Conference | Talking Pictures: Power/Structures – Architecture and Society in Cinema

Serious Topics

Houses, housing estates, neighborhoods, ghettos: in film, architecture is more than a backdrop; it structures perception, organizes characters’ spaces, and makes social power relations visible. From expressionist silent films (Metropolis, 1927) to contemporary auteur cinema (Parasite, 2019), built spaces are charged with social meaning: they point to hierarchy and control, belonging and exclusion, power and powerlessness. The conference explores how cinema uses architectural structures—from stately mansions to urban apartment blocks to segregated neighborhoods—to aesthetically and narratively articulate social inequality. Several film examples illustrate the topic: the housing estate in Mathieu Kassovitz’s La Haine (1995) renders social marginalization as a spatial experience, while in Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing (1989), a Brooklyn street block becomes a focal point of ethnic and social tensions. Through selected film clips, the lecture guides attendees through these topographies of power and shows how built spaces become metaphors for social order in cinema.