Marcel Bächtiger

From the Dark Chamber of the

Lumière Brothers
Le Corbusier in the Reflection of Cinematic Light

Last night I was in the kingdom of shadows. If you only knew how strange it is to be there! 39
Maxim Gorki, Lumière’s Cinematograph, 1896.

Dark Beginnings

The birth of cinema is commonly dated to the 28th of December 1895, when the
Lumière brothers first projected moving images for a paying audience in Paris.1 In
the Lumière’s cinématographe, which in a few steps could transform from a camera
into a projector, film found both a manageable apparatus and – more importantly –
its homeland. When the early French film theorist Ricciotto Canudo stated in 1922
that the seventh art was born from the “chambre noire des frères Lumière”,2 the term
“dark chamber” obviously referred to the camera obscura. But it meant not only the
technologically advanced recording device (the film camera), but also – on a larger
scale, so to speak – the basement of the Grand Café in Paris, where from 1895 on-
wards more and more curious people gathered to watch the one-minute films that
were projected by a bright beam of light onto a screen (the cinema).3
It is worth knowing that this basement on the Boulevard des Capucines was a
modest establishment: a narrow staircase led down to an entrance hall with toilets
and then to a low room without natural light, for which, until then, the director of the
Grand Café had found no use. For the film presentations, the room was filled with
a hundred chairs, a turnstile was mounted to monitor attendance, and a ventilator
was installed as there was no supply of fresh air.4 As if history anticipated Jean-Louis
Baudry’s famous analogy of 1975 between the film-experience and Plato’s parable of
the cave,5 already in its first realization the cinema manifested itself as an underground
cavern without reference to the external world, a bleak space in whose darkness the
only visible thing was a fleeting projection of flickering light.
“Last night I was in the kingdom of shadows…”: It remains provisionally to
be noted, that the first steps of cinematography literally took place in the dark – a
necessary condition for film, which in and of itself was for Canudo nothing other
MAR C E L BÄC HTI G E R

_ Figure 1.
Le Corbusier, La Chapelle
du Notre-Dame-du-Haut,
Ronchamp, 1955 (in E. Nagy,
Le Corbusier, Akadémiai
Kiadó, Budapest 1977, p. 24,
© FLC / 2014, ProLitteris,
Zurich).

40

than light: “the play of lights, harmonization of the conditions of lights ...”.6 At least
until the advent of television, which at once ushered in a different kind of image
production and an altered receptive behavior, the act of seeing a film must therefore
be understood as a genuine experience of light.

“The only two Arts of our Time”

When Charles-Edouard Jeanneret set out in 1911 on his voyage d’orient, the intense
play of light on the Blumentag (flower day) in Vienna did not remind him of an
impressionist painting, but – not so surprisingly in view of the previously noted
observations – of the cinema. In his notes, Jeanneret described the streets decorated
with flowers as “a stunning procession that passes between the black colonnade of
tree trunks bearing an immense barrel vault that recedes as far as the eye can see …
The eye becomes confused, a little perturbed by this kaleidoscopic cinema where
dance the most dizzying combination of colors”.7
Treated here as a casually interjected metaphor, film later took a much more prom-
inent place in Jeanneret’s thinking, once he had reinvented himself under the name
Le Corbusier. The Parisian avant-garde of the 1920s considered cinematography as
 FROM TH E DAR K CHAM B E R OF TH E LU M IÈR E B ROTH E RS

