Pen-Pal Pictures presents Top Banana, March 2019
Film analysis and presentation at 2426 WW, Los Angeles
Come for the pop-corn, stay for the movie: 1955 Il Tetto from Vittorio De Sica! Pen-Pal Pictures is a bi-monthly film series organized by roundhouse and hosted at 2426, in which architects, urbanists and film-makers from abroad are invited to write a text about their favorite motion pictures or short-films to share alongside a public screening — free and open to all. The first four events, airing from March to May, respond to a shared theme: Top Banana. Top Banana reconsiders architecture within the history and practice of film, asking several participants from abroad to write a text about a favorite film in which the mise-en-scene isn't simply a backdrop, but instead a major character. The scenographic dimensions of film have often been explored through methods borrowed from architectural analysis of form and type; however, given the medium's affinity for character and catharsis, we might find another way to consider the architectural aspects of film. In some films, the mise-en-scène strives not so much to be the real thing, as to reveal a kind of character in a way that the careful and orchestrated composition of plot and dialogue cannot. What happens when a city becomes a main character of the cinematographic plot? What stories would buildings tell if architecture was a protagonist? What happens in film when architecture instead plays Top Banana?
Review excerpt: “From the opening credits until the resolution of the protagonists’ difficulties, viewers are saturated with the amount of architectural information of Il Tetto. The emergence of radically new modern urban conditions calls for radically new representational techniques, and Vittorio de Sicca’s cinema synchronises its form and substances accordingly. We are to forget that this movie has been written and directed, that it was shot by cameras and lit by projectors, that it is a curated object. This is the new realism promised – though one can question if the promise has here been kept.
Luisa and Natale must build their squat – the primitive hut – overnight. They design its plan, a simple square on the ground. They design its four facades, pierced by a door and a window. They design its roof shape, with gentle slopes. In the plot’s most crucial moment, the expert knowledge of the architect becomes obsolete. Fittingly, the movie’s main characters are non-professional actors; the movie’s main builders are non-professional architects.”