The Representative Façade and Everything It Hides

The article analyses Black Tower (1987), an avant-garde film by British filmmaker John Smith, from three aspects: its experimental montage, which breaks down the otherwise fluid form of video into distinctly separate frames, the personification of architecture as a film subject and an interpretation of the film’s content as a questioning of the relations between the human being and human-made structures.The article also draws a connection between the film and The Cage (1975), a graphic novel by Canadian author Martin Vaughn-James. Black Tower is thus interpreted as a graphic novel, written on the medium of film, while The Cage functions as a storyboard that is just a step away from transcending its paper base and jumping into the medium of film. Both works present architecture as an entity in its own right, set against an absent or invisible human protagonist who, through this interaction, is dominated or even erased.

The integral version of this article can be found in the printed KINO!