crimeculture

The uncanny, anxiety-inducing architecture of noir

by Marcus Nicholls, Lancaster University

Moving from Expressionism to warped modern space, noir’s author-architects construct architectural edifices and styles that trap their characters in oppressive, chiaroscuro worlds of Piranesi-esque intimidation, each imprisoned amidst symbolic blocks of representation.

            Cinema is viewed as through a window; circular or square apertures of camera converted to huge vertical plazas of framing. Novels also frame their words in the rectangles of pages, each letter an amalgamation of twisted lines, stark black on white. These geometries of textual form build bridges between signs and signifieds, occasionally providing the straight-lined matches to burn them in abstract quest. Creeping deeper into these analogies we see the authors as architects, building edifices of text that totter around the characters who scurry beneath; frames within frames for those vast eyes above and without. The architectures of form provide the meta-structures whose blueprints are further elaborated upon, alluded to or elided by content where architecture provides a myriad stones for symbolism to scratch its glyphs upon.

            The angles and lines which make up textual architecture are carefully selected to form those significant shapes, and space becomes fraught with tensions. Noir has a particularly strong connection between the spaces and buildings of its texts and the outer world; its representations build on the corporeal to be imbued with import, as its “cycle reveals practices of representing and inhabiting space and suggests how culture itself can be understood as a mode of representational and spatial practice.” ^[1] Our interactions with space are our relationships with the world; its emptiness is easily filled by any displacement. Even the terminology of its ‘cycles’ chimes with long-established traditions of the geometry of time and history, Yeats’ gyres of history and Dante’s circles of afterlife, within which the Byzantine and Malebolge architecture further explores ideologies. Many of noir’s most recognisable facets derive from its constructions of geometry and architecture; the lines of shadow from slatted windows, the engulfing, whirling, centrifugal city, “common ground of all artistic and architectural practice in modernity: the space of metropolis.” ^[2] Within each metropolis of noir the buildings crowd together as denizens, of their own bricks and also as bricks for the greater space of city; they mass together creating fluent style and mood, in noir replacing traditional backdrops of sky or landscape; row upon row of lyric images in stages of ruin. Ruskin identifies architecture as man’s sublime, both conquest and celebration of nature’s forms; the architect takes out of nature what is needed for the new construction, and “all building, therefore shows man as either gathering or governing.” ^[3] Within novel and film, architecture is boundless, free from the constraints of physics, and so conceptually it can warp even further those areas of modern space in tune with emotion and senses, or it can anchor the fantastic in the real, as symbolised in ‘Falling Angel’ by the recurrent pentagram; the otherworldly pinned down to understandable geometry. Architecture’s power is that it “strengthens the existential experience, one’s sense of being in the world” ^[4] , but this heavy, cementing existence can also absorb the individual, lose the human in its apparent aeon-shadowed permanence. Architecture can be used to enforce the status quo in cities, such as Stalin’s imposing statues or Hawksmoor’s carefully placed London churches, creating “a conception of space as reciprocally interdependent with society” ^[5] , an architecture planned with Machiavellian intent, subjugating the self to “the square and the circle...preeminently the areas of power among those bounded by purely straight or curved lines.” ^[6] Influence lurks in these buildings, particularly when their Princes have the omnipotence of authors.

