Stairs 1 Geneva
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Stairs 1 Geneva is a film by Peter Greenaway.
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[edit] Details
- 1995
- 107 min.
- Beta SP
- Switzerland
It is also a large scale installation, an exhibition, a catalogue, a cd album.
[edit] The film
The film is composed by one hundred sequences describing a location in the city of Geneva, Switzerland in 1994 where, during a period of one hundred days, one hundred wooden white staircases were installed to be climbed by the public, who was also invited to observe through a simple hole and an exact frame, a perfect "cinema-image by Peter Greenaway" accompanied by a commentary of one sentence in french and english, printed below the viewfinder.
[edit] The event
A special spotlighting with different specific color shades was provided throughout the city, not only around the staircases. The event is called : "The Stairs: Geneva The Location", it is principally a reflection about the idea of location in cinema, and takes part in a wider project including other cities and other cinematic themes of relexion (the frame, the props, etc.) , and it is also published in a catalogue form and a musical compact disc (Merrell, march 1995). The ensemble of the city of Geneva was organized into a cinema event, far more powerful in the cinematic point of view than what any festival can be and represent. The city was virtually captured and redefined through the most brilliant artistic propositions. A general reflexion about cinema, and a city as a principal character.
[edit] The installation
About one hundred performers representing typical regional characters, with costumes and props, (Calvin and his fellows reformers, different spirits of the lake, Laura Ashley with her bicycle, living statues, etc...), were posted into the very framed view of the staircases' viewfinders. They all were specially trained to perform a choreography (by Serge Campardon) every 15 minutes, they were each given a luxury genevean watch to check the time pass throughout the five or more hours of the performance.
[edit] More details
The film's scenes show day or night views in the exact frame defined by the staircase's viewfinder. Superimposed images make some of these characters of the Installation appear and disappear in the frame under different lights, and are linked with different kind of local events, such as a velo race or a children choir on the cathedral steps, and sometimes also the perfect silence of the night. The voice-over patiently helps the visual description by numbering the scenes by the same number of each staircase, and reading the very sentence printed on the viewfinder's metal core, and this accompanied by the smooth one minute music pattern by Patrick Mimran, which elaborates a musical score of 100 patterns that can also be played as randomly (according the cd facilities), as the actual, proposed, promenade in the city, discovering the "stairs".
An exhibition was also set in the Musée d'Art et d'Histoire where a complex light environment and slides projections were supplementing a display of one hundred sculptured heads found and chosen in the museum depot, as well as one hundred historical helmets.
The film beautifully and very cleverly describes the city, the mythology of architectural staircases and the very media of cinema. A new step to declare cinema independent from literature.
[edit] External links
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