Posted by BIGGER THAN LIFE. Ken Adam’s Film Design
Location _Deutsche Kinemathek _Museum für Film und Fernsehen, Berlin
The spatial objects, which were built specifically for the exhibition Bigger Than Life – Ken Adam’s Film Design at the Deutsche Kinemathek, are neither faithful reconstructions of models formerly created by Ken Adam or his colleagues, nor are they scale reductions of film sets. Rather, they imagine potential spatializations of sketches that Adam made for individual film sets. In this way, they not only embody a subservient relationship between the model and the modeled, but also testify to a complex web of effects and repercussions on image and space.
The process of transforming a sketch into a three-dimensional model is a process of negotiating various possibilities between the interpretation of the drawing by the model-building viewer, the material and medial stubbornness of the models, and their significance as representatives of an architectural and cinematic reality. The models focus on the structural formation of the film spaces. Here, the black and white lines typical of Adam’s felt-tip pen drawings, which alternate in light-dark gradations, are translated into serial spatial structures and rhythmic compositions of light and shadow. Like Adam’s drawings, the models show a selected section of space from a specific angle and suggest to the viewer the presence of other, hidden spaces. The principle of movement, to which Adam’s drawings and film spaces are committed, also becomes the subject of model making.
Publication _Bigger Than Life, Kerber Verlag, ed. by Deutsche Kinemathek, with texts from Carolin Höfler and Matthias Karch, 2014, 208 S. ISBN 978-3-7356-0027-1
OZA _Studio for Architecture and Scenography 