UTSOA

Much of Texas is what movies are made of — in a figurative sense; but also quite literally. For 2004 the total budget for all studio, independent and IMAX features and all TV movies, series, pilots and commercials, produced in Texas, amounted to approximately 320 million US dollars. The grand total of all film production budgets for the last 10 years, tracked by the Texas Film Commission, amount to 2.9 billion US dollars. More than 1,200 full feature projects have been made in Texas since 1910. In 2004, the Capital City topped the list of "Top 10 Cities for Moviemakers" and took the #2 spot this year, just behind New York City. More than a thousand professional and service businesses, state and local tax incentives for film production, and over 24 national and international film festivals make for a significant economic and cultural impact of the Texas film industry on state of Texas and on Austin in particular.

The special program being attended is the program of FILM in general, and the program of CINEMATEQUE — a place for learning about film — in particular. Including all the issues raised when thinking about architecture and cinema, you are asked to arrive at designs which provide for the promoting of film (this may include the showing, discussing, making of and caring for film). Our Austin Film Centre attempts to look at the cinematic apparatus free from the constraints of the economy, and free from the constraints of the stereotype.

Film is an allied art to architecture: the two disciplines are complexly related. The settings for film are within the space posited by architecture. By the very nature of film, these spaces are synthetic. They are 'fabricated' out of the multitude of vignettes provided by architecture within the world (and within imagination). Film is able to manipulate, recompose, and juxtapose these spaces/settings almost at will. The viewer is held 'captive' to the direction of the view to the sequence and to the frame. Architecture, by contrast, seems to be somewhat held captive to the 'whims' of the participant. In their architectural interdependency film's heroes and sets investigate issues of Architecture, Culture, Education and Cinema.

The studio, through the project of the CinéTEX, will immerse itself in the city — first through the exercise of 'spatial stories', secondly through the intervention of the composition of the building designs within a selected site in Austin.