holding a “messianic promise”,8 and, each with its own focus, the varying artistic cur-
rents of the epoch all laid claim to this new medium.9 Modern architecture was no ex-
ception. In 1928, Le Corbusier stated: “Cinema and architecture are the only two arts
of our time”.10 And Sigfried Giedion wrote with view to the buildings of the former:
“Still photography does not capture them clearly. One would have to accompany the
eye as it moves: only film can make the new architecture intelligible!”11 That of all the
arts it is architecture which stands closest to film, was on the other hand the opinion of
the filmmaker René Clair, because – and this was not meant as a contradiction – “film’s
aesthetic ... comprises only one word: movement”.12 Comparing such statements with
Jeanneret’s note of 1911, two alterations are remarkable: first, the shift from cinema to
film, and second, the explicit emphasis on the aspect of movement.
Obviously, the mobilization of the gaze, the penetration of space or the fluid
montage of sequences of images are all phenomena which apply both to film and
to the spatial conceptions of modern architecture, in particular to Le Corbusier’s
promenade architecturale, the higher goal of which was always the réaction poétique
induced by the perception of space and volume en mouvement.
However, this parallelism is also an over-simplification. When Giedion associ-
ates the movement of filmic images with modernity’s conception of space, he does 41
so by deliberately focusing on an especially “applicable” aspect of cinematography,
which was then intended to broadly demonstrate the close relationship between
the two disciplines. Other aspects, whose integration into the ideology of modern
architecture would have been more problematic or would have even contradicted
it, were excluded from the interpretation – a process that re-resonates in current
architectural research, which at the latest since the 1990s is concerned with the
rediscovered topic of “film and architecture”. The affinity to the “filmic gaze” af-
firmes – then as now – architecture’s modernity.13
By merely shifting one’s focus from film to the cinema (which, in view of the
fact that film and cinema until the middle of the century formed an inseparable
perceptive entity, is more than legitimate) a far more ambiguous picture emerges. In
fact, it is almost impossible to imagine a type of space that contradicts the modernist
paradigm of “light, air and openness”14 as decidedly as the movie theatre – a dark
vessel, completely isolated from the outside world, in whose sometimes stuffy atmo-
sphere people are condemned to on-going passivity. Only thanks to the darkness of
the cinema, however, could film become that “mysterious art”15 which was related
to hypnosis, dreaming and the occult by the French film theory of the 1920s – a
discourse which was even reflected in Ozenfant’s and Le Corbusiers’s Purist journal
“L’Esprit Nouveau”,16 but was largely ignored when the parallel between film and
architecture was constructed.
As soon as we reposition film back into its concrete spatial context, the
much-asserted affinity between the two disciplines emerges as a contradictory and
sometimes problematic relationship, which – especially with regard to the themes
of light and darkness – raises new and unexpected questions. If film really is the
“modernist art par excellence”17 that influenced the culture of the 20th century
like no other, and if Le Corbusier’s work truly was “filmic from the beginning” and
“unthinkable without photography and film”,18 then what role did the darkness of
the cinema play, a darkness without which it was impossible to show the film?
MAR C E L BÄC HTI G E R

Seeing and Insight

Le Corbusier ascribed a spiritual dimension to light far beyond hygienic concerns.

For him, nothing less than the clarity of thought, the repeatedly invoked esprit de
vérité,19 depended on the presence of light. This spirit of truth can not flourish in
semi-darkness – in black corners, one can not think clearly.20 Instead it appears
only in the building’s precise contours, in forms raised to the status of pure ideas. It
can be easily shown that Le Corbusier’s buildings from the 1920s, from the Atelier
Ozenfant to the Villa Savoye, serve this double objective of seeing and insight: the
visibility of forms in light enables the beholder to grasp their underlying ideas (pro-
vided, of course, he has eyes to see).21
If André Delpeuch, one of the first chroniclers of French cinema, declared “visi-
bilité” the “grande principe”22 of cinematography, or if the director Henri Chomette
claimed that film is entirely made up of “light, rhythm and form”,23 this appears at first
glance to be related to Le Corbusier’s conception of architecture. But while Le Corbusier
reflected on an aesthetic ideal, Delpeuch’s “principle of visibility” was above all a re-
sponse to a practical problem in filmmaking. Because the representation of movement
42 in film required a rapid sequence of images, which in turn required shorter exposure
times than were previously known in photography, in order to make anything visible the
film rolls needed to be exposed to a maximum intensity of light. Under an armada of
floodlights, however, the contrasts disappeared; and to render the forms recognizable
the set designers were obliged to artificially paint in the shadows onto the scenery.24
Thus, when in one of the many metaphors of light that can be found in the film
theories of the time, the filmmaker is identified as a “peintre des lumières”,25 what is
meant is less the painterly lighting arrangement of the setting (for this purpose, the
artistic possibilities were too limited), but rather the way in which the film appears
to the spectator in the cinema. The image is no longer material, but exists only as a
projection of light. This confirms the initially formulated observation that film and
cinema form a dichotomous whole: the visibility of the images in the cinema owes
as much to the light of the projector as to the darkness of the hall.