            The ubiquitous involvement of architectural representations in noir fiction can see its foundations traced back to the roots of Gothic: the tenebrous castle teetering high upon crags of cyclopean boulders transmuted to the steely-eyed glitter of overhanging plate glass. Gothic architecture and architecture within the Gothic became interchangeable with the rise of that form: aspects of style that had been previously ignored, such as “ruins...assumed a different and positive significance in the course of the 18th century” ^[7] , and the haunted house/haunted self dyad emerged most prevalently in the following century. Gothic architecture became symbolic of overwrought minds, the frailty of the human condition in its obsession with death, and a mediation between spirituality and myth; “a Gothic cathedral raises ideas of grandeur in our minds, by its size, its height, its awful obscurity, its strength, its antiquity and its durability.” Gothic architecture epitomised human sublimity whilst steeped in the terrifying archaism of the medieval; its symbolism aspirational yet maudlin, reaching towards heaven from the depths of the grave. Botting identifies it as uncanny double to standard architectural practices; “Gothic style became the shadow that haunted Neoclassical values, running parallel and counter to its ideas of symmetrical form, reason, knowledge and propriety”, the strange reflection of the society it framed. The scale and rich symbolism paved the way for its appropriation by artists and writers, and in the modern era it endures, cyclically adhering to its role of ‘other’, the doppelganger haunting society with the threat of its past, incongruous in spiky intricacies amidst flat planes and matte panes. As counterpoint and predecessor to architectural styles diegetic and non, the presence and affective nature of Gothic bleeds into the present, and into cycles of noir. ‘Falling Angel’ illustrates this legacy which clings claw-footed to the architecture of modernity, as “radiator-cap gargoyles jutted from the corners of the sky-scraper, and beyond them, the building’s stainless-steel spire tapered into the sunlight, shining like the ice-clad summit of some unconquered peak.” ^[8] Noir’s architecture draws much from the blueprints of Gothic, in the focus and prevalence afforded it in texts, in its concentration on shadow, arch and aperture. From the Gothic a Romantic notion of architecture is promulgated, buildings becoming more sentient and affecting, towering presences forgetting their makers, moulded in the image of Byronic alps, but controlled in their impenetrability, nature’s unpredictable wildness removed.

            If Gothic appears as a cornerstone for noir’s architectural representations, its stylistic forefather can be traced in the exaggerated spaces of pooled shadow brought to stain celluloid by German Expressionism. Here space truly warps to the whim of auteur-architect minds, and film, the “obvious role model for spatial experimentation” ^[9] creates an architecture which becomes most strikingly uncanny and symbolic. A true confluence of sister arts begets this architecture, film as hybrid catalyst showcasing the final result of literature, painting and theatre’s conflation: Expressionist sets reflect Bauhaus artists and recall Piranesi, as many noir adaptations will later in the century. The freedom felt by those constructing the architecture of film is evident in the distortion exemplified in ‘The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari’; the stretched windows and bridges flung far skywards like ribbon evoke and emote, stirring the senses. Here the power seen in Gothic styles converges with psychoanalytic representations of characters and society to create spatial allegories; “space as a projection of the subject, and thus as a harbinger and repository of all the neuroses and phobias”, the post-Freud culture of modernist signification, where “spatial images are the dreams of society”. Cinema literally projects again onto new, impossible space, as the abyss is filled with the repressed past, the threatening future and all other combinations of fear and desire. Expressionism posits the author/auteur-architect now as spokesman, creating an “essential complicity of the architect’s project and the collective memory from which it derives” ^[10] , as it “incorporates and infuses both physical and mental structures”, before projecting them before us like a beautiful brain scan. Representing characters, society and individual in an infinitely faceted diamond of reflective interpretation, architecture’s fabric grows richer.

            The chiaroscuro of noir has its origins in the stark contrast and constant interplay of light and dark characteristic of Expressionism. Where films such as Caligari use extremes, such as the somnambulist’s corpse paint, noir mediates more subtly between velvet textures of shadow and illumination, bringing elements of realism to ground the text, similar to its relationship with Expressionist architecture. For Burke, sublimity in stonework is hinged upon the juxtaposition of shades: “all edifices calculated to produce an idea of the sublime, ought rather to be dark and gloomy...darkness (has) a greater effect on the passions than light.” ^[11] Ruskin too, equates the pooling shadows of buildings with their ‘power’, linking it inextricably to mood and emotive engagement, a need for “some equivalent expression for the trouble and wrath of life, for its sorrow and its mystery: and this it can only give by depth or diffusion of gloom.” ^[12] The sets of German Expressionist directors such as Murnau enable that “obvious ability of film to construct its own architecture in light and shade, scale and movement” ^[13] , modulating light in a way that architects can merely dream of as they are faced with the ever-changing daylight.

