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 [Image: Stalag Luft III from The Great Escape; courtesy of Metro Goldwyn Mayer].
Breaking Out and Breaking In: A Distributed Film Fest of Prison Breaks and Bank Heists—co-sponsored by BLDGBLOG, Filmmaker Magazine, and Studio-X NYC—continued recently with The Great Escape (1963), directed by John Sturges.
For those of you new to the fest, from January to April 2012 we will be watching a curated series of films at home, then discussing those films online; here is the complete schedule.
 [Image: A guard tower from The Great Escape; courtesy of Metro Goldwyn Mayer].
As usual, I'll be focusing on the spatial premise of the film, not its directing, characterization, or dialogue; the idea is not to experiment in film criticism but to explore various scenarios of escape.
Also, as usual: there are spoilers ahead!
  [Images: Establishing the camp; courtesy of Metro Goldwyn Mayer].
The film opens with the arrival of several truckloads of Allied war prisoners at a well-fortified German camp in the forests of western Poland. The lighthearted and substantially less than serious tone of the film is immediately made clear, however, not only through the jaunty title score but in the actions of the prisoners themselves as they spill out into their new environment.
Right away, escape is on their minds; we see them kneeling down to look for weaknesses beneath the boarding houses, scanning the barbed perimeter fence, and discussing the logistics of tunneling out into the woods beyond. In fact, several half-baked attempts at escape are made in the first few minutes of the film.
  [Images: Looking for weaknesses; courtesy of Metro Goldwyn Mayer].
The prisoners disguise themselves as rural day workers, for instance, hoping to sneak out through the front gate, yard tools in hand—but they are spotted right away and sent back. Then several men camouflage themselves beneath forest debris, riding out on trucks under piles of pine branches—before the stabs of a menacing pitchfork convince them to pop out from this botanical ruse and surrender.
 [Image: Humans disguised as trees; courtesy of Metro Goldwyn Mayer].
In short order, we learn that the camp was specifically built for these men. Flipping through the files of his newly arrived prisoners, and speaking with obvious exasperation as he reads their dossiers of escape—"escaped, recaptured, escaped, recaptured," Luftwaffe Colonel von Luger sighs, throwing files across his desk—the superintendent explains that the camp is, in fact, inescapable.
"There will be no escapes from this camp," he says flatly—to which the British Captain Ramsey replies that "it is the sworn duty of all officers to try to escape. If they can't, it is their sworn duty to cause the enemy to use an inordinate number of troops to guard them, and their sworn duty to harass the enemy to the best of their ability."
Escape is part of the soldiers' contract; it is something they are literally required to try to do.
  [Images: Reading the files of failed escapes; courtesy of Metro Goldwyn Mayer].
But "it must stop," the Nazi insists—however, "it is because we expect the opposite that we have brought you here. This is a new camp. It has been built to hold you and your men. It is organized to incorporate all we have learned of security measures. And, in me, you will not be dealing with the common jailer."
Here, it's worth recalling that the film is based on a true story, and that the actual camp—called Stalag Luft III—was located for very specific topographical reasons, as if applying the concept of terroir to prison construction. More specifically, the sandy soil upon which the camp was built was seen as all but impossible to tunnel through.
Last month, on his fantastic blog Through the Sandglass, geologist Michael Welland discussed the film's geology of escape: "The prisoner of war camp was built, intentionally, on the sandy soils of the forests of today’s western Poland, along the banks of the Bóbr river. Intentionally, because the river valley is filled with sandy sediments deposited from melt waters of the Ice Age glaciers and carried by the ancestral Bóbr. And sand is difficult to tunnel through. Very difficult." Additionally—and much more visibly—"the excavated sand from the tunnels was immediately visible if deposited against the darker topsoil" outside, which leads to one of the escapees' more interesting innovations.
   [Images: The relaxing technique of soiling a garden down your pant legs; courtesy of Metro Goldwyn Mayer].