Far away from Reality

One would certainly not do justice to cinematography if one were to understand the
darkness of the cinema merely as an optical necessity. Quite apart from the fact that
the darkness of the hall cloaked latent desires (for example, some of the Parisian
cinéma-palaces were infamous for the erotic goings-on in their dim aisles), the specific
mode of perception contributed decisively to the fact that the moving image was not
only perceived as a mere technical achievement, but equally as a magical and wonder-
ful phenomenon – as a “merveille”26 or as “magie blanche et noire”.27
In fact, a conspicuous number of texts from early French film theory are con-
cerned more with the cinematic experience as such than with the aesthetic finesse
of the films themselves. This experience is often described as mythical, whereby the
regime of light plays a central role. “The lights go out”, reports for example the young
Luis Buñuel in 1927 in the Spanish journal “Gaceta literaria”, and he goes on to ask:
 FROM TH E DAR K CHAM B E R OF TH E LU M IÈR E B ROTH E RS

_ Figure 2.
Fernando Jacopozzi,
movie theater Cinéma des
Nouvautés – Aubert-Palace,
entrance façade, Paris, 1915,
illumination around 1920
(photo 1925).

43

“Spiritism? Rusty shadows glow anew in a second existence…”.28 Jean Goudal in turn
builds his analysis of cinema as “hallucination consciente” on the description of the
mental state into which the spectator is transposed by the “purring” of the perforated
celluloid in the darkness. “Life in the street outside no longer exists”, he writes in
1925: “Our problems evaporate, our neighbors disappear. Our body itself submits
to a sort of temporary depersonalization which takes away the feeling of its own ex-
istence. We are nothing but two eyes riveted to ten square meters of white canvas”.29
When the light in the hall comes back on, according to René Clair in 1923, one rises:
“Moments ago, people were sitting in a trance”.30
MAR C E L BÄC HTI G E R

Cinematography’s power of suggestion rests, on one hand, on the phenomenon

that the film historian Klaus Kreimeier has described as the actual “novelty, which
film brings to cultural history”, namely the “dialectic of visual richness (of the im-
age) and limited freedom (of the recipient)”.31 On the other hand, however, this
suggestive power feeds on the fact that despite its undoubted novelty the cinematic
experience repeats the ritual mythical “journey”, which already in the distant past
was meant to foster what Goudal described as a “depersonalisation”, and with it a
change in consciousness.32 The threshold between light and gloom appears in the
initiation rites in human history in many different forms, but always refers to that
“mythical sense of space”, which according to Ernst Cassirer “everywhere emanates
from the contrast between day and night, light and darkness”.33 These correlations
are unlikely to have escaped Le Corbusier, who remained throughout his life influ-
enced by the esoteric writings of the turn of the century.34
The transition from the street to the cinema, the slow darkening of the hall
at the beginning of the show, the brief moment in complete darkness before the
events run their course on the canvas, then, at the end, the abrupt flare of the hall
lights and the return to reality – all this puts film in a context, which not only assists
44 the optical illusion, but also raises visiting the cinema to the level of a revelatory
experience.35 At this, also the illuminated façade of the cinema plays its part, giving
spectators a faint hint of those unseen worlds into which the light of the projector
will transport them. Le Corbusier was well aware of the hypnotic quality of the Fig. 2
cinematic experience and the shock of the subsequent return to sober reality. The
sudden withdrawal from the world of film to the “pavement of everyday and banal
life” was for him a dismal experience: “There’s nothing left! Nothing’s happening…
It’s despairing to turn one’s back on the screen like this… that’s what cigarettes
were invented for”.36
The following words of Le Corbusier can easily be linked to this context: “I
went to the cinema”, he wrote in 1918 to his friend William Ritter shortly after ar-
riving in Paris, “where the fantastic journeys of American films carry one’s thoughts
far, far away, one’s whole being...”.37 To be “carried far, far away” asks that a person
frees itself from the confines of reality. The wonder of film, which basically lies in
its ability to conjure up perpetually new imaginary spaces before our waking eyes,
requires a dissociation from everyday space and the immersion into disconnected
blackness. Suddenly appearing out of the darkness, the film can thus manifest itself
as a “completely new art”.38