            The buildings of film have shadow and light in-built, rather than requiring adroit planning to cope with the mutability of reality. Expressionism imbued its architecture with unnatural shadow and warped geometry, “no longer an inert background, architecture now participates in the very emotions of the film...the frown of a tower, the scowl of a sinister alley”, constructing cities of ominous symbolism, uncanny distortion, preempting noir’s use of shadow and architecture. In these atmospheres of secrecy and hidden power, “deep shadows and darkness are essential, because they dim the sharpness of vision, make depth and distance ambiguous, and invite unconscious peripheral vision and tactile fantasy” ^[14] , the “Expressionist utopias” ^[15] of Caligari and Nosferatu forefathers to the haptic spaces of sense anxiety in noir. Pallasmaa quotes “the extraordinarily powerful sense of focus and presence in the painting of Caravaggio and Rembrandt (that) arises from the depth of shadow in which the protagonist is embedded like a precious object on a dark velvet background that absorbs all light”; the plight of the individual in the face of the void. In both Caligari and the adaptations of Kafka’s dreamlike pre-noir, “adroit diagonals lead and rivet the eye...the whole geometrically felt, cubistically conceived”, strange shapes throw perspective and shadows yawn within, creating spaces of uncertainty, duality, as in the room of the swinging light in The Trial, the faces Janus-like in their piebald oppositions, illuminating pendulum swinging back and forth, the inherent instability of the justice they debate. The “art of chiaroscuro is a skill of the master architect...in great architectural spaces, there is a constant, deep breathing of shadow and light; shadow inhales and illumination exhales light” ^[16] ; only through contraries is progression, and the chiaroscuro of Expressionism and noir gives their uncanny buildings life.

            Vidler’s account of the modern metropolis, “this space (that) has operated as the flux...in which subjects and objects have been forced to adjust their always uneasy relations”, concerns itself with anxieties produced by the city and its architecture. Styles and particular buildings warp space in the way that Expressionist sets made visible through their vicissitudes of exaggeration, the 19th century seeing the emergence of spatial fears agora and claustrophobia. Noir’s cities tone down the surreality of Caligari’s sets, whilst evoking similar psychological struggles with the engulfing natures of modern cities, their buildings of uniformity and reflection threatening to control and obliterate the subject in their hugeness. The architecture of modernity moves from the tapering scale of Gothic to a Biblical scope, elevating ideas of “space and its earthly precipitate, architecture” ^[17] , and exacerbating sensory engagement through sheer monumentality. These new “markers in the city fabric...agents of memory” ^[18] are imbued with that collective awareness, and so could have a calculated effect on the individual who experiences “myself in the city, and the city exists through my embodied experience. The city and my body supplement and define each other. I dwell in the city and the city dwells in me.” ^[19] The individual within the city, and the city of the individual make for that unstable identity which is in constant flux before the city’s faceless authority and invisible mechanisms, each building able to symbolise the oppressive blocks and cycles of the modern machine. Noir often concerns itself with the effect of the modern on the individual, and cities distilled to architecture create perfect arenas to play out these anxieties. The facade becomes important in modern architecture, as with many ‘skyscrapers’ this is uniform, blank, suggesting indifference and hidden agendas; buildings too have a gaze. The bureaucracy of modern systems, parodied most fully in Kafka often appears in noir, with protagonists existing very much outside the city systems, whose internal workings are symbolized in twisting institutional corridors, monotony and repetition constructing that faceless anonymity perceived as pulling strings. The beginning of ‘Falling Angel’ ^[20] , with its typical “green” and “grey”, “inside, the place was all hospital” sets up the conspiracy in its corridors and lack of windows.