One of the British POWs fabricates a kind of illicit earth-moving garment meant to be worn inside the prisoners' trousers; filled with dark soil from the tunnels soon underway beneath the boarding houses, these string-operated bags can be dumped surreptitiously into the gardens outside. This is reminiscent, of course, of the garden scene in Grand Illusion, which we watched last month, but it also allows for the oddly comic sight of prisoner after prisoner walking out into the garden, only to evacuate this terrestrial excess down their pant legs, literally soiling the sandy ground.
But this is not the only method the prisoners use for getting rid of surplus soil. In a surreal scene inside the camp's erstwhile cafeteria and study hall, exaggerated shudders begin to pass through the roof of the building, lurching and convulsing as if in an earthquake—which, in a sense, is exactly what's happening, as we learn that the diggers have begun storing their dirt above the rafters in the attic of the hall. Alas, the unbelievable rolling seismicity of this scene is the last we see or hear of this comically artificial tectonic activity.
 [Image: James Garner looks up with alarm as artificial earthquake waves shudder through the roof; courtesy of Metro Goldwyn Mayer].
Which brings us to the buildings.
As in A Man Escaped, we see that, by dismantling the everyday environment in which we are trapped, we might reveal hidden tools of escape—and then to assemble ways out. In this case, the boarding houses are taken apart from within, their wooden planks strategically removed so as not to induce structural collapse (save for one scene involving an over-enthusiastic campmate collapsing through his newly weakened bed frame).
In the architectural equivalent of cutting hair with thinning scissors, the buildings are lightened of their wood, which is then taken below ground and assembled into bracing for the tunnels.
  [Images: Steve McQueen as erstwhile Matta-Clark of the camp; courtesy of Metro Goldwyn Mayer].
As all this unfolds, the tunnels expand below.
In a well-composed shot, we see Charles Bronson—who has been unspooling string from one end of the tunnel to the other—join two fellow diggers to form a kind of string trigonometry at the tunnel head. Using a plumb bob and pencil, they—incorrectly, as we learn later—determine the tunnel's length.
  [Images: Measuring the tunnel; courtesy of Metro Goldwyn Mayer].
But it's all for naught. The tunnel (one of three simultaneous excavations) is soon discovered. One of the Nazi guards inadvertently reveals it when he spills tea onto the floor of a boarding house kitchen; the water rapidly drains down through the tiles without trace, indicating some sort of void below. And into the void go the Nazis.
  [Images: Discovering the tunnel with tea; courtesy of Metro Goldwyn Mayer].
In any case, I could recount the events of the film ad nauseam, as its procedural tracking of the tunneling process—which, luckily for the prisoners, included two other escape routes from which to choose next—lends itself well to description. But I'll instead just make a few final points, and then recommend that you check out the movie yourselves:
At one point early in the film, Steve McQueen's baseball-tossing character, Captain Virgil Hilts, proposes an absolutely idiotic method of escape, in which he and a fellow inmate will literally burrow through the earth "like moles," passing the dirt behind them, one at a time, as if swimming breaststroke through the solid matter of the planet. After detailing his ridiculous idea, McQueen self-confidently juts his head forward, making a kind of monkey face, as his future collaborator tries not to laugh beside him.
 [Image: Steve McQueen wants to burrow through the earth like a mole; courtesy of Metro Goldwyn Mayer].
Unsurprisingly, however, the plan doesn't work.
 [Image: Steve McQueen's mole fantasy remains tragically unfulfilled; courtesy of Metro Goldwyn Mayer].
Captain Hilts and his Scottish sidekick are almost immediately recaptured and sent to "the cooler," a building filled with unfurnished concrete cells (perhaps foreshadowing McQueen's role in Papillon a decade later).
But fear not! Oh, ye McQueenites. Captain Hilts later finds his odd terrestrial fantasy indirectly fulfilled when he has an opportunity to pop his head up out of a hole in the earth—like a mole!—and look back at the camp from which he is about to escape. He is beyond the camp's perimeter, though there is still a long way to go.
  [Images: Steve McQueen as topography: the actor's head emerges from the surface of the earth; courtesy of Metro Goldwyn Mayer].
Later, with freedom nearly within his grasp and his fellow inmates scattered throughout the Polish and German countrysides, McQueen tries to jump a stolen Nazi motorcycle over a barbed-wire border into Switzerland.
