Never try to convey your idea to the audience – it is a thankless and senseless task.  Show them life, and they’ll find within themselves the means to assess and appreciate it.

– Andrei Tarkovski

One of the criticisms made of cinema is its distance from its audience.  Here, distance is defined as physical detachment; the passive perception of luminous information projected on a screen or other device.  In response, the filmmaker has sought to shock the viewers and denaturalize their experience in order to wake them up from their blasé slumber.  Avant-garde film, in particular, has sought ways through which to challenge the conventions of viewing through techniques that manipulate the image, narrative, time, experience, etc.  It has attempted to revive, through various means, that primal moment of 1896 when fear and terror gripped the movie going audience upon seeing for the first-time a train approaching on screen.

Architects have been fascinated with film since its earliest moments; in the relationship between time-space and in its ability to capture the urban environment.  In some cases, the filmic medium became a metaphor for the movement of the body through space and of new ways of seeing and organizing the world.  In others, the mechanical eye of the camera was understood as a metaphor for modernity itself and of the new inhabitants of the metropolitan environment.  Collaborations between filmmakers and architects had also been a large part of the investment by both mediums in each other: architects had been called on to design the spaces and worlds within which the actions take place.  This role, however, gradually declined as the camera became more able to, itself, create or capture distinct visions of space and the world. 

The function of this studio is to explore the role of avant-garde film and its potentials to generate new perceptions of the world; to challenge and displace; to shock and to heighten awareness.  The aim of the studio is to explore and to give form and architectural intentions to avant-gardist filmic techniques and technologies through representational and discursive strategies (textual, graphic, three-dimensional, composite, filmic, etc.).  As a point of departure, we will utilize representation and film to alter and modify our perceptions and understandings of the world and of lived experience itself.

Programmatically, the studio will articulate these investigations through a proposed Center for Avant-Garde Films for National University (UNAM) in Mexico City.