Over a load-bearing pre-festival coffee, some other film programmers recently related to me the extreme reactions they'd witnessed at screenings of Sense of Architecture. With glee, they told me of responses ranging from amusement, bewilderment, and irrational anger to pure design pleasure.

Sense of Architecture, you see, consists of a series of video images of buildings, with natural sound from the location of the buildings. Forty-two of them, to be exact, with a total running time of just under three hours.

The rigorous purity of the film-no ‘story' per se, with the only ‘characters' being the beautifully shot buildings-quite seriously provokes some viewers. One film programmer described it variously as ‘a film that some people simply aren't going to handle'. Conversely, for some people, it's ‘the ultimate building porn for those who like their buildings modern, glossy, and close-up'. Stifling a giggle, another film programmer told me tales of irate patrons storming out of theatres, declaring, ‘This isn't a film!'. Yet another described attending it as ‘a kind of meditation on the place of place', on structures and how we see them'.

Whatever it is, Sense of Architecture is evidently controversial, demanding, and very worthwhile for those with an interest in architecture, and an open mind about what constitutes ‘a film'.

Sense of Architecture examines key architectural structures in and from the southeastern Austrian Bundesland (or state of Styria), filmed by senior German experimental filmmaker Heinz Emigholz. Emigholz has built a career out of unusual composition and framing, famously eschewing conventional perpendicularity and central perspective. These unusual, freeform, and deceptively untutored-looking compositions characterise all his work but are particularly striking in Sense of Architecture, which continues Emigholz's overarching creative project of depicting the ‘complex interaction between abstract temporal compositions and selected urban and natural landscapes'. As the critic Ronald Balczuweit has written,

the visual space is always populated in [Emigholz's] films, rather than being empty space whose coordinates are fixed to categories borrowed from abstract geometry, such as the horizon and the vanishing point. Where there is a space, there is also a body that defines it.

With Sense of Architecture, shot between 2005 and 2006, he approached a range of buildings in the state whose previous other main claim to fame involves being the birthplace of a certain Californian Governator and filmed them both internally and externally, complete with atmospheric location sound, shadows, and the movements of clouds. The observational-documentary style, with no narration or voiceover and only the titles of the houses to mediate or instruct the viewer, is based around demonstrating the relationship between these buildings and their environment.

Emigholz's interest in the ‘products of human development' situates them firmly in time, and especially in space. He says,

architecture projects a two-dimensional design into reality erecting it there as a three-dimensional situation. The film now takes this space and translates it by means of camera work into two-dimensional images, that are presented to us in a given sequence of time. Thus we experience a space of thought.

This ‘space of thought' is something that Emigholz has explored in the series ‘Photography and Beyond', which describes as ‘a series of films about art and design-‘"projections" that become visible as writings, drawings, photography, architecture and sculpture'. In his filmmaking, Emigholz says,

A reverse visual process is analyzed: seeing as expression, not as impression. The eye as the interface between the brain and the outside world, the gaze as a compositional power that projects an idea into the outside world or comprehends it by means of cinematography. From the writings, drawings and studesi fo the works of various architects, something indescribable is formed: an expression in film of the objectification of thought processes.

Architecture projects space into this world. Cinematography translates that space into pictures projected in time. Cinema then used in a completely new way: as a space to meditate on buildings.

In this project, Emigholz says, ‘the connecting power lies between the works presented in one visual work that references all the participating objects-that is, in the primacy of producing new images through a particular gaze'.

Sense of Architecture, clearly, is not going to be for everyone. For some, watching a film about architecture is like dancing to it: pointless. For some of us, however, the chance to flood one's senses with images of gorgeous modern architecture at the film festival is simply too good an opportunity not to explore, in the director's words, ‘architecture's capacity or incapacity to design and situate spaces in relation to the human body and mind'.

By Danni Zuvela