The Spectacle of Architecture

Beatriz Colomina postulates that Le Corbusier’s houses are “staged as filmic narra-
tives”,39 which is certainly apposite for the buildings of the interwar period. Following
this argument, one might speculate that this “architecture-film” is embedded in a spatial
context which in turn relies on a cinematic disposition, in order to stage modern spati-
ality as a completely new perceptual experience, just as the cinema setting does for film.
In fact, a comparison with the cinema yields striking similarities. Behind the
inconspicuous black entrance door of the Maison La Roche (1925) one is not con-
 FROM TH E DAR K CHAM B E R OF TH E LU M IÈR E B ROTH E RS

fronted with one of those modernist spaces, where “the shells fell away between
interior and exterior”,40 but instead there is an entirely self-contained and at first
glance windowless space. The visitor stands in darkness below a low gallery, and
looks onto a wall extending over three floors in height – a completely white surface
which is empty save for a small ledge, inevitably making one think of a cinema
screen. This impression is reinforced by the large window, which – hidden from
view through the gallery – illuminates the wall like a colossal light projector. Thus,
one enters the Maison La Roche like a cinema: one leaves the external world behind
and comes into a space which completely obeys its own laws both in scale and in the
modeling of light and shadow. This abrupt disconnection from the outside world
is necessary to draw the attention of the visitors unerringly to what they should
be looking at from this point on, namely the “architectural spectacle that unfolds
before the eye”.41 Since the screen opposite the entrance inevitably remains empty,
visitors are encouraged to gaze around, to move. “One follows a path, and perspec-
Fig. 3 tives develop in great variety”42 – in other words, the film has begun.
The Immeuble Molitor (1931-1934) offers a variation on the same theme. Be-
fore one accesses the light-flooded apartments, one is led deep into the interior of
the building on the ground floor: one follows a narrow curved passageway that rises 45
slightly and leads to a spacious but unadorned entrance hall, illuminated only by
four skylights paneled with frosted glass. Again there is a dark and self-oriented
space placed between the outside world and the imminent spectacle of a new archi-
tecture which “strives towards the light”.43 The cinematographically cued staging of
a dark threshold makes the visitor receptive to the subsequent spatial images which
present themselves as dreamlike (light-)visions. This is a dramaturgic device which
was well known among cinema operators. As can be read in the guide Comment
lancer un cinéma et le conduire à la prospérité of 1928, the gradual darkening of the
_ Figure 3.
Le Corbusier, Maison La
Roche, entrance hall, Paris,
1925 (in “L’Architecture
Vivante”, automne-hiver
1926, p. 16, © FLC / 2014,
ProLitteris, Zurich).
MAR C E L BÄC HTI G E R

hall at the beginning of the show was intended to lull the cinema-goers into a state
of extreme receptivity (“un état extrêmement réceptif”).44
Dim light does not represent the essence of Le Corbusier’s architecture, but
it serves to raise the moment of transition to the visible manifestation of an ideal
form. This is a strange, basically contradictory fusion of neoplatonic and mythical
conceptions of space, but one that goes hand in hand with those “well known illog-
icalities” of Le Corbusier that, as Reyner Banham has rightly asserted, contributed
more to the acceptance of his ideas (and one might add, to the impact of his real-
ized buildings) than to their miscommunication.45 In his New World of Space from
1948, Le Corbusier would claim that the insight into the idea underlying a work
can not be acquired by simply anyone. Rather, the idea is only disclosed to those
who patiently seek the truth: “In a complete and successful work there are hidden
masses of implications, a veritable world which reveals itself to those whom it may
concern, which means: to those who deserve it”.46 Viewed from this perspective, the
embedding of neoplatonic conceptions of space into a mythologizing spatial order
(i.e. one that follows the principles of initiation) is only logical.

46
“How the Night is Alive…!”

