Does architecture provide a blueprint for the cinematic experience? Does cinema shape our perceptions of spaces through the built? Martino Stierli, Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design, Museum of Modern Art, New York, delivered the keynote address at the premiere night of the recently concluded ADFF:STIR Mumbai held at the NCPA, Mumbai, from January 10-12, 2025. In his speech, Stierli touched upon the varying registers of architecture and cinema’s reciprocal bond, highlighting how both disciplines shape our interpretations of space, time and narrative. He reflected on their shared affinity through key theories and personal observations, emphasising how architecture often informs cinematic space and vice versa. Below is the full keynote.

Good evening, everyone!

Just before coming here, I had a chance to watch the movie All We Imagine as Light, written and directed by Payal Kapadia. The film was a perfect re-introduction to the urban landscape of Mumbai, India. It follows three female figures representing three different generations, all employees of a large hospital. The film beautifully illustrates the individual struggles of each of these women with a patriarchal society, caste and class, but also their friendship.

Despite the focus on these three characters, it is nevertheless, unmistakably, a film not only set in but also about Mumbai: the modernist architecture and infrastructure are omnipresent, be it in the form of the workplace, a massive hospital, the anonymous apartment building where they share a flat or the railway that allows them to move through the city. Kapadia’s film movingly elevates the lives of these three women out of the sea of anonymity as represented by modern architecture and lends a face to the individual challenges of many inhabitants of our global megalopolises, not only in terms of economic struggle and housing shortages but also in terms of finding meaning and happiness in a society that has lost its anchoring in traditional forms of social organisation.

Architecture is an art of collective experience and, for this reason, a model for aesthetic perception in a modern mass society; and the same is true for film. – Martino Stierli, Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design

All We Imagine as Light illustrates to which degree film is shaping our perception of a place through architecture. Even sitting in a dark room in New York on a cold January Sunday afternoon, the film transported me to another world. Conversely, by moving through space, architecture and buildings can give us a proto-cinematic experience, where the drama of changing scenes unfolds as we move from one space to another.

It might seem paradoxical that two arts that are seemingly so different—architecture on the one hand: massive, inert and static and moving images on the other: immaterial and fleeting, share a deep affinity, which has often been observed. As early as 1925, the French architect Robert Mallet-Stevens discussed the relationship between film and architecture, saying that modern architecture was “essentially photogenic: large plans, straight lines, sobriety of ornaments, unified surfaces, clear opposition between shadow and light”. The eminent architectural theorist Sigfried Giedion differentiated more clearly between photography and film, saying, “Still photography does not capture [buildings] clearly. One would have to accompany the eye as it moves: only film can make the new architecture intelligible!”

The German author Walter Benjamin likewise likened the film to architecture in his seminal essay The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility. Both arts are characterised by a similar structure of perception, namely, a 'reception in distraction'. Quote: “Distraction and concentration form an antithesis... A person who concentrates before a work of art is absorbed by it; he enters into the work… By contrast, the distracted masses absorb the work of art into themselves... Architecture has always offered the prototype of an artwork that is received in a state of distraction and through the collective.”

Architecture is an art of collective experience and, for this reason, a model for aesthetic perception in a modern mass society; and the same is true for film. And Benjamin emphasises that architecture in not only perceived optically, but also in a tactile manner. And he argues that architecture provided a model of reception for the new medium of film.

Both arts are not only optical phenomena, but depend on the involvement of the viewer’s body; they entail what we can call embodied spectatorship. But of course, there is a fundamental difference between the two. Whereas the architectural spectator is mobile in relation to an immobile and static material object, the filmic spectator is immobile vis-à-vis moving and immaterial images.

It might seem paradoxical that two arts that are seemingly so different—architecture on the one hand: massive, inert and static, and moving images on the other: immaterial and fleeting, share a deep affinity. – Martino Stierli, Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design

To complete this brief historical overview, I would like to mention the Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein, who, in his essay Montage and Architecture, provided perhaps the most fully blown attempt at theorising the relationship between the two arts. Eisenstein’s main argument is that cinema’s structural principles were already implicitly present in pre-filmic media, and in particular, architecture. Eisenstein’s theory of cinematic montage is based on his understanding of architecture as a space that needs to be physically and/or mentally traversed in order to be understood.

Architecture, and the ways it invites its spectator to aesthetically engage with it, provides a blueprint for the cinematic experience. An architect such as Le Corbusier (who was an admirer of Eisenstein’s work) was highly aware of this relationship when he devised his buildings as ‘architectural promenades’ that structured a spatial experience in the sense of a cinematic sequence. Contemporary architects, from Bernard Tschumi to Jean Nouvel, developed this notion further, having in mind an aesthetic experience that is embodied, collective and cinematic.

I am hoping that this brief remark on the relationship between the two arts will provide some food for thought in the coming days of ADFF:STIR Mumbai 2025. With that, I would like to thank Amit Gupta [founder & editor-in-chief, STIR] and his team from STIRworld, as well as Kyle Bergman, the director of the festival, for their kind invitation to be here for this important event. Thank you, and enjoy the show!

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed here are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position of STIR or its editors.

For more information, visit the ADFF:STIR Mumbai website for key highlights of the festival, including the 20+ films, 10 cinematic pavilions, special projects the ~log(ue) programme, media and press coverage and more. Stay tuned and keep an eye out for ADFF:STIR Mumbai 2026.