            It can be seen that the grouping of styles into concentrated space in cities contributes significantly to the anxious effects, the interplay of architecture with its surrounds; rather than landscape, the city condenses effect by crowding styles together. Le Corbusier likens this relationship of “transcendent space” to a “sounding board, resonating and reverberating with the ‘plastic acoustics’ set up by the natural and man-made objects that inhabited it”; architecture contributing to “the release of aesthetic emotion (that) is a special function of space.” ^[21] This affecting whole becomes powerfully hectic in cities as buildings loom around, varying heights and styles combating, and the visual space pregnant. In film this effect can be further exacerbated via the compressed frame: there is no freedom to avert or turn, and the lack of peripherals makes for a dense, intense experience of architecture, “unfettered by the material constraints of gravity and daily life.” A predominant effect assimilated by the noir canon rests in the ‘asceticising’ anxiety of these modern spaces; as cinema places portions of reality in a box for the individual, so these spaces can alienate and individuate; the loneliness of the crowd seems to combine both spatial phobias. The isolation of characters such as Harry Angel is created by the city spaces and the separating blocks of architecture; apartments, streets; “caught up in the vast crowd and surrounded by the electric pyrotechnics of the spectaculars, I felt my past sloughing away.” ^[22] The narrative makes this loss of identity literal, as Welles’ ‘The Trial’ seems to insinuate with the shot near the end of K. standing before a projector within a projector, his silhouette part of the shadow of the architecture, image projected on body and wall alike, he is lost like a chameleon, self dissolved into the wall. Fiction takes up these anxieties of society and individual and builds its cities upon their foundations, creating phobic styles reminiscent of Expressionism but grounded in dusty realities where “nihilistic architecture disengages and isolates the body, instead of attempting to reconstruct a cultural order, it makes a reading of collective signification impossible.” ^[23] The architecture of noir’s cities has its blueprints in cultural fears and desires, yet detaches itself in the hands of the author to take on its own visual journey, individuality entering to suppress its image in the characters.

            Noir cities as arenas of anxiety woven by representations of architecture can be explored further in the architectural uncanny; unhomely modern buildings that create that “spatial condition of the devoured subject.” ^[24] The doubled space of cinematic architecture has in its doppelganger effect “the possibility of disclosing the inner menacing or enigmatic meanings of everyday objects” ^[25] . Textual spaces “possess an architectonics of their own, all the more special for its ambiguous status between textual and social domains...buildings as analytical instruments.” This progresses from the individual illustrations of Expressionism to a more societal exploration, an inherent characteristic of noir, which often finds route to one through the other, as “anxieties and phantasms of the past (are) relocated to the period’s most representative spatial constructions: the freeway, the suburban house, the glass office tower.” ^[26] Here again the Gothic spires are decapitated, humanity contained below, blocked in rather than reaching beyond the skies. The flat-topped skyscrapers and sheer volume of buildings replace the sky, focussing the human back on itself as the architecture beneath becomes infected with the noir struggles in Ruskinian interplay of shadow. Claustrophobic self-scrutiny results from this cloistering effect, fostering uncanny atmospheres as the norm, rather than the Romantic extraordinary, becomes anxiety-inducing; those “inhuman monoliths currently in municipal favour” ^[27] exemplifying the “unsettling qualities of much contemporary architecture - its fragmented neo-Constructivist forms mimetic of dismembered bodies.” ^[28] The uncanny transfers from Gothic to noir smoothly, as both trap their characters in nightmare halls of mirrored representations.

            Kafka’s fiction provides an uncanny model which tessellates with atmospheres of noir in a departure from Gothic traditions. Less a ‘making strange’ than ‘over-normalising’, his is a revolution of the architecture of language, a “deterritorialization” with the strange simplicity of dreams: “a sobriety that makes language take flight on a straight line”. ^[29] Kafka uses blocks of language and narrative like an architect and anticipates exaggeration or the spaces of critique, only to leave them empty. Proliferation ahead of over-intricacies, like a building with so many windows that our eyes cannot focus on one, his is an uncanny architecture of prose. Since “the collective and social machines bring about a massive deterritorialization of man, Kafka will take this process farther, to the point of an absolute molecular deterritorialization”, with novels full of contiguous rooms, endless corridors and bureaucratic zombies. Deleuze calls his work a “literary machine that will anticipate the precipitations, that will overcome diabolical powers before they become established”, and yet for the characters in his novels, the world around them is a slowly closing bear trap of infinite doorways, uncanny like the noir city in its displaced authority and vast proliferations of series.

