Film Representations of Cities and Architecture: Characterizing the Social Stratification of Living Spaces

Abstract

Narrative films can serve an important social role in how people understand and make their own judgments of cities, urban spaces, and their lived experiences. Similar to documentaries, narrative films can reflect some aspect of real life but can better immerse the audience into the stories of those created worlds. This allows for a more powerful effect in prompting people to reconsider their living spaces and conditions. As architecture is limited to physical space and is experienced in real time, films can tell stories and offer critiques of spaces as they are able to manipulate time and space. This creates a feedback loop where architects can learn from filmmakers who observe our built world—ultimately seeing the everyday world from a new perspective.

In this paper, I will be using films as primary case studies of the social stratification of living: Parasite and Snowpiercer, directed by Bong Joon Ho, City of God, directed by Fernando Meirelles, and The Second Mother, directed by Anna Muylaert. These films will be analyzed through methods of image and media analysis as well as through drawings. These filmmakers serve as architects in creating spaces that tell the stories of social divide through the craft of filmmaking. Parasite and City of God reveal a vertical social stratification of living with the rich and the poor being on the top or bottom of the hierarchy of spaces, whereas Snowpiercer explores a horizontal arrangement. However, while some arrangements of living spaces are linear, others fall out of the linear stratification and mirror the complex social arrangements of lived spaces. I will bring into context the state of the urban slums of South Korea and the cities and favelas of Brazil: São Paulo and the favela of the City of God in Rio de Janeiro. Each chapter highlights a particular phenomenon observed. Chapter One deals with the domestic hierarchy of vertical spaces and will discuss "invading spaces" in Parasite as well as an analysis of “challenging spaces” in The Second Mother, as both films deal with the verticality of a domestic space and what happens when someone enters and breaks the social barriers of servant and served spaces. Chapter Two discusses the “open world” film that is City of God, and how that is also an inverse of the verticality structure that is discussed in the films of Chapter One. Chapter three deals with Snowpiercer as a horizontal stratification of social class as well as creating a dystopian new city within a train in a “closed world” film, contrasting from Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite as a vertical film. All films discussed have a strong architectural sensibility in their filmmaking and include people entering spaces where they typically do not belong. By seeking to combine the disciplines of film and architecture, we seek to ask: Who is really the parasite?