Film as Architecture
The Fluid Spaces of Etta Lilienthal
By Charles Mudede with Alicia Dara
There is a good reason why Jerry Garcia, a local architect, greatly admires Lilienthal’s work, it is in essence architectural. What is essential to architecture is the relationship between the human body and space or a volume. This relationship is not easy to coordinate or construct. Often the space/volume dominates the body or the body dominates the space/volume. In Lilienthal’s set designs for theater, dance, and film, we see a space that enhances the presence and movement of bodies within it. The space is not invisible, it is clearly crafted, colored, present, designed. We feel the effect of a space, the mood of a room, the terror or calm of a wall. In short, her spaces do not dissolve into the background but nor do they overwhelm the body. Both are present and have a relationship—the essence of architecture.
In a recent column in The Seattle Times, “Three things our writers love this week,” the veteran critic Michael Upchurch, wrote this about the locally produced film Police Beat (2005): “Writer Charles Mudede and director Robinson Devor do inspired work here. But cinematographer Sean Kirby steals the show.” But there’s a fourth inspired person Upchurch should have mentioned: Etta Lilienthal. She designed the interior spaces that Kirby photographed. And her contribution is significant. With the help of her healthy, visual imagination, rooms were dislocated from their stable places and made to be more fluid, more transitional, more organic. And this was an effect the director of the film, Devor, and I wanted—to visually feel that the movement between outside and inside is dream-smooth. This effect was also successfully employed by the makers of Cthulhu, one of the four films Lilienthal has designed so far. The room and the window, the internal and the external, the subjective and the objective are not apart or opposed but unified.
Because this approach dominates the epic look of Cthulhu and Police Beat, and because Lilienthal played a central role in designing this look, it can be argued that it is the aesthetic (or essence) of Seattle’s new cinema.
Set shot from Cthulhu. Photo by Etta Lilienthal
Q: How would you describe your approach to your craft?
A: I think about art-making in pictures that appear in my mind. I reach into all that I have seen in books, museums, travels, life, to find potent images that resonate with the subject matter. Film is often more grounded in reality that theater or dance, so there is a particular real life kind of research I do to collect information that the collective unconscious can recognize and relate to. I tend to begin abstractly and end more realistically. The details of design are often too subtle to perceive or so massive in scale the view is overwhelmed. These dualities fascinate me.
Q: What are some of your major influences?
A: Major dance and theater artists like Pina Bausch and Robert Wilson; visual artists and painters Anselm Kiefer, Alexander Calder, Rothko. Starting with nothing and adding…
Q: Are there any films in particular that you admire?
A: I admire the lush theatricality of Peter Greenaway’s films like The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover; Bladerunner; Wild, Wild World of Animals and Nova.
Q: What are you currently working on?
A: As Production Designer, I am in the development stage for The Sidewalk Never Ends, a feature film directed by Travis Senger and filmed by Sean Porter. I am also in scenic collaboration with choreographer Maureen Whiting on our next “dance piece” The Myth of Us, which will premiere next spring.