            If Gothic architecture is uncanny double of the classical style, modernism perhaps attempts to push away this shadow through its “myth of transparency”. Here Benthamite panopticism is assigned a moral role in society, as buildings are “infinitely extended, and thereby cleansed of all mental disturbance” ^[30] , “dissolved” in space and visually permeable. The dominance of transparency among modern architecture is evident, “functions displayed like anatomical models...the very epitome of social morality” ^[31] , and yet it is surely a failed experiment, these “glass houses of the soul” “gradually discredited by the critique of the universal subject.” We all have abysses to hide, and apparent transparency merely implies to the cynic that these recesses are pushed deeper; it is surely the uncanny which enters once the transparent merely reflects, shows us a double or the imago unreconciled. These mirror buildings are infinitely uncanny, proliferations of selves like Kafka’s K.s; an attempted evasion of an imagined Gorgon, hiding from our own gaze lest we recognise that “conflation of the familiar and the projected.” ‘Falling Angel’ illustrates this treacherous transparency in the final revelation of Cyphre’s identity as Prince of Lies; he is of the glass tower throughout, behind window, sunglasses, windscreen, but has been reflective. Harry is betrayed by openness, his glas (eye) deceived by its semantic double. Uncanny architecture in ‘Falling Angel’ is not limited to critiques of modernist city styles, but also incorporates the Gothic as repressed past attempting to return. The archaic architecture totters between the Cyphre-linked modern buildings, which blind and reflect; the “corbeled-Gothic exclamation point” between “a uniform canyon of brick and masonry to an antiseptic cordillera of glass-walled towers” ^[32] attempts to warn Angel of his double threatening to return. The home which represents Angel as a character is old, not glass, solidly opaque; “red-brick Victorian extravagance” and “the fireplace with its carved black griffins.” The archaic, Gothic arch hides modern fears of repression/opacity which return, though all homes are here unstable as the transparent is deceitful too, skeletons in every closet. The final Gothic architectural symbol of his return of the repressed is the shocking dream architecture image of “an Aztec temple rising abruptly above a crowded plaza, the steep steps slick with blood”, alliteration causing us to trip over the words, slipping on the steps. The anxieties of modern architecture are theorized in the uncanny, highlighted in fiction such as the nightmare blocks of Kafka’s pre-noir, the huge expanses of blank wall in ‘The Trial’ with infinite segmental rooms inside, and the dream architecture of ‘Falling Angel’ where “none of the buildings seemed familiar. They were windowless and very tall’. ^[33] Architecture’s symbolisation of the fears of individual and society can be traced with Vidler in constructions of transparency, or in the assembled Gothic-noir oppressions of Welles’ adaptations.

