The criticism of cine-drama and archi-drama: Dziga Vertov and Rem Koolhaas

Aim of this dissertation is to bring into view the traces of dramatic canons, of which have their origins in Antiquity, on logical, aesthetical and epistemological rhetoric of architectural discourse by looking through Dziga Vertov's critiques of dramatic form in early cinema and Rem Koolhaas's critiques of conventional architecture in western culture. Drama is just not a mere entertainment-oriented production of contemporary culture industry. Instead, it has deep-seated roots in human history for two and a half thousand years as an ancient narrative tradition and still plays an important role in articulating things today. Even now drama is the foremost employed narrational typology as an underlying structure not only by the film makers but also by the most of art and design-oriented professions for its aesthetical and logical rules crafted elaborately to eliminate any weakness in rhetorical power to persuade its audience. For the famous Ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle, dramatic narrative in logical means must be possible according to necessity for being cognitively correct and credible in parallel with the aesthetic rule emphasizes harmony, rhythm and unity for being emotionally correct to keep the audiences focused lest losing their attention. At the end, all these obligations are to shape the influence and effects of drama on cognition and emotion of the audiences for the sake of experiencing "catharsis" which is a kind of relief that can be obtained through the hermeneutic practice of empathy. According to Hans-Georg Gadamer, Ancient drama or as he called, "play", is the very origin of the work of art without any exception, including architecture despite the statistical differences among the architects. But it doesn't mean that there are no exceptions to that which can be best viewed in the case of Dziga Vertov and Rem Koolhaas who can be count amongst those exceptional figures. A systematic literature review was conducted of studies that belongs especially to Vertov and Koolhaas in the field of discourse and text. However, no intention given, or attention paid to show relevance of practice to theory of Vertov or Koolhaas throughout the research. So, excluding their body of works except theoretical ones, just their discourses have been compared. At this point, it has been recognized that there are two intersections that acts as vanishing points of a non-dramatic perspective. First one is the displacement of the emphasize on the dramatic 'plot' which constitutes the credibility of the narrative by determinist reasoning with the emphasize on the indeterminist faculties attributed to the notion of daily life. Second one is displacement of the emphasizes on the unity of perfect composition with the emphasizes on the fragmentary work of montage. During the comparison mentioned above, it has been realized that there was a need to clarify dramatic architecture in a new term, like Vertov's term describing dramatic cinema as "cine-drama", so that term 'archi-drama' was created by combining 'architecture' and 'drama'. Introduction part of the dissertation is mostly dedicated to show the possibility of architecture as a narrational system abling to compare the critiques on 'cine-drama' with 'archi-drama' thanks to structuralist paradigm. Additionally, borrowed from dramatic arts such as theater and cinema the principles, notions and elements that enable architecture to be considered as dramatic also have been mentioned in introduction. Among these similarities of the elements, the most remarkable one that can be recognized easily between the notion of 'plot' or generally known as dramatic 'scenario' and architectural scenario. Second one, less remarkable but not least is between the notion of dramatic 'theme' and 'theme' of design. And thirdly, the least recognizable one is the similarity between the notion of dramatic persona and the notion of user of architectural design. Furthermore, the similarities between elements of cine-drama and archi-drama mentioned above, there are also similarities between aesthetical, logical and epistemological principles must be considered in the light of not only Aristotelian aesthetic sensibilities such as the mythic search of absolute perfection, unity and harmony in composition, but also Aristotelian logic of reasoning and empirical credibility articulated in terms of probability and necessity. And lastly, it can be asserted that the way a dramatic play or film and dramatic architecture supposed to be experienced and understood through hermeneutic practice of empathy are similar in the epistemological sense as they both prefer to configure a perspective and a persona to be placed within. Despite all these similarities mentioned above, it is still too hard to recognize dramatic narrative system that has a big influence on design process for it has been mainstream for a long time enough to being supposed as the natural way of constructing any kind of expression whether concrete or abstract. Given that" it has been seen useful to remind Vertov's "cine-eye" and Koolhaas's "zero-degree architecture" for clarifying alternative ways of dramatical thinking. "Cine-eye" is a term which is used by Vertov for his critical cinematographic approach. Most dominant features of "cine-eye" are lack of dramatic plot or scenario and personae. With introducing "cine-eye" Vertov explicitly targets "cine-drama". With the lack of plot, which is the sequences of actions with understandable reasons that establishes cognitive logic of the narrative, and personae, subject of those actions, "cine-eye" restricts audiences from fulfilling emphatic experience and its terminus "catharsis". Whereas "cine-eye" was established a decade ago, it is still among the most radical and effective criticisms. Following Vertov's critical manifesto, "cine-eye", another key term to remember is "zero-degree architecture" which is used by Koolhaas for criticizing dramatic conventions in architecture such as "plot" and determinist reasoning. With "zero-degree architecture", Koolhaas points out the importance of nullifying the peremptory side of architecture written with capital letter A. In contrast to architecture with capital letter A, "zero-degree architecture" is both "typical" and "generic" offering "nothing" so that everything out of it can be gotten. In fact, according to Koolhaas, it is not even architecture, but, termed "post-architecture". The first chapter is a closer look at the historical backgrounds of dramatic and non-dramatic arts. It seems crucial to provide a review of both the link between Antiquity and dramatic art as well as the link between emergence of metropolis and non-dramatic avant-garde art at the beginning of the twentieth century for going deeper into the subject. It then goes on to the aesthetical, epistemological and ontological conflict between classical art and "avant-garde" art. Whereas Antique drama cannot be understood without the notions of hermeneutic practice of empathy and meaning or classic unity and perfect harmony of composition, the metropolitan non-dramatic avant-garde art is intentionally autistic, meaningless and fragmentary. The roots of conflict between dramatic and non-dramatic art or in other words classical and avant-garde art, can be clarified by looking into a time period that covers the first quarter of the twentieth century after the influence of industrialization on western capital cities being transformed into a new form of inhabited place called 'metropolis', emergence of which as a cultural phenomenon naturally attracted attention of many researchers from various disciplines and avant-garde artists. This leads to the appearance of two discursive patterns which are fragmentary work of montage and chaotic daily life in the field of aesthetic and aestheticization. Given that this chapter is divided into two sub-chapters: 'Aesthetic of the Metropolis' and 'Aestheticization of Metropolis'. In the first sub-chapter, titled as 'the aesthetic theories of metropolis' is examined through associating theories from sociology, psychology, literature and philosophy studying on the experience of modern daily life in metropolis by Walter Benjamin, Henri Bergson, Sigmund Freud, Georg Simmel with the concepts employed such as "sub-conscious", "flâneur", "blasé", "shock". The second sub-chapter, titled as 'the aestheticization of metropolis' is examined through the theory of avant-garde movements in art that employed concepts such as montage, daily life, subconscious and so forth to produce art categorized as non-dramatic, non-figurative, non-representational and such by the theories of Bürger, Adorno, Gadamer. Classic dramatic art which was adopted in Renaissance through Europe and had flourished during the Victorian Era. But just as at the beginning of the 20th century, illusionist mimetic representations of dramatic art started to be denied by avant-garde artists. Moreover, Avant-garde artist such as cubists, Dadaists, futurists and surrealists not only rejected the supposed purpose of classical art as an accurate imitation of world, but also meaning and "catharsis" with dismantling the naturalist perspective through which audiences supposed to be seeing the world is established by artist. At this point, it must be pointed out that by rejecting the notion of meaning and employing montage technique, avant-garde art not only objects to the Aristotelian aesthetical and logical canons but also objects epistemological and ontological propositions of hermeneutic, too. This can be illustrated briefly by a closer look at Gadamer's analogy of dramatic 'play' as origin of the art work or art historian Peter Bürger's theory of 'avant-garde' and 'montage' in which Bürger explains the process of understanding of the meaning of the classical art work according to the proposition called hermeneutical circle which states that the whole of the composition is understood from its parts and their parts from the whole in perfect unity. In the third chapter, Vertov's and Koolhaas's criticism and displacement of two principles of dramatic structures in cinematographic and architectonic discourses analyzed comparatively regarding the promotion of montage and daily life. The first principle that replaced with montage is the aesthetical principle of unity while the second one that is replaced with indeterminism attributed to the daily life is the logical principle of probable necessity. Instead of probable necessity of 'plot', which is based on Aristotle's logic and its modern interpretation, employed as a determinant of life presented in dramatic projection., Vertov and Koolhaas suggest surrendering to the indeterminant and chaotically creative nature of the daily life. Likewise, instead of unity and harmony between parts and whole of a composition, such as classical unity in drama as known unity of action, unity of place, and unity of time, Vertov and Koolhaas offer montage as an emancipatory method to be able to articulate without following the syntactical and semantical principals of Aristotle's aesthetic and its modern interpretation. In the final chapter of this dissertation, after listing similarities and differences between "cine-drama" and 'archi-drama' the main findings of comparison and the principal issues and suggestions which have arisen in analyzing the critiques on drama of these two sensational figures from different fields comparatively are provided as a conclusion.