As an architect I find it truly interesting to read cities and architecture through films, and this is why I went to see the latest film by one of my favourite directors Wim Wenders: Perfect Days. In Wenders’ cinema, his gaze over the city is always the protagonist. He possesses the remarkable ability to make the space of the photographic image the central focus of his filmmaking. It is not only the story that is important to him, but the time and space in which the story takes shape almost by chance.
The first book of photography that I bought in 1991 was a book of his titled “Once”, which used the images as annotations to reveal the poetics of his films. It is a book of sequences. In every second image the editing begins, the story announced in the first image starts to unfold, its sense of space moves in the direction that is its own, foreshadowing a very particular sense of time and place.
“Once” reveals Wenders’ ability to transform his gaze within a complex narrative. It is obvious that the photographs gathered in this book are the prelude to many of the German director’s films. I don’t think there is such a thing as a right or wrong point of view when using photographs as inspiration for a story. Nor do I believe that an image can exist by itself. I believe that every image, and this is true both for photographs and for films, truly begins to exist only when someone is looking at it. Everyone who watches a film sees it in a different way. Films are open so that each of us can discover what we want to see in it. A film exists as many times as there are people watching it.
Wenders has also experimented with shooting in 3D, in a series of documentaries about architecture titled The soul of buildings (2014) in which he sought, not always with particularly interesting results, to tell the stories of iconic buildings such as the Pompidou Centre or the Rolex Centre by Sanaa. In these films, his intense poetics built on light and discontinuous glances, gives way to a muscular display of pure technique, remaining in the realm of promotional videos made by a talented director.
An article in The Guardian by Oliver Wainwright in 2014 provides a very specific analysis and leaves many open questions about how the team of directors gathered by Wenders to define new languages for architectural documentaries should portray the new Cathedrals of Culture.
Wainwright concludes his article with a reference to two artists-documentary filmmakers Ila Bêka & Louise Lemoine, who have chosen architecture as the subject of their own works. They explore architecture, cities and how these realities – both urban and domestic – are treated in relation to the people who live in them or those who design them. The non-actors, the protagonists of their films, guide us in discovering the special world of the design project. In the hands of these two artists, the images in motion are thus the outcome of specific observation, an imaginary place in which people and spaces come into contact. The footage is a journal of notes, not based on fiction like more traditional cinema: what we have here is the style of a diary, a prolonged observation with which the authors follow an action by the protagonist as it unfolds, or the overlapping of many figures when the protagonist is the architectural space. For them, the way a film is made counts far more than the film as a finished product. It’s a process that seeks to compress the experience of the space into a feature-length film. For this very reason, architecture becomes the absolute protagonist, an architecture that dialogues constantly with its users, in an interaction that generates irony, wonder and confusion.
This is a method that sometimes seems instrumental to the story but on the contrary is an attitude towards looking at the world that surrounds us (go see the two filmmakers’ Instagram page and you will understand this better).
But let’s return for a moment to Wenders’ cinema. The director first portrayed Japan in 1985 in the documentary Tokyo-Ga and comes back to observe it in 2024, in his most recent film, Perfect Days.
The first time he went to the capital to make a film in which he evoked the art of one of the greatest auteurs in the history of Japanese cinema, Ozu Yasujiro, and he did so through the direct testimonials of his cinematographer Yushara Atsuta and the actor Chishu Ryu, who appeared in many of the Japanese master’s films. Tokyo-Ga is therefore the story of a man and at the same time a declaration of love to the metropolis at the centre of Ozu’s work, Tokyo, to its people and the transformation it underwent after World War II to become one of the greatest symbols of modernity in the world. In the film, it is instantly clear that the images in motion always arise from a single initial image that is a perfect synthesis of Ozu’s poetics.
The characteristics of the second film, Perfect Days, are completely different, even if Wenders describes it as a tribute to Ozu’s gaze. The name of the protagonist is the same as one of the protagonists of the Japanese director’s film. Hirayama lives a simple life, his daily routine a sequence of rituals.
He listens to music, he reads books, he looks at trees and he likes to photograph the ones that appear to him to be moments of pure simplicity, using an analog camera. He has a modest job: he cleans the public toilets, another ritual that gives him a sense of security and inner calm, the same gestures repeated over and over, each day the same as the last. He wakes at dawn, brushes his teeth, drinks coffee in a can from a vending machine on the street, takes his van, goes to work, comes home, washes at the public baths, dines at a noodle bar, goes to bed. On weekends he adds some variations. A man alone, with a mysterious past. In both films the reference to contemplative Oriental traditions seems quite immediate, the attention to the repetition of gesture as constant physical and mental training.