Obviously the cinema was not the first place where a dualism between light and
darkness occured; however, in the cinema, it was newly formulated and took on a
modern effectual form. As it is, the contradictory dialectician Le Corbusier was not
one of those architects who – faced with the call for light, air and sun – lost his sense
for shadows and darkness. Cinematography served him as a model, which showed
him how darkness could become part of a contemporary dramaturgy of space.
While in Le Corbusier’s buildings of the 1920s darkness was limited to threshold
spaces (and in the eyes of most critics was outshone by the white surfaces of the
Purist architecture), the dualism of light and darkness became more pronounced in
the sacred architecture that he designed after the Second World War. Printed in the
Œuvre complète next to the project for La Sainte-Baume that included a cave-chapel
located deep in the interior of a massive rock with long light-wells for the sun, is
an excerpt from the poème de l’angle droit which can be understood as a belated
rehabilitation of the dark corners he had long disdained. In the poem, night and its
vibrancy (“How the night is alive…!”) are lyrically treated as equals to the bright
space of day, and sleep (“that other side of life”) is interwoven with the poetic image Fig. 4
of a large cave.47
With the help of the analogy of film and the cinema, the irritation caused by a
building like the Ronchamp Chapel can be explained relatively conclusively: while
the cinema and its light were still present, the “modern film” was no longer show-
ing. In other words: in a space like that of Ronchamp, the clear forms designed to be
discernible in light are missing. Now it is light and darkness themselves that are in-
tended to be visible. It is no coincidence that Le Corbusier describes Ronchamp as
a vessel (“vaisseau”), because one of the main intentions of the chapel’s architecture
is the reception, collection, modeling and dramatizing of the shifting sunlight, thus
making it a visible and discernible manifestation for the observer – a sculpturally
 FROM TH E DAR K CHAM B E R OF TH E LU M IÈR E B ROTH E RS

_ Figure 4. formed chambre noir, with close echos of the ambiguous character of the Lumière’s
Le Corbusier, project for La
Sainte-Baume, 1948 (in Le
cinématographe which was simultaneously a camera and a cinema, a light receiver
Corbusier, Œuvre complète and a projector. What at first glance appears to be neither modern nor filmic, can
1946-1952, ed. by W.
Boesiger, Girsberger, Zürich in fact be read as a late reference to the first experiences of light in a cinema. Stand-
1953, p. 29, © FLC / 2014, ing in front of the chapel’s south wall, interspersed with colorful windows which
ProLitteris, Zurich).
project sunlight into the interior in myriad shades, one can not help thinking of the
young architect’s impressions of Vienna’s flower day, of that “kaleidoscopic cinema 47
where dance the most dizzying combination of colors”.48
“Last night I was in the kingdom of shadows…”: Although confined here to a
sketch, the considerations outlined above have been presented in the belief that
they are relevant for an understanding of the “poetic” (in the Corbusian sense)
potentials implied in cinematography as a unity of film and cinema, of medium
and place – potentials that became effective in architecture, and probably still are.
Simply considering the mechanical aspect of the “moving image” does justice to
neither the phenomenon of cinematography, nor to the challenges the architecture
of Le Corbusier continues to present us with. Rather, it seems apposite to recognize
the cinema, in André Breton’s words, as that place where – quite independent of the
film being shown – “the only absolutely modern mystery is celebrated”.49
MAR C E L BÄC HTI G E R

