Vagabonds abroad: European 1930s travelogue

How does Europe look like in the 1930s to an American couple? Here a home-made film about the European tour of "Bill and I": this travelogue, as Giuliana Bruno might call it, is seen from the perspective of a woman and gives a very good amateurial picture, free from propaganda or commercial intentions.

The recording is titled "Vagabonds abroad. A pictorial narrative of my European travels" and it is clear from the very beginning that we will see the travel-journal of a woman, while the male partner is relegated to a minor role. They head towards Europe (probably from New-York) on March 21st (likely 1936, since we see the Hindenburg Zeppelin flying, later on in the movie).

They visit Lisboa, Gibraltar, Algiers, Palermo, Napoli, Capri, Monaco, Geneva, Wengen, Lucerne, Kölln, Brussels, Wien, Budapest, Salzburg, Münich and Berlin: while the Mediterranean cities hold a typical degree of picturesqueness and well-established sightseeing and panorama views (the bay of Napoli is in this respect paradigmatic), towards the end of the journey and traveling north the written comments rarefy and we have the impression that "Bill and I" are baffled by the Nazi troops marching in front of the Brandenburger Tor.

On Walking

I came across some books and material recently, connected in a way to the rebirth and increasing popularity of walking as a random activity, following on one hand Walter Benjamin's flâneur and on the other Situationists' psychogeography.

Francesco Careri, member of neo-situationist group Stalker, "a collective subject that engages research and actions within the landscape with particular attention to the areas around the city's margins and forgotten urban space, and abandoned areas or regions under transformation", wrote in 2001 Walkscapes: Walking as an Aesthetic Practice, in which he goes back to the primitive men to introduce his suburban idyll on foot. Needless to say that they took Tarkovsky as main inspiration.



In the same year Rebecca Solnit, cultural mastermind of San Francisco, was writing Wanderlust: A History of Walking, with a more American and artistic/historic viewpoint, influenced by Italian anthropologist and architect Franco La Cecla, who by himself, wrote Perdersi (to get lost).

Iain Sinclair published in 2003 London Orbital, a book and short movie about his city, seen from the perspective of a pedestrian who walks following the marginal land and territories near to the M25 motorway that encircles Greater London.



Two other wonderful publications, connected with the idea of detour and the relationship between architecture and journey: Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture and Film, by Giuliana Bruno, a deep insight on the history of vision, roaming through photography, cinema, geography and architecture, and The Situationist City by Simon Sadler, a history of the Situationist Movement and psychogeography applied to the city.

Flesh and Stone

After a recent visit to the Schloss Sanssouci’s complex and his gardens in Potsdam I wanted to post a comment sans-souci as well, carefree.

While admiring the gardens’ composition and design, by Peter Joseph Lenné, (and having some rest in the sun on the grass) I focused on the various buildings in a rather naive way, a bit overwhelmed by the extreme, grand ornamentation of the facades, result of Frederick the Great’s taste, turned into stone mainly by G. W. von Knobelsdorff and by the Dutch architect J. Bouman. This peculiar style is therefore known as “frederician rococo”. Starting from the Schloss Sanssouci and ending with the Neues Palais, I concentrated especially on the theme of human body integrated into the design of a building, in the form of sculpture and ornamentation, the classical prototype of which is, as backwards as I can remember now, the caryatid in ancient Greece: if Vitruvius wrote that this figure might symbolize a mythological punishment, I like to think that the caryatids are the main historical source upon which we can state the intimate relationship between architecture and the human body (Atlas of Emotions by Giuliana Bruno is a wonderful text to explore this territory).

Image via Wikipedia. By Harrieta171

The five codified Orders in architecture (Tuscan, Doric, Ionic, Corinthian, Composite) were intended, at least as I perceive it, to give the impression of a kind of newtonian third-law, a feeling of action-reaction of the construction and of materials. So, the entablature has its own weight, and the capital gives the impressions as to have been “suffering” from the compression above, squeezing (in the Doric) or generating two volutes (Ionic). Reduction of diameter towards the top etc. seem to me optical devices to suggest the idea that the column is reacting to the wight above and slightly deforming. In some sense, this “system” could be called an aesthetic of compression, since with stone this was the only force allowed. Maybe in a couple of hundred years we will have an aesthetic of tension as well... For some "serious" explanation and history there is The Classical Language of Architecture by John Summerson.

Here caryatid and atlas (the male counterpart) of the Schloss Sanssouci: the pilaster is not a metaphor anymore; we can see the couple suffering. Maybe they are just pretending, kind of a game, and they wait for the moment to leave the entablature and fall in each other’s arms.

The Chinesische Teehaus: since fake is the code, here you find groups of three people sitting around a palm-column, not giving a damn that the entablature-roof might fall on their heads; the kind of angel with feathers is not so good as an actor instead, and we can feel that he is pretending no to be worried and tired.

And here we come to the Neues Palais: more seriousness, the figures seem concentrated on their task and the do not look being too comfortable. I guess they are always about to say: “Want to get my place?”.