The lecture looks at Antonioni’s architecture: Pirelli Tower in The Night and industrial Ravenna in Red Desert; the dome in The Truman Show and the Ministry of Information in Brazil; dreamlike baroque of Last Year in Marienbad; Paris of the 1960s as Godard’s Alphaville, the main building of the Moscow State University as Koshey’s land in Pyotr Lutsik’s The Outskirts, and Manhattan of the New Hollywood.
Many phenomena of contemporary life that initially contained a promise of utopia, have revealed their dystopian aspect in cinema. Comfort has turned into consumerism, control has led to the loss of freedom, reality has become uncertain and time a labyrinth. Discussing these transformations as examples of "difficult form" [a literary device that helps distinguish poetic language from the language of the everyday, Viktor Shklovsky – TN] in cinema, Vsevolod Korshunov will speak about the problem of critical viewing and the obstacles to it, and show examples of architectural works that have come to symbolize the system, unbalance, shortage, trap, and the loss of self.