_ 1. See T. Elsaesser, Filmgeschichte und frühes terview which Le Corbusier gave in Moscow; it is
Kino. Archäologie eines Medienwandels, Text + cited in J.-L. Cohen, Le Corbusier et la mystique de
Kritik, München 2002, p. 37. l’URSS, Mardaga, Brüssel 1987, p. 72.
_ 2. R. Canudo, De la chambre noire des frères _ 11. S. Giedion, Bauen in Frankreich, Bauen in
Lumière, 1922, in R. Canudo, L’usine aux images, Eisen, Bauen in Eisenbeton, Mann, Berlin 2000
Séguier, Paris 1995 (1927), pp. 134-135, p. 135. (1928), p. 92, English translation S. Giedion,
_ 3. For the double meaning of the term cine- Building in France, Building in Iron, Building in
matography, see the insightful reminder of film di- Ferroconcrete, Getty Center for the History of Art
rector and producer Henri Fescourt: “I went into and the Humanities, Los Angeles 1995, p. 176.
a cinématographe for the first time. You’ve read _ 12. R. Clair, Article in “Le Théâtre”, December
rightly – a cinématographe. Because in 1902 this 1924, cited in R. Clair, Kino, see footnote 8, pp.
term, which originally designated an apparatus, 69-71, p. 70. For Clair “the poetry emerges on
was extended to the entire establishment for the the screen through the image, the outer and inner
‘exhibition’ (note that this older term betrays its movement, and the movement between the images”
origins with fairs) of films” (H. Fescourt, La foi et (ibidem, p. 56).
les montagnes, Paul Montel, Paris 1959, p. 20). _ 13. For the “filmic gaze” and Le Corbusier see
_ 4. J.-J. Meusy, Paris-Palaces ou le temps des ciné- for example: B. Colomina, The Split Wall. Domestic
mas (1894-1918), CNRS, Paris 1995, p. 24. Voyeurism, in B. Colomina, J. Bloomer (eds.), Sexu-
_ 5. J.-L. Baudry, Le dispositif, “Communica- ality and Space, Princeton Architectural Press, New
tions”, 23, 1975, pp. 56-72. York 1992, pp. 73-130, pp. 98 ff.; B. Colomina, Vers
_ 6. R. Canudo, Le septième art et son esthétique, une architecture médiatique, in A. von Vegesack et
1921, in R. Canudo, L’usine aux images, see foot- al. (eds.), Le Corbusier. The Art of Architecture, Vit-
note 2, pp. 77-79, p. 78. Unless otherwise indicat- ra Design Museum, Weil am Rhein 2007, pp. 246-
48 ed, all translations are by the author. 273, pp. 257 ff.; S. von Moos, Voyages en Zigzag, in
_ 7. Le Corbusier, Le voyage d’orient, Forces S. von Moos, A. Rüegg (eds.), Le Corbusier before
Vives, Paris 1966, p. 24, English translation in Le Corbusier. Applied Arts, Architecture, Painting,
N.F. Weber, Le Corbusier. A Life, Alfred A. Knopf Photography, 1907-1922, Yale University Press,
Publisher, New York 2008, p. 81. It should be New Haven-London 2002, pp. 22-43, especially pp.
noted in this context that many early films were 38-39; A. François, L’esprit du cinéma et l’œuvre, in
actually in color. According to a common prac- Le Corbusier, l’œuvre plastique, Xlle Rencontre de
tice, night scenes, for example, were dyed blue, la Fondation Le Corbusier, Ed. de la Vilette, Paris