 [Image: Border games; courtesy of Metro Goldwyn Mayer].
But that, too, does not work, and McQueen is thrown back into the cooler.
The rest of the film is peppered with counterfeit documents and rewoven clothes, secret desks inside tabletops and cupboards full of smuggled foods, homemade potato whiskey and, all along, the spaces of the tunnels themselves, three simultaneous acts of excavation that, in their real-life versions, were a "legendary feat of engineering," according to the New York Times.
  [Images: One of the tunnels; courtesy of Metro Goldwyn Mayer].
As that article goes on to explain, a team of "British-based engineers, battlefield archaeologists and historians" recently tried to repeat the feat of digging these tunnels, producing a "replica tunnel" to test their theories of how the originals were created: The team’s task was to employ “reverse engineering” by uncovering the tunnels and what remained of the tunnelers’ jury-rigged equipment to replicate the wartime fliers’ ingenuity. Ultimately, the team members were stunned that, even without the menace of the ever-watchful Nazi camp guards, they were unable to match their wartime counterparts fully, particularly in the most crucial skill, digging a tunnel 30 feet below the camp surface without repeated collapses of the sandy soil above. The archaeological side of this 2011 investigation revealed the extent of the "improvisational engineering" we mentioned earlier, whereby everyday spaces and objects are dismantled and reassembled into tools of escape. For instance, the archaeologists uncovered "a set of rusting trolley wheels, the metal scavenged from remnants of a campsite stove and a coil spring taken from prison gramophones; wood paneling for the tunnel’s roof and sidewalls, fashioned from the prisoners’ bed boards; and a ventilation pump with a bellows and piping made from a prisoner’s kitbag, ice hockey sticks and tins of powdered milk. The pièce de résistance was a rusting radio made from a biscuit box, the wiring stolen from the prisoners’ huts and batteries scrounged from German guards."
For more, check out the film itself.
(Thanks to Peter Smith for pointing out the New York Times article when it first came out! Up next: Escape from Alcatraz on Friday, February 17; posts about Cool Hand Luke and Papillon are forthcoming soon).
 [Image: Initial Points: Anchors of America's Grid at the Center for Land Use Interpretation].
A new exhibition at the Center for Land Use Interpretation opened last week, called Initial Points: Anchors of America's Grid, produced in collaboration with the Institute of Marking and Measuring.
Through maps, surveying devices, and other artifacts from the process of land marking and measurement, the exhibition "depicts and describes the 37 Initial Points of the Public Land Survey System, the rectilinear grid that covers more than two thirds of the landscape of the USA. These surveying points, located in places such as swamps, under manhole covers, in roads, and on top of mountains, are the physical locations that tie this grid to the ground. Looking at them in a contemporary context explores the process and importance of the endeavor of surveying, and reveals a latent cadastral history of the nation as it expanded westward."
 [Image: A view of the exhibition at CLUI].
An earlier program at CLUI looked at U.S./Mexico border-survey markers, which documented 276 "obelisks" placed at the very limit of the nation, monumentalizing and literalizing a particular vision of state territory.
Initial Points—foregrounding the tools and training that allow state delineation or what we might call "ground control"—is on display until April 15, 2012.
 [Image: From A Man Escaped (1956), courtesy of the Criterion Collection].
Breaking Out and Breaking In: A Distributed Film Fest of Prison Breaks and Bank Heists—co-sponsored by BLDGBLOG, Filmmaker Magazine, and Studio-X NYC—continued last week with Robert Bresson's A Man Escaped (1956). Spoilers ahead!
Bresson's film tells the story of Fontaine—a French prisoner held by Nazis in a prison in occupied Lyon—and it operates through the " close scrutiny of salient details," in Roger Ebert's words. Fontaine himself becomes an avid student of the prison interior, always looking askance for points of weakness. This has the effect of explicitly foregrounding the space of confinement in which Fontaine is held, including, as we'll see, the objects in the cell with him, deemphasizing characterization in favor of an intense focus on architectural setting. Ebert continues: In this way, we watch Fontaine examine his cell. We know it as well as he does. We see how he stands on a shelf to look out a high, barred window. We see how the food plates enter and leave, and how the guards can see him through a peep hole. We see the routine as prisoners are marched to morning wash-up. Amongst these daily routines, we also watch Fontaine slip a note into a fellow prisoner's pocket. What does the note say? "The exit route from the building and how to dismantle your door," Fontaine whispers.