            Kafka said of his home city that “Prague never lets you go...this dear little mother has sharp claws”, and it is true of the architectural spaces he creates too, noir worlds of uncanniness and anxiety; Lacan’s “paranoiac space” ^[34] . His novel ‘The Castle’ places an architectural symbol heavily at the centre, although we glimpse mere visions and dismembered parts, “a lofty and distant chateau, whose form...symbolises the id”; harking back to Expressionist psychoanalysis. K.’s “wild desire for the segmental castle” develops its potency as symbol, filling empty chambers with the desire and phobias of the character, an abstract to pursue as Angel seeks his dark truth. As in ‘The Trial’, we see the architectural permanence of the Gothic as ultimately representing the immemorial, “unapproachable and unfathomable nature of law and authority” ^[35] and mirrored in ‘Falling Angel’  where the Gothic signifies the truth attempting to make itself seen. For Kafka, the blocks and geometry of form and content are the pillars that support his entire edifices. The “triangulation of the subject” confuses identity through doubling, tripling; an “unlimited schizophrenic proliferation”, whilst “power is not pyramidal as the Law would have us believe, it is segmentary and linear”, power in pillars propping up “desire as a plenitude” ^[36] . Power is linked to blocks and segments, contiguous rooms and corridors; the architecture within the novels sculpts these, and those within the narrative function, a product of power, the “paranoid law of the despot, it imposes...a discontinuous repartition of blocks.” The more natural circle pattern is rejected in favour of architectural blocks, corridors and pillars, Deleuze tracing the blocks that “align themselves on a hallway or corridor. Each one thereby forms a segment, on this unlimited straight line.” Kafka places us all in our own boxes, surrounded by the corridors of authority, self-made cloisters situated along God’s line of free choice, and it mirrors our society too, the religious and racial meta-structures but also the buildings and streets we spend our lives in. ‘Falling Angel’ recurrently references the blocks paced by the protagonist, with the panoptic skyscrapers of Cyphre and his followers towering above as does ‘The Castle’.  Each of Kafka’s blocks has a door onto “the line of the hallway”, a distance from the previous block-doorway, and “contiguous back doors”, though these allegorical accesses to the vein-like corridors where the gears move for the Law are in their turn ridiculed in bureaucratic strangeness by the episode witnessed by K. with the gentlemen in their rooms at the Herrenhof. These physical and mental topographies clung to Kafka much like the claws of Prague, his diaries littered with references to, and images of, “block-arches” and “block-segments”, and Welles takes up the theme in his adaptations. The beginning of ‘The Trial’ sees Law represented by a huge doorway of cumbersome archaic block-architecture, cyclopean stone recalling the Babylon of D.W. Griffith’s ‘Intolerance’, blocks stacked upon each other, and guarded. The voiceover indicates that it is a personal architecture, a doorway for each individual, intended for you and now closed. This is echoed in the shot after the first tribunal, of a great white monolith of a door, K.’s dark figure a mere tiny shadow cast upon its obelisk bulk, a horrifyingly blank permanence where even the handle is far above head height; the architecture dwarfs him excessively in Druidic solemnity, architecture of archway and door representing that ponderous authority so completely.

            The blocks of Kafka are represented as doorways frequently in ‘The Trial’, where all is squared, right angles and lines, but the few windows blankly reflect, and it is the doorways that contain influence, closing each act. Each doorway moved through exaggerates trouble, confusion and hopelessness; the low ceilings crowding the frame, the film inherently claustrophobic. Women are glimpsed often through glass, which has the connotations of apparent openness yet the potential reflectivity; Kafka’s characters often think they can read the women around them perfectly, yet their motivations are quite different. The framings of ‘The Trial’ come to an excessive head in the shack of the artist, where empty square frames hang over all the walls for portraits to capture and contain doubles, where eyes stare in through slats; past right angles and between lines of shadow and light. It becomes a nightmare corridor of pure Expressionist chiaroscuro lines, an extremely claustrophobic space, followed by the incredible shot of K.’s dash through the tunnel, chasing his shadow, light concentrated on the blocks/bricks which make up this corridor before the sudden cut to the trial hall’s agoraphobic space. The “blocks of intensity” ^[37] which make up Kafka’s narratives create edifices where “expression must sweep up content; the same process must happen to form”; his architecture dwelling in both syuzhet and fabula. A departure from Eliot’s fragments, his “refer so much to the imperial transcendence and a hidden unity that certain persons feel that the discontinuous wall will find its only finality in a tower”, those proliferations of authority and law where individuality is lost only able to be ended perhaps, by the strength of a single push, by revolution or tyranny. Klamm is aligned with an occupier of heights such as the tower might attain, but is so distant that his tower is never seen; merely an extension of the Castle. His wild eyrie is too far from the wall to break the chain: “his remoteness, of his impregnable dwelling, of his silence, broken only by cries such as K. had never yet heard, of his downward-pressing gaze.” ^[38]