or emotional scenes purple. In this respect black- 2005, pp. 77-99, pp. 79 ff.
and-white film is a product of the process of film _ 14. This the subtitle of Giedion’s popular pic-
becoming a serious art form, i.e. its purification ture book Befreites Wohnen (S. Giedion, Befreites
in the 1920s. See A. Delpeuch, Le cinéma, Doin, Wohnen, Orell Füssli, Zürich 1929).
Paris 1927, p. 29. _ 15. J. Epstein, Bonjour cinéma, 1921, in J. Ep-
_ 8. M. Bardèche, R. Brasillach, Histoire du ciné- stein, Bonjour Cinéma und andere Schriften zum
ma, Denoël & Steele, Paris 1935, cited in R. Clair, Kino, ed. by N. Brenez, R. Eue, Synema, Wien
Kino. Vom Stummfilm zum Tonfilm, Diogenes, 2008, pp. 28-36, p. 28.
Zürich 1995 (1951), p. 101. In the same vein, the _ 16. See particularly the article by B. Tokine in
French art and architecture critic Léon Moussinac the first issue of “L’Esprit Nouveau”: “THE FU-
wrote in 1920: “A new art came into the world, TURE OF CINEMA – is gigantic. … Questions of
discovered its own laws little by little and sought hypnotism, of occultism, to try and to experiment
to perfect itself. An art, bold, powerful, self-con- with” (B. Tokine, L’esthétique du cinéma, “L’Es-
tained, the expression of the ideal of a new age” prit Nouveau”, 1920, n. 1, pp. 84-89, pp. 85-86).
(L. Moussinac cited in R. Abel, French Cinema. _ 17. A. Vidler, The Explosion of Space. Architec-
The First Wave, 1915-1929, Princeton University ture and the Filmic Imaginary, “Assemblage”,
Press, Princeton 1987, p. 52). 1993, n. 21, pp. 44-59, p. 45.
_ 9. See the retrospective observation of the art _ 18. B. Colomina, Vers une architecture média-
historian Elie Faure: “For such a long time now tique, see footnote 13, pp. 257 ff.
we have been accustomed to fixing our modes of _ 19. This oft-used expression by Le Corbusier is
expression to precisely defined forms – painting, significantly also the title of his only text fully de-
sculpture, music, architecture, dance, literature, voted to cinematography: Le Corbusier, Esprit de
theatre, even photography – that each of us has vérité, “Mouvement”, 1, 1933, pp. 10-13.
tended to appropriate the cinématographe for the _ 20. “When shadows and black corners surround
forms he previously cultivated” (E. Faure, Intro- you, you’re only at home up to the dull limits of those
duction à la mystique du cinéma, 1934, in id., Om- dark zones which your gaze doesn’t penetrate; you’re
bres solides (Essais d’esthétique concrète), Société not your own master. And you would like to be pre-
Française d’Editions Littéraires et Techniques, cise, to be correct, to think clearly” (Le Corbusier,
Paris 1934, pp. 168-189, p. 174). L’art décoratif d’aujourd’hui, Crès, Paris 1925, p. 191).
_ 10. This often-cited statement is based on an in- _ 21. “… these forms appeal to us, and this for
 FROM TH E DAR K CHAM B E R OF TH E LU M IÈR E B ROTH E RS