 [Image: From A Man Escaped (1956), courtesy of the Criterion Collection].
As usual, I want to focus only on specific spatial details, in keeping with the premise of Breaking Out and Breaking In, so I'll just make two quick points.
1) Breaking out, in A Man Escaped, occurs through the strategic dismantling and reassembly of all designed objects that aren't architecture. Blankets are cut down to strips then rewoven into rope, finally wrapped and strengthened with wire from the bedframe. The hinges of a small cupboard door are bent and refashioned into grappling hooks. A mere spoon—then another—is sharpened to a chisel with which to cut through the soft wood of the cell door.
It's as if the tools of escape are, in fact, already hidden all around us, disguised as the overlooked equipment of everyday life—the mundane bits of furniture, clothing, and internal ornament that, provided we teach ourselves how to reassemble them, will lead to an unparalleled state of post-architectural liberation. Put another way, the limits of architecture are exposed by everything normally stored inside it.
 [Image: From A Man Escaped (1956), courtesy of the Criterion Collection].
2) The other obvious detail is the film's overriding non-visual dimension—that is to say, the sound design of solitary confinement.
From the coded coughs of fellow inmates to the banister-tapping approach of a particular guard, and from the reciprocated wall-knocks passed prisoner to prisoner to the soundscape of the final escape itself—with the other-worldly grinding gears of a patrol bicycle and the marching feet on gravel that betray a guard who the escapees might not otherwise have seen—the prison is more an acoustic environment than a visual one. Even the timing of Fontaine and his last-minute assistant, as they scamper across the prison rooftop, is coincident with the passing of a nearby train, using the sonic effects of urban infrastructure as camouflage for their actions.
They thus navigate from ring to ring, passing steadily outward, carrying reconstructed ropes made from bedding and forcibly recurved grappling hooks, arming the building's contents against the building itself, disguised by the sounds of a city into which they successfully disappear.
(Earlier: A Prison Camp is for Escaping. Up next: watch Cool Hand Luke on Monday, February 6; for the complete Breaking Out and Breaking In schedule, click here).
 [Image: Making Planning Popular on display at the RCA in London].
For those of you near London, you have one more day to see David Knight's Making Planning Popular on display in a group show called GRIST at the Royal College of Art. I'm a huge fan of Knight's work—an ongoing research project on the strange terrains both encouraged and required by local planning ordinances—and he's thus become a regular referent here on the blog.
 [Image: The manifesto from Making Planning Popular].
Specifically, Making Planning Popular "aims to encourage greater popular knowledge of how the built environment is, or could be, produced." Accordingly, "David is showing a manifesto, recent articles and essays, and a series of case studies chosen from his growing database of arcane, marginalized, or forgotten planning practices. This work will in time form a popular history of planning"—publishers, take note!—"one in which such practises are brought back to life to explore their relevance to today’s environment, in the belief that putting planning knowledge back into popular culture will lead to a more democratic built environment."
    [Images: Excerpts from David Knight's "growing database of arcane, marginalized, or forgotten planning practices," part of Making Planning Popular].
Above are some examples of these case studies; but stop by the RCA before the end of the day on Monday, February 6, to see more. Here's a map.
There was a lot of talk last week about the emergence of " physibles," or downloadable data sets hosted on the Pirate Bay that would allow (potentially copyrighted) objects to be reproduced at home by 3D printers. The idea is that we won't just share music files or movie torrents, but actual physical objects; I could thus print an IKEA table or a Quistgaard peppermill at home, without ever purchasing an original object.
 [Image: A printer known as the Replicator].
Bruce Sterling wrote about just such a scenario in his 2008 novella Kiosk, suggesting that a new "poetry of commerce" would arise in the form of infinitely repeatable, unregulated surrogate objects churned out by desktop factories.
