fritz Lang's great film is one of the key films of German Expressionism. Peter Lorre's performance as the murderer is one of the great screen performances of all time.” Facets Multimedia

Things to Come (dir. William Cameron Menzies, 1936)
“A global war begins in 1940. This war drags out over many decades until most of the people still alive (mostly those born after the war started) do not even know who started it or why. Nothing is being manufactured at all any more and society has broken down into primative localized communities. In 1966 a great plague wipes out most of what people are left but small numbers still survive. One day a strange aircraft lands at one of these communities and its pilot tells of an organisation which is rebuilding civilization and slowly moving across the world re-civilizing these groups of survivors. Great reconstruction takes place over the next few decades and society is once again great and strong. The world's population is now living in underground cities. In the year 2035, on the eve of man's first flight to the moon, a popular uprising against progress (which some people claim has caused the wars of the past) gains support and becomes violent.” IMDb

Swamp Women (dir. Roger Corman, 1955)
“The film follows undercover police officer Lee Hampton after she infiltrates a prison, befriends three female convicts, and helps them all escape. In reality, this planned escape is part of a larger plot to find a diamond stash hidden deep within the swamps of Louisiana.” Internet Archive

Atom Age Vampire (dir. Richard McNamara, 1960)
“A stripper is horribly disfigured in a car accident. A brilliant scientist develops a treatment that restores her beauty and falls in love with her. To preserve her appearance the doctor must give her additional treatments using glands taken from murdered women. His unexplained ability to turn into a hideous monster helps with this problem but does nothing to win her love. The doctor's woes multiply as the police and the girl's boyfriend begin to close in on him.” IMDb

Link:
Feature Films / Internet Archive

In the Archives:
MILF:04 The World
MILF:03 Nanoscapes
MILF:02 Spatializing the Marvelous: The Musicals of Busby Berkeley
MILF:01 Figures in the Field
MILF

Future Tense:
MILF:06 Thick City

Prunings XX

(Herman van den Boom, “Hoeselt”, from Arcadia Redesigned 2004-2005. Source.)

On Derek Jarman's garden.

On some crazy bike lanes. More here.

On the security features of the newly redesigned Washington Monument grounds. (Earlier)

On London's guerrilla gardeners. From the BBC: “Striking at night, armed only with shrubs and plants, they set out to brighten up roundabouts and verges.” (Earlier. And this is obviously related.)

On NYC garbage. Real garbage. For just $50.

On a design research study for the reuse of Silverlake Reservoir in Los Angeles.

Cellular Terrain

(The usually sunless terrain of asparagus roots now shimmering. More — lots and lots and lots more! — beautifully stained plant cells at Jim Haseloff's Laboratory, Department of Plant Sciences, University of Cambridge.)

In the Archives:
More Gardens-in-a-Petri
Microscopic Wood Anatomy

Proto-mississippian hydroengineering

Are these Rube Goldberg machines or the playthings of future hydroengineers?


In the Archives (or, somewhat related):
Vicksburg Harbor Project
Notes on Some Selections from the Visual Images Database of the Mississippi Valley Division of the US Army Corps of Engineers
Theatrum Machinarum
La Machine de Marly

(Spotted at del.icio.us/tag/video.)

Waiting

Some amazing photos of pay phones in Africa from The Payphone Project. In some places, they can be quite active communal spaces.







Unfortunately, it's a different story in the U.S. and elsewhere. They're dead spaces.





For some reason, I've come to associate pay phones with architectures of waiting. Or landscapes of waiting. The anticipation of a call, or the prank call, ticking silently but surely like a bomb counting down to an as yet unknown detonation time. You can even watch Colin Farrell sweating, quivering, crapping his pants, waiting to see if Kiefer Sutherland shoots him in the head, all the while an entire New York City block erupts into pandemonium. And of course, all it takes to neutralize the anxious terrain of Metropolis begins with a phone booth.





Much has been written about architecture as event. Frequently cited as a classic example are those flying buttresses keeping so many gothic cathedrals upright. From a very early BLDGBLOG post: “They're events of gravity channeled downward toward the earth's core; they're the building always on the verge of falling apart – and then not falling apart.” I suppose Hoover Dam can be described as an event: tons of concrete and the entire Colorado Plateau in a delicate dance for equilibrium (and counter-equilibrium) with hydrology and gravity.

