A Different Kind of Thing

Yesterday in Venice, director Wim Wenders premiered From Inside Out – The Architecture of Peter Zumthor, a 114-minute documentary made over fourteen years.¹ Wenders filmed Zumthor’s buildings in native 3D, following visitors through his early houses and the new LACMA galleries. His reason for choosing 3D is unusually explicit: a screen is two-dimensional, and any attempt to represent space on it is »make-believe«. That, for him, is what finally makes the screen »go away and become a window, open to infinity«.²

»That instability may be a condition of artistic progress: an artwork becomes interesting, sometimes, exactly when we get unsure which system it belongs to«

I wasn’t in Venice yesterday, I haven’t seen the film, and I have no idea whether Wenders achieved what he set out to do. (Pina, his 2011 dance documentary, certainly explored Pina Bausch’s choreography in novel ways.³) But the ambition itself is interesting. He’s pushing cinema beyond one of the things that has conventionally defined it, the flat screen, toward something that looks suspiciously like the art form his new film is about: architecture.

Artists have always done this: painting escaping flatness through perspective; poetry escaping metre; music escaping tonality, then harmony, then intentional sound itself. These were never just new techniques added to an existing system. At some point, the thing being changed was the system itself.

Art critic Rosalind Krauss described something like this in her 1979 essay »Sculpture in the Expanded Field«, where sculpture stopped being adequately described by its own category and began to occupy a structured territory between sculpture, architecture, and landscape.⁴ Not because artists had started mixing disciplines, but because the disciplines’ own definitions had become unstable. That instability may be a condition of artistic progress: an artwork becomes interesting, sometimes, exactly when we get unsure which system it belongs to. Is this still music? Still painting? Still architecture? That’s not a failure of classification. Typically, it’s evidence that something is happening at the edge of a category.

Evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis showed that new species don’t only arise through the slow accumulation of small mutations. Sometimes one organism simply incorporates another’s genome, and something genuinely new results; not a better version of the old thing, but a different kind of thing entirely.⁵ That’s probably closer to what Wenders is attempting: not cinema getting better at depicting architecture, but cinema trying to absorb architecture’s own qualities – depth, presence, the sense of being inside a space.

Art has its own versions of this. Joyce didn’t just write better novels. Cage didn’t just compose unusual music. Bausch didn’t just choreograph new dances. Each put pressure on the conditions that made their practice recognisable as literature, or music, or dance.

The same thing happens in architecture. Zumthor’s buildings aren’t primarily designed to keep people dry and warm. They operate within the category of architecture while pushing toward something else: atmosphere, memory, sound, temperature, material presence. Push the same operation far enough, and a building could become a diagram, a dramatisation, or a dance. At some point, the category changes.

Film critic André Bazin described a stranger version of the same idea: a »total cinema«, forever moving toward an ever more complete reproduction of reality.⁶ The ambition contains a paradox. If cinema ever became an exact double of reality, it would stop being cinema. That gap isn’t a flaw waiting to be engineered away. It’s part of what makes cinema cinema.

This is perhaps what a medium actually is: not everything it can do, but the particular territory in which its possibilities remain recognisable as itself. Art forms don’t change by politely extending themselves, but by periodically getting strange enough that we have to ask what they still are.

Margulis’s point isn’t that symbiosis makes a better organism. It’s that a successful one doesn’t arrive labelled as a new species – something new simply exists, and only afterward does anyone decide how much of the old organism is still recognisable in it, and what to call what’s left. A system doesn’t advance by staying short of its own edge, or by simply crossing that edge. It advances by crossing it and leaving the categorisation unsettled behind it: becoming a different kind of thing without waiting for anyone to name it.

Wenders wants his screen to go away and become a window. If it ever actually did, would that still be cinema? Maybe. Maybe not. The only certain thing is that we would be watching the whole world argue about it for years, unable to agree – because that’s what creative expansion actually looks like, from the inside.

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