Description of Rooftops by Rick Hancox (1972)

Rooftoops with be a five minute 16mm black and white film, and as might be guessed, is another film where architecture plays a dominant role. In this film the subject is exclusively exterior, that being the roof of the Great Northern Hotel in New York City, and the architectural panorama of surrounding buildings and rooftops as seen from that viewpoint.

The style of the film might be termed ‘expressionistic’ inasmuch as the camera gives kinetic expression to the otherwise immobile objects b y continual panning, tilting and zooming. Very often all three modes of this camera movement are combined in one shot.

The only signs of life at that city altitude are pigeons, but these in combination with occasional shots of inherent motion-i.e. dripping water towers, smoking chimneys, exhaust fans, rising steam, an airplane, some traffic below-provide a rich kinesthetic contrast to the cold architecture.

The only human movement in the entire film comes during the final shot when, after a seemingly endless tilt straight down a shaft of mass buildings, a little girl is seen skipping rope in an alley far below. It serves as a kind of kinetic climax to the film.

I became interested in this subject after living in New York and noticing (from street level) the great variety of old wooden water towers atop even the city’s most modern buildings. My curiosity around this strange aesthetic relationship finally led me to exploring the subject at close range. It was impossible to plan a script beforehand: I simply took three hundred feet of film up there one afternoon and filmed the location as I experienced it. Thus Rooftops has presented a tremendous editing problem, and in the two years since it was filmed it has gone through dozens of cuts-most of them unsatisfactory.

The solution to this structural problem has only recently become evident. Like House Movie it will receive structural inspiration from music. The selection, an instrumental Sea Interlude from Britten’s opera, Peter Grimes, which will be mixed with light gusts of wind, was tried successfully before an audience last summer. Britten’s music somehow provided a perfect graphic equivalent and transformed the whole film. It now only remains for the editing to intensify this relationship.

I had considered, at one point, going to colour and using filters over superimposed negative and positive images, etc., because I thought the filmed material was not complex enough. But not only can I not afford such complicated printing techniques, I also began to realize that this was an essentially simple subject I had filmed, and that a consistently simple form might be a virtue. This freed me, in a sense, to edit the film with the content of the frame foremost in mind.

I have been grappling with the creative problem in Rooftops for two years, and am thus eagerly committed to finishing the project while I can see a solution now at hand.

Note: Rooftops is considered to be made before House Movie, simply because it was conceived and shot before.