But can you situate architecture as event in the larger context of landscape as waiting? Can we say that Notre Dame Cathedral was built to ride out tourists and lost Dan Brown fans, biding its time until its buttresses reach a critical structural point and collapses in on itself? And Hoover Dam ticks and tocks away the centuries until the Colorado River has eaten away the canyon walls?

Last I've heard, the Army Corps of Engineers will rebuild New Orleans's levee system, this time bigger, stronger, and better, whatever that means. No doubt they're anticipating another Katrina or an even more damaging one. Judging from precedents, however, it won't be entirely immune. So a city waits. Perhaps somebody decides to build levees of levees. Are there levees of levees of levees? The landscapes of waiting.

Meanwhile, how do quaint Swiss villages wait for the next avalanche? How is Tokyo waiting for the next big earthquake? San Francisco for Los Angeles? Yellowstone for the next major wildfire or even for the impending cataclysmic eruption of its supervolcano?





Ultimately however, I'm more intrigued by the idea of a landscape in which you're perpetually waiting. Godot finally arrives, even Guffman and the Messiah, and yet you keep on waiting. And while you're waiting, you go and tend to your garden, plant some cucumbers, prune some trees, water your roses. It doesn't come, whatever it is. You're waiting. Still. So you decide to build a pergola, go to TruValue, and buy some lumber. It's a beautiful pergola, the best in the neighborhood. But rather than admiring it, checking out the views from inside, you take a look at your watch. Twice. And twice again. The summer solstice arrives. And here comes the winter solstice at last, finally. But you only stare at the horizon. Summer and winter again. You harvest your crops. Everything else wilts and dies. But still you and everyone else wait, tense, ecstatic, and apprehensive. Speculating. North America returns to the equator. New landscapes, new species. You wait. The sun becomes a red giant. You wait.

Tornado Alleys of Mars

(Watch dust devils race across an alien planet. Image courtesy of NASA/JPL/Texas A&M.)

Landscapes as Diagnosis

Star Pruned commenter e-tat has a new blog. There are only three posts so far, but what it lacks in frequency, it makes it up in sheer speculative brilliance. In the most recent entry, e-tat takes on Semantic Landscape, a biomedical information retrieval and visualization tool using the language of geography. Data mining, literally.



Here's the most succulent bit: “Distinctions between the body and landscape will be blurred in the new practice of geomedicine and the related science of medical geology. Spa treatments and garden retreats will be internalised, with microbiotic centres of horticultural therapy (also). Conversely, parallel or complementary practices of landscape surgery, medicinal gardening, pharmo-remedial therapies and other site-specific modes of treatment will be established and treated as symbiotic aspects of whole-person medicine. Patients will inhabit the relevant landscapes, and the landscape will be subject to regimes of health, cure, and where relevant, mortality. Consequently, existing medical procedures will have to take on the symbolic aspects of geography: transplants will be regarded as relocations, with attendant vehicle hire and organisation of removals; surgery will be regarded as an exclusion or death in the family, with attendant funeral services; and, routine checkups will be regarded as terrain mapping exercises, bringing us back to the images above, and their implication for the discourses and practices of remediation at previously unexplored scales.”



But what happens when these symbolic terrains start to resemble actual landscapes?

The geography of lung cancer, for instance, matches the peaks, valleys and biomass color gradient of Yosemite Park. And the cartography of AIDS corresponds with the dizzying contours of the Grand Canyon.

Will people stop visiting these treasured national parks for fear of contracting a fatal disease?



Or how about imagined landscapes? What happens when long considered paradisiacal terrains become the classic diagnosis for the plague? Or after an abortion, your biomap now looks like the Garden of Eden.

in the Archives:
A bit about landscapes as therepeutic devices here

Future Sky

For those eager to find out, the correct answer to the Landscape challenge #3 is D — the perfect venue to witness the Milky Way and Andromeda Galaxies coalescing into a new galaxy. And here is a fantastic preview of that intergalactic collision from astronomer John Dubinsky and composer John Kameel Farah.





“The harsh reality of the distant universe with all of its violent interactions seems remote from our human existence and all might seem to be quiet and normal in our home the Milky Way. But it seems likely that in a mere 3 billion years, our neighbouring galaxy Andromeda and the Milky Way will fall together and have a close collision. They will likely merge and be reborn as a single giant elliptical galaxy over the course of another billion years or so. How might this metamorphosis play out and what might you see if you looked up at night over the next 4 billion years!”





And I have to ask: can landscape architecture, whose mastery of time distinguishes it from architecture and most other related fields, concern itself with time scales in the billions?

(Spotted at Moon River.)