The Bartlett Film Exchange is an opportunity for students and staff to present films at evening screenings and explore the relationship between film and the built environment.
Below are upcoming film screenings which are open to all.
Contact bartlettstudentexp@ucl.ac.uk if you have any suggestions.
Blocul (The Block)
17:30 - 19:30 10 November 2016
From neighbourly disputes over garlic-heavy cooking to memories of Ceaușescu’s heatless winters, this film explores the rich social and material universe of a Romanian apartment building. It follows the story of the block’s administrator, in his effort to mediate relationships between neighbours and maintain peace and order. In doing so, it crayons the rich nuances of the inhabitants’ everyday lives. The block comes to life, as its inhabitants constantly reshape it to defy the passing of time, while its failing infrastructure encroaches on their neighbourly relations. This is a film about people’s homes, and the spaces in between. In those spaces, the pipes don’t only carry hot water – they carry meanings from one inhabitant to the next.
The Dilapidated Dwelling, Patrick Keiller
18:00 - 20:00 16 November 2016
A rare screening of Patrick Keiller’s 2000 film about the UK’s housing problem. Before the housing crisis had a name, Keiller was investigating the state of our housing stock. He wanted to know why, in a 21st century economy, we can’t built cheap houses and instead rely on aging, unaffordable building stock.
To find out he interviewed thinkers and architects including as Doreen Massey, Cedric Price and Saskia Sassen. However, he was making no ordinary documentary. Keiller is best known for his political travelogues - London (1994), Robinson in Space (1997) and Robinson in Ruins (2010) - which examine history and culture through the experiences of a fictional narrator.
The Pruitt-Igoe Myth
17:30 - 19:30 24 November 2016
Pruitt-Igoe, a mid-20th century public housing project in St. Louis, is commonly held as an archetype for the failure of publicly funded initiatives. Its dramatically captured demise and demolishment continues to service this myth. Former residents dispel the widely circulated narrative by highlighting the social and systemic forces that led to the estate’s destruction a mere two decades after it was erected.
London Orbital
17:30 - 19:30 29 November 2016
In the months leading up to the turning of the millennium, the writer Iain Sinclair decided that best way to counteract what he termed the ‘mendacity’ of that celebration would be to walk around London’s orbital motorway, the M25. This film follows his route, but chooses to do so in more conventional fashion: by car. In the mantric repetition of driving the motorway, it finds the non-places of London’s hinterlands strangely haunted by the pastoral and the ghosts of English national identity.
Time to Linger: The Long Take in the Architectural Film
17:30 - 19:30 08 December 2016
Join us for a Bartlett Film Exchange screening of three films produced by Sander Hölsgens and Anna Ulrikke Andersen, PhD candidates in the Bartlett School of Architecture, part of the Bartlett Film+Place+Architecture Doctoral Network.
The long take allows for close observation, a reconsideration of time, and an intimacy with, and knowledge of, architecture. The films presented propose an aesthetics of duration and motion to feel and rethink the built environment.
Oh Whistle and I’ll Come to You
17:30 - 19:30 17 January 2017
An eccentric academic on holiday in Norfolk digs up rather more than he bargained for when he uncovers a bone whistle protruding from the ground in a graveyard overlooking the sea. A chilling adaptation of a tale by the undisputed master of the English ghost story, M. R. James, this is as atmospheric a depiction of the East Anglian landscape as any committed to film.