Design that tells a narrative: the works where buildings speak louder than people

It’s often absences and negative space that form the most unnerving, thrilling junctures in art – whether that’s in a carefully restrained graphic identity, a photograph or a film. Things unsaid and sites left blank speak volumes: and some of key facilitators of empty space are architectural details. Within or without the four walls of a comfy room; set against an austere brick backdrop – it’s these features as much as hair and makeup that can give a real sense of what’s happening in a narrative, or create a certain mood. It was something driven home at the excellent talk at last year’s London Design Festival about David Lynch’s use of architecture and design, and underscored even more certainly when I went to see Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’eclisse, his recently re-released 1962 film.

Much has been said about the film – all two hours of it – so I won’t retread old ground, or risk trotting out spoilers. Instead, as well as it’s poignant and drawn out messages about love and isolation and beauty, what we see is the power of design to tell us things that characters can’t, or won’t. The film is set in Rome, but unlike other typically “Roman” films (Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, for instance), the city we see feels like an urban dystopia. It’s a cold and grey landscape, only busy in its stock market, and only romantic behind closed doors. Instead of fountains and statues we have scrubby front gardens and Brutalist behemoths, and our beautiful leading lady, played by Monica Vitti, has a beauty that jars with her surroundings and an ennui that complements it perfectly.

The film is set in a time where everything fell under the shadow of threat of the atomic bomb – something only clunkily alluded to directly in a newspaper headline but something quietly conveyed through the Modernist architecture that dominates the film. It feels new but heavy, futuristic but oppressive – as though hopes and dreams of new beginnings are constantly thwarted by the weight of their own misdirected ideologies.

As we approach the end of Antonioni’s 162-odd minute opus, the notion of narrative formed by design and by space is clear: the final seven minutes of the dil are utterly without its stars, peopled only briefly by characters or little import. Instead we’re forced to look at fences and walls and roads, the designed spaces that make us think about the story, and the things we haven’t seen. The action takes place out of sight, behind the walls of the buildings that jar so much with our romantic, cinema-created ideas of Rome. It’s claustrophobic despite the sparseness of people; and we’re forced to piece together a story through images. Vitti’s first husband (played by Francisco Rabal) lives in a modern apartment proudly showcasing Abstract Expressionist paintings; while her young, flashy stockbroker lover (Alain Delon) chooses art that’s traditional, stuffy even. Their choice of art belies their characters – the older man favours fresh, daring works; his younger replacement looks to the old world. In L’eclisse, images never speak a thousand words, they conceal them: it’s the buildings and the design that betrays a narrative of fear, uncertainly and menace.

For full screening dates click here. L’eclisse is being released on DVD and Bluray on 28 September