Architecture Plays! : New Spatial Narratives of Novi Sad in Architectural Documentaries

Abstract

Architectural documentary film has become one of the primary tools for archiving, recording, and representing the performance and changes in architectural spaces. In the city of Novi Sad, the specially established production house Neoplanta Film adopted? the modernisation of urban space in the second half of the 20th century in the short documentary footage. Through this project, an avant-garde film group of young directors, cinematographers, and screenwriters emerged. The fragmentary digitised archival material from this project records the process of radical urban transformations of the city.

This work deals with creating and re-creating new urban narratives that promote the modern history of Novi Sad and redefine its monolithic identity image (Konstantinović & Zeković, 2023-2). By observing the city as a system of different architectural layers and associated urban narratives, architectural documentary film's importance in revitalising forgotten urban narratives, which has been suppressed due to unsatisfactory ideological connotations, is explored. In these processes, whether based on re-editing and re-assembling film archives or creating new film material, the role of architecture and architectural space is crucial for understanding the history, atmosphere, sentiment, and context of new urban stories.

The work raises key questions about the conceptualisation of such projects: Is it possible to recreate urban narratives through documentary film? What is the role of architecture and architectural space in this? How are spatial narratives created? Can space preserve memory? Following the two projects of the research group BAZA—a spatial praxis platform—approaches will be presented on how architecture and architectural space become vital embodiments of time and how they can be employed in the storytelling of urban history.