            The trapping of characters in uncanny blocks of narrative, where “everything is very uncertain and insoluble” is similar to the architectural spaces created by noir writers and filmmakers. Kafka’s is an “architecture of the police state”, a text like “an unbroken facade of brick, thirteen stories high , absolutely uniform in every detail, mechanically executed, with the word control implicit in every aspect” ^[39] ; the critique of this American architecture tessellates well, and dwells on its resemblance to the Cold War efficiency of the Soviets, of the failure of economic prosperity to create a better place. “Homogenization of space weakens the experience of being, and wipes away the sense of place” ^[40] ; noir architecture often appears to critique this trend of modernism, and Kafka’s architecture of form and content too rails against the inhumanity of modernity’s proliferation of series. Whereas the novels of Kafka build their arches of blocks within the mind, the crumbling cuts and long shots of film make visual as a spatial medium, with a “much greater link than theatre with architecture.” ^[41] Noir cinema employs the baroque visual rhyme to great effect, in a particularly architectural manner; allusions made in the mise en scene to later developments, clues for the viewer-detectives to guess at. The doorway of ‘The Trial’ recurs on each supporting pillar like a gargoyle, and the baroque creeps its way into the representations of power along with the Gothic, its “dramatic tension” in how “close...they bring us to the heaven and hell of emotion” ^[42] , as Nietzsche comments. Baroque, with its “symptomatic analysis of forms in tumult”, fits well with noir’s structures and themes, the seething shadows and psyches; the tragic, Expressionist dramas, and “as with many myths surrounding the emergence of modernism, the baroque effect was seen in terms of light and dark, rather as “modernity itself was construed as poised between reason and the abyss of Expressionist exaggeration.” ^[43] Noir characters glitter betwixt these two as well, in the chiaroscuro urban decay of their Carceri-like worlds of enveloping shadow, Pascal’s void on one side and oppressive reason and law on the other. The architecture of ‘The Trial’ and ‘Falling Angel’ criss-crosses its shadows through interiors crowded by railings and Escher-esque stairs, walls lost to abyssal plains of shadow, trapping characters in infinite prisons of light and dark. The characters and authors become, “the artist imprisoned in his own labyrinth - Piranesi as Daedalus”, glimpsing their own plight they write themselves into the terrifying uniformity or the cycles of noir that mirror Minos’ tail.

            Welles’ cinematic interpretations embody the blocks, the baroque, the Gothic Expressionist influences of architecture into concentratedly noir atmospheres, the narratives of Kafka almost Expressionist themselves in their exaggeration of noir-esque situations of oppression. ‘The Third Man’ unites these facets as well as ‘The Trial’; the “archaic stairways, the great ferris-wheel sticking up into the sky, the rhizome sewers that are barely underground, the contiguity of the sewer-pipes...always the infinite paranoiac spiral and the unlimited schizoid line.” ^[44] The architecture creates “the tragedy of the repression of the human in space - in trinity of space, fate and man”, placing Harry Angel in Malebolge, his building of stone with “iron balconies” ^[45] , and in ‘The Trial’ we see the baroque and Expressionist tropes constructing a Carceri Noir, as if painted by Piranesi. Through the representations of geometry and architecture we reach the final shots of ‘The Trial’, K.’s face half light, half shadow, his substance created by an exteriorly controlled illumination. The architecture is Gothic and baroque here behind the judge, those representations of power; domes, pillars, stone filigree; the immemorial stones of religion’s cathedral Law. Still though, we see a pulpit but no spires, the windows tiny and opaque. His place of execution is open; sky, space, rocks unshaped by man; natural. It is agoraphobic, more truly than any other space in the film, with its low, wide angles, finally away from the architecture of authority. On his way to death, K. is marched past a series of circles; a shock after so much of straight lines and right angles. The realisation is of the cyclicality of these noir traps, finally after following the lines and walls for so long, beyond the doorway is the circle of beginning and end, “the serpent swallowing its own tail...a symbol of the geometric perfection of the universe”, and of noir’s cycles.

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Bibliography

Botting, Fred, (2001) The Gothic. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer.

Burke, Edmund, (1990) A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix, (2006) Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. London: University of Minnesota Press.

Dimendberg, Edward, (2004) Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity. London: Harvard.

Hjortsberg, William, (1980) Falling Angel. London: Arrow.

Kafka, Franz, (1972) The Castle. Middlesex: Penguin.

Pallasmaa, Juhani, (2005) The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses. London: Wiley-Academy.

Ruskin, John, (1901) The Seven Lamps of Architecture. London: Ballantyne Press.

Vidler, Anthony,  (1992) The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely. Massachusetts: Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

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www.theliterarylink.com/piranesi, [accessed April 2011] De Quincey on Piranesi’s Carceri D’Invenzione.