two reasons: first they act clearly on our sensory promenade in particular, see E. Blum, Le Corbusiers
system, and second, from a spiritual point of view, Wege. Wie das Zauberwerk in Gang gesetzt wird,
they embody perfection in and for themselves” Vieweg, Braunschweig 1988.
(Ch.-É. Jeanneret-Gris, A. Ozenfant, Architec- _ 35. The term “révélation” was used remarkably
ture d’époque machiniste / Sur les écoles cubistes often in film theory at the time to describe the
et post-cubistes, Bottega d’Erasmo, Torino 1975 phenomenon that objects and persons on the cine-
(Paris 1926), p. 56). ma screen appeared to be different than in reality,
_ 22. A. Delpeuch, Le cinéma, see footnote 7, pp. thus revealing their “souls”.
112 ff. _ 36. Le Corbusier, Le théâtre spontané, in M.
_ 23. H. Chomette, Article in “Les Cahiers du Richard (ed.), La boîte à miracle – Le Corbusier
Mois”, 1925, cited in R. Clair, Kino, see footnote et le théâtre (Annuaire de la Fondation Le Cor-
8, pp. 74-75, p. 74. busier), Fondation Le Corbusier-Imbernon,
_ 24. This situation is described by R. Mallet-Ste- Paris-Marseille 2012, pp. 48-65, p. 63.
vens, who was involved in several French films as _ 37. Letter from Jeanneret to Ritter, 4 October
a set designer. See C. Briolle, J. Repiquet, Logique 1918, Fondation Le Corbusier, R3 (19) 292-311.
constructive et esprit des formes, in O. Cinqualbre _ 38. See also J. Epstein: “We have only just be-
et al. (eds.), Robert Mallet-Stevens, L’œuvre com- gun to become aware of the fact that a new art
plète, Centre Pompidou, Paris 2005, pp. 40-45, has emerged, which nobody had reckoned with.
p. 41. Since this procedure led to an abstraction Completely new” (J. Epstein, Bonjour Cinéma und
of the film sets, Mallet-Stevens called cinematog- andere Schriften, see footnote 15, p. 28).
raphy the “grand éducateur” of a new architec- _ 39. B. Colomina, Vers une architecture média-
tural language (R. Mallet-Stevens, L’éclairage et tique, see footnote 13, p. 259.
l’architecture moderne, “Lux”, 1928, n. 1, cited in _ 40. S. Giedion, Bauen in Frankreich, see footnote
Cinqualbre et al. (eds.), Robert Mallet-Stevens, see 11, p. 58. 49
above, pp. 52-53, p. 52). _ 41. Le Corbusier, P. Jeanneret, Œuvre complète
_ 25. R. Canudo, L’esthétique du septième art (I), 1910-1929, ed. by O. Stonorov, W. Boesiger, Girs-
1921, in R. Canudo, L’usine aux images, see foot- berger, Zürich 1937, p. 60.
note 2, pp. 59-62, p. 62. _ 42. Ibidem, p. 60.
_ 26. “Cinema! Before the advent of art, the word _ 43. Le Corbusier cited in M. Besset, Wer war Le
used to be ‘miracle’” (L. Moussinac, Naissance du Corbusier?, Skira, Genf 1968, p. 73.
cinéma, J. Povolozky, Paris 1925, p. 25). _ 44. F. Cohendy, Comment lancer un cinéma et le
_ 27. A. Valentin, Introduction à la magie blanche conduire à la prospérité, Paris 1928, cited in A.-É. Bux-
et noire, “L’Art cinématographique”, IV, 1927, pp. torf, La salle de cinéma à Paris entre les deux guerres.
89-116. L’utopie à l’épreuve de la modernité, “Bibliothéque de
_ 28. L. Buñuel, A Night at the Studio des Ur- l’École des chartes”, 163, 2005, pp. 117-144, p. 120.
sulines, “Gaceta literaria”, I, 1927, n. 2, published _ 45. R. Banham, Theory and Design in the First
in L. Buñuel, An Unspeakable Betrayal. Selected Machine Age, Architectural Press, London 1960,
Writings of Luis Buñuel, University of California p. 262.
Press, Berkley 2000, pp. 95-98, p. 95. _ 46. Le Corbusier, New World of Space, Reynal &
_ 29. J. Goudal, Surréalisme et cinéma, “La Revue Hitchcock, New York 1948, p. 8.
hebdomadaire”, 1925, n. 8, English translation in P. _ 47. “Car le gîte profond / est dans la grande ca-
Hammond (ed.), The Shadow and Its Shadow. Sur- verne du sommeil / cet autre côté de la vie / dans
realist Writings on the Cinema, City Light Books, la nuit. / Comme la nuit est vivante / riche dans
San Francisco 2000, pp. 84-94, pp. 86-87. les entrepôts / les collections / la bibliothèque / les
_ 30. R. Clair, Kino, see footnote 8, p. 82. musées du sommeil!” (excerpt from the “Poème de
_ 31. K. Kreimeier, Traum und Exzess. Die Kul- l’angle droit”, handwritten reproduced next to the
turgeschichte des frühen Kinos, Zsolnay, Wien project description of La Sainte-Baume in Le Cor-
2011, p. 50. busier, P. Jeanneret, Œuvre complète 1946-1952,
_ 32. On the various mythological forms of the ed. by W. Boesiger, Girsberger, Zürich 1953, p. 29.)
hero’s journey, see J. Campbell, The Hero with a _ 48. Le Corbusier, Le voyage d’orient, see foot-
Thousand Faces, Bollingen Foundation, New York note 7.
1949. _ 49. “Il est une manière d’aller au cinéma comme
_ 33. E. Cassirer, Philosophie der symbolischen d’autres vont à l’église et je pense que, sous un cer-
Formen. Zweiter Teil: Das mythische Denken, Wis- tain angle, tout à fait indépendamment de ce qui
senschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, Darmstadt 1987 s’y donne, c’est là que se célèbre le seul mystère
(1924), p. 119. absolument moderne” (A. Breton, Comme dans
_ 34. For the influence of esoteric theories from un bois, “L’âge de cinéma”, 1951, n. 4-5, numéro
the turn of the century on Le Corbusier’s archi- spécial surréaliste, pp. 26-30, p. 28, English trans-
tectural ideas in general, see P.V. Turner, La for- lation in P. Hammond (ed.), The shadow and Its
mation de Le Corbusier. Idéalisme & mouvement shadow, see footnote 29, pp. 72-77, p. 74).
moderne, Macula, Paris 1985; on the theme of the