Ila Bêka and Louise Lemoine made also two films about Japan. The first, Moriyama-San (2016) is a week-long immersion into the everyday life of Mr. Moriyama. A collector of Japanese art, architecture and music, he lives in one of the most famous contemporary architectural works, the Moriyama House, built in Tokyo in 2005 by the Pritzker Prize-winning architect Ryue Nishizawa (SANAA). The second film, Tokyo Ride (2020), is the ideal counterpoint to the first, a drive through the streets of Tokyo with architect Nishizawa in search of the significant places of his imaginary.
The film about the Moriyama House was shot with a camera, during the first site visit for the film, which instead of lasting only one day continued for about a week during which the auteurs were completely absorbed by the owner’s life. The film is a journal of annotations masterfully transformed by editing into a film, an immersion into an experimental microcosm that completely redefines the common understanding of domestic life, describing the owner’s unique personality in a spontaneous and personal way: an urban hermit who lives in a small archipelago of peace and contemplation in the heart of Tokyo. Life is a mosaic of fragments: noise music, reading, film screenings on the roof, fireworks and the Japanese city all around condensed into the body of the architecture.
Speaking as a spectator, rather than as an architect, I see many films, and as I watch, I like to feel that my eyes and my mind are free to roam, that in some way you can live inside an image, discover yourself, see yourself inside what you want to see. For this simple reason, after leaving the screening of Wenders’ film Perfect Days, I felt like something was off, I felt like I had already seen that film, as if its frames were too familiar to me. In his essay on the mimetic faculty, Walter Benjamin dwells on the idea that every language is based on the capacity to produce and recognize similarities. I went looking for these similarities within each individual image of the film. The close-range images, the close-up shots, exclude everything around them, and this exclusion makes gesture the only tool useful for constructing the image. And suddenly I understand that the similarities emerge when overlaying the individual images from Wenders’ film over those of the duo Bêka & Lemoine, which highlights a so singular uniformity that makes me wonder if Hirayama and Moriyama are the same person living in two different films!
Hirayama moves like Moriyama. He observes the world from his window, he reads lying on the floor and moving his book towards a light source. The posture is the same, he brushes his teeth and wipes his face in the same way. And even when the field widens, the construction of the image always coincides, the images look like they were painted by the same painter.
If the sequence of photographs shot like a diary were initially the reference for Wenders’ construction of the scene in his films, it now seems that the construction rests on the already-seen and is built upon the mimetic faculty so dear to Benjamin, the only difference being that the similarity is not the story or previous lived experience, but the film made a few years earlier by the other two directors.
Now this feeling becomes stronger when from the images you move on to the film’s narrative. In considering the role of architecture within the film, it is impossible not to connect the vision to all of Bêka & Lemoine’s work. Here architecture is in fact the centre of the vision and becomes the real protagonist of the film.
Wenders follows Wainwright’s advice from years earlier to the letter, and carefully studies the work of Bêka & Lemoine. He doesn’t choose anonymous architectural works, simple public toilets on which to base the story. Instead, he chooses the Shibuya Tokyo Toilets designed by 16 architects from around the world, merging his auteur filmmaking practice with his experience as a producer of architectural films on commission. Like in the films of the two young directors, the architecture of the stars stands in contrast to the characters. The almost obsessive repetitiveness of the daily job of cleaning the spaces, contrasts with the long shots of the spectacular architecture. The actions of the protagonists are performed with great consciousness and attention, just like the colours, the materials and the space define the character of the city.
Furthermore, Hirayama reproduces the motionless daily dance of Guadalupe Acedo, one of the most iconic characters in Bêka & Lemoine’s films (Koolhaas Houselife 2008). Guadalupe cleans and tidies the house as she talks about Oma’s villa in Bordeaux. This seems to be most striking demonstration that in this film, Wenders abandons his photographic annotations and seems to use Bêka & Lemoine’s filmography to give form to his story.
Once all I had to do was look at one of Wenders’ photographs, and everything opened right up, I could go beyond the margins. Whereas in Perfect Days, the image keeps bringing me back into the frame through which I unfortunately observe the world built by someone else. Fortunately, “Anselm” has just been released in theatres, and after the parenthesis of his perfect days Wenders has once again moved me with his interpretation of the life and work of a great artist. But narrating architecture is something else entirely.
Bêka & Lemoine have made their film Moriyama-San available for the public to watch this weekend. Watch it above or here.