Among many other things about this story, what caught my attention was the specific detail that you could scan any object you happen to have on hand; you could then upload that dataset to a kind of eBay of physibles; and, finally, someone on the other side of the earth—or sitting right next to you—could print out their own "pirate" version. As New Scientist writes, however, we might soon soon see a corporate response in the form of what could be called physible rights management—based on, even repeating, certain aspects of the misguided digital rights management (DRM) policies associated with MP3s. This would mean, for instance, "placing a marker on objects that a 3D scanner could detect and which would stop it operating" (though such marks, the article quickly points out, can simply be covered over with tape or otherwise occluded); in fact, we read, a similar such system is "already used to prevent banknotes from being photocopied." The article then mentions other forms of watermarks and "marking algorithms," detectable only by machines, that could be inscribed onto object surfaces, like invisible hieroglyphs of protection, so as to interfere with those objects' being scanned.
The corporate response to the robot-readable world, mentioned earlier, is thus a kind of robot-blocking world.
In any case, what seems more provocative here, on the level of design, would be to appropriate this protective stance and reuse it in the design of future objects, but emphasizing the other end: to allow for the scanning of any object designed or manufactured, but to insert, in the form of watermarks, small glitches that would only become visible upon reprinting.
We could call these object cancers: bulbous, oddly textured, and other dramatically misshapen errors that only appear in 3D-reprinted objects. Chairs with tumors, mutant silverware, misbegotten watches—as if the offspring of industrial reproducibility is a molten world of Dalí-like surrealism.
 [Image: Misprinted objects by Zeitguised and Matt Frodsham].
Put another way, the inadvertent side-effect of the attempted corporate control over objects would be an artistic potlatch of object errors: object cancers deliberately reprinted, shared, and collected for their monstrous and unexpected originality.
One of the more interesting sub-conversations at last fall's Art + Environment Conference at the Nevada Museum of Art revolved around the question of whether or not the future of landscape architecture would be for humans at all—and not for autonomous or semi-autonomous machine systems that will have their own optical, textural, and haptic needs from the design of built space. As highway signage networks are adapted to assist with orienting driverless cars, for instance, we will see continent-spanning pieces of infrastructure designed not for human aesthetic needs but so that they more efficiently correspond to the instrumentation packages of machines.
We touched on this a few weeks ago here on BLDGBLOG with the idea of sentient geotextiles guiding unmanned aerial vehicles, and London-based design firm BERG refers to this as the rise of the robot-readable world. I was thus interested to see that Timo Arnall from BERG has assembled a short video archive asking, "How do robots see the world? How do they extract meaning from our streets, cities, media and from us?" Arnall's compilation reveals the framing geometries—a kind of entoptic graphic language native to machines—and directional refocusings deployed by these inhuman users of designed landscapes. Future gardens optimized for autonomous robot navigation.
 [Image: Posters for Grand Illusion, currently out of print from the Criterion Collection].
For the first film in Breaking Out and Breaking In a distributed film fest—where you watch the films at home and return here to discuss them online—co-sponsored by BLDGBLOG, Filmmaker Magazine, and Studio-X NYC, we watched Jean Renoir's Grand Illusion (1937), recently described as one of the 100 best films of world cinema ( Seven Samurai, if you're curious, was #1).
I will limit myself to discussing Grand Illusion solely from the perspective of this film fest of prison breaks and bank heists (which will be true for all the films discussed in this series). In other words, I'll focus specifically on the topology of escape—on holes, tunnels, walls, and borders. And I should note: there are spoilers ahead.
  [Images: From Grand Illusion, courtesy of the Criterion Collection].
The first attempted escape of the film is through the earth: tunneling from beneath the barracks of a German prison camp with the intention of popping up beyond the outer buildings, in a garden.
Removing the floorboards and hacking through exceptionally soft soil, the prisoners rig an alarm system and fashion a tentacular speaking-tube to make sure they all know if the person on digging duty has passed out in the carbon dioxide-rich microclimate being created by their tunneling activity. In fact, the speaking-tube—like an old-fashioned game of telephone—initially appears to be a breathing apparatus of some sort, as if they are, in fact, snorkeling through the earth.
