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TWO FILMS
ARCHITECTURES D'AUJOURD'HUI by Pierre Chenal, special music by Albert Jeanneret.
Chenal has accomplished the difficult task of making a film of movement with static modern architecture without resorting to the soulless methods of the Skyscraper Symphony school. Chenal is sufficiently unFrench to be objective, sufficiently French not to miss lyrical beautv.
From churches by the Perret brothers the film swings to streets by Mallet-Stevens and then to a modern town at Pessac near Bordeaux. It pictorialises the theory that an aeroplane is a machine built to fly in, a motorcar is a machine built to drive in, therefore a house should be a machine to live in. Thus follow, of course, three houses built by Le Corbusier. The house at Garches has very long windows to ensure the maximum of light, Chenal catches the movement of a modern car in the drive. At Ville d'Avray, we see a house built in the midst of nature, where trees, terraces and gardens form an esthetic whole — a moment's gymnastics symbolise freedom. At Poissy the house is on stilts to prevent humidity, and the Solarium is the way to sun and good health.
Diminuendo : the narrowest old street in Paris. Delightful to look at but not to live in. Crescendo : Corbusier would destrov the old centre of the town and turn Pans into an immense park with glass skyscrapers elevated at every 400 yards. Climax. A Corbusier model skyscraper photographed in the sun against a natural background — a poetic and objective glimpse into the future.
Chenal is his own cameraman and works entirely with a Kinamo; the reproduced stills are unretouched enlargements from his actual films, the precise and delicate realisation of which are as pleasing as the subjects so carefully chosen.
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BATIR by Pierre Chenal with interesting synchronised music by Albert Jeanneret.
The methods used for the construction of a house are shown in detail. All the raw material is shaped in the work-shops and has merely to be erected on the spot, thus what was previously a work of years becomes a work of months. " But " as Chenal himself says and shows, " the official ' architects ' stick upon this splendid steel framework their awful stone ornaments and thus reduce the size of the window frames." Watching upon the screen the new Berlitz school in Paris, an example of this " ruined " modern architecture, I recollected that when this monstrosity was being built last year, I had thought on seeing its hideous pillars on a lorry outside, that these were being removed from a previous building in order to clean up Paris — instead of which ....
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