 [Image: From Grand Illusion, courtesy of the Criterion Collection].
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the digger—an irritatingly effusive French cabaret singer—loses consciousness, his candle goes out, and he must be hauled backward out of the mud by rope.
 [Image: From Grand Illusion, courtesy of the Criterion Collection].
There are at least two particularly interesting things about this tunnel.
1) The diggers engage in an illicit earth-moving operation by filling their clothes with the resulting dirt, and then dumping the dirt into the garden. They're thus generating their own little artificial topography out in the prison yard as they scoop out the earth beneath their barracks house. The negative space of the tunnel becomes this new terrain of dirt piles and rows, which are thus symptoms of this literally underground activity.
 [Image: From Grand Illusion, courtesy of the Criterion Collection].
2) More interestingly, the tunnel is soon abandoned: all of the prisoners are moved to new camps, the barracks are emptied, the tunnel still covered by floorboards, and a last-ditch attempt to let the incoming prisoners know that there is a half-completed escape tunnel beneath their bedroom fails. A train pulls away, splitting up the prisoners and bringing them to new camps; all the while, a remnant escape route, unfinished and unknown, lies waiting to be rediscovered.
Immediately before their departure, however, there is a brief exchange between two of the film's protagonists. Looking out at the clockwork machinations of the German guards, who march in synchrony across the prison courtyard, the imprisoned Captain de Boeldieu quips: "For me it's simple. A golf course is for golf. A tennis court for tennis. A prison camp is for escaping."
   [Images: From Grand Illusion, courtesy of the Criterion Collection].
While this is by no means a remarkable piece of dialogue in and of itself, it suggests that, internal to and implied by the diagram of the camp, there is a goal or proper use, but one that runs against the grain of the space's stated intentions. The camp is a landscape that necessitates its own peculiar misuse; escape is just the sport that actualizes this. Put another way, the design of the camp rigorously implies its own escape routes.
Further to this point, however, and as evidenced by the casual manner with which our sporting gentlemen pack up their rackets and coats and abandon their incomplete tunnel, their behavior is motivated more by following unspoken rules (of war, of the camp, of sporting etiquette) than, in a sense, by trying to win.
In any case, from this point in the film it's onward, out and further, through a series of other camps—shown solely in montage—before the displaced captives arrive at an imposing mountaintop fortress—filmed at the Châteaux du Haut-Koenigsbourg— run by the wounded Von Rauffenstein (who, to my mind, looks remarkably like Darth Vader without a helmet, as seen in Return of the Jedi).
Von Rauffenstein takes his new forced guests on a fortifications tour, walking around the castle's walls. "Nice castle," one of them remarks, as another methodically recites the centuries of original construction. "12th century," he mutters. "13th century."
 [Image: From Grand Illusion, courtesy of the Criterion Collection].
But all along they are looking for blindspots, low points, and ways over the wall.
 [Image: From Grand Illusion, courtesy of the Criterion Collection].
The eventual—and final—method of escape is by way of diversion, using small flutes and makeshift drums to distract the castle guards as two prisoners make an improbable break for it down a handmade rope out of a tower. And, after a brief stop by a house in the Alps where a spot of romance pops up, they find their ultimate freedom in a moment that is absurd for all it reveals about the notion of political jurisdiction.
Running in plain view of German soldiers, who have finally caught up to them, our remaining two heroes have nothing to worry about: they have crossed an invisible line in the snow, making a mockery of all their tunnels and secret ropes, as they walk up a hill in neutral Switzerland.
  [Images: From Grand Illusion, courtesy of the Criterion Collection].
Clearly, outside the specific context of Breaking Out and Breaking In, there is much more to discuss, including the film's actual central theme, which is not escape but class divisions.
Hopefully, though, this will serve as a quick intro to the film's many specifically spatial propositions. If you had a chance to watch Grand Illusion last week, by all means let us all know what you think—and stay tuned in the next day or two for a post about Robert Bresson's A Man Escaped.
(Note: Friday, February 3, brings The Great Escape).
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